COVID-19 cases in EU/EEA countries and the UK
Subsequent to China, COVID-19 underwent further geographical spread and the dynamic of the COVID-19 pandemic in the rest of the world currently follows that of this country [2]. On 11 March 2020, the Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic [3]. In the 5 March issue of Eurosurveillance 2020, Spiteri et al. reported on the first European confirmed COVID-19 cases according to the WHO case definition [4,5]. In the EU/EEA, the first three confirmed cases were reported by France on 24 January 2020 in persons returning from Wuhan, Hubei Province, China [2]. As at 15 March 2020, COVID-19 cases had been detected in all 30 EU/EEA countries and the United Kingdom (UK) [6], whereby between 31 December 2019 and that date included, 39,768 cases and 1,727 deaths had been reported, with 17,750 cases and 1,441 deaths from Italy alone [6].