BANGKOK (AP) — Crossing more borders, the new coronavirus hit a milestone Friday, infecting more than 100,000 people worldwide as it wove itself deeper into the daily lives of millions, infecting the powerful, the unprotected poor and vast masses in between.
The virus, which has killed more than 3,400 people, edged into more U.S. states, emerged in at least four new countries and even breached the halls of the Vatican. It forced mosques in Iran and beyond to halt weekly Muslim prayers, blocked pilgrims from Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem and upended Japan’s plans for the Olympic torch parade.
As financial markets dived again, repercussions from the virus also rattled livelihoods in the real economy.
“Who is going to feed their families?” asked Elias al-Arja, head of a hotel owners’ union in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where tourists have been banned and the storied Church of the Nativity was shuttered.
At the White House, President Donald Trump signed a $8.3 billion bill to fight the coronavirus and an official said Trump’s administration was considering some type of support to hard-hit industries like travel and tourism.
In Geneva, the U.N. health agency said it had received applications for 40 possible virus tests, had 20 vaccine candidates in development and reported that numerous clinical trials of experimental drugs for the new coronavirus were under way.
“We’re all in this together. We all have a role to play,” said Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, chief of the World Health Organization, urging more global cooperation from the business world and solidarity with the poorest.
Yet even as COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, reached 90 countries, more than half of those who contracted the virus have now recovered. And it’s retreating in China, where it first emerged, and nearby South Korea.
Questions swirled around whether Iran could control its outbreak, as the number of reported infections jumped beyond 4,700 on Friday, with 124 deaths. Iran set up checkpoints to limit travel, urging people to stop using paper money and had firefighters spray disinfectant on an 18-kilometer (11-mile) stretch of Tehran’s most famous avenue.
“It would be great if they did it every day,” grocery store owner Reza Razaienejad said after the spraying. “It should not be just a one-time thing.”
The 100,000 figure of global infections is largely symbolic, but dwarfs other major outbreaks in recent decades, such as SARS, MERS and Ebola. The virus is still much less widespread than annual flu epidemics, which result in up to 5 million annual severe cases around the world and from 290,000 to 650,000 deaths annually, according to WHO.
But there was no denying that the epidemic’s economic impact was snowballing. World stocks and the price of oil dropped sharply again Friday.
A sharp drop in travel and a broader economic downturn linked to the outbreak threatened to hit already-struggling communities for months. In response to plummeting demand, German airline Lufthansa announced it would reduce its capacity in coming weeks by as much as 50% of pre-coronavirus outbreak levels.
