reassuring news from patients hospitalized in Paris

Orange with AFP-Services, published on Saturday January 25, 2020 at 4:19 p.m.

Doctors in charge of the two people infected with the coronavirus assured that the patients were fine. Other detections are in progress.

“The two patients are doing very well” and their condition shows “no signs of seriousness”.

As fear grows around the coronavirus epidemic, detected in France on Friday January 24, Professor Yazdan Yazdanpanah, head of the infectious diseases department at Bichat hospital, wanted to be reassuring. It was in his department that two patients were hospitalized in solitary confinement.

Asked about other potential cases, Professor Pierre Carli, head of the Samu de Paris, said that “there are patients being detected”, without giving any figures. However, he said that the Parisian Samu had received “around thirty calls” from “worried people” in the last 24 hours, of which “95%” could have been removed “by a simple conversation with the regulating doctor”.

The patients hospitalized in Bichat are a 31 year old man and a 30 year old woman, a couple “originating from Wuhan” the Chinese city where the epidemic appeared in December, specified Prof. Yazdanpanah. They arrived in France on January 18 and were transported to Bichat hospital on Friday by the Samu with “fever and respiratory signs”. The woman no longer had feverish symptoms on Saturday and the man had “a slightly fluctuating fever”.

“The probability of an epidemic is low”

Asked about other possible cases, Professor Yazdanpanah, also director of the Institute of infectiology of Inserm and expert with the WHO, underlined that “we are going to have suspicious patients, there are going to be cases”. However, he estimated that “the probability of an epidemic in France is extremely low because we have a device” to diagnose and take care of patients quickly.

“The care system is functional,” also said Professor Carli, saying that the care was taking place for the moment “exactly in the scheme that we had fixed”.

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