Indonesian Domestic Worker In Singapore Tests Positive For Coronavirus

On Tuesday, Singapore announced the first local transmissions of the deadly coronavirus from China as a major aviation conference was scrapped due to the escalating health scare.

The Ministry of Health said it had found six additional cases, four of them involving human-to-human transmission in Singapore, bringing the total infections to 24 in the country.

“Though four of these cases constitute a local transmission cluster, there is as yet no evidence of widespread sustained community transmission in Singapore,” the ministry said in a statement.

Two of the local transmission cases involved women working at a health products shop primarily serving Chinese tourists.

According to The Straits Times, the domestic worker is a 44-year-old Indonesian woman who also had no recent travel history to China. She is the domestic helper of a confirmed case, and stayed with her employer in her home in Jl. Bukit Merah. She reported symptoms on Sunday and had not left her home since then.

She was admitted to SGH on Monday.

Another was a female tour guide who had brought groups to the health shop.

In addition to the local transmissions, two cases were among the Singapore residents evacuated from Wuhan on January 30.

Health Minister Gan Kim Yong said that if the local transmissions escalate in the community the government is prepared to consider “measures to reduce human-to-human interaction”.

The Indonesian Embassy in Singapore said in a statement on Tuesday that it had received a verbal notice from Singapore’s Ministry of Health about the Indonesian citizen. The statement said the embassy could not reveal her identity because of the Personal Data Protection Act.

“The Indonesian Embassy in Singapore will continue to communicate with [local] authorities about the handling [of the Indonesian patient],” it said.

The death toll in China stood at 425 Tuesday, exceeding the number of fatalities in the country from the outbreak in 2002-03 of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

The World Health Organization has declared the crisis a global health emergency.