In the past week alone, more than 3,000 people have died in Italy after contracting the coronavirus,among the dead are at least 67 Italian Catholic priests who have died after being infected with the novel virus.
According to the Avvenire newspaper, the youngest of those listed by the Catholic Church-affiliated paper was 53.
“Priests get sick and die like everybody else, maybe even more than the rest,” the Avvenire wrote.
The paper said 22 of the fatalities were in the Bergamo diocese, at the heart of the outbreak not far from the financial centre Milan.
Pope Francis asked priests “to have the courage to go out and see the sick” when the pandemic was gathering strength across the country on March 10.
In Nigeria, new cases of COVID-19 was announced on Wednesday night, bringing the total number of confirmed cases in the country to 51, the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control has disclosed.
The NCDC via its twitter handle said, “On the 25th March 25, 2020, five new confirmed cases of COVID-19 was recorded in Nigeria.