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Mexico among 8 more countries to report first confirmed coronavirus cases

Eight countries reported their first confirmed coronavirus cases Friday — including Mexico — as a World Health Organization spokesman said the deadly bug could reach most “if not all countries around the world.”

Mexico’s assistant health secretary, Hugo Lopez-Gatell, said there is one male patient in Mexico City and another man in the northern state of Sinaloa.

While a second test is still pending on the Sinaloa case, “we are treating this as confirmed,” Lopez-Gatell said, adding that neither person is seriously ill.

One of the men had been in contact with someone who traveled to the northern Italian region battling a severe outbreak.

Nigeria also became the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to confirm a case.

Nigerian officials said the infected person was an Italian citizen who entered the country Monday on a Turkish Airlines flight from Milan through Istanbul, according to the Guardian.





The man stayed at a hotel near the airport that evening and then continued to his workplace in neighboring Ogun state in the southwestern part of the country, the paper reported.

He was treated two days later at his company’s medical facility before health practitioners there notified government biosecurity officers, who transferred him Thursday to a containment facility in Yaba, Lagos.

He is described as clinically stable with no serious symptoms, authorities told the outlet.





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Wales, New Zealand, Estonia, Denmark, Netherlands and Lithuania have also reported their first infections, according to reports. In the majority of those cases, the patients had recently traveled to Italy.

“The outbreak is getting bigger,” WHO spokesman Christian Lindmeier told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland, on Friday. “The scenario of the coronavirus reaching multiple countries, if not all countries around the world, is something we have been looking at and warning against since quite a while.”





WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus tweeted Friday that “the continued increase in the number of COVID-19 cases, & the number of affected countries over the last few days, are clearly of concern.

“Our epidemiologists have been monitoring these developments continuously, and we have now increased our assessment of the risk of spread and the risk of impact of #COVID19 to very high at a global level,” he said.

Most cases “can still be traced to known contacts or clusters of cases,” the WHO official said.

“We do not see evidence as yet that the virus is spreading freely in communities,” he said. “As long as that’s the case, we still have a chance of containing this coronavirus, if robust action is taken to detect cases early, isolate and care for patients and trace contacts.”

With Post wires





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