As the number of people in the U.S. testing positive for novel coronavirus ticks upward, the White House scrambled Monday to prepare a hefty emergency spending request for Congress to respond to the global outbreak.
Several sources told ABC News the figure could be around $1 billion, although they cautioned that the final number remains in flux.
How exactly that money will be used is still unclear, although it will likely be the subject of questions Tuesday when Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar testifies before the Senate Appropriations Committee. Also on Tuesday, several administration officials were expected to deliver a briefing to senators containing some classified information on coronavirus.
U.S. cases of novel coronavirus rose again on Monday, largely connected to passengers who had been aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. As of Monday, 53 people in the United States tested positive for novel coronavirus, or COVID-19, as the virus is officially known.
Of those cases, 39 are among people who were repatriated to the United States on charter flights from Wuhan, China, or from the Diamond Princess cruise ship. There have been 14 additional cases of COVID-19 diagnosed by the U.S.health care system, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. All but two of those cases are among people who traveled to China, and the two cases involving human spread occurred between individuals in the same household.
As cases rise outside of China, Dr. Tedros said he was encouraged by a decline in new cases in China in recent weeks. Dr. Bruce Aylward, who is heading up the team of WHO medical experts in China, pointed to the extreme lockdown measures China has taken as the driving force behind that decline.
"China has taken one of the most ancient strategies for infectious disease control and rolled out probably the most ambitious and, I would say, agile and aggressive disease-containment effort in history," Aylward said during a Monday news conference in Beijing. The approach, he added, "changed the course of what was a rapidly escalating and continues to be a deadly epidemic."
WHO experts in China are currently reporting a 2-4% fatality rate in Wuhan, China, and a 0.7% fatality rate outside of Wuhan. For mild cases of the disease, there's a roughly two-week recovery rate, and for more severe cases, the recovery rate is between three and six weeks.