Health workers test drivers in China. Image courtesy: Xinhua
Coronavirus: one patient dies in Philippines
Manila, February 2, 2020
A man has died of the new coronavirus in the Philippines in the virus's first confirmed fatality outside China.
The patient was a 44-year-old Chinese man from Wuhan, in Hubei province, where the virus was first detected, said a BBC repport.
The victim appeared to have been infected before arriving in the Philippines, the World Health Organization said.
Chinese health authorities said on Sunday that the overall confirmed cases of novel coronavirus infection on the Chinese mainland had reached 14,380 by the end of Saturday, and a total of 304 people had died of the disease.
The US, Australia and an increasing number of other countries have barred the arrival of foreigners from China and are requiring their own citizens to undergo quarantine.
US health officials on Saturday confirmed an eighth case of the fast-spreading new coronavirus in the United States and the Pentagon said it would provide housing for people arriving from overseas who might need to be quarantined.
The latest US patient, who is in Massachusetts, recently returned from Hubei province in central China, the epicenter of the outbreak, a spokeswoman for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said in an emailed statement. The person was not identified and no other details were provided.
The number of coronavirus cases worldwide has overtaken that of the similar Sars epidemic, which spread to more than two dozen countries in 2003. But the mortality rate of the new virus is much lower, suggesting it is not as deadly.
The man travelled to the Philippines from Wuhan, via Hong Kong, with a 38-year-old Chinese woman who also tested positive for the virus last week, the Philippines Department of Health said.
Officials said he was admitted to a hospital in the capital, Manila, and then developed severe pneumonia.
Rabindra Abeyasinghe, the WHO representative to the Philippines, urged people to remain calm. "This is the first reported death outside China. However, we need to take into mind that this is not a locally acquired case. This patient came from the epicentre of this outbreak."
The main driver of transmission, based on currently available data, is symptomatic cases, said WHO.
WHO is aware of possible transmission of 2019-nCoV from infected people before they developed symptoms. Detailed exposure histories are being taken to better understand the pre-clinical phase of infection and how transmission may have occurred in these few instances. Asymptomatic infection may be rare, and transmission from an asymptomatic person is very rare with other coronaviruses, as we have seen with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome coronavirus. Thus, transmission from asymptomatic cases is likely not a major driver of transmission, it said.
Persons who are symptomatic will spread the virus more readily through coughing and sneezing, it said
In China, 60.5% of all cases since the start of the outbreak have been reported from Hubei Province.
In France, for the first time outside China, a healthcare worker was diagnosed as being ill with 2019-nCoV acute respiratory disease. The health worker treated two patients who were later identified as probable cases.
In the last 24 hours, additional instances of human-to-human transmission outside China were reported: in Japan, a tour guide who is part of the same cluster of Japanese cases who had contact with tourists from Wuhan; in Germany, a case that is part of the cluster in Bavaria; and in Thailand, a taxi driver who had no travel history to China.
