Three people, including a 65-year-old U.K. citizen with a travel history to Hong Kong, have been quarantined at the civic-run Kasturba Hospital as a precautionary measure against the novel coronavirus (nCoV), which has led to an outbreak in China.
While the senior citizen was admitted to the isolation ward of the hospital on Friday, the two others — a 36-year-old man and a 31-year-old woman — with a travel history to China were admitted on Thursday. Those two however tested negative for nCoV.
A statement from the Union Health Ministry said that one of the Mumbai patients had tested positive for Rhinovirus, while the other had a common cold. The test reports of the U.K. citizen are awaited.
State health officials said more than 1,700 travellers have been screened at Mumbai airport and seven people are currently under surveillance in Maharashtra, including three in Pune and four in Mumbai.
The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s executive health officer, Dr. Padmaja Keskar, said samples of all three patients at Kasturba Hospital had been sent to the National Institute of Virology in Pune.
The U.K. citizen, who is attached to a multinational engineering firm implementing major infrastructure projects in Mumbai, had travelled to London for Christmas and thereafter spent nine days in Hong Kong before returning to Mumbai on January 10.
When in Mumbai, he lives in an apartment rented by his company at a hotel in Bandra. On Friday, he visited the Asian Heart Institute to seek treatment for a sore throat and headache, but looking at his travel history, the hospital gave him an N95 mask (a mask with efficient filtration) and referred him to Kasturba Hospital, which has an isolation facility.
Created since the H1N1 outbreak in the State, the isolation facility — ward 30 — has six glass cabins and four side rooms for quarantined patients.
“When we came to Kasturba Hospital, the doctors insisted that he get admitted. They have taken his throat swabs and blood samples for testing,” said a colleague who was accompanying him, expressing concern about the quality of care at the isolation facility.
In a press statement, Health Minister Rajesh Tope said there is no reason to panic. “For suspected patients, isolation facilities have been created in Mumbai’s Kasturba Hospital and Pune’s Dr. Naidu Hospital,” said Mr. Tope, adding that those who have travelled to Wuhan in China and have symptoms like cold and fever should seek medical advice.
Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses with some causing less severe ailments, such as the common cold, and others more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS). The World Health Organization was informed of a cluster of cases of pneumonia of an unknown cause detected in Wuhan, a city in Hubei province of China, on December 31, 2019.
