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All of Italy on lockdown over coronavirus outbreak CNNView Full Coverage on Google News
ROME (Reuters) - Italy’s prime minister promised “massive shock therapy” to beat the coronavirus on Monday and urged Europe to act decisively after markets plunged and his country sealed off much of its wealthy industrial north.
Police officers wearing protective masks make checks on people at Milan's main train station following a government decree that has shut down large areas in the north of the country, to stem coronavirus contagion, Milan, Italy March 9, 2020. REUTERS/Flavio Lo Scalzo
France echoed Giuseppe Conte’s call for action, saying Europe must come up with a “strong, massive and coordinated response” and euro zone finance ministers, meeting next week, must decide on a stimulus plan to avoid economic crisis.
Stocks have fallen worldwide as the virus has spread, cutting global supply lines and crippling industry.
They plummeted again on Monday as prices for crude oil tumbled as much as 33% after Saudi Arabia launched a price war with Russia, sending investors already worried by the coronavirus fleeing for the safety of bonds and the Japanese yen.
U.S. stock futures fell 5% to hit their daily lower limit and halt trading. London’s FTSE 100 shed 8.4 per cent a few minutes after the open in its worst single-day drop since the financial crisis.
In little more than two weeks, the number of recorded coronavirus cases in Italy has surged to 7,375, with 366 deaths, the second-highest death toll after China, putting the health system under huge strain.
“We will not stop here,” Conte told the daily La Repubblica. “We will use a massive shock therapy. To come out of this emergency we will use all human and economic resources.”
He said strict European Union borrowing limits should be loosened to allow more fiscal room for maneuver, and that the flexibility envisaged by the EU’s budget rules should be used “in full”.
“Europe cannot think of confronting an extraordinary situation with ordinary measures,” he said.
The virus emerged in China in December but has since spread around the world. Flights have been canceled, communities from cities to cruise liners have been isolated, and concerts, trade fairs and sporting events postponed. Even the Tokyo Summer Olympics are in doubt.
More than 110,000 people have been infected in 105 countries and territories and 3,800 have died, the vast majority in mainland China, according to a Reuters tally.
With Italy’s economy already on the brink of recession, its new curbs, unprecedented in Italy’s post-war history, halt movement in and out of Lombardy, which is the richest and most economically productive region and includes Milan, and close many public spaces.
Bars and restaurants were ordered to close or to restrict entry and maintain a distance of at least a meter between people on their premises. Major sporting events, including top-flight Serie A football, will be played without spectators for a month.
France had 1,126 confirmed coronavirus cases and 19 deaths as of Sunday evening. The central bank estimated the economy would barely grow in the first quarter from the previous three months and warned of a potentially severe slowdown.
But China and South Korea, Asia’s second-worst hit country, have both reported a slowdown in new infections.
Mainland China, outside the epicenter of Hubei province, reported no new locally transmitted coronavirus cases for the second day on Monday, but a top Communist Party official warned against reducing vigilance.
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday reported 165 new coronavirus cases in South Korea, bringing the national tally to 7,478, while the death toll rose by one to 51.
The rate of increase in new infections fell to its lowest level in 11 days, prompting President Moon Jae-in to say South Korea can enter the “phase of stability” soon if it continues to reduce the number of new cases.
Iran, with 7,161 cases and 237 deaths, the third highest toll after China and Italy, released about 70,000 prisoners because of the coronavirus, judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi said on Monday, according to Mizan, the news site of the judiciary.
“The release of the prisoners, to the point where it doesn’t create insecurity in society ... will continue,” he said.
Additional reporting by Leigh Thomas in Paris; Hyonhee Shin and Joyce Lee in Seoul; Babak Dehghanpisheh in Dubai; Writing by Nick Macfie, Editing by Timothy Heritage
As cases of the novel coronavirus surge in Italy, Iran, South Korea, the U.S. and elsewhere, many scientists say it’s plain that the world is in the grips of a pandemic — a serious global outbreak.
The World Health Organization has so far resisted describing the crisis as such, saying the word “pandemic” might spook the world further and lead some countries to lose hope of containing the virus.
“Unless we’re convinced it’s uncontrollable, why [would] we call it a pandemic?” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said last week.
The U.N. health agency has previously described a pandemic as a situation in which a new virus is causing “sustained community-level outbreaks” in at least two world regions.
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Many experts say that threshold has long been met: The virus that was first identified in China is now spreading freely in four regions, it has reached every continent but Antarctica, and its advance seems unavoidable. The disease has managed to gain a foothold and multiply quickly even in countries with relatively strong public health systems.
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On Friday, the virus hit a new milestone, having infected more than 100,000 people worldwide, far more than those sickened by SARS, MERS or Ebola in recent years.
“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a pandemic and I don’t know why WHO is resisting that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
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Experts acknowledge that declaring a pandemic is politically fraught because it can rattle markets, lead to more drastic travel and trade restrictions and stigmatize people coming from affected regions. WHO was previously criticized for labeling the 2009 swine flu outbreak a pandemic. But experts said calling this crisis a pandemic could also spur countries to prepare for the virus’ eventual arrival.
WHO already declared the virus a “global health emergency” in late January, putting countries and humanitarian organizations on notice and issuing a broad set of recommendations to curb its spread.
Even in countries that moved quickly to shut down their links to China, COVID-19 has managed to sneak in. Within a matter of weeks, officials in Italy, Iran and South Korea went from reporting single new cases to reporting hundreds.
“We were the first country to stop flights to China and we were completely surprised by this disease,” said Massimo Galli, an infectious-diseases professor at the University of Milan. “It’s dangerous for the entire world that the virus is able to spread underground like this.”
With more than 7,300 cases, Italy is the epicenter of Europe’s outbreak and has shut down schools, closed sports stadiums to fans and urged the elderly not to go outside unless absolutely necessary. But it has still exported cases of the virus to at least 10 countries, including Austria, the Czech Republic, Spain, South Africa and Nigeria.
Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh who co-chaired a review of WHO’s response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said a pandemic declaration is long overdue.
“This outbreak meets all the definitions for a pandemic that we had pre-coronavirus,” she said.
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At a news conference last month, Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said a pandemic is “a unique situation in which we believe that all citizens on the planet” will likely be exposed to a virus “within a defined period of time.”
Several experts said they hadn’t heard that definition. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for its part, defines a pandemic as “an epidemic that has spread over several countries or continents, usually affecting a large number of people.”
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Foto: Ivan Romano/Getty Images Train passengers in Salerno, southern Italy, on March 8, 2020.
Thousands of people rushed to flee Northern Italy after plans by the government for a 16-million-person quarantine were leaked to the media ahead of time.
Italy on Sunday shut down its Northern Lombardy region, which includes Milan, and 14 nearby provinces, a lockdown that is due to last until at least April 3.
The measure does not totally restrict movement within the areas, but it means places like schools, museums, and theaters are closed, events like weddings and funerals are suspended, and bars and restaurants must keep customers a minimum distance apart.
People can enter or leave the affected area only for emergencies, with the possibility of jail time for those who break the rules.
A draft of the bill to enforce the rules was reported by the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera on Saturday, prompting panic and pushing thousands of people to try to leave the region before the measures took place, The Guardian reported.
Foto: An empty St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Italy, on Sunday. Source: REUTERS/Manuel Silvestri
The Italian newspaper Il Tempo reported that the draft plan’s leaking prompted thousands of people to „leave Lombardy in a hurry before the rules were approved.“
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte called the leak „unacceptable“ on Sunday, The Guardian reported. „This news created uncertainty, insecurity, and confusion, and we cannot tolerate this,“ he said.
As of Monday, Italy had recorded more than 7,300 confirmed COVID-19 cases and 366 deaths – more than any other country in Europe.
People fleeing prompted other cities and regions to check passengers arriving from the north, The Guardian reported. And Puglia, a region in Southern Italy, is requiring anyone who arrives from the north to quarantine themselves.
Michele Emiliano, the president of Puglia, urged people on Facebook to take measures to stop the virus from spreading in the region.
Foto: Military officers outside the Duomo cathedral, closed by authorities amid the coronavirus outbreak, in Milan on February 24. Source: REUTERS/Flavio Lo Scalzo
„You are carrying into the lungs of your brothers and sisters, your grandparents, uncles, cousins, parents the virus that folded the health system of Northern Italy,“ he said.
He also said thousands of people had decided to stay in the north „out of responsibility and out of love towards their loved ones and their land.“
Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at Milan’s Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, told The Guardian: „What happened with the news leak has caused many people to try to escape, causing the opposite effect of what the decree is trying to achieve.“
„Unfortunately some of those who fled will be infected with the disease.“
The measures have resulted in empty streets in Milan and the affected regions. Serie A soccer matches are being played in empty stadiums.
Foto: Juventus and Inter Milan played in an empty stadium in Turin, Italy, on Sunday. Source: VINCENZO PINTO/AFP via Getty Images
People outside the quarantined regions have also decided to leave Italy given the virus and the severity of the measures.
Alice Nicoletta Richardson, a UK citizen who was in a Northern Italy region not under quarantine for a ski holiday, told Business Insider that her group decided to leave the country on Sunday.
Walter Ricciardi, a coronavirus adviser to Italy’s health ministry who is a member of the World Health Organization, described Italy’s measures to The Guardian as „extreme“ and as something that „I don’t think have ever been taken in any other democratic country.“
The measures are the most drastic outside China, which locked down Wuhan, the city of 11 million people where the virus is thought to have originated, and had put more than 780 million people under some sort of travel restrictions, according to a CNN tally.
Most of those cases and deaths are in China, but new cases there have slowed dramatically, leaving countries like Italy and as the new hot spots.
The epidemic of the new coronavirus reached a new stage globally, with confirmed cases outside China tripling over the past week and governments warning of more infections among people who recently traveled to countries where infection rates are rising.
The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases was more than 110,000 Monday, with infections in 108 countries and regions, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. There were 29,306 cases outside mainland China, versus around 10,000 a week ago. The U.S. tally rose to 554 cases, with 21 deaths.
The world-wide death toll stood at 3,825—the bulk of it in China, especially in the central city of Wuhan, where the pneumonia-causing virus first appeared in December. Italy has the second-highest number of deaths at 366, and the total number of confirmed infections in the Mediterranean country climbed to 7,375 over the weekend, almost catching up with South Korea’s 7,478 cases.
Stock markets around the world plunged again Monday, though a large trigger for the selloff was the prospect of an energy glut that could make a global recession more likely during the epidemic. Oil prices fell more than 25%, and the 10-year Treasury note yield dipped below 0.4%, a historic low.
In China, health authorities reported 40 new cases on the mainland in the past day, bringing its total number of confirmed infections to 80,735, up about 1% from a week ago. More than two-thirds of the sickened people have recovered.
While China also has by far the highest death toll from the respiratory disease, at 3,119 fatalities, its officials have said lockdowns of cities, strict quarantine measures, and widespread workplace and school closures have helped limit infections across the country.
A few weeks ago, China was reporting thousands of new cases daily. In late January the government locked down much of Hubei province, where Wuhan is, to stem the spread of the virus, and hasn’t lifted those restrictions.
In recent days, major cities including Shanghai and Beijing have seen people returning to malls, shops reopening and other business activities gradually resuming. On Monday, Shanghai government officials said some major tourist spots and sports facilities had reopened after being closed for more than a month.
Walt Disney Co.’s Shanghai Disney Resort said it would partially resume operations as a first step in reopening in phases, while the main Shanghai Disneyland theme park would remain closed until further notice.
Some facilities in Disneytown—the resort’s shopping, dining and entertainment complex—as well as its hotel and nearby park grounds began operating under limited capacity and reduced business hours. The resort said guests would have to undergo temperature checks and wear masks during their visits, and would be reminded to “maintain respectful social distances.”
Governments are preparing for a new wave of coronavirus cases among people who have traveled to countries other than China. Health authorities in Hong Kong, which has 114 confirmed cases, said several people who tested positive for the virus that causes Covid-19 in recent days had been on a tour to India in February. India has reported 39 coronavirus infections.
On Monday, South Korean Vice Health Minister Kim Ganglip said the spread of the coronavirus appears to be slowing in the country but that new infections could come from people returning from abroad.
The country added 165 cases, the lowest daily new numbers since Feb. 25, according to the Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
China said it has a total of 67 imported cases, including people who recently traveled to Italy and Iran.
In Japan, a new rule kicked in Monday that effectively bans tourists from China, Hong Kong, Macau and South Korea until the end of March, as the country seeks to prevent more new imported infections. Japan reported 488 cases on Monday, up 33 from a day earlier.
Write to Chong Koh Ping at chong.kohping@wsj.com
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