DUBAI (Reuters) – Dubai, the United Arab Emirates’ business hub, has extended by one week a 24-hour curfew imposed as part of a sterilisation drive to control the spread of the new coronavirus, the government’s media office said in a Twitter post on Friday.
The UAE has imposed a nationwide nightly curfew since March 26 for the disinfection campaign, but Dubai on April 4 expanded it within the emirate to a 24-hour lockdown for two weeks.
The UAE on Thursday reported 460 new cases and two more deaths from the virus, taking its tally to 5,825 with 35 deaths. It does not give a breakdown for each of the seven emirates.
It has the second-highest infection count after its much larger neighbour Saudi Arabia among the six Gulf Arab states, where the total infection count has surpassed 22,000 with more than 140 deaths.
(Reporting by Alexander Cornwell and Hesham Abdul Khalek; Writing by Ghaida Ghantous; Editing by Hugh Lawson)
