Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:
The spread: 100,000 deaths
In all likelihood the COVID-19 illness associated with the new coronavirus will claim its 100,000th death during the next 24 hours. From the report of the first fatality in early January, it took a month to record 1,000 deaths and a further month to hit 10,000. That was just three weeks ago.
The death toll now compares with that of London’s Great Plague in the mid-1660s, which killed an estimated 100,000 people, about a third of the city’s population at the time.
But it is still far short of the so-called Spanish flu, which began in 1918 and is estimated to have killed more than 20 million people by the time it ended in 1920.
A very European compromise
Europe’s finance ministers put the phone down on each other last night having achieved a compromise agreement on half a trillion euros’ worth of support for their coronavirus-battered economies – but left open the question of how to finance recovery in the bloc headed for a steep recession.
The controversy over whether – as countries in southern Europe had sought – members of the eurozone could issue joint debt has also been left until another day.
