Two Chinese citizens were taken on Wednesday to a hospital in Armenia and tested there for possible cases of a dangerous new virus which has infected thousands of people in China and killed at least 132 of them.
Axar.az reports citing Armenian media that officials in Yerevan said they were hospitalized after being barred from again entering neighboring Georgia at the main Armenian-Georgian border crossing.
According to Liana Torosian, a senior official from the National Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the Chinese travelers showed no symptoms of any virus while the other only had a mild fever and is now undergoing an X-ray examination of their lungs at a Yerevan hospital specializing in the treatment of infectious diseases.
“Let’s see what results the X-ray will produce,” Torosian told reporters. “The condition of both patients is satisfactory at the moment. They will certainly remain under medical surveillance in separate insulated wards.”
Torosian insisted that the likelihood of either Chinese national suffering from the new kind of coronavirus is low because they had left China before the disease outbreak. “During the entire [two-week disease] incubation period they were in Georgia and Armenia and had no health issues,” she said.