Coronavirus: Sarawak bans recruitment of China workers

MIRI: Sarawak has imposed an immediate ban on recruitment of workers from China following the outbreak of the coronavirus in that country.

This follows the decision of the state Disaster Relief Management Committee after a meeting on Monday (Jan 27) afternoon.

The committee decided to ban China workers with immediate effect and imposed mandatory declaration of travel destinations for all those entering the state.

A notice of the decision by the committee was posted in websites of enforcement agencies.

The committee also discussed the case of a 25-year-old woman from China, who is working for a foreign industrial plant in the Bintulu district in northern Sarawak.

The woman, who hails from Hubei province in China, has been hospitalised for flu-like symptoms after returning from a trip to Wuhan.

She has been working for an energy-production plant in Bintulu for the past two years.

On Jan 11, she went to Wuhan for a work-related trip and on Jan 16, she came back to Sarawak on board a Wuhan-Kota Kinabalu-Bintulu flight.

On Sunday (Jan 26), she showed symptoms of flu and was warded in the Bintulu Hospital.

At 4.15pm Sunday, the Bintulu police sent a team of officers to the hospital to find out more about the hospitalised woman after a social media posting claimed that she was a Wuhan virus carrier.

The Bintulu Hospital had extracted samples of her blood and sent it to a lab in Kuala Lumpur.

It is not yet confirmed that she has been infected by the Wuhan virus.