House Coronavirus Supplemental Funding Package on Floor Next Week: Pelosi

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said on Saturday that she hopes to bring an emergency funding supplemental package to the House floor next week.

In a letter to House members, Pelosi offered condolences to the man who has been confirmed as the first person to die from the novel coronavirus in the United States. She vowed a congressional response.

Sadly and prayerfully, today, we learned of the first death from the #coronavirus in the United States. The American people expect a well-coordinated, fully-funded response that appropriately addresses this public health crisis.

— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) February 29, 2020

“An important step that Congress must take is to ensure the government has the resources needed to combat this deadly virus and keep Americans safe,” she said. “To that end, House appropriators are working to advance a strong emergency funding supplemental package that fully addresses the scale and seriousness of this public health crisis, which we hope to bring to the Floor next week.”

Pelosi indicated that the House’s funding proposal will seek “entirely new” funding—not funding reallocated from other accounts.

While the details are not yet clear, Pelosi has emphasized that congress needs to make sure that vaccines are affordable and available to all those in need, and that Small Business Administration (SBA) loans are readily available for small businesses impacted by the outbreak. She added that any bill should ensure that state and local governments are reimbursed for the costs they incur when assisting the federal response to the outbreak.

The White House sent a request for $2.5 billion emergency coronavirus supplemental funding to the Congress on Feb. 24. The Trump admin asked for about $1.25 billion in new funding, and for the remaining funds to be quickly reallocated from funds already budgeted by Congress, like yose for Ebola preparedness, The Epoch Times reported.

Pelosi made the statement after Washington state announced the country’s first fatality from the virus—a man in his late 50s with underlying health conditions.

Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), during a White House press conference on Saturday confirmed that the person had no history of travel to other affected countries and no known contacts with infected individuals.

House Coronavirus Supplemental Funding Package on Floor Next Week: Pelosi

The death came after patients in Washington, Oregon, and California tested positive for the new disease without a history of exposure to known sources of infection, officials in those states said.

“This is a case of community spread of the disease, much like the case from California earlier this week,” Pat Allen, director of the Oregon Health Authority, told reporters on Friday about the first case in Oregon.

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Director Dr. Anthony Fauci said that seniors or patients with underlying conditions are the most likely to be affected by the virus.

“For the most part, the people who get in trouble and ultimately tragically would die from this are people who are elderly and or have underlying conditions: heart disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, obesity because of the difficulty in breathing back and forth,” he said.

Earlier Friday, 62 Americans tested positive for the virus, with 15 contracting it through travel to China or through person-to-person transmission from spouses who returned from China. Forty-seven others were among groups of Americans and family members evacuated from Wuhan, the epicenter of the virus, or the Diamond Princess cruise ship, which docked in Yokohama in Japan.

Italy, Iran, and South Korea have reported spikes in the number of cases in recent days, with travelers from those countries becoming some of the first patients in a number of nations, including as far away as Brazil and New Zealand.

The White House expanded travel restrictions for Iran on Saturday, barring entry to foreign nationals who have recently visited the Middle Eastern nation.

Meanwhile, the State Department urged Americans to avoid non-essential travel to Italy and South Korea, while issuing the highest ‘Level 4: Do Not Travel’ advisories for Italy’s Lombardy and Veneto regions and South Korea’s Daegu due to local outbreaks of the virus.

Ivan Pentchoukov and Zachary Stieber from the Epoch Times contributed to the report.

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