Breaking News! Coronavirus Now In Spain, Three Confirmed Cases In Spanish Hotel, More Than 1,000 Guest Placed In Quarantine In Hotel Lock Down At Tenerife.
Source: Thailand Medical News Feb 25, 2020 4 years, 10 months, 1 hour, 42 minutes ago
Spain announced that one Italian tourists and two other guests that was staying at a huge tourists resort at Tenerife in Spain’s Canary Island had tested positive for the
coronavirus with a few more guest and staff already exhibiting symptoms and being tested.
Spanish health has decided put all thousand plus guests and staff at the hotel cum resort under isolation while the hotel is under lockdown.
Medical authorities and hospitals all over
Spain are racing to prepare contingency plans in case of a
coronavirus outbreak.
All 1,000 plus tourists who were staying at a hotel in Tenerife, in
Spain’s Canary Islands, and staff have been placed in isolation after an Italian man tested positive for the Covid-19
coronavirus, police sources said on Tuesday. Subsequently two more guests also tested positive. The hotel is located in Adeje, in the south of the island.
The first male patient is a tourist from Lombardy, northern Italy, which has seen a recent spike in
coronavirus cases. He has been hospitalized at a medical center in the south of Tenerife, the news agency Efe reported.
It was revealed that this the third, fouth and fifth known case of the
coronavirus in
Spain, although the other two patients have already been discharged after being quarantined at hospitals in La Gomera (Canary Islands) and Mallorca (Balearic Islands).
Apparently Spain had been under pressure not to make public revelations of the first two cases by the European Union officials!
The Government in
Spain has announced the creation of an Interministerial Committee on the
Coronavirus, to be presided by Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of the Socialist Party (PSOE). The first gathering will take place on Tuesday following the weekly Cabinet meeting.
The worsening
coronavirus epidemic in Italy, its proximity to
Spain and the close ties between both countries have created a new scenario for health authorities.
Dr Pere Godoy, president of the Spanish Epidemiology Society told
Thailand Medical News, “This changes a lot of protocols, it’s the beginning of a new phase. Until now, the criteria for suspicion were simple: showing symptoms, and having spent time in Hubei. It is now urgent to reformulate these criteria in a precise manner, and that’s going to be complicated because the situation in Italy and elsewhere in Europe is changing fast and because of the deep ties between both countries. The virus is already here and also in other parts of Europe, and there are few opportunities left to contain it.”
Medical experts from
Spain’s major hospitals spent much of Tuesday trying to adapt to a situation that few had predicted would be changing so fast, so soon.
Dr Jesús Rodríguez Baño, head of
the infectious diseases department at Virgen Macarena Hospital in Seville commented, “The first step now is to change the protocols and have contingency plans ready for whatever may come. These contingency plans include elements such as “reinforcing teams, protection measures for personnel, defining the spaces reserved for suspicious cases in the ER, and having hospital rooms ready for admissions.”
However updating the protocols that determine who is a potential
coronavirus patient is proving harder as EU officials are trying to find ways to downplay the situation or conceal figures. On Monday, the advisory board of the European Center for Disease Control (ECDC) met in Stockholm in a bid to define the clinical criteria that should be followed across the EU to identify cases.
However the board, made up of representatives of the public healthcare services of member states, failed to reach a consensus. “It’s still being debated and will be newly reviewed tomorrow or in the coming days,” said a source at the ECDC.
Dr Antoni Trilla, head of preventive medicine and epidemiology at Barcelona’s Clínic Hospital, agreed that it is “urgent” to resolve this point in order to deal adequately with suspicious cases in the coming days.
Dr Trilla added, “The definition of what constitutes a case is the key tool. It tells us what symptoms and personal background such a strips, contacts and we should take into account to decide whether a patient is likely or not to be infected with the virus, and to adopt all appropriate measures.”
Spain’s Health Minister Salvador Illa has also mentioned “the meeting of experts” of the ECDC as a preliminary step for the central and regional governments of Spain to draft a new protocol.
Meanwhile hospitals in
Spain have started to adapt their existing guidelines “case by case and prudently,” said a department head at another large hospital, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Meanwhile health authorities say that 6 other guest and staff at the hotel had tested positive in the first PCR tests but a second test is being conducted before they are identified as confirmed
coronavirus cases. The first guest had three test that showed positive results while the other two had two tests each.
For more developing stories on the
Spanish Coronavirus Outbreak, keep checking at :
https://www.thailandmedical.news/articles/coronavirus
