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It's been a roller-coaster ride for international stocks this week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, an index of 30 important American stocks, fell hundreds of points on Monday and Tuesday. Japan's Nikkei index dipped more than three percent. Key Australian stocks dropped 1.6 percent. Indexes were also down in Germany and London. Stocks seeming to drop as the Earth spun around.
The main culprit for this is a disease outbreak that started in Wuhan, China late last year. The new coronavirus is not as widespread or deadly as the flu but it's mysterious. International health officials aren't sure how it started. They don't know exactly how it spreads. They're not certain how contagious people are when they get it. Because of all that, they've had to resort to serious measures to try and contain it. Closures, cancellations, lockdowns and quarantines are some of those measures. In Italy, which has seen the worst outbreak in Europe, at least 322 people have caught the new coronavirus and 11 have died.
MELISSA BELL: Italian authorities continue to monitor and to try to prevent the spread of coronavirus here in what is the first outbreak outside of Asia. Eleven towns under quarantine with some 100,000 people affected by that. Italian authorities have had to put in special measures to ensure that those quarantines are respected with laws designed to keep people in and to keep people out. A three month sentence looms if anyone tries to disobey those quarantine rules.
AZUZ: There's been an impact on tourism. We've talked about the cruise ship in Japan where there've been hundreds of cases. On Tuesday, there were lockdowns and isolations in hotels in Austria and the Canary Islands because guests who traveled there from Italy initially tested positive for coronavirus. All public and private schools are closed for two weeks in Bahrain where there've been 26 cases so far. Iran has seen dozens of cases and planned military exercises between the United States and South Korea were expected to be scaled back because of concerns about the disease. So as the new coronavirus has spread around the globe, it's had a myriad of impacts on the different societies it's hit.
