Number of novel coronavirus cases in Italy surpasses 180,000

The number of novel coronavirus cases in Italy has reached 181,228, the Italian Civil Protection Department informed on Monday, Trend reports citing TASS.

In the past 24 hours, 454 people have died from the disease, with the total number of deaths reaching 24,114. Head of the department Angelo Borrelli noted that for the first time in over a month, the number of people currently receiving treatment has gone down by 20, reaching 108,237.

The number of those recovered has reached 1,822, with 48,877 people having recovered from the disease in total.

On Monday, the regional council of the Italian province of Lazio informed that a married couple from China’s Wuhan, who were hospitalized in serious condition in Rome in late January, fully recovered from COVID-19. The tourists first arrived to Milan and visited several cities in the north of Italy before they began exhibiting first symptoms of the disease.

A local outbreak of the coronavirus was documented on February 21 in the area of Lodi (near Milan). The so-called patient zero still has not been found. Many experts think that the virus had begun to spread in Italy in late January - early February.

In late December 2019, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia.

On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 2,414,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 165,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 629,000 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.