Coronavirus Kills Three Persons In Italy.

The head of Italy’s civil protection department, Angelo Borrelli, said during a news conference that 152 people had now tested positive for the virus, including the three deceased.

An elderly cancer patient became the third person known to be infected with the coronavirus to die in Italy, health officials said on Sunday, as the number of people contracting the virus continued to mount.

The death of the woman in a hospital in the small city of Crema in Lombardy, the centre of Italy’s coronavirus scare, followed that of a 77-year-old woman on Saturday and a 78-year-old man on Friday, the first victim of coronavirus in Europe.

The deaths, and steadily rising cases of infected people, have prompted a series of security measures to try to check the spread of the contagion.

Most of the cases in Italy are in Lombardy, a prosperous region in the country’s north, and can be traced back to a 38-year-old man whom authorities have called “patient one.”

The man, who is intensive care, dined last month with another man who had visited China in January. He exhibited flu-like symptoms at the time of the dinner, but has since tested negative for the virus, media reports said. And health officials are still puzzled over certain cases with no obvious links with infected persons.