TRAVIS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- More than 300 American cruise-ship passengers, including 14 who tested positive for coronavirus, were being quarantined at military bases in California and Texas on Monday after arriving from Japan on charter flights overnight.
One plane carrying cruise passengers touched down at Travis Air Force Base in Northern California just before midnight Sunday, while another arrived at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas early Monday. The passengers will remain at the bases for two weeks.
The U.S. said it arranged for the evacuation because people on the Diamond Princess were at a high risk of exposure to the new virus that's been spreading in Asia. For the 328 departing Americans, the evacuation cuts short a 14-day quarantine that began aboard the cruise ship Feb. 5.
The State Department announced later that 14 of the evacuees received confirmation they had the virus but were allowed to board the flight because they had no symptoms. They were being kept isolated from other passengers on the flight, the U.S. State and Health and Human Services Department said in a joint statement.
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It's unclear which base the 14 who tested positive for the virus went to.
Officials said the evacuees who arrived at Travis Air Force Base will be housed at a different location from the more than 200 other Americans who were already being quarantined on the base, in a hotel. Those people have been at the base since early February, when they arrived on flights from China.
No Travis airmen will have contact with the passengers, officials said.
Now that they're in the U.S., the cruise ship passengers must go through another 14 days of quarantine at the military facilities -- meaning they will have been under quarantine for a total of nearly four weeks.
Japan on Monday announced another 99 infections on the Diamond Princess, raising the ship's total number of cases to 454. Overall, Japan has 419 confirmed cases of the virus, including one death. The United States has confirmed 15 cases within the country. Separately, one U.S. citizen died in China.
In China, Health officials have published the first details on nearly 45,000 cases of the novel coronavirus disease that originated there, saying more than 80% have been mild and new ones seem to be falling since early this month, although it's far too soon to tell whether the outbreak has peaked.
Monday's report from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention gives the World Health Organization a "clearer picture of the outbreak, how it's developing and where it's headed," WHO's director-general said at a news conference.
"It's too early to tell if this reported decline will continue. Every scenario is still on the table," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
China says more than 70,000 people have been infected with Covid-19 and 1,868 have died in mainland China, but the country is counting many cases based on symptoms rather than the methods that WHO uses.
The new study reports on 44,672 cases confirmed in China as of Feb. 11. The virus caused severe disease such as pneumonia in 14% of them and critical illness in 5%.
The fatality rate for these confirmed cases is 2.3% -- 2.8% for males versus 1.7% for females.
Meanwhile, authorities in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou detained Xu Zhiyong, a prominent Chinese legal activist, on Saturday, according to Xu's friends, after he spent nearly two months in hiding. His girlfriend, Li Qiaochu, a social activist, vanished Sunday, Xu's friends said.
The activist is the latest critic to be caught up in President Xi Jinping's far-reaching efforts to limit dissent in China. The crackdown, which has ensnared scores of activists, lawyers, journalists and intellectuals, is likely to intensify as the ruling Communist Party comes under broad attack for its handling of the Covid-19 outbreak, one of its biggest political challenges in years.
Xu, a 46-year-old former university lecturer, has long railed against government corruption and social injustice in China. He went into hiding in December as police began rounding up human-rights activists who met with him in the eastern city of Xiamen.
While in hiding, Xu criticized Xi's handling of the outbreak. In one of his last writings before he was detained, Xu mourned the death of a doctor in Wuhan whom police had silenced after he warned about the virus.
It is unclear what charges authorities might bring against Xu. The circumstances of the disappearance of his girlfriend, Li, were also ambiguous. Police in Guangzhou did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Information for this article was contributed by Mari Yamaguchi, Yuri Kageyama, Emily Wang, Marilynn Marchione, Yanan Wang, David Pitt, Maria Cheng, Olga R. Rodriguez, Ken Miller and staff members of The Associated Press and by Javier C. Hernandez of The New York Times.
A Section on 02/18/2020