Some 70 to 80 people have been tested for the novel coronavirus in Cambodia since January 10, including 20 people aboard a luxury cruise ship who were tested on Thursday, Health Ministry spokeswoman Or Vandine said.
Only one person, a Chinese man, tested positive for the new viral strain, and he recovered and left the country this week, Vandine told VOD on Friday.
She estimated some 11 to 20 Cambodians had been tested for the novel coronavirus (Sars-CoV-2), while the rest were foreigners, mostly from China, where the disease was first detected.
All suspected cases in Cambodia had been tested by the Pasteur Institute of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, she added.
Epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health told VOA this month that Cambodia’s reporting of one confirmed case was “not very likely,” but “not completely beyond what you would expect.”
Lipsitch also said that the 25 cases of coronavirus reported in Thailand at the time was lower than expected. Thailand has reported 33 cases, as of Friday.
He co-authored a new study posted on medRxiv that found that the number of coronavirus cases reported in Thailand and Indonesia has been well below what scientists would expect, given the nations’ air travel volume estimates to the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the outbreak was first identified.
The numbers raise concerns that the virus may be spreading undetected in those countries, potentially contributing to the outbreak, according to VOA.
