THE Baltic country of Latvia, with its population of 1.9 million is one of the smallest countries in the European Union, but it is showing much bigger nations how to deal with the coronavirus pandemic.

Yesterday it was announced that developers there had created an app that will help track possible victims of the virus as part of Latvia’s commitment to testing and tracing.

Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins has refused to introduce a compulsory lockdown on all businesses, although many have closed as they cannot keep to social distancing regulations.

Karins is taking much of the credit for the fact that Latvia has had so few deaths – just 13 as of – yesterday as he introduced stringent measures even before his country recorded its first cases. That included closing Latvia’s borders to non-EU countries, introducing distance learning to schools and banning all group meetings.

Now as the country ramps up its testing regime, a group of Latvian IT and telecommunication companies have joined forces to develop an app for tracking people’s contacts. The app, which uses Bluetooth to detect the presence of an infected person and runs on both iOS and Android devices, will be available for free downloading in mid-May, the developers said at a news conference.

They hope it will initially it be used by some 400,000 people in Latvia.

The app was developed by the LMT mobile operator, IT services providers MAKIT, Mobilly, TestDevLab and Zippy Vision, as well as the University of Latvia and other institutions.

All personal data will be encrypted to make sure users remain anonymous.

Users would agree to get in touch with the Centre for Disease Prevention and Control if they discovered they had come into contact with an infected person.

The developers said use of the app will not be made mandatory.

Malta hit by sharp fall in cruise trip tourism

CORONAVIRUS has devastated the lucrative cruise industry that fuels a lot of the tourism to Malta, Gozo and Comino, the three main islands of the European Union’s smallest member state.

Malta closed its ports to all shipping on March 10, but statistics released yesterday show that the collapse of cruising was already damaging the Maltese economy in the first three months of the year.

The Times of Malta reported on the figures published by Malta’s National Statistics Office.

There were just nine cruise liner calls to Malta, 12 fewer than the number recorded during the same quarter last year.

Total cruise passenger traffic during the first quarter of 2020 amounted to 40,175, a decrease of 48.5% compared to the corresponding period in 2019.

This meant that there were 37,876 fewer cruise passengers coming to Malta than in the same period last year.

Malta is heavily dependent on tourism and fears have been expressed that the cruise industry will take years to recover from the pandemic.

Passengers from EU member states comprised 53.5% of total traffic. The major markets were Italy accounting for 22.8% of the total passengers, followed by France and Germany with 10.7% and 6.3% respectively.

The total number of passengers from non-EU countries stood at 18,663, of whom 15.4% came from the UK after it ceased to be a member state of the EU.

Strict quarantine rules are in place for all people entering Malta where just four people have died of Covid-19.

Luxembourg to test its entire population

LUXEMBOURG yesterday announced ambitious plans to test every one of its citizens for coronavirus.

With some 614,000 people in a landlocked country in the centre of Europe, Luxembourg has already tested 40,000 people of whom 3741 produced positive results. There have been 89 deaths.

Although testing is not yet compulsory, the country’s health services have developed a plan which they hope every citizen will support. It is further proof, as if any was needed, that smaller nations are responding to the pandemic in a more flexible and more effective way than larger countries.

With 17 testing stations to open across Luxembourg, the hope is that about 6000 high school students and 2500 teachers will have the opportunity to get tested before they go back to class from May 4.

The testing strategy consists of expanding the capacity to 20,000 tests per day. The objective is to be able to test the entire population, progressively and in contingents, in some cases several times.

The Minister of Higher Education and Research, Claude Meisch said: “Due to the size of Luxembourg and its limited number of residents, we have a great opportunity: we can test the entire population for the virus within a short period of time.

“This makes us the first country in the world to have a complete overview of the number of infected citizens.”

The Minister of Health, Paulette Lenert said: “The high number of tests carried out will help to assess the extent of the spread of the virus and to detect for the first time asymptomatic cases, which are currently estimated to account for up to 80% of cases.

“This means we can detect many more infected people than before, put them in isolation and track their contacts, thus breaking the infection chain.”