Trump administration allowed at least 10 flights to enter the US from Wuhan AFTER the city was in coronavirus lockdown
THE Trump administration allowed at least 10 flights to travel from Wuhan to the United States after the city had been put on lockdown following the coronavirus outbreak.
Half of those flights were chartered by the State Department, but at least five appear to have been commercial flights that travelled into the country before President Trump banned travel from China.
A review of government records and Flight Aware data by The Sun shows that one plane made four trips to San Francisco from Wuhan in the week between the city being shutdown and President Trump announcing his travel ban.
It is unclear who was on these flights, which were operated by China Southern Airlines, and representatives for the airline have not responded to multiple requests for comment.
The plane that made four round trips between Wuhan and San Francisco in the space of one week touched down in the Bay Area on January 25, 27, 30 and February 1.
There was also a flight to Chicago by way of Anchorage just as the lockdown whent into place on January 23.
The paths of both of those flights have since been removed from public viewing online.
These San Francisco flights could hold the key to how Patricia Dowd, the first American to die from the virus, contracted COVID-19.
She lived in San Jose, less than 50 miles away from San Francisco International Airport, Wuhan’s main hub in the United States.
Dowd was a frequent traveller but had not been out of the country for weeks prior to her death, suggesting this was a case of community transmission.
That would mean that coronavirus was in the country for weeks, if not months, before she passed away on February 6.
There were also at least four flights out of Wuhan after February 2, when the travel ban from China was put in place.
Passengers on those flights, and another on January 29 that flew into Riverside, California by way of Anchorage, were out in a mandatory two-week quarantine.
One of those flights landed in San Diego at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar.
At least two individuals on that flight were hospitalized after testing positive for coronavirus, as did three Marines on the base.
Those three tested positive two weeks after passengers departed the base following their quarantine.
Another one of those flights landed in San Antonio, where the Center for Disease Control released a woman who had tested positive for COVID-19.
A state of emergency was declared, but by then the woman had been to the local mall where she ate at the food court and checked into a nearby hotel.
She was one of the 12 individuals who tested positive on the flight, the most of any of the groups who travelled from the Hubei Provence on those governments charters.
In Riverside County, where that first group was quarantined, 100 people have died and there are over 3,000 cases.
That is a comparatively high number for a county without a major city, and why the annual Coachella Festival in Indio was cancelled this year long before the country started to go on lockdown.
Things went better in Omaha, where none of the 53 passengers who arrived from Wuhan on February 7 tested positive for COVID-19.
It was a much different story a week later however, when the first of what would be 15 infected patients began to arrive in Nebraska from the Diamond Princess cruise ship.
The state has managed to avoid any real outbreak however, and as of Thursday reported 1722 cases with 38 deaths.
And in Sacramento, five of the passengers who landed at Travis Air Force Base from China were hospitalized as a result of COVID-19-related complications.
The California capital managed to keep things contained however and was showing excellent numbers until a recent surge just this week that drove up deaths in the county to 41 and just shy of 1000 cases.
It is not known however how many passengers on those previous flights may have contracted coronavirus.
There were also multiple flights bound for the United States that took off from Wuhan just hours before officials quarantined ground zero for the coronavirus.
Four international flights took-off out of Wuhan in the 14 hours prior to the quarantine.
China Southern Airlines 8419 left the night before, bound for John F Kennedy International Airport in New York City.
An hour later, a flight took off from Wuhan bound for Sydney.
China Southern also operated the flight from Wuhan to Rome that night.
The last flight out of Wuhan before the quarantine was Asiana 909, which took off at 5:30am on Thursday January 23 and, due to the time difference, landed in Anchorage on Wednesday night at 8:45pm.
It refuelled there for just over two hours, and shortly after 11pm continued on to Chicago.
At the time, there was no testing available for these travelers who were instead assessed with a temperature check upon landing at the airport.
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Two of those four flights landed in what would become the epicenters of the virus in the coming months – New York and Italy.
At the time, there had been no deaths or reported cases in either city.
New York City has since reported 146,000 cases and over 11,000 deaths while Italy lost 25,969 citizens to the virus and has reported 196,000 cases.