France has seen the first death of the Coronavirus outside of Asia. The victim was an 80-year-old tourist from China who had been hospitalized since Jan. 25, the French health minister said.
Is this significant, well in terms of media hype it is, for some time people have been dismissing the dangers of the Coronavirus as up until this point all deaths had been isolated to Asia, specifically China. Now with this recent death in France peoples fear levels just got ramped up a notch.
But is it significant in reality, not really. This is an 80 year old tourist from China who was hospitalised in Mid January in France. As far as we can determine the victim has not infected anyone else since hospitalisation.
What we know about the victim is very little, but at 80 years old the victim likely already had health issues prior to infection.
The New York Times reports:
France’s health minister, Agnès Buzyn, said on Saturday that a 80-year-old Chinese tourist had died of coronavirus on Friday at a hospital in Paris.
Ms. Buzyn said the man, who was from the Chinese province of Hubei, the center of the outbreak, arrived in France on Jan. 16 and had been hospitalized at the Bichat-Claude Bernard Hospital since Jan. 25.
“His condition had quickly worsened and he had been in critical condition for several days,” Ms. Buzyn said in a televised statement.
