Day 23: Italy Takes the Lead

The AP reports that "coronavirus infections in Italy are now the largest outbreak outside Asia" (which isn't saying much) with 132 cases. More notably, Carnevale has been cancelled in Venice and schools shut down in Lombardy. As mentioned yesterday, these case remain untraced:

Authorities expressed frustration they haven’t been able to track down the source of the virus spread in the north, which surfaced last week when an Italian man in Codogno in his late 30s became critically ill.

“The health officials haven’t been yet able to pinpoint patient zero,” Angelo Borrelli, head of the national Civil Protection agency, told reporters in Rome.

At first, it was widely presumed that the man was infected by an Italian friend he dined with and who recently returned from his job, based in Shanghai. When the friend tested negative for the virus, attention turned to several Chinese people who live in town and who frequent the same cafe visited by the stricken man. But Lombardy Gov. Attilio Fontana told reporters all of those Chinese residents have tested negative, too.

Back in Asia, South Korea has firmed up its lead with 602 cases, while two young Chinese doctors have died in the past 24 hours. Reports continue to circulate about relapses; the South China Morning Post reports new quarantine restrictions for recovered patients:

The authorities in Wuhan on Saturday introduced 14 days’ mandatory quarantine for recovered coronavirus patients, after some discharged patients again tested positive.

From Saturday, all patients who had recovered and been discharged had to be sent to designated places for two weeks of quarantine and medical observation, the city’s coronavirus treatment and control command centre said on Weibo, China’s equivalent of Twitter.

P.S. Bloomberg reports on the potential significance of the fecal-oral route.

P.P.S. Iran has increased to 43 cases and 8 deaths. Several neighboring states have closed the border, and the government is already making noise about reducing New Year travel. (Nowruz, the Zoroastrian New Year, falls on the vernal equinox.)