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First death of a European affected by coronavirus

The first European infected with coronavirus died Friday evening in Italy, while the number of new infections fell in China but almost doubled in South Korea. Adriano Trevisan, 78-year-old retired mason, died in Veneto (northern Italy) after ten days of hospitalization for a disease other than Covid-19, according to the Italian Minister of Health, Roberto Speranza. After his hospitalization, he had tested positive for coronavirus.

The announcement of his death was made in the aftermath of a wind of panic in Italy: fifteen patients were listed, bringing to twenty the total number in the country, the most affected in Europe. The authorities then closed public places in eleven cities in northern Italy. Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte, questioned in Brussels by the Italian press, wanted to be reassuring by stressing that Italy “applies a very high level of precaution”.

The first person dead in Europe after being infected by this epidemic, which appeared in December in Wuhan (central China), was a Chinese tourist, originating from the province of Hubei, of which Wuhan is the capital. Arrived in France on January 23, this 80 year old man had died in Paris on February 14. The death was “the first outside Asia, the first in Europe”, as the French Minister of Health, Agnès Buzyn had pointed out.

If fear grips Europe a little more, it is also because the World Health Organization (WHO) is worried about the difficulty of containing the spread of the epidemic. The head of the WHO, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, sounded the alarm on Friday in Geneva: “As we speak, we are still in a phase where it is possible to contain the epidemic”. But the “window of fire is narrowing,” he warned, lamenting the lack of international financial support.

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