Europe on high alert for virus as cases rise

Bloomberg

Europe kicked into high alert as countries from Italy and Spain to France reported rising numbers of cases of coronavirus, struggling to limit its spread.
Vast swathes of the Lombardy and Veneto regions of Italy, stretching from Milan to Venice, remained in a virtual lockdown. Spain kept about 700 guests confined to a Canary Islands hotel as they undergo tests, while France announced three new confirmed cases, including a 60-year-old Frenchman who died in a Paris hospital overnight. Greece reported its first case.
As of early Wednesday, at least 12 people across the region had died from disease, mostly in Italy, while more than 380 people have been infected, according to European Center for Disease Prevention and Control. The numbers don’t take into account the early afternoon national updates from some countries.
Although small relative to the worldwide death toll of 2,769 and 81,170 confirmed cases, authorities are scrambling to find ways to contain the disease and businesses are counting the costs of its impact on economic activity.
US authorities are preparing for a potential outbreak, while mounting cases across the Middle East and Asia are raising the specter of a pandemic.
Stocks fell in Europe and Asia, while US index futures fluctuated, a day after the S&P 500 Index fell 3% to cap its worst two-day slide since 2015. Treasuries extended gains.
Italy, the European nation worst affected, is working on a package of measures to help sustain the economy after the virus claimed 12 lives and the number of cases rose to 374, mostly in the rich, industrial north.
The latest is a 69-year-old man who died in the Emilia Romagna region. Two hotels on the Liguria coast were sealed off after one tourist tested positive.
In Spain, the total number of live cases has climbed to nine, with two each in Madrid and the Catalonia region and one in Valencia. The four others were on the Tenerife island hotel, the H10 Costa Adeje Palace.
In France, which has so far reported two fatalities, most of the 17 confirmed cases have been treated and released from hospital.
Greece’s first coronavirus case is a 38-year-old woman in the northern city of Thessaloniki, the country’s second-largest city, who had recently returned from a trip to northern Italy.
Many of the cases across Europe seem to have links to Italy or with Italians. The outbreak in Italy was initially linked to a 38-year-old man who sought treatment at a hospital in the Lombardy region on Feb. 18. While there, he infected dozens of patients and medical staff, who then spread it further afield.
Tracking efforts initially focused on a friend of the man, a businessman who had returned from China, but tests proved negative and the origin of the contagion remains a mystery.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said his government will try to help businesses harmed by the outbreak in sectors from manufacturing to tourism, according to an interview with Corriere della Sera newspaper. About a third of Italy’s output comes from Lombardy and Veneto, the two most-hit regions.
As the fallout spread, Milan postponed its design week — one of its busiest events with hundreds of thousands of visitors from around the world — from April to June.
The region’s other countries are also studying the economic impact of the spread of the virus. In Germany, the DIHK industry group said exporters in Europe’s biggest economy are already unsettled by events in Italy. The southern European nation is Germany’s fifth-largest trading partner with a volume of more than 125 billion euros ($136 billion).
“The impact on the German economy should not be underestimated,” Volker Treier, DIHK head of foreign trade, said in a statement.
In Austria, travel agents are in talks with trade unions on imposing reduced working hours on around 10,000 employees, the head of the commerce chamber WKO, Karlheinz Kopf, was quoted as saying by the Austria Press Agency. The travel agents’ business has “almost ground to a halt,” and bookings “plummeted dramatically,” Kopf said.
Still, for now European countries are not actively considering closing borders. Health ministers from Italy and neighboring countries meeting in Rome on Tuesday agreed that border closures aren’t currently an appropriate measure to stem the spread of the virus, Austrian Health Minister Rudolf Anschober said in a TV interview.
Health experts who briefed the ministers “said that this doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t help,” and sharing information and preventive measures are more important, Anschober said.