Kaaba completely closed to slow the spread of coronavirus

INTERNATIONAL DESK: The central courtyard of the Great Mosque of Mecca was completely closed on Thursday as workers disinfected it in an attempt to slow the spread of coronavirus, reports the Daily Mail.

Photos and videos showed the area around the cuboid Kaaba – the holiest site in Islam – completely deserted except for cleaners in near-unprecedented scenes.

It comes after Saudi Arabia banned its citizens from making pilgrimages to the site, having already banned foreigners from coming amid fears it was spreading the virus.

The courtyard of the mosque is at it busiest during the Hajj pilgrimage – which this year falls during July and August – but remains busy throughout the year for Umrah pilgrimages, meaning it is almost never empty.

Saudi Arabia has so far confirmed five cases of coronavirus, all of them in citizens who had recently returned from Iran – which it at the centre of the outbreak in the  Middle East – or their relatives.

Having initially dismissed the outbreak as ‘no big deal’, Iran’s mullahs seemed to have woken up to the scale of the crisis as Friday prayers were cancelled in major cities to prevent the disease spreading.

It comes after troops were placed on alert to help deal with the crisis, travel between major cities was restricted, holy sites were disinfected, and 54,000 prisoners who had tested negative were freed to stop it spreading in jails.

The country has also urged people not to use paper money.

Palestinian officials also announced on Thursday that the Church of the Nativity in the biblical city of Bethlehem would close indefinitely after the first suspected cases of coroanvirus were reported on their territory.

The move comes just weeks before Easter, when thousands of pilgrims come to worship at the site – built on the reputed birthplace of Christ.

The Church of the Nativity was closed after suspicions that four Palestinians had caught the virus, prompting a flurry of measures that included banning all tourists from the West Bank for an unspecified amount of time and shutting down other places of worship in Bethlehem for two weeks.

Built on the grotto where Christians believe Jesus was born, the church joins a list of prominent tourist and holy sites to shutter their doors in the wake of rising fears over the spread of the virus, which has infected tens of thousands and killed more than 3,000 globally.

‘We respect the instructions of the relevant authorities,’ said Wadie Abunassar, an adviser to Catholic church officials in the Holy Land. ‘Safety comes first.’