A first probable case of coronavirus has been identified in Quebec, announced the Minister of Health, Danielle McCann, Thursday evening.
This is a woman from the Montreal region who has just returned from a trip to Iran. The lady presented herself to a hospital that has not been identified.
She has had positive tests. The sample was returned to the National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg for confirmation. Minister McCann said the results should be available on Sunday.
The patient felt well enough to be sent back to her home where she will remain in segregation.
According to the Deputy Director General of Public Health Protection, Dr. Yves Jalabert, the lady has not been to work or has not taken public transit since her return to Quebec.
The authorities will seek the people with whom this lady has been in close contact.
For his part, the Chief Public Health Officer of Canada says that the authorities are preparing to monitor possible cases of transmission of the coronavirus on Canadian territory, while the United States has confirmed a first case of the virus which does not seem to be linked to a trip abroad.
The risk of contracting the disease in Canada remains low, but for the second day in a row Thursday, there were more new confirmed cases outside of China than in the country considered to be the epicenter of the epidemic.
The director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, says that the world is at a crucial point in the fight against COVID-19, which is now present in 46 countries.
The United States confirmed on Thursday a case in California that cannot be linked to a trip to one of the affected countries, suggesting that the person may have contracted the virus in the United States.
At a briefing on Thursday, Canada’s public health official, Dr. Theresa Tam, said that Canada has methods for monitoring the local spread of the virus – with the same systems used to monitor influenza. If public health agencies discover that COVID-19 has started to spread locally, they will quickly deploy measures to try to contain it.
There are now 14 confirmed cases of the virus in Canada, but to date all have been linked to international travel or close contact with someone recently returned from abroad.
The management of the infected person went well, which shows that our intervention protocols work
–
–
