We’re closing this blog now. But you can follow all the day’s developments at our new live blog here:
We will close this live blog now, and take up our coverage on a new live blog shortly. My many thanks all for your company and correspondence. Be well.
A summary of developments today.
- Covid-19 cases pass 10.6 million across the globe. There are now 10,644,064 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 514,527 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
- Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
- Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
- Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
- Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
- California closed down indoor bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities. The measures, which will be in place for three weeks, follow a surge in infections.
- Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
- The World Health Organisation warns the Middle East is at a “critical threshold” with more than a million cases recorded across 22 countries.
- West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
- NZ’s health minister, David Clark, has resigned, after a series of political missteps, and repeated breaches of his own government’s lockdown rules.
New Zealand’s health minister has resigned
Dr David Clark, NZ’s health minister since 2017, has made a series of political and and public blunders, even as his country has weathered the Covid-19 crisis remarkably well.
First, during the height of New Zealand’s strict lockdodown regime, he was forced to apologise for breaching lockdown rules by going for a mountain bike ride. Three days later, he again apologised, this time to the prime minister, for taking a 20-kilometre drive to go for a beach walk.
Last week, he face public opprobrium for blaming border quarantine errors at NZ’s director of health Ashley Bloomfield, while Dr Bloomfield was standing nearby.
“I’ve made the call it is best for me to stand aside,” Clark said, saying he had become a distraction for the government in its effort to combat Covid-19.
“It has been a privilege to serve in this role.”
New Zealand has recorded only 1528 cases of Covid-19, with 22 deaths.
The response here is very, very Australian.
Some context: Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, has seen a spike in community transmission cases (albeit from a very low base) so 10 suburbs across the city have been forced back into lockdown. But the measure has had some perverse outcomes, including in Summerhill Road, where one side of the street is locked down, the other is not.
As our interlocutor here says: “what a stitch-up”.
“What a bloody stitch-up!” says Cal, when he learns his neighbours across the street won’t be forced to stay at home.
— Luke Henriques-Gomes (@lukehgomes) July 1, 2020
“Mate, the other side is Footscray, they aren’t locked down!” he calls out to his roommates. by @MatildaBoseley https://t.co/14esdXaHjK
Good morning, day, or evening, wherever this coverage finds you. Ben Doherty here in Sydney. My many thanks to my colleagues Kevin Rawlinson et al for their stewardship thus far.
The Middle East has recorded a million cases of Covid-19, and is at a “critical threshold”, the World Health Organisation has warned.
The global health body confirmed on Sunday there were more than one million confirmed cases of the Covid-19 disease across the 22 countries that the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region covers, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.
Over 80% of all deaths in the region were reported in five countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.
“We are at a critical threshold in our region,” the WHO’s Middle East head, Ahmed al-Mandhari, said in an online press conference.
Mandhari said it was a “concerning milestone”.
“The number of cases reported in June alone is higher than the total number of cases reported during the four months following the first reported case in the region on 29 January,” he said.
He attributed the rise in cases to increased testing, but also to the lifting in recent weeks of restrictions put in place to combat the virus’ spread.
Colombia’s confirmed number of infections has tipped across the 100,000 case threshold, as the country’s quarantine measures roll on and intensive care units fill.
They now number 102,009, the health ministry said, 54,941 of which are active. Some 3,470 people have died. Wednesday also marked the highest-ever daily increase in confirmed cases with an uptick of 4,163.
Health experts are warning that young people of color face a growing threat from the coronavirus pandemic as young Americans drive record-setting coronavirus outbreaks in several US states.
Data from the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown the majority of coronavirus hospitalizations among Black and Latino Americans are of those under the age of 50. Dr Mary T Bassett, te director of the Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and a former health commissioner for New York City’s health department, said:
The risk is multifold because young people are more often susceptible to the same conditions that increase the risk of exposure, including working on the frontline.
In the UK, the British Medical Association has criticised the government over reports that millions of items of personal protective equipment (PPE) were found to be faulty.
The country’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has issued safety warnings, notices for disposal and distribution stoppages for some 85m masks and respirators, according to an investigation by Channel 4 News.
The broadcaster reports that the masks and respirators were stored in the government’s pandemic stockpile and have been distributed to hospitals, care homes and GP surgeries since March.
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) Council, said it was a “dereliction of duty” if healthcare workers had been supplied with faulty PPE during the epidemic.
These reports, if true, are nothing short of a national scandal. If doctors and health and care workers have been supplied with, and worn, faulty, re-dated masks, this is clearly a dereliction of duty to ensure the safety of NHS staff and patients.
Wearing substandard PPE places doctors at risk of becoming infected and also spreading the illness to patients.
We know that doctors and healthcare staff have become infected and died from this virus and therefore nothing short of 100% fit for purpose PPE should have been supplied from the outset.
A Department for Health and Social Care spokeswoman told the broadcaster:
The quality of PPE released to the frontline is critically important to us. Rigorous checks were made to ensure products were safe before being distributed to the frontline and all products purchased for the stockpile in 2009 met the essential safety requirements required by law.
As soon as we are alerted to any potential issues we take immediate action to ensure the safety of our health and care staff, and work to resolve those issues as quickly as possible.
Nigeria will resume domestic flights from 8 July, the government has said, as Africa’s most populous country relaxes restrictions despite mounting cases and deaths.
The airports for the capital Abuja and Lagos will open that day, while a handful of others are set to open three days later and the rest after another four days, the government said on its official Twitter account.
No date was given for the resumption of international flights.
Nigeria had confirmed more than 25,000 cases and almost 600 deaths as of Wednesday, with little sign of the outbreak slowing. Officials have expressed their concern that the outbreak there might become much worse.
Yet the government is keenly aware of the economic toll, which has crushed the price of oil, on which Nigeria depends. Officials have steadily eased measures aimed at curbing the outbreak, believing the economic damage of a stringent lockdown could be worse than the harm done by the pandemic.
Crucial data that could help prevent fresh local waves of coronavirus is being withheld from some of the parts of England most in danger of further lockdowns, Robert Booth, Dan Sabbagh, Heather Stewart and Ashley Kirk write.
Council leaders have told the Guardian they are either not getting test results needed to prevent new outbreaks, or the results were incomplete and without sufficient detail to allow them to quell local surges in infection.
The complaints come as Labour accuse the UK prime minister Boris Johnson of presiding over a “lost week” that has let the virus spread, threatening fresh lockdowns as physical distancing restrictions are loosened this weekend. The government hit back, claiming councils had the information they needed to keep the virus at bay.
Summary
Here’s a summary of the latest news:
- Covid-19 cases pass 10.5 million across the globe. There are now 10,501,482 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 511,909 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
- Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
- Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
- Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
- Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
- California closed down indoor bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities. The measures, which will be in place for three weeks, follow a surge in infections.
- Ryanair pilots agree to 20% pay cut in attempt to limit job losses. The pilots’ union Balpa announced 96% of its Ryanair members had voted to accept the temporary pay cut as part of efforts to avoid up to 3,000 job cuts at Europe’s biggest budget airline.
- Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
- West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
Israel’s parliament has voted to allow the country’s domestic intelligence agency to track the cellphones of coronavirus carriers for the next three weeks amid a resurgence in new cases, Reuters reports.
The Shin Bet surveillance technology has been used on and off to track carriers since March, when the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet circumvented parliament and approved the program through emergency regulations as cases first spiked.
Those emergency measures drew challenges from privacy watchdog groups and the supreme court cited worries over dangers to individual liberty in demanding Netanyahu’s government regulate the surveillance through legislation.
The new law allows the Shin Bet to access carriers’ phone location data for 14 days before they were diagnosed. That data is used to identify anyone they came into contact with, which proponents say is crucial to identify new cases.
Indoor activities at bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities will be banned in most of the US state of California for at least three weeks as infections surge, its governor Gavin Newsom has announced.
The UN Security Council has finally backed the UN chief Antonio Guterres’ 23 March call for a global truce amid the pandemic, adopting a resolution after months of talks to win a compromise between the United States and China, Reuters reports.
The resolution, drafted by France and Tunisia, calls for “all parties to armed conflicts to engage immediately in a durable humanitarian pause for at least 90 consecutive days” to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid.
Negotiations were stymied by a standoff between China and the US over whether to urge support for the World Health Organization (WHO). The latter country did not want a reference to the global health body, while the former did.
The US president Donald Trump said in May that Washington would quit the Geneva-based agency over its handling of the pandemic, accusing it of being “China-centric” and promoting China’s “disinformation”. The WHO denies the claims.
The resolution does not mention the WHO explicitly, but does reference a UN General Assembly resolution that does. Richard Gowan, International Crisis Group UN director, said:
We have really seen the body at its worst. This is a dysfunctional security council.
The pandemic is exacerbating inequality throughout the world by hitting hardest those without a social safety net in developing countries while central bank asset purchases in advanced countries benefit the richest, the World Bank president David Malpass has said.
During a webcast event hosted by the Council of the Americas, he warned of a “catastrophe” for the developing world that will bring long-term damage and global economic output would not recover to its pre-pandemic level for years.
The US has suffered 560 more deaths and registered another 43,644 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said, taking the respective totals to 127,299 and 2,624,873.
Summary
- Covid-19 cases pass 10.5 million across the globe. There are now 10,501,482 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 511,909 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
- Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
- Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
- Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
- Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
- Ryanair pilots agree to 20% pay cut in attempt to limit job losses. The pilots’ union Balpa announced 96% of its Ryanair members had voted to accept the temporary pay cut as part of efforts to avoid up to 3,000 job cuts at Europe’s biggest budget airline.
- Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
-
West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
Alitalia has resumed international flights from Milan as Italy gradually reopens its airports to foreign travellers and scraps restrictions imposed to contain the outbreak.
The carrier, which is in the process of being nationalised after 11 years of troubled private management, will fly from Milan Malpensa airport to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and London.
France has suffered 18 more deaths, taking its overall total to 29,861, its health department has said. That figure is in line with the daily average of 18 seen over the last week.
In May, France counted 143 additional deaths every day on average. This decrease has allowed the government to gradually reopen businesses, restaurants and some schools since 11 May.
Brazil death toll passes 60,000
Brazil has just passed yet another grim Covid-19 milestone with confirmation that more than 60,000 lives have been lost since mid-March.
On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
The number of confirmed infections rose to 1.42 million after 18,428 new cases were reported.
That places Brazil behind only the US in terms of both the total number of deaths and cases.
There was no immediate comment from Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has faced domestic and international condemnation for his handling of the crisis.
Updated
Egypt restarted international flights and reopened major tourist attractions including the Great Pyramids of Giza on Wednesday after over three months of closure due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The country closed its airports to scheduled international flights and shut famous historical sites in mid-March as the government looked to curb the spread of the virus.
That brought the tourist industry, which the government says accounts for 5% of economic output but which analysts say may account for as much as 15% if jobs and investment indirectly related to the industry are included, to a virtual halt.
The health ministry has registered 68,311 cases of the coronavirus and 2,953 deaths.
West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar
The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
“Starting from Friday morning, all governorates of the West Bank... will be closed for a period of five days,” government spokesman Ibrahim Melhem said, adding that pharmacies, bakeries and supermarkets were exempt.
The latest data from the Palestinian ministry of health said that as of Wednesday morning, a total of 2,636 people had tested positive for Covid-10, compared with just 1,256 a week ago.
Last week, after the easing of a previous coronavirus lockdown in late May, Palestinian health minister Mai al-Kaila said the territory had entered a second wave of infections “more dangerous than the first”.
Most infections were traceable to Palestinians working in Israel or Arab Israeli visitors to the West Bank, Kaila said.
There have been seven deaths from the virus in the territory.
Israel has also recorded a surge, with 25,547 confirmed cases on Wednesday morning, up around 15% from a week earlier.
The Palestinian Authority imposed a full West Bank lockdown after the first coronavirus cases were identified on 5 March, lifting it at the end of May.
French MPs have voted to grant a tax credit to anyone taking out a new subscription to a current affairs newspaper or magazine after the government argued that the sector was “suffering enormously” from the coronavirus crisis.
Deputies voted to allow a one-off deduction of up to €50 (£45) to households subscribing for the first time, and for at least 12 months, to a newspaper, magazine or online news service “providing news of a general or political character”.
News publishers around the world have been hit hard by the crisis, hindered from printing, distributing or selling paper copies and devastated by a collapse in advertising revenues while obliged to continue paying fixed costs such as office rents and staffing. US newspapers are said to be facing an “extinction-level” crisis.
Several countries are looking at ways to support their ailing news sectors, particularly local press. Canada, for example, is considering raising the tax credit on digital news subscriptions from 15% to 50% in an effort to encourage more people to support media outlets.
France’s state secretary for economic affairs, Agnès Pannier-Runacher, said the measure reflected “an undertaking by the president to support the press, which is suffering enormously and not necessarily benefiting from all sorts of aid” available to other sectors of the economy.
Doctors treating coronavirus patients in Sierra Leone will go on strike within 24 hours after the government failed to pay promised allowances, their union said on Wednesday.
The Sierra Leone Medical and Dental Association (SLMDA) said in a statement the strike would continue until the allowances are paid in full, without specifying how much the doctors are owed.
“That could be in five hours or five months. But we won’t settle for anything less than the full backlog of weekly payments for the last three months,” Samba Jalloh, SLMDA’s secretary general, told Reuters.
Doctors treating patients for conditions other than Covid-19 will continue to show up to work, it said.
A spokesman for the Sierra Leone’s coronavirus response team had previously told Reuters that the government was carrying out an audit of health workers to verify those that are directly involved in the Covid-19 response.
The union also complained that a memorandum of understanding between the government and doctors working in Covid-19 isolation and treatment centres expired on Tuesday and has not been renewed.
Jalloh said:
They’ve continuously said that these payments would come once they verified our ranks, but no progress was ever made. But we never breached our part of the contract, despite few PPEs (personal protective equipment), medicine shortages and other issues.
Sierra Leone has recorded 1,462 cases of the virus, including 60 deaths, far fewer than many other West African countries despite its fragile health infrastructure.
The association said two doctors have died of Covid-19 related causes since the outbreak, while more than 100 health workers have also been infected.
Health workers in Sierra Leone went on strike several times during the 2014-2016 Ebola outbreak, which killed nearly 4,000 people in the country including around 250 medical workers.
The World Health Organization has warned the Middle East faces a “critical threshold” amid a relaxation of coronavirus measures, following a surge in cases in the region.
The global health body confirmed on Sunday there were more than one million cases of Covid-19 across the 22 countries that the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region covers, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.
Over 80% of all deaths in the region were reported in five countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, according to the WHO.
The WHO’s Middle East head, Ahmed al-Mandhari, said it was a “concerning milestone”, adding: “We are at a critical threshold in our region.”
The number of cases reported in June alone is higher than the total number of cases reported during the four months following the first reported case in the region on 29 January.
He attributed the rise in cases to increased testing, but also to the lifting in recent weeks of restrictions put in place to combat the virus’ spread.
He urged individuals to be “cautious and vigilant” as lockdowns and curfews were eased, and to follow protocols recommended by health authorities.
“Easing of lockdowns does not mean easing of the response or easing of social responsibilities,” he said, adding there was a risk the number of cases will rise as public spaces reopen “even in countries where the situation now seems to be stabilising”.
Textile factories that operated normally at the height of the coronavirus pandemic could be responsible for a fresh lockdown in Leicester, central England, a report has claimed.
The city on Tuesday became the first in the country to see localised two-week restrictions imposed because of a spike in cases, just days before a planned easing of restrictions.
Labour Behind the Label, which campaigns for the rights of textile workers, claimed in a report that some factories in Leicester operated at full capacity throughout the crisis.
It added it was “inconceivable” they would have been able to do so and still follow social distancing rules and proper Covid-19 protection measures.
The report alleged that textile workers were pressured into working, in one case when a staff member had tested positive for the virus.
Furlough wage payments from the government were in some instances kept by bosses rather than passed on to workers, it added.
“Allegations of abuse at many Leicester companies have been reported for years now,” said Labour Behind the Label’s Dominique Muller.
A parliamentary report last year suggested there are as many 1,000 garment factories operating in the English east Midlands city, which has one of the Britain’s most diverse populations.
Labour Behind The Label accused major retail brands, including Boohoo, which it said accounted for 75% of clothing production in the city, of doing little to monitor conditions at factories.
Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week: WHO
The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization has said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
“For the past week, the number of the new cases has exceeded 160,000 on every single day,” WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual briefing.
Sixty percent of all cases so far have been reported just in the past month.
With over 511,000 deaths and more than 10.5 million known infections worldwide, the coronavirus pandemic is “not even close to being over”, the WHO warned earlier this week.
Tedros reiterated that taking a “comprehensive approach” was the best way to rein in the virus.
Countries that have implemented a wide range of measures, including contact tracing, isolation, physical distancing and mask wearing “have suppressed transmission and saved lives”, he said.
The UN health agency was therefore very concerned, he said, to see that a number of countries “have not used all the tools at their disposal and have taken a fragmented approach.
“These countries face a long, hard road ahead,” he said.
He stressed that while the pandemic posed a scientific challenge, “it’s also a test of character”.
Iraq’s official coronavirus death toll has surpassed 2,000, as the war-ravaged country’s crippled healthcare system struggles to cope.
Health authorities announced there were now 51,524 cases of the Covid-19 disease in the country and that 2,050 people had died of the virus, while 26,267 people had recovered.
Iraq, which has recorded cases in all of its 18 provinces but mainly in Baghdad - a city of 10 million people - said it has carried out 556,000 tests since March.
But due to decades of chronic shortages of doctors, medicines and hospital beds, the country has relied heavily on aid from abroad to continue testing its population.
According to the World Health Organization, there are 14 hospital beds per 10,000 inhabitants in Iraq - compared to 60 in France, for example - and the oil-rich country devotes just 1.8% of its budget to health.
Hospitals across the country have been overwhelmed over recent weeks by a jump in cases and deaths, following months of the virus spreading relatively slowly.
Doctors in coronavirus wards have complained of a lack of personal protective equipment and say they have been made to keep working even if they showed symptoms of infection.
Hundreds of Covid-19 cases have been recorded in their ranks.
Despite the rise in infections, authorities are refusing to reimpose a full lockdown in an effort to revive the economy.
Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response but cautious on timeframe
A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
Speaking at a parliamentary hearing, Sarah Gilbert, professor of vaccinology at the university, said 8,000 volunteers had been enrolled for Phase III of its trial into the vaccine, AZD1222, which was licensed to AstraZeneca. She said:
We’re very happy that we’re seeing the right sort of immune response that will give protection, and not the wrong sort.
The project has started Phase III of the human trials to assess how the vaccine works in a large number of people over the age of 18.
The race is on to develop a working Covid-19 vaccine, with fears that the pandemic could re-intensify towards the end of the year, in the northern hemisphere’s winter season.
Kate Bingham, chair of the UK Government Vaccine Taskforce, said that, excluding the Oxford vaccine programme, she hoped there would be a breakthrough by early 2021.
Gilbert said she hoped that her Oxford vaccine would make progress earlier, but was not more specific as she said the timeline for when the vaccine might be ready depends on the results of the trial.
John Bell, regius professor of medicine at Oxford University, said that Britain should prepare for not having a Covid-19 vaccine for the winter and encourage people to get their flu vaccinations to avoid “pandemonium” in hospitals.
This whole epidemic has relied too heavily on assumptions that have turned out not to be true.
So my strong advice is to be prepared for the worst.
Americans’ anxieties over the spread of the coronavirus are at the highest in more than a month, a Reuters/Ipsos poll showed, as California recorded its biggest single-day spike in cases since the pandemic began.
With the US death toll at more than 127,000, by far the highest in the world, the 29-30 June poll found that 81% of American adults said they are “very” or “somewhat” concerned about the pandemic, the most since a similar poll conducted 11-12 May.
The centre of the US pandemic has moved from the northeast to the west and south, especially California, Texas, Florida and Arizona.
Bill de Blasio, the mayor of hard-hit New York City, said on Wednesday he was not going ahead with a plan to allow indoor restaurant dining from 6 July, citing the alarming situation elsewhere.
We see a lot of problems and we particularly see problems revolving around people going back to bars and restaurants indoors, and indoors is the problem more and more.
Public health officials believe the decision to reopen bars in many states was one of the main contributors to the sharp increases. Several states have since moved to re-close them.
Cases in California rose by 8,441 on Tuesday as the United States recorded it biggest one-day increase of nearly 48,000 new infections, a Reuters tally showed.
Concerns about the pandemic appear to be rising the most among members of president Donald Trump’s Republican Party, according to the Reuters/Ipsos poll.
Republicans have generally been less enthusiastic about imposing and maintaining restrictions to stop the spread of the virus such as sheltering at home or wearing face masks, turning the public safety measures into a partisan issue.
About seven in 10 Republicans said they were personally concerned about the virus’ spread, up from six in 10 Republicans in polls conducted over the past few weeks.
Trump officials have blamed the surge in cases on increased testing, but the rise in the percentage of people testing positive and in hospitalisations are not linked to more tests being conducted.
Three states with at least 500 total deaths - Arizona, Louisiana and Texas - have seen the rate of fatalities increase for two weeks or more. Deaths in Arizona rose 63% in the week ended 28 June, one of the largest increases in the country.
In parts of Texas and Arizona, hospital intensive care beds for Covid-19 patients are also in short supply.
With limited guidance from the White House, the pandemic fight has largely been left to local officials, and the pressure to re-open their economies has been enormous.
Millions have lost their jobs as the economy contracted sharply in the first quarter and is expected to crater in the second.
But when asked in the latest poll about the “most important factor” determining their vote in November, 27% of respondents said it was the candidate’s plan to help the nation recover from the coronavirus, compared with 21% who said it was the candidate’s plan to create jobs and boost the economy.
After months in self-isolation, he’s back. Vladimir Lenin, embalmed and entombed, has reopened to the Russian public, luring bold tourists back to Red Square and down a steep set of mausoleum stairs to his resting place for most of the last 96 years.
From early on Wednesday morning, a queue of dozens of people stretched around the mausoleum, past the Kremlin walls and up to the red-bricked historical museum. To see the preserved corpse of the former Soviet leader you must wear a mask, gloves, and pass a temperature check. Inside, visitors reported a pungent smell of cleaning solution, perhaps due to a recent sanitisation.
Coming after a three-month break due to the coronavirus pandemic, attendance was subdued. “I’ve never seen the queue so short,” said one young mother, who was taking her daughter and friends from out of town for the first time. It is joked of as a tourist trap. “Muscovites never come here without visitors [from out of town].”
The reopening is another sign that life is getting back to normal in Russia, if normal means displaying a leader who died in 1924 in a glass case to tourists.
The UK may find it hard to obtain stocks of remdesivir, one of two drugs shown to work in treating Covid-19, over the coming months, deputy chief medical officer Jonathan Van-Tam told the science and technology select committee of the House of Commons.
The UK had stocks it bought for clinical trials, which the NHS is currently still using, he said.
But asked whether it would be so easy to get more, following the deal done by president Trump to buy up almost all the stocks made by the manufacturer Gilead from July to September, Van Tam said it would not.
The deputy CMO side-stepped the politics, contrasting remdesivir with dexamethasone, the one drug shown to save lives, which is very easy to obtain because it is cheap and widely available all over the world. He said:
No - I don’t think it [remdesivir] will be as easy or straightforward to obtain as the measures we took for dexamethasone, by virtue of its scarcity and the fact that it is a new medicine with a relatively long manufacturing time.
But remdesivir would not be suitable for all patients, because it is an intravenous drug and cannot be used in the later stages of the disease, he said.
The drug has so far only been shown to shorten the course of the disease, so patients recover sooner. But Van Tam said it was possible remdesivir could also have an effect on survival.
The US government has secured 100% of the drug being made in July and 90% due to be produced in August and September.
The US has issued emergency use authorisation for Kroger’s at-home sample collection kit for Covid-19, according to a report by Reuters.
The kits will be available to frontline workers across its companies beginning this week, Kroger said, adding that it plans to expand availability to other companies in the coming weeks, with a goal of processing up to 60,000 tests per week by the end of July.
Kroger said the nasal swab sample needs to be performed under the supervision of a licensed healthcare professional through video chat and will be shipped overnight to a designated laboratory for processing.
Most results will be confirmed in less than 72 hours, the company said.
While self-sample collection helps reduce patient traffic at hospitals and minimise chances of infection for healthcare workers, experts have flagged concerns about whether patients can accurately collect samples on their own and ship them to labs.
The FDA in April authorised for emergency use the first Covid-19 diagnostic kit by LabCorp with at-home collection of nasal swab samples which are then sent to the company’s labs for testing.
Updated
The US has been criticised by health experts for buying up nearly the entire global supply of remdesivir, the only drug licensed so far to treat Covid-19.
AP reports:
Ohid Yaqub, a senior lecturer at the University of Sussex, called the move disappointing news.
It so clearly signals an unwillingness to cooperate with other countries and the chilling effect this has on international agreements about intellectual property rights, Yaqub said in a statement.
Dr. Peter Horby, who is running a large clinical trial testing several treatments for COVID-19, told the BBC that a stronger framework was needed to ensure fair prices and access to key medicines for people and nations around the world. He said that as an American company, Gilead was likely under certain political pressures locally.
The criticism follows Guardian health editor Sarah Boseley’s story that the US has bought up virtually all the stocks of remdesivir for the next three months. She writes:
Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.
“They’ve got access to most of the drug supply [of remdesivir], so there’s nothing for Europe,” said Dr Andrew Hill, senior visiting research fellow at Liverpool University.
Read more below
Updated
The UK’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 43,906 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus as of 5pm on Tuesday, up by 176 from 43,730 the day before
The UK’s government figures do not include all deaths involving Covid-19 across the UK, which are thought to have passed 54,000, PA Media reports.
The DHSC also said in the 24-hour period up to 9am on Wednesday, 226,398 tests were carried out or dispatched, with 829 positive results. Overall, a total of 9,662,051 tests have been carried out and 313,483 cases have been confirmed positive.
The figure for the number of people tested has been “temporarily paused to ensure consistent reporting” across all methods of testing.
Hello, I’m Aamna taking over the liveblog while Jessica has lunch. If you want to get in touch, you can email me (aamna.mohdin@theguardian.com) or tweet me (@aamnamohdin)
Ryanair pilots take pay cut to avoid job losses
Ryanair pilots have agreed to take a 20% pay cut as part of efforts to avoid up to 3,000 job cuts at Europe’s biggest budget airline.
The pilots’ union Balpa announced on Wednesday that 96% of its Ryanair members had voted to accept the temporary pay cut in order to “save jobs that were under threat” due to the collapse in demand for flights in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Brian Strutton, Balpa’s general secretary said:
This is a terrible time for aviation and for employees in all airlines. It was our members’ mandate for us to save as many jobs as possible. In the circumstances this is the right thing to do even if it means accepting difficult temporary reductions in pay.
The pilots agreed to the pay cut deal hours after Ryanair’s chief executive, Michael O’Leary, made public an ultimatum that a total of 3,000 job losses could only be avoided if all staff agreed to pay cuts.
Updated
Global cases pass 10.5 million
There are now 10,501,482 confirmed cases of the coronavirus worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker.
The virus has killed at least 511,909 people across 188 countries and regions, the data shows.
The tally likely only reflects a fraction of the actual number of infections, with many countries testing only symptomatic or the most serious cases.
The US continues to be the worst-hit country with 127,425 deaths from 2,636,538 cases.
After the US, the hardest-hit countries are Brazil with 59,594 deaths from 1,402,041 cases, the United Kingdom with 43,815 deaths from 314,162 cases, Italy with 34,767 deaths from 240,578 cases, and France with 29,846 deaths from 202,063 cases.
China has to date declared 84,813 cases, including 4,641 deaths.
Updated
Wearing a facemask on public transport will become compulsory in Switzerland, following a resurgence in Covid-19 cases in a country that had largely got the virus under control.
The landlocked country fully reopened its borders on 15 June and said the rise in cases was due to infected people entering the country, as it imposed 10-day quarantine measures on new arrivals from countries deemed to pose a risk.
The number of cases in Switzerland had been at a low and stable level for weeks but began to tick upwards in the second half of June as it lifted most of its remaining lockdown restrictions.
“Given the increasing use of public transport and the increase in cases since mid-June, the government decided to make wearing a mask mandatory on public transport,” the government said in a statement.
The rule will apply from Monday to people aged 12 and above.
Switzerland said on Wednesday that 31,768 people in total had tested positive for the coronavirus - up 137 in the last 24 hours, the biggest jump since April. Only 843 new cases were registered in the whole of June.
The Alpine nation, with a population 8.5 million, has registered 1,684 deaths due to the virus.
Updated
Luxury British department store Harrods said it plans to cut up to 672 jobs because of the coronavirus crisis, which kept its flagship branch in central London closed for nearly three months.
Harrods, which is owned by the Qatar Investment Authority (QIA), told staff it needed to shed up to 14% of its total workforce of 4,800.
Employees affected will primarily be in parts of the business that have been worst hit by the lockdown.
Chief executive Michael Ward warned it would take a drastic improvement in external conditions for Harrods’ business to recover and return to growth.
The necessary social distancing requirements to protect employees and customers is having a huge impact on our ability to trade, while the devastation in international travel has meant we have lost key customers coming to our store.
Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19
Global tourism revenues are expected to fall by up to $3.3tn due to Covid-19 restrictions, with the US standing to lose the most, according to a UN study published on Wednesday.
The Covid-19 and Tourism report released by The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is based on three scenarios for the industry, with lockdown measures lasting four months, eight months and 12 months.
In those scenarios, revenues would fall $1.17tn, $2.22tn and $3.3tn respectively or between 1.5-4.2% of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP).
The report did not say which scenario was most likely, although an UNCTAD official said the middle scenario “could be a realistic one”. The report said:
International tourism has been almost totally suspended, and domestic tourism curtailed by lockdown conditions imposed in many countries.
Although some destinations have started slowly to open up, many are afraid of international travel or cannot afford it due to the economic crisis.
The US incurs the highest losses in all three scenarios, with a $187bn drop in the one lasting just four months, followed by China with $105bn.
Thailand and France also stand to lose approximately $47bn each.
Small island states such as Jamaica stand to suffer big losses in proportion to their economies, facing an 11% fall in GDP or $1.68bn.
The US loss in the “pessimistic” scenario is $538bn, or 3% of GDP.
The UNCTAD report covers 65 individual countries and regions. It calls for governments to boost social protection for affected workers in badly-hit nations.
Some of the estimates are comparable to those in a previous UN report by its World Tourism Organization in May, which found that tourism numbers could fall by 60-80% compared with 66% in UNCTAD’s intermediate scenario.
Updated
The Italian head of the Red Cross has accused Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro of “underestimating” the coronavirus pandemic with “very, very sad” consequences.
Speaking to journalists in Geneva on Wednesday – with Brazil’s death toll poised to rise above 60,000 – Francesco Rocca said his organisation viewed what was happening in the South American country “with concern”.
“It is a very difficult situation … Unfortunately, Bolsonaro I think underestimated the consequences of the Covid-19 in his country and we are living the consequences,” he told the Brazilian journalist Jamil Chade. Rocca added:
It is very, very sad. It is the perfect example of when the economy is given priority over the lives of human beings.
Bolsonaro is facing domestic and international condemnation for what is widely seen as his reckless handling of a pandemic that has now killed 59,656 people, according to a coalition of Brazilian news groups keeping an independent tally.
On Tuesday, 1,271 deaths were reported, meaning Brazil’s total is likely to exceed 60,000 today. Only in the US have more deaths been recorded.
Despite this, Bolsonaro has urged the reopening of the economy, claiming the “side-effects” of shutdowns cannot be allowed to be more severe than Covid-19’s impact on public health.
A study released by one of Brazil’s top pollsters on Tuesday showed that nearly half of Brazilians disapproved of Bolsonaro’s reaction to the coronavirus, which he has dismissed as a “bit of a cold”. About 30% of the population continues to support him.
Rocca said political divisions had also contributed to the scale of Brazil’s crisis.
I think that one of the lessons learned of this pandemic is that politicians should learn to speak with one voice. Politicians should start to follow the advice coming from the scientific community.
Updated
The Kazakh government has proposed starting a second lockdown from 5 July and maintaining it for at least two weeks, president Kassym-Jomart Tokayev said, after a sharp rise in new cases.
Tokayev said on Twitter a special commission would review the plan on 2 July and then lay out its details.
Tokayev ordered his cabinet this week to urgently tighten the restrictions after the number of Covid-19 cases surged more than sevenfold following the lifting of the first lockdown in mid-May.
A dip in airline bookings in the second half of June give grounds for caution about the prospects for the industry in the coming months as Covid-19 cases start to spike again in certain countries, the chief economist of airline body IATA said.
Brian Pearce said that while June had on average been been better than the month before, the second half of the month had seen a drop in bookings, and that prolonged travel restrictions to the US or Latin America could hit its base case forecast for the year.
“There was a dip in bookings in the second half of June, as coronavirus cases picked up … This is causing us to be rather cautious about prospects in the next few months,” he said.
Updated
Scotland’s national bard Robert Burns wrote that the Highland welcome was such that he’d ask no more on entering heaven.
But with only 114 coronavirus deaths to date, residents of this vast area – which swiftly isolated in March – are equivocal about an influx of visitors as the Scottish tourism sector reopens on 15 July.
The homemade “tourists go home” signs that appeared at the start of lockdown to deter isolation tourists may have been removed, but Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, this week acknowledged she could not rule out quarantining or screening travellers from England if infection rates rise south of the border.
While tourism bosses warn of threatened cancellations, the Guardian has spoken to residents, businesses and community leaders across the Highlands, whose anxiety and ambivalence is palpable.
Germany takes over the European Union’s six-month presidency on Wednesday, with outgoing chancellor Angela Merkel staking her legacy on a massive economic recovery plan to help the bloc with the coronavirus fallout.
Merkel’s last major role on the international stage comes as the 27-member club faces its deepest recession since the second world war, triggered by a pandemic that has killed more than 500,000 people globally.
The crisis has galvanised Europe’s most powerful leader who, with just over a year left in her final term, has ditched her usual wait-and-see approach to call for “extraordinary measures” to weather the storm.
“Europe’s future is our future,” Merkel said on Monday as she stood beside French president Emmanuel Macron to push for a €750bn ($843bn) coronavirus recovery fund.
The proposed fund would controversially be financed through shared EU borrowing, which marks a stunning U-turn for Germany after years of opposition to debt pooling.
The EU’s rotating presidency is Merkel’s “last chance” to make her mark as one of Europe’s great leaders, Der Spiegel weekly wrote.
“For years the chancellor put off dealing with the chronic problems of the EU and the euro. Now, towards the end of her political career, she has the opportunity to make up for past mistakes,” Spiegel wrote.
There will be no shortage of challenges to tackle in the months ahead.
Post-Brexit negotiations, a more assertive China, rocky transatlantic ties, climate change and the conflict in Libya will all be jostling for attention, even if the pandemic promises to dominate the agenda.
Updated
Northern Ireland’s first minister called on her deputy to apologise for undermining coronavirus restrictions at the funeral of a member of her Sinn Féin party and ex-Irish Republican Army (IRA) prisoner that attracted large crowds.
The British region’s devolved executive, led by Sinn Féin and its rival Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), allowed up to 30 people at funerals from Monday, including some friends but only when no household or family members of the deceased were there.
Deputy first minister Michelle O’Neill of Sinn Féin, party president Mary Lou McDonald, former party leader Gerry Adams, and the party’s deputy in the Irish republic Pearse Doherty, were all at Tuesday’s funeral in Belfast for Bobby Storey.
Images from the funeral show Storey’s relatives present and large numbers of mourners on streets nearby.
First minister Arlene Foster told BBC Radio Ulster:
It is quite intolerable now that people think that there are some people to whom the law doesn’t apply and that indeed there are some politicians who are saying: ‘Do as I say but not as I do.’
She needs to apologise, she needs to recognise the wrong that has been done and also absolutely needs to make amends.
Northern Ireland’s power-sharing government was restored in January after a three-year standoff between Sinn Féin and the DUP that threatened part of a 1998 peace pact.
Doherty told Irish national broadcaster RTE that thousands lined the streets after the church service, but that the cortege was limited to 30 and others were urged to keep distance.
While the presence of crowds was “obviously of a concern”, Doherty added that he would not recommend anyone to self-isolate, just as he would not encourage people who went to the supermarket to quarantine.
Other parties, north and south of the Irish border, joined the criticism.
“Many families have endured burying a loved one alone, to help save lives. When those who make the rules, break the rules, it is more hurtful still,” tweeted Northern Ireland justice minister Naomi Long of the Alliance Party.
In Portugal’s capital city of Lisbon, the mayor’s office has put up posters amid an uptick in cases and reports of parties that have attracted as many as 1,000 revellers.
“You know who also never misses an illegal party? The virus,” the posters read.
Lisbon's mayor's office puts up posters saying "Do you know who never misses an illegal party? The virus" 📸CML pic.twitter.com/7YRfx8zhCA
— Catarina Demony (@CatarinaDemony) June 30, 2020
In June, the country of 10.3 million people recorded 9,441 confirmed cases, according to the health ministry – an average of 314 new cases a day.
Portugal’s per capita rate of new infections now ranks among the highest in Europe, second only to Sweden.
The government has responded by introducing restrictions in the Greater Lisbon area.
Starting today, in 19 of the 118 parishes in the Lisbon metropolitan area, residents have been ordered to stay in their homes, allowed out only for food or medicine or to travel to work, play sports or care for vulnerable family members.
Gatherings are limited to five people in these areas, compared with a 20-person limit in most of the country.
Initially hailed for its rapid response to the virus, the Portuguese government has pointed to widespread testing to explain the rise in new cases, with an average of 98,000 new tests carried out weekly.
The number of lives claimed by the virus remains relatively low in the country, with 1,576 deaths.
On Wednesday, António Costa, the prime minister of Portugal, and his Spanish counterpart, Pedro Sánchez, reopened the shared border to travellers, bringing an end to a closure that stretched more than three months.
“I can’t give you a hug,” Sánchez said apologetically as the mask-clad prime ministers greeted each other.
Updated
Dutch brothels, including Amsterdam’s red light district, reopened on Wednesday after a long coronavirus shutdown, with sex workers and clients having to observe new rules to prevent infection.
The Netherlands ordered all sex clubs to close in mid-March and had originally planned to keep them closed until September, but recently brought the date forward as Covid-19 cases dropped.
“I’m totally booked” for Wednesday, Foxxy, a sex worker and activist at the Prostitution Information Center in Amsterdam, told AFP using her professional pseudonym.
“I had a little party when I heard” [the announcement that sex work could restart], said Foxxy, who rents a room in a brothel outside the red light district.
Everybody is so relieved that we can go back to work again because a lot of sex workers didn’t get any benefits from the government. So it’s really nice to be making money again.
While less restrictive than other countries, the Netherlands’ “intelligent lockdown” emptied the red neon-lit, street-front windows from which many of Amsterdam’s sex workers normally beckon customers.
Now they are reopening but, as with Dutch hairdressers and masseurs which have already been allowed to resume operations, sex workers are encouraged to verify their clients do not have Covid-19 symptoms.
“Before I make an appointment, I have to check with the client if they’re feeling OK and if they don’t have any of the symptoms, or if any of their housemates has symptoms,” Foxxy said.
Updated
Lithuania has issued a new collector’s coin to mark the coronavirus crisis, bearing the inscription: “After darkness, I hope for light”.
The coin features rays of light illuminating the year 2020 while the perspective shadow of the date forms the international distress signal SOS.
Asta Kuniyoshi, deputy governor of Lithuania’s central bank, said the bank came up with the idea in March when the Baltic eurozone member imposed a lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus.
She told AFP:
At the height of the pandemic we witnessed solidarity between people. So the coin marks not only the lockdown period but also the universal human values of hope, unity and solidarity.
With this coin we also pay tribute to medics and all the other people who helped during the pandemic, from volunteers who assisted the elderly to teachers who taught kids online.
Thousands of silver €5 coins, as well coins in copper and nickel with a nominal value of €1.50, are now available online and in a number of shops across the country.
The bank minted 2,500 €5 coins and 30,000 of a €1.50 version.
The country of 2.8 million inhabitants has now eased most of the anti-virus restrictions imposed from mid-March.
Lithuania reported one new case of the coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the total number of confirmed cases to 1,818, including 78 deaths – much lower than in most other EU countries.
Updated
The Spanish government is working with Airbus to keep jobs in the country, prime minister Pedro Sanchez has said, a day after the aerospace giant announced it would cut 15,000 jobs as part of a global restructuring.
Speaking to journalists after the reopening of Spain’s border with Portugal, Sanchez highlighted the country’s role in the founding of Airbus and said he hoped to find solutions to retain some jobs.
Macy’s has reported a staggering $3.58bn loss for the coronavirus-hit quarter, as shutdowns resulted in the department store chain recording a $3bn impairment charge.
The pandemic has forced brick-and-mortar retailers to tap credit lines, lay off employees and suspend dividends and buybacks in a bid to stay afloat.
Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, said net sales for the first quarter ended 2 May, nearly halved to $3.02bn.
“While our stores are re-opened, we expect that the Covid-19 pandemic will continue to impact the country for the remainder of the year,” chief executive officer Jeff Gennette said in a statement.
On a per share basis, it reported a net loss of $11.53 in the first quarter ended 2 May, compared with a profit of 44 cents a year earlier.
Macy’s results comes as some of its peers, including J Crew, J.C. Penney and Neiman Marcus Group, filed for bankruptcy after failing to cope with market uncertainties and mounting debt.
Major sports events working to get back up and running after the coronavirus crisis are likely to have to do so without cancellation insurance for communicable diseases, as insurers remove cover or ramp up the cost.
Although the Wimbledon tennis championships will be covered by an existing pandemic policy after this week’s event was cancelled due to the coronavirus outbreak, its organisers say it will not be able to get similar cover next year.
“All the policies that we are seeing at this time have a complete exclusion for communicable disease,” said Warren Harper, Sports & Events Industry Practice Leader at insurance broker Marsh’s.
World Athletics also said that as far as it was aware, there were no longer insurance policies available for the coronavirus.
This reluctance to offer cover comes after Lloyd’s of London estimated that insurers worldwide will hand over $100bn in pay-outs this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, including for cancelled sports, music and industry events.
And insurers say they will need government help if they are to provide pandemic cover as sports groups try to plan future tournaments after much of the 2020 fixture list was cancelled.
Although only larger sporting competitions usually buy “communicable disease” cover, which comes as an add-on to a cancellation policy, they typically do so at least a year in advance, insurers and brokers said.
This means some tournaments taking place this year or even in 2021 could still be able to make claims.
Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19
Brazil’s government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic, it said in a decree late on Tuesday.
Foreigners with permanent residence in Brazil or working authorisation will be exempted from the decree, along with foreigners with Brazilian spouses or children.
Passengers in transit to other countries are also exempted, as long as they do not leave the airports.
The decree also exempts Venezuelan citizens arriving at the land border and allows foreigners involved in cargo transport.
Brazil has the second-highest number of cases and deaths due to Covid-19, second only to the US. According to the health ministry, Brazil has 1.4 million cases and 59,594 people have died.
Updated
Ryanair’s chief executive has told staff the airline can avoid many of its planned 3,500 job losses if they agree to pay cuts of up to 20%.
Michael O’Leary, who announced plans to axe 3,000-3,500 jobs in May, said that across-the-board pay cuts could be an alternative to job losses.
He told BBC News on Wednesday:
We’ve already announced about 3,500 job losses but we’re engaged in extensive negotiations with our pilots, our cabin crew and we’re asking them to all take pay cuts as an alternative to job losses.
We’re looking from 20% from the best paid captains, 5% from the lowest paid flight attendants and we think if we can negotiate those pay cuts by agreement, we can avoid most but not all job losses.
Europe’s biggest budget airline previously said it had cut more than 250 staff from its office around Europe and was looking at up to 3,000 cuts among pilot and cabin crew because of the coronavirus crisis.
Updated
Volkswagen has said it will not build a controversial new factory in Turkey because of the coronavirus pandemic, scrapping plans for the site previously on hold because of Ankara’s offensive in north-eastern Syria.
The German group had last year postponed a decision on whether to go ahead with the factory because of Turkey’s incursion in its wartorn neighbour.
But in the end it was the pandemic that killed off plans for the plant, which would have employed 4,000 people.
Confirming the decision, VW spokesman Christoph Ludewig told AFP: “The background is that the coronavirus pandemic has had an impact on car markets and the situation is a different one from pre-corona.”
Last November, VW boss Herbert Diess had defended the decision to put the factory on ice over Ankara’s Syrian incursion, saying that planning for a factory amid the military tensions would be “completely irresponsible”.
The VW executive then said the company would not consider an alternative factory site but instead look at rearranging production within its existing network if it decided against building the plant in Turkey.
Updated
No live fireworks, no star-studded concert on Parliament Hill, and no crowds of tourists: Canada’s official birthday celebrations on Wednesday for the first time ever will be completely online.
Ottawa is usually home to the country’s largest Canada Day party, with tens of thousands of foreign and domestic tourists descending on the capital to celebrate with live music and family fun, capped off with a dazzling fireworks show.
But in-person festivities have been cancelled amid Covid-19 restrictions, with organisers instead offering an online show featuring Canadian pop stars including Alanis Morissette and Avril Lavigne, along with other artists.
The night will end with Canadians holding their mobile devices to the sky to watch a virtual fireworks show.
Bike paths and beaches have opened in many regions, and Canadians are encouraged to have barbecues within their social bubbles and even a drink on a restaurant patio, while being mindful of social distancing guidelines, said Jantine Van Kregten, director of communications for Tourism Ottawa.
“Everybody wants to do this in a safe way, so we can get back to a more regular way of life sooner rather than later,” she said.
Cities across the country are adding their own flair to online Canada Day, from social media pancake breakfasts and live-stream magic shows to virtual dog parades and fun runs.
But Canada Day is facing push back from Indigenous groups, which have organised #CancelCanadaDay marches across the country and will host an online counter-celebration on Wednesday featuring indigenous artists and activists.
“We will not celebrate stolen Indigenous land and stolen Indigenous lives,” organisers wrote on the Idle No More website.
Summary
- Cases worldwide are nearing 10.5m. There have been 10,498,090 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide and 511,686 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. The true number of infections is likely to be much higher, however, given the vast number of unrecorded and asymptomatic cases.
- New Covid-19 cases in California rose by 8,441 on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, the highest single-day increase since the start of the pandemic. The US as a whole had its biggest one-day spike in new infections on Tuesday with more than 47,000 cases.
- The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of remdesivir, one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world. Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The governments of Australia and Germany have since said that they have secured sufficient supplies of the drug.
- The French education minister, Jean-Louis Blanquer, has said he expects all the country’s schools to return as normal at the start of the new academic year in September. “Today, our main outlook is quite optimistic. We think that the health conditions will allow us to have a normal return to classes,” Blanquer told French radio, RTL.
- The prime ministers of Spain and Portugal participated in a ceremony to officially reopen their joint border to all travellers after a three-month closure. Elsewhere, tourists were welcomed back to Greece, Malta and Croatia on Wednesday. The Greek prime minister said his country should prepare for a “very difficult” tourist season, with revenues from tourism predicted to decline from €18.1bn to €5bn this year.
- Turkey has urged the EU to correct the “mistake” of excluding it from the bloc’s list of safe coronavirus travel partners, which includes Australia and Morocco but excludes Russia, Turkey and the US. “The lack of Turkey’s presence on the list is disappointing,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement. “We expect this mistake to be corrected as soon as possible.”
- Sinn Féin is facing accusations of imperilling Northern Ireland’s fight against Covid-19 after its leaders allegedly breached guidelines and regulations by leading hundreds of mourners at the funeral of an IRA commander. Mary Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin’s respective current and former leader, and Michelle O’Neill, a deputy leader who is also Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, attended the send-off for Bobby Storey, a veteran republican and IRA figure. The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said it will review footage of the funeral in Belfast on Tuesday that drew more than a thousand people.
- Burundi’s new president, Évariste Ndayishimiye, has declared the coronavirus the country’s “biggest enemy”, in a major about-turn for a nation which has largely ignored the dangers of the virus. “From tomorrow, I declare the Covid-19 pandemic the biggest enemy of Burundians, because it is clear it is becoming their biggest concern,” he said on Tuesday evening. “We firmly commit ourselves to fight this pandemic.”
- Deaths in Brazil, the second-worst affected country after the US, are nearing 60,000. Brazil has suffered 1,280 more deaths, bringing the country’s confirmed death toll to 59,594, according to health ministry data.The total number of confirmed cases rose by 33,846 to reach 1,402,041, the worst outbreak in the world outside the US.
- Australia locked down 300,000 in Victoria state suburbs. Authorities will lock down around 300,000 people in suburbs north of Melbourne for a month from late on Wednesday to contain the risk of infection after two weeks of double-digit rises in new coronavirus cases in Australia’s second most populous state.
- The UN warned jobs figures are worse than feared. The pandemic has taken a much heavier toll on jobs than previously feared, the UN says, warning the situation in the Americas is particularly dire. In a fresh study, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that by the mid-year point, global working hours were down 14% compared with last December – equivalent to 400m full-time jobs.
- The United Nations has called on governments to provide nearly $10bn in aid for Syria, as the war-torn country’s humanitarian crisis deepens amid the coronavirus pandemic. The UN said it needed $3.8bn to help 11 million people in Syria – where food prices have soared.
Updated
The Afghan health ministry has detected 319 new Covid-19 infections, taking the total number of confirmed cases to 31,836.
The number of deaths has risen by 28 to 774, as the health ministry asked warring sides to not target medical centres amid intensified violence across the country.
The country, which has admitted it has a lack of testing capacity, has tested 72,996 suspected patients since the outbreak began. The health ministry has said it has capacity for 2,000 tests a day, but has never reached that number.
Ahmad Jawad Osmani, the country’s acting health minister, asked the warring sides on Wednesday to not target medical centres after fighting intensified in recent days.
At least 27 civilians were killed in Helmand and dozens were wounded, including children, when mortars hit a cattle market on Monday, sparking nationwide condemnations as both government forces and Taliban blamed each other for the attack.
“Both parties must stop fighting in civilian-populated areas. Such indirect fire incidents in ground engagements cause 1000s of civilian casualties each year,” the UN said. “Dozens were killed and injured in Monday’s incident, including children.”
A UN mission also called on the Afghan government to set up an independent team to investigate the incident.
The European Union in a statement has raised concerns over a dramatic surge in the civilian toll in Afghanistan. The EU has also warned that attacks by the Taliban could harm prospects for the start of intra-Afghan talks and called for an immediate humanitarian ceasefire. The EU said:
The EU strongly condemns target killings, which have risen sharply in recent weeks, directed against clergy, journalists and media workers, human Rights defenders, healthcare personnel and others.
It appears to be a deliberate attempt to stifle debate in advance of peace negotiations. These crimes need to be investigated and the responsible brought to justice.
China has played down the threat of a new swine flu strain with pandemic potential that researchers discovered in pigs, saying the study is “not representative”.
The new swine flu strain found in China, according to the study published on Monday in the US science journal PNAS, had “all the essential hallmarks” to infect humans and raised fears over another potential pandemic.
But China’s foreign ministry moved to downplay fears on Wednesday. Foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said in a routine briefing:
The G4 virus mentioned in the relevant report is a subtype of the H1N1 virus. Experts have concluded that the sample size of the report is small and not representative.
Zhao added that “relevant departments and experts” will continue to step up monitoring of the disease, send warnings and handle it in a timely manner.
The new G4 swine flu strain is genetically descended from the H1N1 strain that caused a pandemic in 2009, according to the study, which was authored by scientists at Chinese universities and the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
G4 was observed to be highly infectious, they said, replicating in human cells and causing more serious symptoms in ferrets than other viruses. Researchers took 30,000 nasal swabs from slaughterhouse pigs in 10 Chinese provinces, allowing them to isolate 179 swine flu viruses.
According to the study, 10.4% of pig slaughterhouse workers tested had already been infected.
So far, there has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission. China did not elaborate further on how many had been infected by G4.
“It is of concern that human infection of G4 virus will further human adaptation and increase the risk of a human pandemic,” the researchers wrote, calling for urgent measures to monitor people working with pigs.
Updated
California records highest single-day rise in Covid-19 cases - Reuters tally
New Covid-19 cases in California rose by 8,441 on Tuesday, according to a Reuters tally, the highest single-day increase since the start of the pandemic.
The US as a whole had its biggest one-day spike in new infections on Tuesday, with more than 47,000 cases.
California, Texas and Arizona have emerged as new US centres of the pandemic.
Updated
Germany has for now secured enough supplies of remdesivir, which is set to become the first Covid-19 treatment approved in Europe, and is banking on developer Gilead to meet future needs, the country’s health ministry said.
“The federal government has early on secured remdesivir for the treatment of coronavirus patients. Currently, there are still sufficient reserves,” the ministry told Reuters.
With a conditional market approval, which is expected to be issued by the EU commission this week, comes an obligation to deliver sufficient quantities in the future, it added.
“We trust Gilead will meet this obligation,” the ministry said.
Updated
North Korea has reopened schools, but has kept a ban on public gatherings and made it mandatory for people to wear masks in public places as part of its response to the coronavirus, a World Health Organization official has said.
While North Korea has not confirmed any infections, its Ministry of Public Health has been sharing weekly updates with the WHO on steps it is taking to ward off the pandemic, said Edwin Salvador, the agency’s representative to the reclusive country.
In the latest update provided on 19 June, the ministry said all educational institutions are now open, with children required to wear masks and washing stations installed.
The ministry also reported that all of 922 people checked so far have tested negative, while hundreds of others, mostly cargo handlers at seaports and land borders, are regularly quarantined for monitoring, Salvador said.
Temperature checks using infra-red thermometers, hand washing facilities and sanitisers continue to be in place in all public places including shopping malls, restaurants and hotels.
It is mandatory for all people to wear masks in public places and no public gatherings are allowed.
Pyongyang devised a “national preparedness and response plan” in February based on the WHO’s recommendations, under which it appointed community doctors, each of whom is responsible for 130 households, Salvador said.
It also set up 235 ‘Rapid Response Teams’ consisting of an epidemiologist, doctor, nurse, paramedical and a livestock official, tasked with investigating any suspected cases.
Hello everyone, this is Jessica Murray taking over the global coronavirus blog for the next few hours.
As always, please do send over any story tips and suggestions.
Email: jessica.murray@theguardian.com
Twitter: @journojess_
French education minister predicts 'normal return to classes' in September
The French education minister, Jean-Louis Blanquer, has said he expects all the country’s schools to return to normal at the start of the new academic year in September. Blanquer said the situation with Covid-19 in France, where the virus has been deemed under control, meant the return to classes after two-month summer holidays, known in France as “la rentrée”, would be “a normal return”.
“Today, our main outlook is quite optimistic. We think that the health conditions will allow us to have a normal return to classes,” the minister told French radio, RTL. “Everyone should be there … except if there is a worsening of the situation. Of course, we will prepare for any further crisis.”
Blanquer said schools reopening and operating as before the pandemic was “fundamental … for educational and also psychological reasons”.
He reported that since president Emmanuel Macron ordered everyone back to school from 22 June, only about 20% of pupils had stayed away. “It’s still a lot, but even in normal times there are not 100% of pupils at school because at the end of June many of them leave on holidays,” Blanquer said.
The number of patients in French hospital and intensive care with Covid-19 has been declining since reaching a peak in April. The number of hospital deaths over the previous 24 hours dropped to 21 on Tuesday with nine reported in French care homes over the past week.
Updated
Dr Iván Cruz wanted to shock people out of pandemic scepticism with X-rays of his coronavirus-scarred lungs
Before he died in hospital, the young Mexican doctor had intended to publish them online to convince the unbelievers: coronavirus exists, and this is what it does to you.
“It makes you feel impotent and angry not to be able to grab people and tell them: ‘Don’t you get it?’” said Agileo Cruz, the father of the 28-year-old Mexican doctor, who died from Covid-19-related complications last month.
In late April, with only 1,351 fatalities, the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, claimed the pandemic had been “tamed”. But on Saturday Mexico recorded 602 deaths, the highest number anywhere in the world that day.
Despite the growing tragedy, some in Mexico continue to doubt the virus’s very existence, taking no precautions and insisting that the epidemic is little but a government invention.
More here:
Earlier today the Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sanchez, and his Portuguese counterpart, Antonio Costa, officially reopened their joint border to all travellers after a three-month closure to prevent the spread of coronavirus, in a ceremony also attended by Spain’s King Felipe and Portugal’s President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa.
“Our shared prosperity and common destiny within the European project depend on this border being open,” Costa tweeted earlier on Wednesday. “The pandemic offered us a new vision of the past we do not want to come back to: a continent with closed borders.”
Hoje assinalamos ao mais alto nível a normalização do trânsito terrestre da #fronteira entre #Portugal e #Espanha. É um reencontro entre vizinhos, que são irmãos e amigos. Desta fronteira aberta depende a nossa prosperidade partilhada e um destino comum no projeto europeu.
— António Costa (@antoniocostapm) July 1, 2020
Updated
Here are a few pictures from last night’s “farewell party” for Covid-19 in Prague, where more than 1,000 people ate together at a giant table that stretched across the Charles Bridge.
“The bridge is a good metaphor, different people can gather,” said Ondrej Kobza, who organised the event. The event “is a kind of celebration, to show that we are not afraid, that we go out and we won’t be stuck at home,” he said, noting that the dinner was only possible because there were hardly any tourists now.
The guests were invited to share among themselves the meals and drinks they brought.
The Czech Republic was among the first to implement tough restrictions designed to curb the coronavirus in mid-March. As of 30 June, the country of 10.7 million reported 11,895 cases and 349 deaths connected to the illness.
Updated
Turkey asks to be added to EU list of safe travel partners 'as soon as possible'
Turkey on Wednesday urged the EU to correct the “mistake” of excluding it from the bloc’s list of safe coronavirus travel partners, saying it was disappointed by the move.
On Tuesday, Brussels produced a list of 15 countries including Australia and Morocco whose health situation was deemed safe enough to allow their citizens to travel to the EU from 1 July.
But the UUS was notably excluded along with Russia and Turkey.
“The lack of Turkey’s presence on the list is disappointing,” Turkish foreign ministry spokesman Hami Aksoy said in a statement. “We expect this mistake to be corrected as soon as possible.”
Aksoy added that the decision should have been made on the basis of “objective criteria”. He insisted Turkey had handled the coronavirus pandemic well, pointing to the “precautions, work undertaken and success” of the Turkish authorities.
Turkey has recorded 5,131 deaths since the first reported case of Covid-19, while nearly 200,000 people have been infected, according to health ministry figures on Tuesday. Doctors, however, have raised concerns that Turkey is not following all the World Health Organization’s reporting standards.
Updated
Workers at a chicken processing facility in western North Carolina reportedly underwent widespread testing for Covid-19 in early June.
Workers at the plant were scared. Several employees had already tested positive and the company, Case Farms – which has been repeatedly condemned for animal treatment and workers’ rights violations – was not providing proper protective equipment.
“We don’t have a lot of space at work. We are shoulder to shoulder,” said one worker, who declined to be identified, during a recent union call. “I’m afraid to go to work, but I have to go.”
The testing turned up 150 positive cases at the facility, the worker said.
On 8 June, the health department for Burke county, where the Case Farms facility is located, reported 136 new Covid cases, a 25% increase in its total caseload. Yet neither the company, county officials nor the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services would confirm whether those cases were connected to Case Farms. It is just one example of the currently taut relationship between public health and the economy in North Carolina, as the number of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations rises.
More here:
Updated
In Greece the first flights bearing tourists have begun flying into airports nationwide.
A charter plane carrying 172 passengers from Hamburg landed at Heraklion airport on Crete at 8am, minutes after another aircraft had arrived from the Czech Republic, reopening the island’s air links with the outside world. The visitors received an enthusiastic welcome with airport ground staff spraying the planes with water jets as they taxied to their gates and local musicians greeting tourists as they emerged from the arrivals hall.
“Tourism has got off to a dynamic start on Crete,” the airport’s manager, Giorgos Pliakas, told local TV, saying 40 international flights were expected on Wednesday. “It’s encouraging that all the flights are full.”
Until late last night 150 flights had been scheduled to land at regional airports around Greece including the popular destinations of Mykonos, Rhodes, Corfu and Kos.
By this morning that figure had dropped to 104, an abrupt change highlighting the last-minute flight cancellations that are likely to become the new normal in the age of coronavirus.
With the exception of the UK and Sweden, from where flights continue to be suspended until 15 July – illuminating the lack of headway made by both countries in containing the virus - there are no restrictions on arrivals from other European countries. Athens, following EU guidelines, has also permitted air traffic to resume with 15 other nations including Australia, Canada and New Zealand.
But in a country that has managed to keep infection and casualty rates low, tourism’s resumption also resembles a military operation. In Crete, as in other airports, public health officials have created special screening areas with mask-wearing travellers being subject to Covid-19 tests upon arrival – depending on the findings of an electronic form all are obliged to complete 48 hours before entering Greece.
Sinn Féin is facing accusations of imperilling Northern Ireland’s fight against Covid-19 after its leaders allegedly breached guidelines and regulations by leading hundreds of mourners at the funeral of an IRA commander.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) said it will review footage of the funeral in Belfast on Tuesday that drew more than a thousand people in apparent violation of rules limiting outdoor gatherings to 30 people.
Mary Lou McDonald and Gerry Adams, Sinn Féin’s respective current and former leader, and Michelle O’Neill, a deputy leader who is also Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister, attended the send-off for Bobby Storey, a veteran republican and IRA figure.
Politicians from other parties who share executive power with Sinn Féin at Stormont accused it of undermining efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
“What we are seeing … was a breach of the guidance that has been issued and has been worked on by the executive and has been supported by the executive,” said the health minister, Robin Swann. “I sincerely hope that this isn’t the Dominic Cummings effect in Northern Ireland because in our health service we can’t afford it to be.”
It was a reference to the Downing Street adviser taking long drives during England’s lockdown.
Naomi Long, the justice minister and Alliance party leader, said in a tweet that when the rule-makers break the rules it was more hurtful “for all who made huge sacrifices to obey the regulations”.
O’Neill, who is expected to face tough questions at Stormont on Wednesday, defended her attendance at the funeral and said it respected regulations and guidelines.
The cortège had a “maximum of 30 people” and the service inside St Agnes’ Church was “exemplary” in terms of social distancing and hygiene, with only three people per pew, she told the Irish News. “It was all done in accordance with the guidelines.”
The loosening of lockdown restrictions has prompted loyalist Orange Order marching bands to ask permission to hold traditional parades this month.
Updated
An update to earlier news that the US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of remdesivir, one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world: Australia has also got plenty.
Burundi’s new president, Evariste Ndayishimiye, has declared the coronavirus the country’s “biggest enemy”, in a major about-turn for a nation which has largely ignored the dangers of the virus.
Former president Pierre Nkurunziza, who died suddenly last month, and even Ndayishimiye himself, had previously downplayed the gravity of the pandemic, saying God had spared Burundi from its ravages.
Burundi held a full campaign ahead of May’s election, and unlike its neighbours which have imposed lockdowns and curfews, has taken few measures to combat the spread of the virus. Officially the country has reported only 170 cases and one death in two months.
Ndayishimiye was speaking late Tuesday after the swearing in of his new government in parliament. “From tomorrow, I declare the Covid-19 pandemic the biggest enemy of Burundians, because it is clear it is becoming their biggest concern,” he said. “We firmly commit ourselves to fight this pandemic.”
Updated
When coronavirus claimed its first victim in India’s largest slum in April, many feared the disease would turn its narrow, congested streets into a graveyard, with social distancing or contact tracing all but impossible. But three months on, Mumbai’s Dharavi offers a rare glimmer of hope with new infections shrinking, thanks to an aggressive strategy that focused on “chasing the virus, instead of waiting for disaster”, according to city official Kiran Dighavkar, AFP reports.
The sprawling slum has long been a byword for the financial capital’s bitter income disparities - with Dharavi’s estimated one million people scraping a living as factory workers or maids and chauffeurs to Mumbai’s well-heeled residents. With a dozen people typically sleeping in a single room, and hundreds using the same public toilet, authorities realised early that standard practices would be of little use.
“Social distancing was never a possibility, home isolation was never an option, and contact tracing was a huge problem with so many people using the same toilet,” Dighavkar told AFP.
An initial plan to conduct door-to-door screenings was abandoned after Mumbai’s searing heat and humidity left medical workers feeling suffocated under layers of protective equipment as they combed the area’s cramped alleys for cases.
But, with infections rising fast and fewer than 50,000 people checked for symptoms, officials needed to move quickly and get creative. What they came up with was coined “Mission Dharavi”.
Each day, medical workers set up a “fever camp” in a different part of the slum, so residents could be screened for symptoms and tested for coronavirus if needed. Schools, wedding halls and sports complexes were repurposed as quarantine facilities that offered free meals, vitamins and “laughter yoga” sessions. Strict containment measures were deployed in virus hotspots that were home to 125,000 people, including the use of drones to monitor their movements and alert police, while a huge army of volunteers swung into action, distributing rations so they didn’t go hungry. Bollywood stars and business tycoons paid for medical equipment as construction workers built a 200-bed field hospital at breakneck speed in a park inside Dharavi.
By late June, more than half the slum’s population had been screened for symptoms and around 12,000 tested for coronavirus. So far Dharavi has reported just 82 deaths - a fraction of Mumbai’s more than 4,500 fatalities.
“We are on the brink of victory, I feel very proud,” said Abhay Taware, a doctor who saw around 100 patients daily in his tiny clinic at the height of the crisis.
The 44-year-old father-of-two also had to fight his own battle against coronavirus when he contracted the disease in April, but told AFP he had “no doubts” about returning to work. “I thought I could show my patients that a positive diagnosis does not mean the end,” he said.
With Mumbai and Delhi struggling to accommodate coronavirus patients as India’s cases surge past half a million officials are also wary of celebrating too soon.
“It’s a war. Everything is dynamic. Right now, we feel like we are on top of the situation. The challenge will be when factories reopen,” said Dighavkar, referring to the billion-dollar leather and recycling industries run out of Dharavi’s cramped tenements.
And some in the slum fear their community might not be as lucky next time.
On a blazing morning, as car salesman Vinod Kamble lined up to have his temperature taken, he recalled his terror when the virus landed in Mumbai.
“I felt like Dharavi would be destroyed, and nothing would be left,” he told AFP, describing the near impossibility of avoiding infection in the slum. “We need better infrastructure,” the 32-year-old said. Otherwise the next time a disease like this emerges, I don’t think Dharavi will be able to escape.”
When Jacinda Ardern urged New Zealanders to stand firm behind her government’s decision to keep the country’s borders tightly closed against Covid-19, the prime minister described a reality that many around the world could only imagine with envy. “We get to enjoy weekend sport, go to restaurants and bars, our workplaces are open, and we can gather in whatever numbers we like,” she said.
New Zealanders returned in June to normal life with strict border controls the only remnant of a pandemic that months ago had threatened to sweep the country as it had in most others before a strict lockdown quashed its spread.
But now its inhabitants now face a burgeoning anxiety that some find more difficult to cope with than the fear of the pandemic, analysts say: an open-ended uncertainty about their own futures and New Zealand’s place in the world if the virus continues to rage elsewhere.
Keep reading here:
Here’s an AFP report on an anticipated baby boom in Indonesia:
With her husband left jobless by the pandemic, the last thing Indonesian mother Juarsih needed was to get pregnant, but now she’s expecting a third child – one of many in the country anxiously preparing for a Covid-fuelled baby boom.
Indonesian authorities believe there could be 400,000 more births than usual next year as lockdowns keep couples at home and cut access to contraception, prompting fears of an increase in abortions and stunting of children in poorer families.
Juarsih, 41, says her birth control ran out as clinics closed or slashed hours and overwhelmed hospitals struggled to keep up with mounting coronavirus infections in the world’s fourth most populous country. The mother of two teenagers is now too scared of the deadly respiratory disease to risk going out for a pregnancy checkup in her hometown Bandung, on Java island.
“At first I was shocked when I found out that I was pregnant,” she said. “I started feeling happy later although there’s still some sadness … I should be grateful but this is happening at a difficult time.”
Contraception use has “dropped drastically” since the pandemic took hold across the sprawling archipelago in early March, Hasto Wardoyo, the head of Indonesia’s national population and family planning board, told AFP.
Health authorities are worried increasing numbers of expectant parents will turn to abortions and push up maternal mortality rates. “We’re also worried about stunting – not all families can afford proper nutrition,” he said.
This week. authorities launched a one-day blitz that aimed to give away contraceptives to one million citizens.
Condoms are not popular in Indonesia, where 98% of contraceptive users are women, mainly of hormone injections and birth-control pills. The family planning agency also enlisted the help of celebrities with huge social media followings to get the word out to the country’s nearly 270 million people.
Nearly 3,000 people have died of Covid-19 in Indonesia, according to an official tally, but independent researchers say the real toll could be several times higher.
Updated
Michael Veale, a lecturer in digital rights and regulation in the faculty of laws at University College London, on the Apple-Google contact-tracing app:
In April, Apple and Google announced a partnership. They would take research into how to undertake Bluetooth-powered Covid-19 contact tracing in a privacy-preserving manner, with no central database, and make it available as a toolkit inside their operating systems for public health authority–sanctioned apps. Before they did this, all such apps had effectively been doomed to fail. At least on iPhones, they were crippled by the same baked-in Bluetooth restrictions that stop normal apps secretly tracking you.
The firms’ contact-tracing toolkit has been both praised and condemned. Its “decentralised” approach, with no sensitive central database of who-saw-who, has been supported by hundreds of privacy, security and human rights scholars. The concerns are understandable. The history of passports – which were introduced as a seemingly temporary measure during the first world war, but were retained in response to fears about spreading the Spanish flu – shows that pandemics can significantly influence our social infrastructure. And so they should be designed to minimise future misuse.
More here:
Nightclubs in Queensland, Australia are to open this weekend, with one significant and enforced change: customers will have to remain seated. Ben Smee reports:
Queensland’s nightclubs could pioneer a new craze – social dis-dancing – when they open this weekend under rules that will force patrons to remain seated.
“It will be a little bit different,” says Tammy Wood, the marketing manager of Retro’s in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane. “We’ll need to bring in extra chairs. Everyone will have to do the chair bop dance.”
More here:
Schools in Thailand have reopened today, along with bars, clubs and massage parlours. Despite the push for normality in daily life, on Tuesday the kingdom’s cabinet extended its state of emergency for another month.
Morning/evening/whatever-it-is-where-you-are everyone. This is Simon Burnton taking on the live blog for the next few hours. If you have seen any stories that deserve our attention, or if you have any tips, comments or suggestions for our coverage then please let me know by sending me a message either to @Simon_Burnton on Twitter or via email. Thanks!
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along – and stay tuned for the latest global updates with my colleague Simon Burnton.
Global report: US reports another record increase in coronavirus cases
The US again reported a record one-day increase in coronavirus cases on Tuesday, with 44,358 new coronavirus cases confirmed in the country, according to coronavirus database the Covid Tracking Project, as infections surge across the country, which is the worst-affected worldwide in terms of cases and deaths.
The US has more than 2.6m cases and accounts for approximately one in four known deaths worldwide, with the country’s toll at 127,410. There are close to 10.5m cases globally, with infections rising by around 150,000 in the last 24 hours alone to 10,450,628. The global death toll stand at 510,632.
Brazil, with the highest cases and deaths outside of the US, recorded 1,280 more fatalities on Tuesday, bringing the country’s confirmed death toll to nearly 60,000, with the total at 59,594, according to health ministry data. The total number of confirmed cases stands at 1,402,041.
On Twitter, the Covid Tracking Project said the US’s seven-day average for new daily cases has doubled since 13 June and that hospitalisations in the country jumped by the highest number since 21 April.
It marks the fourth time in a week that the country posted a one-day case record, according to the New York Times, which said new cases in the US had increased by 80% in two weeks.
On Sunday, CNN reported that cases were rising in 36 US states, with just two – Connecticut and Rhode Island – reporting declines in their daily infections.
Updated
UK front pages, Wednesday 1 July
Here is a look at coronavirus-related front pages from around the UK this morning:
Wednesday’s GUARDIAN: “More local lockdowns on the way, experts warn” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/q4HuEPdXEC
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s TIMES: “Bank predicts V-shaped recovery from pandemic” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/ORPOAgvjMT
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s SCOTSMAN: “Schools braced for ‘tidal wave’ of exam appeals #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/FSNrwWwS77
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s Daily MIRROR: “Boris Deal Is Not Enough To Save Jobs” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/44ckAfIjut
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s INDEPENDENT Digital: “Scandal-hit maternity units face police inquiry” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/SKw5sIg6ya
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s i - “Biggest change to planning laws since war” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/qBh3XHT6By
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s FINANCIAL TIMES: “US and Europe condemn Beijing for tightening grip on Hong Kong” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/eOCbwL9P7M
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday’s METRO: “Lockdown City’s Mayor Broke Lockdown” #BBCPapers #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/E1lDy2SIkU
— Allie Hodgkins-Brown (@AllieHBNews) June 30, 2020
Wednesday briefing: Experts ‘expect more Leicesters’
A rise in coronavirus infections has been detected in areas of England, Scotland and Wales, raising fears of renewed Leicester-style lockdowns as the countries prepare to ease restrictions. The Medway in Kent, the boroughs of Hammersmith and Fulham and Ealing in London, and Lanarkshire and Dumfries and Galloway in Scotland saw a rise in infections in the week to 25 June, according to official data. Other areas seeing higher rates included Bedford, Barnsley and Flintshire. The much-awaited reopening of pubs is set for Saturday throughout England, and from 15 July in Scotland. “I am expecting there to be a number of Leicesters,” said Prof Deenan Pillay, a virologist at UCL.
Some clothing factories in Leicester remained open during the national lockdown and ordered workers to work even when they were sick, labour campaigners have claimed, amid concerns that the city’s garment industry has played a key role in the resurgence of cases. The government has been criticised for “sowing confusion” about the city’s new lockdown, while residents and businesses said they were baffled by the messaging.
Summary
- Cases worldwide are nearing 10.5m. There are 10,450,628 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, and 510,632 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.
- The US saw a record one-day case increase. Tuesday saw 44,358 new coronavirus cases confirmed in the US, according to The Covid Tracking Project, which said on Twitter that the 7-day average for new daily cases as doubled since 13 June and that hospitalisations in the country jumped by the highest number since 21 April. Tuesday saw 44,358 new coronavirus cases confirmed in the US, according to The Covid Tracking Project, which said on Twitter that the 7-day average for new daily cases as doubled since 13 June and that hospitalisations in the country jumped by the highest number since 21 April.
- Deaths in Brazil, the second-worst affected country after the US, are nearing 60,000. Brazil has suffered 1,280 more deaths, bringing the country’s confirmed death toll to 59,594, according to Health Ministry data.The total number of confirmed cases rose by 33,846 to reach 1,402,041, the worst outbreak in the world outside the United States.
- Australia locked down 300,000 in Victoria state suburbs. Authorities will lock down around 300,000 people in suburbs north of Melbourne for a month from late on Wednesday to contain the risk of infection after two weeks of double-digit rises in new coronavirus cases in Australia’s second most populous state.
- The UN warned jobs figures are worse than feared. The pandemic has taken a much heavier toll on jobs than previously feared, the UN says, warning the situation in the Americas is particularly dire.In a fresh study, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that by the mid-year point, global working hours were down 14 percent compared to last December - equivalent to some 400 million full-time jobs.
- Three asylum seekers at camp near US border tested positive for coronavirus. Three asylum seekers have tested positive for coronavirus in a sprawling border encampment, marking the first cases in a settlement that advocates have long viewed as vulnerable amid the pandemic, Reuters reports.
- The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of remdesivir, one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world, my colleague Sarah Boseley reports. Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.
- South Korea is treating severe coronavirus cases with remdesivir. South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports that South Korea has started providing remdesivir to patients for coronavirus treatment.
- Dr Anthony Fauci told US senators he “would not be surprised” if cases go up to 100,000 a day. He said the US is “going in the wrong direction” in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the death toll “is going to be very disturbing” unless officials intervene, and urged Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing in public spaces.
- Speaking in Delaware, Joe Biden said the pandemic is unlikely to have subsided by January 2021, and if he’s elected. “On the day I’m sworn in, I’ll get right to work implementing all aspects of the response that remain undone,” he said.
- The United Nations has called on governments to provide nearly $10bn in aid for Syria, as the war-torn country’s humanitarian crisis deepens amid the coronavirus pandemic. The UN said it needed $3.8bn to help 11 million people in Syria – where food prices have soared – and a further $6.04bn to help the 6.6 million Syrians who have fled the country.
- Greece should prepare for a “very difficult” tourist season, the country’s prime minister has said. Tourism officials say the country – which usually makes around 18.1 billion a year from tourism – would be lucky if revenues hit the 4-5 billion euro mark this year.
Updated
Australia locks down 300,000 in Victoria state suburbs
Authorities will lock down around 300,000 people in suburbs north of Melbourne for a month from late on Wednesday to contain the risk of infection after two weeks of double-digit rises in new coronavirus cases in Australia’s second most populous state.
Australia has fared better than many countries in the pandemic, with around 7,830 cases and 104 deaths, but the recent surge has stoked fears of a second wave of Covid-19.
From midnight tonight, more than 30 suburbs in Australia’s second-biggest city will return to stage three restrictions, the third-strictest level in curbs to control the pandemic.
That means residents will be confined to home except for grocery shopping, health appointments, work or caregiving, and exercise.
The restrictions will be accompanied by a testing blitz that authorities hope will extend to half the population of the area affected, and for which borders will be patrolled, authorities said. The measures come as curbs ease across the rest of the state of Victoria, with restaurants, gyms and cinemas reopening in recent weeks.
Victoria recorded 73 fresh cases on Tuesday from 20,682 tests, following an increase of 75 cases on Monday. State premier Daniel Andrews warned on Wednesday that the return of broader restrictions across city remained a possibility.
Updated
Spain’s Teatro Real will reopen its doors to the public on Wednesday, becoming one of the world’s first opera houses to return to the stage with a production that includes a chorus, orchestra and soloists after months of lockdown. On offer is Verdi’s La Traviata, tweaked to reflect life in the time of Covid-19.
“There are people who prefer to sit with their arms crossed and wait until we return to normal,” said Joan Matabosch, the artistic director of the Teatro Real. “And then there are theatres that prefer to try and conquer the normality that we find ourselves in.”
South Korea: incidents of Covid-19 ‘mask rage’ flare as summer heats up
The onset of summer has sparked a rise in incidents of “mask rage” in South Korea, as more hot and bothered commuters either refuse to wear face coverings or leave parts of their faces exposed.
In South Korea, Japan and other countries in east Asia, widespread mask wearing has been cited as one possible explanation for the region’s relative success in bringing the Covid-19 pandemic under control.
South Korea, one of the first countries outside China to be affected by the virus, flattened the coronavirus curve in April, although it is now struggling with dozens of daily cases, mainly in and around the capital Seoul.
To avoid a second major outbreak, the government in June required masks to be worn on all buses and subways, and inside taxis, with drivers permitted to refuse passengers without face coverings.
But the country’s typically hot summer is making mask wearing increasingly uncomfortable, with temperatures regularly exceeding 30C last month.
As a result, more people are refusing to wear them, or are positioning them across their chins so they leave their mouth and nose exposed.
Hi, Helen Sullivan here. A reminder that you can send comments, questions, news, tips from your part of the world, and other people’s good tweets, to me directly at the places below:
Twitter: @helenrsullivan
Email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
The full story on the case increases in Victoria, Australia now:
The state reported 73 new Covid-19 cases overnight, with 10 hotspot postcodes to enter lockdown from midnight as the state tries to bring the cases under control.
While there were 14 new cases announced in New South Wales overnight, all of those were in returned international travellers now in quarantine hotels. Of Victoria’s cases, only three were from hotel quarantine, with community transmission becoming a growing concern in the state over the past fortnight. The source of 42 of Victoria’s newest cases remains under investigation.
The Victorian premier Daniel Andrews told reporters on Wednesday that the work of public health officials door-knocking the most affected suburbs and offering people free testing was now a key part of the state’s strategy to bring the spread under control.
Now, the answers you’ve all been waiting for.
The questions: Why are Nick Kyrgios and Boris Becker fighting? Who is the rat and who is the doughnut?
The Guardian’s Mike Hytner explains what is going on with tennis Twitter to Gabrielle Jackson:
Mike, I’m hearing some vague murmurings about Nick Kyrgios and Boris Becker, rats and doughnuts. Sounds intriguing. What’s going on?
It’s just another day in the bizarre world that is post-Covid tennis Twitter. Australia’s most outspoken and entertaining tennis star has attracted a strong rebuke on the socials from the German six-time grand slam champion after Kyrgios aired his views about how some in tennis have responded to the coronavirus crisis – recklessly and selfishly, in Nick’s view.
Reckless and selfish? Sounds like some world leaders I know. Tell me more.
Alex Zverev, the Russian world No 7, was filmed partying at a crowded bar on the Côte d’Azur, apparently just six days after he vowed to be a good boy and self-isolate following the debacle of Novak Djokovic’s Adria Tour event.
Disneyland Tokyo reopened today, after four months of being closed due to the coronavirus pandemic.
The Mainichi reports:
In order to keep the number of visitors to less than half pre-pandemic levels, the parks’ operator Oriental Land Co. will limit entry to fixed-date tickets purchased online in advance.
Operating hours at the parks, which had been closed since 29 February have been shortened from 8am to 8pm.
Attractions and restaurants will cater to a smaller number of visitors while most entertainment shows and parades, including the nighttime Tokyo Disneyland Electrical Parade Dreamlights, will remain canceled.
Visitors are required to undergo body temperature checks and wear a face mask to enter the park, and will be asked to keep a certain distance from Disney characters during meets.
Here are some more photos:
Panama registered 765 new cases of coronavirus infection on Tuesday, taking the total number in the country to 33,550, while deaths climbed by 11 to 631 overall, the health ministry said in a statement.
More on remdesivir now from Australia:
Associate Professor Barbara Mintzes from The University of Sydney Charles Perkins Centre and School of Pharmacy said if remdesivir does prove effective in treating Covid-19, the drug would be needed not only in the US but globally, including in Australia.
“The US arrangement to buy 500,000 doses of remdesivir from Gilead raises concerns not only about access in other countries but also how to prevent profiteering from the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuring that patients who need treatment are able to access it,” she said.
Gilead announced its global price for remdesivir on 29 June as US $390 per vial. The Guardian reports that the cost will be US$3200 for a 6-day treatment, or AUD$4607. The cost of production of remdesivir has been estimated to be less than US$1 per day or US $6 (AUD$ 8.64) for a 6-day course of treatment.
“Gilead has licensing agreements with manufacturers in Egypt, India and Pakistan to supply remdesivir to 127 low to middle-income countries. The US deal with Gilead and limits on which countries can be supplied under this licensing agreement leave countries like Australia in the lurch: unable to access remdesivir from Gilead at a high price - as the US is doing - and unable to access it at a low price from generic manufacturers, as lower income countries can.”
As for a solution, Mintzes said international trade agreements in a public health emergency, governments can issue compulsory licenses to bypass patent protection and either produce a drug themselves or buy the drug from generic manufacturers. The Netherlands is currently considering an amendment to its patent law to allow compulsory licensing of remdesivir. “Currently we don’t know for sure whether remdesivir will prove to be an important treatment for Covid-19,” she said. “If it does, given that the US is buying out Gilead’s supply, and also given the extremely high price as compared with costs of production, the obvious solution for Australia would be to also consider compulsory licensing.”
Updated
Record one-day case increase in US
Tuesday saw 44,358 new coronavirus cases confirmed in the US, according to The Covid Tracking Project, which said on Twitter that the 7-day average for new daily cases as doubled since 13 June and that hospitalisations in the country jumped by the highest number since 21 April.
Our daily update is now published.
— The COVID Tracking Project (@COVID19Tracking) June 30, 2020
States reported over 44k new cases, the new normal. The 7-day average of new cases per day has doubled since 6/13, and now exceeds 41k.
Current hospitalizations saw their biggest jump since 4/21.
For details, see: https://t.co/PZrmH4bl5Y pic.twitter.com/uhD6Ifv8oT
The high marks the fourth time in a week that the country, the worst-affected worldwide in terms of number of cases and deaths, posted a one-day case record, the New York Times reports. According to the Times’ own analysis, new cases in the US have increased by 80% in two weeks.
On Sunday CNN reported that cases were rising in 36 US states, with just two – Connecticut and Rhode Island – reporting declines in their daily infections.
Updated
Victoria, Australia confirms 73 more cases
The state of Victoria, Australia, which has been struggling to control a recent coronavirus outbreak, has recorded another 73 Covid-19 cases overnight, according to Premier Daniel Andrews.
It’s the fifth-highest day for Covid cases recorded in one day since the pandemic began.
Andrews told reporters at a press conference:
Three from hotel quarantine, nine that are associated with known and contained outbreaks, 19 as a result of routine testing and 42 that remain under investigation by our public health team. We did 20,682 tests yesterday so I’ll take this opportunity to thank every single one of those going on for 21,000 people who presented for a test.
As we reported earlier, news emerged overnight that the US has bought up all supply of the drug remdesivir for the next three months. The drug has shown some promise in helping Covid-19 patients recover faster from Covid-19, and is manufactured by US pharmaceutical giant Gilead.
The Guardian’s UK health reporter Sarah Boseley wrote that “Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US”.
Guardian Australia has asked the federal health minister Greg Hunt about whether he is concerned about the US buying up supply, and whether Australia has enough of the drug in its national medical stockpile to manage in the meantime. A spokesman said he will provide a response this afternoon.
Associate Professor Alice Motion from the school of chemistry the University of Sydney, who works as part of open source drug discovery projects including the Breaking Goodcitizen science project. She said the actions of the US are a “real concern”.
“We would want to make sure something like this isn’t possible for a vaccine,” Associate Professor Motion said.
“A vaccine should be available to people all over the world rather than one country, or a group of countries having preferred access to a medicine. Remdesivir is a medicine that helps people to recover faster, but imagine if the same thing happened with a vaccine that emerges. That would be terrible. It’s also a bit of a risk too because lots of different medicines that we all need across the world are not made in the countries where the patients live. If you start to buy up all the supply of one medicine you could see other countries that then might not be as willing to distribute or to share medicines with the US.”
She said the actions of the US raised fundamental issues about fair and equitable access to medicine. “The other issue is whether everyone in the US will now have equal access to remdesivir too,” she said. “Equal access is not just an issue on a global level, but within countries.”
Professor Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician with the Australian National University, said similar issues were seen early on in the pandemic with access to personal protective equipment, with countries holding on to their supply while other countries struggled to get protective gear.
“Many countries prioritise their own,” he said. “Of course, I don’t agree with it. It’s not good practice and we need the arts and behavioural experts to look into this and this attitude.”
New Zealand reports second consecutive day of zero new cases
Charlotte Graham-McLay reports for the Guardian:
New Zealand has reported a second consecutive day of no new cases of Covid-19, according to health officials.
There are 22 active cases of the coronavirus in New Zealand, all of them travelers returning to the country. There is no known community transmission of the virus in New Zealand.
Of those sufferers, 21 remain in government-run quarantine, which is a compulsory for all travelers entering the country. One is in a stable condition in Auckland City Hospital.
Only New Zealanders and their families, along with certain essential workers, are permitted to enter the country. They must spend two weeks in quarantine, where they are tested twice for the coronavirus.
New Zealand has recorded 1,178 cases of Covid-19, and 22 deaths. Last month the country reported a streak of 24 straight days without a fresh diagnosed instance of the virus before the number of New Zealanders returning from abroad began to grow.
New South Wales, Australia confirms 14 new cases – all returned travellers
The state of New South Wales in Australia on Wednesday announced 14 new coronavirus cases, but all are travellers currently in hotel quarantine, state health minister Brad Hazzard announced. The day before, 5 cases were reported among travellers.
The state also eased its restrictions as follows, AAP reports:
- Funerals, weddings, and church services now allow for the maximum number of people permitted on the premises, with one person per four square metres
- Up to 20 people can visit another household in NSW at one time and guests can stay overnight, with no daily limit on visitors
- No restrictions on travelling within NSW and up to 20 people can stay at a holiday home
- Up to 20 people can gather outside in a public place
- Community sport can have up to 500 participants - including players, trainers, officials and spectators - with a Covid-19 safety plan
- All businesses can now open and operate in NSW, with some required to implement a Covid-19 safety plan
- Music festivals remain banned and nightclubs remain shut.
UN warns jobs figures worse than feared
The pandemic has taken a much heavier toll on jobs than previously feared, the UN says, warning the situation in the Americas is particularly dire.
In a fresh study, the International Labour Organization (ILO) estimates that by the mid-year point, global working hours were down 14 percent compared to last December - equivalent to some 400 million full-time jobs.
Yonhap also reports that fights are starting in South Korea over the wearing of masks on public transport.
The government has made wearing face masks mandatory on public transport and taxis, but the summer heat is discouraging some from obeying the rules:
This has even coined the term “tuk-sk,” referring to wearing masks lower to only cover the wearer’s chin, with “tuk” meaning chin in Korean.
...
Last week, police asked the Seoul Southern District Court to detain a woman in her forties who had got into a bickering match with other passengers after they asked her to wear a mask.
The woman, who was apprehended at a subway No. 1 station, allegedly cursed at passengers asking her to wear a mask and delayed the train schedule for around seven minutes.
Police said the issue should not be taken lightly considering that “mandatorily wearing a mask on public transportation is an issue that is directly related to public health.”
The court, however, denied the request, citing that the woman said she didn’t wear the face mask due to health-related reasons and promised to wear it going forward.
Earlier this month, a man in his fifties was formally detained by the Seoul Eastern District Court after assaulting a bus driver and another passenger who asked him to wear a face mask.
South Korea treating severe coronavirus cases with remdesivir
South Korea’s Yonhap News Agency reports that South Korea has started providing remdesivir to patients for coronavirus treatment.
The drug has been used to treat Ebola.
It is the same drug that the US has bought almost all global stocks of.
Yonhap reports:
The Korea Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC) said the medication developed by US pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences Inc. will be used for Covid-19 patients with severe symptoms.
The KCDC said it signed an agreement with Gilead Sciences, with details of the imported amount and price not to be disclosed.
Last month, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, South Korea’s drug safety watchdog, approved the use of remdesivir as a treatment drug for Covid-19, allowing special imports by using its special measures procedure.
Three asylum seekers at camp near US border test positive for coronavirus
Three asylum seekers have tested positive for coronavirus in a sprawling border encampment, marking the first cases in a settlement that advocates have long viewed as vulnerable amid the pandemic, Reuters reports.
Since confirmed cases of coronavirus in Mexico began rising in March, advocates and government officials have worried about the potential for an outbreak in the Matamoros camp, where an estimated 2,000 migrants live in tents on the banks of the Rio Grande river.
Here’s your weekly roundup of coronavirus news from the Pacific, with Dan McGarry in Port Vila and Tess Newton Cain:
The total number of cases of Covid-19 infection listed by the World Health Organization for the region stands at 382, an increase of 22 since last week.
With increasing evidence that many of the world’s worst-affected nations are either unprepared or unwilling to fight the virus, it’s clear that Pacific islanders will be living with Covid-19 on their borders for years to come. Despite this, countries have been slow to adapt.
Tourism-reliant nations are instead focusing on finding ways to restart the industry as it was before the pandemic. Others simply languish. Despite imminent labour shortages in the agricultural sector in New Zealand and Australia, little progress has been made to safely replace thousands of repatriated workers.
Pacific islanders working in the US appear to be more exposed to Covid-19 than most other ethnicities. A large number of them report at least one family member who is an essential worker, and many of them live and/or work in crowded conditions.
In less serious news from Brazil, municipal authorities in the city of Petropolis said they discovered a speakeasy masquerading as a pet shop.
Reuters reports:
The shutters were down, but the pub chatter in the midst of a coronavirus quarantine gave the game away: a crowded Brazilian bar under the cover of a pet shop with no pets.
Inspectors found 16 patrons drinking beer, none of them wearing a mandatory mask or keeping to social distancing rules.
“The owner served customers behind a closed door. They came in through the adjacent pet shop,” a city spokesman said.
The mayor’s office said the shop, which had pet food but no animals, lacked proper registration papers.
Under the lockdown in the mountain city above Rio de Janeiro, bars are not allowed to open while pet shops are viewed as an essential service that can.
The shop was closed after the raid and the bar owner fined.
Brazil deaths near 60,000
Brazil has suffered 1,280 more deaths, bringing the country’s confirmed death toll to 59,594, according to Health Ministry data.
The total number of confirmed cases rose by 33,846 to reach 1,402,041, the worst outbreak in the world outside the United States.
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic, as the seventh month of the coronavirus crisis begins.
My name is Helen Sullivan and I’ll be with you for the next few hours.
I welcome your comments, questions, news, tips and flattery. Here’s where to send them:
Twitter: @helenrsullivan
Email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com
The US has bought up virtually all the stocks for the next three months of one of the two drugs proven to work against Covid-19, leaving none for the UK, Europe or most of the rest of the world, my colleague Sarah Boseley reports.
Experts and campaigners are alarmed both by the US unilateral action on remdesivir and the wider implications, for instance in the event of a vaccine becoming available. The Trump administration has already shown that it is prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries to secure the medical supplies it needs for the US.
Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:
- There are 10,393,467 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide, and 508,392 deaths.
- Dr Anthony Fauci told US senators he “would not be surprised” if cases go up to 100,000 a day. He said the US is “going in the wrong direction” in its handling of the coronavirus pandemic and warned that the death toll “is going to be very disturbing” unless officials intervene, and urged Americans to wear masks and practice social distancing in public spaces.
- Speaking in Delaware, Joe Biden said the pandemic is unlikely to have subsided by January 2021, and if he’s elected. “On the day I’m sworn in, I’ll get right to work implementing all aspects of the response that remain undone,” he said.
- India’s prime minister has warned citizens against “negligence” in following coronavirus guidance. Narendra Modi raised concerns that social distancing and hand washing advice was being ignored as daily new cases in the country remain close to 20,000.
- The United Nations has called on governments to provide nearly $10bn in aid for Syria, as the war-torn country’s humanitarian crisis deepens amid the coronavirus pandemic. The UN said it needed $3.8bn to help 11 million people in Syria – where food prices have soared – and a further $6.04bn to help the 6.6 million Syrians who have fled the country.
- Greece should prepare for a “very difficult” tourist season, the country’s prime minister has said. Tourism officials say the country – which usually makes around 18.1 billion a year from tourism – would be lucky if revenues hit the 4-5 billion euro mark this year.
- Face masks in public spaces are to be made mandatory in Toronto. The city’s mayor and medical officer announced the rules, which will take effect on July 7 if the city council passes the motion today, on Tuesday.
- The United States is not on a European Union “safe list” of destinations for non-essential travel. From Wednesday, the EU will allow travel to 14 countries beyond its borders.
