France's first victim of a Sars-like virus which the 65-year-old man is thought to have contracted in Dubai, has died, health officials said Tuesday. "The first patient is dead," a spokesman with the Directorate General for Health said, referring to the man who was hospitalised on April 23.
Another man, who shared a hospital room with him for three days, was later found to have the nCoV-EMC virus, which is a cousin of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (Sars) that sparked a health scare around the world in 2003. The other man, who is in his 50s, has been in hospital in the northern city of Lille since May 9.