The mother, father and two daughters were reportedly in contact with someone who recently tested positive in France.
Samples have already been taken from all four patients and sent to the laboratory of Majadahonda and members of the Ministry, the Servei de Salut and Son Espases have promised to publish more details about these cases at 1100am on Saturday.
The Ministry of Health & Consumer Affairs has appealed for calm, asking the public to have confidence in the professionals who are dealing with the virus and wait to find out whether or not these four patients have contracted the coronavirus 2019-nCoV.
Last week the Balearic Islands adopted a protocol to deal with patients who had symptoms of the coronavirus 2019-nCoV. The details were published in a document which states that anyone who is diagnosed with the disease must be held at the hospital or centre where the diagnosis was made and not automatically transferred to Son Espases Hospital.
The health centres and hospitals must then send respiratory samples to the Microbiology Laboratory at Son Espases Hospital where to be tested. The head of Virology, Dr. Jordi Reina, explained that those samples are compared to a list of respiratory viruses and if they don’t match any of them, the analysis will be sent on to the Reference Laboratory in Majadahonda, Madrid.
The investigation period is activated when an affected person meets one of the three criteria described in the protocol: an acute respiratory infection; a history of travel to the Chinese province of Wuhan up to 14 days prior to the onset of symptoms or close contact with a probable or confirmed case of the coronavirus, such as close contact with passengers located within a radius of two seats on the same flight.
The new coronarivus 2019-nCoV was first detected in December 2019 in the central-eastern Chinese city of Wuhan, which is capital of the Hubei province and has a population of about 11 million.
There are unconfirmed reports from China linking the spread of the disease to fish from the seafood market in Wuhan.
The World Health Organisation, or WHO decided not to treat the disease as an International Emergency.
"At the beginning of any epidemic outbreak, they assess its intensity, mortality and what the country does to contain it and right now it is very much concentrated in China, even although there are cases elsewhere. The WHO doesn’t want to continually launch International Emergencies, they are cautious and they will to wait until the time is right,” said Dr. Reina.
No comments
To be able to write a comment, you have to be registered and logged in
Currently there are no comments.