Fifth case of coronavirus in France

It comes as France announces it has developed a test to detect the virus in a few hours which should be made available in public hospitals this week.

The 80-year-old Chinese tourist is still in intensive care at Bichat hospital, where is also hospitalised his daughter, as well as a previous victim, a 31-year-old man whose condition has worsened.

The other victims are a 30-year-old woman who is at Bichat hospital, and a 48-year-old man hospitalised in Bordeaux.

The Chinese tourist and his daughter arrived in France on January 23. The 80-year-old man first came at the hospital Georges Pompidou on Saturday 25 but was not considered as a suspected case as he did not show any breathing issues and just had fever.

The definition of ‘suspected cases’ has now been updated, the health minister Agnès Buzyn said, “to expand the capacity to track cases coming into our territory”. Any person coming from an area where there is significant human-to-human transmission will now be considered suspect.

A first flight has left Paris yesterday and will repatriate 200 French people from Wuhan in China, which is the centre of the epidemic, on Friday.