Health, Government - QLD Man Tested For Coronavirus
Health officials in Queensland are monitoring a man who traveled to Wuhan City in China and is now displaying symptoms of respiratory illness associated with the troublesome new coronavirus causing global concern.
"We've got one gentleman that we're following at the moment who has traveled to Wuhan and has developed a respiratory illness," said Queensland's chief medical officer Dr. Jeannette Young. "He is recovering at home," she added, "We've done some tests on him and are awaiting test results."
The young man has family in the Wuhan area, and visited around the time that doctors believe the 2019-nCoV coronavirus made the jump from animals to people. Chinese health officials say the new illness has made hundreds of people sick in the past few weeks, and three patients died. Believed to have originated in a meat and seafood market, it has been carried by travelers to three Chinese provinces including the area around Beijing, as well as to South Korea, Japan, and Thailand.
Because it's so new, the Australian medical community still doesn't have all of the details it needs to test for the new coronavirus, and thus the man in QLD was only given a very general test for coronavirus. China has provided its data to the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO), which will distribute it to Queensland and around the world so that more specific testing can be done.
WHO is also convening an emergency meeting of experts at its headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland on Wednesday to assess whether the novel 2019-nCoV coronavirus is a global threat.