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Second British doctor to be taken into quarantine over coronavirus infection fears

Friday, 28 February 2020 6:50 PM [ Last Update: Friday, 28 February 2020 7:04 PM ]

An employee packs respiratory protective face masks on an assembly line at the Valmy protective mask manufacturer plant in Mably, central France, on February 28, 2020. (File photo by AFP)

A Surrey-based GP, feared to be the latest British case of the new coronavirus, is being transferred to one of six specialist NHS centres for infectious diseases, a report says.

The development was reported on Friday by The Guardian, which also said an investigation was underway to determine whether any of the GP’s patients had also been infected. The individual is believed to have seen a large number of patients during the week prior to his becoming ill in the last 24 hours.

Public Health England (PHE), NHS England or the Department of Health and Social Care, have yet to publicly confirm his diagnosis.

The Surrey-based GP’s wife is also a doctor, and the PHE is “contact tracing” everyone with whom either of the two individuals has been in contact, including all patients they have seen, even though it was not yet known if his wife had also contracted the virus. That would include scores of patients as the couple is understood to have been working normally for several days before the man was diagnosed as a carrier of Covid-19.

Public health officials have yet to establish how he might have caught the virus since he has not recently visited any of the places abroad where there have been recent outbreaks, such as northern Italy, Tenerife, Iran, and China.

Contact tracing of his patients should reveal whether anyone he has seen in recent days has been to any of those destinations.

If confirmed, he would be the second GP to contract the new coronavirus among what is now 20 confirmed cases in the UK. The first, a family doctor in Brighton, and a member of staff at Worthing Hospital, also in Sussex, was among the first cases to be identified in Britain earlier this month.

The number of confirmed cases in the UK had surged from 13 to 19 in the last 24 hours, with four emerging in England and one each in Wales and Northern Ireland. The latest case would bring the total to 20.

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