Jewish community in Canada under virus quarantine

Some 4,000 members of a Hasidic Jewish community in the Montreal region have been put under quarantine after around 20 of them tested positive for the new coronavirus following a trip to New York, Canadian health officials said Monday.

"They started to have symptoms last week. We got first test (results) yesterday," said Eric Goyer, the head of public health in the area of Quebec that includes Boisbriand, where the Jewish community is located.

Of the first 40 people tested, about half came back positive, alarming health authorities.

At the start of the month, several members of the community travelled to New York state, which is now the epicenter of the epidemic in the United States, to attend a religious festival.

The highly religious Yiddish-speaking community shuns listening to the radio or watching television, and rejects contraception, with many families typically having around 10 children.

Most members have a rudimentary understanding of French or English, although Goyer said the community had translated a number of publications about coronavirus into Yiddish.

He said the community had voluntarily placed itself in isolation for 14 days and that its members were providing an "extraordinary" amount of collaboration with health authorities.

Canada as a whole had 6,671 declared coronavirus cases, and 67 deaths, as of Monday, according to a tracker run by Johns Hopkins University.

In Quebec, which accounts for roughly half the country's confirmed cases, police checkpoints have already been set up to curb access to eight parts of the province in order to stem the virus's spread.