May 23 (Reuters) \u2013 The Democratic Republic of Congo have no plans to change their preparations for the 2026 World Cup despite a warning from the United States that the team must isolate for 21 days \u200bbefore arriving in the country, a team official said on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Andrew Giuliani, \u200cexecutive director of the White House Task Force for the World Cup, confirmed to ESPN on Friday that the\u00a0Congolese delegation needed to maintain a bubble where they are training in Belgium and isolate for 21 days or risk being denied entry after a deadly outbreak of the \u200cEbola \u200bvirus in the central African country.<\/p>\n
The Congolese team are \u2060to be based in Houston \u2060at the tournament and will play an opening Group K fixture against Portugal on June 17, followed by matches against Colombia on June 23 in Guadalajara, Mexico, and against Uzbekistan on June 27 in Atlanta.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve been very clear \u200bto\u00a0Congo\u00a0that they should maintain the integrity of their bubble for 21 days before they can then come to Houston on June 11,\u201d Giuliani told ESPN.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve made \u2060it very clear to the\u00a0Congo\u00a0government as well that \u2060they need to maintain that bubble or they risk not \u200bbeing able to travel to the United States. We cannot be any clearer.\u201d<\/p>\n
But a \u200bteam spokesperson said that at this stage there was no change to \u200ctheir schedule, which includes a friendly against Denmark in Liege, Belgium, on June 3 and another against Chile in Cadiz, Spain, six days later.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have kept our training programme. No player in the squad has come from DR Congo,\u201d the official \u2060said.<\/p>\n
The entire squad of players are based outside the DR Congo, mostly in Europe, including coach Sebastien Desabre. A few team officials arrived at the training camp in Belgium \u2060from the DRC earlier \u200cthis week.<\/p>\n
The team had planned a three-day trip to Kinshasa \u2060next week as a celebratory send-off before they head \u200bto their \u200cfirst World Cup in 52 years, but that trip has \u200bbeen cancelled.<\/p>\n
The \u2060World Health Organization on Friday raised to\u00a0\u201cvery high\u201d\u00a0the risk of the rare Bundibugyo strain of Ebola turning into a national outbreak in the DRC and has declared the outbreak there and in neighbouring Uganda an\u00a0emergency of international concern.<\/p>\n
Nearly 750 suspected cases and 177 suspected deaths have been recorded following the outbreak in DRC.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Nick Said; \u200bediting by Clare Fallon)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"May 23 (Reuters) \u2013 The Democratic Republic of Congo have no plans to change their preparations for the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":660525,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-660524","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=660524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/660524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/660525"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=660524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=660524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=660524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}