MONDAY, March 2, 2020 (HealthDay News) — U.S. health care workers have been sent new testing guidelines for novel coronavirus after the nation’s first case of a patient with an unknown source of infection, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The agency said the patient in California did not travel to a location known to be affected by the virus and was not exposed to anyone known to be infected, CNN reported.
Initial CDC guidance to U.S. doctors was that to be tested, a patient had to have traveled to China or be a close contact of someone who had been there, CDC Director Robert Redfield, M.D., said. But the California patient with an unknown source of infection changed all of that.
“As soon as that case was recognized, we met and we revised our case definition for persons under investigation,” Redfield said, CNN reported. “Today, that has been posted [to the CDC website], along with a new health advisory that the recommendation should be when a clinician or individual suspects coronavirus, then we should be able to get a test for coronavirus.”
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