Even as the territory girds itself for potential economic damage from COVID-19, coronavirus, slowing the cruise industry, three different WhatsApp messages began to circulate on Sunday stating – falsely – that there was a patient at Gov. Juan F. Luis Hospital with the new virus strain.
According to a release from JFL, the good news is that these messages are false. Hospital officials say there are still no confirmed cases of coronavirus in the U.S. Virgin Islands, the island of St. Croix or at JFL.
As of Monday evening, there were six confirmed COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. The Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering reports more than 3,000 deaths and 90,000 confirmed infections so far. Of those, more than 80,000 infections and 2,800 deaths have been in China. Iran and Italy are a distant second and third, with 66 and 52 deaths, respectively.
Statistics on the worldwide outbreak are available here.
