‘I’ve never seen anything like it’: Police forcing people to stay apart in cafes as coronavirus crisis wreaks chaos in Italy
Entire country is in lockdown to prevent spread of illness
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Police in Italy are forcing customers in cafes to stay one metre apart in an effort to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Giuseppe Conte, the Italian prime minister, announced this and other measures to contain the virus on Monday.
Police across the country have started to patrol cafes to ensure people keep their distance from one another and that shops shut at 6pm each day.
Massimo Leonardo, who runs a market stall, said: "It's bad. People are terrorised. I've never seen anything like it."
As of Tuesday, 631 people had died from the disease in Italy, making it the second-most affected country behind China.
It became the first country to order a nationwide lockdown, which went into force on Tuesday.
Since the so-called red zone was extended to the whole country, Italy has experienced its most severe limits on movement since the Second World War.
Lorenzo Codogno, a former Italian treasury chief economist, said on Tuesday that the country’s economic output had been reduced by between 10 and 15 per cent due to the lockdown.
Amid the economic fallout, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen tried to reassure EU member states on Tuesday. She said: "We will use all the tools at our disposal to make sure that the European economy weathers this storm.”
She added that a joint investment fund of €25bn (£22bn) would be established to help vulnerable parts of the EU’s economy, including healthcare and labour markets.
Elsewhere, China only reported 24 new cases on Wednesday, signalling a significant reduction from the thousands of infections recorded per day last month.
President Xi Jinping went to Wuhan, the city where the disease was first identified in December 2019, on Tuesday and said: "We will certainly defeat this epidemic."
Yang Tianxiao, a finance worker in Beijing, said things there were slowly returning to normal as the city’s government reduced restrictions.
Additional reporting by agencies
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