KUALA LUMPUR, Jan 24 — Singapore’s first coronavirus patient was in close contact with eight Chinese nationals, who are all in Johor Baru, but they haven’t shown signs of infection, Malaysia said.
Health director-general Dr Noor Hisham Abdullah said the four adults and four children from China — who were in contact with the 66-year-old Wuhan resident in Singapore — have been screened by the Johor state health department and found to be healthy. Clinical samples were taken from them to test for the 2019-nCoV virus.
“The Johor state health department will continue monitoring their health every day for 14 days, or until they return home to their country of origin, whichever comes first,” Dr Noor Hisham said in a statement.
As of today, no confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus have been reported to the Johor state health department or to the Ministry of Health (MOH), he said.
The DG previously said that four suspected coronavirus cases in Malaysia — two foreigners in Sabah and two Malaysians in Selangor — tested negative for the potentially deadly virus from the family of viruses that produced SARS.
Channel News Asia reported that two more coronavirus cases were confirmed today in Singapore — the 37-year-old son of the first patient and a 53-year-old woman from Wuhan — totalling three cases.
The death toll from the new strain of coronavirus has reached 26, all in China, and infected 830 people across the country. More cases were confirmed in Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Macau, Hong Kong, and the United States.
The World Health Organization (WHO), however, has declined to declare a global health emergency over the 2019-nCoV outbreak, saying that at this stage, it was an emergency in China but not yet an international one.
