Health authorities have confirmed a fourth case of coronavirus in Catalonia. The patient is a 58-year-old woman from Sant Cugat del Vallès, in the Barcelona metropolitan area, who was admitted to the Hospital Clínic in Barcelona. Announcing the latest case on Friday afternoon, health service officials said the woman shows mild symptoms.
Contact with a positive case
The woman had had contact with a person who tested positive in Germany, and an alert was given to Catalan epidemiological services, who got in touch with the woman and tested her for the virus, with the result coming back positive.
This new case is in addition to three other patients already detected in Catalonia.
Four cases linked to travel abroad
With this new case, there are now four known cases of coronavirus in Catalonia - all four in the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where the majority of the Catalan population lives, and all four directly linked to a journey abroad. On Thursday health authorities confirmed the positive result of a 22-year-old woman from Tenerife, who had been in the Italian city of Milan, between 19th and 25th February, the day she travelled to Barcelona, where she stopped over. Once in the city, the patient went to the Hospital Clínic, and has been in isolation since then, showing mild symptoms.
The other two cases are progressing well. They are a young man, from Barcelona and aged 22, who had been to Milan between February 22th and 25th; and a 36-year-old woman, of Italian nationality and resident of Barcelona, who travelled to the Italian cities of Bergamo and Milan, from 12th to 22th February. None of the Catalan cases are related.
On Wednesday, Catalan public health secretary Joan Guix said it was likely that for a number of days there could be a succession of cases in Catalonia. This, he said, would be concerning, but only relatively, "as long as they were only imported cases". The key, he said, was to detect and isolate them, and search for people they had had contact with. "We will be much more concerned if we start to have community-acquired infections," he said. Even so, in European countries such as France and Germany, some outbreaks of coronavirus infection within the community have also been contained.
Thirty-nine active cases in Spain
One 77-year old man in Madrid is in a serious condition in hospital with the virus. All other detected cases in Spain show only mild or moderate symptoms.
In the whole Spanish state, there were 39 confirmed active COVID-19 infections late on Friday night: ten in the Valencian Community, eight in Andalusia, five in the Canary Islands, seven in Madrid, four in Catalonia, two in Castile and León, two in the Basque Country and one in Aragon.
Added to these are the German patient from La Gomera (Canary Islands) and the British man from Mallorca (Balearic Islands), who have already been discharged. Thus, the Spanish state has had a total of 41 known cases of the virus so far.