We are closing this blog, but will continue coverage here.
The AP has this report from Brazil, which is on the way to becoming a virus outbreak centre.
Cases of the new coronavirus are overwhelming hospitals, morgues and cemeteries across Brazil as Latin Americas largest nation veers closer to becoming one of the world’s pandemic hot spots.
Medical officials in Rio de Janeiro and at least four other major cities have warned that their hospital systems are on the verge of collapse, or already too overwhelmed to take any more patients.
Health experts expect the number of infections in the country of 211 million people will be much higher than what has been reported because of insufficient, delayed testing.
Meanwhile, President Jair Bolsonaro has shown no sign of wavering from his insistence that Covid-19 is a relatively minor disease and that broad social-distancing measures are not needed to stop it. He has said only Brazilians at high risk should be isolated.
In Manaus, the biggest city in the Amazon, officials said a cemetery has been forced to dig mass graves because there have been so many deaths. Workers have been burying 100 corpses a day, triple the pre-virus average of burials.
Yesterday Donald Trump made those jaw-dropping remarks wondering whether the virus could be treated by injecting bleach. Doctors everywhere were very quick to say people should absolutely not do this.
Today, from New York, Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington has this story:
The leader of the most prominent group in the US peddling potentially lethal industrial bleach as a “miracle cure” for coronavirus wrote to Donald Trump at the White House this week.
In his letter, Mark Grenon told Trump that chlorine dioxide – a powerful bleach used in industrial processes such as textile manufacturing that can have fatal side-effects when drunk – is “a wonderful detox that can kill 99% of the pathogens in the body”. He added that it “can rid the body of Covid-19”.
A few days after Grenon dispatched his letter, Trump went on national TV...
Read more below.
Hi, this Helen Davidson here to take you through the next few hours of updates. Thanks to Kevin Rawlinson and my other colleagues in London for their work.
In Australia and New Zealand it is Anzac Day, the annual day of remembrance for armed forces. With both countries under lockdowns or strict social distancing rules, there was not the usual parades or public dawn services.
Instead, people were encouraged to stand at the ends of their driveways for moments of silence.
New Zealand’s prime minister Jacinda Ardern was one of many thousands of Kiwis who spent at least a minute of their mornings in contemplation by their letterbox.
She issued a message, addressing both the unique nature of the 2020 commemoration and the ways that war have shaped her modern nation.
“While we cannot gather in person, we join in spirit as we remember the service and sacrifice of New Zealanders in times of war and crisis,” she said.
“Many New Zealanders have been affected by war or know somebody who has.
“Returned and current service personnel, friends and families of the fallen, New Zealanders who have come to start a new life here as refugees - through Anzac Day we are all connected.”
At the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, prime minister Scott Morrison attended a service which was closed to the public but filmed by media.
He reflected on a 1919 gathering in Gallipoli.
“A small group of Anzacs who’d been arranging and tending the graves of their mates gathered and there was no pomp at that little service, there were no dignitaries, no band, just the sound of lapping water on the lonely shore,” he said.
“One said of that little service, ‘It was the real thing’.
“And so our remembrances today, small, quiet and homely will be.”
Reuters is reporting that China has dispatched a team to North Korea that includes medical experts to advise on the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. The news agency cites three people familiar with the situation.
The trip by the Chinese doctors and officials comes amid conflicting reports about the health of the North Korean leader. There was no indication of what, if anything, it signalled in terms of Kim’s health.
Downing Street has issued a second response to the Guardian’s report that Boris Johnson’s top political adviser, Dominic Cummings, is on the secret scientific group advising the government on the pandemic.
It is not true that Mr Cummings or Dr Warner are ‘on’ or members of Sage. Mr Cummings and Dr Warner have attended some Sage meetings and listen to some meetings now they are all virtual.
They do this in order to understand better the scientific debates concerning this emergency and also to understand better the limits of how science and data can help government decisions.
Occasionally, they ask questions or offer help when scientists mention problems in Whitehall. Others also listen to meetings without being ‘on’ or ‘a member of’ Sage.
Sage provides independent scientific advice to the government. Political advisers have no role in this.
The scientists on Sage are among the most eminent in their fields. It is factually wrong and damaging to sensible public debate to imply their advice is affected by government advisers listening to discussions.
The prime minister wants his advisers to understand the scientific debates around Covid as well as they can for obvious reasons.
From the start, the government has tried hard to integrate scientific advice into its decision-making in a sensible way. It will continue to do so.
Public confidence in the media has collapsed during this emergency partly because of ludicrous stories such as this.
You can read the full story here:
The US defence secretary, Mark Esper, will “thoroughly review” the Navy’s preliminary inquiry into a coronavirus outbreak aboard the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt and then meet with Navy leadership to discuss the next steps, the Pentagon said on Friday.
The Pentagon said Esper had received a verbal update from the acting navy secretary and chief of naval operations.
After the secretary receives a written copy of the completed inquiry, he intends to thoroughly review the report and will meet again with navy leadership to discuss next steps.
US officials have told Reuters that, during the Friday meeting, the navy recommended reinstating the fired captain of the coronavirus-stricken carrier, whose crew hailed him as a hero willing to risk his job to safeguard his sailors.
A French court has rejected Amazon’s appeal against a ruling that restricts what it can deliver during the pandemic, handing a victory to unions that criticised the firm’s safety measures.
Amazon must limit deliveries in France to IT products, health items, food and pet food, the court of appeal has said, upholding a previous order for the firm to curtail shipments while it improves its health protocols.
US navy leaders have recommended the reinstatement of the commander of the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt, who was fired after he pleaded for help with a coronavirus outbreak onboard.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, officials have told the Reuters news agency the recommendation to reinstate Captain Brett Crozier was made during a meeting on Friday between the US defence secretary, Mark Esper, and navy leaders.
The decision is pending Esper’s approval, the officials said.
US authorities warn doctors against prescribing hydroxychloroquine
The US Food and Drug Administration has warned doctors against prescribing the malaria drug Donald Trump has been touting, citing reports of sometimes fatal heart side effects among patients.
From the Associated Press:
The warning comes as doctors at a New York hospital published a report that heart rhythm abnormalities developed in most of 84 coronavirus patients treated with hydroxychloroquine and the antibiotic azithromycin, a combo Trump has promoted. Both drugs are known to sometimes alter the heartbeat in dangerous ways, and their safety or ability to help people with COVID-19 is unknown.
The warning excludes in hospital and research studies. A National Institutes of Health experts panel earlier this week also recommended against taking that drug combo except in a formal study.
Responding to the news that the prime minister’s chief political adviser is part of SAGE – the secret scientific group advising the government, the shadow health secretary Jonathan Ashworth, has said:
These are very serious revelations and raise significant questions about the credibility of decisions being taken by the government on the coronavirus.
Dominic Cummings has no place on the government’s scientific advisory group on the coronavirus.
He is a political adviser, not a medical or scientific expert. If the public are to have confidence in the SAGE, the government must make clear Dominic Cummings can no longer participate or attend.
We also need full transparency on who is attending meeting of SAGE and what is being discussed.
Air France will receive a €7bn (£6.1bn) loan package backed by the French government to avert a cash crisis brought on by the pandemic, the country’s finance minister Bruno Le Maire has announced.
France will issue €3bn in direct loans and guarantees on another €4bn in bank lending to the carrier, part of airline group Air France-KLM, Le Maire said.
“Air France’s planes are grounded, so we need to support Air France,” the minister said on TF1 television, adding that the aid would carry conditions requiring the group to “become the most environmentally friendly airline on the planet”.
The French state is also preparing to back about €5bn in loans to the car manufacturer Renault, Le Maire said.
Summary
Global confirmed death toll passes 190,000
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University say at least 193,042 people have died since the outbreak began, while at least 2.7m have been infected. The figures are likely to significantly underestimate the true scale of the pandemic due to suspected under-reporting and differing testing regimes.
UK records 684 more hospital deaths
The Department for Health and Social Care reports 684 more deaths in UK hospitals, bringing the death toll to 19,506. Friday’s update also shows an increase of 5,386 confirmed cases, bringing the UK total to at least 143,464.
Recoveries outstrip infections in Spain
Authorities in Spain, which has seen the second largest number of confirmed cases in the world, point out that more people are being diagnosed as cured than are falling sick for the first time since the beginning of the outbreak.
On Friday, there were 2,796 new infections confirmed while 3,105 overcame the infection. “With all the effort that we have done, the evolution of the epidemic is obviously beginning to be where it should be,” said Fernando Simón, the ministry’s health emergency centre coordinator.
Italy to ease lockdown, local media report
Newspapers in Italy are reporting that the country’s lockdown, the longest and toughest in Europe, is to be eased over the next four weeks. There has been no official confirmation, however.
Saudi Arabia extends Yemen ceasefire
Saudi Arabia says it is extending a unilateral ceasefire in Yemen by one month to support efforts to contain the epidemic there. The announcement comes after a two-week ceasefire expired on Thursday. The ceasefire was by the Saudi-led coalition waging war on the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group that had seized control of parts of the country.
UK ministers were warned of pandemic risks last year
Government ministers were warned last year that the UK must have a robust plan to deal with a pandemic virus and its potentially catastrophic social and economic consequences, the Guardian reveals.
A confidential 600-page Cabinet Office document warned that even a mild pandemic could cost tens of thousands of lives, and set out the must-have “capability requirements” to mitigate the risks to the country, as well as the potential damage of not doing so.
Don’t ease lockdown yet, says German public health body
The Robert Koch Institute warns against further loosening restrictions. Its vice-president, Lars Schaade, says the situation is too fragile to allow more relaxation after small shops were allowed to reopen this week and some pupils returned to school.
Schaade says Germany should only consider further relaxation if the confirmed cases fall to a few hundred per day. There are typically more than 2,000.
WHO launches effort for €7.5bn fund
The World Health Organization announces a multibillion-euro “call to action” for a global response to the pandemic. The programme and its €7.5bn (£6.5bn) fundraising effort will be officially launched on 4 May.
Sweden reports its greatest number of new cases yet
Sweden reports 812 new confirmed cases, the highest such number since the outbreak began. That brings the total number of infections in the country to 17,567. It also reports 131 new deaths, taking the total death toll there to at least 2,152, according to data published by its public health authority.
Philippines pass 7,000 cases
Confirmed cases in the Philippines rise to more than 7,000, as the country’s health ministry announces 211 new infections. The ministry reported 15 additional deaths and 40 more recoveries. It brought the total cases to 7,192, deaths to 477 and recoveries to 762.
Brexit mastermind on UK Covid-19 science committee
The UK prime minister’s chief political adviser, Dominic Cummings, and a data scientist he worked with on the Vote Leave campaign for Brexit are on the secret scientific group advising the government on the coronavirus pandemic, according to a list leaked to the Guardian.
It reveals both Cummings and Ben Warner were among 23 attendees present at a crucial convening of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage) on 23 March, the day Boris Johnson announced a nationwide lockdown in a televised address.
Multiple attendees of Sage told the Guardian that both Cummings and Warner had been taking part in meetings of the group as far back as February. The inclusion of Downing Street advisers on Sage will raise questions about the independence of its scientific advice.
There has been growing pressure on Downing Street in recent days to disclose more details about the group, which provides scientific advice to the upper echelons of government during emergencies. Both the membership of Sage and its advice to ministers on the Covid-19 outbreak is being kept secret.
The government’s former chief scientific adviser Sir David King said he was “shocked” to discover there were political advisers on Sage. “If you are giving science advice, your advice should be free of any political bias,” he said. “That is just so critically important.”
Told that Cummings was in the 23 March meeting, King replied: “Oh my goodness. Isn’t this maybe why they don’t want us to know who was there?”
Deaths from the Covid-19 epidemic in Italy climbed by 420 on Friday, the smallest daily tally since 19 March, the Civil Protection Agency said, but the number of new infections rose to 3,021 from 2,646 on Thursday, Reuters reports.
Friday’s death toll was down from 464 the day before.
The total of fatalities since the outbreak came to light on 21 February now stands at 25,969, the agency said, the second highest in the world after that of the US.
The number of confirmed cases was 192,994, the third highest global tally behind those of the United States and Spain.
The New York Times admits it has abandoned its commitment to giving both sides of the story when it comes to Donald Trump’s suggestion that injecting disinfectant might help treat coronavirus.
We've deleted an earlier tweet and updated a sentence in our article that implied that only "some experts" view the ingestion of household disinfectants as dangerous. To be clear, there is no debate on the danger.
— The New York Times (@nytimes) April 24, 2020
According to Jim Acosta, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, the president has since clarified that his remark was sarcastic.
Trump doing clean-up on disinfectant comments: "That was done in the form of a sarcastic question to the reporters."
— Jim Acosta (@Acosta) April 24, 2020
US Covid-19 deaths pass 50,000
The US Covid-19 death toll, the highest in the world, topped 50,000 on Friday, having doubled in 10 days, according to a Reuters tally, and the number of Americans known to be infected surpassed 875,000.
The milestone came as New York, so far the country’s worst-affected state, reported its lowest number of daily coronavirus deaths in weeks on Friday.
The state reported 422 deaths as of Thursday. That’s the fewest since 31 March, when it recorded 391 deaths, the Associated Press reports. More than 16,000 people have died in the state from the outbreak.
Updated
We spend a lot of time on this blog posting death tolls, infection rates and other coronavirus-related statistics. But how useful is comparing these statistics?
A team of Guardian reporters have set out to answer that question.
Two hundred people have defied a police ban to gather in Vienna to protest against Austria’s coronavirus lockdown, Reuters reports.
The protest’s organisers, the Initiative for Evidence-Based Corona Information (ICI), want the lockdown ended and argue, among other things, that wearing face masks and fabric equivalents that are compulsory in shops and on public transport is counter-productive.
The protesters assembled on a square behind the Vienna State Opera on Friday afternoon, chanting slogans including “We are the people” and “Kurz must go”, referring to the conservative chancellor, Sebastian Kurz.
After looking on for an hour, police dispersed the crowd, checking the identities of those who stayed. There was one arrest, a spokesman said.
ICI urged people to respect the ban on Friday’s event but said it would register “a new, bigger demo” for a week’s time.
It is more than a month since the Austrian government shut bars, restaurants, schools and non-essential shops, although it allowed some shops to reopen last week in a first easing of the curbs.
Since the measures were introduced, Austria’s daily increase in infections has fallen to less than 2%. The country has reported 530 coronavirus-related deaths so far, fewer than some larger countries have reported daily.
Updated
The Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, the African Union’s health body, has released its latest continent-wide coronavirus statistics.
#COVID19 - UPDATE BY COUNTRY/REGION IN AFRICA
— Africa CDC (@AfricaCDC) April 24, 2020
(24 APRIL 2020, 6 PM EAT)
52 African Union Member States reporting 27.862 #COVID19 cases, 1.304 deaths & 7.633 recoveries.
Visit the @AfricaCDC dashboard https://t.co/teDFU1XFLZ for regular update.#FactsNotFear #AfricaResponds pic.twitter.com/VWptnSuiwp
Updated
Singapore’s ministry of health has reported 897 new cases of coronavirus, taking the national total above 12,000 but ending a four-day streak of more than 1,000 new cases detected per day.
Again the overwhelming majority - 853 - of the new cases were detected among migrant workers who live in foreign worker dormitories, while just 25 were in Singapore’s other communities.
Twelve people have died from coronavirus in Singapore.
As of 24 Apr, 12pm, we have confirmed and verified an additional 897 cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore. Breakdown: 0 imported, 25 cases in the community, 19 Work Permit holders residing outside dorms & 853 Work Permit holders residing in dorms. https://t.co/JN5DgB9IML
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 24, 2020
Of the new cases, 68% are linked to known clusters, while the rest are pending contact tracing. Read more: https://t.co/JN5DgB9IML
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 24, 2020
As of 24 Apr, 12pm, 38 more cases of COVID-19 infection have been discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities. In all, 956 have fully recovered As of 24 Apr, 12pm, the infection and have been discharged. Read more: https://t.co/JN5DgB9IML
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 24, 2020
There are currently 1,229 confirmed cases who are still in hospital. Of these, most are stable or improving, and 24 are in critical condition in the intensive care unit. Read more: https://t.co/JN5DgB9IML
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 24, 2020
Updated
Ecuador’s confirmed coronavirus cases reached 22,719 after health authorities released the results of a batch of tests that had been backed up, Interior Minister Maria Paul Romo said on Friday, according to Reuters.
He identifies as a leftist and rails constantly against neoliberalism. But Mexico’s president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has introduced austerity measures so severe that his critics have compared him to Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, writes David Agren in Mexico City.
This week, the president, popularly known as Amlo, unveiled more cuts in response to the Covid-19 crisis, including the abolition of 10 government departments, a hiring freeze and a 25% cut in government salaries.
He also eliminated Christmas bonuses.
“Reagan, Thatcher and now Amlo. This is how it will go down in history – along with all the human suffering that austerity will cause,” tweeted Ricardo Fuentes Nieva, executive director of Oxfam Mexico.
Despite the cuts, the president promised to plough ahead with a suite of mega-projects including a huge oil refinery in his home state of Tabasco, a pair of railways and an airport north of Mexico City.
Confirmed cases of Covid-19 increased by 3,122 in Turkey, and 109 more people have died, taking the death toll to 2,600, according to figures published by the health ministry on Friday.
The total number of cases in the country is now at 104,912, the data showed.
A total of 21,737 people have so far recovered. The number of tests carried out in the past 24 hours was 38,351.
António Guterres joined leaders from the European Union and beyond on Friday to ensure all countries receive the tools to fight the coronavirus outbreak.
Speaking during a virtual WHO launch event, Guterres said treatments and vaccines should belong to the whole world, not to individual countries or regions.
Not a vaccine or treatments for one country or one region or one-half of the world, but a vaccine and treatment that is affordable, safe, effective, easily administered and universally available for everyone, everywhere.
The early easing of lockdowns in Ghana and Burkina Faso this week has revealed differing views in West Africa on the most effective application of lockdowns, in response to outbreaks of Covid-19, writes Emmanuel Akinwotu, the Guardian’s West Africa correspondent.
In many countries in the region, lockdowns have been imposed early on entire cities. But it has sparked outcry amongst the poorest. Lockdowns on economic activity have weighed heavily on large populations reliant on daily wages, in informal labour.
Many countries have not clearly spelled-out what conditions will determine whether lockdowns can ease, fuelling uncertainty and worry.
In Ghana, an unexpected decision to ease its lockdown has seen schools, places of worship, restaurants and bars remain closed in Accra and Kumasi. But markets and businesses have been allowed to open with restrictions on movement lifted.
Opposition politicians have led criticisms that easing restrictions while cases are rising - now at 1024 infections according to data released on Tuesday - is premature and could accelerate the spread of the virus.
But Ghana’s information minister told the Guardian that in a country where almost 90% of its workforce was in the informal economy, its lockdown was not to indefinitely shut down activity until cases fall.
A limited lockdown he said bought Ghana time to boost its testing capacity, test widely, assess the nature of its outbreak and prepare its health system.
“We have peculiar local circumstances,” he said. “We decided not to wait but to do a precautionary lockdown early and within that period get mass findings and data to help us,” he said.
Nkrumah said the country has conducted more than 80,000 tests - the most per million in Africa, and could now aggressively trace cases as restrictions eased.
Updated
Coronavirus claimed its seventh fatality in Senegal on Friday, as health officials recorded the West African state’s largest single increase in infections.
In a statement, Senegal’s health ministry announced that a 65-year-old man had succumbed to Covid-19 in the seaside capital Dakar, AFP repots.
Senegalese authorities said the same day that they had recorded 66 new coronavirus cases - out of a total of 545 - in the largest single increase since the pandemic began in the country.
In addition to a night-time curfew, Senegal has closed schools, banned travel between cities and required people to wear a mask in public transport and shops, measures that fall short of a total lockdown
The health minister, Abdoulaye Diouf Sarr, told reporters the news underlined why the government has ordered the “systematic wearing of masks in markets and other public places”.
Updated
Saudi Arabia extends Yemen ceasefire
Saudi Arabia has said it is extending a unilateral ceasefire in Yemen by one month to support efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic in the battle scarred country.
The announcement comes after a two-week ceasefire by the Saudi-led coalition waging war on the Iran-backed Houthi rebel group that had seized control of parts of the country expired on Thursday.
The Houthis, who ousted the internationally recognised Saudi-backed government from power in the capital, Sanaa, in late 2014, had rejected the previous ceasefire. They want a lifting of air and sea blockades imposed by the coalition to the regions they control before agreeing to a ceasefire, sources have told Reuters.
Yemen’s war has been described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis for the third year in a row, the UN refugee agency said on Friday as it called for $89.4m to support displaced people in the country.
UNHCR said that only half of Yemen’s health centres were functional, and more than 24 million people in the country needed humanitarian aid.
Updated
The US has insisted that it is still determined to lead the world on global health matters, despite not taking part the launch on Friday of a World Health Organization initiative to build a coordinated global response to Covid-19.
Donald Trump last week suspended US funding to the WHO, which he accused of being slow and “China-centric.” The US had been the largest single donor to the UN health body.
Despite that, and the US’s absence from Friday’s launch, Reuters quoted the US mission in Geneva as saying there was “no doubt about our continuing determination to lead on global health matters”.
“The pause in U.S. funding to WHO does not limit or redefine our commitment to strong and effective international engagement,” a spokesperson at the mission said.
It was in late February that the world was first alerted to a rapidly spreading outbreak of coronavirus in Italy, the first major western country to face the viral disease.
Italy began testing people after diagnosing its first local patient on 21 February in Codogno, a small town in wealthy Lombardy. Cases and deaths immediately surged.
A study presented on Friday suggests the earliest Covid-19 infections in Italy in fact date back to at least a month earlier.
Stefano Merler, of the Bruno Kessler Foundation, told a news conference with Italy’s top health authorities that his institute had looked at the first known cases and drawn clear conclusions from the subsequent pace of contagion, Reuters reports.
“We realised that there were a lot of infected people in Lombardy well before 20 February, which means the epidemic had started much earlier,” he said.
“In January for sure, but maybe even before. We’ll never know,” he said, adding that he believed the immediate surge in cases suggested the virus was probably brought to Italy by a group of people rather than a single individual.
A separate study based on a sample of cases registered in April said 44.1% of infections occurred in nursing homes and another 24.7% spread within families. A further 10.8% of people caught the virus at hospital and 4.2% in the workplace.
Another team of Italian scientists has said the coronavirus may have reached Italy from Germany, not directly from China, in the second half of January.
Updated
UK reports 684 more deaths from Covid-19 in hospitals
The UK has reported 684 more deaths in hospitals from Covid-19, bringing the total death toll in the country to 19,506, according to a daily report from health authorities.
Friday’s update from the Department of Health and Social Care also showed an increase of 5,386 confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the UK total to 143,464.
As of 9am 24 April, 612,031 tests have concluded, with 28,532 tests on 23 April.
— Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk) April 24, 2020
444,222 people have been tested of which 143,464 tested positive.
As of 5pm on 23 April, of those hospitalised in the UK who tested positive for coronavirus, 19,506 have sadly died. pic.twitter.com/ixQBaugnGh
For more detailed updates from the UK, click below:
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the Netherlands rose by 806 to 36,535, health authorities said on Friday, with 112 new deaths.
The country’s overall death toll is now 4,289, the Netherlands’ Institute for Public Health (RIVM) said. However it emphasised it reports only confirmed cases, and actual numbers are higher.
Separately, statistician Ruben van Gaalen, of the Netherlands’ central bureau of statistics, tweeted data that suggested the country’s real Covid-19 death toll could be somewhere in the region of 7,000.
Bij RIVM gemelde #Covid19 sterfte t/m 24/4 naar overlijdensdatum
— Ruben van Gaalen (CBS) (@rubenivangaalen) April 24, 2020
🔸Pieken: dinsdag 31/3 en donderdag 2/4 (167)
🔸Totaal 4289
🔸Incl. bovengemiddelde sterfte die CBS voor wk 12-16 berekende (+70%) zou dat nu ruim 7000 kunnen zijn
🔸Precieze schattingen 'oversterfte' volgen later pic.twitter.com/FcGoAPXGpD
RIVM’s update added that 123 more patients had been admitted to hospital.
“Not all of the reported hospital admissions or deaths occurred within the last 24 hours,” RIVM said. “Some patients are reported later. For this reason, the figures are often supplemented with data from previous days.”
It added: “The figures for the last few days are in line with the impression that the measures are working. The number of new hospital admissions reported per day is still decreasing. The same applies to the number of reported deaths.”
Updated
Sweden’s top coronavirus official has questioned the scientific basis of other EU countries’ strict coronavirus lockdowns, as Germany said its number of cases needed to fall from about 2,000 to a few hundred a day before it could ease restrictions further, writes Jon Henley, the Guardian’s Europe correspondent.
As several European countries continued to cautiously lift their lockdowns, sending children back to school and reopening some shops and businesses, Sweden’s chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said the original measures looked difficult to justify.
Sweden has favoured civic responsibility over mandatory rules, closing senior high schools and banning gatherings of more than 50 people, but asking rather than ordering people to avoid non-essential travel, work from home and stay indoors if they are over 70 or feeling ill. Shops, restaurants and junior schools have stayed open.
Polls show many Swedes support and are complying with the policy, which has been heavily criticised by some senior members of the country’s scientific community. The country has also recorded 2,150 deaths – giving it a per-million total much lower than Italy’s and Spain’s, but many times higher than those of its Nordic neighbours.
Coronavirus has been detected on particles of air pollution by scientists investigating whether this could enable it to be carried over longer distances and increase the number of people infected, writes Damian Carrington, the Guardian’s environment editor.
The work is preliminary and it is not yet known if the virus remains viable on pollution particles and in sufficient quantity to cause disease.
The Italian scientists used standard techniques to collect outdoor air pollution samples at one urban and one industrial site in Bergamo province and identified a gene highly specific to Covid-19 in multiple samples. The detection was confirmed by blind testing at an independent laboratory.
Leonardo Setti, at the University of Bologna in Italy, who led the work, said it was important to investigate if the virus could be carried more widely by air pollution. He added:
I am a scientist and I am worried when I don’t know. If we know, we can find a solution. But if we don’t know, we can only suffer the consequences.
Updated
Sweden reports its highest number of new cases yet
Sweden reported 812 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, the highest number of new cases yet reported, bringing the total number of infections so far in the country to 17,567.
On Friday, the country also reported 131 new deaths from Covid-19, taking the total death toll in the country to 2,152, according to data published by its public health authority.
So far, 1,256 patients have had cases serious enough for them to be treated in intensive care.
Updated
This is Damien Gayle taking back the controls on the blog now, with thanks to my colleague Simon Murphy for keeping you updated while I had my lunch.
If you want to contact me with comments, tips or suggestions send an email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or you can message me via my Twitter profile, @damiengayle.
The Dutch National Ballet may have cancelled all of its stage shows until June but for some of its performers the lockdown has not stopped them dancing.
Six of its dancers headed out this week on to the deserted streets of Amsterdam to film parts in a piece of choreography inspired by the Covid-19 lockdown.
Footage of the solo dances, featuring performances in front of landmarks including the Amstel Hotel and the Eye film museum, will be edited together into a film titled Gently Quiet that will be streamed online by early May, the National Ballet said, according to a Reuters report.
“I like this project as we can show what we want to do and what we are waiting for to do again,” 25-year old dancer Yvonne Slingerland, who performed her piece beside the Amstel river, said on Friday.
Even if we are in this weird situation we are still moving and we are still trying to get to the audience. I think art right now is really important for everyone.”
Bars, restaurants, museums and other public places have been shut in the Netherlands since 15 March in an attempt to limit the spread of coronavirus. The National Ballet has cancelled all its performances until 1 June and stopped its dancers from rehearsing together, with many resorting to practicing at home.
“This is our way of bringing a poetic production, despite not being able to work together in our studio or to perform in front of an audience,” National Ballet spokesman Richard Heideman said.
Updated
WHO launches effort for €7.5bn coronavirus fund
The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced a multibillion-pound “call to action” for a global response to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The programme and its €7.5bn (£6.5bn) fundraising effort will be officially launched on 4 May.
WHO director general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said the Access to Covid Tools (ACT) Accelerator programme would call on international experts and governments to unite and speed up access to safe, affordable and universally available vaccines and therapeutics.
Tedros said:
“Past experience has taught us that even when tools are available, they have been not been equally available to all - but we cannot allow that to happen.
Today, the WHO is proud to be uniting with many partners to launch the Access to Covid Tools Accelerator.
The virtual conference also heard all new vaccines, diagnostics and treatments against coronavirus must be made equally available to everyone worldwide.
The WHO call comes as it launches a “landmark collaboration” to speed the development of effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent and treat Covid-19, with Tedros warning the disease is a “common threat which we can only defeat with a common approach”. He said:
Experience has told us that even when tools are available they have not been equally available to all. We cannot allow that to happen.”
European commission president Ursula von der Leyen also told the virtual conference that the effort to raise €7.5bn was to ramp up work on prevention, diagnostics and treatment. “This is a first step only, but more will be needed in the future,” she said.
Updated
More from France where it has been announced that millions of washable face masks will be provided to the public from next month. The government move is the latest development in a row over its apparent flip-flopping over the value of masks in protecting people from Covid-19 infection.
More than 10m textile masks were produced by domestic and international plants last week and output should reach 25m by the end of April, Junior finance minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher told financial daily Les Echos. From 4 May, the masks will be sold to the public, likely via pharmacies, supermarkets and online.
The French government has been hit by criticism from medical specialists and opposition politicians for repeatedly shifting its position on whether, when and where citizens should wear masks in public to limit the spread of the disease.
In a video call with French mayors on Thursday, President Emmanuel Macron indicated that mask wearing for the public would only be recommended, and probably made mandatory in public transport, once the lockdown is lifted.
Updated
The Czech Republic today opened its borders for outbound foreign travel in a sudden U-turn after official figures showed a decline in the incidence of Covid-19 infections.
The move, announced by the health minister ,Adam Vojtěch, represented a surprise change of course for the country, which had been among the first in Europe to close its borders on 16 March. Officials had insisted until recent days that travel restrictions would remain for the foreseeable future, with the country’s president, Milos Zeman, suggesting last weekend that frontiers should stay closed for the next year.
However, Vojtěch heralded a dramatic reversal in a late-night press conference on Thursday but indicated the onus would be on travellers to prove they were uninfected on their return.
“Upon return, travellers will either have to present confirmation of a negative test for coronavirus, or be forced to spend 14 days in quarantine,” he said. Commuters would also be able to cross the borders daily if they presented a negative test for coronavirus every 14 days, Vojtěch added, a move that will affect a relatively small number of people who live in the Czech Republic but work in a neighbouring country, or vice versa.
In a further development, the deputy health minister, Roman Prymula, announced that mandatory face mask-wearing – credited by officials with containing the virus’s spread – would stay until at least the end of June. Restrictions are also being lifted on movement within the country, with groups of up to 10 people now permitted to gather. Previous rules limited outdoor gatherings to two.
The move follows growing public pressure for an easing of emergency measures. But there was criticism that the announcement sowed confusion, with no immediate announcement on when foreign visitors would be allowed to re-enter, which would help Prague’s beleaguered tourist economy.
The announcement came hours after the government had accelerated its timetable for reopening the economy following pressure from Czech trading lobbies. Restaurants and pubs will be allowed to fully reopen on 25 May, two weeks earlier than initially planned in a five-phase restart plan announced last week. Zoos will be allowed to reopen from Monday, a month earlier than planned.
The relaxations came after Prague’s municipal court on Thursday ruled the government’s restrictions unlawful.
Officials have hailed better-than-expected results from the anti-coronavirus clampdown. The health ministry confirmed the number of infections at 7,188 on Friday, with 55 new Covid-19 positive tests recorded the previous day – the lowest number since 14 March. There have been 213 deaths.
Updated
France will decide at the end of next month when it will allow bars and restaurants to reopen, the country’s finance minister says, as the government prepares to ease some coronavirus lockdown measures from 11 May.
Bars and restaurants in France have been shut for five weeks already but the government is warning against the risk of a premature reopening. Finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on Friday:
Nothing would be worse than to make a hasty reopening which would then force us to close again. It would be a huge disappointment for the restaurant owners, a huge disappointment for French people as well.”
From 11 May, children will begin returning to school, but this will be organised in stages and classes will be much smaller in order to reduce infection risks.
Updated
The World Health Organization has been working with thousands of researchers across the world since January in a bid to fast-track a development of a vaccine, its director general says, as he announces the launch of a new scheme to help achieve the goal.
WHO’s Tedros Adhanom says the organisation is uniting with partners to launch the “Access to #COVID19 Tools Accelerator, or the ACT Accelerator”.
The “landmark collaboration” will accelerate the development, production and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for Covid-19, he says.
"Since January, WHO has been working with thousands of researchers all over the world to accelerate and track vaccine development - from developing animal models to clinical trial designs, and everything in between"-@DrTedros #COVID19
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) April 24, 2020
Updated
Hello folks, it’s Simon Murphy here taking over the global live blog while my colleague Damien Gayle takes a break.
Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary general, and Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, are due to launch a “landmark collaboration to accelerate the development, production and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for Covid-19.”
According to the WHO, the aim of the collaboration is to make vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for Covid-19 accessible to everyone who needs them, worldwide.
They are due to begin speaking in just a few minutes, and you can watch for yourself, live, in the player embedded at the top of the blog.
Join world leaders at the virtual launch of a landmark collaboration to accelerate the development, production and equitable distribution of vaccines, diagnostics, and therapeutics for #COVID19.
— World Health Organization (WHO) (@WHO) April 24, 2020
📺13:00 GMT/15:00 CEST @WHO: Access to COVID-19 Tools (ACT) accelerator
Updated
Don't ease lockdown yet, says Germany public health body
Germany’s leading public health body, the Robert Koch Institute, has warned against further loosening restrictions introduced to slow down the spread of coronavirus, writes Kate Connolly, the Guardian’s Berlin correspondent.
Lars Schaade, its vice president, said at the RKI’s twice-weekly briefing the situation was too fragile to allow more relaxation, after small shops were allowed to reopen this week and some pupils returned to school, following a month of strict lockdown measures.
Schaade said only if the confirmed cases fell to a few hundred, should Germany consider further relaxation. Currently there are typically more than 2,000 new infections every day.
According to the RKI, Germany has 150,383 confirmed cases, a rise of 2,337 from Thursday, and 5,321 people have died from the virus.
But due to a delay in the central collation of figures, the real number of cases is said by reliable health watchers gathering statistics on the Länder level, to be more than 3,000 higher, and the number of deaths just under 300 more than the RKI’s figures.
The current reproduction rate in Germany is 0.9 - which means every person with the infection is passing it on to one other person. This is up from 0.7 a week ago, but virologists consider one and under to be good.
Schaade said keeping the restrictions was necessary because in order to be able to keep the disease under control, health authorities around the country have to be in a position to be able to identify each case and trace their contacts, to place them in immediate isolation. If the number of new infections grows too quickly, the tracking and tracing process becomes too unwieldy a task, and the situation could quickly get out of control, he said.
He said unlike in Italy, France and Spain, there was so far no evidence of excess mortality in Germany - that is, a death rate higher than the usual average death rate for this time of year. This was, he said, due to the fact that Germany was able to tackle the illness early on, largely through testing, and dampen its spread, and therefore treated many coronavirus cases effectively, without lessening hospitals’ ability to treat other illnesses.
Referring to the pressure being placed on authorities to relax measures, which he advised against strongly, Schaade said:
It is a paradox, that due to the success of the measures that have been taken ... these very measures are now being called into question.
That Germany has come through this epidemic comparatively well so far, is thanks to the measures we have taken. The number of cases has stayed at a level with which the health system has been able to cope, and it must stay that way. We cannot afford to become lax. With respect to the first relaxation of measures, this must not be allowed to lead to a landslide of other subsequent easing that could have serious consequences.”
He said quite simply, that more contact would automatically lead to more infections “and when there are more infections a dynamic will develop again very quickly with rising infection rates which in the worst case, could bring us to a point where the epidemic is no longer manageable.
In short, Schaade said, his “emphatic plea” was for people to stick to the recommendations:
Stay at home, stay away from others, keep the 1.5 metre - or even better 2 metre distance, keep to the coughing and sneezing rules, and on public transport or shops, wear mouth-nose cover to protect others.
He recognised, he said, that “many people are running out of strength, and many are suffering from existential angst. Believe me, I’d like nothing more than to tell you it’s over...but unfortunately it’s not over.”
While social distancing and national lockdowns have been credited with slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic, governments and experts have said the only permanent way out is through a vaccine.
Vaccine development usually takes years, meaning that teams around the world are considering a range of risks and shortcuts to bring one to market in a much shorter time. Hannah Devlin, the Guardian’s science correspondent, has looked at four different approaches being taken by research teams around the world, ranging from classic weakened viruses, to genetically modified forms, to revolutionary approaches using DNA and RNA.
But, as she writes, there is a chance none of them will work, or that they may have serious unintended side-effects.
Updated
Italy "to ease lockdown", local media reports
Newspapers in Italy are reporting that the country’s coronavirus lockdown, the longest and toughest in Europe, is to be eased over the next four weeks. However, there has been no official confirmation, AFP reports.
The Covd-19 pandemic has killed at least 25,500 people in Italy, the world’s second highest death toll.
“The next four Mondays will mark the country’s reopening” following the lockdown implemented last month to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, the Corriere della Sera daily reported.
“Everything depends on the infection curve,” the best-selling daily said, but if it doesn’t rise again “factories making agricultural and forestry equipment can reopen on (Monday) 27 April.”
Building sites as well as the textile and fashion industry can restart on 4 May, followed a week later by clothing, shoe and other shops. Finally, bars, restaurants and hairdressers can reopen on 18 May, the paper said.
Other Italian media said that bars and restaurants could reopen some time “in the second half of May”.
Italy’s national lockdown is the longest in force anywhere in the world. Its stay-at-home orders – introduced on 9 March – have since been replicated by other European nations. The government ordered all shops except for pharmacies and grocery stores to close on 12 March.
Updated
Human Rights Watch has accused security forces in Rwanda of arbitrarily arresting scores of people and imprisoning them in stadiums while enforcing coronavirus lockdown measures in the country.
Among those detained were journalists and bloggers trying to expose abuse, including reports of killings, rapes and other serious crimes by soldiers, the NGO said, as it called for the government to investigate the alleged abuses.
Lewis Mudge, central Africa director at Human Rights Watch, said:
Government directives to prevent the spread of Covid-19 do not give security forces carte blanche to ignore rule of law and commit abuses against the population while locking up those trying to expose them.
The Rwandan authorities should end these unlawful practices immediately, transparently investigate those responsible, and bring officers involved in violations and who have committed crimes to justice.
The lockdown in Rwanda, which has so far reported 154 cases of coronavirus, 87 recoveries and no deaths, was extended last week until the end of the month.
#Rwandan police have arbitrarily arrested scores of people, among them journalists and bloggers, since directives to prevent the spread of #Covid_19 came into force on March 22, @hrw reports https://t.co/fPbR4FdyDZ pic.twitter.com/gR0CTe3oqf
— Birgit Schwarz (@BirgitMSchwarz) April 24, 2020
Updated
Covid-19 recoveries outstrip infections in Spain
Authorities in Spain have pointed out that for the first time since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak more people are being diagnosed as cured than those falling sick, the Associated Press reports.
On Friday, there were 2,796 new infections confirmed while 3,105 overcame the infection. “With all the effort that we have done, the evolution of the epidemic is obviously beginning to be where it should be,” said Fernando Simón, the ministry’s health emergency centre coordinator.
On Friday, Spain recorded 367 new deaths of patients with the coronavirus, raising the total death toll to 22,524, as the government considered how to end a strict confinement that has extended for more than 40 days.
Health officials from Spain’s 17 regions and the central government were to meet later on Friday with proposals on how to roll back the six-week lockdown. Authorities have said that future steps will be incremental and depend on how regions meet certain health criteria.
Updated
The UN’s human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, has criticised countries for using the coronavirus crisis as an excuse to attack independent journalists, saying “credible, accurate reporting is a lifeline for all of us”.
In a statement on Friday, Bachelet pointed to data from the International Press Institute showing there have been nearly 40 journalists arrested around the world for reports critical of states’ responses to the pandemic or for questioning the accuracy of official numbers of cases and deaths. She said:
Some states have used the outbreak of the new coronavirus as a pretext to restrict information and stifle criticism. A free media is always essential, but we have never depended on it more than we do during this pandemic, when so many people are isolated and fearing for their health and livelihoods. Credible, accurate reporting is a lifeline for all of us.
This is no time to blame the messenger. Rather than threatening journalists or stifling criticism, States should encourage healthy debate concerning the pandemic and its consequences. People have a right to participate in decision-making that affects their lives, and an independent media is a vital medium for this.
Being open and transparent, and involving those affected in decision-making builds public trust and helps ensure that people participate in measures designed to protect their own health and that of the wider population and increases accountability.
According to an AFP report, rights office spokesman Rupert Colville pointed to, among others, US president Donald Trump, who has been known to make direct attacks on journalists during his press briefings.
“That’s a worrying trend, when you’re talking about mainstream, serious media organisations under fire,” Colville said during a virtual press briefing.
UN Human Rights Chief is alarmed at the hostile environment some political leaders have created towards the media: free flow of information about #COVID19 is vital.
— UN Human Rights (@UNHumanRights) April 24, 2020
"Credible, accurate reporting is a lifeline for us all" – @mbachelet.
👉 https://t.co/KJ46am1lpl pic.twitter.com/W2lxIFUhpn
Updated
Authorities in France have banned online sales of nicotine substitutes, and limited their sale in shops, to avoid stockpiling after research suggested the drug could stop people contracting coronavirus.
Until 11 May, when the country’s lockdown is planned to gradually begin lifting, pharmacies will only be able to sell a maximum of one month’s worth of products treating nicotine dependence, such as patches, chewing gum or lozenges, AFP reports.
The move was to “firstly prevent the health risks from excessive consumption or misuse linked to media coverage of the possible protective effect of nicotine against COVID-19,” the government said in a statement.
“Secondly it guarantees continuous and appropriate supply to people requiring medical support to stop smoking.”
It comes after a study at a major Paris hospital suggested a substance in tobacco – possibly nicotine – may be stopping patients who smoke from catching Covid-19. Clinical trials of nicotine patches are awaiting the approval of the country’s health authorities.
The team at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital questioned 480 patients who tested positive for the virus, 350 of whom were hospitalised while the rest with less serious symptoms were allowed home.
It found that of those admitted to hospital, whose median age was 65, only 4.4% were regular smokers. Among those released home, with a median age of 44, 5.3% smoked.
French health minister Olivier Veran on Friday urged citizens not to rush out and buy nicotine products, telling France Inter radio that there are 70,000 deaths due to tobacco each year in France. But he called the research “interesting” and said that products similar to nicotine could be developed that could help avoid its “addictive effects”.
Updated
Coronavirus cases in the Philippines pass 7,000
Confirmed cases of coronavirus in the Philippines have rose to more than 7,000 on Friday, after the country’s health ministry reported 211 new infections, Reuters reports.
In a bulletin, the ministry reported 15 additional deaths and 40 more recoveries. It brought the total cases to 7,192, deaths to 477 and recoveries to 762.
President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday extended a strict lockdown in the capital Manila - where more than two thirds of deaths have been reported - until 15 May to try to contain coronavirus infections, but will ease restrictions in lower-risk regions.
Summary
Ramadan begins with new coronavirus measures
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Friday, with some countries easing restrictions and others tightening them. Egypt is set to ease its coronavirus lockdown for the holy fasting month of Ramadan by allowing more businesses to reopen and shortening a night-time curfew. The United Arab Emirates has shortened a nationwide coronavirus curfew by two hours to now run daily from 10pm-6am (instead of from 8pm).
Doctors condemn Trump’s ‘disinfectant’ virus theory
Medical experts have widely condemned Donald Trump’s musings at the latest White House briefing about whether disinfectant and UV rays could be used on people to fight the virus.
US may extend social distancing until summer
Trump also said he might extend federal social distancing guidelines to the summer. It came as Congress approved a $484bn coronavirus relief package, taking to nearly $3tn the money pledged so far. Also in the US, the Democratic senator, Elizabeth Warren, has revealed her older brother has died after contracting Covid-19.
Russia: 5,849 new cases and 60 new deaths in 24 hours
Russia on Friday reported 5,849 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, pushing its nationwide tally to 68,622.
Sixty people with the virus died overnight, pushing the death toll to 615, Russia’s official crisis response centre said.
New deaths in Spain at lowest level in more than a month
The number of coronavirus deaths in Spain has fallen to its lowest level in more than a month, with 367 new deaths reported on Friday, Reuters reports. The latest update took total fatalities to 22,524 from 22,157 the day before, the health ministry said. The overall number of coronavirus cases rose to 219,764 from 213,024 the day before.
No deaths in South Korea in last 24 hours
South Korea reported just six more cases of Covid-19 compared with 24 hours ago as of midnight on Friday local time, raising the total number of infections to 10,708. There were no deaths in the last 24 for the first time since 16 March – a full 39 days. The death toll is now at 240; the total fatality rate is 2.24%.
China reports low numbers of new cases again
China has published its daily coronavirus figures, reporting just 6 new cases and no new deaths.
Macron to release lockdown exit plan early next week
French president Emmanuel Macron says the government is aiming to release its detailed end of lockdown plan “probably on Tuesday”. Speaking to a group of mayors by video-conference on Friday, the president said managing the return to normal life was a “logistical and organisational challenge”.
The company that makes Dettol has issued a warning against consuming or injecting disinfectants, after Donald Trump, the US president, suggested it would “interesting to check” whether doing so could help cure patients of coronavirus.
During his latest press conference, Mr Trump said researchers were looking at the effects of disinfectants on Covid-19. Wondering aloud if they could be injected into people, he added the virus “does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that”.
But hours later, disinfectant manufacturer RB, the company behind the Dettol and Lysol brands, issued a statement urging people not to try the method. It said:
Due to recent speculation and social media activity, RB has been asked whether internal administration of disinfectants may be appropriate for investigation or use as a treatment for coronavirus.
As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route).
It added that all its products should only be used as intended and according to usage guidelines.
In response to the Mr Trump’s comments, William Bryan, of the US department of homeland security’s science and technology unit, said health officials were not considering such treatment.
New deaths in Spain at lowest level in more than a month
The number of coronavirus deaths in Spain has fallen to its lowest level in more than a month, with 367 new deaths reported on Friday, Reuters reports.
The latest update took total fatalities to 22,524 from 22,157 the day before, the health ministry said.
The overall number of coronavirus cases rose to 219,764 from 213,024 the day before.
This is Damien Gayle taking over the controls on the live blog now, for the next eight or so hours, with all the latest updates in coronavirus-related world news.
If you want to get in touch with any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage, please send me an email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or a Twitter direct message to @damiengayle.
Iran: reports 1168 new cases, 93 new deaths in last 24 hours
Iran has reported 1,168 new cases of coronavirus in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of infections to 88,194. There have been 93 new deaths in the last 24 hours, bringing the total number of deaths to 5,574.
Updated
Taliban rejects pleas for a ceasefire
The Taliban have rejected appeals for a ceasefire from Afghanistan’s president, as the country records its biggest daily rise in new coronavirus cases, reports my colleague Akhtar Mohammad Makoii.
The country recorded 95 new cases, bringing the overall total to 1,330. It recorded two new deaths, bringing the overall number of deaths to 43.
President Ashraf Ghani, speaking on the eve of Ramadan, asked the Taliban to declare a ceasefire during Ramadan as the nation continues its struggle with coronavirus.
Ghani said coronavirus is now “spread all over the country” and urged the Taliban to answer a call for peace and a ceasefire and to “stop the violence”.
But the Taliban refused to announce a ceasefire. The group’s spokesman Suhail Shaeen said they had a framework of a peace deal with the US and “if it is implemented (fully), it will take us to a lasting peace and ceasefire” .
Meanwhile, the Taliban continued their attacks across the country. Local media reported that at least 13 local forces were killed in western Badghis province over night.
Afghanistan’s health ministry has said the ministry is concerned about the spread of coronavirus in war zones. A spokesman said the country is fighting both terror and coronavirus: “You won’t find any country like us, war is our biggest challenge in order to fight with coronavirus.”
Updated
No deaths in South Korea in last 24 hours
More positive news out of South Korea. The country reported just six more cases of Covid-19 compared with 24 hours ago as of midnight on Friday local time, raising the total number of infections to 10,708.
There were no deaths in the last 24 for the first time since 16 March – a full 39 days. The death toll is now at 240; the total fatality rate is 2.24%.
It is worth remembering that South Korea has not imposed any lockdown, but has instead pursued a policy of “test, trace, contain” from the outset.
This report from my colleague Justin McCurry is a fascinating read:
Here an excerpt:
By the time the World Health Organization issued its plea in mid-March for countries to “test, test, test”, South Korea had spent weeks doing just that, quickly developing the capability to test an average of 12,000 people – and sometimes as many as 20,000 – a day at hundreds of drive-through and walk-in testing centres. The mobile centres conducted the tests free of charge within 10 minutes, with the results were sent to people’s phones within 24 hours. By mid-March more than 270,000 people had been tested.
Testing aside, South Korea – the most connected country in the world – also used mobile technology against the outbreak in the form of contact tracing. People who tested positive were asked to describe their recent movements, aided by GPS phone tracking, surveillance camera records and credit card transactions. Those details enabled the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention to issue alerts, in real time, about where infected people had been before their positive status was confirmed.
Updated
Indonesia: 436 new cases, 42 new deaths in last 24 hours
Indonesia reported its biggest daily jump in coronavirus infections after identifying 436 new cases, taking the total to 8,211, data provided by health ministry official Achmad Yurianto showed on Friday.
Forty-two more people who had tested positive for the virus died, taking the total number of deaths to 689, according to the data.
Germany: 2,337 new cases, 227 new deaths in last 24 hours
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany needs to fall to a few hundred a day to enable further easing of lockdown measures, the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases said on Friday.
Germany recorded 2,337 new cases on Friday to bring the total number of confirmed infections to 150,383. The reported death toll rose by 227 to 5,321.
Updated
Macron to release lockdown exit plan early next week
French president Emmanuel Macron says the government is aiming to release its detailed end of lockdown plan “probably on Tuesday”.
Speaking to a group of mayors by video-conference on Friday, the president said managing the return to normal life was a “logistical and organisational challenge” and that measures to end the lockdown would be introduced nationally across the country and not region by region as had been reported.
The reopening of schools would happen progressively and along “three major principles … progressively, with consultations and adapted to the situation”.
Priority would probably be given to younger pupils and those with “the most difficulties”, he said, without specifying what those difficulties might be.
More importantly in the face of some opposition from worried parents, Macron said there would be “no obligation” for pupils to return immediately. “We have to be flexible,” the president added.
French junior economy and finance minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher said the distribution of washable face masks to the general public will begin on 4 May, but told French radio the details of how this would be carried out were still being decided.
Catherine Guillouard, the president of RATP, the Paris region transport authority, said she hopes to have 70% of public transport running on 11 May, the day the French lockdown is due to be eased.
Paris’s automated Metro lines will run at 100%. The city’s public transport network is operating 30% its usual trains, buses and trams. The authorities are looking at whether to make it obligatory to wear a mask when using public transport.
Work on Notre Dame Cathedral, ravaged by fire a year ago, is to restart on Monday. General Jean-Louis Georgelin, tasked by Macron to oversee the work, said he still believes it can be completed in five years if everyone “rolls up their sleeves”.
Updated
Russia confirmed 5,849 new cases of coronavirus on Friday, a sharp increase that appears to dash hopes that the country has reached a plateau in its battle against the virus.
The near-record jump in cases brought the country’s total to 68,622, with nearly half of those in Moscow, the country’s capital.
The sudden increase came after several days of decreasing tallies, and was accompanied by reports that hospitalisations in Moscow have been going up.
On Thursday, the chief doctor at one of Moscow’s hospitals battling the virus said that emergency departments are under pressure from a wave of younger patients.
Chief doc at Hospital 15 in Moscow recorded this video warning: 'We're being brought an increasing no of young patients in a really bad way who need ventilating. Our ER is under pressure. There's lots of patients, more & more each day. Esp aged c. 40, brought in in a bad way.' pic.twitter.com/ukzUdxAOZV
— Sarah Rainsford (@sarahrainsford) April 23, 2020
Russia is also expected to see cases rise in coming days as the virus continues to progress from Moscow out into the country’s other regions.
Updated
Reuters have a story here that sounds straight out of a film script, but such are the times in which we live:
Police in the United Arab Emirates are deploying smart helmets that can scan the temperatures of hundreds of people every minute in their effort to combat the new coronavirus.
The helmets, which need less time and less contact than traditional thermometers, can measure temperatures from five metres (16ft) away and scan up to 200 people a minute, triggering an alert if a fever is detected.
Chinese company KC Wearable says it has sold more than 1,000 of the temperature-scanning helmets and has received orders from the Middle East, Europe and Asia.
Police officer Aly al-Ramsy told Reuters:
We’ve implemented the smart helmet during this time of crisis, with Covid-19, across all police stations in Dubai, as well as at patrolling stations whose duty requires them to be on the frontline.
In the case of someone with a high temperature, we take the necessary measures to stop the person … and then the person is dealt with by paramedics and taken to the closest medical facility.
Dubai police are using the helmets to screen people in densely populated areas, including sealed off neighbourhoods.
The UAE has the second highest infection count among the six Gulf states, with more than 8,000, and over 50 deaths. It does not provide a breakdown for each of its seven emirates.
Updated
Philippines: 211 new infections, 15 additional deaths in last 24 hours
The Philippines’ health ministry on Friday reported that confirmed cases of the new coronavirus have risen to more than 7,000.
In a bulletin, the ministry recorded 211 new infections, 15 additional deaths and 40 more recoveries. It brought the total cases to 7,192, deaths to 477 and recoveries to 762.
President Rodrigo Duterte on Friday extended a strict lockdown in the capital Manila until 15 May to try to contain coronavirus infections, but will ease restrictions in lower-risk regions.
Updated
Russia: 5,849 new cases and 60 new deaths in 24 hours
Russia on Friday reported 5,849 new confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, pushing its nationwide tally to 68,622.
Sixty people with the virus died overnight, pushing the death toll to 615, Russia’s official crisis response centre said.
This is a lovely picture essay of Italian teenage lockdown living.
More disheartening economic news. European Union industry commissioner Thierry Breton said on Friday the EU was heading this year towards a 5-10% economic contraction due to the coronavirus outbreak – and that could be an optimistic prediction.
Breton said on France 2 television:
As of today, in the European Union, we’re on course for a 5% to 10% (recession), meaning it’s about 7.5%. But that is today, and if things don’t improve and if we have a second peak (of the outbreak), things could get worse.
Updated
European stock markets have dropped opened lower, with the FTSE 100 shedding 77 points or 1.3% to 5748.
Disappointment that Gilead’s Remdesivir drugs has apparently failed a Covid-19 test has dampened investors’ mood, with the European-wide Stoxx 600 index down 1%, writes my colleague Graeme Wearden.
Donald Trump’s suggestion that corovavirus patients could be injected with disinfectant or bathed in ultraviolet light has, unsurprisingly, not helped the mood in the markets either.
For all business and financial markets updates, do work Graeme’s superlative work on Business Live:
This is the moment that Dr Deborah Birx, the US’s coronavirus taskforce response coordinator, listened in obvious discomfort as President Trump asks his science adviser to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus suggested people could receive injections of disinfectant to cure coronavirus, a notion one medical expert described as “jaw-dropping”.
Here is Dr. Birx's reaction when President Trump asks his science advisor to study using UV light on the human body and injecting disinfectant to fight the coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/MVno5X7JMA
— Daniel Lewis (@Daniel_Lewis3) April 24, 2020
Here is the full story on (yet another) extraordinary press conference:
Updated
More on Sweden. Nature published an in-depth piece on the country’s approach, including an interview with Tegnell, which is really worth a read:
Anders Tegnell, an epidemiologist at Sweden’s Public Health Agency, is the architect of the country’s “trust-based” strategy for handling the COVID-19 pandemic. He spoke with Nature about the approach. https://t.co/nXYpoUnTJ2
— Nature (@nature) April 22, 2020
Here’s a snippet:
The approach has sharp critics. Among them are 22 high-profile scientists who last week wrote in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter that the public-health authorities had failed, and urged politicians to step in with stricter measures. They point to the high number of coronavirus deaths in elder-care homes and Sweden’s overall fatality rate, which is higher than that of its Nordic neighbours — 131 per million people, compared with 55 per million in Denmark and 14 per million in Finland, which have adopted lockdowns.
What is striking, to me at least, is Tegnell’s statement that we still do not know about coronavirus, the way it behaves or the way it spreads - in contrast to the UK government’s insistence that “we are following the science”. Tegnell states:
It is difficult to talk about the scientific basis of a strategy with these types of disease, because we do not know much about it and we are learning as we are doing, day by day. Closedown, lockdown, closing borders – nothing has a historical scientific basis, in my view. We have looked at a number of European Union countries to see whether they have published any analysis of the effects of these measures before they were started and we saw almost none.
Closing borders, in my opinion, is ridiculous, because Covid-19 is in every European country now. We have more concerns about movements inside Sweden.
As a society, we are more into nudging: continuously reminding people to use measures, improving measures where we see day by day the that they need to be adjusted. We do not need to close down everything completely because it would be counterproductive.
Updated
Fascinating interview with Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme this morning.
Sweden has been criticised for taking a different path to its neighbours, and indeed the rest of Europe, in its approach to dealing with coronavirus. It has asked its citizens to avoid non-essential travel, work from home and stay indoors if they are over 70 or are feeling ill - but there has been no enforced lockdown.
The country has seen a higher death rate than its neighbours. Yesterday, the Public Health Agency of Sweden said it had recorded 16,755 confirmed cases, and 2,021 deaths with the coronavirus. And there has been anger in the country that older people have borne the brunt of the strategy, as reported by my colleague Richard Orange.
Lena Einhorn, a virologist who has been one of the leading domestic critics of Sweden’s coronavirus policy, told the Observer.
They have to admit that it’s a huge failure, since they have said the whole time that their main aim has been to protect the elderly.
But Tegnall today said Sweden’s strategy put it in a better place to deal with a second wave of coronavirus as the country’s scientists estimated there was now around 15-20% immunity in the population – not enough for herd immunity, but enough to slow and control the spread of the disease.
Asked if the policy had worked, Tegnall said the aim had been to slow the progression of the disease so its healthcare system did not become overwhelmed.
It has worked in some aspects. The health service has been able to cope – 20% of ICU beds have been empty and able to take coronavirus patients at all times.
In terms of death toll, Sweden had seen “about the same results as other countries”, he said.
Asked about the fact that there are more deaths in Sweden than in other Scandinavian countries, he said that as many as 50% of deaths had come in care homes for the elderly – which have banned visitors. “It’s hard to know how a lockdown would have stopped that,” he said. Asked if the strategy had resulted in more deaths, he said:
It’s a difficult question and I don’t think we have the answer and I don’t know if we will ever get the answer.
Sweden estimates it passed the peak of the disease last week, and hopes it will be better placed to deal with any further outbreaks
We hope this will make it easier for us in the long run. Other part of the reasoning is we want something sustainable, if we need mitigation we can go on doing this for a long time, if looks like going to get second wave in the fall we can easily continue doing what we are doing now.
Updated
I’m handing over the blog to my colleague in the UK, Alexandra Topping. Thanks for your company and enjoy the day’s continuing coverage from our HQ in Britain.
The alpine ski resort of Ischgl, at the centre of Austria’s biggest cluster of coronavirus infections, has said it wants to move away from “party tourism” as it emerged from more than a month under quarantine.
Ischgl is near the point where Austria, Italy and Switzerland meet and has described itself as the “Ibiza of the Alps”. It is now clear that more than 800 cases spread across Austria can be traced back to the resort and the surrounding Paznaun valley.
In February and early March, the virus found a breeding ground in crowded apres-ski bars. Hundreds of foreign tourists were infected in Ischgl and then unwittingly took the virus home with them.
“We will question developments of the past years and, where necessary, make corrections,” Ischgl’s mayor, Werner Kurz, said in a statement issued by the tourism authority for his town and the Paznaun Valley, which on Thursday came out of a quarantine imposed on 13 March.
Kurz said the town’s image as a party destination was unfair because that was just a small part of its offering, but he said he would work with local businesses to make changes.
You can read our full story below:
Updated
If you are just joining the blog, you can get up to speed fast on our latest At A Glance coverage of coronavirus developments.
And you can also see our latest global wrap-up of the day’s events, as the governments of nations with large Muslim populations were divided on coronavirus restrictions as Ramadan began, with with some easing lockdowns while others enacted travel bans.
Several of the UK papers lead on virus testing. Here’s a flavour of the coverage:
Guardian front page, Friday 24 April 2020: Hospitals sound alarm at failings in privately run test centre pic.twitter.com/smbv6UqAwm
— The Guardian (@guardian) April 23, 2020
Tomorrow's front page: Grateful Britain https://t.co/9Ny5VAhuYm #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/CzwsUJOnOM
— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) April 23, 2020
The front page of tomorrow's Daily Telegraph:
— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) April 23, 2020
'Johnson back at the controls on Monday'#TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/QPawqzVogr
In the latest blame game tit-for-tat between US and China over who concealed what in regards to the coronavirus, the Chinese state media tabloid, the Global Times, has tweeted that a lawyer from Wuhan plans to sue the US for “falsely reporting Covid-19 patients as flu patients”.
A #Wuhan lawyer is suing US government for falsely reporting #COVID19 patients as flu patients. He recently introduced the latest updates of the case in a video. pic.twitter.com/tsKy7ALIsG
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) April 24, 2020
Thailand reports no new deaths
Thailand reported 15 new coronavirus cases and no new deaths on Friday, bringing the total number of cases since its outbreak in January to 2,854 cases and 50 fatalities.
Of the new cases, nine were linked to previous cases and two had no known links.
Four other new cases were reported from the southern province of Yala where the authorities are aggressively testing the population because of high infection rates there, said Taweesin Wisanuyothin, a spokesman for the government’s Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration.
Since the outbreak 2,490 patients have recovered and gone home
Updated
South Korea’s stock market has bounced back stronger than any other major world market, as investors bet Seoul’s handling of the crisis would see it through sooner and stronger than others, Reuters reports.
The Kospi index is up 31% from a low point hit on 19 March, a performance matched only by smaller Thailand, and bettered only by Argentina’s S&P Merval, which is less than 1% of the Seoul market’s size by value. The jump has come even as South Korea’s exports have cratered and the economy has contracted.
South Korea is Asia’s fourth-largest economy and among the first countries to bring its major outbreak of the virus under control, with a vigorous without mandatory lockdowns or a gigantic debt-funded rescue package.
It has fewer than 11,000 cases so far, with 240 deaths.
Beyonce and Twitter CEO join forces to donate $6m to virus relief
Press Association in the UK is reporting that Beyonce has teamed up with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to donate US$6m to the coronavirus relief effort.
The pop titan’s BeyGood foundation announced the donation on Thursday, with money going to frontline workers and those affected by the pandemic.
Beyonce said: “The impact of this pandemic is far reaching, and it’s going to take each and everyone of us to help make a difference.”
Recipients of the money, donated in partnership with Dorsey’s StartSmall initiative, include small community organisations as well as mental health services in US cities New York, Detroit, New Orleans and Houston, Beyonce’s home city.
She previously warned the virus was having a disproportionate impact on black Americans and shared grim statistics from Houston.
The BeyGood initiative said: “Communities of colour are suffering by epic proportions due to the pandemic. Many families live in underserved areas with homes that make it harder to practice social distancing.”
Beyonce appeared on the One World: Together At Home concert on the weekend and paid tribute to medical staff, describing them as “true heroes”.
And she made a surprise appearance on the Disney Family Singalong broadcast and dedicated her performance of When You Wish Upon A Star to those risking their lives.
Other stars to make donations to the coronavirus relief effort include George Clooney, Angelina Jolie and Ryan Reynolds.
Summary
Here’s a summary of the main news today on coronavirus:
- Global infections have passed 2.7 million, with deaths standing at just under 191,000. The US leads infections with 869,000, according to the Johns Hopkins tracker, then daylight before Italy on 213,000. The US also leads global deaths at 49,954. The next worst affected countries are Italy on 25,549 deaths, Spain on 22,157 and France on 21,856.
- Medical experts have widely condemned Donald Trump’s musings at the White House briefing this morning about whether disinfectant and UV rays could be used on people to fight the virus. It followed a briefing by Bill Bryan, who heads the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security, presenting information on how the virus reacts to heat, humidity and light on surfaces and when it is airborne.
- Donald Trump said the US may extend federal social distancing guidelines to the northern summer. It came as Congress approved a $484bn coronavirus relief package, taking to nearly $3tn the money pledged so far.
- Democratic senator, Elizabeth Warren, has revealed her older brother has died after contracting Covid-19.
- Ramadan begins on Friday with strict non-essential travel measures being enforced in Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country. Police will use road blocks to enforce measures. There will also be a domestic and international air and sea travel, with some exceptions. The ban on air travel will be in place until 1 June, officials said, with a ban on sea travel in force until 8 June.
- Elsewhere, Ramadan restrictions have been lifted, including in the UAE, Egypt and Algeria, where curfews have been slightly shortened.
- China has published its daily coronavirus figures, reporting just 6 new cases and no new deaths.
- In Japan, the mayor of Osaka has come under fire for suggesting men should do grocery shopping during the coronavirus outbreak because women are indecisive and “take a long time”. Also in Japan, about 40 more crew on an Italian cruise ship docked in Nagasaki have tested positive for the new coronavirus, bringing the total to about 90.
- The Philippines has extended its lockdown in the capital Manila until 15 May stretching to eight weeks one of the world’s strictest community quarantines to curb coronavirus infections.
- The New Zealand intensive care nurse thanked by British prime minister Boris Johnson has revealed he was treated like “any other patient” – and originally thought his praise was a prank. “My first reaction was that it was a joke. I thought my friends were playing a joke on me … it was totally out of the blue,” Jenny McGee told TVNZ.
- Ecuador’s health minister has said the country’s coronavirus case total is twice as high as previously confirmed, as authorities added 11,000 new infections that resulted from delayed testing. The new cases will be added to the confirmed total of 11,183 infections. The country has registered 560 deaths.
- Tom Hanks has sent a letter and a Corona brand typewriter to an Australian boy who wrote to him about being bullied over his name, Corona. Corona De Vries, an eight-year-old from the Gold Coast in Queensland, wrote to the Hollywood star after he and his wife, Rita Wilson, spent more than two weeks in quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19. Hanks told the boy: “You’ve got a friend in ME!” – a line made famous in the music in the animated film Toy Story, where Hanks voiced the main character, Woody.
Japan mayor under fire for saying ‘women dawdle at shops’
The mayor of Japan’s Osaka has come under fire for suggesting men should do grocery shopping during the coronavirus outbreak because women are indecisive and “take a long time”, Agence France=Presse writes.
Japan is under a state of emergency over the pandemic, and residents in some areas have been asked to shop less frequently and only send one family member out to get supplies to limit contact.
Osaka Mayor Ichiro Matsui told reporters on Thursday that men should be entrusted with grocery runs because women “take a long time as they browse around and hesitate about this and that,” Kyodo news agency reported.
“Men can snap up things they are told (to buy) and go, so I think it’s good that they go shopping, avoiding human contact,” the 56-year-old added.
When challenged by a reporter, he acknowledged his remarks might be viewed as out-of-touch, but said they were true in his family.
But online he was roundly condemned, with one Twitter user accusing him of being “disrespectful to women and men.”
Another dubbed his comment “full of prejudice against women,” adding “there are indecisive men and nimble and sharp women.”
“Does he think (shoppers) like to take time?” added a third. “They are thinking about menus and prices.”
Despite its highly educated female population, Japan ranked 121 out of 153 countries in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 gender gap index, primarily because of its poor showing in political representation.
Traditional gender roles are still deeply rooted in Japanese society and women are often still expected to take primary responsibility for childcare and domestic chores, even while holding down professional jobs.
Australia’s prime minister and chief medical officer have just given a coronavirus briefing. As Guardian Australia’s Amy Remekis writes:
Prof Brendan Murphy, the chief medical officer, is barely holding back incredulous laughter when asked if anyone should follow Donald Trump’s latest suggestion about dealing with the coronavirus – which was basically injecting disinfectant (kill it with bleach! and yourself!) and blasting yourself with massive amounts of UV light (kill it by giving yourself cancer!).
Murphy says:
Um ... I would not ... I would caution against the injection of disinfection! They could be quite toxic to people. I wasn’t privy to his comments, so I want to be very careful about commenting on something that I didn’t hear myself. And ultraviolet light, look, I don’t know the context in which he said it, so I really would need to study it before I could comment, thank you.
Australia's Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy struggles to hide a few giggles as he's asked about President Trump's comments on injecting disinfectant and sunlight as treatments for coronavirus.
— Matthew Doran (@MattDoran91) April 24, 2020
Says it all, really @abcnews @politicsabc #auspol pic.twitter.com/mMpvegrusH
Updated
Philippines extends lockdown in Manila to 15 May
The Philippines has extended its lockdown in the capital Manila until 15 May stretching to eight weeks one of the world’s strictest community quarantines to curb coronavirus infections.
The measures will be expanded to other regions with big outbreaks but modified in lower-risk areas, which would see a partial resumption of work, transport and commerce.
Television broadcast images on Friday of a crisis panel meeting where Duterte had made the decision late the previous day. He even offered a reward of 50 million pesos ($986,000) to any Filipino who could create a vaccine.
“We are all at risk, but do not increase the odds or chances of getting it,” he said, warning against complacency.
There country 6,981 infections and 462 deaths from coronavirus, according to Johns Hopkins university figures.
Updated
It is going to be a very different Ramadan this year due to the Covid-19 global pandemic and the social isolation laws, writes Heba Shaheed. For 1.8 billion Muslims around the world, the cultural traditions and customs of this religious month of fasting will have to be forsaken for the safety of the global community. As an introvert, I am really looking forward to spending this month focusing inwards, without the burden of social responsibility.
Ramadan in 2020 means no communal gatherings in mosques for “tarawih” night prayers, no large “iftar” dinners with family and friends at sunset to break the day’s fast,and, sadly, restrictions on celebrating Eid, the biggest social holiday for Muslims signalling the end of Ramadan.
In this time of physical distancing, as Muslims we will be forced to reconnect to our God and the Qur’an on a deeply intimate level. Interestingly enough, this is the authentic practice of Prophet Muhammad. He would isolate himself for days in a cave at the top of a mountain to introspect, reflect, worship and connect with God. During each of the 10 days of Ramadan, he was known to self-isolate in a spiritual seclusion practice known as “itikāf”.
Updated
About 40 more crew on an Italian cruise ship docked in Nagasaki, southwestern Japan, have tested positive for the new coronavirus, public broadcaster NHK reported on Friday, bringing the total to about 90.
The Costa Atlantica was taken into a shipyard in Nagasaki in late February after the COVID-19 pandemic scuttled plans for scheduled repairs in China. Nagasaki officials have said they hoped to complete testing of all 623 crew soon.
‘The government has a cake problem!’: New Zealand couple document luxury life in Covid-19 quarantine
A couple in government-enforced quarantine at an Auckland airport hotel are documenting their experience of luxury lockdown – and causing envy worldwide with images of waffles delivered to the door, mini-fridges stocked full of cake, and escorted walks under stormy New Zealand skies.
The Instagram blog thequarantinecanteen_nz has recorded 13 days of quarantine at the four-star Novotel, a lockdown measure introduced by the Jacinda Ardern government to stop the spread of coronavirus. The majority of those in quarantine are New Zealanders, as the country closed its borders to foreign nationals in mid-March.
Most of New Zealand’s 1,400 virus cases have links to overseas travel and arrivals, and the island country of five million people is now attempting to eliminate the virus with stringent lockdown rules that are among the toughest in the world.
“The government has a cake problem” the blog’s authors have said, adding that the whole process has been “really impressive”.
Breakfast on day 13 was poached eggs on a bean medley with chorizo sausage and porridge with spiced apple and almonds, while lunch on day seven was a mushroom frittata with buttered potatoes, a green salad with french dressing, a banana, a cheese scone with butter, hummingbird cake and a can of coke.
Updated
Japan is taking drastic measure to discourage people from being outside, but cutting thousand of roses off their stems in public parks do deter public gatherings.
Justin McCurry in Tokyo writes:
Tiptoeing through the tulips or breathing in the scent of roses are popular spring rites in Japan, but there is concern that flower festivals could become the source of new infection clusters.
This week workers began severing the buds of about 3,000 rose bushes at Yono park in Saitama, north of Tokyo, in an attempt to keep flower viewers away.
The local government had already cancelled the annual rose festival, but the park is still open to the public, prompting the decision to rid the venue of its main attraction – 180 varieties of rose bushes that reach their peak from around the middle of May.
“It’s very painful, but we decided to take action after looking at the situation in other cities,” a local official told the Mainichi newspaper, adding that it would take about a week to remove all the buds.
You can read Justin’s full story below.
New Zealand nurse says she treated Boris Johnson like 'any other patient'
The New Zealand intensive care nurse thanked by British prime minister Boris Johnson has revealed he was treated like “any other patient” – and originally thought his praise was a prank, writes our NZ correspondent Eleanor Ainge Roy.
Jenny McGee said she had not been told of the public praise in advance. “My first reaction was that it was a joke. I thought my friends were playing a joke on me … it was totally out of the blue,” she told TVNZ.
The 35-year-old – who has worked as an intensive care nurse for 10 years, five of those as a sister – highlighted just how ill Johnson was, saying: “We take it very seriously who comes into intensive care, these patients who come into us it’s a very scary thing for them so we don’t take it lightly. And he absolutely needed to be there.”
Johnson thanked “Jenny from Invercargill” on his release from hospital on 13 April, crediting her and another sister with saving his life after he contracted Covid-19 and became severely ill. Johnson said two nurses sat by his bed for 48 hours, nursing him through the darkest time when “things could have gone either way”.
McGee also revealed the toll the coronavirus restrictions were taking. “People are dying without their loved ones around … we can be there to hold their hand but it should be their family and that’s heartbreaking to watch,” she said.
McGee said she and Johnson talked about New Zealand, and her home town of Invercargill – the country’s most southern major town, famous for rugby, oysters and farming . “He was interested to know about Invercargill,” she said.
You can read Eleanor’s full story below:
Tom Hanks consoles Australian boy named Corona
Tom Hanks has sent a letter and a Corona brand typewriter to an Australian boy who wrote to him about being bullied over his name, Corona.
Corona De Vries, an eight-year-old from the Gold Coast in Queensland, wrote to the Hollywood star after he and his wife, Rita Wilson, spent more than two weeks in quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19.
The boy wrote to Hanks saying: “I heard on the news you and your wife had caught the coronavirus,” Channel 7 reported. “Are you ok?”
.@tomhanks has written a heart-felt letter to a young Helensvale boy named Corona. The 8-year-old was being bullied at school and decided to write to the Hollywood superstar and his wife @RitaWilson, after they were diagnosed with Coronavirus. https://t.co/6l2nzFJNn5 #7NEWS pic.twitter.com/H02WF2dRCx
— 7NEWS Gold Coast (@7NewsGoldCoast) April 23, 2020
He said he loved his name but people at school called him the coronavirus, which made him “sad and angry”.
“Your letter made my wife and I feel so wonderful!” Hanks replied in a letter typed on a Corona typewriter which he had taken to the Gold Coast.
“You know, you are the only person I’ve ever known to have the name Corona – like the ring around the sun, a crown,” the double Oscar winner wrote to the boy.
“I thought this typewriter would suit you,” an image of the letter showed. “Ask a grown up how it works. And use it to write me back.”
Hanks hand wrote at the end: “P.S. You got a friend in ME!”
The biggest health crisis in a generation and the enforced isolation of lockdowns is taking not just a physical toll on people but also affecting mental health. The Guardian’s John Crace discusses his mental health challenges and public health specialist Dr Antonis Kousoulis tells Anushka Asthana what may help, on the Guardian’s Today in Focus podcast.
As I mentioned earlier, Donald Trump stunned viewers of his daily White House briefing by suggesting that people could receive injections of disinfectant to cure the coronavirus, a notion one medical expert described as “jaw-dropping”.
The Guardian’s David Smith in Washington writes ...
At Thursday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing, the US president discussed new government research on how the virus reacts to different temperatures, climates and surfaces.
“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute,” Trump said. “One minute! And is there a way we can do something, by an injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it’d be interesting to check that. So, that you’re going to have to use medical doctors with, but it sounds interesting to me.”
Dr Deborah Birx, the task force response coordinator, remained silent. But social media erupted in hilarity and outrage at the president, who has a record of defying science and also floated the idea of treating patients’ bodies with ultraviolet (UV) light.
Several doctors warned the public against injecting disinfectant or using UV light.
Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at the University of California at Berkeley and a former labor secretary, tweeted: “Trump’s briefings are actively endangering the public’s health. Boycott the propaganda. Listen to the experts. And please don’t drink disinfectant.”
You can read David’s full story below:
Here’s something to brighten the coronavirus gloom ... Getty photographers Cameron Spencer and Ryan Pierse have taken to the skies to capture the sights of Sydney – Australia’s biggest city – during the Covid-19 pandemic. New South Wales residents can be fined for leaving their homes unless they have a reasonable excuse. The laws allow for fines of up to $11,000 or six months’ imprisonment for those who flout them.
You can see the full series of images here, but these are some of my favourites.
Updated
The Philippine president, Rodrigo Duterte, has threatened to declare martial law if communist rebels disrupted the flow of relief goods for Filipinos impacted by the coronavirus lockdown restrictions, and asked his military to be ready.
“I am now warning everybody, I am putting notice to the armed forces and police. I might declare martial law and there will be no turning back,” he said at the beginning of the meeting on the extension of coronavirus containment measures on Friday.
Duterte has long been at odds with the New People’s Army, worsened by repeated breakdowns in a peace process he launched at the beginning of his presidency.
China's ambassador to the UK denies virus cover-up
China’s ambassador to the UK has strongly rebuked the US for suggesting Beijing was not truthful about the coronavirus, saying Washington should not seek to bully the China in a manner reminiscent of the 19th century European colonial wars, Reuters reports.
“I hear quite a lot of this speculation, this disinformation about China covering up, about China hiding something - this is not true,” Liu Xiaoming said. “The Chinese government was transparent and very quick to share data.”
His comments were targeted at a growing number of legal claims over the virus, primarily aimed at China.
“Some other country – their local courts sued China – it is absurd,” he said. “Some politicians, some people, want to play at being the world’s policeman – this is not the era of gunboat diplomacy, this is not the era when China was a semi-colonial, semi-feudal society.”
“These people still live in the old days – they think they can bully China, think they can bully the world,” Liu said. “China is not an enemy of the United States – if they regard China as an enemy they chose the wrong target.”
You can read the Guardian’s full story below.
Updated
China records just 6 new cases of Covid-19
China has published its daily coronavirus figures, reporting just 6 new cases and no new deaths.
On Thursday, the Chinese mainland reported:
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) April 24, 2020
- No new #COVID19 deaths
- 4 new domestic cases and 2 more imported cases
- 34 asymptomatic cases
- 915 active cases in total, including 57 in critical condition pic.twitter.com/QzHEBGeR6C
Indonesia stops non-essential travel for Ramadan
Indonesia – the world’s most populous Muslin nation – has stopped non-essential travel between provinces to contain coronavirus during Ramadan, with police using road blocks to enforce the measure.
The ban will include domestic and international air and sea travel, with some exceptions, Transport Ministry officials said.
The ban on air travel will be in place until 1 June, officials said, with a ban on sea travel in force until 8 June.
Cargo transport is exempted from the bans. Other exceptions would include flights to repatriate Indonesian and foreign citizens, as well as travel by state officials, diplomatic staff and representatives of international organisations, the officials said.
Indonesia has 7,775 cases of Covid-19, according to Johns Hopkins university, and 647 deaths, but with a population of 268 million people, there are fears of widespread infections.
Egypt and UAE ease restrictions
Egypt will ease its coronavirus lockdown for the holy fasting month of Ramadan by allowing more businesses to reopen and shortening a night-time curfew, the prime minister said on Thursday.
- Starting on Friday, the curfew will start at 9pm instead of the previous 8pm and run until 6am.
- Shopping malls and businesses will be allowed to open on weekends, but will still be required to close at 5pm.
- Mosques will remain closed and any public religious gatherings will still be banned.
Egypt has reported 232 new cases of Covid-19, including 11 deaths, bringing the country’s total to 3,891 infections and 287 deaths.
The United Arab Emirates has shortened a nationwide coronavirus curfew by two hours to now run daily from 10pm-6am (instead of from 8pm).
In Dubai, one of the Gulf country’s seven emirates and which has been under a 24-hour curfew since 26 March, authorities said they lifted the curfew from 6am-10pm.
A statement from Dubai’s media office said cafes and restaurants have been allowed to resume business, and shopping malls to be reopened partially from noon to 10pm, but with a maximum capacity of 30%.
Public transportation services including subways will resume on Sunday and companies will be allowed to have 30% of their staff in offices, although daily temperature testing is required for employees.
Mosques, cinemas and playgrounds will remain closed until further notice.
Updated
Ramadan begins with new coronavirus measures
The Muslim holy month of Ramadan begins on Friday, with some countries easing restrictions and others tightening them. I’ll take you through a few of the measures in the next few posts:
Algeria will shorten a night curfew and lift a full lockdown for a province near the capital Algiers, the prime minister’s office said on Thursday.
The Blida province south of Algiers will be replaced with a curfew from 2pm-7am, while a 3pm-7am curfew in nine provinces, including Algiers, will be shortened to run from 5pm-7am. The government made no changes to the confinement measures in the remaining provinces where a 7pm-7am curfew has been imposed for weeks.
Algeria has so far reported 3,007 cases of the novel coronavirus, with 407 deaths and 1,355 recoveries.
Updated
During the briefing, Trump was joined by Bill Bryan, who heads the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security. Bryan presented more information on how the virus reacts to heat, humidity and light on surfaces and when it is airborne.
He said the virus survived best indoors, in dry conditions. UV rays and hotter, more humid temperatures seem to cut down the half-life of the virus ...but was at pains to say the research is ongoing.
After that Trump wondered whether UV light therapy or disinfectants could be a way to treat people, something that was dismissed by medical professionals, including his own coronavirus task force co-ordinator, Deborah Birx.
Medical professionals have since taken to Twitter to warn people to disregard the president’s comments.
Injecting disinfectant into your body will kill you. While it feels completely unnecessary to even say this, people drank fish tank cleaner containing chloroquine because of what they heard from rumors about the substance. We must fight deadly misinformation no matter how stupid.
— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) April 24, 2020
Updated
During the briefing, the president evaded questions about Rick Bright, the vaccine expert who says he was removed from his post after resisting the president’s push to use hydroxychloroquine as a treatment for coronavirus without proper vetting and testing. Bright said he would file a whistleblower complaint, after being reassigned from his post overseeing the development of a coronavirus vaccine.
President Trump doesn’t answer multiple questions about Rick Bright, who alleges his removal was retaliation. The White House has not really pushed back on his allegations in any formal capacity.
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) April 23, 2020
You can read the full story on Bright below:
US could extend social distancing
The spending package was voted through during President Trump’s daily press briefing during which he said federal social distancing guidelines could be extended through to the American summer.
“We may, we may go beyond that - we’ll have to see where it is. Until we feel it’s safe, we’re going to be extending,” Trump said, in a change of tone from previous briefings where he has pushed strongly for the country to reopen.
The president said he was “not happy about Brian Kemp”, referring to the governor of Georgia, who has moved ahead with a plan to reopen businesses despite criticisms from the president and other Republican and Democratic lawmakers.
“I don’t want this thing to flare up because you’re deciding to do something that’s not in the guidelines,” Trump said.
Congress passes $500bn relief package
If you’re just joining us, the big news in the past hour or so is that the US Congress has passed a huge spending package to help deal with the coronavirus. The package takes US spending during the crisis to nearly $3tr dollars.
It will rush new relief to employers and hospitals buckling under the strain of a pandemic that has claimed almost 50,000 American lives and a staggering one in six US jobs.
Anchoring the bill is the Trump administration’s $250bn funding request to replenish a fund to help small- and medium-size businesses with payroll, rent and other expenses. The payroll program provides forgivable loans so businesses can continue paying workers while forced to stay closed for social distancing and stay-at-home orders.
It also contains $100bn demanded by Democrats for hospitals and a nationwide testing program, along with a $60bn set-aside for small banks and an alternative network of community development banks that focus on development in urban neighbourhoods and rural areas ignored by many lenders. Theres also $60bn for small-business loans and grants delivered through the Small Business Administrations existing disaster aid program.
It came as it was reported another 4.4 million people filed for unemployment benefits last week as layoffs sweep the economy. Over the last five weeks, roughly 26 million people have filed for jobless aid.
Updated
Good morning and welcome to our live global coverage of coronavirus developments, with me Alison Rourke.
Before we get started, here are the top stories making news at the moment:
- The total number of confirmed coronavirus cases around the world is at 2,699,338, while 188,437 deaths have been recorded, according to Johns Hopkins University.
- US Congress has passed a $480bn coronavirus aid package to help small business. It comes as President Trump says federal social distancing guidelines could be extended to the summer.
- Democratic senator, Elizabeth Warren, has revealed her older brother has died after contracting Covid-19.
- Indonesia has stoped non-essential travel between provinces to contain coronavirus during Ramadan.
- Algeria will ease confinement measures from the first day of the holy month of Ramadan on Friday by shortening a night curfew and lifting a full lockdown for a province near the capital Algiers, the prime minister’s office said on Thursday.
- Remdesivir, a drug thought to be one of the best prospects for treating Covid-19, failed to have any effect in the first full trial, it has been revealed.
- German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, has said the coronavirus pandemic is “still at the beginning” and parts her country may be rushing their exit from lockdown, as divided EU leaders clashed at a video summit over a desperately needed Europe-wide recovery fund.
- Ecuador’s health minister has said the country’s coronavirus case total is twice as high as previously confirmed, as authorities added 11,000 new infections that resulted from delayed testing. The new cases will be added to the confirmed total of 11,183 infections. The country has registered 560 deaths.
- Four people in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon have tested positive for the coronavirus, a health official said, bringing total cases in the settlement to five. Residents of the Wavel camp in the eastern Bekaa Valley were tested after a Palestinian refugee from Syria was admitted to hospital in Beirut with symptoms.
- The 2020 European Athletics Championships, due to be held in Paris at the end of August, have been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic, organisers have announced. A number of major sporting events, including Wimbledon and the Open, will not be held this year.
You can get in touch with me via email: alison.rourke@theguardian.co.uk
