‘Stay at home!’: Italian mayors plea to residents
Italian mayors go online to plead with residents to stay at home amid the coronavirus lockdown.
Mayors of towns across Italy have been recording impassioned and sometimes furious pleas asking their residents to respect COVID-19 lockdown rules.
They went online after witnessing people flouting the lockdown by going jogging, taking “exhausted dogs” and even cats out for long walks on a leash.
“Hundreds of students will be graduating. I hear some want to throw parties,” Vincenzo De Luca, president of the Campania region, says in the video.
“We will send armed police and we’ll be sending them with flamethrowers.”
Morena Martini, the mayor of Rossano Veneto, said:
“Something that drove me crazy, crazy, is people secretly going to the hairdresser and beauty salons. Great, you will die with your hair combed and nicely waxed, but you will die.”
The Italian government has banned any travel inside the country and closed all non-essential businesses as it desperately tries to stem the spread of the coronavirus.
Italy is currently the worst-hit country in Europe with nearly 100,000 cases and at least 10,700 deaths.
It comes second only to the United States as the country with the most cases worldwide.
Watch our report compiled by Al Jazeera NewsFeed’s Seena Khalil.