Ukraine condemns unrest

Italy seeks self quarantine while a South Korea religious leader calls disease the ‘devil’s deed’

A UKRAINIAN village where residents clashed with riot police and threw rocks at buses while protesting the local quarantine of people evacuated from China is under control but the unrest may continue, Ukraine’s prime minister said yesterday.

The day-long protests broke out after the government announced that more than 70 evacuees would spend two weeks in a sanatorium in the village of Novi Sanzhary to make sure they were not infected with the virus.

Several hundred villagers put up road blocks, burnt tyres and hurled stones at buses arriving with the people evacuated from the city of Wuhan, the epicentre of the virus outbreak.

Ukrainian health minister Zoryana Skaletska voluntarily joined the evacuees for the 14-day quarantine to help assuage residents’ concerns.

Nine police officers and one civilian were hospitalised as a result of Thursday’s turmoil and 24 protesters were detained. Ukraine does not have any confirmed cases of the new coronavirus that has infected more than 75000 people in mainland China.

Addressing Ukraine’s parliament, Prime Minister Oleskiy Honcharuk warned that “provocations may continue” in order to “create panic, undermine trust of the people, sow discord among us”.

He condemned the protests as “part of the information war” and said there was no reason for Ukrainians to fear for their safety.

Hundreds of Ukrainian National Guard troops guarded the sanatorium yesterday, the interior ministry said. Local police also patrolled the area.

In Italy, health officials reported the country’s first cases of contagion in people who had not been in China. The three new cases bring to six the number of people in Italy known to be infected with the virus.

Indicating how seriously the Italian government saw the domestically acquired infections, the Italian health ministry ordered anyone who had been in direct contact with the three new patients to be quarantined for 14 days and called for all residents of the two Lombardy towns where they lived to stay home.

Italy’s civil protection service said all precautions were being taken “to put in place all the necessary measures to reduce the health risk”.

Rome’s infectious disease hospital is caring for three other people with the virus, a Chinese couple from the hard-hit city of Wuhan and an Italian.

In South Korea, meanwhile, the leader and self-proclaimed messiah of a religious movement at the centre of the country’s largest coronavirus outbreak yesterday called the disease the “devil’s deed” and a test of faith.

Lee Man-hee sent the message on an internal app used by members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus the Temple of the Tabernacle of the Testimony, which he founded in 1984.

“This disease case is seen as the devil’s deed to stop the rapid growth of Shincheonji,” he wrote, images of which were published by Yonhap news agency. “Just like the tests Job went through, it is to destroy our advancement.”

South Korea reported 52 new confirmed cases of the coronavirus yesterday, taking the national total to 156, the majority in Daegu, the country’s fourth-largest city with a population of 2.5 million. | AP and Reuters