Each day the retailer ships out some 1,500 packages to online customers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Finland. Across the region, sales doubled in the first week of April compared to the same period last year.

Danes are famed for their ‘hygge’ – a word roughly meaning “cosiness”, for being among the happiest people in the world and for their progressive laws such as the legalisation of pornography in 1969, long before most of Europe.

Smoking is known to weaken the immune system, making it less able to respond effectively to infections. Smokers may also already have lung disease or reduced lung capacity which would greatly increase the risk of serious illness.

The virus that causes COVID-19 is believed to have spread from animals to humans, and a handful of animals have tested positive in Hong Kong.
But officials believe this is a unique case because Nadia became sick after exposure to an asymptomatic zoo employee, Paul Calle, chief veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo, told Reuters. Calle said they did not know which employee infected the tiger.

“This is the first time that any of us know of anywhere in the world that a person infected the animal and the animal got sick,” Calle said, adding that they planned to share the findings with other zoos and institutions. “Hopefully we will all have a better understanding as a result.”

“We found that countries without universal policies of BCG vaccination, such as Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States, have been more severely affected compared to countries with universal and long-standing BCG policies,” noted the researchers led by Gonzalo Otazu, assistant professor of biomedical sciences at NYIT.

India has recorded 3,577 cases of the illness, with a death toll of 83. Authorities worry that the healthcare system would be overwhelmed if the disease took deep hold in the country of more than 1.3 billion.

New York suffered its deadliest single day from the coronavirus on Friday, with 562 additional deaths in the last 24 hours for a total of 2,935 fatalities, by far the most of any U.S. state.

The fear of health experts is not just that COVID-19 will kill many people in poorer nations, but that it will also exacerbate existing problems such as poverty, poor infrastructure and other communicable diseases.

New Orleans residents suffer from obesity, diabetes and hypertension at rates higher than the national average, conditions that doctors and public health officials say can make patients more vulnerable to COVID-19, the highly contagious respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus.

Some 97% of those killed by COVID-19 in Louisiana had a pre-existing condition, according to the state health department. Diabetes was seen in 40% of the deaths, obesity in 25%, chronic kidney disease in 23% and cardiac problems in 21%.