“To everyone who has left New York City over the last few days, because of the number of cases, you may have been exposed before you left,” Dr. Deborah Birx said on Tuesday at the daily coronavirus briefing, adding that anyone who had been in New York should be “self-quarantining for the next 14 days to ensure the virus doesn't spread to others.”

New York state accounted for 60 percent of all the new Covid-19 cases in the US by Tuesday and almost half the total cases, with 25,665 documented instances. Big Apple residents were almost ten times more likely to be infected than any other Americans, noted Dr. Anthony Fauci of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

“We don’t want it to become another seeding point,” Fauci said, adding that anyone in the New York metropolitan area who traveled elsewhere should "monitor temperature, be sensitive to symptoms" and self-isolate for two weeks, in order to prevent further spread of the virus.

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