Total coronavirus cases:
48 in California, including 29 in the Bay Area
121 in the U.S., including nine deaths, all in Washington state
Over 92,800 in the world and over 3,100 deaths
For a detailed map, click here for The Chronicle’s Coronavirus Tracker
Breaking news developments on March 3, 2020:
4:03 p.m. California to release 21 million face masks for use in low-risk health settings: The state is releasing millions of N95 filtering face masks that have been stored in a climate-controlled setting as part of California’s emergency planning reserves. Some of the masks are expired, but the CDC and National Institute of Occupational Safety have approved them to be used in “low-risk health settings.” Health experts say healthy people should not wear masks.
“Releasing this supply of masks will help keep our health care professionals safe on the job,” said Dr. Sonia Angell, director of the California Department of Public Health.
3:30 p.m. Santa Clara officials says more cases expected, elderly at greatest risk: Older residents, especially those above 80, and people with underlying medical conditions are more likely to develop serious symptoms if infected with coronavirus. Nursing homes should cancel gatherings like bingo and movie nights and be vigilant about cleaning, said Sara Cody, a county health officer. Officials expect more confirmed cases as the infection spreads through the county.
3:04 p.m. First case reported in Berkeley: A Berkeley resident tested positive for COVID-19 after returning from a country that has experienced an outbreak, city officials said Tuesday. Since returning from travel on Feb. 23, the unidentified resident has remained “largely” at home. City officials and Berkeley Public Health are investigating whether the person came into contact with others. City Manager Dee Williams-Ridley declared Tuesday a local emergency to leverage resources in case additional cases are identified. “While the risk of infection remains low, the expended presence of the virus in our community is a reality we should all prepare for,” said Dr. Lisa Hernandez, a Berkeley health officer.
Your questions — answered
The Chronicle is collecting reader questions on coronavirus. A common one: “I am showing symptoms of coronavirus. What should I do?” Here’s a quick answer: If you don’t think your condition is urgent, call your doctor or an urgent care clinic. Be prepared to answer questions about your recent travel history. Try to call ahead before showing up in case they need to redirect you to another medical center or ER. If you believe your symptoms are urgent and you need to go to the ER, try to call ahead and let them know you’re coming “so that they’re prepared to isolate (you).”
3:03 p.m. United waives change fees: United Airlines, which accounts for 40% of the traffic at its SFO hub, has waived change fees for flights booked through the end of March, as travelers rethink their plans due to the coronavirus.
2:34 p.m. Reported cases of coronavirus decrease as tally of those recovered increases : The number of people who have the virus across the world decreased to 67,217, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Meanwhile the number of people who have recovered from the virus in China increased to 36,208.
2:17 p.m. Santa Clara County confirms two new cases: Two new cases of coronavirus — of unknown origin — were confirmed, bringing the county’s total number of cases to 11. Officials are investigating to determine the source of transmission and did not release information about the newly infected individuals.
1:48 p.m. Marin County declares local health emergency: Officials in Marin County declared a local health emergency Tuesday afternoon to prepare for any potential virus impact. The county has yet to record a case among its residents. Proclaiming the emergency ensures the county’s ability to recover any costs from the virus.
1:30 p.m. Florida Governor says California resident under self-isolation: Gov. Ron DeSantis said a California resident whose sister had returned from a trip to Italy has presumptively tested positive for the virus. CDC officials are expected to confirm the diagnosis of the woman, who is under self-isolation in Florida.
1:15 p.m. Google cancels May event: Google said Tuesday it would cancel I/O, its big annual conference for developers scheduled for May in Mountain View.
1:02 p.m. Markets down again: The Dow Jones industrial average closed below 26,000 again, down 3 percent following a bounce-back Monday. The Federal Reserve’s move to cut interest rates did not seem to reassure investors. The index ended Tuesday at 25,917.
12:49 p.m. San Francisco cancels large event for homeless: The city’s Department of Public Health canceled Project Homeless Connect, a community event scheduled Wednesday at Bill Graham Auditorium that would provide social and health services to the homeless.
“Out of an abundance of caution for this particularly vulnerable population, DPH has determined with Project Homeless Connect that the supportive services will be better deployed through existing homeless service channels and not at a single centralized gathering,” a statement said.
12:20 p.m. U.S. coronavirus deaths at 9: A man in his 40s with underlying health conditions died at Evergreen Health, according to Snohomish County public health officials. The man was a Snohomish County resident. The death was reported on Monday, but was not previously included in the state’s total death toll.
12:04 p.m. Death toll climbs to 8: King County health officials said a woman in her 80s died on Feb. 26 at her family home due to a coronavirus infection. She was another resident of Life Care Center of Kirkland to die. She had not been hospitalized.
County officials also confirmed the 7th death first reported by a Seattle hospital.
In addition, the county confirmed five other new cases: Two with unknown exposure, one Life Care staff member who is recovering at home, one family member of a Life Care confirmed case and one frequent visitor at Life Care. The total number of cases in the county is now 21, including the 8 deaths.
11:55 a.m. U.S. death toll rises to 7: A death last week in a Washington state hospital has been tied to coronavirus, according to a statement from Harborview Medical Center in Seattle.
The 54-year-old man died Feb. 26 at the hospital. Health officials detected a presumptive positive case of coronavirus after he died, they announced Tuesday.
The man had been admitted to the hospital on Feb. 24 after being transferred from Life Care Center of Kirkland, the nursing home that has had multiple coronavirus cases and deaths.
The hospital said some staff may have been exposed while working in the intensive care unit where the patient was treated. Those staff members are being monitored and screened daily.
11:42 a.m. More Californians self-quarantine: The number of Californians who are self-quarantining at home after returning from China Feb. 2 or after has risen to 9,215, according to the California Dept. of Public Health. That is up from 8,700 late last week.
11:35 a.m. Mayor London Breed criticizes White House response to coronavirus in letter to Pence: Mayor Breed said coordination between the White House, Department of Health and Human Services and U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was inadequate, calling the administration’s response to the viral outbreak “anemic” and “deficient.”
“Leadership at the federal level is imperative — we cannot wait as the window to take action to reduce community infections is closing,” Breed wrote.
9:25 a.m. San Francisco software company Okta cancels annual meeting at Moscone Center, opting instead for a virtual conference: The decision by Okta to pull out of the conference and make it digital instead over concerns about coronavirus follows other Bay Area technology conferences that have been postponed or gone online, including the Game Developer Conference at Moscone Center and Nvidi’a GTC conference scheduled for this month in San Jose.
7:25 a.m. Fed cuts rates: The Federal Reserve cut interest rates by half a percentage point to a range of 1% to 1.25% due to the “evolving risks” of the coronavirus to the economy. The stock market, which has been volatile in early trading, was slightly up after the Fed’s announcement. The Fed’s announcement also sent Treasury yields below 1% for the first time ever.
Updates from March 2
5:32 p.m. Twitter urges all employees to work from home: The social media company,headquartered in San Francisco, is “strongly encouraging” its roughly 5,000 global employees to work from home to lower the chance of coronavirus spreading. Working from home is mandatory in Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea offices. The company previously suspended all non-critical business travel.
4:35 p.m. Google cancels major San Francisco conference, which will be web only: Google Cloud Next ’20 will now take place through online-only sessions on April 6 to 8. It was originally planned at Moscone Center in San Francisco. The event will now be free and tickets will be refunded. Facebook previously canceled a San Francisco marketing conference, and Game Developers Conference also suspended its conference at Moscone Center.
3:58 p.m. Health workers on the front lines of the epidemic express fear: A third Northern California health care worker has tested positive for the coronavirus, increasing the concerns from nurses, doctors and other health staff who are on the front lines of coping with the epidemic.
3:25 p.m. More airlines waive change fees: Delta Air Lines on Monday became the latest U.S. airline to waive its normal change-fees on nonrefundable flights because of coronavirus fears — though it only applies to certain international flights. American Airlines, JetBlue and Alaska Airlines previously waived change-fees on all flights, domestic and international, for limited time periods.
3:20 p.m. First case in Placer County: Placer County’s first case of coronavirus is a health care worker who had “close contact” with a Solano County coronavirus patient, health officials said. Placer County is just north of Sacramento County, where the Solano County patient is being treated. The Placer County patient is in isolation at home and the risk to the general public is low, but people should be prepared for unrelated virus spread, county officials said.
12:15 p.m. Sonoma County reveals another coronavirus patient, declares local emergency: A person in Sonoma County who had returned from a cruise ship to Mexico has symptoms of coronavirus, health officials said Monday. Officials declared a local public health emergency and said they are working to identify anyone the person may had contacted in the last week. The person marks the second positive case in the county. The patient, who was not identified, had been in the county for 10 days after returning from a cruise ship that departed San Francisco to Mexico.
11:31 a.m. Four more deaths in Washington state: Four more people have died in Washington state from coronavirus, bringing the state’s total to six deaths, health officials said Monday. The state has recorded the only U.S. deaths to date.
10:44 a.m. Salesforce bans most domestic travel: San Francisco’s largest private employer has prohibited cross-border travel and restricted all non-critical domestic travel. Salesforce is also replacing in-person customer events with “digital experiences.” It wasn’t immediately clear if Dreamforce, the company’s 171,000-person conference in San Francisco in the fall, would be affected.
We are implementing safety precautions for March, incl prohibiting cross border travel, restricting domestic travel, replacing in-person customer events with digital experiences & enhancing office protocols to provid healthiest work environment possible. https://t.co/xjO8FQ9t29
— Marc Benioff (@Benioff) March 2, 2020
10:40 a.m. San Mateo County resident positive: A San Mateo County resident is believed to have coronavirus, pending confirmatory testing by the CDC. The adult patient has had no known exposure to the virus through travel or contact with a confirmed case. The patient has been hospitalized and is in isolation. The source of exposure is unknown.
10:32 a.m. Two new cases confirmed in Santa Clara County: Two new cases of coronavirus were reported in the South Bay county, bringing the total number of cases there to nine.
10:17 a.m. Healdsburg school cancels class: The Healdsburg School, a private K-8 school in the wine country town, closed on Monday after learning “an adult member of our community, not an employee, had been exposed to a confirmed case of Coronavirus,” Head of School Andy Davies said in a statement Monday. The school said it will work with public health officials in determining whether it will stay closed.
10 a.m. Quarantined cruise ship passengers released from Travis AFB: Roughly 140 Diamond Cruise ship passengers were released from a mandatory 14-day quarantine at Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield Monday. Most were sent on buses to airports in Sacramento and San Francisco in the morning with another bus load scheduled for noon. Around 15 passengers had already been removed from the base to local hospitals after testing positive for coronavirus. Less than 10 are still in quarantine for up to another week because of close contact with the patients who were hospitalized. People in quarantine without symptoms were voluntarily tested for the virus. Everyone who was released had no symptoms and no positive results, the CDC said.
9:50 a.m Contra Costa County bracing for more cases: Contra Costa County health officials are anticipating more COVID-19 cases and warned that the outbreak could turn into a pandemic. County officials plan to shift their efforts in containing the virus into a more sustained response. “Although this is a difficult message to share, it is important to recognize how difficult the times ahead may be,” county Health Services Director Anna Roth wrote in a statement Monday.
7:15 a.m. Most people under quarantine to be released from Travis base: Up to 140 travelers who were aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan are expected to be released from Travis Air Force Base in Fairfield after showing no symptoms of coronavirus. Fewer than 10 will remain under quarantine until health officials clear them for release, said CDC spokesman Scott Pauley. Everyone being released will leave the base in two buses — one around 7 a.m. and the other scheduled around noon, officials said.
6:30 a.m. Twitter suspends all ‘non-critical business travel and events’: Twitter has suspended all “non-critical business travel and events” for employees and affiliates, company officials announced in a blog post. The company said it has “the responsibility of ensuring that the health and safety of our employees and partners is not compromised.” The policy will remain in place until health officials “deem it appropriate to step back from pandemic precautionary measures or when a vaccine becomes available.”
6:10 a.m. Global infections near 90,000: The number of people who have tested positive for the COVID-19 virus reached 89,198 Monday morning, according to numbers compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Updates from March 1:
6:30 p.m. Washington state health officials say a second person there has died from coronavirus, the only fatalities in the country thus far.
4:40 p.m. Three more cases in Santa Clara County: The County of Santa Clara Public Health Department announced three new cases of COVID-19 on Sunday. This brings the total number of cases in the county to seven.
The fifth case is an adult woman with chronic health conditions who is hospitalized, officials said. There was no information released on how she contracted the virus.
The sixth and seventh cases are a husband and wife. Both are hospitalized, and the husband has chronic health conditions. The couple has recently traveled to Egypt.
The Public Health Department said it will continue to identify anyone who has come into contact with these cases. The department will also be conducting community surveillance to determine the extent of possible disease spread in the community.
3:30 p.m. New presumptive cases in Solano, Alameda counties: Public health officials announced Sunday two new presumptive coronavirus cases — in Solano and Almeda counties — both health care workers at NorthBay VacaValley Hospital, where a patient was recently treated.
Both cases are health care workers and are currently in isolation at home and their cases are pending confirmatory testing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). One is a Solano County resident, the other is an Alameda County resident.
The health-care workers were exposed to the community-acquired case currently hospitalized at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento. Officials said the initial case is slowly recovering, and the individual’s family members had negative test results for COVID-19 so far and remain in quarantine.
9 a.m. Global infections surpass 87,400: According to figures compiled by Johns Hopkins University, the number of people infected by the new coronavirus reached 87,470 on Sunday. The total number of fatalities rose to 2,990, with more than 2,700 in China where the outbreak originated.