By NewsDesk  @infectiousdiseasenews

Health officials in England are reporting the 9th COVID-19 case in the country and the first in London.

Image/zraimondas

According to Chief Medical Officer Professor Chris Whitty:

“One further patient in England has tested positive for novel coronavirus (COVID-19), bringing the total number of cases in the UK to nine.

“This virus was passed on in China and the patient has now been transferred to a specialist NHS centre at Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London.”

Officials say seeing a case in a city the size of London with several international airports is not surprising and both London and the rest of the UK could expect to see more cases.

Michael Head, a global health expert from the University of Southampton said that of the 1,750 tests carried out so far in the UK, more than 99 per cent had turned out to be negative. Risks to Londoners and other UK residents remained low.

In related news, Chinese officials (computer translated) added new category of “cases confirmed by clinical diagnosis” to the case diagnosis classification in Hubei Province, so that patients can receive standardized treatment according to confirmed cases as early as possible to further improve the success rate of treatment. According to the plan, Hubei Province has recently conducted investigations on suspected cases and revised the diagnosis results, and newly diagnosed patients were diagnosed according to the new diagnosis classification. In order to be consistent with the classification of case diagnosis issued by other provinces across the country, starting today, Hubei Province will include the number of clinically diagnosed cases into the number of confirmed cases for publication.

On Wednesday, with this new category, Hubei Province newly added 14,840 new cases of pneumonia (including 13332 clinically diagnosed cases) and 248 deaths.

Globally, the case tally has surpassed 60,000 cases and nearly 1400 deaths.