The Health and Welfare Ministry said Saturday that a Chinese tour guide who entered South Korea from Japan has tested positive for a new coronavirus raging through China.
While he was in Japan, the male guide had contact with a person who had been found to have been infected with the virus, and he took a test in South Korea after the infected person in Japan recommended that he do so as well, according to the ministry.
(A disinfection worker wearing protective gears spray anti-septic solution in an train amid rising public concerns over the spread of China's Wuhan Coronavirus at SRT train station on January 24, 2020 in Seoul.)[Getty/Kyodo]
After staying in Japan for work, the guide entered South Korea from Gimpo airport in the suburbs of Seoul on Jan. 19.
The mayor of Bucheon, Gyeonggi Province, of which the male guide is a resident, said on Facebook that the man is presumed to have contracted the virus in Japan while he was with a tourist bus driver and guide who had already been infected with the virus.
The tour guide is the 12th case of the new coronavirus confirmed in South Korea.
On Saturday morning, a second group of South Koreans returned to South Korea from China on a government-chartered plane.
Including about 370 South Koreans who returned home on the first chartered plane the previous day, about 700 South Koreans have been evacuated from the central Chinese city of Wuhan -- at the center of the outbreak -- and its vicinity, according to local media.
