On March 4, the Belarusian Health Ministry has recorded two more COVID-19 cases.
A day earlier, the ministry reported on the fourth patient with coronavirus.
“Two more test results of patients related to the contact of the 1st level have shown positive results,” the press service said on Tuesday evening. Today, the fact of their being infected has been officially confirmed.
Thus, six cases of the novel coronavirus infection have been registered in Belarus.
The first case was detected and confirmed in Belarus in late February: an Iranian national who is studying at the Belarusian National Technical University tested positive. A week before, he came to the country from Baku. On February 29, the Health Ministry said that the father of a girlfriend of the BNTU student from Iran could also be infected. The agency called the results of his tests ‘questionable’.
On March 1, the Health Ministry reported that a test of resident of Vitsebsk region revealed that a fragment of RNA ‘may belong’ to the 2019-nCoV. Shortly before, the woman and her colleagues had been to Italy on a business trip.
At the end of 2019, China alerted the World Health Organization to the outbreak of a pneumonia-like disease in the city of Wuhan that has about 11 mln residents. Later, the infecting agent was defined as coronavirus 2019-nCoV, then COVID-2019. As of March 4, 93,455 laboratory-confirmed cases of COVID-19 were registered worldwide, of which 3,198 were fatal. South Korea and Iran are among the most-affected countries. A number of the diseased is growing sharply in Europe as well; over 2,500 residents of Italy have caught the novel coronavirus.
The WHO urges people to take care of their health and protect others by following the recommendations.
