ITALY ON LOCKDOWN
HEALTH chiefs were on the brink of declaring a pandemic last night as officials enforced widespread travel bans following a sixth death in Italy from coronavirus.
Cases of the virus have rocketed to 200 in the country and experts warned that efforts to contain the spread of the disease were failing.
Twelve Italian towns have been placed in lockdown with hundreds of thousands of residents unable to leave without special permission.
The latest victim was an 88-yearold man from the northern Lombardy region which has ordered schools and universities to close for at least a week. Museums and cinemas have been shut and the last two days of the Venice carnival axed.
A coach driver sparked a panic at a French bus station yesterday after arriving from Italy with symptoms of the virus.
Outside China, Iran has the highest number of fatalities with 12. Eight have died in South Korea.
Mark Woolhouse, professor of infectious disease epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh, said: “A pandemic means an infectious disease is spreading out of control in different regions of the world. We already have [a coronavirus] epidemic in China and, more recently, large outbreaks in South Korea, Iran and Italy.
“If those outbreaks cannot be brought under control then I would expect the World Health Organisation [WHO] to declare a pandemic.
“The immediate implication is that many different countries around the world may be sources of infections. This makes it much harder for any one country to detect and contain imported cases.”
WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said the organisation will not officially declare a pandemic but will start to use the term in communications if it reaches that stage.
She said: “We could start describing it as a pandemic, but at the moment we are saying it is clusters and outbreaks in some countries.”
About 77,000 people in China have been infected with the virus while nearly 2,600 have died. More than 1,200 cases have been confirmed in other countries and there have been more than 20 deaths.
Yesterday an Italian passenger jet was detained in Mauritius over coronavirus fears, with dozens told to return to Italy or face being held in quarantine.
A British Airways flight to Milan was delayed yesterday after a passenger left the plane shortly before take-off at Heathrow, allegedly because they feared they would catch the virus.
The Foreign Office has not advised Britons against travel to Italy. The Government insisted that “the threat to the British public is currently low”.