A health system employee who recently returned from Italy is the first person in New Hampshire to test positive for a potentially deadly strain of coronavirus, officials announced Monday.

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The unidentified patient is an adult from Grafton County, officials said. Dartmouth-Hitchcock and Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health President Joanne Conroy confirmed the patient is an employee of Dartmouth-Hitchcock. The patient did not return to work in Lebanon before placing themselves under self-quarantine.

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New Hampshire health officials said the person tested positive at the state's lab for the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus. Samples are being sent to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for confirmation. It is considered a presumptive case of COVID-19 until the confirmation is made.

"This individual and this test still needs to be confirmed at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, but we are not going to wait for that confirmation," said state epidemiologist Dr. Benjamin Chan. "We are going to be beginning the investigation. In fact, we already have begun the investigation when we initiated testing over the weekend. So, we will be working very closely with the health care agency involved in this."

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Officials said the patient is not sick enough to be hospitalized and is currently isolated at home. Chan said the patient experienced mild symptoms of the virus after returning from a trip to Italy, where more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19 have been identified.

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"We'll be working tirelessly to investigate this most recent identification and to identify any susceptible contacts who may need to themselves be placed under self-quarantine," Chan said.

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The patient did not return to work after coming back from Italy, officials said. Dartmouth-Hitchcock officials said they are taking precautions and have created an incident command center.

"It involves probably 20 individuals with their areas of expertise specific to the issue we're addressing," Conroy said. "There is a very, very structured way they develop what are the near-term issues we need to address and what are the long-term issues we need to address."

The person is the fourth patient to be tested for coronavirus in New Hampshire and the first positive result. The previous three tests came back negative.

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"Our public health laboratory has brought on the capacity to do COVID-19 testing as of this morning," Chan said.

According to the CDC, there have been dozens of confirmed cases of the virus in the United States, and six people have died. Worldwide, there have been more than 87,000 confirmed cases and more than 2,900 deaths, mostly in China, where the outbreak began.

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Chan said he couldn't say whether COVID-19 might become widespread in the state, but he said his office has a lot of experience dealing with outbreaks, including MERS, SARS and the H1N1 influenza outbreak from a decade ago.

Health officials urged people to continue to take commonsense precautions against becoming sick or spreading illness.

"We ask people that if they are sick, that they stay home, they do not go to school or work, especially if they have a fever or respiratory illness," Chan said. "People should be practicing frequent hand hygiene. People that are coughing and sneezing should be appropriately covering those coughs and sneezes and then washing their hands afterward. If anybody is sick, we encourage them to call ahead to their health care providers to talk about their symptoms and any potential travel that we will continue to work closely with our health care providers and our health care systems to address concerns and issues that arise around this new virus."

Concerns over the coronavirus are prompting several New Hampshire schools to ask some students to stay home after they returned from trips to Italy during school vacation week.

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