Coronavirus: new cases confirmed in UK and Spain as efforts to identify carriers intensify
- In Britain, a plane evacuating more than 200 people from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the centre of the epidemic, landed on Sunday
- The virus death toll in China rose Sunday to 811, passing the number of fatalities in the 2002-03 Sars epidemic
Both the new cases were acquired during trips to France, officials said.
Italian health authorities in Tuscany, meanwhile, were trying to retrace the steps of a Taiwanese couple who stayed four days in a Florence hotel, flew to Hong Kong and then to Taiwan on February 1 and were later confirmed to have the virus.
The new UK case is a known contact of a previously confirmed case there, the country’s Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty said, adding that “experts … continue to work hard tracing patient contacts”.
In Spain, authorities were working to identify everyone who came into contact with a British man whose case was detected in Mallorca, a popular holiday island in the Mediterranean Sea, Spain’s National Microbiology Centre said.
The man, who lives on the island, contracted the virus at the end of January at a French ski resort, according to Fernando Simón, head of Spain’s Coordination Centre for Health Alerts and Emergencies.
The man, who was not identified, is healthy but was being kept in isolation in Palma de Mallorca, Simón told a news conference in Madrid. His wife and two daughters tested negative.