Coronavirus Patient Visited San Antonio Hotel, Mall After She Was ‘Mistakenly Released’ From Isolation, Officials Say

A woman that tested positive for coronavirus was “mistakenly released” from isolation Saturday, causing the mayor of San Antonio to declare a public health emergency in the city. Dallas News reports: The patient was one of 91 evacuees who were brought to San Antonio from Wuhan, China. She was released Saturday and was in the community for a little more than 12 hours before she was quarantined again. During that time, the woman checked into a Holiday Inn hotel near the San Antonio airport and took a hotel shuttle to the North Star Mall, said Dr. Anita Kurian of the city’s Metropolitan Health District. She was at the mall from about 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Kurian said the health department completed its risk assessment of any people the woman could have exposed to the virus and determined that everyone was at low risk, except for health-care personnel who were in direct contact with the woman when she was released. The CDC said the patient had been treated at a local medical facility for several weeks after she returned from Wuhan on a flight chartered by the State Department. “At the time of discharge from the facility, the patient was asymptomatic and met all of CDC’s criteria for release — resolution of any symptoms and two consecutive sets of negative test results, collected more than 24 hours apart,” the agency said. After the patient was released, a lab test was determined to be “weakly positive.” The patient was brought back into isolation “out of an abundance of caution,” the CDC said. “We simply cannot have a screw-up like this from our federal partners,” San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg said at a news conference Monday. Texas Governor Greg Abbott also criticized the CDC, saying: “What the CDC did is completely unacceptable. It appears to be a case of negligence with regard to allowing this person who had coronavirus to leave Texas Center for Infectious Disease and go back into the general population. I think they understand the magnitude of the error.”