Spain on Tuesday reported first death from coronavirus, the local media reported. According to the report, the deceased was a patient at Arnau Vilanova Hospital in the Valencia region, who passed away on February 13 after suffering from severe pneumonia. Following retesting, the country's Health Ministry determined that the patient had been infected with COVID-19. Johns Hopkins University currently reports 153 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Spain.
Coronavirus first originated in the Chinese city of Wuhan and has since then spread to several countries across the world. The World Health Organisation has declared the outbreak an international health emergency.
Virus crisis ebbs in China, spreads fear across the West
Meanwhile, the coronavirus epidemic shifted increasingly westward toward the Middle East, Europe and the United States on Tuesday, with governments taking emergency steps to ease shortages of masks and other supplies for front-line doctors and nurses.
“We are concerned that countries’ abilities to respond are being compromised by the severe and increasing disruption to the global supply of personal protective equipment, caused by rising demand, hoarding and misuse,” said World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus. “We can’t stop COVID-19 without protecting our health workers.”
Deaths in Italy surged to 79, making it the deadliest reported outbreak outside China. Twenty-three members of Iran’s Parliament and the head of the country’s emergency services were reported infected. South Korea expanded drive-thru testing and confirmed hundreds of new cases. And in Spain’s Basque region, at least five doctors and nurses were infected and nearly 100 health care workers were being held in isolation.
The mushrooming outbreaks contrasted with optimism in China, where thousands of recovered patients were going home and the number of new infections dropped to the lowest level in more than six weeks.
Worldwide, more than 92,000 people have been infected and over 3,100 have died, the vast majority of them in China. The number of countries hit by the virus exceeded 70, with Ukraine and Morocco reporting their first cases.
Virus clusters in the United States led schools and subways to sanitize and spread fears among nursing home residents, who are especially vulnerable. The number of infections in the U.S. topped 100 and the death toll climbed to nine. All of the deaths were in Washington state, and most of them were residents of a Seattle-area nursing home.
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