UK tourists at risk as Alps hit by coronavirus
HOLIDAYMAKERS skiing in France are being traced amid fears they came into contact with five Britons, including a nine-year-old boy, who have been diagnosed in the Alps with coronavirus.
Six other British people staying at a shared chalet at Les Contamines-Montjoie near Chamonix have also been taken to hospital as a precaution, French authorities revealed yesterday.
Two schools attended by the infected boy after he moved to the region last year will close this week as parents were advised to keep children at home until they have been tested.
All 11 Britons at the resort are thought to have encountered a British man who attended a conference in Singapore last month before visiting the chalet and returning home. He was diagnosed with the virus in Brighton.
A spokesman for Servomex, an East Sussex-based global gas analysis company which organised the conference,
said “a limited number of its employees in different countries” had been diagnosed with coronavirus. Sir Rowland Kao, professor of veterinary epidemiology and data science at Edinburgh University, said the cases originating from Singapore “change the game”. The man is believed to have attended the Singaporean hotel with more than 90 business people from around the world
Sir Rowland said: “There will be a substantial window of risk around when the cases occurred, as well as the additional risks associated with the British cases, as the French ski resort where they were staying is likely to result in a wide range of international contacts. We are likely reaching the point where the tendrils of transmission risk reaching out from China and becoming a web.”
Last night, Prof Peter Piot, the microbiologist who co-discovered Ebola and the presence of Aids in Africa warned that Britain could suffer a “major outbreak” of coronavirus.
Prof Piot, director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine told The Sunday Times it posed a greater threat than Ebola “because of the mode of transmission”. He said he was “increasingly alarmed” and that “the potential for spread is much much higher.” A 60-year-old American has become the first non-Chinese national to die from coronavirus. It brings the death toll to 724 and infections to 34,974.
Seven Britons, including the new cases in France, have been confirmed as having the virus. Two others, a student at the University of York and a visiting relative, who are thought not to be British, have also been diagnosed here.
Alan Steele, 58, who was among 61 passengers on a cruise ship off the port of Yokohama who tested positive, used social media yesterday to say he was “optimistic” but “still in the twilight zone” in a Japanese hospital.
A British family of four is also being tested in Majorca after coming into contact with a person who had tested positive for it in France. Meanwhile, Manchester United striker Odion Ighalo, 30, who has recently returned to the UK from China, was told he could not fly to Spain to train with his team as he may be unable to get back to Britain if immigration controls here tighten.
Agnès Buzyn, the French health minister, said the British people with coronavirus in the Alps were “not in a serious or worrying” condition. The official said the British man stayed at the chalet between Jan 24 and 28, after his three-day business trip in Singapore.
When he was diagnosed in Brighton, NHS officials notified their French counterparts he had been at the resort. France now has 11 confirmed cases.
The last repatriation flight from the Chinese city of Wuhan to the UK will arrive at RAF Brize Norton early today.
‘The tendrils of transmission risk reaching out from China and becoming a web’