EVENTS ACROSS THE world are being cancelled or curtailed as part of efforts to prevent the spread of Covid-19.
France has cancelled gatherings of 5,000 people or more after 16 new cases were confirmed there yesterday, bringing the country’s total to 73.
Today’s Paris half-marathon and an agricultural symposium were among the events axed.
It has also put Ireland’s scheduled Six Nations rugby international against France in Paris on 14 March in serious doubt. Ireland’s fixture against Italy planned for Dublin next weekend has already been postponed.
The first Covid-19 case in the Republic of Ireland was confirmed last night after a seperate case was confirmed in Northern Ireland on Thursday.
Italy, the hotspot of the outbreak in Europe, saw a jump in new cases yesterday, with its number of infections exceeding 1,000 and the death toll jumping by eight to 29.
The outbreak forced the postponement of five matches in Italy’s top-flight Serie A football league, including the heavyweight clash between champions Juventus and Inter Milan.
In Japan, just 200 people took part in Sunday’s Tokyo marathon after it was reduced from a mass participation event of 38,000 runners to just elite athletes. And the sumo spring tournament which opens next Sunday will now be held behind closed doors due to the coronavirus.
In recent days, the epidemic has spread also to sub-Saharan Africa, while Qatar, Ecuador, Luxembourg and Ireland all confirmed their first cases on Saturday.
Governments around the world have scrambled to prevent the spread of the virus, from large-scale lockdowns of millions of people in China to flight bans and travel restrictions from disease hotspots.
Beijing’s drastic steps include curbing the movement of people, temporarily closing factories across China and quarantining Hubei, a key industrial province where the virus first appeared.
Despite these efforts, China has reported a fresh spike in coronavirus infections today.
While the numbers in China are still far lower than the huge daily increases reported during the first two weeks of February, Covid-19 has spread rapidly across borders, with South Korea, Italy and Iran emerging as hotspots.
South Korea, which has the most infected people outside China, reported 586 new cases on Sunday, bringing its total to 3,736.
The total in South Korea is expected to rise further as authorities screen more than 210,000 members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, a secretive entity often accused of being a cult that is linked to around half of the country’s cases.
Elsewhere, both the United States and China confirmed their first fatalities from the virus yesterday.
US President Donald Trump urged calm after the first death was announced.
“We’ve taken the most aggressive actions to confront the coronavirus,” President Donald Trump said at a hastily arranged White House press conference.
“Our country is prepared for any circumstance… There is no reason to panic at all.”
The fatality occurred in Washington state’s King County, which includes Seattle, a city of more than 700,000 people, health officials said.
Australia’s death was a 78-year-old man who had been evacuated from the coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan.
The virus has spread to more than 60 countries around the globe, prompting the World Health Organisation to raise its risk assessment to its highest level.
According to the most extensive study done so far, the novel coronavirus was benign in 80.9% of cases, “serious” in 13.8% and “critical” in 4.7%. The remaining 0.6% was not specified.
Part of the reason Covid-19 has been declared a public health emergency is due to the speed at which it has spread compared to other coronaviruses (like Sars and Mers) and the fact that there’s a lot about the disease we still don’t know – including how exactly it’s being transmitted.
© – AFP 2020 - with reporting by Rónán Duffy
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