Pope gives up on Lent event to pray in safety
The Pope, who is still struggling to overcome a cold, will skip a spiritual retreat with prelates this week as the number of cases of coronavirus soars in Italy, with 34 dead.
As he coughed and sneezed during an address to pilgrims in St Peter’s Square, Francis, 83, said, ‘‘Unfortunately a cold will force me not to take part this year.’’
It is the first time in his sevenyear papacy that he will miss the Lent retreat, due to be held in Ariccia, south of Rome, but he plans to follow the prayers from the Vatican. ‘‘I will do the spiritual exercises from home,’’ he said.
The Pope, who had part of a lung removed after contracting tuberculosis in his twenties, has cancelled appointments since coughing his way through an Ash Wednesday service last week.
The Vatican has said that he is suffering from no more than a cold but his illness has prompted concern because it coincides with a rise in the number of coronavirus cases in Italy to 1694 – a rise of 566 in one day. This makes the country the thirdworst hit after China and South Korea.
Roberto Gualtieri, the Italian economy minister, said that the government was preparing a €3.6 billion (NZ$6.4b) package to bail out businesses. There have been warnings that Italy could fall into recession and lose 3 per cent of GDP as the virus hits tourism and industry.
Although half of sufferers have few or no symptoms and have been placed in isolation at home by doctors, 639 are in hospital and 140 are in intensive care, of whom 106 are in one region: Lombardy. That represented a ‘‘tsunami’’ for hospitals, according to Massimo Galli, an infectious diseases expert at the Sacco hospital in Milan.
Galli told Corriere della Sera that the number of cases made him suspect that the virus had been circulating in Italy since the end of January. The country’s first case was identified on February 19 in Codogno, one of ten towns now locked down in Lombardy.
Walter Ricciardi, who sits on the executive board of the World
Health Organisation and is advising the Italian government, called for the emergency recruitment of medical staff. The local government in Lombardy, where 10 per cent of doctors have the virus, has asked for help from those who have retired. In Milan the army is preparing a former military hospital to take cases. Other hospitals are erecting tents in car parks.
Hospitals, however, have proved to be excellent breeding grounds for the virus. A woman who returned home near Rome after being infected while visiting her elderly father in hospital in Bergamo, near Milan, has prompted fears of mass contagion in the capital. The region of Emilia Romagna has overtaken Veneto, its northern neighbour, for the number of cases, showing that the virus is moving south.
The virus has played havoc with Italy’s football season, with five of the weekend’s Serie A games postponed.
Outside Turin, Cristiano Ronaldo and his team-mates at Juventus had to train separately from the under-23 squad, who had been exposed to infected players from the Serie C club Pianese, from Piancastagnaio in Tuscany.
In Germany cases almost doubled from 66 to 117 yesterday. More than half the cases are in North Rhine Westphalia, the most populated region, where several schools and day care centres will be shut today to prevent the spread.