Thailand’s public health ministry reported seven new cases of the coronavirus on Saturday, including three Thais and four Chinese.
The new cases brought the total reported in the country to 32, among the world’s highest number of infections outside of China.
“The seven new cases are all in hospital,” said Suwannachai Wattanaying charoenchai, director-general of the Disease Control Department.
One of the Thai cases was part of the group of 138 evacuated from China’s coronavirus epicentre of Wuhan on Tuesday, Suwannachai told reporters.
The other two Thais had exposure to tourists, he said.
Among the four Chinese, three are members of the families of previously reported cases, while the other is a tourist from a “risky area” in China, said Suwannachai.
Among the 32 cases Thailand has reported so far, 23 are Chinese while nine are Thais.
As of Saturday, one more patient was allowed to go home, bringing the count of discharges to 10, said Suwannachai.
Twenty-two other patients remain in hospital, he said.
Below is a Live Tracking of the cases, death toll and other information related to the virus:
Meanwhile, the number of new infections in China’s Hubei province, the epicentre of the outbreak, rose on Friday from a day earlier, Chinese health officials said, reversing two days of declines and showing the difficulty of predicting the epidemic’s peak.
The death toll in mainland China jumped by 86 to 722, and is poised to pass the 774 deaths recorded globally during the 2002-2003 pandemic of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), another coronavirus that jumped from animals to humans in China.
So far, only two deaths have been reported outside mainland China – in Hong Kong and the Philippines – from about 332 cases in 27 countries and regions.
