John Caputo had heard a little about the virus spreading across the world in early March. Like many others, full awareness didn’t come until rituals started being upended.

“I was one of those people who went to Las Vegas for the Gonzaga basketball tournament,” said Caputo, referring to the WCC championship that ended up being the Bulldogs’ final action in a virus-shortened season. “By the time I returned, I thought, why did I even go there? All of a sudden, I started paying more attention.”

Within days the NCAA championships were canceled. Caputo, a professor emeritus at the school, turned his attention globally.

As president of Spokane’s Sister Cities Association, Caputo realized he had windows to cities in Italy, Ireland, South Korea, Japan and China that could help locals understand the novel coronavirus and build solidarity with those in other countries who are at various stages of a pandemic that doesn’t respect borders.

“One of the goals of Sister City, as envisioned by President Eisenhower, was if we were waiting for governments to make certain decisions, if we started using citizen-to-citizen diplomacy, the more we can make positive progress,” Caputo said.

As the organizer for a long-running study abroad program in Cagli, Italy, Caputo had already heard from families in the small medieval town about 260 miles southeast of Milan. Milan is the capital of the Lombardy region in northern Italy, which has seen the highest concentration of cases in a country devastated by COVID-19.

The World Health Organization reported Friday that there have been 192,994 confirmed cases of the virus in Italy, with 25,969 confirmed deaths.

Cagli residents, who number about 9,000, have seen many of the same restrictions instituted in Spokane by orders of Gov. Jay Inslee and health officials, Caputo said. The country remains on a stay-home order, and people there have been participating in some of the nightly balcony singalongs that have gone viral on the internet.

On April 6, the city’s mayor, Alberto Allesandri, announced via Facebook video that he had tested positive for COVID-19. Dozens of people throughout Italy commented on the video, wishing a speedy recovery for the mayor, who visited Spokane and met with Mayor David Condon and other business leaders four years ago.

“They’ve actually had volunteer doctors from Cuba in Italy, and China donated 20,000 masks to Cagli,” Caputo said.

A planned dedication of a statue in the Riverfront Park Sister Cities garden had to be postponed as a result of the viral spread, Caputo said, and a reboot of the exchange program was also canceled for 2020. But Caputo said he recorded a video message of solidarity with Cagli, and when the Sister Cities organization is able to meet again members plan to come up with additional ways to support all five of Spokane’s kindred sites across the globe.

The communication’s main goal is to make the world feel a little smaller, Caputo said.

“That just has a way of making people think we’re not alone,” he said.

Here’s what we know about the virus’ spread in Spokane’s other sister cities:

Limerick, Ireland

The city of about 94,000 people in the south of Ireland is experiencing many of the same concerns that have been raised in the Lilac City, including an outbreak of cases at elderly care facilities, worries about increasing domestic violence cases and a public debate over the release of people imprisoned to avoid the spread of the disease

All of those stories appear on the front page of the Limerick Leader, the city’s newspaper. Ireland and the United Kingdom are seeing a spike in cases, Caputo said.

“Of our five sister cities and their countries, Italy has been the hardest-hit. Ireland is catching up. Both the U.K. and Republic of Ireland have seen their rates up,” he said.

The city that shares a name with the popular humorous verse became a Sister City to Spokane in 1990. A Limerick Irish harp sculpted by Sister Paula Mary Turnbull, the creator of Spokane’s Garbage Goat, was dedicated in the Riverfront Park Sister Cities Connection Garden last fall.

The World Health Organization reported Friday that there have been 18,184 confirmed cases of the virus in Ireland, with 1,014 reported deaths.

Nishinomiya, Japan

Nishinomiya, Spokane’s oldest Sister City and namesake of the popular garden in Manito Park, is in the Hyosho prefecture, a region of Japan that hasn’t been the hardest hit by the virus but was included in an initial one-month state of emergency declared by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on April 8. It has since been extended to the entire country.

Three players for the Hanshin Tigers, a Japanese professional baseball club, tested positive for COVID-19 in late March. They were believed to be the first pro baseball players in the country to contract the disease. Nippon Professional Baseball, the Japanese equivalent of Major League Baseball, has delayed the start of its season because of the virus.

An initial scarcity of cases in the country has been attributed to a reluctance to test for COVID-19 to preserve medical supplies. Confirmed cases began growing quickly in Tokyo at the end of March. The capital city lies about 320 miles to the east of Nishinomiya on the island Honshu.

The World Health Organization reported Friday that there have been 12,368 confirmed cases of the virus in Japan, with 328 reported deaths. Of those deaths, 30 had occurred in the previous 24 hours.

Jecheon, South Korea

South Korea has been praised by world health officials for its aggressive stance toward testing for the novel coronavirus, and after an initial spike in cases in early March numbers have remained relatively low.

That’s especially true of the landlocked, mountainous province of Chungcheongbuk-do, where Jecheon is among the larger cities at roughly 137,000 people. Jecheon became a Sister City to Spokane in 1999.

South Korea has seen such a decline in cases that voters were emboldened earlier this month to turn out in droves for national elections. Special polling centers were established outside hospitals for patients with suspected cases of COVID-19, and in-person voting was held in the country just a week after Wisconsin’s controversial presidential primary took place.

The World Health Organization reported Friday there have been 10,708 confirmed cases of the virus in South Korea with 240 deaths.

Jilin City, China

Jilin City is located roughly 1,300 miles from Wuhan, in Hubei province, where the novel coronavirus is thought to have originated. That’s longer than the distance from Spokane to Minneapolis.

The city of more than 4 million people in northeast China has been more concerned in recent days with infected travelers arriving in their town from Russia than from mainland China. According to Reuters, Jilin announced a 14-day quarantine this week on travelers from its neighboring province of Heilongjiang, where officials are starting to see new infections based on land and air travel from neighboring Russia.

Officials in the communist country have begun relaxing some initial draconian measures in recent days that were instituted to stop the spread of the virus, including temperature and symptom checks that limited where citizens were allowed to travel or even leave their homes.

The World Health Organization reported Friday that there have been 83,885 confirmed cases of the virus in China, with 4,636 deaths. Some have questioned the accuracy of those numbers, and President Donald Trump has ordered a halt to American funding of the WHO to review the agency’s response to the virus and its initial dealings with China.