A suspected coronavirus case has been detected in Pakistan’s Sindh province in an engineering student who has been quarantined by authorities following his return from China.

Shahzaib Ali Rahuja, a petroleum engineering student at a Chinese university situated around 1,000km from Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, returned to the country from China via Qatar, his brother Irshad Ali said.

“He returned to Karachi on Saturday night on our insistence and unable to take a direct flight he came via Qatar on Saturday. They screened him at the airport in China and also at Karachi but he showed no problems. It was after returning home that he developed a fever and cough and took some medicines but when his nose started to bleed we rushed him to the hospital,” he said.

The brother posted a video on social media, showing him sitting on a hospital bed and bleeding from the nose in a government hospital in Pir Jo Goth near Khairpur.

In the video, the brother claimed that doctors have locked them up in a ward. “They left us alone after suspecting that Shahzaib had contracted the coronavirus,” he claimed.

He said that after his video went viral, the health authorities took Shahzaib to the civil hospital in Khairpur and it was decided to send him to Karachi for screening and treatment as doctors said they didn’t have required facilities in Khairpur.

The provincial health authorities have now put him in an isolation ward. Sindh health hinister Azra Fazal Pechuho, however, told media that Shahzaib had shown no symptoms of the virus.