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Operative board calls for visiting restrictions as Hungary coronavirus cases rise to 7
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Hungary’s operative board coordinating efforts against the new coronavirus has recommended that hospitals and nursing homes introduce visiting bans as the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the country rose to seven over the weekend.
Tibor Lakatos, head of the board’s emergency centre, told a news conference on Sunday that Hungary has so far only identified individual cases of the virus and that the aim was to prevent an epidemic.
Of the seven people diagnosed with the new virus so far, four are Iranian citizens, one is British and two are Hungarian nationals, he said.
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The first two to be infected were Iranian students, one of whom attends Budapest’s Semmelweis University and the other Gödöllő’s Szent Istvan University, he noted. The third patient is a British national who lives in Debrecen, often commuting to Milan for work. The fourth person to test positive for the virus was the Iranian girlfriend of one of the students. The fifth patient is a 70-year-old Hungarian man with underlying illnesses and the sixth a 22-year-old Iranian man who had attended a birthday party with the first Iranian student who tested positive.
The seventh person to have tested positive for the virus is the 59-year-old Hungarian wife of the British patient, Lakatos said.
According to the government website providing updates about the coronavirus outbreak, there are an additional 67 people in quarantine in Hungary and 362 people have been tested.
Chief medical officer Cecilia Müller told the same news conference that six of the seven patients were being looked after in Budapest and the British patient in Debrecen. Their condition is satisfactory, she said, adding that only the 70-year-old Hungarian patient was being treated in intensive care. There are altogether 54 people quarantined at Budapest’s St. Laszlo Hospital, Müller said, adding that the 11 secondary school students and their teachers who returned from Italy at the end of February have been released from hospital.