In Italy, there shut schools and universities.

But today 49 people died from the virus.

Fear of infection has depleted even the most devoted crowds.

Some Peters and Rome is missing its song of pilgrims.

Tiny Vatican City has registered its first positive case.

The Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem is empty.

Israel's daunting security walls may stop an intifada, but can they stop the virus mecca from above?

Before the government stopped for worshippers and after Iraq's Shia city of Kabbalah, they stopped Friday prayers and deep clean.

The empty spaces fear this virus has made us its hosts put our borders and barriers, while the unwelcome guest is busy crossing them with blind disregard for ideology, creed or flag.

For now, covered, 19 has the run of the place.

Battling the rising fear and the growing infections is, of course, science.

Here in Bedfordshire, they're working on a rapid infection test that could yield results within 20 minutes, but it'll only be ready in the autumn at the earliest.

Meanwhile, the cases keep rising to a total of 163 in the UK today, way are all in the same boat as the prime minister, learning the basics, of course, singing to ourselves while purging our hands.

Myrtle, thank you, it looks to me, is that there will certainly be a substantial period of disruption when we have to deal with this with this outbreak.

How big that will be, How long that will be.

I think it's still unopened.

Question the most alarming open question off the mall.

How many more deaths Yesterday, a woman in her seventies with underlying health conditions became Britain's first fatality.

In reading.

Today, a patient in Milton Keen's, an elderly man with preexisting illness, became the second fatality.

Trust is the indispensable medicine in this battle on by all accounts around, with over 4700 official cases is running short.

They may be using the fire brigade to disinfect cities, but the government there has put pressure on doctors to falsify the reasons for death and play down the numbers.

And with three direct flights still from Tehran to London every week, what happens in Iran doesn't necessarily stay in Iraq.

Ondas.

If airlines weren't having a bad enough time to be a baggage handlers at Heathrow have tested positive today, which surely begs the question.

Could the virus have survived a journey in the luggage hold here I am on the Princess Cruise ship and finally spare a thought for those giant vessels of indulgence turned Petri dishes of questionable quarantine.

Witness an airdrop of testing kits onto the Grand Princess meandering off California floating hurted 3500 passengers and crew, including 142 Brits.

None infected so far.

But a passenger on a previous voyage has died from the virus, and that was reason enough to confine everyone here on board.

We are all on that cruise ship now, afraid of the mundane, constantly scaling down our expectations on playing the lottery of infection.

Dr.

Richard Hatch had advised the Bush and Obama white houses and work for the agency that protects Americans against pandemics on bioweapons.

His organization has now received more than £20 million from the UK government to developed a covert 19 vaccine.

I spoke to him earlier and began by asking how much of a threat the virus now is, but I think that the threat is very significant.

The potential of the virus it's already demonstrated in China.

Yeah, I think it's demonstrating that potential in Italy, in Iran looking at what's happening here in the UK Are we on a similar trajectory?

Well, I don't like to make predictions.

I think it's up to society's how they will respond to the various.

You can look at places like Singapore and Hong Kong.

Singapore had its first case on January 23rd.

Yesterday they had gotten up to, I think, about 115 cases.

So if you were in the UK viewers in the UK over six weeks and basically they have been able through their public health interventions through the public health response for contact tracing isolation of cases and through engaging the public, they have been able to keep the virus under control Well, given the rate of increase that we're seeing now in the U.

K.

Do you think the government needs to be more aggressive as they were in China?

Singapore, Hong Kong, Singapore and Hong Kong did not shut themselves down, but they have mounted very aggressive responses.

Contact tracing is very important.

The voluntary quarantine of contacts is very important.

Isolation of cases is very important.

I think there may be a time to close schools.

The virus has been circulating here for some time and I think the government does recognize the criticality of the situation.

I think that I actually think Chris, Woody and his colleagues air doing a good job at communicating the risk to the public.

I don't think they're minimizing the threat.

I think they recognize the potential of the virus toe overall and certainly relative to some other countries.

I think the UK is doing a good job.

Is there a danger, though, of an overreaction given when you look at the scale of flu deaths worldwide upto 600,000 year and you don't shut down public transport networks to stop people getting the flu?

I don't think we're dealing with the flu from what scientists know about this virus so far.

What concerns you most about it?

I think the most concerning thing about this virus is the combination of infectiousness and the ability to cause severe disease were death and we have not since 1918 the Spanish flu, the Spanish flu seen a virus that combined those two qualities in the same way and do you believe the W H O figure of 3.4% mortality rate?

Because, I mean, the UK puts it a 1% roughly in some respects.

If it is between 1% and 3.4% it really doesn't matter what after the decimal point.

I think what we're seeing is a virus that is many, many times more lethal than flu and right now, a population that is completely vulnerable to it and that we're seeing its ability to explode.

There is nothing to stop that expansion from continuing unless those societies move aggressively, engage their publics.

Implement multiple public health interventions, including focusing on cases but also introducing so social distancing interventions.

There's nothing to stop right now.

Social distancing.

I think.

I think everybody should be doing what we call the Ebola handshake the elbow bump instead of shaking hands, Bruce Aylward has his tongue that Chang from W.

H.

O.

Has talked about coming back from China, put it in terms of it is like they are at war with the virus.

I don't think it's a crazy analogy to compare this toward war to a lot of people might be really surprised, if not sort of vaguely insulted, that you're comparing this to a war World War two.

Well, I don't w h o is using those kinds of terms in talking about what's required to mobilize people, and it's because they have seen what this virus is capable of doing.

Three government here has announced funding for vats of ACSI or several trial vaccines against the virus.

Do you agree there's no hope off securing a vaccine and rolling that out cross population in time for this outbreak?

We don't see any way that a vaccine can be available much more rapidly than 12 to 18 months.

And and even if it were to be available in 12 to 18 months, that would literally be in the world record for developing and delivering a vaccine and the vaccine that would become available in 12 to 18 months.

The supply would be such that we would need, I think, ethically to prioritize it for those who were at highest risk.

So if this is a war in your terms is a lengthy, it is a lengthy When this is a virus, it's going to be with us for some time.

Um I'm there.

There are many epidemiologists who think that the virus is likely to become globally endemic and be with us in perpetuity.

If I had to bet, I would think that that is the most probable scenario you're using this thes Marshall metaphors.

You make it sound very scary.

You have a vested interest in making people fearful, so you get the investment in vaccine.

What do you say to that?

I've been working on epidemic preparedness for about 20 years and completely dispassionately without without elevating the temperature or speaking hyperbolically.

This is the most frightening disease I've ever encountered in my career, and that includes Ebola.

It includes MERS.

It includes SARS, and it's frightening because of the combination of infectiousness and lethality that is appears to be many fold higher than flu.

Richard Hatch it thanks very much.

Thanks, Kathy.

I'm joined now by our business and label trade correspondent Paul McNamara or Paul.

It's been a really interesting day, with the health secretary making some pretty interesting comments about supermarkets and stockpiling, which have bean challenged has more about that.

Yes, so at the beginning, the weak hand sanitizer started selling out.

Now there were plenty off other supermarket shelves that emceeing because people started stockpiling last night.

The health secretary, Matt Hancock, try to calm people down, he said.

It is absolutely no need to panic by adding, we're working with supermarkets to make sure people be able to get the food and supplies they need, which is all very reassuring, except for one small thing.

I spoke to someone from one of the biggest supermarket changed this morning, and they said we were a little bit surprised about that because we've had no contact with government whatsoever.

That seems to have changed during the day.

On the environment, Secretary George Juices have been hitting the phones with chief executives on the messaging from both government on the supermarket is essentially, don't worry.

Supply chains will continue to function is normal for the foreseeable future.

But while people are being panic buying in supermarkets, stock markets, they've been panic selling.

All markets around the world took an absolute hammering today.

The Fritzi closed down three and 1/2 just about three and 1/2 percent on the problem for investors.

We've been speaking to it.

I don't know where or when or how this will end.

Paul Thanks very much.

Well, there's growing concern about the number of Corona virus related hate crimes against the Chinese and Asian communities.

Charity, which monitors hate crime now once more support from the government to tackle the issue.

Today, two teenage boys were arrested on suspicion of racially assaulting a Singapore in man following the outbreak, I should tell, has been speaking to a man who also claims he's being attacked because of the Corona virus.

As fear of catching the new Corona virus has grown around the world.

There's another concern that arise in racist attacks against the Chinese and Asian community is growing, too.

I'm more worried about them.

Tang Jiang has lived in Runcorn or his life.

When he popped out to his local shop with his wife and kids recently, he says he experienced his first racist attack.

She was a walk around the corner.

There's about 7 15 lads in there.

I could feel that I could feel there's a bit of a presence there.

So I walked by, starts with an autumn and soon got past the started shouting abuse boat.

The krone violation on racist remarks towards me, come back from the car.

They follow me on the space surrounding the car on this float through rocks and stones on the car.

How did it feel when you've got groups of men shouting at you, your wife, your kids about Corona virus?

Look at you like you're a disease.

I mean, it's not like you're the control device.

It's meaning is audible.

It's Mr Jang isn't happy with how the police are dealing with his case around last week.

Can you tell me the more specific time?

Because I said it's between one o'clock of three o'clock.

They said We're going to sit there for two hours and look through life forage.

They're actually rolled me up in, sat down.

I said to you, That's your job.

To sit through two hours of footage of you kidding me.

And he also has concerns about how seriously this is being looked at.

Wait like the report not required.

But that's the problem.

Mr.

Jang has also lost his job.

A local Chinese take away.

His boss says business is so bad he can't afford to keep him on.

Police say they're investigating Mr Jang's case.

In a statement to us, they said.

Cheshire Constabulary takes all reports of hate crimes extremely seriously, and we encourage anyone who has been affected by this type of crime to get in touch.

Chinese students across the UK have been organizing anti racist protests.

Shannon is one of them and she also wants universities to do more, maybe for at this very crucial time with Cornel IRAs universities to have some tangible or accessible platform for Chinese students.

Any students actually know only from China, from also from South Asia or Singapore, Thailand, South Korea.

A lot of myself, Korean friends also got attacked because they look Chinese.

It doesn't matter how you look like you look Chinese and you get attacked.

There are concerns that these types of incidents are on the rise.

Tell Mama is a charity that monitors discrimination and they're calling for action.

We need to have that public outrage against the anti Chinese racism that is growing and it's not happening yet and needs communities to stand together to tackle anti Chinese racism as we call on all communities to stand against all types of hatred.

This isn't just happening in the UK, we've seen reports from countries including France Australia and America.

In some countries, politicians are speaking out and condemning Corona virus abuse.

But some in the Chinese community here in the UK hope that leaders will start to speak up for them well.

Earlier, I spoke to the former business secretary, Andrea Leadsom, and began by asking her whether she thought we should all be invoking the blitz spirit to battle the Corona virus or not.

I think what we've been very clear about is that people should go about their usual lives on dhe, take care over there, washing hands and so on on dhe for people who feel ill to self isolate.

But I'm not sure that's quite the same as the Blitz Spirits.

You a business secretary before you were let go by Boris Johnson.

Do you fear now?

Given the kind of clamp down going on around the world that a global recession is all but inevitable, there's a lot of evidence of a recent slowdown.

Anyway, we've had the issues with the trade between the U.

S.

And China.

We've seen a big slowdown in the European Union, and so, yes, I mean, Corona virus doesn't help.

We saw flyby collapse this week.

Just a few weeks ago, as business secretary, you tweeted delighted that we've reached agreement with flybys shareholders to keep the company operating, ensuring that UK regions remain connected.