ARCHIVED - British man becomes second confirmed coronavirus patient in Spain

The virus was contracted during a skiing holiday in the French Alps

The second case of a patient having contracted the conronavirus was confirmed on Sunday morning in the hospital of Son Espases in Palma de Mallorca, with the man now in isolated care being a UK national who returned to his home in the Balearics from the Alps on 29^th January.

Fortunately the diagnosis points to only a “slight” infection, although it has been established that among the group of people with whom the man was in contact in Contamines-Montjoie in the French Alps during a skiing holiday a total of six other people are reported to have been infected, all of them British: five remain in France and the other is in London. So mild is the infection of the man in Mallorca that the health authorities report that the man is “practically asymptomatic”.

It is believed that the outbreak in the Alps started with another British national who was in Contamines-Montjoie after attending a business meeting in Singapore between 20^th and 22^nd January, an event from which medical authorities believe the virus also spread to Malaysia and South Korea. The following week 11 people shared two apartments in the ski resort and all have now been hospitalized in Lyon, Grenoble and Saint-Étienne while another 100 people have been tested at the ski resort close to Mont Blanc.

In Mallorca it was the patient himself who reported his circumstances when he began to feel unwell, since when he, his wife and his two daughters aged 10 and 7 have all been held in hospital. He is the only one to have tested possible, but as the coronavirus continues to spread no precaution is deemed too extreme and efforts are being made to trace all of those with whom he had contact after returning to his home in Mallorca and on the flights he took from Geneva to Barcelona and then on to Palma.

The first case of coronavirus confirmed in Spain was similar in many ways, involving a foreign resident in the islands, although in that instance the patient is a German man in La Gomera in the Canaries. He is thought to have contracted the virus from a work colleague in Bavaria who in turn had been in contact with an employee from Wuhan in China, the focus of the outbreak.

The coronavirus death toll worldwide has now exceeded that of the SARS virus in 2003 (almost 800), and 43 cases have been reported in 9 European countries including the UK, France, Italy and Germany as well as Spain.

Image: the Son Espases hospital (Google Maps)

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