China will provide Egypt with 1,000 COVID-19 detection kits as well as technical documents for precautionary and protective measures against the novel coronavirus, Egypt’s Minister of Health Hala Zayed announced on Monday.
On Sunday night, Zayed headed to China, aiming to enhance cooperation with Asian giant to counter the virus outbreak. During her visit, Zayed met with her Chinese acting counterpart and the deputy speaker of the Chinese Parliament. The officials exchanged experiences and data on dealing with the issue, and Zayed stressed that her ministry is ready to deal with all scenarios in Egypt.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly was following the latest updates on the outbreak of COVID-19 in accordance with the latest data provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) on Monday.
The total number of confirmed cases of COVID-19 globally has reached 89,198 cases, including 80,026 cases in China, while the death toll has reached 3,048 so far. The WHO is reviewing the risk assessment of this outbreak to become “very high” in China, “very high” in the East Asia, and “very high” for the rest of the world.
On Sunday, the Ministry of Health announced that a foreigner had been suspected of COVID-19 in Egypt and she is now in quarantine and receiving the needed medical treatment. The ministry explained on Monday that the case was a female Danish patient who had arrived to Egypt on Friday from Portugal. After taking the needed procedures, she tested negative.
The announcement came at a time when health authorities in the Santa Clara County in California, US reported three new cases of COVID-19; two of them are a husband and a wife who traveled recently to Egypt.
Moreover, French health authorities reported 47 new cases of the COVID-19, 11 of them were on a voyage in Egypt recently.
The latest cases reported in the US and France raised the number of infected cases who had visited Egypt recently to 16 from China, US, France, Canada, and Taiwan, raising concerns about unrecorded cases of the epidemic in the country.
“Egypt checked 1,443 suspected cases of COVID-19, and all came negative except one case. The case showed no symptoms and tested negative after 48 hours, and left quarantine,” Zayed said.
China is the most affected, recording 90.4% of total cases worldwide, and there is an increasing internal transmission of the disease in several countries, including South Korea, Italy, Japan, Germany, France, Iran, and Singapore.
The total confirmed cases that appeared in countries other than China reached 7,698 cases, with a percentage of 9.6% in 62 countries. The hotspots of the epidemic are Japan, South Korea, Iran, and Italy, according to WHO’s estimations.
There are also 705 suspected cases on the “Princess Diamond” ship in the territorial waters of Japan.
