Montreal hospitals on heightened coronavirus alert

Montreal hospitals are on heightened alert after the city’s public-health department issued “a call for vigilance” Monday concerning a new coronavirus — considered a cousin of the SARS virus — that has infected nearly 300 people since an outbreak began in Wuhan, China in December.

The World Health Organization has been monitoring the spread of the virus closely and is considering whether to declare an international public health emergency over the 2019-nCoV virus.

To date, Chinese authorities have confirmed that six people have died from the virus, while the U.S. Centres for Disease Control reported on Tuesday its first case, a man who had contracted the virus after having travelled to the city of Wuhan.

Canadian authorities have not detected anyone returning from Asia with the virus, but are bracing for the possibility. In Montreal, medical staff have been instructed to ask anyone turning up in emergency rooms with flu-like symptoms whether they have travelled to China.

“It’s good to remain cautious to make sure we can curtail this virus before it spreads more than it has already spread in China,” Dr. Caroline Quach, in charge of infection control at Ste-Justine Hospital, told the Montreal Gazette on Tuesday.

“Whenever someone has a runny nose and a cough, regardless of the etiology (cause), we isolate the patient as a precaution. What all the hospitals have added on top of this now is we make sure that when we triage a patient in the ER, we ask them if they were travelling in the past two weeks, and if people are coming from that area in China, we’re going to isolate them right away, ask them to wear a mask, so that they don’t transmit it to others.”