Zimpapers Logo

The coronavirus is spreading in the Middle East, Europe, Latin America and other parts of the world, as Brazil confirmed its first case in Latin America, while parts of China begin to lower their emergency response level as the number of new cases reported there continues to slow.

More deaths have been reported in Iran and Italy, while South Korea yesterday said an 11th person had died of the disease there. Globally, at least 80 000 people have been diagnosed with the illness.

A woman who recently arrived from Italy is North Macedonia’s first confirmed case, the health minister said yesterday.

“The patient tested positive for coronavirus… She is the first patient in North Macedonia to have tested positive for this pathogen,” Health Minister Venko Filipce said.

The woman, who sought medical help early on Wednesday, drove to North Macedonia from Italy in a van. All other passengers from the van are undergoing tests, Filipce said.

The Irish Rugby Football Union said it has postponed the country’s Six Nations fixture against Italy due to the coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy, following a recommendation from Irish health authorities.

“The IRFU is perfectly happy to comply with this instruction. We will immediately begin to work with our Six Nations partners to look to reschedule. I would hope to have an update on that in the coming days,” IRFU chief executive Philip Browne told reporters after a meeting with the health minister.

The game was scheduled to take place in Dublin on March 7 with thousands of Italian supporters, many from the regions most affected by the outbreak, expected to make the trip.

The novel coronavirus was confirmed in two new cases by the University Hospital in the south-western German city of Tuebingen, bringing to three the number of cases confirmed in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg over the past two days.

A further two cases were confirmed in the state of North Rhine Westphalia of a man and his wife. The man, reported to be in his 40s and suffering from a pre-existing health problem, is being treated in an intensive care unit in Dusseldorf.

His wife is a kindergarten teacher. State Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann said the children from the facility had been ordered to stay at home. The couple are believed to have had widespread social contacts over the past two weeks.

Lebanon’s health ministry confirmed the country’s second case of coronavirus and said the patient was quarantined after returning from a religious trip to Iran.

The woman arrived in Lebanon last week on the same flight as the first case and had been in quarantine at a Beirut hospital since showing symptoms on Monday, the ministry statement said.

Brazil’s government confirmed that a 61-year-old Brazilian man who traveled to Italy this month has Latin America’s first confirmed case of the contagious new coronavirus.

“We will now see how this virus behaves in a tropical country in the middle of summer, how its behavior pattern will be,” Brazil’s Health Minister Luiz Henrique Mandetta said in a press conference.

The Brazilian man spent two weeks in northern Italy’s Lombardy region on a work trip, where he contracted the contagious virus, the health ministry said.

China’s embassy in Russia has demanded authorities in Moscow end what it said are discriminatory anti-coronavirus measures against Chinese nationals.

The complaint, detailed in an embassy letter to the city’s authorities, deplored what it called “ubiquitous monitoring” of Chinese nationals, including on public transport.

Authorities in Moscow have also been carrying out raids on potential carriers of the virus — individuals at their homes or hotels — and using facial recognition technology to enforce quarantine measures.

The letter followed unconfirmed local media reports that Mosgortrans, which runs Moscow’s vast bus, trolleybus and tram networks, had told drivers to try to identify Chinese passengers and inform police of their presence.

There are now more new cases of the coronavirus reported each day outside China than inside the hardest-hit country, the World Health Organisation said.

“Yesterday, the number of new cases reported outside China exceeded the number of new cases in China for the first time,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told diplomats in Geneva, according to a written version of his speech.

Guests in locked down Tenerife hotel to stay in isolation for 14 days — Al Jazera