South Sudan has announced confirmation of another case of coronavirus, bringing to six the number of confirmed cases so far.
The announced was made by Health Ministry Undersecretary Dr. Makur Koryom, who is also the spokesperson for the taskforce on COVID-19.
He indicated that the new case is a 60-year-old South Sudanese man with no recent travel history. “This is a sixty-year-old South Sudanese national who is not sick, did not complain of anything, but he was tested because he wants to travel to one of the states of South Sudan,” he explained.
Koryom said the government was in the process of locating any person who had come into contact with the sixth patient whose results emerged on Saturday.
He added, “In light of this, the taskforce decided that all 101 travelers who were with this particular person be placed in a 14-day quarantine period.”
The undersecretary disclosed that the health ministry on Saturday carried out 170 tests, adding that the government is scaling up its capacity for testing more people for the infection.
The fifth case that was confirmed on Thursday also involved a South Sudanese national who went for routine tests to secure an exit clearance from Juba.
Key symptoms of the new coronavirus include fever, dry cough and shortness of breath. The virus is spread when an infected person coughs or sneezes and the droplets land in the mouths and noses of another person.
A person can also get infected with coronavirus by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or their eyes.
The coronavirus global death toll exceeded the 200,000 threshold, according to a tally by the Johns Hopkins University.
Worldwide, the number of confirmed infections stood at more than 2.88 million people, with some 813,000 recoveries.