Italy’s coronavirus deaths surpassed 10,000 on Saturday even as the contagion’s spread remained substantially stable. Europe’s hardest-hit country had 889 new fatalities in the last 24 hours, health authorities said, with a slight decline compared to Friday’s record.
New cases rose marginally to 5,974, bringing the total count of patients in the country to 92,472. The government is set to extend its drastic containment measures until the middle of April and will more than double the amount of financial stimulus for the country’s paralyzed economy. “Italy’s virus trend shows the curve is now fully in its linear phase and no longer exponential, with a daily increase in total cases of around 7%," Lorenzo Pregliasco, co-founder of researcher