Yiannis Plakiotakis, Greece’s minister for merchant marine, went into quarantine on Thursday after meeting a person who contracted the coronavirus the day before.
Plakiotakis, who will stay home to await his test results, is one of three Greek cabinet members known to have taken the precautionary measure so far after meeting the same carrier.
The other two are investment minister Adonis Georgiadis and his deputy Nikos Papathanassis, who announced earlier on 3 September in a statement they too had met the person in question.
The unidentified individual was among a group of foreign investors meeting Greek officials on Wednesday. The investor is understood to have been among a group of Israeli businessmen visiting Greece on shipyard privatisation business.
Georgiadis and Papathanassis were about to join Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis on a domestic flight earlier this morning when they were informed they had to go in isolation
They didn’t get to actually meet Mitsotakis who proceeded as planned with his scheduled trip to Thessaloniki, the country’s second-biggest city.
The incident is characteristic for an upsurge in Covid-19 cases in Greece, in line with a flare-up of the disease across much of Europe over the late summer..
Greece managed the disease particularly well when its first wave spread across the globe earlier this year. In recent weeks, however, it came back with vengeance as the country opened up for tourism and health safety discipline relaxed notably among the general population.
Confirmed cases jumped to more than 5,730 in August, up from 1,010 in July and 475 in June, according to figures by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).
The flare-up suggests that organisers of Posidonia, the world’s largest shipping exhibition, were right to cancel the event that was scheduled to take place in Athens in late October.
Posidonia had already once been postponed from its original date in June. The number of coronavirus dead stood at 273 in Greece as of 3 September, which very low by international comparison.
