By IBTISSEM GUENFOUD, ABC News (PARIS) — Starting Thursday, people in Lebanon are asked to stay home, day or night, without exemptions for grocery shopping or exercising, to curb a new surge in coronavirus cases. Lebanon has entered a national state of emergency, which includes a 24-hour curfew prohibiting citizens from leaving their home from [.]
Beirut’s Rafik Hariri International Airport will remain open, with traffic limited to 20 per cent of capacity at most.
Passengers travelling from Baghdad, Istanbul, Adana, Cairo and Addis Ababa must quarantine at a hotel for seven days.
About 85 per cent of incoming coronavirus cases arrived from these cities, the government said.
Private businesses will be closed with a few exceptions, including pharmacies and bakeries.
People will be forbidden from leaving their properties from 5am on January 14 until January 25.
Measures introduced last week to close religious institutions, schools and universities, and a ban on all social gatherings was reimposed.
At a coronavirus inter-ministerial committee meeting, interim Prime Minister Hassan Diab criticised citizens’ attitude to the virus, saying they had not taken the dangers seriously.
Marwan Naamani/picture alliance via Getty Images
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Inside an emergency room at Rafik Hariri Hospital on Nov. 17, a medic wearing full protective gear checks a woman who might have the coronavirus. Beirut hospitals are reaching maximum capacity amid an influx of coronavirus patients. Marwan Naamani/picture alliance via Getty Images
A surge in coronavirus cases is overwhelming hospitals across Lebanon, leading doctors to tell families to care for sick loved ones at home because there s no more space in the wards.
Jean Nakhoul, an executive producer for Lebanon s MTV channel, says his family has been calling around the country and finding no medical treatment for his 83-year-old grandmother who is sick with COVID-19.