Environmental Protection Agency

Greek gymnast Lefteris Petrounias, Olympic gold medalist and world champion, carries the Olympic torch during the flame handover ceremony for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympic Games at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens on Thursday. The ceremony took place without spectators as a precaution amid the continuing spread of the coronavirus.

The centre of the Serbian capital Belgrade, usually bustling with people and cars, was empty and quiet as a nocturnal curfew began at 8pm on Wednesday evening.

The curfew will be observed across Serbia each night until 5am. No one is allowed to go out apart from police officers and soldiers on duty, nightshift workers and people who have a health-related emergency.

Visit our liveblog for the latest coronavirus updates

This trend seemed to consolidate by the day, with very few voices trying to argue for a cooperative international approach, multilateralism, win-win solutions and a search for common ground, and community-based policies rather than a purely individualistic vision of society.

Polls suggest that over two-thirds of Czechs approve of same-sex marriage, so it is little surprise that the centrist Ano party of Prime Minister Andrej Babis, which leads the minority governing coalition, offered its support to the bill. 

Scrambling

The coronavirus is reaching south-east Europe just a little later than the rest of the European continent. In doing so, it is giving citizens and governments just enough time to watch the chaos engulfing countries such as Italy before it hits the region in full force.

Electrical workers at a power plant in the town of Obilic in Kosovo, December 2011. Photo: EPA/VALDRIN XHEMAJ

US power generation company ContourGlobal has halted plans to build the 500-megawatt coal-fired Kosova e Re (New Kosovo) power plant, Reuters reported on Tuesday.

Seizing the moment, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis nominated Orban, head of the National-Liberal party that Iohannis once led, to form the next government.

See also:

Coronavirus: Live Updates

Tight-Lipped Balkan Governments Scramble to Defend Against COVID-19

The Pandemic Stress Test

In Central Europe, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia have declared states of emergency and Poland has declared a "state of epidemic threat".

Apart from the direct impact on public health, a crisis of this magnitude can trigger at least two direct kinds of economic shock.

The first is a shock to production, owing to disrupted global supply chains. Suspending the production of basic pharmaceutical chemicals in China disrupts the production of generic drugs in India, which in turn reduces drug shipments to the United States.

Although the number of cases is small compared with other countries, the outgoing government of Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, who has doubled as health minister for the past few months, has introduced widespread prevention measures.