Chaos emerging amid lockdowns

As countries began enforcing strict lockdowns to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, the uncertainty over future, specially among the poor, is beginning to spark anger and chaos.

Unprecedented measures by governments to tackle the coronavirus pandemic has forced more than 3 billion people to remain home. But without clarification and a timeframe when the situation will improve, some of the most vulnerable groups have already began to express dissent.

President Hassan Rouhani yesterday warned that "the new way of life" in Iran was likely to be prolonged, as its declared death toll from the novel coronavirus rose to 2,640.

"We must prepare to live with this virus until a treatment or vaccine is discovered, which has not yet happened to date," President Hassan Rouhani said in a cabinet meeting.

In Sicily, police with batons and guns have moved in to protect supermarkets on the Italian island of Sicily after reports of looting by locals who could no longer afford food.

The novel coronavirus has claimed more than 10,000 lives across the Mediterranean country, about a third of the world's total, creating the worst emergency Italians have known since World War II.

Simultaneously, it has eroded the economy, which had been the third-largest in the European Union before the new illness reached Italian shores from China last month.

A lockdown designed to curb contagion has shut almost everything across the country since March 12, depriving millions of steady incomes.

The building sense of desperation reportedly boiled over on Thursday in Sicily, long one of Italy's least developed regions.

According to La Repubblica daily, a group of locals ran out of one of Palermo's supermarkets without paying.

"We have no money to pay, we have to eat," someone reportedly shouted at the cashiers.

In other Sicilian towns, small shops owners that are still allowed to stay open have been pressured by the locals to give them free food, Il Corriere della Sera said.

The paper wrote of a ticking "social time bomb" in the region.

"I am afraid that concerns shared by much of the population -- about health, income, the future -- will turn into anger and hatred if this crisis continues," Giuseppe Provenzano, Italy's minister overseeing southern regions, told La Repubblica.

In Thailand, dozens of prisoners broke furniture and smashed windows during a riot in a Thai jail yesterday sparked by fears of a coronavirus outbreak in the facility. During the violence some convicts escaped from the Buriram prison where 2,000 are held, the justice ministry said. Seven have been arrested.

Justice Minister Somsak Thepsutin confirmed that a group of inmates sentenced to life had started "agitating" other prisoners with rumours of a virus outbreak.

In India's cities, too, anger was rising. "We have no food or drink. I am sat down thinking how to feed my family," said Amirbee Shaikh Yusuf, 50, in Mumbai's sprawling Dharavi slum.

"There is nothing good about this lockdown. People are angry, no one is caring for us."