The Colorado Army National Guard facility on Fort Carson that’s been tapped to potentially house coronavirus evacuees will likely end up not being needed, U.S. Sen. Cory Gardner told The Gazette on Friday.

“That could change, but they (Fort Carson officials) feel they are a very low-potential site at this point,” said Gardner, who visited the post Thursday and toured the facility.

The post has been selected by the Department of Defense to house as many as 250 evacuees from areas with the virus, according to a Feb. 1 news release from Fort Carson officials. The post will provide an update if any people who may have been exposed to the virus are assigned to it, officials said Monday.

Evacuees would be housed at the Guard’s training center, in a remote area on the southwest side of the operational area of post. The facility includes an operations center, dining facility, auditorium, conference rooms, classrooms and living accommodations, according to a Guard spokesman.

Fort Carson soldiers and personnel would not be in direct contact with evacuees. Health and Human Services workers would be responsible for the care, transportation and security of those in quarantine, according the post’s news release.

HHS officials have not returned repeated calls from The Gazette requesting additional information on logistics, should evacuees be assigned to Fort Carson.

Gardner was unaware on Friday of any additional sites in Colorado tapped to potentially house virus evacuees.

When asked to address concerns regarding the risk of introducing the virus to the Colorado Springs area, Gardner said he was confident that federal health officials are ensuring “every safeguard is put in place.”

Evacuees sent to Fort Carson would be “extremely isolated” and “under the strictest of medical supervision,” he said.

“These are people who have been screened multiple times,” he said. “They’ve been tested before they left, tested when they first arrived, tested again. These are people who just need to wait out that 14-day period and are very unlikely to have anything.”

As to living conditions, Gardner said rooms at the Guard facility on Fort Carson, while “perhaps not as nice as a fancy hotel,” were “probably even better than a college dorm room.”

Any evacuees housed at Fort Carson would be assigned cellphones so they could connect with friends and family. A fence would be built around an outdoor track, allowing them recreation opportunities, he added.

Gardner said he had just completed a visit to a U.S. Center for Disease Control lab in Fort Collins. Among his takeaways: The 2019 novel coronavirus is “maybe two or three times more transmissible than the flu.” 

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control “won’t be able to catch every infected person, but they’ll be able to contain it,” he said.

On Thursday, Gardner wrote a letter expressing his concern over the virus and requesting “robust funding” for outbreak response. That letter was addressed to the chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Committee on Appropriations and the chairman and ranking member of the Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

On Friday, Gardner – chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on East Asia, the Pacific and International Cybersecurity Policy – authored another letter, this one to World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus regarding Taiwan’s exclusion from the World Health Organization. In the letter he urged the organization to grant Taiwan observer status at its meetings.

The organization, which declared the virus a world health emergency on Thursday, “has not permitted Taiwan to attend any emergency briefings despite Taiwan having nine confirmed cases of the Wuhan coronavirus,” according to a Friday press release from Gardner’s office.

The letter was also signed by Republican Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas, Marco Rubio of Florida, John Cornyn of Texas, Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, Mitt Romney of Utah and Ted Cruz of Texas.

Fort Carson is one of four military facilities approved as possible quarantine sites by the Pentagon. Americans returning from Hubei province in China, the center of the outbreak, will be subject to up to 14 days of mandatory quarantine under an order signed Jan. 31 by President Donald Trump.

As of Wednesday afternoon, there were no confirmed cases of coronavirus in Colorado, with four tests pending, according to the state health department’s website. The department updates virus-related numbers each Wednesday. A call to the department for updated numbers was not immediately returned.

Hundreds of Americans being evacuated from China over the virus will be quarantined in Texas and Nebraska, officials said Thursday, stressing that it was unlikely that anyone will arrive there with signs of illness.

The new virus is in the coronavirus family that includes Middle East respiratory syndrome, or MERS, and severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS. It causes fever, cough, shortness of breath and, in severe cases, pneumonia. 

Globally, more than 31,400 people are infected, and the death toll has climbed past 630. The overwhelming majority of cases are in China, but more than 310 people with the illness have been reported in over two dozen other countries.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.