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Addressing a press conference in capital Ankara, Turkey’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said the novel coronavirus patient has been placed in isolation and all his close relatives have been quarantined.

Turkey's Health Minister Fahrettin Koca addresses a press conference in Ankara on Wednesday March 1q, 2020. (AA)

The first novel coronavirus case has been diagnosed in Turkey, the country’s Health Minister Fahrettin Koca confirmed early on Wednesday.

Addressing a press conference in capital Ankara, Koca said that first confirmed case of the coronavirus was a Turkish national who had travelled from Europe.

He added that the patient has been placed in isolation and all his close relatives have been quarantined.

The health minister said that all necessary precautions have been taken to prevent the spread of coronavirus in Turkey and that a single case poses no threat to the country.

The Turkish health ministry had also announced that the leaves of all its officials had been cancelled.

Earlier during the day, Koca had urged the public to take precautions against the virus in the coming month.

“We should limit human touch, travel abroad as little as possible, self-quarantine ourselves, and take special care of the elderly,” he said.

Koca said he would meet with the country’s education minister in coming days and discuss temporally closing schools.

The Turkish presidency can publish a notice restricting civil servants’ international travel except in obligatory cases, he added.

He dismissed reports that an elderly US woman tested positive for the virus after visiting Turkey.

“In records from the last two weeks, there is only one 86-year-old female US national. She did not visit Turkey. On March 3, she was on a connecting flight from Tirana [Albania] to Washington via Istanbul,” he said on Twitter.

Turkey last month closed its border gates with Iran, a hard-hit country by the virus, and cancelled all flights to that country.

There have been more than 4,000 deaths from the coronavirus globally, with more than 113,000 confirmed cases in 115 countries, according to the World Health Organization.

Source: TRT World