Europe on alert as virus breaks out from Tenerife to Croatia
Italy has largest outbreak outside of Asia, while Britons are among those quarantined in hotel
was that A SURGE Italy an reported outbreak had in spread yesterday coronavirus which across began as Europe. fears infections in northern grew Cases Switzerland were reported and in Spain, Austria, where Croatia, British families were among hundreds of tourists confined to a Tenerife hotel after a holidaymaker tested positive.
There were already 16 confirmed cases in Germany, 13 in Britain, 12 in France and four in Spain, including one on the mainland.
Worldwide the count stood at 80,350, with 2,705 fatalities.
Italy appeared to be the hub of the European outbreak. Three people died in northern Italy yesterday, bringing the country’s total death toll to 11. Italian authorities confirmed 93 new cases yesterday, taking the total number of infections nationwide to 322.
The infections included one case in Sicily, a suspected case in Liguria and two confirmed cases in Tuscany, well outside the “red zones” in the north, where authorities put 50,000 people in 11 towns under quarantine.
In Britain, the Government cautioned against all but essential travel to those towns. Italy has the largest outbreak of coronavirus outside Asia.
Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, rebuffed international calls for more rigorous travel restrictions, saying Italy’s “excellent healthcare system and maximum rigour and caution” made it safe for most of the country to continue to operate as normal.
But questions were being asked about the Lombardy and Veneto regions after cases emerged in neighbouring countries. Andrej Plenkovic, Croatia’s prime minister, said the country had identified its first case in a patient in Zagreb who had spent two nights in Milan last week. “It is a younger person and has milder symptoms. He is in isolation and his condition is good at the moment,” he said.
Austrian authorities said an Italian couple, both 24, from a town near Bergamo in Lombardy, had tested positive. A doctor treating them said they had driven into the Tyrol region on Friday.
Switzerland said it, too, had identified a case.
In Brussels, a European Commission spokesman said it had instructed staff who had visited northern Italy to work from home until further notice. The European Parliament implemented a similar policy.
In the Canary Islands, guests at Tenerife’s H10 Costa Adeje Palace hotel were told the hotel was closed and they had to stay in their rooms. It came after an Italian doctor and his wife tested positive for the virus after staying at the hotel for a week.
Hannah Green, 27, from Hertfordshire, arrived there on Saturday with her boyfriend and their year-old son. They were supposed to be staying until Sunday but were caught up in the lockdown. “People are moving around the hotel but we’re not,” she said. “We’re in our room with the baby. We’re worried for the baby.”
Other tourists said they had switched off the air-conditioning to prevent the spread of coronavirus through ventilation ducts. David Hoon, 60, from Matlock, Derbys, said: “The hotel is like a ghost house and my fear is that by trapping us inside it we stand more chance of catching the coronavirus. This whole thing is very worrying.”
There were also fears that dozens of British holidaymakers unwittingly exposed to the disease may have already returned to the UK. Nigel Scotland, a guest at the hotel, said “probably five or six hundred people” staying at the same time as the infected man “must have left and gone back to various places in Europe” before the alarm was raised.
One nervous Briton who returned from the hotel last week wrote on social media that they would be “eating Dettol” until given the all-clear, while others said they were in self-isolation. Other guests said they had missed flights home with no word on whether they would be compensated.
Outside the hotel, a handful of local and national police were seen standing around in masks and protective gloves, the entrance cordoned off by plastic tape. Photographs taken by guests showed the exit doors secured with large padlocks. Some guests could be seen sunbathing by the pool.
Popular with British holidaymakers, the hotel can accommodate hundreds of guests, has several restaurants and is 50 metres from the beach.
Travel firms Tui and Jet2holidays were among operators using the hotel for package holidays. Tens of thousands of people were expected this week in the Canary Islands for carnival festivities. The Italian doctor was placed in isolation at the University Hospital Nuestra Señora de Candelaria in Santa Cruz, 38 miles from the hotel. He was due to undergo a second test to confirm the virus. His wife was taken to the same hospital where she had also tested positive in the first analysis.
A spokesman for the Spanish government said that the guests would remain in lockdown until a second test on the Italian doctor conclusively con- firmed the infection.
A spokesman for the Foreign Office in the UK said: “Our staff are offering advice and support to a number of British people in a hotel in Tenerife and their families. We are in close contact with the hotel management and the Spanish authorities and are seeking further information.”
The surge in cases outside Asia came as the World Health Organisation said that containment measures taken by China had slowed the outbreak’s trajectory, giving other countries vital time to prepare.
“Hundreds of thousands of people in China did not get Covid-19 because of this aggressive response,” said Dr Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO’S independent delegation to China, adding that the expert panel had “unanimously” agreed. New infections have continued to slow in China – 508 cases and 71 deaths were reported yesterday, compared with an average of 2,000 infections a day at the start of last week.
By contrast, South Korea experienced a near 15-fold rise in cases in just one week, with almost 900 coronavirus infections confirmed.
Its government announced that it aimed to test more than 200,000 members of a shadowy religious group – the Shincheonji Church of Jesus – in Daegu city, which was at the centre of the country’s outbreak. “It is essential to test all of the church members in order to contain the spread of the virus and relieve public anxiety,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement.
Kim Kang-lip, the vice health minister, added that the priority was to test around 1,300 members who were showing symptoms, which he said would be completed by today.
‘People are moving around the hotel but we’re not. We’re in our room with the baby. We’re worried for the baby’
As a country that finds itself in the eye of the global coronavirus storm, the prosperous island city-state of Singapore might provide some useful tips on how British officials can best contain the outbreak without plunging the entire country into paralysis.
Singapore, with its large population of ethnic Chinese people, was one of the first Asian countries to be affected by the virus, and is dealing with almost 90 confirmed cases. Moreover, there were significant concerns that it might follow China in being identified as one of the main sources of the outbreak after a British businessman who had previously attended a conference held in the Asian city was identified as Britain’s first coronavirus victim.
And yet, compared with the extreme measures that have been taken elsewhere to contain the virus, such as the mass lockdown of entire provinces by China’s communist rulers, Singapore has somehow managed to contain it while enabling the vast majority of the country’s inhabitants to continue with their normal daily routines, as I found when I visited the city earlier this week.
The key to the country’s ability to reduce the outbreak to manageable levels lies in the government’s early decision to place a strict ban on anyone who has recently travelled to China from entering the country, a move that, at a stroke, limited the ability of potential carriers of the disease to spread the contagion throughout the country.
In fairness to the British authorities, they, too, acted quickly to limit the movement of travellers from known areas of infection, such as China’s Wuhan province, with leading airlines such as British Airways imposing a ban on flights to key Chinese cities.
But where the Singaporean response – which has been hailed as the “gold standard” in tackling the epidemic by no less an authority than Harvard University – has proved most effective is through the introduction of the basic, common-sense measures that safeguard the wellbeing of ordinary citizens.
It is virtually impossible to enter any building in Singapore without being offered a sanitising hand wash, a simple expedient for limiting the spread of the virus. Similarly, citizens are encouraged to conduct regular checks of their temperature, thereby making early detection of potential new cases more likely.
And when new cases are confirmed, rather than indulging in the type of knee-jerk behaviour that has characterised the reaction of the Chinese authorities to the crisis, the Singaporean authorities simply get in touch with anyone who might have come into contact with the carrier and place them in quarantine.
The key lesson, therefore, that Britain and other Western countries could learn from the Singapore model is that it is perfectly possible to implement a number of reasonable and effective measures to prevent the virus from spreading, without bringing the entire country to a standstill.
There will inevitably be those who would regard any new measure, from hand sanitisation to temperature checks, as a gross affront to their liberty. Yet, compared with the major disruption to their lives that would be caused if the outbreak developed into a major pandemic, the introduction of simple but effective protocols along the lines of those imposed in Singapore could prove vital to containing the spread of the virus if, as now seems likely, there is going to be a significant increase in the number of cases detected in Britain.
That is not to say that everything about the Singaporean response has been faultless. Fears that the authorities were failing to control the virus led to widespread panic-buying, resulting in the shelves in many stores being stripped bare earlier this month.
The epidemic is also having a negative impact on the country’s economy, with the government announcing that it is introducing measures to provide financial support to sectors, such as tourism and aviation, that have been worst affected by the outbreak.
Yet the economic impact on countries like Singapore would have been far worse had the government not acted to contain the virus while at the same enabling the country to continue to function, a consideration British officials need to take on board as they consider their next steps in tackling the crisis.
With billions of pounds having already been wiped off the value of European shares in response to the coronavirus outbreak, health officials need to take care not to make comments that could be interpreted as scaremongering. The recent suggestion by an Oxford University expert on epidemics, for example, that travelling on the London Underground could result in thousands of commuters being infected by coronavirus is hardly the kind of statement that is going to calm the nerves of jittery investors.
The key aim of ministers and health professionals alike must be to reassure the nation that the battle to contain the virus is being won, not to conjure up scare stories about a nation facing impending doom because one of its key transport hubs has become an incubator for a deadly virus.