We’ve launched a new blog at the link below – head there for the latest:
UK decision to add France to quarantine list will lead to reciprocal measure, says European affairs minister
Britain’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France will lead to a reciprocal measure, French junior minister for European affairs Clément Beaune said late on Thursday.
“A British decision that we regret and which will lead to a measure of reciprocity, hoping that things will return to normal as soon as possible,” Beaune said on Twitter at midnight.
Une décision britannique que nous regrettons et qui entraînera une mesure de réciprocité, en espérant un retour à la normale le plus rapidement possible @Djebbari_JB https://t.co/6pA0qDQun6
— Clement Beaune (@CBeaune) August 13, 2020
Transport secretary Jean-Baptiste Djebbari added that he had spoken to Mr Shapps about the decision.
He tweeted: “France regrets the British decision and will apply reciprocal measures in terms of transport.
“I told my counterpart Grant Shapps of our will to harmonise health protocols in order to ensure a high level of protection on both sides of the Channel.”
La France regrette la décision du Royaume Uni et appliquera des mesures de réciprocité dans le champ des transports. J’ai dit à mon homologue @grantshapps notre volonté d’harmoniser les protocoles sanitaires pour assurer un haut niveau de protection des deux côtés de la Manche. https://t.co/bH7LkqD3LB
— J-Baptiste Djebbari (@Djebbari_JB) August 13, 2020
Updated
Hi, Helen Sullivan joining you now.
I’ll be bringing you the latest for the next few hours. Get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com with questions, comments and news from your part of the world.
The UK’s decision to impose a 14-day quarantine on all arrivals from France will lead to a reciprocal measure, the French junior minister for European affairs, Clément Beaune, said late on Thursday, who added that France regretted the move.
Une décision britannique que nous regrettons et qui entraînera une mesure de réciprocité, en espérant un retour à la normale le plus rapidement possible @Djebbari_JB https://t.co/6pA0qDQun6
— Clement Beaune (@CBeaune) August 13, 2020
Updated
Mexico plans to extend the closure of its shared border with the United States for another month to non-essential travel, Mexico’s foreign affairs secretary, Marcelo Ebrard, said.
The current agreement runs through 21 August, but Ebrard said it does not make sense to reopen the border at this time.
“We already told the United States that we’re of the idea that it’s extended because of what we have along the strip on their side,” Ebrard said, referring to a surge in cases in the south-western United States.
The travel restriction at the shared land border was first announced on 18 March and has been renewed monthly. It has included the US-Canada border as well.
“The border couldn’t be opened right now,” Ebrard said. “It wouldn’t be logical that we change it right now, so it will be another month.”
Mexico has reported about 500,000 confirmed Covid-19 infections and about 55,000 deaths, both considered to be significant undercounts due to very limited testing.
Updated
Updated
Summary
As Australia wakes up, here’s a summary of some of the key developments from the last few hours.
- The UK government confirmed that six countries including France would be removed from its travel corridor list following a surge in Covid-19 cases. Arrivals into the UK from France, the Netherlands, Malta, Monaco, Aruba and Turks & Caicos will have to quarantine for 14 days on their return or face a fine as of 4am on Saturday.
- Brazil’s coronavirus death toll passed 105,000. A further 1,261 deaths from Covid-19 were recorded in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Thursday. Another 60,091 new cases were reported, bringing that tally to 3,224,876 since the pandemic began.
- The UK government resumed the easing of lockdown measures in England. Among the measures from Saturday, physically distanced indoor performances can go ahead, beauty salons can offer more treatments, weddings of up to 30 guests can take place, and casinos can reopen. The moves were postponed from 1 August due to concerns about a slight increase in positive coronavirus cases in England.
- The UK government said 41,347 people have died across the country within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, as of Thursday. That is a rise of 18 from the day before. Wednesday’s figures showed a total of 313,798 people had tested positive for Covid-19, a rise of 1,009 on the previous day.
- France reported more than 2,500 new Covid-19 infections for the second day in a row. Levels that high were last seen in mid-April when the country was in the middle of one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns.
- French health authorities warned that new coronavirus cases were rising fastest among younger people, as the number of confirmed infections per day continued to tick up. In mainland France, the pace of growth in cases in the week of 3-9 August was fastest among people aged 15-44, the health ministry’s DGS public health arm said, calling it a “troubling situation”.
- Italy has imposed mandatory coronavirus testing for all travellers arriving from Croatia, Greece, Malta and Spain, and banned all visitors from Colombia. In a bid to rein in new infections, travellers arriving in the country can choose from a number of options, including rapid tests on the spot, presentation of a certificate obtained within the last 72 hours which shows they are Covid-19 free, or carry out a test within two days of entering Italy, but will have to stay in isolation until the results arrive.
Updated
Brazil death toll from Covid-19 passes 105,000
Brazil reported 60,091 new cases of coronavirus and 1,261 deaths from the disease caused by the virus in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Thursday.
Brazil has registered 3,224,876 cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll from Covid-19 has risen to 105,463, according to ministry data.
Brazil ranks as the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak after the United States.
Updated
UK government resumes easing of lockdown measures in England
The UK prime minister Boris Johnson confirmed plans to open up more of the economy from Saturday, including giving the go-ahead to delayed plans to resume socially distanced indoor performances and allowing beauty salons to offer more treatments in England.
The moves were postponed from 1 August due to concerns about a slight increase in the number of people in England testing positive for Covid-19 but that now appears to have levelled off.
From 15 August:
- Indoor theatre, music and performance venues will be able to reopen with socially distanced audiences.
- The piloting of spectators at sporting events will resume.
- Casinos, bowling alleys, skating rinks and soft play centres will be allowed to reopen.
- “Close contact” beauty services such as facials, eyebrow threading and eyelash treatments will resume.
- Wedding receptions for up to 30 guests will be permitted.
- Pilots will take place at conference venues ahead of the expected resumption of business events from 1 October at the earliest.
The changes will not apply in the specific areas where local restrictions are in place. Johnson said:
Most people in this country are following the rules and doing their bit to control the virus, but we must remain focused and we cannot be complacent.
That is why we are strengthening the enforcement powers available to use against those who repeatedly flout the rules. At every stage I have said our plan to reopen society and the economy is conditional and that it relies on continued progress against the virus.
Today, we are able to announce some further changes which will allow more people to return to work and the public to get back to more of the things they have missed.
However, as I have always said, we will not hesitate to put on the brakes if required, or to continue to implement local measures to help to control the spread of the virus.
New guidance will also mean that staff offering “close contact” services, including hairdressers, will now have to wear a face mask as well as a clear visor.
The move, which follows new evidence from the scientific advisory group for emergencies (Sage) is aimed at protecting customers and staff from respiratory droplets caused by sneezing, coughing, or speaking.
The guidance also applies to businesses that operate remotely, such as massage therapists working in people’s homes, and those learning in vocational training environments.
More detail on the new enforcement measures will be set out in the coming week.
The home secretary Priti Patel said she would not allow progress in tackling the virus to be undermined by “a small minority of senseless individuals”.
These measures send a clear message - if you don’t cooperate with the police and if you put our health at risk, action will follow.
UK government removes France from Covid-19 travel corridor list
Hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers’ plans have been plunged into chaos after the government confirmed that France would be removed from the UK’s travel corridor list following a surge in Covid-19 cases.
The move, which will mean arrivals into the UK from France will have to quarantine for 14 days on their return or face a fine, will come into effect at 4am on Saturday leaving a window of little more than 28 hours for travellers to get home if they want to escape the measures.
The UK government will also remove the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos and Aruba from the list, the transport secretary Grant Shapps confirmed. Travellers arriving in the UK from those destinations from that time will also be required to self-isolate for 14 days.
The Foreign and Commonwealth Office has updated its travel advice for those countries, now advising against all but essential travel based on the current assessment of Covid-19 risks.
Data shows we need to remove France, the Netherlands, Monaco, Malta, Turks & Caicos & Aruba from our list of #coronavirus Travel Corridors to keep infection rates DOWN. If you arrive in the UK after 0400 Saturday from these destinations, you will need to self-isolate for 14 days.
— Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP (@grantshapps) August 13, 2020
The decision comes after the Joint Biosecurity Centre and Public Health England indicated a significant change in Covid-19 risk in all six destinations.
Department for Transport officials said that data from France shows that over the past week there has been a 66% increase in newly reported cases and a 52% increase in weekly incidence rate per 100,000 population, indicating a sharp rise in Covid-19.
There has been a consistent increase in newly reported cases in the Netherlands over the past four weeks, with a 52% increase in newly reported cases between 7 and 13 August.
Over the past week, there has been a 273% increase in newly reported cases in Turks & Caicos, a 1,106% increase in newly reported cases in Aruba, and Malta has had a 105% increase.
Updated
An artist in Los Angeles is memorialising each of the thousands of people who have died from Covid-19 in the United States with a delicate origami crane.
Karla Funderburk started making the cranes three months ago, stringing the paper swans in pink, blue, yellow and many other colours together and hanging them in her art gallery.
“I was feeling the loss, and one way to process that was I started folding cranes. Cranes are a traditional Japanese symbol of carrying the soul to heaven,” she said.
She tried making 10 cranes each night but when on 14 May the number of deaths ticked to 88,000 she realised it would take her 24 years to complete them and she asked for help.
Now volunteers drop off scores of the elegantly made paper birds daily.
“I started receiving boxes and bags. Sometimes I would get one crane with one name on it, some boxes had 300,” she said.
Hundreds now hang from the ceiling of her Matter Studio with others sitting on tables and stacked in boxes waiting to be added to the sad reminder of the virus toll. The gallery’s website also lists hundreds of names of virus victims.
I feel like this space is holding, holding the place, for the remembrances of the souls we are losing, she said.
Funderburk had 9,300 cranes as of Thursday. More than 165,000 people in the US have died of Covid-19, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Updated
Bolivia’s political crisis is adding to the burden on its health care system, which was already grappling with coronavirus as it continues to spread across one of Latin America’s poorest countries, the Associated Press reports.
Street unrest erupted after the Supreme Electoral Tribunal moved the planned vote from 6 September to 18 October following warnings from medical experts that it would be unsafe to hold the election while the pandemic was not yet under control.
It was the third time the vote has been delayed, angering protesters who accuse the government of the interim president Jeanine Áñez of simply trying to hang on to power.
After about 10 days of nationwide blockades by supporters of the party of the former president Evo Morales, who object to the recent postponement of elections, supplies are threatened in some hospitals that are also dealing with an escalating number of Covid-19 patients, according to officials.
The blockades are having a wider impact on Bolivia’s beleaguered health system. Ambulances are sometimes prevented from reaching hospitals. The health ministry said 31 adults with Covid-19 have died since last Friday because of a lack of oxygen.
The government has described the situation as inhumane, blaming Morales’ supporters for causing even more misery at a time when the pandemic is inflicting a heavy toll on the country. But authorities are reluctant to use force to break up the blockades, recalling widespread bloodshed in clashes last year around the time when Morales resigned after an election marred by irregularities.
Morales, who had ruled for 14 years, left Bolivia after resigning and could face sedition and other charges if he returns. He was Bolivia’s first Indigenous president and remains a powerful influence in the country. His party, the Movement Toward Socialism, controls congress.
Bolivia has reported nearly 4,000 deaths from Covid-19, though the real number is believed to be much higher.
Last month, police in major cities said they had recovered the bodies of hundreds of suspected victims of the coronavirus from homes, vehicles and, in some instances, the streets. Hospitals filled up with patients, and funeral homes were besieged by grieving relatives looking to bury their dead.
The UK government said 41,347 people have died across the country within 28 days of testing positive for Covid-19, as of Thursday. That is a rise of 18 from the day before.
Separate figures published by the UK’s statistics agencies show there have been 56,800 deaths registered in the UK where Covid-19 was mentioned on the death certificate.
The government said:
We have not received the latest data for cases and tests in England. We will update today’s records as soon as they become available.
Wednesday’s figures showed a total of 313,798 people had tested positive for Covid-19, a rise of 1,009 on the previous day.
French health authorities warned Thursday that new coronavirus cases were rising fastest among younger people, as the number of confirmed infections per day continued to tick up, AFP reports.
In mainland France, the pace of growth in cases in the week of 3-9 August was fastest among people aged 15-44, the health ministry’s DGS public health arm said, calling it a “troubling situation”.
In total 2,669 tests had come back positive in the past 24 hours, it added, pointing to “regular growth” in daily new cases.
The figure was higher than Wednesday’s 2,524, which itself had been the highest since May.
Among the new infections were 50 gendarmes based in Tarbes, southwest France, out of a group of 82 who had just returned from a deployment in Polynesia, the prefecture in the Hautes-Pyrenees department said.
Richard Peabody, an epidemiologist leading the High Threat Pathogens Team at the World Health Organization Regional Office for Europe, warned that laxer respect for infection control measures was leading to increased case numbers across the continent.
“If you take... the pressure off the virus, then it will come back,” he said, calling on European governments to be mindful of the lessons learnt in the first months of the pandemic.
So far almost 30,400 people have died of coronavirus in France - 17 in the past 24 hours - and 374 are presently in intensive care.
Mexico’s energy minister, Norma Rocío Nahle García, said on Thursday she placed herself in isolation due to a Covid-19 infection, although she was not suffering symptoms of the virus.
“As soon as the viral load goes away, I will return to my normal activities,” she wrote on Twitter.
Como lo comenté estoy en aislamiento por contagio de Covid-19. Atendiendo desde mi domicilio.
— Rocío Nahle (@rocionahle) August 13, 2020
Afortunadamente estoy bien, sin síntomas y con el tratamiento recomendado.
En cuanto desaparezca la carga viral, regreso a mis actividades normales.
Agradezco las expresiones de apoyo.
Updated
Coronavirus is making it more difficult for indigenous Wayuu people in Colombia to survive and putting children at risk of malnutrition, advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said on Thursday.
Even before coronavirus, food insecurity and malnutrition plagued Wayuu communities, exacerbated by mismanagement and corruption, migration from neighbouring Venezuela and climate change, HRW said.
But limited state support afforded the Wayuu amid the pandemic creates a particularly dangerous situation, HRW’s Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco, said in a virtual media conference.
“This crisis is fundamentally due to state abandonment which has led to very limited access to drinking water, food, and basic health services,” Vivanco said.
A government spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Travel restrictions to contain the spread of Covid-19 have severely limited the Wayuu’s access to food, HRW said in the report with the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health.
The majority of the 270,000 Wayuu live in Colombia’s impoverished and arid La Guajira province in the north of the country.
Colombia has reported more than 420,500 cases of coronavirus and just under 14,000 deaths. La Guajira has reported over 3,000 cases, with some 100 Wayuu infected.
The country’s president, Ivan Duque, declared an ongoing national lockdown in late March that is due to lift at the end of August.
La Guajira has 7% of Colombia’s population but accounts for a fifth of malnutrition deaths in children under 5. Of those, more than 75% are from indigenous communities, HRW added, citing government data.
Previous government initiatives to address malnutrition have been beset by shortcomings, the report found. School meals have at times been scant or spoiled and treatment for malnutrition hard to access.
Updated
Here is some more detail as France reported more than 2,500 new Covid-19 infections for the second day in a row, levels last seen in mid-April when the country was in the middle of one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns.
Despite the rise in cases, which could prompt the UK to remove France from its list of safe travel destinations, the number of people hospitalised due to the disease continued to fall, having dipped below 5,000 for the first time since mid-March on Wednesday.
Experts say this is because more young people are being infected, who are less likely to need hospital care.
The total official tally of cases now stands at 209,365.
The seven-day moving average of new infections, which smooths out reporting irregularities, increased to 1,962, a total that has doubled over the last two weeks to levels not seen since the end of April.
Meanwhile, the daily average since the beginning of the month has reached 1,650, approaching March’s 1,678, when the disease started to overwhelm the healthcare system and prompted the government to impose lockdown on 17 March.
The daily death toll increased by 17 to 30,388 on Thursday, lifting the seven-day average to 11 versus 10 on 1 August.
But fatalities remain low in comparison with the April’s average daily death toll of 695.
Italy has imposed mandatory coronavirus testing for all travellers arriving from Croatia, Greece, Malta and Spain, and banned all visitors from Colombia, in a bid to rein in new infections.
“We must continue to be cautious in order to protect the results obtained thanks to sacrifices made by all in recent months,” the health minister, Roberto Speranza, said late on Wednesday after issuing the new rules, which will last until 7 September.
Health authorities worry in particular that Italians returning from vacations abroad may be bringing home the virus and passing it on when people are crowding outdoors, on beaches, at festivals or parties during the summer.
A weekly report issued on Thursday by the health ministry and the top health agency, the Instituto Superiore di Sanità, said Italy was in a transitional phase “with a progressive worsening trend”.
Recent infections from early August showed “important warning signs for a possible increase in transmission” of the virus”, it said.
Under the new rules, travellers arriving at an airport, port or border crossing can choose from a number of options, including rapid tests on the spot, or the presentation of a certificate obtained within the last 72 hours which shows they are Covid-19 free.
They can also choose to carry out a test within two days of entering Italy, but will have to stay in isolation until the results arrive.
Anyone found to be positive, including asymptomatic cases, must report to the local health authorities.
More than 251,000 people have been infected by coronavirus and more than 35,000 have died in Italy, once of the worst affected countries in Europe. More than 13,000 people are currently known to be infected.
Updated
Summary
If you’re just joining us, here’s a recap of the latest coronavirus-related developments from the past few hours:
- Global coronavirus deaths top 750,000. The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 750,000 people worldwide, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University tracker. Almost half of the deaths reported worldwide were in the four worst hit countries: the United States (166,118), Brazil (104,201), Mexico (54,666) and India (47,033).
- France reports new post-lockdown peak in daily Covid-19 cases. The French health ministry reported 2,669 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, setting a new post-lockdown daily high for the second day in a row and taking the country’s cumulative total of cases to 209,365.
- WHO downplays danger of coronavirus latching on to food packaging. The World Health Organization urged people not to be afraid of the virus entering the food chain, after two cities in China said they had found traces of the coronavirus in imported frozen food and on food packaging.
- Netherlands and Malta set to be added to England’s quarantine list. The two countries are set to be removed from England’s travel-corridor list but ministers are still mulling over a decision on France, the Guardian has learned.
- UK will be “ruthless” over quarantine, Johnson says. The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, said his government was prepared to be ruthless with even its closest partners over Covid-19 quarantine rules, after he was asked whether France would be removed from the government’s safe-travel list.
-
Germany admits delay in thousands of virus test results. The Bavarian premier, Markus Söder, has been forced to apologise over an embarrassing delay to thousands of coronavirus test results, just as Germany is seeing a new surge in virus cases.
- Spain’s daily infections spike to 2,935 but officials insist rise is not second wave. Spain reported 2,935 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, the highest number since the country’s lockdown ended and up from 1,690 recorded the previous day, although officials argued the situation remained manageable.
- Exposure to air pollution may increase risk of Covid death, major study says. Long-term exposure to air pollution may increase the risk of death from Covid-19, according to a large study by the Office for National Statistics.
- Air passenger numbers to drop 60% in Europe in 2020: IATA. Air passenger numbers in Europe are expected to drop by 60% in 2020 due to the coronavirus crisis, the global aviation industry has said, with the recovery looking highly uncertain.
- Iraq reports record daily Covid-19 cases. Iraq’s health ministry has reported 3,841 new Covid-19 cases over the past 24 hours, a record since the first infection was registered in February.
- US progress towards black equality seen unravelling in pandemic. Black people in the US were making slight progress towards equality, but even that is being undone by the economic and social impacts of the coronavirus, according to an index of American equality released on Thursday.
- Workplaces top source of virus clusters in France. Workplaces are the main source of clusters of coronavirus infection in France, and companies should have staff work from home as much as possible after the August holidays, one of France’s top coronavirus experts has said.
- Germany reports highest daily cases since start of May in “unsettling” trend. Germany has reported 1,445 new coronavirus infections in 24 hours, the highest level since 1 May, according to the Robert Koch Institute, which said the “trend is unsettling”.
- Spanish regions impose smoking ban to curb virus spread. A ban on smoking on streets and restaurant terraces when social distancing cannot be guaranteed has been introduced in Spain’s Galicia region, and will come into force on the Canary Islands tomorrow.
- England launches trial of revamped contact-tracing app. Britain’s health ministry has launched its delayed contact tracing app for England with fresh trials after technical issues prompted a rethink of its approach and a change of system.
- Trans-Tasman travel bubble ‘on pause’ amid new Covid outbreaks across Pacific. A Trans-Tasman bubble allowing travel between Australia and New Zealand is “on pause” after new Covid-19 outbreaks, and may be delayed until after NZ’s general election, possibly until next year.
A Trans-Tasman bubble allowing travel between Australia and New Zealand is “on pause” after new Covid-19 outbreaks, and may be delayed until after NZ’s general election, possibly until next year.
Australia’s minister for the Pacific, Alex Hawke, said both Australia and New Zealand remained committed to establishing a travel bubble as soon as it could be safely done, but that while work was continuing on the logistics of a travel regime, it was not imminent.
“The Trans-Tasman bubble’s on pause for a little bit, but as soon as we are able to get policy commitment to it, we want to be administratively ready,” Hawke told a Pacific press briefing. “New Zealand has indicated that there will be a short pause on that but they are committed to the outcome.”
After early reports that a regime allowing travel between Australia and New Zealand could be in place by September, it may now be delayed until after New Zealand’s uncertain general election.
Scheduled for 19 September, the election itself may now be postponed, after new Covid-19 outbreaks in Auckland, the country’s largest city.
Updated
Dutch national carrier KLM is unilaterally postponing a 2.5% salary increase across the board as the airline deals with massive losses due to the effect of the coronavirus pandemic.
KLM’s announcement comes as the airline said it was losing €10m (£9m) per day.
“KLM is in a crisis of unprecedented magnitude since the outbreak of the Covid-19 virus,” it said, adding “our half-year results for 2020 were the worst ever”.
The airline continued: “To survive, KLM must take measures to lower costs.” This is despite a €3.4bn government bailout package being approved last month.
KLM and major aviation unions last year agreed to a long-negotiated 2.5% increase in salaries, which was supposed to have been implemented this month.
“The situation then was totally different to what it is now,” the airline said, adding unions could not reach consensus about the postponement.
“Therefore KLM had no choice but to act unilaterally,” it said, without giving a postponement date.
Top umbrella union FNV reacted with anger to the news, saying it could take urgent legal action to force KLM to implement the agreement.
“We are unpleasantly surprised. KLM is unilaterally scrapping an agreement and you can’t do that,” Jan van den Brink, manager at FNV’s aviation branch, said in a statement. “And as usual, it’s hitting the lower income groups the hardest.”
Updated
A combination of eased restrictions, less strict following of rules in summer and increased testing explains the rising number of Covid-19 cases seen around Europe, the European chapter of the World Health Organization has said.
Nevertheless, deaths have not kept pace even as countries around Europe have seen an increase in cases.
Richard Pebody, an epidemiologist leading the high threat pathogens team at the WHO Regional Office for Europe, insists “there is no suggestion of an overall change in severity (of the virus)”.
Rather, the lower death rate can in part be explained by the disease spreading among young people, who are generally spared the most severe symptoms and suffer a lower mortality rate.
The WHO now fears people will become more lax about measures and recommendations aimed at curbing the spread.
“The key message is if you take... the pressure off the virus, then it will come back,” he said calling on European governments to be mindful of the lessons learnt in the first months of the pandemic.
“The trick is to quickly identify new cases, new clusters, to try to prevent further spread amplification,” Pebody said.
According to the WHO, nearly 3.7 million cases of Covid-19 have been recorded in Europe since the start of the pandemic, and 218,383 deaths.
Around the world, more than 20 million confirmed cases have been reported.
Updated
France reports new post-lockdown peak in daily Covid-19 cases
The French health ministry reported 2,669 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours on Thursday, setting a new post-lockdown daily high for the second day in a row and taking the country’s cumulative total of cases to 209,365.
The seven-day moving average of new infections, which averages out weekly data reporting irregularities, increased to 1,962, a total that has doubled over the last two weeks and is at levels not seen since the end of April.
Germany admits delay in thousands of virus test results
Bavarian premier Markus Soeder has been forced to apologise over an embarrassing delay to thousands of coronavirus test results, just as Germany was seeing a new spike in virus cases.
Some 44,000 people who took advantage of free coronavirus tests in the southern German state have had to wait more than a week for their results, Bavarian health minister Melanie Huml admitted on Wednesday.
These included around 1,000 who tested positive, Huml said at Thursday’s press conference, adding that 900 of them had now been identified and were being informed after officials worked through the night to clear the backlog.
Many of those tested were travellers returning to Bavaria and other parts of Germany after their holidays.
“This is a difficult situation, no question,” Soeder told a press conference in Munich, calling the delays “annoying” and “regrettable”.
“The entire state government is sorry that these mistakes were made... and that now many people are unsettled,” he said.
Huml said the delay, which affected tests carried out at centres along the region’s motorways and in train stations, had been caused by problems with processing handwritten contact details.
Soeder said his health minister had offered her resignation but he had not accepted it, calling the delay a failure “not of strategy, but of execution”.
Green party politician Michael Kellner, however, said on Twitter that it was “the result of a policy that focuses on style instead of substance”.
WHO downplays danger of coronavirus latching on to food packaging
The World Health Organization downplayed the danger of the coronavirus latching on to food packaging and urged people not to be afraid of the virus entering the food chain.
Two cities in China said they had found traces of the coronavirus in imported frozen food and on food packaging, raising fears that contaminated food shipments might cause new outbreaks.
WHO head of emergencies programme Dr Mike Ryan told a briefing:
People should not fear food, food packaging or delivery of food. There is no evidence the food chain is participating in transmission of this virus.
WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said China had tested hundreds of thousands of packages and “found very, very few, less than 10” proving positive for the virus.
Updated
The European commission said it has concluded preliminary talks with US pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson to buy upfront 200m doses of a potential Covid-19 vaccine.
The EU executive arm said this could pave the way for the signing of a contract that would allow EU countries to buy the vaccines or donate to developing countries.
The commission said that once the vaccine has proven to be safe and effective against Covid-19, the Commission would have a contractual framework in place for the initial purchase of 200m doses on behalf of all EU states, and could further purchase up to an additional 200m vaccine doses.
The move follows a similar announcement in July about the conclusion of preliminary talks with Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline for the purchase of 300m doses of their potential Covid-19 vaccine.
Updated
The Canary Islands became Spain’s second region to all but ban smoking in the streets on Thursday as part of measures to stop a resurgence of coronavirus infections, and other regions considered a similar ban.
Smoking will be banned when people cannot maintain a 2-metre distance between each other on the islands, which are popular with tourists.
Authorities also imposed new restrictions including the use of masks in public at all times, a limit of 10 people in gatherings and restrictions on nightclub capacity.
“The last few days point to an increase in positive cases ... We will increase checks to make sure people follow the rules because otherwise it will be our health and economy paying the price,” the president of the region, Ángel Victor Torres, said.
The northwestern region of Galicia imposed a similar ban on smoking on Wednesday.
Officials in both regions said smoking in public places, such as outdoor bar terraces or simply in the street with other pedestrians close, represents a high risk of infection.
Since lifting one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns about seven weeks ago, Spain has struggled to keep a lid on new infections, with average daily cases rising from less than 150 in June to more than 1,500 in the first 12 days of August.
There were 99 new cases reported in the Canaries and 107 in Galicia on Thursday, bringing Spain’s total new infections to 2,935 and the cumulative total for the country to 337,334.
Updated
UK will be "ruthless" over quarantine, Johnson says
The British prime minister, Boris Johnson, said his government was prepared to be ruthless with even its closest partners over Covid-19 quarantine rules, after he was asked whether France would be removed from the government’s safe-travel list.
Britain has in recent weeks imposed a 14-day quarantine period for arrivals from countries such as Spain and Belgium, responding to rising infections and fears of a second wave of the virus, having initially declared them safe for travel.
Johnson told reporters on a visit to Northern Ireland:
We’ve got to be absolutely ruthless about this, even with our closest and dearest friends and partners around the world.
We will be looking at the data a bit later on this afternoon ... looking at exactly where France and other countries are getting to, and you know we can’t be remotely complacent about our own situation.
The French health ministry reported 2,524 new coronavirus infections on Wednesday – the highest since its lockdown restrictions.
That has prompted speculation it could be the next European country added to Britain’s list – a move that would affect the large number of British tourists travelling there during English school holidays.
For UK holidaymakers, France is the second most-visited country behind first-choice destination Spain. Almost 13 million Britons travelled to France in 2017, data from Statista showed.
Britain usually welcomes about 3.5 million visitors from France each year according to the same data, making France the second biggest market for tourists coming into the UK behind the United States.
Updated
German airline Lufthansa said it had broken off negotiations with the Verdi union on cutting ground staff wages, warning that forced redundancies may be unavoidable as the pandemic wreaks havoc on the travel industry.
Verdi union’s deputy chairwoman Christine Behle called Lufthansa’s walkout, after 20 rounds of talks, “a slap in the face” for 24,000 ground crew members.
Europe’s largest airline by passengers said it was negotiating with all employee groups “to stabilise the company” amid the collapse in air traffic because of the coronavirus crisis.
But without union backing for its proposals, forced redundancies “can no longer be avoided”, it warned.
The flag carrier, which received a €9bn ($10.7bn) government bailout to stave off bankruptcy, announced in June that 22,000 jobs would have to go.
Although it initially said it would use schemes for shorter work hours and other crisis arrangements to avoid redundancies, the company said at its earnings announcement earlier this month this was now “no longer realistically within reach for Germany”.
Savings of 20% in personnel costs are needed, Lufthansa said, which could cut staff annual gross salaries as much as 18%.
In exchange, Lufthansa said it would offer “the exclusion of compulsory redundancies for the duration of the crisis measures.”
But Behle said the proposed cuts were “not bearable”.
“The income losses demanded by Lufthansa went so far that employees who had worked for the company for years would be pushed to the edge of the subsistence level,” she said.
The union said it had offered €600m in contributions to cost cutting so far.
Behle said the government should step in and “use its influence on the company to protect employment and maintain Germany’s air transport infrastructure.”
Africa will continue to see new coronavirus cases as countries begin to reopen lockdown-devastated economies, but increases will not be exponential, the head of the African branch of the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
Africa last week surpassed the figure of one million infections, with the continent’s most developed economy, South Africa, accounting for more than half of those cases.
Seeking to strike a balance between saving lives and avoiding worse economic damage, many African governments are beginning to remove mobility restrictions imposed at the start of the pandemic and resuming business, including tourism.
“We are very much expecting to see continuing increase in cases, a gradual increase... some upticks as these measures are being released,” WHO Africa regional director Matshidiso Moeti told journalists.
But “we don’t expect to see actually an exponential increase. We hope very much this is not going to happen like we have seen in other parts of the world,” Moeti said.
The briefing was held to mark six months since the first case was detected on the continent.
Egypt was the first country on the continent to detect coronavirus, on 14 February. Since then Africa has registered 1,076,744 cases and 24,282 deaths according to an AFP tally.
Countries that have started to experience rising numbers after easing of restrictions include Kenya, Algeria and Ghana, she said.
And other countries that have seen rising new cases over the past two weeks include Nigeria, Madagascar, Zambia and Namibia.
“We will have to contend with this increase... until such a time (as) we manage to have access to a vaccine and manage to deploy the vaccine. So this will continue until well into next year,” she said.
Moeti arrived on Wednesday as part of 43-member team of WHO experts, who are being deployed to help South Africa respond to the pandemic.
The key to fighting Covid-19 is stopping clusters spreading into community transmission, Dr Mike Ryan, head of the World Health Organization’s emergencies programme, said in today’s press conference.
A very small percentage of the world population has had the virus already and it has a “long way to burn” if allowed, he said.
The WHO does not have enough information to make a judgement on the expanded use of the new Russian vaccine, WHO senior adviser Bruce Aylward said at the briefing in Geneva.
Russia on Tuesday became the world’s first country to grant regulatory approval for a Covid-19 vaccine, to be named Sputnik V in homage to the Soviet Union’s launch of the world’s first satellite.
Spain's daily infections spike to 2,935 but officials insist rise is not second wave
Spain reported 2,935 new coronavirus infections on Thursday, the highest number since the country’s lockdown ended and up from 1,690 recorded the previous day, although officials argued the situation remained manageable.
The Madrid region, which failed to report its data the previous day due to technical difficulties, led the tally with 842 new infections in the 24 hours to Thursday, followed by the Basque Country, with 545 cases.
“The number of known cases keeps rising in Spain, but it is a mild rise that allows the implementation of control measures,” health emergency coordinator Fernando Simon told reporters, adding that the localised outbreaks did not amount to a second wave of infections that many expect in the autumn.
He said more than half of the infected people showed no symptoms.
The new data brought the cumulative total to 337,334 cases in the country. The ministry also said 70 people had died over the past seven days, bringing the death toll from the virus to 28,605.
Since lifting one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns around seven weeks ago Spain has struggled to keep a lid on new infections, with average daily cases rising from less than 150 in June to more than 1,500 in the first 12 days of August, and now spiking further.
The resurgence of the virus has dashed Spain’s hopes of saving the tourism season as many countries have issued no-travel advisories or introduced quarantine requirements for travellers from Spain.
Various Spanish regions have reimposed some restrictions and even come up with new ones, such as a ban on smoking in public spaces in Galicia and the Canary Islands.
Updated
Brazil will require more information and talks before it commits to buying the Russian Covid-19 vaccine, which is at a very early stage, the country’s acting health minister has said.
With the world’s second-worst coronavirus outbreak, Brazil has become a magnet for drugmakers seeking partners to test their potential vaccines - and then produce and buy the successful candidates.
On Wednesday, a Brazilian technology institute said, shortly after the state of Parana signed a memorandum of understanding with Moscow, that it expects to produce the Russian vaccine by the second half of 2021.
Speaking with lawmakers on Thursday, the health minister, Eduardo Pazeullo, said he took part in a video conference on Wednesday with representatives from national health regulator Anvisa, the Russian embassy in Brazil and the Parana government but said the Russian vaccine was still at an early stage.
“It is just emerging,” he said. “We do not have depth in the answers, we are not able to monitor the data ... There will still be a lot of negotiation, a lot of work for this to be effective.”
Nonetheless, he added that “we must also participate” if the Russian vaccine, which has faced skepticism from scientific experts due to a lack of test results, is shown to work.
At the moment, he said, the most promising vaccine is being developed by Oxford University researchers in partnership with AstraZeneca.
AstraZeneca has agreed to sell the federal government tens of millions of doses of its potential vaccine, and has arranged to transfer technology so Brazil can eventually produce it domestically at the Fiocruz institute, in Rio de Janeiro.
Fiocruz has said production of the new vaccine will begin by mid-2021, but experts warn it may take at least twice as long.
Some more words from Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus speaking at today’s WHO press conference.
If we don’t get rid of the virus everywhere, we can’t rebuild economies anywhere.
The sooner we stop the pandemic, the sooner we can ensure internationally interlinked sectors like travel, trade and tourism can truly recover.
World needs to spend at least $100bn on new tools to fight virus- WHO
The director general of the World Health Organization has urged the world to work together as it moves forward in the Covid-19 pandemic, rather than focusing on “how to get back to normal”.
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus talked in detail about how the world has come together since the outbreak of the disease to share resources and information on the virus to enable the rapid development of tests and vaccine candidates.
However, he warned much greater financial investment will be needed to ensure multiple vaccine candidates are researched and therefore increase the likelihood of success.
When a successful vaccine is found, there will be greater demand than there is supply. Excess demand and competition for demand is already creating vaccine nationalism, and risk of price gouging.
This is the kind of market failure that only global solidarity, public sector investment and engagement can solve.
He said the world needs to spend at least $100bn on new tools to address the coronavirus pandemic.
He added that the IMF estimates the Covid-19 pandemic will cost the global economy $375bn a month, and predicts a cumulative loss over two years of over $12tn.
Updated
New Zealand’s sharp response to a cluster of cases contrasts with the uncertainties surrounding the UK prime minister’s plans, writes David McCoy, a professor of global public health and director of the Centre for Public Health at Queen Mary, University of London.
Unlike New Zealand, England’s approach is not to eliminate Covid-19 altogether, but to minimise its impact.
Instead, there are good reasons to be worried about the approaching winter, when transmissibility of the virus will be greater and schools are expected to reopen.
Crucially, the country’s over-centralised, fragmented and semi-privatised test-and-trace system has been costly and ineffective; despite the proclamations of Boris Johnson, a system based on outsourcing centralised contracts to Serco, which then outsourced contact-tracing jobs to call centre operatives, was never going to be “world-beating”.
Updated
Berlin’s legendary Berghain nightclub will relax its notoriously strict door policy for art lovers from next month as the venue turns into a gallery, while the German capital’s nightlife remains on hold because of the pandemic.
Berghain, housed in an old power plant on the border between the Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg districts, will from 9 September show works produced during the Covid-19 lockdown by 85 Berlin-based artists, including established figures such as Olafur Eliasson, Tacita Dean and Wolfgang Tillmans and younger names such as Shirin Sabahi, Christine Sun Kim and Sandra Mujinga.
Visitors will be able to book guided tours that will take them through the club’s 3,500-sq-metre premises, including the dancefloor, the Panorama bar and “dark rooms” designed for casual sexual encounters between clubbers.
The entrance fee will go towards supporting Berghain, one of 140 nightclubs in Berlin facing an uncertain future because of the pandemic.
Updated
Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, has extended restrictions to stem surging coronavirus transmission, as the country reported 2,098 new cases.
Indonesia has reported a total 132,816 coronavirus infections and 5,968 deaths. Jakarta logged 608 new cases on Thursday, bringing the total to 27,761, the most in Indonesia’s 34 provinces, according to central government data.
The governor, Anies Baswedan, extended restrictions, with restaurants, places of worship and public transportation operating at limited capacity, to 27 August.
“Through this extension, we, along with the police and the military, will focus on law enforcement, especially on the use of masks among the people,” Baswedan said.
Baswedan said 65% of Jakarta’s 4,456 isolation beds had been filled.
Updated
Iraq reports record daily Covid-19 cases
Iraq’s health ministry has reported 3,841 new Covid-19 cases over the past 24 hours, a record since the first infection was registered in February.
The latest count raises total confirmed cases in Iraq to 164,277, including 5,641 deaths, according to the ministry.
Covid-19 has brought Iraq’s fragile economy to its knees and overwhelmed hospitals already stretched by decades of conflict and a lack of investment.
Iraq reopened to commercial flights in late July after four months of lockdown. Earlier that month it had lifted other restrictions and reopened malls and shops.
But the number of confirmed virus cases had risen steadily until Thursday’s record tally.
It makes Iraq one of the worst-hit countries in the Middle East, but still far behind neighbouring Iran, where total confirmed cases since February are more than 300,000.
Updated
Air passenger numbers to drop 60% in Europe in 2020: IATA
Air passenger numbers in Europe are expected to drop by 60% in 2020 due to the coronavirus crisis, the global aviation industry has said, with the recovery looking highly uncertain.
Although air traffic in Europe has increased in recent months since its low point in April, flights remain “more than 50% below the same period in 2019” – a drop of about 705m passenger journeys, said the International Air Transport Association.
“The near-term outlook for recovery in Europe remains highly uncertain with respect to the second wave of the pandemic and the broader global economic impact it could have,” IATA said in a statement.
IATA estimated that more than 7m jobs supported by aviation, including in the tourism industry, were now “at risk”.
In France, Britain and Germany, the drop in traffic in 2020 is estimated at 65%, and in Spain and Italy, at 63%.
The most heavily-affected European country is set to be Norway, with an expected 79% fall.
IATA estimates the global shortfall for the sector – one of the worst affected by the pandemic, which grounded almost the entire global fleet at the height of the crisis – to be $419bn (£320bn) in 2020.
It does not expect traffic to return to 2019 levels until 2024.
Geneva-based IATA represents some 290 airlines, comprising 82% of global air traffic.
Updated
About 43% of schools worldwide entered the Covid-19 pandemic lacking basic hand-washing facilities, the UN has said, deeming it a key condition for schools to reopen safely.
The World Health Organization and the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef) said that 818 million children were affected, putting them at increased risk of being infected with Covid-19 and other transmittable diseases.
Of those, 355 million went to schools which had facilities with water but no soap, while the rest had no facilities or water available for hand washing at all, the UN agencies said in a joint report.
In the 60 countries at highest risk of health and humanitarian crises caused by Covid-19, the report said three in four children lacked basic hand-washing facilities at school at the start of the pandemic.
The executive director of Unicef, Henrietta Fore, said:
Global school closures since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic have presented an unprecedented challenge to children’s education and wellbeing.
We must prioritise children’s learning. This means making sure that schools are safe to reopen – including with access to hand hygiene, clean drinking water and safe sanitation.
In the least developed countries, seven out of 10 schools lack basic hand-washing facilities, the agencies said.
The WHO director-general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said:
Access to water, sanitation and hygiene services is essential for effective infection prevention and control in all settings, including schools.
It must be a major focus of government strategies for the safe reopening and operation of schools during the ongoing Covid-19 global pandemic.
The agencies’ report lists measures necessary for Covid-19 prevention and control in schools, with guidelines on cleaning and disinfection, as well as hand washing stations and safe toilets.
Updated
The Portuguese capital and its surroundings will remain under tougher anti-coronavirus restrictions than the rest of the country until at least the end of August, the government has said.
Portugal has reported 53,223 infections and 1,764 deaths from the coronavirus, much lower than many other European countries including neighbouring Spain, where more than 28,500 have died.
But although the sunny southern European nation initially won praise for its quick response to the pandemic, a steady count of several hundred new cases per day in and around Lisbon in June and July, after the end of a nationwide lockdown, prompted authorities to re-impose some curbs.
Even as the number of infections in Lisbon has fallen again, the government wants to take it slow, especially when some of Europe’s top football teams are in the city for a special Final Eight UEFA Champions League mini-tournament.
Greater Lisbon will stay under the “state of contingency”, meaning most commercial spaces, excluding restaurants, must shut by 8pm. There is also a 10-person limit for gatherings, compared with 20 across the rest of the nation.
The prime minister, António Costa, has nevertheless encouraged fans and tourists to visit the country during the Champions League tournament, which kicked off on Wednesday, even though supporters have been barred from the stadiums.
The outbreak is set to leave long-lasting scars on Portugal’s tourism-dependent economy, with the central bank expecting it to contract 9.5% this year.
The biggest hit came when Portugal was left off a list of countries Britain, its leading source of tourism, considers safe enough for travel without coronavirus-related restrictions.
Updated
Netherlands and Malta set to be added to England's quarantine list
The Netherlands and Malta are set to be removed from England’s travel corridor list but ministers are still mulling over a decision on France, the Guardian has learned.
The transport secretary, Grant Shapps, met with ministers on Wednesday afternoon, where it is understood it was decided the Netherlands and Malta would be taken off the list after a rise in Covid-19 cases in the countries, but that a decision on France was delayed.
Ministers at the meeting are also understood to have agreed that the British overseas territory Turks and Caicos Islands, and the island of Aruba, a Dutch constituent country in the Caribbean, should be listed for removal.
The move to take the four locations off the list – which means arrivals from those places to England will have to quarantine for 14 days once the measures are imposed – was initially expected to be announced on Thursday.
However, it is understood Boris Johnson intervened to pause plans on Wednesday evening, with more time now being given to analyse Covid cases in France to see whether it should be removed alongside the other four locations.
Updated
A newly developed saliva test aims to determine in less than a second whether or not people are infected with Covid-19, Israel’s largest medical centre said.
Patients rinse their mouth with a saline wash and spit into a vial. This is then examined by a small spectral device that, in simple terms, shines light on the specimen and analyses the reaction to see if it is consistent with Covid-19. With machine learning, the system will become more accurate over time.
Prof Eli Schwartz of the Center for Geographic Medicine and Tropical Diseases at Sheba Medical Center, who is leading the trial, said it was easier to use than PCR swabs commonly used to detect Covid-19.
“So far we have very promising results in this new method which will be much more convenient and much cheaper,” he said.
The centre said in an initial clinical trial involving hundreds of patients, the new artificial intelligence-based device identified evidence of the virus in the body at a 95% success rate.
Prof Amos Panet, an expert in molecular virology at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University, said he would like to see more data and comparisons with existing tests before making a final judgment.
The amount of virus present in saliva increases as patients get sicker, he said, and a big challenge is to detect in “people who are borderline”.
“It will be a game changer only if we see validation of this technology against the current technology,” he said.
Sheba, located just outside Tel Aviv, has partnered with the device’s developer, the Israeli firm Newsight Imaging, to bring the system to market.
The company said they were in the process of getting regulatory approval. Each test costs less than $0.25 (£0.19) and it expects the device will eventually cost less than $200.
Updated
Global coronavirus deaths top 750,000
The coronavirus pandemic has now killed more than 750,000 people worldwide, according to data from the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
A total of 750,371 deaths have been recorded, out of 20,651,113 cases across the globe.
Almost half of the deaths reported worldwide were in the four worst hit countries: the United States (166,118), Brazil (104,201), Mexico (54,666) and India (47,033).
According to AFP, the number of people killed by the virus has doubled since 2 June, while 100,000 people have died in the last 17 days alone.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, more than 18,600 deaths have occurred in the past week, ahead of Canada and the US at more than 8,000, Asia at 7,800, Africa with nearly 2,700 and Europe with almost 2,600.
Overall, Oceania has been the least affected in terms of deaths, with just under 400 for 24,000 infections.
And of almost 1.1 million people confirmed infected in Africa, so far just more than 24,000 have died.
Updated
Liberia’s health ministry has confirmed the vice-president, who was flown to Ghana on Tuesday for medical care, has tested positive for Covid-19.
Officials initially denied that Jewel Howard-Taylor was ill with the coronavirus. She is an ex-wife of the former jailed Liberian president Charles Taylor.
But the health minister, Wilhelmina Jallah, said in a statement that the vice-president tested positive for the virus on 10 August and was granted permission to travel abroad for treatment.
The 56-year-old flew to Ghana on Tuesday after developing respiratory complications, her office said Wednesday.
Liberia’s health sector has remained weak since the country’s civil war ended 17 years ago. Government officials and those who can afford it routinely travel abroad for medical attention.
Updated
Coronavirus is making it more difficult for indigenous Wayuu people in Colombia to survive and putting children at risk of malnutrition, the advocacy group Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.
Travel restrictions to contain the spread of Covid-19 have severely impacted their limited access to food, HRW said in a report with the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health.
The majority of the 270,000 Wayuu live in Colombia’s impoverished and arid La Guajira province in the north of the country.
HRW’s Americas director, José Miguel Vivanco, said:
Rural indigenous communities in La Guajira can’t get sufficient food or enough water for basic hygiene, such as hand washing, and access to healthcare and information is very poor.
This situation has for years contributed to one of the highest levels of child malnutrition in Colombia, and raises critical concerns in the current context of Covid-19.
The Andean country has reported more than 420,500 cases of coronavirus and just under 14,000 deaths. La Guajira has reported more than 3,000 cases. About 65 Wayuu people have been infected in the province.
The president, Iván Duque Márquez, declared an ongoing national lockdown in late March that is due to lift at the end of August
Even before coronavirus, food insecurity and malnutrition plagued Wayuu communities, exacerbated by mismanagement and corruption, migration from neighbouring Venezuela amid a humanitarian crisis and climate change, HRW said.
La Guajira has 7% of Colombia’s population but accounts for a fifth of malnutrition deaths in children under five. Of those, more than 75% are from indigenous communities, HRW added, citing government data.
Government initiatives to address malnutrition have been beset by shortcomings, the report found. School meals have at times been scant or spoiled and treatment for malnutrition hard to access.
Updated
Updated
AMC Entertainment will start its first phase of reopening cinemas in the US from 20 August, covering more than 100 venues, the company has said.
The world’s largest cinema chain said it planned to open about two-thirds of its more than 600 cinemas in the US in time for the much-anticipated Christopher Nolan film Tenet, slated for a 3 September release.
Cinemas across the world have been shuttered since mid-March when several countries imposed lockdowns and social distancing measures to limit the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Updated
Prosecutors have investigated the Italian prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, and six members of his government over how they handled the coronavirus crisis, but have recommended the case be dropped, Conte’s office has said.
Judicial sources confirmed the prosecutors had investigated the ministers following lawsuits filed in recent months in various cities on accusations including manslaughter, creating a pandemic and curbing Italians’ political rights.
The Rome-based prosecutors concluded the accusations were groundless and the case should be dropped, the premier’s office said in a statement.
Under a standard procedure, the prosecutors sent the files to the ministers tribunal, a special court that is called to rule on cases involving the prime minister and other ministers, and which could still order Conte and his ministers to face trial. However, this is considered unlikely following the prosecutors’ recommendation.
The ministers involved along with Conte are the health minister, Roberto Speranza; the economy minister, Roberto Gualtieri the interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese; the foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio; the defence minister, Lorenzo Guerini and the justice minister, Alfonso Bonafede.
Italy was the first European country to be hit hard by the coronavirus and has recorded more than 35,000 deaths.
Conte said on Facebook on Thursday: “We always took responsibility for [our] decisions. Very demanding ones, at times painful, taken without having a manual, guidelines, or protocols.
“We always acted [supported by] science and with conscience, without claiming to be infallible, and aware that we must make as few mistakes as possible,” he said, adding that the government’s actions were always “cautious and transparent”.
In June, Conte, Lamorgese and Speranza were questioned by prosecutors about the country’s response to the epidemic.
At the time, Conte said he would tell prosecutors everything he knew and was not worried by the possibility he could be personally investigated.
Conte’s office said on Thursday that he and the ministers would fully cooperate with magistrates.
Updated
England’s exam authority awarded lower grades than teachers had predicted to almost 40% of pupils studying for their main school-leaving exams, results showed on Thursday, after the government cancelled the exams due to Covid-19.
Overall results were up on a year ago, but many teachers said their pupils had been unfairly treated, while others raised concerns that the system adopted by the Ofqual exam board regulator favoured students at private schools.
The stakes are high for school leavers, whose places at the universities or training colleges of their choice hang on their grades.
The education minister, Gavin Williamson, defended the process and said he would not follow Scotland’s lead in cancelling the results in favour of teachers’ assessments. The Scottish government did so on Tuesday after a huge outcry.
“The majority of young people will have received a calculated grade today that enables them to progress to the destination they deserve,” said Williamson, who had hastily introduced an appeals process on Wednesday after the Scottish debacle.
But Keir Starmer, the leader of the opposition Labour party, said the system had failed. “Something has obviously gone horribly wrong with this year’s exam results,” he said.
Parents, teachers and young people are rightly upset, frustrated and angry about this injustice.
— Keir Starmer (@Keir_Starmer) August 13, 2020
The system has fundamentally failed them.
Other European countries have faced similar challenges. While students in Germany were able to sit their exams, France cancelled school-leaving exams but published methodology for awarding grades months in advance of results day.
In England, Ofqual awarded lower grades than teachers had estimated in 39% of cases, and higher grades 2% of the time.
Teachers estimated 14% of their pupils deserved the top A* grade, almost twice the proportion who achieved this in exams last year. Ofqual called that “implausibly high”.
But England’s main teaching union criticised Ofqual’s process, saying teachers knew their students better than any computer data prediction.
Ofqual said it tested its model to ensure it was fair to pupils of all genders and of different ethnic and social backgrounds.
However, it relied more heavily on teacher assessment for some subjects that attract low numbers of pupils – a process critics said favoured pupils at private schools where some of those subjects are more common.
Under the last-minute changes announced on Wednesday, pupils unhappy with their grades will have avenues to appeal.
Updated
Seven African countries will start administering coronavirus antibody tests from next week, a regional body said, as part of efforts to understand the extent of the outbreak on the continent.
“Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Nigeria, Morocco are the first set of countries that committed to it,” said John Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
Western governments are using antibody tests to find out how many of their citizens have been infected, in the hope that will help them reopen their economies.
Africa had so far conducted 9.4m coronavirus tests, a 10% increase over last week, Nkengasong said. These tests show whether people currently have Covid-19.
The continent’s relative isolation has so far spared it the worst of the pandemic, but low levels of testing in many countries mean Africa’s infection rates are likely to be higher than reported, experts say.
As of Thursday, Africa had recorded more than a 1 million cases of Covid-19 and 24,113 deaths, according to a Reuters tally.
Nkengasong said 25 African countries still had full border closures while 23 were imposing testing at entry points.
He stressed the need to harmonise border testing and recognition of certificates in order to facilitate travel.
Updated
Exposure to air pollution may increase risk of Covid death, major study says
Long-term exposure to air pollution may increase the risk of death from Covid-19, according to a large study by the Office for National Statistics.
It analysed more than 46,000 coronavirus deaths in England and showed that a small, single-unit increase in people’s exposure to small-particle pollution over the previous decade may increase the death rate by up to 6%. A single-unit increase in nitrogen dioxide, which is at illegal levels in most urban areas, was linked to a 2% increase in death rates.
These increases are smaller than found in other research; a US study found an 8% increase and an analysis of the Netherlands found a 15% rise. This may be because those studies assessed earlier stages of the pandemic when the virus was mostly spreading in cities.
Data is so far only available as averages for groups of people and the ONS said this meant no definitive conclusion on the link between dirty air and worse impacts of Covid-19 could yet be made. Instead, individual-level data would have to be examined to rule out other possible factors. The ONS has begun this work for patients in London.
The ONS also found that air pollution could be a factor in explaining why people from BAME backgrounds suffer more from coronavirus. The report said:
The effects of long-term exposure to air pollution as a factor that increases coronavirus mortality appear smaller than those reported in previous studies, though our upper estimates are similar in magnitude to some.
[But] it must be accepted that the true picture will likely only emerge once data are available for highly detailed individual-based modelling.
Updated
Workplaces top source of virus clusters in France
Workplaces are the main source of clusters of coronavirus infection in France, and companies should have staff work from home as much as possible after the August holidays, one of France’s top coronavirus experts has said.
Weekly health ministry data shows that since 9 May, private and public companies have accounted for 22% of 609 clusters of infection.
Nearly a third of these clusters are currently under investigation by health authorities.
The data – which excludes retirement homes and individual families – also showed that health institutions accounted for 16% of all clusters and extended families accounted for 14%.
Prisons and public transport, including trains and planes, accounted for only 1% of clusters, and schools and universities only 4%.
Eric Caumes, the head of infectious diseases at La Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris, said on Franceinfo radio:
Given that companies have the highest rate of virus infection clusters, we should make the wearing of masks mandatory in all enclosed spaces, including in private companies.
Where possible, companies should continue to ask their staff to work from home, he said.
“Teleworking is reasonable,” he said. “It is important to prevent infection between colleagues.”
Updated
Democrat demands that a coronavirus relief bill include federal aid for the overtaxed post office and funding for the upcoming US election have become sticking points in negotiations for legislation that members of both parties say needs to be passed soon, Donald Trump has said.
“The items are the post office and the $3.5bn for mail-in voting,” he told Fox Business Network, saying Democrats wanted to give the post office $25bn.
“If we don’t make the deal, that means they can’t have the money, that means they can’t have universal mail-in voting. It just can’t happen.”
Updated
A religious leader who shared a stage with India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, during a ceremony to launch construction of a grand temple has tested positive for Covid-19.
Nritya Gopal Das, an 82-year-old Hindu priest, is the latest public figure to test positive after a string of Modi’s top cabinet colleagues were stricken with the virus, including the interior minister, Amit Shah.
With Thursday’s jump of 66,999 cases, India now has nearly 2.4 million infections, according to the Health Ministry, behind only the US and Brazil.
Modi and Das were among 170 people who attended the 5 August launch of the temple construction in the northern town of Ayodhya.
Dr Murli Singh, the director of information in Ayodhya, said Das had tested positive and was being moved to a hospital near Delhi.
But he added that at the time of the ceremony, the priest tested negative and so had not posed an infection risk to Modi.
Television footage showed Modi held Das’s hands and bowed before him.
Singh said people invited for the launch were all clear of the virus at the time.
“Guidelines were sent to all that only Covid-19 negative people will be allowed in the ceremony,” he said, adding doctors on the ground in Ayodhya had run tests before the event started.
Updated
Two cities in China have found traces of Covid-19 in imported frozen food and on food packaging, local authorities said, raising fears that contaminated food shipments might cause new outbreaks.
A sample taken from the surface of frozen chicken wings imported into the southern city of Shenzhen from Brazil, as well as samples of outer packaging of frozen Ecuadorian shrimp sold in the northwestern Xi’An city, have tested positive for the virus, local authorities said on Thursday.
The discoveries came a day after traces of the coronavirus were found on the packaging of frozen shrimp from Ecuador in a city in eastern Anhui province. China has been stepping up screenings at ports amid the concerns over food imports.
Shenzhen’s health authorities traced and tested everyone who might have come into contact with potentially contaminated food products, and all results were negative, the city’s notice said.
“It is hard to say at which stage the frozen chicken got infected,” said a China-based official at a Brazilian meat exporter.
The Shenzhen Epidemic Prevention and Control headquarters said the public needed to take precautions to reduce infection risks from imported meat and seafood.
The health commission of Shannxi province, where Xi’An city is located, said authorities are testing people and the surrounding environment connected to the contaminated shrimp products sold in a local market.
In addition to screening all meat and seafood containers coming into major ports in recent months, China has suspended some meat imports from various origins, including Brazil, since mid-June.
Li Fengqin, who heads a microbiology lab at the China National Center for Food Safety Risk Assessment told reporters in June the possibility of contaminated frozen food causing new infections could not be ruled out.
Viruses can survive up to two years at temperatures of minus 20 degrees, but scientists say there is no strong evidence so far Covid-19 can spread via frozen food.
Germany reports highest daily cases since start of May in "unsettling" trend
Germany has reported 1,445 new coronavirus infections in 24 hours, the highest level since 1 May, according to the Robert Koch Institute, which monitors public health.
“This trend is unsettling,” the RKI said in a statement. “We absolutely have to avoid a further accentuation of the situation.”
The states of North Rhine Westphalia in the west and Hamburg in the north, are showing marked increases.
There are fears that the daily increase which has been occurring over the past three weeks, will soon be too much for health authorities to handle. At the height of the pandemic, Germany was reporting around 6000 new cases a day.
Jens Spahn, the health minister, noted that there had been a significant rise in the infection rate amongst younger people. The average age of those infected is now 34, Spahn said, “the lowest average age since the start of the pandemic”.
He said the development was of concern, because it could indicate the spread of the illness through the wider population. At the end of April the average age of those infected was 50.
With a growing number of holiday makers among the new infections, Bavaria’s government has been forced to admit that the test results of 44,000 returning travellers have yet to be communicated to them, blaming high demand. Of those, 900 are of people who have tested positive.
All travellers returning to Germany from regions considered high risk have been obliged since last Saturday to undergo tests and to quarantine until they receive a negative result. Bavaria was also the first state to offer tests to anyone returning from their holiday who wants one.
The highest number of positive results so far has occurred at the A3 motorway border crossing between Germany and Austria.
Overall, the number of holiday makers returning with positive results is on the rise, according to health authorities.
And in Berlin a school has been forced to close just three days into the new term, after a teacher tested positive. But education authorities insist the school in the eastern district of Friedrichshagen will only have to remain closed for a day.
Meanwhile thousands of teachers who had lodged applications to stay away from the classroom due to concerns about their health, have been told they must return to teach.
England launches trial of revamped contact-tracing app
Britain’s health ministry has launched its delayed contact tracing app for England with fresh trials after technical issues prompted a rethink of its approach and a change of system.
The test-and-trace programme is key to detecting flare-ups of Covid-19 and reopening the economy but has been dogged by problems.
A smartphone app developed by the National Health Service (NHS) was initially expected to be rolled out in May but did not materialise, and in June the government pivoted away from a homegrown model to a system developed by Apple and Google.
“We’ve worked with tech companies, international partners, privacy and medical experts to develop an app that is simple to use, secure and will help keep the country safe,” the health minister, Matt Hancock, said.
The app will be tested on the Isle of Wight to the south of England, as the first app was, as well as with healthcare workers.
It will log how long and how close a person has spent near another and alert them if they later test positive for Covid-19, though the ministry said it was designed with privacy in mind “so it tracks the virus, not people”.
It will also let people scan barcode-like QR codes to log venue visits.
The privacy-centric, decentralised system of the Apple-Google model contrasts with the centralised approach Britain had used before, and the app’s launch follows a pivot towards a more local approach for test and trace.
On Monday, the government said the tracing scheme would become more locally targeted, and reduce the number of national-level contact tracers.
Despite the delays and problems with the test and trace system, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, has described it as “world beating”, while officials have played down the centrality of the app, saying it is the “cherry on the cake” of the programme.
Updated
US healthcare providers are kicking off flu vaccinations early, ordering extra shots and aiming to add tests that check for both the annual flu and Covid-19, pharmacy executives and experts told Reuters.
Flu vaccination for the autumn has taken on increased urgency because of the potential for serious complications if patients contract both viruses at once.
Vaccine makers will provide nearly 200m flu vaccines to the US this year, potentially 20% more than usual, said LJ Tan, the chief strategy officer for the Immunization Action Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes vaccination.
CVS Health expects to more than double the number of flu shots it provides to about 18 million people and Walgreens Boots Alliance is stockpiling extra vaccines, the companies told Reuters.
Failure to inoculate for the flu could also strain the US Covid-19 testing capacity, which is still below the 6-10m daily tests needed, Reuters has reported.
“If we can eliminate the dynamic of people getting symptoms and their first reaction is, ‘Is this the seasonal flu or is this Covid?’ it can take demand off of Covid-19 testing,” the chief executive of CVS, Larry Merlo, told Reuters.
Merlo added that CVS was working to obtain tests that screened for both viruses simultaneously. US regulators approved a joint Covid-19 and flu test in July.
The same people who are most vulnerable to risks from Covid-19, such as the elderly and those with respiratory conditions, are also at greatest risk for the flu, Tan added.
The US healthcare system is already expected to be strained in the autumn by a resurgence in Covid-19. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is anticipating an uptick in Covid-19 cases in the coming months, resulting in about 300,000 total deaths by December, up from the current figure of roughly 160,000, and a nearly 75% increase in hospitalisations.
There is evidence that social distancing measures for Covid-19 reduce the transmission rate of the flu as well, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, meaning that continued measures in the US could potentially slow flu transmission this season.
CVS plans to begin inoculating patients earlier than usual – possibly by the end of this month – to get a jump start on preparing for this year’s flu season, which usually starts around October.
However, studies show there is a risk that getting inoculated against the flu too early can leave a patient vulnerable to contracting the virus later on in winter, if the shot wears off.
Updated
Vietnam’s health ministry reported 25 more coronavirus infections and three additional deaths on Thursday, bringing the total number of cases in the south-east Asian country to 905, with 20 fatalities.
More than 430 of the total cases are linked to the central city of Danang, where the new outbreak began late last month.
The ministry said 133,340 people are being quarantined in the country, including 5,361 at hospitals, 25,043 at centralised quarantine centres and the rest at home.
Updated
Finnish health authorities have recommended that people begin wearing masks in public places, after months of claiming there was insufficient evidence to justify their use.
Mika Salminen, director of health security at Finland’s public health body THL, said “evidence of masks’ effectiveness is not particularly strong” but “even small additions to our range of available options are justified.”
After only a trickle of cases at the start of the summer, Finland is now experiencing an increase, with 219 new confirmed coronavirus cases in the last fortnight.
However, the Nordic country still has one of Europe’s lowest incidences of the virus according to the WHO.
Earlier in the pandemic, Finnish health authorities rejected the idea of a mask policy, insisting that wearing the face coverings could in fact exacerbate the spread of the virus if they were handled improperly.
At a press conference on Thursday, Salminen defended the earlier decision not to recommend masks, saying: “When masks were discussed in spring, the number of cases was in sharp decline.”
While not mandatory, the Finnish recommendations state that masks should be worn on public transport, when travelling to a coronavirus test or other situations where avoiding close personal contact is impossible.
They will not apply to under-15s, nor in areas of the country where there have been no new cases in a fortnight, such as in some vast, rural regions along the Russian border.
Local authorities will organise masks to be distributed to those who cannot afford them, officials said.
On Monday, ministers announced mandatory coronavirus testing at some airports and harbours, warning that arrivals from countries not on Finland’s “green list” could face a fine or prison if they refuse to quarantine themselves for 14 days.
Updated
US progress towards black equality seen unravelling in pandemic
Black people in the US were making slight progress towards equality, but even that is being undone by the economic and social impacts of the coronavirus, according to an index of American equality released on Thursday.
Research by the National Urban League, a civil rights organisation, found black Americans’ levels of equality with white people had risen slightly since 2018, aided by improvements in health and social justice.
But the calculations were made before the outbreak of Covid-19, which is wiping out gains in wealth and jobs, while killing about twice as many black people as white, said the National Urban League report, titled 2020 State of Black America.
On a scorecard gauged with white people at 100%, black Americans scored 74% on economics, health, education, social justice and civic engagement, up 1.6 percentage points from 2018, the League said.
Since those calculations were made, the US has grappled with the impact of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, which was sparked in large part by the death of George Floyd, a black man, in police custody.
Marc Morial, the National Urban League president, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in an interview:
America is in crisis. Black America is in a doubly difficult crisis.
You’ve got the health issues related to Covid and the disproportionality of deaths and disease, and you’ve got the economic fallout, disproportionality in terms of unemployment, the impact on businesses.
The you’ve got the racial justice crisis, which was put into plain sight by the death of George Floyd.
Even before the coronavirus and the economic recession, the study’s findings “reflect longstanding racial and ethnic disparities across nearly every area of American life,” the report said.
Updated
Dozens of holidaymakers have been barred from boarding flights from the UK to Greece because of confusing red tape caused by the coronavirus.
In July the Greek government announced that all passengers must submit a personal locator form including their travel and contact details 48 hours before departure. They are then emailed a QR code, which must be downloaded and presented at check-in.
The details are used for contact tracing in the event of a Covid-19 outbreak and arrivals who fail to comply face a €500 (£452) fine.
However, delays in receiving the code and differing interpretations of the rules by airlines have led to passengers being turned away at the airport.
Some travellers claim their airline did not inform them of the new requirements or that minor form-filling errors cost them their holiday.
Updated
Indonesia’s move to reopen schools in some areas risks creating new clusters of coronavirus cases, with at least 180 students and teachers infected since the new academic year started in July, a teachers’ federation has said.
The world’s fourth-most populous country has allowed schools to reopen with limited capacity in “yellow” and “green” zones, with fewer reported cases, covering 43% of the student population, according to government data.
Parents can opt not to send their children to schools in these areas and extracurricular activities are not allowed.
Heru Purnomo, the secretary general of The Federation of Indonesian Teachers Associations (FSGI), said distance learning was still preferable.
“We’ve always sounded out our worries that schools could become new clusters,” Purnomo said. “Distance learning, be it offline or online, is safer than face-to-face lessons.”
Wiku Adisasmito, a spokesman at Indonesia’s Covid-19 task force, told reporters new clusters would not break out at schools if all health protocols were adhered to.
Explaining the policy of limited reopening, the education minister, Nadiem Makarim, said almost 90% of children live in areas where “most of the students find it extremely difficult to do any type of technology-based distance learning”.
The World Health Organization in Indonesia warned that a return to schools “risks worsening local transmission, putting a heavier burden on the nation’s limited healthcare facilities and workers and, in the long term, slowing down the economic recovery”.
Some provinces have reported a significant number of cases among young people. In Papua, nearly 300 people aged under 19 had confirmed infections as of Wednesday.
A co-founder of Lapor Covid-19, a volunteer group collating information, told Reuters it had found six clusters originating in schools that had reopened in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.
Indonesia has reported 132,816 coronavirus infections and 5,968 deaths, the highest death toll in South-east Asia. About 9% of infections are among the 0-18 age group.
Updated
Greece has reported its first Covid-19 infection in one of its overcrowded asylum seeker camps, a migration ministry source said.
A 35-year-old man from Yemen living at the camp of Vial on the island of Chios tested positive late on Wednesday, the source told AFP.
“The man has been quarantined at the local hospital. Another 30 people are undergoing tests,” the official said.
There are more than 3,800 people living inside the Vial camp, over three times nominal capacity.
Several non-fatal coronavirus cases have surfaced in Greek camps on the mainland – including 150 infections at a migrant hotel in the Peloponnese in April.
But this is the first case involving an island camp, where the worst overcrowding occurs.
The news came a day after Greece registered its highest-ever daily number of new infections at 262.
Authorities have blamed the rise in infections to the flouting of social distancing rules in restaurants, bars and public gatherings.
The government this week announced a night curfew for restaurants and bars in some of its top tourist destinations, and new restrictions for incoming travellers, requiring them to produce negative tests up to 72 hours before entry.
Updated
Spanish region imposes smoking ban to curb virus spread
A ban on smoking on streets and restaurant terraces when social distancing cannot be guaranteed came into effect today in Spain’s northwestern region of Galicia, with other areas mulling similar restrictions.
Under a law approved by the regional government of Galicia late on Wednesday, smoking in public is not allowed if it is not possible to maintain a distance of two metres between people.
When he announced the measure, the head of the regional government of Galicia, Alberto Nunez Feijoo, said several experts had warned his administration that “smoking without any restrictions, including on a terrace without any limitations, with people nearby, or in crowded places, without any social distancing, represents a high risk of infection”.
Officials in the southern region of Andalusia, along with those in the central regions of Castilla y Leon and Castilla La Mancha, said they were considering similar smoking restrictions.
The World Health Organization has said tobacco users are likely to be more vulnerable to being infected by the virus and could increase the possibility of transmission of the disease due to increased contact of fingers with the lips.
Spain’s highly decentralised system of government makes regions responsible for healthcare, leading to a patchwork of different measures to curb the virus across the country of 47 million people.
The smoking ban is part of a series of new measures imposed by Galicia, best known as the destination for pilgrims hiking the Camino de Santiago, to curb the spread of Covid-19.
It has already ordered the closure of bars and nightclubs, and restricted the number of people who can enter shops at the same time.
With 30 cases per 100,000 inhabitants, Galicia has one of the lowest prevalence rates of the virus in Spain, one of the European nations hardest-hit by the pandemic with nearly 29,000 deaths.
Updated
Sénéquier, a famous restaurant based in the French Riviera town of St Tropez, is shutting for two weeks after the discovery of two Covid-19 cases on its premises.
The closure of Sénéquier highlights the challenges faced by the French tourism industry following a recent resurgence in Covid-19 cases in France.
Updated
Hi everyone, this is Jessica Murray taking over the coronavirus live blog for the next few hours.
Please do get in touch with any suggestions or story tips.
Email: jessica.murray@theguardian.com
Twitter: @journojess_
Lyon and Bordeaux have joined the lengthening list of major French cities to have made wearing a mask obligatory in public in their busiest areas, where narrow streets or large numbers of people make physical distancing impossible.
Since the end of last month, city halls and government prefects in Lille, Nice, Tours Biarritz, Marseille and Annecy have adopted similar measures, along with popular tourist spots such as Mont-Saint-Michel in Normandy and Locronan in Brittany.
Paris city hall declared masks mandatory from 10 August in more than 100 areas, including busy shopping streets, open-air markets and popular nightlife districts with large numbers of cafes and restaurants. The order concerns pedestrians, including joggers, but not cyclists or motorists.
Alarmed by a steady increase in case numbers, the government has repeatedly urged people to observe hygiene and distancing measures and extended by two months, until 30 October, its ban on gathering of more than 5,000 people.
The national health agency on Wednesday night reported more than 2,500 new infections in the previous 24 hours, with the country’s rolling seven-day average rising to more than 1,800 new cases a day compared to about 4,300 at the epidemic’s peak in March and April.
Experts have said most of the new infections are younger people experiencing few if any symptoms, but the number of Covid-19 hospitalisations and intensive care admissions, stable since France exited its lockdown in May, has also now started to creep up, the agency warned.
Updated
Fascinating piece today from my colleague Rupert Neate. Entrepreneur Xu Weiping has 20 offices turned into 2,000 individual pods for post-Covid working. He is building 3-metre square workspaces with a chair, desk, fridge, microwave and fold-down bed, in east London
Less than two months after battling back the coronavirus, Spain’s hospitals are beginning to see patients struggling to breathe returning to their wards.
The deployment of a military emergency brigade to set up a field hospital in Zaragoza this week is a grim reminder that Spain is far from claiming victory over the coronavirus that devastated the European country in March and April.
Authorities said the field hospital was a precaution, but no one has forgotten scenes of hospitals filled to capacity and the daily death toll reaching over 900 a few months ago.
While an enhanced testing effort is revealing that a majority of the infected are asymptomatic and younger, making them less likely to need medical treatment, concern is increasing as hospitals begin to see more patients.
Experts are searching for reasons why Spain is struggling more than its neighbours after western Europe had won a degree of control over the pandemic. But one thing is clear: the size of the second wave has depended on the response to the first one.
The data doesn’t lie, Rafael Bengoa, the former health chief of Spain’s Basque Country region and international consultant on public health, told the Associated Press.
Updated
German authorities have worked through the night to clear a backlog of coronavirus tests from travellers after it emerged that 900 people who were positive for Covid-19 had yet to be informed.
The Bavarian health minister, Melanie Huml, said all people with positive results would be informed on Thursday and that systems were being improved to prevent any further delays.
Bavaria has been offering free voluntary tests at airports, as well as specific train stations and highway rest areas, and has carried out some 85,000 since the end of July, Huml said.
The interest was higher than expected, and the delays were almost exclusively at the rest areas and train stations, where about 60,000 people were tested. Those operations were initially run by aid organisations, but are now being taken over by private companies, which are digitising the transmission of the results, among other things, the dpa news agency reported.
Updated
The world’s largest tour operator, TUI, said on Thursday it had slumped to a huge loss in the third quarter as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged the global travel sector.
The German tourism giant, which has already announced job cuts and store closures, posted a bottom-line net loss of €1.42bn ($1.7bn) in the period from April to June. In the same period a year earlier it booked a net profit of €22.8m.
TUI runs its business year from October to September, and in the nine months to June, TUI’s cumulative net loss amounted to €2.3bn.
In the third quarter alone, revenues plunged 98% to €71.8m, as hotels, cruise-ship and flight operations all but shut down because of global coronavirus lockdowns.
The company restarted tourism operations in June, including a much-publicised first trip with German tourists to the Spanish island of Mallorca.
Updated
Nearly 6% of people in England were likely infected with Covid-19 during the peak of the pandemic, researchers studying the prevalence of infections said on Thursday, millions more people than have tested positive for the disease.
A total of 313,798 people have tested positive for Covid-19 in Britain, 270,971 of whom have been in England, or just 0.5% of the English population.
However, a study which tested more than 100,000 people across England for antibodies to the coronavirus showed that nearly 6% of people had them, suggesting that 3.4 million people had previously contracted Covid-19 by the end of the June.
The results are consistent with other surveys, such as those conducted by the Office for National Statistics, which suggest higher levels of Covid-19 in the community during the pandemic than implied by daily testing statistics.
Updated
Hello everyone. I am running the global live feed, bringing you all the latest updates on what is happening around the globe.
Please do keep in touch with me as I work and contact me if you have any questions, news tips or thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Twitter: @sloumarsh
Instagram: sarah_marsh_journalist
Email: sarah.marsh@theguardian.com
Cases in Russia more than 907,000
Russia reported 5,057 new cases of the coronavirus on Thursday, bringing its nationwide tally to 907,758, the fourth-largest caseload in the world.
Russia’s coronavirus taskforce said 124 people had died over the past 24 hours, pushing its official death toll to 15,384.
Updated
Like many countries, Rwanda is finding it impossible to test each of its citizens for the coronavirus amid shortages of supplies. But researchers there have created an approach that’s drawing attention.
They are using an algorithm to refine the process of pooled testing, which tests batches of samples from groups of people and then tests each person individually only if a certain batch comes back positive for Covid-19. Pooled testing conserves scarce testing materials.
Rwanda’s mathematical approach, the researchers say, makes that process more efficient. This is an advantage for developing countries with limited resources, where some people must wait several days for results. Longer waits mean a greater chance of unknowingly spreading the virus.
Updated
Record daily jump in cases in Ukraine
Ukraine reported a record daily jump of 1,592 coronavirus cases on Wednesday, the national council of security and defence said on Thursday.
The number of infections has increased sharply in Ukraine in the past two months as authorities have eased some restrictions, allowing cafes, churches and public transport to reopen.
The health minister, Maksym Stepanov, urged people to obey broader restrictions that remain in place. “I will insist on strict adherence to all the rules. The situation is very tense,” Stepanov told a televised briefing.
The total number of cases rose to 86,140, including 1,992 deaths and 46,216 recoveries, as of 13 August.
Updated
Australia posted its lowest one-day rise in new Covid-19 cases in more than three weeks on Thursday, stoking hopes that a second wave of new infections gripping Victoria state is finally being brought under control.
Australia, once heralded as a global leader in combating the virus, has struggled to contain an outbreak in the country’s second most populous state, which has seen triple digit daily new cases for weeks.
But Australian states and territories on Thursday reported just 292 new infections in the past 24 hours, down from 414 the previous day and the lowest since 20 July.
“We now believe, cautiously, that we have early signs of the flattening of the curve,” Australia’s minister for health, Greg Hunt, said in a televised media conference.
The bulk of the new infections again came in Victoria, which detected 278 new infections in the past 24 hours, down from 410 a day earlier.
Updated
Hello everyone. I am taking on the global live feed from London and will be bringing you all the latest updates on what is happening around the globe. Please do keep in touch with me as I work and contact me if you have any questions, news tips or thoughts. Thanks in advance.
Twitter: @sloumarsh
Instagram: sarah_marsh_journalist
Email: sarah.marsh@theguardian.com
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along.
My colleague Sarah Marsh will take you through the next few hours.
British tourists cancelling trips to France because they may have to quarantine for 14 days on their return might be upset, but the owners – often British too – of the places they had booked to stay are losing more than just a holiday.
“For every potential visitor, there’s an owner who depends on that rental for their livelihood,” said Gavin Quinney, who runs a large farmhouse gîte in Créon near Bordeaux and is now staring at a blank late August and a very shaky September.
“You can understand people hesitating, for all sorts of reasons. But we’re going to have to work out what the rules are, what’s fair, because there are people who are really suffering from the permanent stop-start uncertainty of this summer.”
France is reportedly “on the cliff-edge” of being removed from the British government’s list of quarantine-exempt destinations amid a continuing rise in infections, with a decision expected by the end of the week:
New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, has said Auckland’s Covid-19 outbreak will get worse before it gets better, and warned of extended lockdowns after the country reported its first new cases after 102 days without community transmission.
Ardern stressed New Zealand’s approach of going hard early remained their best chance of slowing the spread and urged caution over growing misinformation around coronavirus:
Updated
Summary
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- Global deaths near 750,000. There are 749,358 known coronavirus deaths globally, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, as the world nears the sombre milestone of 750,000 dead in nearly eight months since the first coronavirus cases were reported. Two days ago, cases passed the staggering total of 20 million. Already, they stand at 20,620,847.
- India reported another record daily rise in novel coronavirus infections on Thursday, while the death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 47,000. Infections grew by 66,999 on Thursday from a day earlier to reach a total of nearly 2.4 million to date, India’s health ministry said. The country, with the world’s biggest caseload behind the US and Brazil, has now reported a jump of 50,000 cases or more each day for 15 straight days.
- France records most new daily virus cases since May. More than 2,500 new coronavirus cases were registered in France in 24 hours, in the sharpest increase since May, government data showed on Wednesday, as officials said indicators were “clearly worsening”. Of 600,000 tests over the past week, more than 11,600 were positive, the health ministry’s DGS public health division said.
- Jordan will close its border with Syria for a week starting on Thursday, after staff at their only open land crossing tested positive for coronavirus, state media said. Jordan has reported a drop in virus cases, with new infections recorded mainly among travellers arriving from abroad, but it registered 25 cases of Covid-19 in the past two days, mostly at the Jaber crossing with its war-torn northern neighbour.
- The Australian state of Victoria has recorded 278 new coronavirus cases overnight, consistent with a recent downward trend that is bringing cases to numbers closer to those seen in mid-July, after increases to the 600s in early August. Eight people have died overnight.
- Venezuela’s communications minister and close adviser to President Nicolás Maduro said on Wednesday that he had been diagnosed with the coronavirus, as the daily cases in the nation steadily rise. Jorge Rodríguez becomes the latest of several high-ranking officials in Maduro’s government to become infected in the pandemic, following the July announcement by Venezuela’s socialist party boss, Diosdado Cabello, who says he is recovering.
-
Germany on Wednesday added Bucharest and several other areas of Romania to a list of places considered a high risk for coronavirus infections, forcing a German minister to cancel a work trip to the Romanian capital.
- Peru extended its lockdowns following surge in coronavirus cases. The Peruvian president, Martín Vizcarra, has banned family gatherings and extended lockdowns to five more regions of the country amid a fresh surge in cases of coronavirus. Fifteen of Peru’s 25 regions were already covered by rolling lockdowns.
- Italy has ordered travellers arriving from Croatia, Greece, Malta and Spain to be tested for Covid-19 and added Colombia to a list of countries under a complete travel ban amid growing concern over new infections. With the annual summer holiday reaching its peak, health services are bracing for a return of travellers from destinations where social distancing, face masks and other protective measures appear to have been widely ignored.
- France reported 2,524 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, a new post-lockdown daily record. Despite the rise in infections, the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 continued to fall and was down by 121 to 4,891, the first time it fell below 5,000 since 19 March.
- Turkey is to delay the reopening of schools by almost a month. Students will return to classrooms in Turkey in late September, nearly a month after the start of the new academic year, the government announced, as daily coronavirus cases remain above 1,000. It will be a gradual transition, starting with online learning before transitioning to in-person education.
- Chile will lift one of the world’s longest lockdowns on Monday. The capital Santiago’s central business district and adjoining Central Station will move to a “transitional” stage under a “Step by Step” reopening. The mayor said citizens should remain indoors whenever possible, wear masks in public and wash their hands. People may leave their homes on weekdays without the previously required police permissions, and meet in small groups, while businesses can gradually reopen.
Updated
Global deaths near 750,000
There are 749,358 known coronavirus deaths globally, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, as the world nears the sombre milestone of 750,000 dead in nearly eight months since the first coronavirus cases were reported.
Two days ago, cases passed the staggering total of 20 million. Already, they stand at 20,620,847.
Updated
India reports record one-day case rise
India reported another record daily rise in novel coronavirus infections on Thursday, while the death toll from Covid-19 surpassed 47,000, Reuters reports, citing the Health Ministry.
Infections grew by 66,999 on Thursday from a day earlier to reach a total of nearly 2.4 million to date, India’s health ministry said.
The country, with the world’s biggest case load behind the US and Brazil, has now reported a jump of 50,000 cases or more each day for 15 straight days.
Updated
As surging Covid-19 cases across Latin America leave cemeteries and funeral homes struggling to keep pace, engineers in Bolivia have come up with a solution as pragmatic as it is macabre: a mobile crematorium.
The five-metre by two-and-half-metre oven is small enough to fit on to a trailer, and is powered by locally produced liquefied petroleum gas – making it a cheap option for families who cannot afford a funeral service.
Three canisters of LPG can cremate a body in 30 to 40 minutes, said the mobile crematory’s inventor, Carlos Ayo, an environmental engineer who says he designed the device to help his country in a time of crisis.
“We wanted to help in this pandemic, and one possibility was showing others how to make a crematory oven,” said Ayo in a telephone interview.
“Then we asked ourselves wouldn’t it be better if it could be mobile, to move it from one place to another?”
Ayo said he had received orders from several local councils in Bolivia, where authorities are struggling to deal with the rising death toll. Crematoriums are only found in the country’s main cities, and even then, many Bolivians cannot afford the fees:
More than one million Australians are now out of work, according to the latest labour force data, which shows the unemployment rate is now 7.5%.
Even though seasonally adjusted employment increased by 114,700 people between June and July, and hours worked increased 1.3%, the unemployment rate in July edged up from 7.4% in June.
The survey was completed before Victoria implemented the stage four lockdown in an effort to contain a second wave of coronavirus infections in the state, so the monthly result is likely more rosy than the current reality:
Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Olivia Colman have welcomed a donation from Amazon Prime Video to a fund which the actors launched to help support theatre professionals whose livelihoods have been threatened by the pandemic.
Amazon said it would give $6m to support the European film, TV and theatre production community get through the crisis.
The first awards are £1m to a Covid-response fund created by the film and TV charity; and £500,000 to the theatre community fund spearheaded by Waller-Bridge, Colman and their Fleabag producer Francesca Moody:
Researchers in Thailand have been trekking though the countryside to catch bats in their caves in an effort to trace the murky origins of the coronavirus, AP reports.
Initial research has already pointed to bats as the source of the virus that has afflicted more than 20.5m people and caused the deaths of over 748,000 worldwide, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
The closest match to the coronavirus has been found in horseshoe bats in Yunnan in southern China.
Thailand has 19 species of horseshoe bats but researchers said they have not yet been tested for the new coronavirus.
Researchers hiked up a hill in Sai Yok National Park in the western province of Kanchanaburi to set up nets to trap some 200 bats from three different caves.
The team from the Thai Red Cross Emerging Infectious Diseases-Health Science Center took saliva, blood and stool samples from the bats before releasing them.
They worked through the night and into the next day, taking samples not only from horseshoe bats but also from other bat species they caught in order to better understand pathogens carried by the animals.
The team was headed by Supaporn Wacharapluesadee, the centers deputy chief, who has studied bats and diseases associated with them for more than 20 years. He was part of the group that helped Thailand confirm the first Covid-19 case outside China in January.
Updated
The Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, has launched a campaign targeting a new enemy of the country: food waste.
“Waste is shameful and thriftiness is honourable,” Xi said in a speech published on Tuesday, describing the amount of food that goes to waste in the country as “shocking and distressing”, according to the state news agency Xinhua.
Quoting a poem, he said: “Who knows that of our meal in the dish, every grain comes after hard toil?” He added: “We should still maintain a sense of crisis about food security. The impact of this year’s Covid-19 pandemic has sounded the alarm.”
The focus on food waste comes after weeks of mass flooding across the country wiped out crops, contributing to rising food prices – already higher after the Covid-19 outbreak paralysed the Chinese economy.
Faced with trade tensions with the US and other countries, food security – always a priority for China – has become even more important. As much as 20% to 30% of China’s grains are imported, according to estimates:
Close adviser to President Nicolás Maduro has coronavirus
Venezuela’s communications minister and close adviser to President Nicolás Maduro said Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with the coronavirus, as the daily cases in the nation steadily rise.
Jorge Rodríguez becomes the latest of several high-ranking officials in Maduro’s government to become infected in the pandemic, following the July announcement by Venezuela’s socialist party boss Diosdado Cabello, who says he is recovering.
“Even though I am in good general condition, I must comply with the isolation measures and the necessary care in order to overcome the virus, Rodríguez said on Twitter.
Es mi deber informar que he recibido el diagnóstico de infección x Covid-19. Aun cuando me encuentro en buenas condiciones generales, debo cumplir con el aislamiento y los cuidados necesarios a fin de superar el cuadro viral. Un abrazo a todas y a todos!
— Jorge Rodríguez (@jorgerpsuv) August 13, 2020
Rodríguez often appears just off camera in Maduros frequent appearances on Venezuelan state TV, answering the presidents impromptu questions. He also speaks on the presidents behalf fending off the socialist government’s critics, and he regularly gives nightly updates on daily cases of illnesses and deaths from the virus.
Venezuela is a once-wealthy oil nation that was gripped by economic and political crisis before the pandemic hit in March. According to official figures by Maduro’s government, the virus has so far spared the nation compared to neighboring Latin American nations, such as Brazil.
Officials on Wednesday reported fewer than 250 total deaths and roughly 29,000 people falling ill since March. The daily number of new illnesses first topped 1,000 on Tuesday, according to official figures.
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 1,445 to 219,964, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Thursday.
The reported death toll rose by 4 to 9,211, the tally showed.
A world-leading parasite researcher has warned there could be serious consequences for Australia if the drug ivermectin were to be used widely in the treatment of Covid-19, saying “there is no strong, robust evidence that ivermectin provides benefits against the disease”.
Dr Carlos Chaccour, from the Barcelona Institute of Global Health, has been studying ivermectin for more than a decade and spoke after reports the anti-parasitic drug could treat Covid-19.
On Tuesday the National party MP David Gillespie called for ivermectin to be used off-label – that is, for conditions for which it has not been approved by regulators – to treat the virus.
It is the latest in a line of medicines being promoted by some commentators as “safe” and “approved” because drugs regulators such as the Therapeutic Goods Administration in Australia and the Food and Drug Administration in the United States have said they are safe for treating certain well known and studied conditions.
But this does not mean the same drugs are safe when used to treat Covid, especially since many patients have weakened immune systems and co-morbidities:
Here’s the full story on the latest from New Zealand:
Covid-19 may have been circulating in the community for weeks, New Zealand’s top health official has said, as 13 new community cases were confirmed – all linked to the four cases announced on Tuesday.
The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said the growing cluster in Auckland, now totalling 17, “would get worse before it gets better”.
Thirty-six cases are now active in the country, including those in managed quarantine facilities. One of the new cases announced on Thursday was at the Mount Albert grammar school in Auckland, and was confirmed to be a relative of a previous case. The infected student attended class on Monday, and local health authorities said they were contacting and isolating around 100 close contacts they had while at school:
Australian state of Victoria records 278 new cases, eight deaths
The Australian state of Victoria has recorded 278 new coronavirus cases overnight, consistent with a recent downward trend that is bringing cases to numbers closer to those seen in mid-July, after increases to the 600s in early August.
Eight people have died overnight:
#Covid19VicData for 13 August 2020.
— VicGovDHHS (@VicGovDHHS) August 12, 2020
278 new cases of #coronavirus (#COVID19) detected in Victoria in the last 24 hours. Sadly, 8 lives have been lost.
More detail will be provided this afternoon. pic.twitter.com/8SWet6eHv1
There is not one single piece of television that is more relatable than Marge Simpson saying 'at times like this, I guess all you can do is laugh' and then staring silently pic.twitter.com/4yptzz9KMA
— Taylor Swift Socialist (@labourtswift) August 12, 2020
Podcast: How Britain’s deepest recession is becoming a jobs crisis
Economics writer Aditya Chakrabortty describes how the coronavirus crisis has sent Britain plunging into a record recession and what it means for the millions of people fearing for their jobs:
Updated
Moving on from New Zealand now to lighter news from South Korea, which has opened a high-tech new front in the battle against coronavirus, fortifying bus shelters in the capital with temperature-checking doors and ultraviolet disinfection lamps, AFP reports.
To enter, passengers must stand in front of an automated thermal-imaging camera, and the door will slide open only if their temperature is below 37.5C.
A separate camera is installed lower down to test children.
Inside the glass-walled booths – which cost about 100m won ($84,000) each – the air-conditioning systems have ultraviolet lamps installed to kill viruses at the same time as cooling the air. Free wifi is also included.
A dispenser provides hand sanitiser, and users are advised to wear face masks at all times, while keeping at least one metre apart from others.
Ten advanced facilities have been installed in a north-eastern district of Seoul, offering protection from monsoon rains and summer heat as well as Covid-19:
Dr Bloomfield says the earliest time an infected person displayed symptoms was July 31st, and that implies that the latest outbreak could have been circulating in the community for that long.
The person who fell sick on July 31st and later tested positive for Covid-19 spent most of the time they were ill at home in bed.
An anti-lockdown protest is currently taking place in the Northland city of Whangarei and prime minister Jacinda Ardern said conspiracy theories regarding the virus aren’t new, but are dangerous.
“I have seen reports of people overseas who have viewed Covid-19 as fake who have lost their lives to it - so that’s the evidence. The global situation is the evidence that this is very very real, we need to take it seriously.”
Ardern said if you don’t trust politicians than you should trust doctors and scientists.
New South Wales, Australia confirms 12 new cases, one death
Meanwhile in the state of New South Wales, Australia:
#BREAKING: NSW has recorded 12 new cases of COVID-19 from 24,621 tests. A woman in her 80s has also died - linked to the Our Lady of Lebanon cluster.
— Chelsea Hetherington (@chelsea_hetho) August 13, 2020
- 4 locally acquired, linked to known cases
- 3 locally acquired, no known source
- 5 hotel quarantine@abcnews @COVID_Australia
The original family of four who tested positive for Covid-19 also visited Taupo last weekend, Dr Bloomfield has revealed, in addition to a number of tourist sights in Rotorua.
The prime minister is now speaking and says the situation is “serious”, though under control.
“Once you identify a cluster it grows before it slows, we should expect that to be the case here. The fact we are in Level 3 in Auckland is giving us a helping hand.”
The index case - or source of the cluster - is yet to be found, the PM says.
Ten checkpoints have been set up in Auckland, and since 7am this morning 300 vehicles have been turned back, including some people trying to get to their holiday homes.
“I acknowledge the anxiety of some New Zealanders...but the pace and speed should act as some reassurance,” Ardern said.
Hong Kong, Vietnam and Vietnam all waited a number of weeks, rather than hours, to lockdown, Ardern said, when they experienced a resurgence of the virus.
“Things will get worse before they get better, but at this stage, it is heartening to see them in one cluster,” Ardern said.
“But once again we are reminded of how tricky this virus is and how easily it can spread. We have a plan, we have acted quickly, and we will continue to roll out that plan.”
A second briefing by the PM would be held later today after cabinet meets.
Updated
Dr Bloomfield said all positive cases related to the Auckland cluster must now be managed in a quarantine facility – a departure from how New Zealand handled cases during lockdown, when it required positive cases to self-isolate at home, or in hospital if they were extremely unwell.
Yesterday 6,006 tests were processed in New Zealand. The total number of swabs collected in the country was 10,000.
“Demand has been high at our dedicated testing centres,” Bloomfield said.
“We are aware one of the people who has tested positive has visited an aged-care facility in the Waikato,” Bloomfield said, saying the aged-care facility had been alerted and planning a response.
“The visit was when the person wasn’t displaying symptoms, but they developed symptoms the next day.”
All aged-care facilities in New Zealand have been locked down since Wednesday.
Updated
New Zealand reports 14 new cases, 13 of which are linked to new cluster
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the country’s director-general of health, has said there is “no blame or shame” in having Covid-19 - the virus is to blame, and people are the solution.
“In managed isolation, there is 1 new case to report, a woman from the Philippines who arrived on the 8th of August,” Bloomfield said.
“In the community, there are 13 new confirmed cases to report, they are all in Auckland and they are all linked to the original cluster.”
That brings a total of 14 new cases to report, and 36 active cases in New Zealand”.
The family of four who tested positive on Tuesday are now considered “a cluster” by the ministry of health.
“Clusters do continue to grow, we do believe there will be further cases” Bloomfield said.
Updated
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern is about to give a live press conference from the beehive in Wellington. She will be joined by the director-general of Health, Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
Follow live here:
New Zealand deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters has called for opposition leader Judith Collins to “stop undermining democracy”.
In a statement, Peters said:
New Zealanders are sadly being fed a steady stream of misinformation about the pre-election period from the National Party.”
Its effect is to sow doubt about the legitimacy of the current government as it focuses solely on protecting the health of New Zealanders.
There is no convention for power sharing such as Ms Collins, a trained lawyer, is claiming. She should know better. So who is giving her that advice and why is she taking it?
...
What we are witnessing is the disappointing collapse of a once honourable party. The party of Keith Holyoake, Ralph Hannan and Jack Marshall was a party of principle, whether one agreed with them or not. National is in danger of losing its way.
At the very time the government, alongside the ‘team of five million’ New Zealanders, is solely focused on restoring the nation’s health, the National Party appears focused on undermining that effort to an already fearful public.
If it wasn’t so malicious and dangerous for our democracy it would merely be sad.”
In Australia, the peak Victorian state authority for safety improvement in healthcare is still examining how almost 1,600 healthcare workers acquired Covid-19, calling into question claims from the state’s premier, Daniel Andrews, and health minister, Jenny Mikakos, that most workers were infected in the community.
An email sent to health workers by the chief medical officer of Safer Care Victoria, Prof Andrew Wilson, says as of 8 August 1,835 healthcare workers had been infected with the virus. The figure includes healthcare workers with active infections and those who have recovered from the virus. Of those infected, 50 were confirmed to have acquired the virus in a healthcare setting, Wilson said, including 12 doctors, 29 nurses and nine other health practitioners such as paramedics and allied health workers:
Three people at Auckland workplace test positive
In Auckland, New Zealand, the workplace of a man infected with Covid-19 has confirmed that three other workers at the cool store in Mt Wellington have now tested positive for the virus.
Americold managing director Richard Winnall told the New Zealand Herald: “It’s not good. There’s a lot of people awaiting test results, they’ve got families. There’s a lot of anxiety and concern.”
This brings the confirmed number of infections to 8, one of whom is a schoolboy from Mt Albert Grammer, New Zealand’s second-largest school and host to 3000 pupils, now all in lockdown.
Prime minister Jacinda Ardern is due to give her daily press conference in 40 minutes, but as cases continue to spread it is looking unlikely Auckland’s level 3 lockdown will end at midnight tomorrow.
The source of the original infections has still not been found.
Germany adds Bucharest to virus-risk list
Germany on Wednesday added Bucharest and several other areas of Romania to a list of places considered a high risk for coronavirus infections, forcing a German minister to cancel a work trip to the Romanian capital, AFP reports.
In its latest travel advice, the German foreign ministry warned against travel to Bucharest and 10 other areas in Romania - including Brasov, Gorj, Prahova and Vrancea - after already putting seven other counties on its high-risk list last week.
This means that travellers entering Germany after visiting these sites must take a compulsory coronavirus test and go into quarantine if it comes back positive.
German Labour Minister Hubertus Heil announced late Wednesday that he was cancelling Thursday’s planned visit to Bucharest, where he was due to meet Romanian Prime Minister Ludovic Orban, Foreign Minister Bogdan Aurescu and Labour Minister Violeta Alexandru.
Heil said it was “with great regret” that he had to postpone the trip at short notice but that he would talk to his Romanian counterpart by video link instead.
The visit was meant to discuss the plight of Romanians working on farms and in slaughterhouses in Germany, after a spate of coronavirus clusters threw a spotlight on their often dire working conditions.
The latest travel warning comes amid growing concern in Germany about an upsurge in coronavirus infections at home and across Europe, partly blamed on summer travel.
Germany on Wednesday recorded its highest daily increase of new infections since early May, adding 1,226 new cases.
Health Minister Jens Spahn called the jump in numbers “worrying” and urged Germans to be “very alert” in the fight against the pandemic.
Overall, Germany has recorded a total of 218,519 coronavirus cases and 9,207 deaths.
Sales at pub, restaurant and bar chains halved in July compared to last summer, as almost two-thirds of restaurants remained closed and consumer wariness sparked a surge in home deliveries.
Sales in July were down 50.4% year-on-year, with restaurants worse hit than pubs and London suffering more than the rest of the UK.
Bar sales fell 63%, restaurants 60% and pubs 45%, according to the Coffer Peach business tracker, which collates figures from 49 group-owned and managed companies that run more than 7,500 sites:
How to make a face mask using a piece of fabric and two elastic bands:
Struggling to find a face mask?
— Dr Michelle Dickinson (@medickinson) August 12, 2020
Don’t panic, just grab 2 hair ties/elastic bands, a cotton hankerchief/bandanna and you can make one in under 10 seconds! pic.twitter.com/3QR8dU9KBu
Actors who had objected to Walt Disney Co’s proposed coronavirus safeguards at the Walt Disney World theme park have reached an agreement to return to work, according to a union statement on Wednesday.
Actors’ Equity Association said Disney had committed to providing Covid-19 tests at the Florida theme park for its members, who cannot wear protective masks while performing.
Jordan to close Syria border over virus cases at crossing
Jordan will close its border with Syria for a week starting Thursday, after staff at their only open land crossing tested positive for the novel coronavirus, state media said.
AFP reports that Jordan has seen a drop in virus cases, with new infections recorded mainly among travellers arriving from abroad, but it registered 25 cases of the Covid-19 illness in the past two days, mostly at the Jaber crossing with its war-torn northern neighbour.
Interior Minister Salamah Hammad al-Sahaim decided Wednesday “to close the Jaber border post for a week starting from Thursday morning,” the official Petra news agency reported.
He ordered a “review of all procedures” at the country’s other land borders to prevent them being the source of new outbreaks.
Jordan has registered a total of 1,303 coronavirus infections, including 11 deaths.
Syria has confirmed over 1,000 cases in government-held areas, but the health ministry has admitted it lacks the “capacity... to carry out widespread testing in the provinces”.
Here is a useful explainer about how genome sequencing is used to trace the source of coronavirus cases, from a microbiologist at the University of Auckland:
Latest from @XTOTL and me on genome sequencing and how that can help understand how cases of #COVID__19 are related. More details in the accompanying @TheSpinoffTV piece: https://t.co/ezSqfVmpaH #COVID19nz pic.twitter.com/AtC2Oas9DI
— Dr Siouxsie Wiles (@SiouxsieW) August 12, 2020
Covid-19 may have been circulating in New Zealand for weeks, as fresh case emerges
Covid-19 may have been circulating in the community for weeks, New Zealand’s top health official has said, as a potential ninth new case emerged overnight.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the director-general of health, said a new case had been identified at the country’s second-largest school, Mt Albert Grammar, which hosts 3,000 students.
Bloomfield said isolation and testing of any close or casual contacts to positive cases was the primary response to the outbreak, as was tracing the original source.
Genome sequencing was “well underway” on the original four cases, to trace the train of transmission, but he agreed “it was possible” the virus has been circulating in the community for weeks, as some experts are now suggesting.
“We will find the source, I have no doubt about that.” Bloomfield said told Radio NZ.
France sees most new daily virus cases since May
More than 2,500 new coronavirus cases were registered in France in 24 hours in the sharpest increase since May, government data showed on Wednesday, as officials said indicators were “clearly worsening”, AFP reports.
Of 600,000 tests over the past week, more than 11,600 were positive, the health ministry’s DGS public health division said.
At 2.2 percent, the weekly rate of positives was up from 1.6 percent the week before, confirming “increased viral circulation”, it added.
“Indicators used for tracking the epidemic on French territory have clearly worsened in recent days,” the DGS said.
With August traditionally a month when many French people take weeks of summer holiday, “it’s imperative that we keep up our efforts to avoid the epidemic picking up again, individually and collectively, everywhere and at all times”, the DGS said.
Health officials identified 18 new virus clusters in the past 24 hours, bringing the total to 896 nationwide.
But the number of patients in intensive care dropped slightly to 379, a level relatively steady since late July.
Almost 30,400 people have died of coronavirus in France since the epidemic began, the third-heaviest toll in Europe after Britain and Italy.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.
I’ll be bringing you the latest news from around the world for the next few hours. Please do get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email on helen.sullivan@theguardian.com – tips, questions, feedback and news from your part of the world are all welcome.
Russia said on Wednesday the first batch of its Sputnik V Covid-19 vaccine would be ready within two weeks and rejected safety concerns over its rapid approval as ‘groundless’.
The vaccine has not yet completed its final trials. Only about 10% of clinical trials are successful and some scientists fear Moscow may be putting national prestige before safety.
Meanwhile in New Zealand, Covid-19 may have been circulating in the community for weeks, New Zealand’s top health official has said, as a potential ninth new case emerged overnight.
Dr Ashley Bloomfield, the director-general of health, said a new case had been identified at the country’s second-largest school, Mt Albert Grammar, which hosts 3,000 students.
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
- There are more than 20,450,00 known coronavirus cases worldwide, and 745,530 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
- Peru extends lockdowns following surge in coronavirus cases. The Peruvian president Martín Vizcarra has banned family gatherings and extended lockdowns to five more regions of the country amid a fresh surge in cases of coronavirus.Fifteen of Peru’s 25 regions were already covered by rolling lockdowns.
- Italy has ordered travellers arriving from Croatia, Greece, Malta and Spain to be tested for Covid-19 and added Colombia to a list of countries under a complete travel ban amid growing concern over new infections. With the annual summer holiday reaching its peak, health services are bracing for a return of travellers from destinations where social distancing, face masks and other protective measures appear to have been widely ignored.
- France reported 2,524 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, a new post-lockdown daily record. Despite the rise in infections, the number of people in hospital with Covid-19 continued to fall and was down by 121 to 4,891, the first time it fell below 5,000 since 19 March.
- Turkey is to delay the reopening of schools by almost a month. Students will return to classrooms in Turkey in late September, nearly a month after the start of the new academic year, the government announced, as daily coronavirus cases remain above 1,000. It will be a gradual transition, starting with online learning before transitioning to in-person education.
- Chile will lift one of the world’s longest lockdowns on Monday. The capital Santiago’s central business district and adjoining Central Station will move to a “transitional” stage under a “Step by Step” reopening. The mayor said citizens should remain indoors whenever possible, wear masks in public and wash their hands. People may leave their homes on weekdays without the previously required police permissions, and meet in small groups, while businesses can gradually reopen.
Updated
