Three days after Myanmar’s health authorities announced the country’s first suspected case of the new coronavirus, the authorities today said that four other patients also might have the disease.
A Chinese man was hospitalized immediately after his flight landed in Yangon from Guangzhou on Friday and his samples were sent to a Bangkok laboratory for testing.
The government said today the man had been given the all-clear and—along with two Myanmar passengers—had been discharged from Yangon’s Waybargi Infectious Disease Hospital in North Okkalapa township.
However, other suspected cases of the virus in Rakhine and Shan states as well as Yangon and Naypyidaw have been identified, said Khin Khin Gyi, deputy director of Contagious Disease prevention and Eradication under the Department of Public Health.
“We will be sending the samples [to Thailand] in the same fashion,” Khin Khin Gyi told Myanmar Mix.
Among the suspected cases is a one-year-old baby with a cough and fever who is being treated at a hospital in Kengtung in Shan state, near the China border, according to local media. The child’s family had recently returned from the southwestern Chinese province of Sichuan.
In Naypyidaw, a 29-year-old Chinese man with a fever is being treated in a private clinic. A 15-year-old Taiwanese boy was also taken to Waybargi hospital on Saturday (February 1) because of signs of a respiratory illness.
Meanwhile, a 38-year-old man with similar symptoms is being treated at Minbya township hospital in Rakhine state after he recently returned from south China’s Yunnan province.
The new virus is believed to have originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan and has since spread to at least 23 other countries. It has killed more than 360 people and infected more than 17,000 others, mostly in China.
Myanmar has been bracing for the arrival of the pathogen, as confirmed cases began appearing in neighbouring countries.
More people in Yangon are wearing surgical masks as they go outside. But experts fear the country’s fragile health system is in no way capable of coping with a serious outbreak.
