The coronavirus has now infiltrated every province in the US, including the smallest, a remote Hawaiian island of fewer than 100 residents that was home to a leper colony.
Kalawao County, so remote that it is supplied once a year by barge, recorded its first case of COVID-19 in December, nearly a year after the deadly bug surfaced in the U.S. in Snohomish County near Seattle, the Wall Street Journal reported. .
The small enclave on Molokai Island was established in 1865 for patients with leprosy – now known as Hansen’s disease – who would be banned there for life, according to the newspaper, which reviewed data from Johns Hopkins and individual states for its report.
Hawaiian health officials had taken steps to shut down the settlement after seeing the disease sweep through U.S. nursing homes early last year – and authorities banned visits to the county to protect the five remaining Hansen patients, the median age of whom is 86 , according to the Journal.
Some of the five have serious underlying health conditions that put them at high risk of serious complications or death from the coronavirus, Hawaii health official Glenn Wasserman told the news center.
But the remote county finally registered its first case after a resident returned from a trip to Honolulu after receiving a COVID-19 test. The person, who was symptom-free, then tested positive, the Journal reported.
However, the virus did not spread, as the person and three close contacts on the same flight immediately went into quarantine.
“To me that person was a hero because they were honest, and they reported it, and they followed quarantine rules when they returned from outside the settlement,” Wasserman told the paper.