Pandemic

The number of people who recovered from the coronavirus has exceeded 200,000 worldwide. According to the Worldometer website, the exact number of people who managed to fight the dangerous virus is 200 317 people.

Most of the cured are in China - 76 408 people. Spain is followed by 26 743, Germany - 19 175, Italy - 16 847, Iran - 15 473, France - 10 935 and the United States - 8 878.

Google will publish data on the location of its users around the world today to allow governments to evaluate the effectiveness of the social distance measures introduced to combat the coronavirus pandemic, the company said.

Education Minister Niki Kerameus has said the government is working hard to make sure that the coronavirus pandemic will not push back the dates of the nationwide examinations for university entrance. 

The Greek Foreign Ministry on Friday held a ceremony in solidarity with Italy where the death toll from the Covid-19 outbreak continues to rise.

Officials raised the flags of Greece and Italy as the two countries' national anthems played.

The ceremony was attended by Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias, Italian Ambassador Efisio Luigi Marras and Parliament speaker Kostas Tasoulas.

I am writing this column sequestered at home in Minnesota. The university where I work has been closed for about two weeks now and will remain so for the rest of the academic year. Starting on April 1, I will continue teaching my classes online. 

Greece may shut down tolls to prevent city dwellers from traveling to their villages for Easter as the country fights to stem the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, government spokesman Stelios Petsas has said.

"We'll see if we need to shut down the tolls… For the time being, we are reiterating the key prohibitions," Petsas told Skai radio on Friday.

Another person infected with the novel coronavirus has died, with the death toll caused by the pandemic in Romania thus reaching 116, informs the Strategic Communication Group (GCS). It was a man of 70 from the Mures County, who started to have symptoms on March 29, without having an epidemiological context to explain the infection.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide passed the 1 million threshold on April 2 as the pandemic swept across the globe.

Johns Hopkins University's website showed the milestone was hit on April 2 afternoon. The count represents confirmed cases, but the true numbers are believed to be much higher.

Nearly 51,500 people have died from the virus.

As the government continues with its efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus, a new opinion poll has indicated that the majority of the public approves of its response despite a high level of public concern about the crisis.

In this commentary for Kathimerini newspaper, the European Stability Mechanism's Managing Director Klaus Regling calls for a concerted European financial response to the coronavirus crisis: