A Kashmiri Muslim devotee covers his face as municipal workers spray disinfectants as a precautionary measure against the coronavirus inside the shrine of Shah-e-Hamadan in Srinagar, Indian controlled Kashmir, on Friday, March 20. Dar Yasin/AP
The numbers: Johns Hopkins University, which is tracking coronavirus cases reported by the World Health Organization and additional sources, puts the total number of infections worldwide at more than 244,500, with at least 10,000 deaths.
India asks citizens for their "full contribution": The south Asian country is trialing a curfew and urging people to stay at home in an attempt to contain the spread of the coronavirus.
South Korea to test all arrivals from Europe: While numbers in the East Asian country have dropped, authorities fear a second wave of cases imported from overseas. Hong Kong and mainland China also announced new controls on international arrivals this week.
China no new domestic cases: Mainland China recorded 39 new cases of coronavirus -- all imported from overseas -- on Thursday. It's the second consecutive day of no new domestically transmitted infections. It's also the second day in a row of no new confirmed cases in Hubei province -- ground zero for the pandemic.
Olympic Torch: The Olympic flame arrived in Japan on Friday, marking the beginning of official Olympic celebrations. The International Olympic Committee said cancelation is "not on the agenda" but the next few weeks could prove decisive in whether it will go ahead this summer.
Hong Kong airlines slash flights: Both the city's flag carrier, Cathay Pacific, and budget service HK Express are suspending the majority of their routes in the light of tight new restrictions on international travelers and a global drop in demand.
Italy death toll: The total number of fatalities reported in the country at the new epicenter of the outbreak has now surpassed China's death toll. The number of deaths in Italy reached 3,405 on Thursday -- 157 more than China's toll, which stands at 3,248.
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China’s coronavirus infections from abroad hit a new daily record while infected travelers reached an unprecedented number of Chinese provinces, pressuring authorities to hold the bar high on already tough custom rules and public-health protocols.
FILE PHOTO: March 17, 2020 picture of staff in protective suits accompanying a passenger outside a centralized facility for screening and registration near the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing as the country tries to contain imported cases of the coronavirus. REUTERS/Thomas Peter
China has intensified measures to guard against infections arriving from abroad as the coronavirus spread around the world, concerned that travelers might trigger a second wave of domestic infections just as the outbreak was controlled at home.
Mainland China had 39 new confirmed cases on Thursday, the country’s National Health Commission said, all of which were imported cases. There were no locally transmitted cases for the second day.
Of the new imported infections, 14 were in Guangdong, eight in Shanghai and six in Beijing, the health authority said in a statement on Friday.
Big transport hubs like the Chinese capital, Shanghai, Guangdong, including Shenzhen, have been the main points of entry for cases involving infected travelers.
But on Thursday, imported cases were also reported in Tianjin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Shandong and Gansu in the north, as well as in Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangxi, Sichuan.
That brings the total number of imported infections in China to 228 as of Thursday.
The imported travelers, many of whom are Chinese nationals returning from overseas, have yet to pass their illness on to local communities so far, thanks to 14-day quarantine periods and isolation either at home or at designated venues.
But authorities are acutely aware of the dangers.
China must not allow the improving trend in the containment of the virus to reverse, President Xi Jinping warned on Wednesday, as the pandemic sickened more than 200,000 people around the globe.
Wuhan, capital of central Hubei province and epicenter of the outbreak in China, saw zero new cases for the second day, the National Health Commission said.
That brings the total accumulated number of confirmed cases in mainland China so far to 80,967.
The death toll from the outbreak had reached 3,248 as of the end of Thursday, up by three from the previous day.
Reporting by Ryan Woo and Brenda Goh; Editing by Tom Hogue and Stephen Coates
NEW DELHI —
India executed four men convicted in a brutal 2012 rape and murder case early Friday, closing a painful chapter in the country’s history but raising difficult questions about how far the nation has progressed in tackling violence against women.
Dozens gathered outside the Delhi jail where the hangings took place even as the country has asked citizens to remain indoors because of the coronavirus pandemic. The executions marked the first use of capital punishment in India in five years.
“Today, the women of this country have got justice,” Asha Devi, the victim’s mother, told reporters after the hanging.
For many women in India’s capital, the memory of the December night when the crime took place is vivid. Maitri Deb had just finished eating dinner with her family when the news came on the television: A young woman — in her 20s, just like Deb — had been viciously raped and her body dumped on the side of a road in south Delhi.
“Something broke inside me,” said Deb, now 33. She went to a protest for the first time in her life, part of a surge of anger against sexual violence in India. But in the following years, Deb’s hopes for change faded.
Nicky Loh
Getty Images
Women march during an anti-rape rally in June 2013 in Kolkata, to urge the government to act faster.
In the wake of the fatal rape, India ushered in landmark legal reforms. Lawmakers expanded the definition of rape to include oral sex and the insertion of any object into a woman’s vagina. Stalking and voyeurism became criminal offenses. Jail terms were increased for sexual crimes, and the death penalty was introduced in some cases. Fast-track courts were set up to expedite trials that often took years.
Yet gruesome rapes continue to take place. The number of reported rapes has risen nearly every year since 2012. In 2018, the most recent year for which data was available, 33,356 rapes were reported, or one every 15 minutes.
Experts say it is not clear whether the increase is because of a higher incidence of such crimes or better reporting — or both. The vast majority of such attacks in India remain unreported, they say. (In the United States, about 101,000 rapes were reported in 2018.)
Meanwhile, the fast-track courts have failed to deliver. Nearly half of Indian states hadn’t even set up such tribunals as of December. Interviews with lawyers and prosecutors indicate that where they do exist, their impact has been limited.
“I didn’t feel safe then, and I don’t feel safe now,” said Neha Chabbra, a 32-year-old living in Delhi. “I’m a married woman with a 5-year-old daughter. Now, I worry about her.”
Women’s rights activists and lawyers in India warn that harsher punishments, like the death penalty, may do little to stem the tide of sexual crimes against women. They also point to a damning statistic: Nearly 94 percent of reported rape cases in India are by people known to the victim, not stranger rape like the 2012 Delhi case.
“Things haven’t progressed the way they should have,” said Kalpana Sharma, an Indian journalist who has covered gender violence for three decades and recently published a book on the topic. “The mind-set hasn’t changed — women are not your property.”
Kamla Bhasin, a Delhi-based feminist activist, said the focus should be on preventive measures instead of punishment. “They are all coming from our homes,” she said.
The 2012 rape that spurred India into action stood out for its grisly nature.
On a cold December night, Jyoti Singh, known in India as “Nirbhaya” or “fearless,” and a male friend, boarded a private bus on their way home after watching a movie.
Six men were on board, drunk and cruising the city. They beat Singh’s male friend and dragged her to the back of the bus. The men took turns raping her and one ruptured her intestines with a metal rod. Then they dumped her by the roadside. Two weeks later, Singh died at a hospital in Singapore where she had been flown for treatment.
The next year, four of the accused were sentenced to death after a nine-month trial. (One juvenile accused was tried separately, and the sixth accused committed suicide in jail). The judge wrote that the crime had “shocked the collective conscience” and deserved “exemplary punishment.”
Prakash Singh
AFP/Getty Images
Hangman Pawan Kumar, right, says he feels zero remorse for the four men executed Friday for the 2012 crime.
It took more than six years for various appeals to wind their way through the system. The convicts’ lawyers argued that all possible legal challenges should be exhausted, but Singh’s parents decried what they call delaying tactics.
The executions of the four men — Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh — have also reignited a debate over whether capital punishment deters such crimes. The hangings are the first in a rape-and-murder case since 2004.
An analysis of murder rates for three decades in the United States by the Death Penalty Information Center found no evidence of a deterrent effect of the death penalty on the incidence of murders. Researchers who did a comparative study of murder rates in Hong Kong, which abolished the death penalty, and Singapore, where murderers are sentenced to death, found little difference in homicide trends.
But despair that not enough has changed in India has fueled a thirst for revenge. In December, after thegruesome rape and murder of a veterinarian in the city of Hyderabad in south India, many celebrated after the four suspects were shot and killed in police custody. Activists decried the shootings as a case of extrajudicial killings, but city residents showered police officers with rose petals and fed them sweets.
Nishtha Das, 24, works at a publisher in Delhi and said that safety remains a constant worry. “I have to notify people that I am going here, going there,” she said, and reassure them that she has arrived at her destination. “I would feel safer if laws were more strict and action was more swift.”
For many women in Delhi, the 2012 rape and murder was a moment that still circumscribes their lives. Garima Pradhan, 31, a video editor, said she stopped traveling by bus after the crime and prefers to be home by 8 p.m. Even now, she said, “there is always a sense of fear and a feeling of helplessness.”
NEW DELHI —
India executed four men convicted in a brutal 2012 rape and murder case early Friday, closing a painful chapter in the country’s history but raising difficult questions about how far the nation has progressed in tackling violence against women.
Dozens gathered outside the Delhi jail where the hangings took place even as the country has asked citizens to remain indoors because of the coronavirus pandemic. The executions marked the first use of capital punishment in India in five years.
“Today, the women of this country have got justice,” Asha Devi, the victim’s mother, told reporters after the hanging.
For many women in India’s capital, the memory of the December night when the crime took place is vivid. Maitri Deb had just finished eating dinner with her family when the news came on the television: A young woman — in her 20s, just like Deb — had been viciously raped and her body dumped on the side of a road in south Delhi.
“Something broke inside me,” said Deb, now 33. She went to a protest for the first time in her life, part of a surge of anger against sexual violence in India. But in the following years, Deb’s hopes for change faded.
Nicky Loh
Getty Images
Women march during an anti-rape rally in June 2013 in Kolkata, to urge the government to act faster.
In the wake of the fatal rape, India ushered in landmark legal reforms. Lawmakers expanded the definition of rape to include oral sex and the insertion of any object into a woman’s vagina. Stalking and voyeurism became criminal offenses. Jail terms were increased for sexual crimes, and the death penalty was introduced in some cases. Fast-track courts were set up to expedite trials that often took years.
Yet gruesome rapes continue to take place. The number of reported rapes has risen nearly every year since 2012. In 2018, the most recent year for which data was available, 33,356 rapes were reported, or one every 15 minutes.
Experts say it is not clear whether the increase is because of a higher incidence of such crimes or better reporting — or both. The vast majority of such attacks in India remain unreported, they say. (In the United States, about 101,000 rapes were reported in 2018.)
Meanwhile, the fast-track courts have failed to deliver. Nearly half of Indian states hadn’t even set up such tribunals as of December. Interviews with lawyers and prosecutors indicate that where they do exist, their impact has been limited.
“I didn’t feel safe then, and I don’t feel safe now,” said Neha Chabbra, a 32-year-old living in Delhi. “I’m a married woman with a 5-year-old daughter. Now, I worry about her.”
Women’s rights activists and lawyers in India warn that harsher punishments, like the death penalty, may do little to stem the tide of sexual crimes against women. They also point to a damning statistic: Nearly 94 percent of reported rape cases in India are by people known to the victim, not stranger rape like the 2012 Delhi case.
“Things haven’t progressed the way they should have,” said Kalpana Sharma, an Indian journalist who has covered gender violence for three decades and recently published a book on the topic. “The mind-set hasn’t changed — women are not your property.”
Kamla Bhasin, a Delhi-based feminist activist, said the focus should be on preventive measures instead of punishment. “They are all coming from our homes,” she said.
The 2012 rape that spurred India into action stood out for its grisly nature.
On a cold December night, Jyoti Singh, known in India as “Nirbhaya” or “fearless,” and a male friend, boarded a private bus on their way home after watching a movie.
Six men were on board, drunk and cruising the city. They beat Singh’s male friend and dragged her to the back of the bus. The men took turns raping her and one ruptured her intestines with a metal rod. Then they dumped her by the roadside. Two weeks later, Singh died at a hospital in Singapore where she had been flown for treatment.
The next year, four of the accused were sentenced to death after a nine-month trial. (One juvenile accused was tried separately, and the sixth accused committed suicide in jail). The judge wrote that the crime had “shocked the collective conscience” and deserved “exemplary punishment.”
Prakash Singh
AFP/Getty Images
Hangman Pawan Kumar, right, says he feels zero remorse for the four men executed Friday for the 2012 crime.
It took more than six years for various appeals to wind their way through the system. The convicts’ lawyers argued that all possible legal challenges should be exhausted, but Singh’s parents decried what they call delaying tactics.
The executions of the four men — Akshay Thakur, Pawan Gupta, Vinay Sharma and Mukesh Singh — have also reignited a debate over whether capital punishment deters such crimes. The hangings are the first in a rape-and-murder case since 2004.
An analysis of murder rates for three decades in the United States by the Death Penalty Information Center found no evidence of a deterrent effect of the death penalty on the incidence of murders. Researchers who did a comparative study of murder rates in Hong Kong, which abolished the death penalty, and Singapore, where murderers are sentenced to death, found little difference in homicide trends.
But despair that not enough has changed in India has fueled a thirst for revenge. In December, after thegruesome rape and murder of a veterinarian in the city of Hyderabad in south India, many celebrated after the four suspects were shot and killed in police custody. Activists decried the shootings as a case of extrajudicial killings, but city residents showered police officers with rose petals and fed them sweets.
Nishtha Das, 24, works at a publisher in Delhi and said that safety remains a constant worry. “I have to notify people that I am going here, going there,” she said, and reassure them that she has arrived at her destination. “I would feel safer if laws were more strict and action was more swift.”
For many women in Delhi, the 2012 rape and murder was a moment that still circumscribes their lives. Garima Pradhan, 31, a video editor, said she stopped traveling by bus after the crime and prefers to be home by 8 p.m. Even now, she said, “there is always a sense of fear and a feeling of helplessness.”
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India hanged four men on Friday who were convicted for the rape and murder of a young woman on a bus in New Delhi in 2012, in a case that shocked the world and shamed the country over its appalling record for crimes against women.
The men were executed at dawn in Tihar jail, on the outskirts of the capital, four television news channels reported.
Hundreds of police men were deployed outside the jail premises to control the jubilant crowd that waited with placards to celebrate the execution of the men for the attack that shone a spotlight on women’s safety across India.
The crime, which happened on the night of 16 December, 2012, sparked massive protests and global outrage. The victim was dubbed Nirbhaya - the fearless one - by the Indian press, as she could not be named under Indian law.
Six men were arrested for the attack. One suspect, Ram Singh, was found dead in his jail cell in March 2013, having apparently taken his own life.
Another, who was aged 17 at the time, was released in 2015 after serving three years in a reform facility - the maximum term possible for a juvenile in India.
The four - gym instructor Vinay Sharma, bus cleaner Akshay Thakur, fruit-seller Pawan Gupta and unemployed Mukesh Singh were sentenced to death by a fast-track court in 2013.
In 2017, the Supreme Court upheld death sentences against four men, with judges ruling the crime met the “rarest of the rare” standard required to justify capital punishment in India.
India’s president rejected pleas for clemency from the condemned men, after the Supreme Court dismissed their pleas for a review of the death sentences.
Attacked on a moving bus and left for dead on roadside, the victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student, clung to life for two weeks before succumbing to her injuries. She died in a hospital in Singapore, where she had been transferred in a desperate attempt to save her.
Outrage over her death led to India passing tough new laws against sexual violence, including the death penalty for rape in some cases.
Reporting by Rupam Jain; Additional reporting Suchitra Mohanty; Editing by Lincoln Feast.
(Reuters) - Struck down by coronavirus at the age of 83, the long life of Alfredo Visioli ended with a short ceremony at a graveyard near Cremona, his hometown in northern Italy.
FILE PHOTO: Cemetery workers and funeral agency workers in protective masks transport a coffin of a person who died from coronavirus disease (COVID-19), into a cemetery in Bergamo, Italy March 16, 2020. REUTERS/Flavio Lo Scalzo/File Photo
“They buried him like that, without a funeral, without his loved ones, with just a blessing from the priest,” said his granddaughter Marta Manfredi who couldn’t attend. Like most of the old man’s family - like most of Italy - she was confined to her home.
“When all this is over,” she vows, “we will give him a real funeral.”
Everywhere the coronavirus has struck, regardless of culture or religion, ancient rituals to honor the dead and comfort the bereaved have been cut short or abandoned for fear of spreading it further.
The virus, which has killed nearly 9,000 people worldwide, is reshaping many aspects of death, from the practicalities of handling infected bodies to meeting the spiritual and emotional needs of those left behind.
In Ireland, the health authority is advising mortuary workers to put face masks on dead bodies to reduce even the minor risk of infection. In Italy, a funeral company is using video links to allow quarantined families to watch a priest bless the deceased. And in South Korea, fear of the virus has caused such a drop in the number of mourners that funeral caterers are struggling for business.
There is little time for ceremony in hard-hit cities such as Bergamo, northeast of Milan, where the mortuaries are full and the crematorium is working around the clock, said Giacomo Angeloni, a local official in charge of cemeteries.
Bergamo, home to about 120,000 people, has been dealing with 5-6 times the number of dead it would in normal times, he said.
Italy has now reported nearly 3,000 deaths from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus - the highest outside China where the virus first emerged. The Italian army sent 50 troops and 15 trucks to Bergamo on Wednesday to take bodies to less overwhelmed provinces.
A ban on gatherings has shattered the vital rituals that help us grieve, said Andy Langford, the chief operating officer of Cruse Bereavement Care, a British charity providing free care and counseling to those in grief.
“Funerals allow a community to come together, express emotion, talk about that person and formally say goodbye,” he said.
“When you feel you have no control over how you can grieve, and over how you can experience those last moments with someone, that can complicate how you grieve and make you feel worse,” he said.
EXTRA STAFF
In Iran as in northern Italy, hospital and funeral workers are overwhelmed with bodies, as the virus has torn across the country, killing 1,284 people and infecting thousands, according to state TV.
The authorities have hired new people to dig graves, said a manager at Tehran’s Behesht-e Zahra cemetery. “We work day and night,” he said. “I have never seen such a sad situation. There are no funerals.”
Most corpses arrive by truck and are buried without the ritual washing that Islam dictates, he said.
Some Iranians suspect that the official haste to bury them has more to do with obscuring the spiraling death toll than halting the spread of the virus.
Deaths from COVID-19 have been recorded as heart attacks or lung infections, a hospital worker in Kashan, a city about a three-hour drive from Tehran, told Reuters.
“The officials are lying about the death toll,” the worker said. “I have seen dozens of corpses in the past few days, but they have told us not to talk about it.” Two nurses at Iranian hospitals also told Reuters they thought the death toll was higher than the official tally.
Iranian authorities have rejected allegations of a cover-up, and President Hassan Rouhani, in a televised speech on Mar. 18, said his government had been “honest and straightforward with the nation.”
INFECTION RISK
In several countries, clusters of infection have followed funerals. In South Korea, where more than 90 people have died, the government has urged the families of COVID-19 victims to cremate their loved ones first, and hold the funeral later.
Korean funerals usually take place in hospitals, and involve three days of prayers and feasting. Most of the country’s early cases were linked to a church in Daegu city and a hospital in a nearby county. In February, several members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus attended a funeral at the hospital for the brother of the church’s founder.
Since the outbreak, the number of mourners at funerals has plunged by 90%, regardless of whether the deceased had the virus, said Choi Min-ho, secretary general of the Korea Funeral Association.
“The culture of funerals has changed significantly,” he said. “A handful of mourners quickly offer condolences and leave the place without dining together out of infection worries.”
Condolence money, traditionally handed over in cash, is now sent via bank transfer, he added.
Authorities in Wuhan, the epicenter of China’s outbreak and location of the majority of its deaths, quickly identified the funeral business as a potential source of transmission.
The local civil affairs bureau in late January ordered all funerals for confirmed COVID-19 victims to be handled at a single funeral home in the city’s Hankou district. Mourning ceremonies, usually boisterous social events in China, were curtailed along with all other public gatherings.
Those restrictions are still in place, even though the number of new cases has dwindled in recent weeks. Bereaved families are not even allowed to see the bodies of their loved ones, a worker at the funeral home told Reuters.
In China, the ashes of the deceased tend to be kept in funeral homes until they are taken to a family plot on public holidays such as the Tomb Sweeping Festival in April. That’s also canceled this year.
“DEATH MANAGEMENT”
In Spain, too, a large cluster of cases has been traced to a funeral in the northern town of Vitoria in late February. At least 60 people who attended tested positive after the event, said local media reports.
With over 600 deaths, Spain is the second-worst hit country in Europe after Italy, and most people are now confined to their homes. Referring to these restrictions, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has called coronavirus a “cruel” disease that paralyses the human need to socialize.
In Ireland, up to 100 guests are still allowed at all funerals - for now. But most families are opting for small private ceremonies and encouraging others to express their condolences online through websites such as RIP.ie, where death notices and funeral invitations are usually posted.
Open casket funerals are out for any victim of coronavirus, and “the family should be advised not to kiss the deceased,” according to new guidelines from Ireland’s Health and Safety Executive to its funeral directors.
The risk of catching coronavirus from a dead body is slim, public health officials say, but some countries are recommending extra measures.
Israel has reported no coronavirus deaths, but its health ministry says the deceased should be double-wrapped in impermeable plastic. Ritual washing and rites will be performed in full protective gear and the corpse re-wrapped in plastic for burial. Normally Israel’s Jewish dead are laid to rest in a cloth smock and shroud.
Ireland’s guidelines advise workers in funeral parlors to put face masks on dead bodies before moving them, in case they “expel a very small amount of air and viral droplets from the lungs” and infect the living.
In Britain, where the pandemic is still gathering pace, there is widespread anxiety about the likely death toll.
Britain has been slower in implementing the strict measures seen elsewhere in Europe, and expert estimates of how many will die from COVID-19 have ranged wildly from the tens to the hundreds of thousands.
An emergency bill to tackle the virus, which has killed 104 people in Britain, includes a number of measures the government says will “streamline the death management process.” The measures include allowing funeral directors to register a death on behalf of a self-isolating family.
Deborah Smith, a spokesperson for the National Association of Funeral Directors, said the bill will help the profession “preserve the dignity of those who die and care for their bereaved families with compassion - even if they are not able to have the kind of funeral they would have wanted.”
Smith would not be drawn on the expected numbers, but said “funeral directors are preparing for a variety of scenarios.”
“NOT ALONE”
One scenario is already playing out in Wuhan.
Last month, a worker at the funeral home in Hankou district, identifying himself only as Huang, wrote an essay that was circulated on social media. He said funeral workers were as overwhelmed as the city’s medics but had received less recognition.
He said staff had worked without a break since the start of the epidemic. “Some of our employees don’t even drink water because they need to go to the toilet and it’s difficult to take off the protective clothing,” he wrote.
Half a world away, in the virus-stricken Italian town of Bergamo, funeral workers wage a near-identical struggle.
“It’s like being in a war with an invisible enemy,” said Roberta Caprini, a partner in Centro Funerario Bergamasco, a funeral service in Bergamo. “We’ve been working without interruption for two weeks and sleeping 3-4 hours a night when we manage it. Everyone in our area, us included, has lost someone or have someone sick in their home.”
FILE PHOTO: Cemetery workers and funeral agency workers in protective masks transport a coffin of a person who died from coronavirus disease (COVID-19), into a cemetery in Bergamo, Italy March 16, 2020. REUTERS/Flavio Lo Scalzo/File Photo
Bergamo’s Church of All Saints has become a makeshift mortuary, its pews pushed aside to accommodate the dead. Caprini said she had counted at least 60 coffins when she visited on Tuesday.
She spoke of the “real torture” felt by families who watched sick relatives taken away to hospital and never saw them again. Her company has arranged video links to burials, to allow families to watch the priest bless the deceased.
Sometimes, she said, they drive the hearses past the bereaved family’s home, so mourners “can at least come down at the moment and offer a quick prayer.”
Reporting by Elisa Anzolin and Emilio Parodi in Milan; Angelo Amante in Rome; Parisa Hafezi in Dubai; David Stanway in Shanghai; Joan Faus in Barcelona; Hayoung Choi in Seoul, Padraic Halpin in Dublin; Emma Farge in Zurich; Kate Kelland in London and Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Writing and additional reporting by Andrew RC Marshall; Edited by Sara Ledwith and Jason Szep
A medical worker wearing a face mask talks on her mobile phone inside the new coronavirus intensive care unit of the Brescia Poliambulanza hospital, Lombardy, on March 17, 2020.
PIERO CRUCIATTI
The number of people who have died from the coronavirus in Italy has hit 3,405, according to Reuters, meaning the country has now reported more deaths than China as a result of the pandemic.
The death toll in China, where the coronavirus started in Wuhan, in Hubei province late 2019, currently stands at 3,249, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
Health officials in Italy said Thursday that the death toll had risen by 427 in the last 24 hours, with 475 deaths recorded the day before.
After sweeping through China in early 2020, the virus spread to Europe where Italy — and particularly the northern Lombardy region, which is home to financial hub Milan — became the epicenter.
The country, like many others in Europe, remains under lockdown as authorities attempt to stem the human cost of the virus. And closures will have to be extended beyond the current end-date of April 3, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte confirmed earlier in the day.
"The total blockade will go on," Conte said. "The measures taken, both the closure of (public) activities and the ones concerning schools, can only be extended," he told the paper.
Under the lockdown rules, people can only leave their homes to get food or medicines (grocery stores and pharmacies are the only stores that remain open), or to perform other essential services or to go to work. Most shops had been forced to close until March 25 but that deadline also looks set to be extended.
Meanwhile on Thursday, China said that there were no new domestic transmissions of the coronavirus in the country for the first time since its outbreak, although 21 "imported" infections were confirmed in Beijing as people returned from trips abroad.
