A Cornell student presented symptoms that mirror the novel coronavirus strain — which has afflicted over 17,000 people internationally, Ryan Lombardi announced in an email. It is not confirmed that the student has coronavirus.
With multiple cases of the disease from Wuhan, China spreading to the United States, Cornell students are taking precautions to try and avoid getting sick.
As I was packing up on Friday, preparing myself for an unusually tiresome journey back to Ithaca totaling about three days on the road with three layovers, my phone buzzed: the U.S. Center for Disease Control announced that it would begin screening passengers arriving from Wuhan, China at Los Angeles, New York City, and San Francisco airports. Given my first layover in L.A.— lasting an unbelievably long twelve hours and giving me an excuse to visit Santa Monica for a bit— I was quite worried. For one, though I did not visit Wuhan this winter break, I was reminded of the panic after the West Africa Ebola epidemic back in 2013, when an overreaction caused a public health crisis in the United States, putting many African passengers under duress. Given the tense political climate between the U.S. and China, who knows there won’t be a repeat? A second, perhaps more foreboding concern, underlies my thoughts: Is the outbreak really this bad?