Cuba will establish a plan for the prevention and control of the coronavirus, known as “Wuhan pneumonia,” approved this Friday at a meeting of the Council of Ministers, where several sectors of the country will be involved, headed by the Ministry of Public Health (MINSAP), the official Cuban media reported.
Minister of Health Dr. José Ángel Portal Miranda explained that the actions will avoid by all means the risk of introduction and dissemination of the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV) throughout the island, in addition to mitigating the negative effects that the spread of an epidemic in the population would entail.
This group of measures is being applied a few days after the World Health Organization (WHO) emergency committee declared a state of international emergency, due to the outbreak of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China.
MINSAP will guarantee the International Health Control personnel with professionals who must check passengers arriving on the island, both by sea and at airports. In this regard, the Cuban health minister stressed that “strict compliance with measures for the surveillance and control of travelers and crew members, coming from areas with transmission, must be ensured after their arrival.”
The country’s medical personnel will receive all the necessary training referring to this new strain of the coronavirus in order to increase epidemiological surveillance at different levels of the public health system in the country, in case assistance is needed in the centers where a case may arise with suspicion of the virus, according to the official sitie of the Cuban presidency.
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Another of the measures to be taken will be the protection and epidemiological monitoring of Cubans who carry out internationalist missions in other countries, although there are currently no cases of Cubans in China infected by the virus.
This week the National Director of Epidemiology of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health, Francisco Durán, said that no cases of coronavirus have been reported in Cuba and there are no suspicious cases or people under surveillance.
The outbreak of a new virus that began in China has so far infected almost 12,000 people worldwide, of which there are 11,791 cases in the Asian giant, with a balance of 259 dead, mostly in the province of Hubei, where the first case of the new type of coronavirus was detected in December 2019.
So far, scientists from Jiangsu Province in China have developed a rapid nucleic test kit to detect the new coronavirus (2019-nCoV), with a response time of between 8 and 15 minutes, as confirmed by the municipal office of science and technology of the locality.
The first batch of this instrument is already in use in the province of Hubei, center of the virus outbreak, a tool that is highly sensitive and easy to use, a mechanism that is vital for the prevention and control of the outbreak.
