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Armenian opposition lawmaker Edmon Marukyan urged the authorities to cancel all the mass events and shut down all educational institutions in an effort to prevent the spread of coronavirus in the country.

His comments came after Armenia reported three new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the total number of cases to four in the country as the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a pandemic.

Two of the patients are citizens of Armenia aged 45 and 27, while the third one is a 51-year-old Italian who works in Armenia.

“Many European countries have banned all gatherings with 100 or more participants. Meanwhile, Armenia has confirmed three new coronavirus cases. This raises serious concerns, which further deepen taking into account the probability of the virus spread,” the MP said in a Facebook post. “Of course, we strongly hope that we will avoid such a scenario but at the moment we have what we have and in order to overcome the challenge we first need to assess the situation accurately.”

The Bright Armenia MP called on the authorities, the opposition, civil society organizations and the public in general to focus their efforts on combating the common threat – the coronavirus infection.

“This is indeed a national security issue, which implies the need to concentrate all possible resources,” he stressed.

Also, Marukyan said they had repeatedly stressed the need to suspend all flights to and from Italy, but all their calls had been ignored.