Pictured: British family including nine-year-old at the heart of coronavirus outbreak

Five Britons – including a nine-year-old boy – have been diagnosed with deadly coronavirus in France after being whisked to hospital from a ski chalet high in the Alps.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that environmental consultant Bob Saynor, 48, and his nine-year-old son have been named locally as being at the centre of the outbreak.

The father and son were being treated in hospital in France last night, along with three other Britons from another family who were staying in the Saynors’ six-bedroom ski chalet.

Mr Saynor’s two other children and four Britons from the other family were being kept in isolation in French hospitals as a precaution.

Stunned locals in the sleepy village of Les Contamines-Montjoie, near Megeve, expressed shock after medics airlifted the families out of the isolated resort on Friday afternoon.

A friend of the family, Louise Gasparelli, said Mr Saynor and his wife Catriona, a doctor, had moved from Brighton to live permanently in the chalet three years ago.

French health minister Agnes Buzyn last night said it was believed that all five coronavirus cases were linked to a British man who had stayed there following a business trip to Singapore, where he had contracted the virus.

The middle-aged British man – also from Brighton – flew back to the UK where he fell ill and alerted the NHS. He was being treated in St Thomas’s Hospital in London last night.

The dramatic development in the Alps came as:

• A school pupil from Brighton was told by Public Health England to ‘self-isolate’ for 14 days;
• A British family of four who live in Majorca are waiting to hear if they have the virus;
• The global death toll from coronavirus is today expected to exceed the 774 people killed by SARS in 2002 and 2003;
• China launched a crackdown, rounding up those suspected of having the virus and putting them in quarantine;
• A jet commissioned by the Foreign Office to bring back more than 200 Britons from virus-hit Wuhan is due to arrive today.

The alarm was raised in the Alps on Friday when people staying at the Saynor family’s large chalet began to fall ill.

Chris Hopkinson, who lives in Les Contamines-Montjoie, said a helicopter and several ambulances descended on the village and took the affected Britons away.

He described the ski resort at the foot of Mount Blanc as ‘just about the last place you could imagine the virus to reach’. Village mayor Jean-Marc Peillex said two schools had been closed as a precaution. Because it is the height of the ski season, the resort is full.

Two of the apartments in the resort were being examined, health officials said, adding that no other people in the village had been affected by the outbreak.

In Brighton, a pupil at Portslade Aldridge Community Academy – who is thought to be related to the initial Singapore case – was told to self-isolate as part of the PHE’s investigation. The school said it had been told there was no need for it to close.

In Majorca, a 46-year-old father was quarantined in the island’s main hospital, Son Espases, after he came into contact with a coronavirus sufferer.

His wife and their two daughters, aged seven and ten, were later admitted to the same hospital. All four family members were undergoing tests to see if they had contracted the killer virus.

The ten-year-old tested positive for a common strain of flu but none of the other three family members is said to be showing any signs of ill health.

The father, who lives in Marratxi, close to the island capital of Palma, went to the hospital on Thursday and told medics he had been in contact with a person who had tested positive for the virus in France.

He was in France between January 25 and 29 before returning to Majorca by plane. The identity of the person he came into contact with has not been revealed.

Health officials told a press conference in Spain yesterday morning that only the father had contact with the confirmed French case. His wife and children were admitted to be quarantined.

Six other UK nationals who had come into close contact with them at the resort were also taken to hospital last night in Lyon, Saint-Etienne and Grenoble. 

‘They were all staying in a chalet in Contamines-Montjoie when some complained of feeling unwell,’ said a health ministry source in Paris of the five new patients.

‘The 11 are now in isolation in three hospitals in the Haute Savoie region, with care and tests ongoing. Five have the Coronavirus, including a child.’    

The mayor of Contamines-Montjoie revealed three of the children being probed -including the confirmed case – attend the same school, which will remain shut next week. 

The UK patient who arrived in France from Singapore on January 24 had been attending a business conference at a £1,000-a-night hotel in the Asian country.

The gathering at the luxury-laced Grand Hyatt comprised more than 100 people and has been linked to the spread of coronavirus in at least three other states.

There is now a manhunt underway to find the other campus attendees in case they spread the infection.  

On return to the UK, the British man suffered flu-like symptoms and took himself to A&E at the Royal Sussex in Brighton on Sunday, February 1.

The anonymous victim was then whisked 55 miles to a specialist infectious diseases unit at Guy’s Hospital in London yesterday, where he will remain in isolation for at least two weeks. 

Jean-Yves Grall, the head of the regional health authority, said the child’s mother ‘was in Britain taking exams’ at the time of the contamination.

Mr Grall said the infected child had attended school in Contamines-Montjoie and also spent a day at a second school in the nearby town of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains.

Mayor and Departmental Councilor of Mont-Blanc Jean-Marc Peillex wrote in a statement: ‘To avoid unnecessary interpretation and panic, the English student who was infected […] took a French class with four other students on Thursday morning. 

‘I learned that as a caution the first minister had decided to close the schools in Contamines and Saint-Gervais.’ 

Etienne Jacquet, the mayor of Contamines-Montjoie, said: ‘I was called by the regional health agency at 12.30am on Saturday about two British families. Seven were in one chalet and four in another. Of the 11 people, five have tested positive for the coronavirus.’ 

‘Their clinical condition shows no sign of seriousness,’ said the minister, who added that the French authorities were trying to contact family of the British national.

Buzyn said the group of newly-infected people with the virus formed ‘a cluster, a grouping around one original case.’   

The results of their tests will be analysed at a lab in Madrid, with health officials expecting results within 24 to 48 hours.

Spanish officials have said the passengers who were on the plane the British father took from France to Majorca will be contacted only if he tests positive for coronavirus. 

‘That original case was brought to our attention last night, it is a British national who had returned from Singapore where he had stayed between January 20 and 23, and he arrived in France on January 24 for four days,’ Buzyn said, adding that the latest outbreak had occurred in the mountainous region of Savoie in eastern France 

Singapore’s use as a transport hub in south-east Asia means it could be a contaminating zone for the virus. 

‘We may well find further international cases that have travelled through Singapore,’ Dr Michael Head, Senior Research Fellow in Global Health, University of Southampton, told the MailOnline.  

‘This cluster of cases in France illustrates how the coronavirus can spread to countries indirectly of China. 

‘The French ski resort will have citizens from numerous other countries there, so there are implications for potential onward transmission. 

‘Hopefully further people will not also have been exposed and infected, and this specific localised outbreak can be immediately contained.’  

According to the French health ministry, a crisis unit has been set up and people who have been in close and prolonged contact with these new cases will be informed during the day and given specific instructions.

The confirmed cases in France came as a British honeymooner transferred from the cruise liner Diamond Princess to hospital in Japan with the coronavirus was said to be feeling well and in good spirits.

Mrs Marshall Steele said she was also well but had ‘cabin fever’ as she continued to be confined to her room on the ship, a status shared with nearly 3,700 other passengers and crew. 

‘It was a hard first night without Alan. But hey, we are constantly in touch. Japanese doctors are excellent and he is in safe hands,’ she wrote.

A total of 78 British passport holders – including crew – were among those who boarded the ship, sources said. 

The ship’s operator, Princess Cruises, said the vessel’s quarantine was due to end on February 19, barring ‘unforeseen developments’, and confirmed all affected guests were being taken to hospitals.

The total number of people infected with the virus in France has now reached 11.

The six others include one man in a serious condition, while the others have shown signs of improvement in recent days, according to medical officials. 

On Sunday, 40 French people are to be repatriated from China, where more than 700 people have been killed by the virus, and 34,000 cases have been detected.

The first cases of Coronavirus arrived in France at the end of January, among ill people recently arrived from China.

Public health officials around the world are trying to contain the new virus that first appeared in the seafood market at Wuhan, China, at the start of December.

Coronaviruses are common in animals of all kinds, and sometimes can evolve into forms that can infect humans.

Since the start of the century, two other coronaviruses have jumped to humans, causing the SARS outbreak in 2002 and the MERS outbreak in 2012.   

A 747 charted by the Foreign Office left Wuhan last night carrying more than 200 Britons and dependants, on a direct flight to RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire. They will then be sent by coach to Kents Hill Park, a conference centre in Milton Keynes, where they will be kept in quarantine for two weeks.

In Japan, British honeymooner Alan Steel – who caught the virus on board the cruise liner Diamond Princess – was transferred to hospital. His wife Wendy posted on Facebook: ‘Alan is well, Japanese doctors are excellent.’

Coronavirus has a 14-day incubation period where a patient may not display symptoms but can still infect others by coughs and sneezes. It has infected 34,974 people worldwide and killed 724.