Roundup: Italy’s Covid cases soar, Austria teeters toward lockdown
Madrid Desk, Nov 13 (efe-epa).- Italy’s Covid-19 infections numbers soared on Friday, while Austria was edging closer to national lockdown measures.
Elsewhere, Belgium is maintaining its current restrictions, which include a curfew, for at least two weeks.
ITALY
Italian authorities on Friday logged 40,902 new Covid-19 infections in the last 24 hours and the government added two new regions, Campania and Tuscany, to the so-called red list of high-risk areas, meaning they fall under a partial lockdown.
According to the health minister, the latest data pushes Italy’s overall coronavirus infections to more than 1.1 million since the pandemic began. The official death toll is over 44,000.
Health authorities conducted more than 250,000 tests in the last 24 hours and the data returned a positivity rate of 16%.
The hospitals in Italy are at near capacity with 31,000 patients nationwide, an increase of 1,000 in the previous day. At least 3,200 people are in ICU.
Despite the outlook, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte wants to avoid a nationwide quarantine in the hope that the measures currently in place will bring the infection rate down.
He did, however, give an early warning that at the current rate social gatherings and parties would still be ruled out over the Christmas period.
AUSTRIA
