Livemint : Mar 12, 2020, 12:24 PM
Chandigarh: The Haryana government on Thursday declared the contagious coronavirus infection an epidemic."COVID-19 declared epidemic in Haryana," Health minister Anil Vij said in a tweet.According to the state Health Department, 44 samples of suspected cases were sent for tests till Wednesday. Out of these, 38 were found negative for coronavirus while reports of six people were awaited.The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared the outbreak a pandemic, saying cases outside China have risen 13-fold over the last two weeks.Since the outbreak started in December, more than 120,000 people have been infected by the virus, with around 80,000 of them in China alone where the virus originated. However, the spread of the disease has been rapid in other countries over the last two weeks, with around 30,000 cases now in Iran, Italy, South Korea, Spain, France and Germany.New coronavirus patients with mild symptoms are most contagious and have the highest virus shedding in early infection days and become less infectious as the disease begins to weaken, according to a new study.