Around 1,800 people live in the Malakasa refugee camp north of Athens. The corona virus has now been found in one resident. It is the second affected camp.
Athens (AP) - For the second time within a few days, the Greek coronavirus crisis team quarantined a refugee camp near Athens for 14 days because of a coronavirus infection.
It is the Malakasa camp around 45 kilometers north of the Greek capital, as the Greek State Broadcasting Corporation (ERT) reported in the morning. Around 1800 people live there. According to this, a 53-year-old Afghan was tested positive for the virus.
"We will implement our plan in the same way as in the other case," said Greece's Minister of Migration, Notis Mitarakis, on the Protothema radio station. The virus had been found in a woman in a hospital in Athens earlier last week after the birth of her child. The woman lived in the Ritsona camp about 75 kilometers north of Athens. Subsequently, 20 other refugees in this camp had tested positive for the virus. Ritsona has already been quarantined. Around 3000 people live there.
In the camps on mainland Greece, the situation is nowhere near as bad as in the camps on the islands in the east of the Aegean. The people there don't live as close together in living containers as on the islands. The majority of them endure there in tents and provisional accommodation under plastic sheeting.
To date, 68 people in Greece have died from the lung disease Covid-19 caused by the novel coronavirus.