A grimmer reality over the spreading coronavirus set in globally with swelling infection numbers and growing dread that no area could fend off the illness. Clusters of infections in South Korea, Italy and Iran continue to expand and with COVID-19 raising distress and reshaping routines around Europe and across the Atlantic in the U.S. Nearly 90,000 people have been infected in over 60 countries and more than 3,000 people have been killed by COVID-19.
With fears of a pandemic on the rise, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged all countries to stock up on critical care ventilators to treat patients with severe symptoms. The WHO says the virus appears to particularly hit those over the age of 60 and people already weakened by other illnesses. It has a mortality rate of between 2 and 5%.
In the U.S., the virus has spread to eight states as a second person died in Washington state. Authorities stepped up testing for the illness as the number of new cases grew nationwide, with new infections announced in California, Florida, Illinois, Rhode Island, New York and Washington state.
In Europe, leaders braced for worsening caseloads after the count surged in France and Italy over the weekend. Italy’s number of infections ballooned by 50% in 24 hours to 1,694. Health officials in northern Italy sought to bring doctors out of retirement and to accelerate nursing students' graduations to help an overwhelmed public health system.
The risk level for people in the EU due to the spreading coronavirus has been raised from moderate to high in the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control's latest assessment, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said. "In other words, the virus continues to spread," she added at a Brussels press conference. The European Commission launched a coronavirus response team on Monday, scrutinizing medical risks as well as the implications for transport and mobility in the EU, and the bloc's economy. So far, there have been 2,100 cases confirmed in the 18 EU member states, with 38 deaths, EU Health Commissioner Stella Kyriakides said.
In the Nordic region, the number of reported coronavirus cases as of Monday morning was as follows: four in Denmark, six in Finland, three in Iceland, 19 in Norway and 14 in Sweden. Russia has so far managed to avoid a large number of infections and introduced a range of travel and visa restrictions. However, authorities on Monday confirmed the first case of coronavirus in Moscow, saying the patient had recently returned from Italy.
Iran has the highest number of deaths from the coronavirus outside China, where the outbreak began. Iran said Monday that the novel coronavirus had killed 12 more people in the Islamic republic, raising the country's overall death toll to 66. The number of confirmed cases leaped by 523 from the previous day, to a total of 1,501, Deputy Health Minister Alireza Raisi told a news conference.
The worst-hit places were Tehran, the central province of Qom and Gilan in the north, the official said, adding that 291 people had recovered. Qom, a Shiite holy city, was the scene of Iran's first reported cases and deaths from the outbreak that began in China. The official news agency IRNA reported on Monday the death of Mohammad Mirmohammadi, 72, a member of the Expediency Council which advises the supreme leader.
Several countries in the region have reported coronavirus infections in people who have visited Iran. These include Kuwait, whose health ministry on Monday reported 10 new cases, all of whom had been in Iran. The Gulf Arab state has now reported 56 cases of the virus.
In Australia, health officials said on Monday that a woman and a male doctor have contracted coronavirus, becoming the first cases of community transmissions in the country. So far, the U.S., Germany and France all reported cases in people with no known ties to Italy, travel to China or contact with an infected person, raising concern about additional clusters of no known origin possibly forming outside China.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, Senegal and Latvia on Monday announced their first cases of the new coronavirus. The infected person in Saudi Arabia had come from Iran through Bahrain, the report by the Saudi health ministry said, according to the state news agency.
The case in Senegal is the second case in sub-Saharan Africa after one was confirmed in Nigeria last week. The patient is a French man who lives in Senegal and flew back from France on Feb. 26, Health Minister Abdoulaye Diouf Sarr told reporters. The patient had since been in contact with his wife and two children and is now under quarantine in a hospital in the capital Dakar.
The Latvian Health Ministry has also confirmed in a statement that "the first patient has been diagnosed with the coronavirus in Latvia." It gave no further details.
The World Health Organization said Monday that the number of new coronavirus cases registered in the past day in China was far lower than in the rest of the world.
"In the last 24 hours there were almost nine times more COVID-19 cases reported outside China than inside China," World Health Organization chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.
