The BC Centre for Disease Control’s public health lab has conducted 114 tests for the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV, which is rapidly spreading around the world and the World Health Organization yesterday said was a global health emergency.
The lab tested some people more than once, so fewer than 114 people have sought medical attention in B.C. for the virus that affects patients’ respiratory systems and causes fever, cough and sneezing.
B.C.’s provincial health officer Bonnie Henry said January 31 that after the province announced its lab had first tested a patient as being positive, on January 28, there was a spike in the number of people who wanted to be tested.
Henry stressed that the risk to the public is low, and that the biggest risk factor is having visited China, or more specifically Wuhan, in Hubei province. That province has seen 5,806 cases of people with the virus so far, with 204 of those people dying from the disease, according to Johns Hopkins University Whiting School of Engineering.
Worldwide, 213 people have died from the diseases – all in China – and 9,776 people have been infected.
Henry advised that people postpone trips to China, although “there is no concerns that I am aware of in transiting airports in China."
She said that while other viruses, such as measles, are far more infectious, and even the common flu kills far more people worldwide, the reason that the novel coronavirus is such a concern is that it has recently passed the species barrier and is a new virus.
Most cases of transmission have taken place when an infected person has been symptomatic and is in very close quarters with the person who contracts the virus. There have been media reports of a case in Germany where a patient is believed to have contracted the virus from someone who was not yet showing symptoms of the disease. Henry stressed that these cases are rare.
