NEWS 3
COMMUNITY 13
Douglas overpass planned
Kids help Aussie animals
COMMUNITY 18
Man with dementia speaks out
5
THINGS TO DO THIS WEEKEND THURSDAY, JANUARY 30, 2020
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LOCAL NEWS – LOCAL MATTERS.
LUNAR NEW YEAR: A Cheondoong drummer pounds a beat at the City of Lougheed celebration on Saturday. See more photos on page 29.
SEE PAGE 15
PHOTO JENNIFER GAUTHIER
HEALTH
Official cautions against spreading coronavirus ‘rumours’ Kelvin Gawley
kgawley@burnabynow.com
B.C.’s provincial health officer, Bonnie Henry, said there is “no risk” of British Columbians being infected with the novel coronavirus in connection with a woman rumoured to have visited the Lower Mainland while suffering from the disease. According to a story spread on social media, a
woman visiting from China fell ill but was turned away by Metro Vancouver hospitals only to be diagnosed with the 2019-nCoV virus after returning to her home country. “We have reviewed that case with the clinicians who assessed the individual,” Henry said. “It has been investigated in some detail, and we can confirm that there is no risk to people
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here in B.C.” Henry made the comments at a press conference Tuesday morning where she announced the province’s first confirmed “presumptive” case of the new virus, which has infected more than 4,500 and killed more than 100 people in China, according to the New York Times.The presumptive case, a man in his 40s, recently returned from Wu-
han, the central Chinese city where the outbreak began, Henry said. While health officials are confident further testing will conclusively confirm the province’s first diagnosis, Henry said there is no reason to be concerned about contracting the disease from the individual diagnosed or from the rumoured carrier who returned to China. A health ministry spokes-
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person also provided a statement to the NOW about the rumoured case: “[The B.C. Centre for Disease Control] is aware of reports of an unconfirmed case of novel coronavirus in an individual who spent time in the Lower Mainland and has returned to China. Even if the case is confirmed, given what we know about the virus and humanto-human transmission, the
risk to British Columbians is very low.” Posts on Chinese social media app WeChat have spread, relaying a supposed incident in which a visitor from China was sent home from Burnaby Hospital, Vancouver General Hospital and a Burnaby clinic, despite having told health-care providers they had recently come from Wuhan. Continued on page 8
Glenn Chivers
604-420-9100 GlennChivers@remax.net ChiversBell.ca
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