The number of COVID-19 cases in Canada grew to 27 on Monday as Ontario announced three new cases.
Ontario had announced four cases on Sunday, and in total has 18 cases, the most in the country. British Columbia remains at eight cases. No coronavirus-related deaths have been reported in Canada.
Williams has said that so far it doesn’t appear the virus known as COVID-19 is spreading locally.
A spate of new cases was reported over the weekend, all of them people who had recently travelled to Iran or Egypt, or family members of those who had visited the countries.
Ontario’s first four cases were people with a travel history to China, where the outbreak originated, and three of them have since been completely cleared of the virus.
In China, nearly 80,000 people have been diagnosed and more than 2,800 have died.
Iran has confirmed 1,501 cases of the virus and 66 deaths, but many believe the true number is larger as its caseload surged more than 250 per cent in just 24 hours.
Egypt has only two publicly reported cases of the illness.
The province’s chief medical officer of health, Dr. David Williams, is expected to provide details about the new cases at a news conference this afternoon.
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The Canadian Press
