An American couple, who came to a hospital in Kerala showing symptoms of coronavirus on Friday and went missing later have been tracked down and quarantined, NDTV reported.
Authorities tracked them down to the Kochi International airport while they were trying to fly out to Doha. They were brought back to the district hospital in Ernakulam where their samples were collected. They are now in isolation at Kalamassery Medical College hospital, according to The News Minute reported.
The couple came to a hospital in Alappuzha on March 12, complaining of diarrhoea and other symptoms. They were then asked to go to a virology hospital where doctors advised them to get quarantined, Hindustan Times reported. They went out of the hospital saying that they had to make some calls and disappeared.
Kerala has 19 cases of coronavirus or COVID-19, the highest in India. The Union health ministry on Friday confirmed 81 cases in India. Out of these, three people in Kerala have recovered, and includes the man in Karnataka who died because of it. Of the remaining cases, 64 are Indians, 16 Italians and one person is a Canadian national. However, according to officials in state governments, there are reports of 87 patients in India.
India reported its second death from coronavirus on Friday, a 68-year-old woman from Noida. A 76-year-old man from Kalburagi in Karnataka was the first to die of coronavirus in the country.
The World Health Organization has declared the outbreak of coronavirus a pandemic. The virus, which first surfaced in China in December, has now killed more than 5,000 people, with cases around the world topping 134,000, according to AFP.
On Friday, WHO said that Europe was now the “epicentre” for the global coronavirus pandemic, and warned it was impossible to know when the outbreak would peak. “More cases are now being reported every day than were reported in China at the height of its epidemic,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.
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