The Lebanese government announced Tuesday the country will enter a “total” shutdown after seeing a resurgence of new COVID-19 cases.
The shutdown will last from at least Wednesday evening until Monday morning and comes nearly a week after the government began to ease some restrictions on restaurants, mosques and churches, the BBC reported.
Lebanese President Michel Aoun said at the start of a cabinet meeting Tuesday the country must “tighten preventative measures to cope with the coronavirus pandemic, especially that the number of infections, unfortunately, increased in the past days,” according to local media reports.
The country’s health ministry on Tuesday reported 11 new cases of COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, including one that returned from overseas on a special repatriation flight. The uptick marks a sharp increase in a country that has been relatively protected from a vast spread of the virus.
Lebanon’s interior ministry is expected to outline the exempted industries that would not fall under the country’s second complete lockdown.
Lebanon has reported 870 confirmed cases of coronavirus, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. At least 26 people have died and 234 have recovered.
The country has a population of 6.8 million.
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