With the Zika virus spreading to Miami Beach, federal health officials on Friday advised pregnant women not to visit a 20-block stretch of one of the country’s most alluring tourist destinations. They also told them to consider postponing travel anywhere in Miami-Dade County.
The escalation of the Zika crisis here sent tremors through South Florida’s vibrant tourist industry and stoked the fears of pregnant women, worried about the virus’s ability to cause severe brain damage in newborn babies.
The travel advisory from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was prompted by the discovery of a second zone of local Zika transmission in an area between Eighth and 28th Streets in Miami Beach that includes the heart of South Beach, a tourist mecca. Officials said five people, including travelers from New York, Texas and Taiwan, were infected there. The other area where mosquitoes are spreading the virus is in the Miami neighborhood of Wynwood, a hip, gentrifying arts district.
Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the C.D.C. director, warned at a news briefing on Friday that more cases of local Zika transmission are likely to emerge in the other parts of the county. The agency he leads said in a statement that because so many people infected with Zika have no symptoms, because the virus can incubate for two weeks and because diagnosis of cases can take several weeks, “it is possible that other neighborhoods in Miami-Dade County have active Zika transmission that is not yet apparent.”
A skillful piece of detective work by health officials led them to zero in on Miami Beach on Thursday morning after they spotted an announcement from Taiwan about a woman there who was infected with Zika and had visited Miami Beach, said Dr. Lyle R. Petersen, who is managing the C.D.C.’s Zika response. Before that, he said, health officials were investigating a few cases of infected people who had been in Miami Beach, but had also been other places. The Taiwanese woman, in contrast, had stayed near her hotel on Miami Beach throughout her visit, enabling them to establish where she was infected. The other four people had all been in the same vicinity.
Combating the virus and the Aedes aegypti mosquitoes that carry it will not be an easy task on Miami Beach, health officials warned. The county has successfully used aerial spraying to combat mosquitoes in the Wynwood neighborhood, but will not be able to use that tactic in Miami Beach because of its high-rises and high winds, Dr. Frieden said. South Beach also attracts big crowds of revelers and beachgoers who are juicy targets for mosquitoes. And there is the swimsuit factor.
“We don’t think our advice to wear long sleeves and long pants is likely to be widely followed in some of these areas,” Dr. Frieden said.
Health officials have been predicting for months that Zika would arrive in the continental United States, especially in warm mosquito havens like Florida. And despite Friday’s developments, they said they remain confident that the virus will not turn into a major epidemic in the continental United States as it has across Latin America and the Caribbean. The widespread use of air-conditioning and window screens helps reduce the risk of mosquito bites.
The vast majority of Zika cases have been and will continue to be in people who have traveled to the other countries where the virus has spread widely, or have had sexual relations with someone who traveled to those places, officials said. There have been 2,260 cases of Zika reported in the continental United States and Hawaii, including 529 in pregnant women, the C.D.C. said Friday.
So far, 36 cases of locally transmitted Zika have been identified, all in Florida, and 25 of them are linked to an area around two small businesses in Wynwood, north of downtown Miami. On Aug. 1, the C.D.C. advised pregnant women not to travel to a one-square-mile area in Wynwood. And while Gov. Rick Scott and the Florida Health Department have announced that 17 blocks of that area have been found to be clear of Zika transmission, the C.D.C. maintains that the one-square-mile section should still be considered an active Zika zone, Dr. Petersen said.
Mr. Scott also struck a different note from the federal health officials about the risks of Zika posed to Miami-Dade County, a sprawling multicultural metropolis of 2.7 million people. He minimized the extent of the spread, saying in a news conference, “We have two small areas. One less than a mile, and we’ve already been able to reduce the footprint. We have another area now that’s 1.5 miles on Miami Beach. That’s out of a state that takes 15 hours to drive from Key West to Pensacola, so let’s put things in perspective.”
His communications director, Jackie Schutz, said Friday that Mr. Scott “is encouraging people to come to Miami, to come to South Beach. Just remove standing water and wear bug spray.”
But Dr. Frieden noted that there have been several other cases of suspected local transmission in Miami-Dade County that are believed to be isolated cases. Other cases will likely crop up, he said.
“What we’re doing is stepping back and saying there have been now multiple areas of individual transmission,” he said. “It’s a large county. There are more than two million people there, more than 20,000 pregnant women. We would always err on the side of caution.”
The C.D.C. generally must defer to state officials to decide where to set the boundaries around an area of potential disease transmission and what travel warnings to issue, federal officials and health experts said.
“The state has authority within its borders and it takes advice and counsel from the C.D.C.,” said Dr. William Schaffner, head of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University’s medical school.
The realization that Miami Beach was a zone of Zika transmission was triggered by a news release from Taiwan that C.D.C. officials noticed on Wednesday, Dr. Petersen said. Taiwan’s Center for Disease Control reported that a 44-year-old woman who visited Miami for business in early August, sought medical treatment for a rash on her legs and abdomen. The woman, who is not pregnant, tested positive for Zika.
“We tried repeatedly to get in touch with Taiwan the minute we heard about this,” Dr. Petersen said. With the time difference, C.D.C. officials were not able to talk to Taiwanese officials until 6 a.m. Thursday. What they learned, he said, “ provided pretty strong evidence that these other people who had gone to multiple places” including Miami Beach, had probably been infected there.
Although the four other people had not stayed in the same hotel, he said, the places they had visited in Miami Beach “clustered in a fairly tight area.”
So far, local leaders and people involved in tourism said they have not seen panic, though there is concern.
Grace Della, the owner of Miami Culinary Tours, a company that leads daily food-focused group tours around Miami, said she canceled her Wynwood tours for the first two weeks in August, but restarted them last Saturday. Now, she said, she is continuing with her two-and-a-half-hour South Beach Food Tour, which runs daily, because she received an email from the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau that the city is safe.
But, she said, “I have received emails from women saying that they are pregnant or thinking about getting pregnant, and are concerned about coming to Miami, and I am happy to give them a refund and also to anyone else who wants one.”
Josh Alexander, a travel specialist at the New York City-based Protravel International, said that clients have been canceling their plans.
“They don’t want to go anywhere near Florida in general,” he said. “I have had cancellations to the Florida Keys and am getting calls from families who are booked to go to Disney in December.”
And Mayor Carlos A. Giménez of Miami-Dade County, said “I’m concerned about the impact on the economy, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t.”
Although many elected officials fretted Friday about the potential economic consequences of the virus’s spread, some said public health must come before tourism, among them Mayor Cindy Lerner of Pinecrest, a village of 19,000 people in Miami-Dade County.
“I think all of us are holding our breath and crossing our fingers that it doesn’t continue to expand,” she said. “But you can’t build a wall or a net.”
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