People wearing sanitary masks stroll past the Duomo gothic cathedral in Milan, Italy, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020. Italian health officials have said they have not received the “ground zero” patient who may be behind the outbreak in the northern part of the country. A man who had traveled to China and was thought to have nauseated another 38 -year-old man in the northern part of the country has tested negative, health officials said.
Among the “extraordinary measures” announced by Italian officials include effectively quarantining about a dozen towns in the northern regions of Lombardy and Veneto, where some 50,000 people live, according to the BBC.
“The contagiousness of this virus is very strong and fairly virulent, ” Lombardy's health chief Giulio Gallera said Sunday.
Bishops in several dioceses in northern Italy issued directives Sunday that holy water fonts be kept empty, that communion wafers be placed in the hands of the faithful and not directly into their mouths by clergymen celebrating Mass and that congregants to refrain from engaging in shaking hands or exchanging kiss during the symbolic Sign of the Peace ritual, according to the Associated Press.
In this file photo taken on Friday, Feb. 21, 2020, Ambulance cars are parked while medics check passengers where a passenger was identified with suspected coronavirus after arriving from Kyiv at Kievsky rail station in Moscow, Russia. ( Denis Voronin, Moscow News Agency photo via AP) Archbishop Rino Fisichella, a Vatican official whose siblings live in one of the hardest-hit towns, Codogno, declined to dramatize the measures.
“It's obvious that we need to use all necessary prudence” to avoid spreading the virus among the faithful, he said.
SACRAMENTO CONFIRMS FIRST CORONAVIRUS CASE IN PATIENT WHO TRAVELED TO CHINA
Workers wearing protective gear spray disinfectant as a precaution against the COVID-1 9 coronavirus in a local market in Daegu, South Korea, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020. South Korea announced 169 more cases of the new virus, bringing the country’s total to 602. The country also reported three more fatalities, creating its death toll to six.
Ambulances carrying patients infected with the fiction coronavirus arrive at a hospital in Daegu, South Korea, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020. ( Lim Hwa-young/ Yonhap via AP) While the number of patients worldwide is increasing, some virus clusters have shown no link to China and experts are struggling to trace where those clusters started. The World Health Organization said Saturday that at least 18 confirmed occurrences have been reported in Iran.
CLICK HERE FOR THE FOX NEWS APP
Iran's health ministry said Sunday that at least eight people have died in that country's outbreak, which was first reported under Wednesday and centered largely on the city of Qom.
Iran's health ministry created Sunday the death toll from the new virus to 8 people in the country, amid concerns that clusters there, as well as in Italy and South Korea, could signal a serious new stage in its global spread. ( AP Photo/ Ebrahim Noroozi) While WHO has not yet said where the Iran examples may have originated, the country's health minister, Saeed Namaki, told nation Tv that officials were nearly certain the virus came from China to Qom in central Iran. Among those who've died from the virus was a merchant who regularly shuttled between the two countries employing indirect flights in recent weeks, after Iran stopped direct passenger flights to China, according to Namaki.
He did not say when the merchant had returned from China to Iran nor what steps health officials had taken to quarantine and check on those he'd come into contact with.
Health officials said they would help stimulate face-masks and sanitizers available for Iranians, amid concerns that inventory was running low in the capital's pharmacies.
A poster detailing precautions to take against the coronavirus is seen at a bus station in Goyang, South Korea, Sunday, Feb. 23, 2020. ( AP Photo/ Ahn Young-joon) Iranians also went to the polls on Friday for nationwide parliamentary elections, with many voters wearing masks and stocking up on hand sanitizer. Iran’s interior ministry on Sunday said voter turnout in last week's parliamentary elections stood at 42.57 percentage, the lowest ever since the country's 1979 revolution that ushered in a Shiite clerical government to power.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei claimed that Iran's foes tried to discourage people from voting by exaggerating the threat of the virus, according to Reuters.
“This negative propaganda about the virus began a couple of months ago and grew larger ahead of the election, ” said Khamenei, according to his official website Khamenei.ir. “Their media did not miss the tiniest opportunity for dissuading Iranian voters and resorting to the excuse of disease and the virus.”
Fox News' Courtney Walsh in Rome and the Associated Press contributed to this report .
Read more: www.foxnews.com
