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Louvre reopens

Louvre reopens after coronavirus fears

Tom Hoepf
Tom Hoepf
Louvre reopens
Napoleon courtyard of the Louvre museum at night, with the I.M. Pei-designed pyramid in the forefront. 2010 photo by Benh Lieu Song, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

PARIS (AP) – This should restore the Mona Lisa’s famous smile: Her Paris home, the Louvre Museum, is open again after management eased workers’ fears about catching the coronavirus.

Louvre Museum employees who had stayed off the job since Sunday for fear of infection voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday to resume work, allowing the world’s most-visited museum open its doors again in the afternoon.

Management presented a raft of new anti-virus measures to try to coax employees back to work. Among them: wider distributions of disinfectant gels and more frequent staff rotations so employees can wash their hands.

Staff members will be pulled back from the room where Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic Mona Lisa is displayed. Instead of rubbing shoulders with visitors in the room itself, workers will just be posted at the entrances.

Most of the museum’s 9.6 million visitors last year came from abroad.

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AP-WF-03-04-20 1208GMT

 

Louvre reopens