Officials get a grip on coronavirus rogue cases

Initial lab results show that the state doctor who tested positive for the coronavirus appears not to have infected his patients, while health officials have managed to track down some passengers of an infected taxicab driver.

State health officials in the Republic of Cyprus said they did not find infection in patients treated by a state doctor who was infected with the coronavirus in the UK prior to going back to work at Nicosia General Hospital.

The initial testing came as good news for public health officials who remarked that follow-up tests would be necessary to rule out infection. The doctor’s family, colleagues, and people in his social circle were still being tested according to reports.

The head of Cardiac Surgery at Nicosia General Hospital, Chrysostomos Kokkinos, was one of first two confirmed cases in Cyprus, with the 64-year-old head physician telling the media he did not have symptoms when he went back to work.

Health Minister Constantinos Ioannou initially maintained that the doctor was showing symptoms, while state officials later said priority should be given to testing over assigning blame.

Kokkinos told Kathimerini Cyprus last week that he was the one who insisted on getting tested while some colleagues scrubbed the idea.

The doctor’s case was made more complicated after it emerged that experts were not fully clear on whether asymptomatic carriers could be contagious in the initial stages of an infection.

Experts believe that people are most contagious when they are most symptomatic, but cases have been reported of coronavirus spreading before people could start showing symptoms.

In another case, a Paphos cabbie who tested positive earlier this week, was believed to have been infected by a foreign tourist. The taxicab passenger, according to media speculation, may not have had any symptoms or known he or she was infected.

Officials managed to track down a number of passengers who used the cabbie’s services, while reports said his routes were fixed and known to authorities.

The taxi driver’s grandson tested negative for the coronavirus after the young boy was hospitalized in Nicosia with high fever.