A 60-year-old Chinese woman has been confirmed as the country’s third case of the novel coronavirus or 2019-nCoV, the Department of Health said Wednesday.
The Chinese national arrived in Cebu City from Wuhan, China via Hong Kong on January 20, Health Undersecretary Eric Domingo said in a briefing.
The couple who arrived in the country two weeks ago from Wuhan — the Chinese city at the epicdenter of the 2019-nCoV outbreak — are the Philippines' first two confirmed cases of infection with the new coronavirus.
One of them, a 44-year-old Chinese man, who along with his partner visited Dumaguete, Cebu and Manila, died from health complications Saturday making him the first 2019-nCoV fatality outside of mainland China.
The second death outside the world’s most populous country was recorded in Hong Kong, one of China’s special administrative regions.
The global death toll from the 2019-nCoV was at 490 as of Wednesday morning, with more than 24,000 cases of infection recorded in at least 28 countries and territories, including mainland China, according to the Johns Hopkins University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering that tracks coronavirus cases across the world.
The number of deaths from the 2019-nCov has overtaken that from the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome epidemic in China in 2002, which left 349 dead, CNN reported.
But the new virus that in some cases can lead to fatal acute respiratory disease, has a lower mortality rate of about two percent compared to around 10 percent for SARS and 35 percent for the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, health experts said.
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This article first appeared on CNN Philippines.
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