United States agencies coordinate monitoring of arrivals from Siberia

On 7 October, Erica Schwartz, director of the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, United States), described federal coordination to monitor arrivals from Siberia. She spoke at The Wall Street Journal’s The Future of Health event in Washington.

She named homeland-security, State and military agencies as partners. She said the health station at New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport could conduct surveillance and screening, while assessing the United States risk as extremely low.

Reuters (international news agency) corrected its report: the HHS (Department of Health and Human Services, United States) spokesperson’s figure was about 200 travelers annually, not flights, and was not attributed to Schwartz.

The department had not answered a separate question about plans for new airport screening. The station’s availability is not presented here as a confirmed new checkpoint or travel ban.

The Reuters copy was published on 7 October at 17:30:12 UTC (Coordinated Universal Time), updated at 20:17:34 UTC: 8 October, 01:30:12 and 04:17:34 in Irkutsk. Exact speech time unestablished; source added to the research on 8 October.