The Covid-19 Pandemic is totally non discriminatory in its relentless march around the planet.
Gender, race, age, income are no defense against the encroaching monster as the Pandemic nears the one year mark.
The latest high level government official to be struck down is the 45 year old Belgian Foreign Minister.
Excerpted from Deutsche Welle 10.22.2020
Belgium, a country of 11.5 million inhabitants, has been severely hit by the coronavirus and is currently seeing a sharp rise in new cases. More than 10,000 people have died from coronavirus-related complications in Belgium.
Belgian Foreign Minister Sophie Wilmes, the former prime minister who led the country’s fight against coronavirus, is in intensive care with COVID-19, her office said Thursday.
Wilmes, 45, who handed the reins over to Prime Minister Alexander De Croo earlier this month and is now Belgian’s foreign minister, announced last week that she had tested positive.
She was admitted to the hospital on Wednesday. Her spokeswoman said Wilmes is in a “stable” condition and conscious and that her “condition is not worrying.”
“She is conscious and she can communicate,” her spokeswoman said.
The announcement of Wilmes’ positive test came after she attended a face-to-face summit with her fellow EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg on October 12. Her Austrian counterpart, Alexander Schallenberg, has also tested positive for COVID-19.
She did not mention the summit when announcing her positive test last Saturday, instead saying she thought she got infected within her family circle.
Wilmes was in charge of a caretaker government when the first wave of infections hit Belgium this spring.
Wilmes became Belgium’s first female prime minister in October last year when she succeeded Charles Michel.
First appointed as a caretaker, she then led a government with special powers to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
Born in Brussels, Wilmes started her political career as a local councilor in the Belgian capital and joined the federal government in 2015 as budget minister.
She stepped down earlier this month when De Croo was sworn in after nearly 18 months of complex negotiations among parties divided along linguistic as well as political lines.
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