World scrambles to get a firm grip on outbreak
SECUGNAGO, ITALY >> The phone call came from inside one of the northern Italian towns quarantined to contain the rapid spread of the coronavirus.
“Did you get the focaccia?” Tina Pomati, 65, asked her daughter, who was preparing to move a paper bag loaded with Rothmans Blue cigarettes, salami and chocolate cordials across an invisible border and into the Lombardy region’s forbidden “red area.”
“I’m almost there,” her daughter, Alessandra Paladini, 46, said. A few minutes later, she pulled up to a checkpoint outside the town of Zorlesco guarded by stern police. Her mother stood eagerly across the divide as the officers, wearing masks and white gloves, brusquely took the care package and handed it to her mother. The two women blew kisses at one another.
Northern Italy has taken an aggressive response to the spread of the virus, testing and quarantining people with and without symptoms, locking down 11 towns and more than 50,000 people as officials desperately seek to seal the virus off from the rest of Italy. But as the burden of the crisis weighed on Lombardy, the measures in the region have also divided families, damaged businesses and created the sense that Italy is sacrificing the few to protect the many, just as some countries around the world are trying to protect themselves from Italy.
As the virus spreads, the situation inside the locked-down towns and on the ambiguous — and sometimes porous — borders between the free and the quarantined offers a potential preview of what may come if countries, including the United States, choose to confront the virus with a similar hard line.
Millions of tourists have canceled their trips to Italy and the head of the Bank of Italy, Ignazio Visco, this week estimated that the impact of coronavirus on Italy’s economy, already slumping, to be around 0.2% of the GDP.
Meanwhile, Mexico’s assistant health secretary announced Friday that the country now has two confirmed cases of the new coronavirus.
Hugo Lopez-Gatell said one of the patients is in Mexico City and the other in the northern state of Sinaloa. While a second test is still pending on that case, he said, “We are treating this as confirmed.” Neither is seriously ill; one is in isolation at a hospital, the other is isolated at a hotel.
In the central China city of Wuhan, where the new coronavirus first exploded, 2% to 4% of patients have died, according to the World Health Organization. But in the rest of China, the death rate has been 0.7%. On average, the death rate from seasonal flu is about 0.1%.
Brazil on Wednesday confirmed Latin America’s first confirmed case of the new coronavirus in a man who traveled to Italy this month.
The virus has now officially reached sub-Saharan Africa, after Nigeria reported its first case Friday. The patient is an Italian traveler who recently arrived in Lagos, Africa’s largest city.