india

Updated: Mar 06, 2020 13:25 IST

An Irish woman, suspected to be infected with coronavirus, who was reported missing from a government hospital in Odisha, has been found at a hotel in state capital Bhubaneswar. Officials in Bhubaneswar hospital where she was initially referred to refuted reports that the foreign national refused to get admitted in SCB Medical College and hospital in Cuttack.

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She was at Biju Patnaik International airport in Bhubaneswar on Thursday after showing flu-like symptoms and was taken to city’s Capital Hospital. The woman was then referred to isolation ward of SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack along with a person who was accompanying him, said B Maharana emergency officer of the hospital.

Meanwhile, the test reports of blood and swab samples of a couple from Kanpur who had arrived at Paradip port on March 3 in a Singapore ship has tested negative for Covid-19. Director of State health department, Ajit Mohanty, said that the couple will remain in isolation ward for next one week.

However, the test reports of a youth of Sonepur district, who returned from Dubai on February 27 and showed symptoms of coronavirus infection, is yet to be received. The youth been admitted to a special ward at VIMSAR medical college and hospital in Sambalpur district and kept in isolation.

Odisha health minister Naba Kishore Das has urged Union Health Minister Dr Harsh Vardhan to set up a coronavirus testing laboratory at SCB Medical College and Hospital in Cuttack. The ministry of health and family welfare has already notified the Regional Medical Research Centre in Bhubaneswar as a laboratory for Covid-19. In the absence of a testing lab, the blood sample of the patients are being sent to the virology institute in Pune.

The total number of coronavirus positive cases in India reached 31 on Friday after a man from Delhi’s Uttam Nagar tested positive for coronavirus. The patient had travelled to Malaysia and Thailand, the health ministry said in a statement.

The virus started spreading in China in late December, but is now recording an exponential spike outside of the country. Iran, South Korea and Italy are among the nations where the outbreak is now most serious.

“We are calling on every country to act with speed, scale and clear-minded determination,” WHO’s director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing at the UN health agency’s Geneva headquarters.

India has activated its massive health care machinery to trace and isolate new infections, tapping into a network of more than 3,00,000 workers who are deployed across the country. India also revised its travel advisory and asked passengers from South Korea and Italy to produce a certificate saying they are Covid-19 free.