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5 coronavirus cases traced to Chinese department store. Who was the carrier?
- Health authority finds source after discovering the movements of a fifth person in a cluster of cases in Tianjin
- The chronology of the five people’s symptoms reveals how each could have become infected
Reading Time:3 minutes
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Chinese experts were left puzzled after five cases of the new coronavirus were linked to a department store in the northern megacity of Tianjin – until their investigations shed light on the extent of the rapidly spreading illness’ transmissibility.
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Four women and a man, all of whom had shown symptoms then been confirmed as infected in the past two weeks, had one thing in common: their connections to the store, in the Baodi district in Tianjin, about 130km (80 miles) from the capital of Beijing.
But only when the fifth case was discovered did their ability to infect one another become apparent.
None of them had been to the city of Wuhan, where the virus is believed to have originated, nor did they have close physical contact with one another except for two who were a married couple, according to the city’s infectious disease prevention centre.
Their cases have helped to reveal the transmission pattern of the deadly virus, which has infected more than 20,000 people in mainland China, killing over 400, and spread to more than 20 countries.
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