Mexico confirmed its fourth case of the new coronavirus on Saturday — all linked to recent travel to Italy — after a young woman tested positive for infection.
Health authorities said the 20-year-old from northern Coahuila state was carrying the virus without showing symptoms.
She had recently travelled to Milan and was now under isolation in her home, according to the state government.
Another eight people are being tested for suspected infection, authorities said.
The other three confirmed cases — two men in Mexico City and one man in northern Sinaloa state — are all believed to have visited northern Italy, authorities said Friday.
Italy has emerged as one of the global hotspots of the COVID-19 outbreak with more than 1,100 cases in cities across the country’s north.
The virus has infected around 87,000 people and killed nearly 3,000 since it first emerged in central China late last year.
ABN TV earlier reported that Mexico’s health ministry said the country has confirmed three cases of the coronavirus, becoming the second Latin American nation reached by the global outbreak.
The three men — two in Mexico City and one in the northern state of Sinaloa — are all believed to have visited northern Italy, the epicentre of the virus in Europe.
“Probably all three were infected from the same source. All three are imported cases,” Jose Luis Alomia, general director of epidemiology at the Ministry of Health, said at a press conference Friday.
Senior health ministry official Hugo Lopez-Gatell told a separate news conference that one of the men, a 35-year-old in the capital, “has a mild, mild illness” with symptoms “similar to that of a cold”.
“He is a young individual and so he is at very low risk,” he said.
[AFP]
