We are closing this blog now. You can stay up to date with all our coverage on our new live blog below
We will be closing this blog shortly and moving to a new live blog (I will give you those details shortly), but you can stay up to date on all of our latest coverage with our latest At a Glance summary of global coronavirus news.
People across the UK stepped out for the fifth weekly clap for key workers on Thursday, and many called on the government to provide workers with adequate PPE. Watch the Guardian’s video round-up here.
Summary
Here is a summary of key events from the last few hours:
- The global total of confirmed cases is approaching 2.7m, standing at 2,699,338 while 188,437 deaths have been recorded, according to Johns Hopkins University.
- Ecuador’s case total is twice as high as previously confirmed, Ecuador’s health minister has said, as authorities added 11,000 new infections that resulted from delayed testing.
- Algeria has become the latest country to announce it will ease confinement measures from the first day of the holy month of Ramadan on Friday, replacing a full lockdown with a curfew in Bilda and shortening curfews in nine provinces.
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Four people in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon have tested positive for the coronavirus, bringing total number of cases in the settlement to five.
- The 2020 European Athletics Championships, due to be held in Paris at the end of August, have been cancelled because of the coronavirus pandemic.
- Cameroon has freed over 1,300 prisoners in its two main cities in an effort to ease overcrowding and limit the spread of the coronavirus.
- Armenia commemorated its genocide anniversary in lockdown, switching off street lights and chiming church bells in place of the traditional annual torch-lit procession to mark 105 years since the genocide by Ottoman Turks.
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Dubai has become the latest city to ease lockdown restrictions, announcing that cafes, restaurants and shopping malls are to reopen with a maximum capacity of 30 per cent. Public transportation services will resume from 26 April.
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The Czech Republic is speeding up plans to relax its coronavirus lockdown by two weeks to get all shops, restaurants and hotels running again by May 25 as the number of infections stabilises.
- Peru has passed 20,000 coronavirus cases, reaching 20,914 on Thursday. The country has recorded 572 deaths, and the number of recorded coronavirus cases in the country has doubled in the last nine days.
Updated
Trump is asked if federal distancing will be extended until the US 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.
The president says he is “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.
Trump finishes the briefing by criticising the media (“CNN is fake news. Don’t talk to me.”), complaining about the “fake Russia, Russia, Russia deal” and the “illegal witch hunt,” (impeachment) and implying that the media is giving Joe Biden “a pass”, or an easy ride because of the virus.
The briefing has now ended.
Updated
The Guardian’ s Manvi Singh, who is running our US blog says: We cannot immediately fact-check Bryan on the emerging research he is presenting on the effect of heat, light, and humidity on the coronavirus, but we’ll circle back to it. While there are a few preliminary studies suggesting that hotter temps could slow the virus, most of this research so far has not been through a rigorous process of peer review.
You can see all of our coverage of the briefing on our US blog (below), including that Congress has just passed a coronavirus relief package worth $484bn.
Updated
Donald Trump begins briefing
President Trump has begun his daily briefing. He has been joined today by Bill Bryan, who heads the science and technology directorate at the Department of Homeland Security. Bryan is presenting more information on how the virus reacts to heat, humidity and light.
He says the virus survives best indoors, in dry conditions. UV rays and hotter, more humid temperatures seem to cut down the half-life of the virus.
He is at pains to say the research is ongoing.
“Every week or two weeks we are finding out something different,” he says, acknowledging the ongoing nature of the fight against the virus.
Ecuador case total twice as high as previously confirmed
Ecuador’s health minister has said the country’s coronavirus case total was twice as high as previously confirmed, as authorities added 11,000 new infections that resulted from delayed testing.
With 560 confirmed deaths, Reuters reports that the outbreak has devastated the oil-producing country’s economy and overwhelmed sanitary authorities in the largest city of Guayaquil, where corpses remained in homes or for hours on the streets.
Minister Juan Carlos Zevallos said the government would add the new cases to the confirmed total of 11,183 infections. Almost 24,000 test results were pending, according to the health ministry’s figures, and on average they take a week to process.
Zevallos said authorities were calling relatives of people who had recently died to check whether the deceased had coronavirus symptoms, as many deaths were not linked to the disease due to a lack of testing.
Updated
Algeria has become the latest country to announce it will ease confinement measures from the first day of the holy month of Ramadan on Friday.
The prime minister’s office said the full lockdown in the Blida province south of Algiers will be replaced with a curfew from 2 pm to 7 am while a 3 pm to 7am curfew in nine provinces, including Algiers, will be shortened to run from 5 pm to 7 am. No changes have been announced in the remaining provinces where a 7 pm to 7am curfew has been imposed for weeks.
“The government reiterates its call for citizens to remain vigilant,” the prime minister’s office said in a statement. “Changing or keeping the confinement measures will depend on the evolution of the epidemiological situation.”
Algeria has so far reported 3,007 cases of the novel coronavirus, with 407 deaths and 1,355 recoveries.
Updated
Wondering why the UK is struggling to reach its coronavirus testing target? The Guardian’s health editor Sarah Boseley explains:
The UK started ramping up testing too late, having abandoned it as a core principle on 12 March, when Johnson declared the virus could no longer be contained. People with symptoms should just stay at home, he said. Only hospital patients would be tested. Thus Britain went to the back of the queue for testing kits, reagents and other commodities that the world was scrambling for.
Read the full analysis here.
A reminder that you can get in touch with me on Twitter @cleaskopeliti. I won’t have time to reply to everything but will read all your messages. Thanks so much.
Updated
UK prime minister Boris Johnson will be back at work as soon as Monday, the Telegraph reports.
Johnson has been recovering from the coronavirus in Chequers since his release from hospital. He was hospitalised for a week, including three days in intensive care.
Updated
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.
AFP reports that the residents of the Wavel camp in the eastern Bekaa Valley were tested after a member of their household, a Palestinian refugee from Syria, was admitted to the state-run Rafic Hariri hospital in Beirut earlier this week after developing Covid-19 symptoms.
Contact tracing and initial investigation by the health ministry “of the refugee patient who tested positive with Covid-19 in Baalbek yesterday reveals four members of her immediate household affected,” Firas Abiad, the hospital’s head, wrote on Twitter.
Contact tracing and initial investigation by @mophleb of the refugee patient who tested positive with #Covid19 in Baalbek yesterday reveals four members of her immediate household affected. All the rest tested negative. All contacts are in quarantine and under observation.
— Firass Abiad (@firassabiad) April 23, 2020
Lebanon has officially announced 688 infections including 22 deaths from the virus across the country.
Medical experts visited the Wavel camp on Wednesday to carry out tests, focusing on relatives of the first patient, people she has interacted with, as well as 50 others chosen arbitrarily inside the camp and its surroundings, according to Lebanon’s official National News Agency.
Apart from the 5 confirmed cases in the camp, all other tests have returned negative, said the head of the Rafic Hariri hospital.
Updated
European Athletics Championships cancelled
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.
“The decision to cancel was driven by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and the associated risks linked to the current situation, which are far from being under control, as well as the existing ban on mass gatherings in France,” said European Athletics in a statement.
The Paris 2020 European Athletics Championships, scheduled to take place at the Charlety Stadium from 25-30 August, have been cancelled.
— European Athletics (@EuroAthletics) April 23, 2020
📰: https://t.co/WsFBeJ0oIv pic.twitter.com/kLXkUnlYiX
It said the decision was partly swayed by an “unfavourable opinion” from the French Athletics Federation medical commission after it evaluated potential risks for spectators and officials.
The event had been due to take place from 25 to 30 August.
Updated
Dan Collyns has written this dispatch on how Peru will extend its lockdown faced with an rising number of Covid-19 infections:
Peru’s president Martín Vizcarra told the country’s 32m people in his daily press briefing that the strict lockdown they had endured for the last 39 days would be extended until May 10 rather than lifted this Sunday.
The message was not unexpected as the number of Covid-19 cases has doubled in the last nine days to 20,194 with 572 deaths and rising patient numbers, reported at 2,786, which are putting hospitals under pressure. Reuters reports cases of bodies being kept in hallways, masks being reused, and protests from medical workers concerned about their safety.
“The most important thing in Peru is its people,” said Vizcarra announcing the two-week extension. “These are the efforts we have to make to beat this disease.” He added “lifestyle changes” like social distancing and using a mask would have to become habits until there was a vaccine.
“To begin with, there was skepticism, they said it was an exaggeration,” the president said, referring to the quarantine measures.
“Now, when we see the effects in an important part of the population we realise that the right measures were taken at the right time because with this country’s precarious health system imagine what it would have been like [if the quarantine had not been applied].”
Some 6.8m poor households would receive additional cash transfers worth 760 soles ( £182) over the next two weeks, Vizcarra announced. Last month, in the response to the coronavirus, Peru launched the biggest economic stimulus package in the region worth 90bn soles (£21bn) – equivalent to about 12% of GDP.
Updated
Cameroon has freed over 1,300 prisoners in its two main cities in an effort to ease overcrowding and limit the spread of the coronavirus, officials have said.
President Paul Biya signed a decree to commute sentences and free some prisoners in April, AFP reports. The country’s justice minister said that 608 prisoners had been freed in Doula, the economic capital, and another 700 released in the capital Yaounde.
More prisoners in other areas are in the process of being released, the ministry said, with the exact number to be determined by commissions put in place to study who is eligible.
Cameroon has officially registered 1,163 coronavirus infections and 42 deaths, making it the second most affected country in sub-Saharan Africa after South Africa.
Cameroon has a prison population of around 30,000 with more than half of those awaiting sentencing and mostly held in overcrowded facilities. As well as overcrowding, poor hygiene conditions and a high rate of illnesses including tuberculosis, cholera and AIDS make the prison populations vulnerable.
This follows warnings from criminal justice experts that chronic overcrowding and underfunding have left prisons around the world vulnerable to being devastated by the coronavirus.
Updated
European Union leaders have clashed over how to rescue their economies from an economic slump caused by the coronavirus pandemic and forecast to be unparalleled since the 1930s Great Depression, Jennifer Rankin reports.
Meeting via video-conference summit, as the confirmed Covid-19 death toll passed 108,000 lives across the European Economic Area and UK, the 27 leaders instructed the head of the EU executive Ursula von der Leyen to draft a recovery plan.
Read the full report here.
Updated
Armenia has turned off street lights nationwide as President Armen Sarkisian acknowledged the coronavirus lockdown altered the annual commemoration of the victims of WWI-era genocide by Ottoman Turks.
In the capital Yerevan, a torch-lit procession traditionally held annually on 23 April had been cancelled and access was closed to the genocide memorial. Instead, street lights were switched off and church bells chimed across the country, while many lit candles or mobile phone flashlights at windowsills.
The 105th anniversary of the tragedy “is commemorated in accordance with a protocol forced on us by the (coronavirus) pandemic,” President Sarkisian said in a statement. “We remember our victims all the time and everywhere, no matter where in the world we are.”
Last month, Armenia - which has reported 1,401 coronavirus cases and 22 deaths - declared a state of emergency and imposed a nationwide lockdown to slow the spread of the infection.
Armenians say up to 1.5 million people were killed during World War I as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, a claim supported by many other countries. Turkey continues to reject the genocide label.
Nina Lakhani has written in from New York with the latest on the pandemic’s forecasted economic effects:
Global remittances are projected to plummet by about 20 percent - or $109 billion - in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic which has pushed the world towards recession, according to the World Bank.
The grim forecast is mostly down to a sharp fall in the wages and employment of migrant workers, who tend to be the most vulnerable during any economic crisis. Research shows that remittances help alleviate poverty in lower- and middle-income (LCMI) countries, and are linked with reductions in malnutrition, child labour, and missed school in disadvantaged households.
The dramatic fall will be felt sharply after a record $554bn was sent to LMICs in remittances in 2019 - overtaking foreign investment for the first time. The latter is predicted to drop by a whopping 35% next year, which means the decline in weekly or monthly money transfers to struggling families in countries such as Guatemala, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Ukraine will hit communities hard. The unprecedented crash in crude oil prices will also add to the woes.
The biggest falls are expected in Europe and Central Asia (27.5%), followed by Sub-Saharan Africa (23.1%), South Asia (22.1%), the Middle East and North Africa (19.6%), Latin America and the Caribbean (19.3%), and East Asia and the Pacific (13%).
On the bright-ish side, the World Bank reckons that remittances will recover slightly by 2021, to rise by an estimated 5.6% to $470 billion. But - and there are a lot of buts - this depends on how the pandemic evolves across the globe during the rest of the year, and the measures implemented to mitigate the spread of the virus. Also, remittance flows are typically counter-cyclical, as migrant workers tend to send more money to their families in times of crisis and hardship back home. But, this pandemic is truly global, and so is the economic fall-out.
Updated
Jason Burke, the Guardian’s Africa correspondent, has written this dispatch on how South Africa will begin to ease its lockdown:
South Africa’s president Cyril Ramaphosa spoke to the nation for the second time in three days on Thursday night, giving 56 million people the good news that the very strict lockdown that they have endured for nearly month would be lifted at the end of the month, but undoubtedly disappointing some by making it very clear that changes to the lives of many would not be substantial.
So far South Africa, which has been praised for its pro-active strategy of screening and testing to contain the Covid-19 virus, has nearly 4,000 confirmed cases and has suffered 75 deaths. Ramaphosa announced a shift to a system of five levels. The total lockdown - where any movement out of the home is banned - is now designated level five and can be restored if necessary. But from May 1st South Africa will move to level four, which will allow “some activity to resume subject to extreme precautions”.
Few further details were immediately available though Ramaphosa mentioned the phased reopening of schools. The country’s borders will remain shut however. Level three would allow some social activities, but even level two would mean a continuing ban on religious services, sporting events, concerts, cinema and similar gatherings.
Ramaphosa stressed the risk of a new surge of infections, and though the president did not mention the coming winter, experts have repeatedly warned that the month ahead are likely to be difficult. Very significant restrictions look set to remain in place for six months at least.
“Let us stay strong and united,” Ramaphosa, a popular leader who took power in 2018 and won an election last year, said.
Updated
Dubai has become the latest city to ease lockdown restrictions, announcing that cafes and restaurants are to reopen with a maximum capacity of 30 per cent.
Reuters reports public transportation services, including the subway, will resume from 26 April. Shopping malls will also be partially reopened.
Updated
The Czech Republic is speeding up plans to relax its coronavirus lockdown by two weeks to get all shops, restaurants and hotels running again by May 25 as the number of infections stabilises, Reuters reports.
The central European country has used drastic measures including shop and school closures, limiting people’s daily movements and making masks obligatory in public in an effort to prevent any uncontrolled spike in the new coronavirus.
With the number of cases declining in recent days, it had planned a cautious lifting of restrictions between this week and June 8. Business lobbies had criticised the schedule as being too slow.
Industry minister Karel Havlicek said on Thursday the slowing of new infections since the Easter holiday weekend had been good enough for the government to move faster.
“We evaluated Easter, the results are very promising,” Havlicek told a televised news briefing. “There will be 14-day intervals (in the re-opening), at the moment (the schedule) roughly copies what is done in Germany or Austria.”
The country has seen the daily increase of reported cases drop to an average of 119 in the past week, less than half of what was being recorded in early April. The virus’s reproduction factor has dropped to 0.73, according to Havlicek. A figure below the neutral level of 1 means the epidemic is on the decline.
It has reported a total of 7,138 cases since the start of March, and the number of active cases fell below 5,000 on Wednesday for the first time since April 8. Havlicek said the easing may be reversed if the situation worsens again.
The country has recorded 210 deaths of people who had tested positive for the coronavirus.
Updated
Peru passes 20,000 coronavirus cases
Peru’s reported coronavirus cases have rapidly increased this week, reaching 20,914 on Thursday. The country has the second highest number of cases in South America after Brazil despite introducing tough lockdown measures.
The health ministry says it expects patient numbers to peak within the following week, as hospitals strain to deal with the sharp rise in infections. Reuters reports cases of bodies being kept in hallways, masks being reused, and protests from medical workers concerned about their safety.
Peru has recorded 572 deaths, and the number of recorded coronavirus cases in the country has doubled in the last nine days.
Updated
Hello, I’ll be taking over the live blog for the next few hours. As always, tips and suggestions are most welcome. You can reach me via Twitter DM @cleaskopeliti or by email at clea.skopeliti.casual@guardian.co.uk. Thanks in advance.
Summary
Here are the latest lines from our global coronavirus news coverage.
- The US may never restore funding to the World Health Organization, the US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has said. Before Donald Trump announced last week that he was freezing donations to the UN health body, the US was its largest donor. China, meanwhile, has stepped up support.
- Deaths from malaria could double across sub-Saharan Africa this year if work to suppress the disease is disrupted by Covid-19, the WHO has said. If countries fail to maintain supplies of treated nets and antimalarial medicines, up to 769,000 people could die, marking a return to mortality levels last seen 20 years ago.
- Another 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment, adding to a total of more than 26 million since the pandemic shut down the US and large parts of its economy. Millions more are expected to file in the coming weeks as there is a backlog of claims.
- The UK reported 616 more deaths in hospital from Covid-19, taking the total to 18,738, according to statistics published by the UK’s department for health and social care. Wednesday’s daily figure was 759.
- A potential treatment for coronavirus has flopped in its first proper clinical trial, according to draft results accidentally published online by the World Health Organisation. Remdesivir had earlier shown promise when given to patients in the US.
- The Muslim world is preparing for Ramadan under lockdown. This year mosques will remain closed for evening prayers and feasting will be confined to family homes during the month of fasting, which begins on Friday
- France is to unveil its lockdown exit plan next week, its president, Emmanuel Macron, has said. Restaurants, bars and cafes will not open immediately, and travel restrictions within the country are expected to remain in place for a while yet. France has been in lockdown since mid-March.
- Greece is extending lockdown measures by a week, to 4 May. The country has been in lockdown since 22 March and has announced 2,408 confirmed cases and 121 deaths, with 55 people remaining in intensive care.
- Bank of England has warned of the worst slump ‘in centuries’. The virus and the lockdown have caused both a supply shock and a demand shock, said a policy-maker at the world’s oldest central bank, with some sectors being much worse hit than others.
- Indonesia has banned all domestic air and sea travel until June, to prevent thefurther spread of the coronavirus, Indonesia has ordered a ban on air travel until 1 June, while travel by sea will be prohibited until 8 June.
Updated
Confirmed Covid-19 cases in Turkey pass 100,000
The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Turkey increased to 101,790 on Thursday, the Turkish health minister said.
The country registered 115 Covid-19 deaths and 3,116 new cases in the past 24 hours, Fahrettin Koca said on his official Twitter account.
With the latest figures, Turkey’s fatalities have reached 2,491.
A four-day lockdown began in 31 Turkish cities including Ankara and Istanbul on Thursday, and will last until midnight Sunday, in a bid to curb the spread of the virus, AFP reports.
The government has already taken a series of measures including shutting schools and universities, banning mass gatherings and closing public spaces such as restaurants.
Potential coronavirus drug "flops in first trial" - report
An experimental drug that had touted as a potentially effective treatment for coronavirus has flopped in its first comprehensive clinical trial, according to draft results accidentally published online by the World Health Organisation.
According to a report in the Financial Times, which saw the documents, remdesivir failed to improve the condition of patients or reduce the among of the virus in the blood.
The trial, in China, studied the effects of remdesivir on 237 patients, giving the drug to 158, while keeping 79 others as a control group.
Optimism about the drug, made by US drug company Gilead Sciences, had boosted stock markets around the world at the end of last week.
A University of Chicago hospital participating in a study of the antiviral medication had found that nearly all patients suffering severe fever and respiratory symptoms were discharged within a week.
However, it was not an official trial.
Singapore’s ministry of health has reported 1,037 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, the fourth day in a row that it has discovered more than a thousand infections in the city.
Yet again the majority of new cases were among migrant workers housed in dormitories, with the numbers found among Singaporeans and so-called “permanent residents” actually fewer on average than last week.
A 47-year-old Indian national who had tested positive for Covid-19 died on Thursday, the ministry said. However, his death was not immediately ruled to be as a result of the coronavirus so the country’s official Covid-19 death toll remains just 12. So far, Singapore has recorded 11,178 cases of coronavirus.
The ministry said in its press release on Thursday:
The main increase today continues to be for Work Permit holders residing in dormitories, where we are picking up many more cases because of extensive testing. Most of these cases have a mild illness and are being monitored in the community isolation facilities or general ward of our hospitals. None of them is in the intensive care unit.
As of 23 Apr, 12pm, we have confirmed and verified an additional 1,037 cases of COVID-19 infection in Singapore. Breakdown: 0 imported, 25 cases in the community, 30 Work Permit holders residing outside dorms & 982 Work Permit holders residing in dorms. https://t.co/hspThmXQkU
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 23, 2020
Of the new cases, 75% are linked to known clusters, while the rest are pending contact tracing. https://t.co/hspThmXQkU
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 23, 2020
As of 23 Apr, 12pm, 36 more cases of COVID-19 infection have been discharged from hospitals or community isolation facilities. In all, 924 have fully recovered from the infection and have been discharged. https://t.co/hspThmXQkU
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 23, 2020
There are currently 1,368 confirmed cases who are still in hospital. Of these, most are stable or improving, and 26 are in critical condition in the intensive care unit. https://t.co/hspThmXQkU
— Ministry of Health (@sporeMOH) April 23, 2020
Updated
South Africa has recorded 318 new confirmed cases of coronavirus.
As at today the total number of confirmed #Covid_19 Cases are 3953 and the total number of deaths is now 75. pic.twitter.com/fIYKLyvXuU
— Dr Zweli Mkhize (@DrZweliMkhize) April 23, 2020
Indonesia will ban all air and sea travel until June, officials said Thursday, in an apparent effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus during Ramadan.
The temporary ban takes effect Friday, the first day of the fasting month, and lasts until 1 June, AFP reports.
It comes a day after the government, fearing an explosion in virus cases, banned the annual exodus for Eid al-Fitr, the holiday marking the end of Ramadan, when millions travel to their hometowns and ancestral villages.
The latest measure will not apply to emergency, diplomatic or cargo transport, the government said.
The repatriation of Indonesian citizens from abroad and foreigners living in the Southeast Asian archipelago will also be exempt.
“It applies to both domestic and international commercial travel but there are some exceptions,” Transportation Ministry spokeswoman Adita Irawati told AFP.
As of Thursday, Indonesia had confirmed 7,775 cases of COVID-19 and 647 deaths. But the toll is widely believed to be much higher in a country with one of the lowest testing rates in the world.
Italy reported 464 new deaths from coronavirus on Thursday, 27 more than on Wednesday, bringing the death toll to 25,549, Angela Giuffrida, the Guardian’s Rome correspondent, reports.
The number of people currently infected with the virus fell for the fourth day in a row, by 851 to 106,848, while the number of people recovered increased by 3,033.
Italy’s total cases to date, including the victims and 57,576 survivors, is 189,327.
Updated
Sweden on Thursday said it had had recorded more than 2,000 deaths from Covid-19 in the country, while revising earlier statements about when the capital Stockholm was believed to have passed the peak of infections, AFP reports.
The country’s public health agency said it had recorded 16,755 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus, and 2,021 deaths. It also corrected a report it published earlier this week on Stockholm, the epicentre of the Swedish epidemic.
The report, based on statistical modelling, initially said the capital region passed the peak of simultaneous infections on 15 April with 86,000 people believed to be have been infected. But on Thursday it revised the date to 8 April, with some 70,500 believed to have been infected.
Criminal justice experts have warned that chronic overcrowding and underfunding have left prisons around the world vulnerable to being ravaged by coronavirus, Hannah Summers reports.
The challenges of a record global prison population of 11 million have been brought to light in a report published by Penal Reform International (PRI) which found that 102 countries have prison occupancy levels of more than 110%.
Social distancing and personal infection control are almost impossible in overcrowded settings where poor ventilation and sanitation are likely increase the speed at which the virus spreads.
Florian Irminger, executive director of PRI, said: “Prison systems globally were at crisis point before the coronavirus pandemic. Now prisons across the world are ticking time bombs set to be devastated by this virus because of overcrowding, lack of basic healthcare, limited access to clean water … and inhumane living conditions.”
In Bangladesh 10 doctors serve 68 prisons, while Ghana has two doctors covering 46 prisons with 15,000 inmates.
Health authorities in Kenya have reported 17 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total in the country to 320.
COVID-19 UPDATE
— Ministry of Health (@MOH_Kenya) April 23, 2020
✔️668 samples tested
✔️17 positive cases today
✔️Total confirmed cases stand at 320
✔️6 recoveries today
✔️Total discharged and recovered stands at 89#KomeshaCorona
All the 17 are Kenyans.
— Ministry of Health (@MOH_Kenya) April 23, 2020
✔️12 from Mombasa
✔️5 from Nairobi.
✔️15 were picked by the surveillance teams.
✔️2 are from mandatory quarantine centers.
Gender distribution:
✔️9 males.
✔️8 females#KomeshaCorona update by @DrMercyHealth pic.twitter.com/GWVh6U97rj
#KomeshaCorona update pic.twitter.com/c1NJdjXI8F
— Ministry of Health (@MOH_Kenya) April 23, 2020
Updated
European Union leaders were expected to clash over the size and scope of a coronavirus recovery fund on Thursday, as they stood on the precipice of an economic slump unparalleled since the 1930’s Great Depression, Jennifer Rankin reports from Brussels.
The 27 leaders in the bloc’s video-conference summit were to debate a variety of trillion-euro proposals to resuscitate the single market, following the pandemic that so far has claimed more than 108,000 lives in the European Economic Area and UK.
Some European commission officials have suggested a €2tn plan, a combination of loans and grants that relies on raising funds on capital markets, and an agreement on the tortured question of the EU’s next seven-year budget. Spain has called for a €1.5tn programme of grants for the worst-hit countries, funded by “perpetual” (non-maturing) bonds, while France wants a special fund outside the EU budget.
Updated
Zambia has reported two new cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours - and two recoveries.
Catch the daily update by Hon. Chitalu Chilufya on the @mohzambia facebook page https://t.co/RgMSnWnnKR the last 24hrs, #Zambia recorded 2 new confirmed cases of #COVID19 from Chingola, Copperbelt. 2 recoveries were recorded from Levy #StayHome #StaySafe #WashYourHands #MaskUp pic.twitter.com/ugHeUY1fxY
— Zambia National Public Health Institute (@ZMPublicHealth) April 23, 2020
From forest ranger to care home cleaner: volunteering to take on coronavirus in Spain - video diary
Javier is a 50-year-old forest ranger in Soria, a popular tourist region in the north-east of Spain and one of the regions hardest hit by the coronavirus crisis. Alongside local firefighters and trainee police, he has joined a group of volunteers dedicated to containing the spread of Covid-19 in the most vulnerable settings: care homes for the elderly.
Updated
Mirroring a similar move by Egypt, the United Arab Emirates has shortened its nationwide coronavirus curfew by two hours for Ramadan, Reuters reports.
The curfew will run daily from 10pm to 6am for the Muslim fasting month, the state news agency WAM said on Thursday. It had been in force from 8pm to 6am daily.
It was unclear whether Dubai, one of the Gulf country’s seven emirates, which has been under a 24-hour curfew since 26 March, was included in the latest decision.
Updated
Health care services in Gaza are not ready for an outbreak of coronavirus, the Red Cross has warned, as it donated intensive care equipment to the territory.
Palestinians say 13 years of economic sanctions by Israel and its border blockade have crippled their economy and undermined the development of medical facilities, weakening their ability to face a pandemic.
Hospitals in Gaza only have about 110 intensive care beds for adults, most of which are already occupied, and 93 ventilators, for a population of about 2 million.
The ICRC’s donation includes a ventilator, patient monitors, defibrillators, suction devices and pumps for treating patients with serious cases of Covid-19.
Announcing the donation on Thursday, Daniel Duvillard, head of the ICRC delegation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, said:
The prospect ofCovid-19 escaping control in Gaza is frightening, given the weakness of the health system and the dense population of the Gaza Strip.
For the time being there have been only a handful of cases, but Gaza needs to stay vigilant. This equipment will help, yet much more is needed to help the local health facilities cope with any kind of scenario, including the worst-case one.
With passage through Gaza’s borders tightly controlled by Israel and Egypt, so far there have been just 17 confirmed cases of coronavirus in Gaza. Quarantine facilities have been set up by local health authorities for Palestinians who enter via Egypt or Israel.
Updated
The president of Botswana and all the country’s MPs ended 14 days of self-isolation on Thursday, after they were quarantined following contact with a nurse who had contracted the coronavirus.
President Mokgweetsi Masisi and the country’s 63 legislators all tested negative for the virus, AFP reports. It was Masisi’s second period of quarantine in the past month. His office said in a statement:
The director of health services has released [President] Masisi … and [Vice-president] Slumber Tsogwane from home quarantine today.
This follows release of their Covid-19 test results which came out negative.
Botswana has recorded 22 coronavirus cases so far, including one death.
Masisi has imposed a 28-day period of “extreme social distancing” from 2 April to limit the spread of infection.
PRESS RELEASE
— Botswana Government (@BWGovernment) April 23, 2020
The Office of the President wishes to inform the public that Director of Health Services has released His Excellency, Dr Mokgweetsi Eric Keabetswe Masisi, President of the Republic of Botswana and His Honour, pic.twitter.com/u99d0KLk5X
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US may never restore WHO funding, says Pompeo
The US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has said his country, until recently the World Health Organization’s biggest donor, may never restore funding to the UN health body.
Last week Donald Trump announced he was freezing donations to the WHO, accusing it of “severely mismanaging and covering up” the threat posed by the coronavirus outbreak.
Late on Wednesday, Pompeo told Fox News the US government would “take a real hard look at the WHO”, adding that the US needed to see “a structural fix” with the way it operated.
Asked if he was not ruling out a change in leadership of the WHO, Pompeo replied: “Even more than that, it may be the case that the United States can never return to underwriting, having US taxpayer dollars go to the WHO. We may need to have even bolder change than that.”
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A key minister in the government of Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, has urged the media to stop using footage of coffins and bodies, after images of mass graves in the jungle city of Manaus emerged, and Brazil’s death toll from coronavirus continued to rise, Dom Phillips reports for the Guardian from Rio de Janeiro.
Gen Luiz Eduardo Ramos said an overload of negative new coverage was spreading fear among the population, as Brazil’s confirmed cases reached 45,757 and deaths hit 2,906 – 165 of those reported in the last 24 hours.
“On the morning news, it’s coffins, it’s bodies,” Ramos told reporters on Wednesday. “On the lunchtime news, it’s coffins, its bodies and it’s the number of deaths. I ask everyone, how do you think an older lady, a poor person, or a fragile person feels … It’s not helping.”
The comments came after Brazilian TV showed footage of mourners beside a mass grave in Manaus. The Amazon city’s mayor, Arthur Virgílio Neto, cried during a newspaper interview on Tuesday and said doctors were reaching the point of having to decide who to save.
Manaus começa a enterrar vítimas de coronavírus em trincheiras. Um vídeo que circula na redes sociais mostra máquinas usadas para o sepultamento de várias pessoas pic.twitter.com/mg0QzYMGnu
— Band.com.br (@portaldaband) April 21, 2020
On Wednesday, TV Globo broadcast mobile phone footage of a doctor in Rio explaining he had one ventilator for 30 patients and had already lost two patients.
But Ramos suggested the media report good news. “There is so much that is positive happening,” he said, suggesting more coverage of the “wonderful” work of health professionals, ignoring recent in-depth reporting on intensive care wards by the Folha de S Paulo and O Globo newspapers.
“Bolsonaro government working hard,” tweeted Michele Brasil under video footage of the briefing. “Working hard to destroy the country,” tweeted one user in reply.
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China did not cover up the coronavirus outbreak and the US should not seek to bully the country in a manner reminiscent of the 19th century European colonial wars, the Chinese ambassador to London said on Thursday.
Liu Xiaoming was quoted by Reuters as saying:
I hear quite a lot of this speculation, this disinformation, about China covering up, about China hiding something – this is not true ... The Chinese government was transparent and very quick to share data.
... Some other country – their local courts sued China – it is absurd ... 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 still 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 ... China is not an enemy of the United States – if they regard China as an enemy they chose the wrong target.
You can see the ambassador’s comments - which came as a response to a question from a BBC reporter - for yourself in this video tweeted by the ambassador. The most interesting bit begins at about 1hr 3min in.
Beyond the pandemic: Confidence and solidarity https://t.co/79MhcCzjoN
— Liu Xiaoming (@AmbLiuXiaoMing) April 23, 2020
Liu’s comments came after the state of state of Missouri bizarrely decided to sue the Chinese government in a US court over the coronavirus, alleging that nation’s officials are to blame for the pandemic.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court by the state’s top lawyer, claims Chinese officials are “responsible for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world, including Missourians”.
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Egypt has shortened its night-time curfew for an hour for the month of Ramadan, the prime minister, Mostafa Madbouly, has said, according to Reuters.
The curfew will start at 9pm instead of the previous 8pm and run until 6am, Madbouly told a televised news conference.
Ramadan, when Muslims fast until sunset, starts on Friday. In Egypt, fast-breaking is around 6.30pm.
Communal activities and mass prayers were still banned, but some restrictions were being eased, such as allowing shops and restaurants to deliver food, as long as infections did not begin to accelerate too quickly, Madbouly said.
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The WHO’s Africa director, Dr Matshidiso Moeti, in a briefing today again emphasised the risk that lockdowns across Africa could hamper health services on the continent from tackling other diseases.
Dr @MoetiTshidi: "On Saturday we commemorate #WorldMalariaDay. These are two reminders of the importance of essential health services."
— WHO African Region (@WHOAFRO) April 23, 2020
"In 2018, there were 213 million malaria cases & 360,000 related deaths in the African Region – accounting for over 90% of the global burden."
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Africa malaria deaths 'could double during Covid-19 disruption'
Deaths from malaria could double across sub-Saharan Africa this year if work to prevent the disease is disrupted by Covid-19, the World Health Organization has warned, Kaamil Ahmed reports.
The UN’s global health agency said that if countries failed to maintain delivery of insecticide-treated nets and access to antimalarial medicines, up to 769,000 people could die of malaria this year. That figure, which would be more than double the number of deaths in 2018, would mark a return to mortality levels last seen 20 years ago.
“While Covid-19 is a major health threat, it’s critical to maintain malaria prevention and treatment programmes,” said the WHO’s Africa director, Dr Matshidiso Moeti. “The new modeling shows deaths could exceed 700,000 this year alone. We haven’t seen mortality levels like that in 20 years. We must not turn back the clock.”
In 2018, 94% of global deaths from malaria occured in sub-Saharan Africa.
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The number of coronavirus patients in intensive care in Belgium has fallen below 1,000 for the first time since the end of last month.
According to the latest epidemiological bulletin from Belgium’s Sciensano health institute, 993 patients were in intensive care beds with Covid-19 related health complications, a fall of 27 on the day before. It is the first time there have been fewer than 1,000 Covid-19 patients in Belgian ICU’s since 30 March. Overall, 4,527 patients were in hospital with the disease, 238 fewer than on Wednesday.
The institute reported 908 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in the past 24 hours, 347 of which where in care homes. The death toll rose by 230, with 93 of those occurring in hospital and 134 in care homes (of which 38 were confirmed Covid-19 cases and 96 were suspected).
Overall, Belgium has recorded 42,797 coronavirus infections so far.
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Damien Gayle back at the controls now.
Remember, you can reach me with any tips, comments or suggestions for coverage at damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or via Twitter DM to @damiengayle.
Another sign that the world of sport is attempting to return to some version of normality, via Sid Lowe, in Madrid.
Spain’s footballers will undergo daily coronavirus tests under a protocol for a return to training La Liga hopes to set in motion from the second week of May.
There will be three stages to training – individual, small group and full team – and the first tests are pencilled in for next Tuesday. From the second stage, squads will be obliged to live together in isolation, away from their families. A match-day protocol, first drafted in March, is being updated, with the league’s president, Javier Tebas, warning clubs that fans are unlikely to be able to attend games until after Christmas.
Face masks have become a familiar sight throughout the world, and in many different forms, during the Covid-19 pandemic. Here is an extensive gallery of some of the contexts in which they are being used globally:
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Indonesia has banned all domestic air and sea travel until June to try to prevent further spread of coronavirus, Reuters reports.
The ban on air travel will be in place until 1 June, Novie Riyanto Rahardjo, the transport ministry’s director general of aviation, said. The ban on travel by sea will be in place until 8 June, the sea transportation director general, Agus Purnomo, said.
Cargo transportation is exempted from the ban, the officials said. The government is banning Indonesia’s traditional annual exodus for Muslim holidays.
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Humanitarian agencies are in a “race against time” to help Yemen address Covid-19, according to the UN.
“The threat of Covid-19 is so terrifying we have to do everything we can to stop the spread of the virus and help the people who may become infected,” said Lisa Grande, the UN humanitarian coordinator for Yemen.
“We have to be frank, the odds are stacked against us. Already we are supporting the largest humanitarian operation in the world, reaching more than 13 million people each month.”
The UN’s full report on efforts to help Yemen can be found here.
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514 more hospital deaths recorded in England, bringing total to 16,786
From our UK-focused live blog, NHS England has announced 514 more deaths of people who tested positive for Covid-19, bringing the total number of confirmed reported deaths in hospitals in England to 16,786.
Wales has also announced another 17 deaths. Its total now stands at 641. The figures for England and Wales are broken down here:
Earlier today, the Chelsea and Germany footballer Antonio Rüdiger announced that – through the foundation he runs – he will provide 60,000 face masks to low-income traders in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone. So far, 61 Covid-19 cases have been reported in the country, with no deaths.
I am pleased to announce that my Foundation Antonio Rüdiger For Sierra Leone will be partnering with @madam_wokie and @LunchBoxGift to provide 60,000 face masks to low income market traders in Freetown, Sierra Leone. This will hopefully reduce the spread of Covid19. 🇸🇱🙏🏾
— Antonio Rüdiger (@ToniRuediger) April 23, 2020
Deaths from malaria could double across sub-Saharan Africa this year if work to prevent the disease is disrupted by Covid-19, Kaamil Ahmed writes.
“While Covid-19 is a major health threat, it’s critical to maintain malaria prevention and treatment programmes,” said the WHO’s Africa director, Dr Matshidiso Moeti. “The new modeling shows deaths could exceed 700,000 this year alone. We haven’t seen mortality levels like that in 20 years. We must not turn back the clock.”
Kaamil’s piece is here:
France could unveil lockdown exit plan on Tuesday
Emmanuel Macron has told mayors in France that a plan to unwind the country’s Covid-19 lockdown will be unveiled around Tuesday next week, Reuters reports. France’s lockdown was imposed in mid-March. It currently has the fourth-highest Coronavirus death toll, with 21,340 deaths recorded from 157,135 confirmed cases.
Plans are already well underway to refine what form the easing of present restrictions might take. The government wants retailers to open when the lockdown ends on 11 May although restaurants, bars and cafe will not be among those allowed to start up again. Curbs on travel between regions are expected to remain after that date.
Avoiding a second wave of infections remains prominent in any thinking around relaxing the lockdown, and how that might be achieved. Public Health Authority chief Jerome Salomon told a parliamentary hearing on Thursday that lifting it would depend on a substantial fall in the number of people sick and in intensive care.
“France’s goal is not to create collective immunity by creating a second and then a third wave, that seems too dangerous to us,” Salomon said. “The goal is to prevent the circulation of the virus, and to create favourable conditions to gain time before the arrival of effective drugs or vaccines.”
This is Nick Ames taking over for the next hour or so of global coronavirus news. As ever, any tips, updates or suggestions are always warmly welcomed. You can email me on nick.ames@theguardian.com or tweet/direct message me at @NickAmes82.
4.4 million more Americans sign on as unemployed
An additional 4.4 million Americans filed for unemployment last week, adding to a total of more than 26 million since the coronavirus pandemic shut down swathes of the US and brought its economy to a near standstill, report Dominic Rushe and Amanda Holpuch in New York.
The pace of layoffs appears to have slowed slightly, but a backlog of claims means millions more are likely to file in the coming weeks. States across the country are encountering problems with the sheer number of people applying for unemployment benefits.
Delays in processing applications have boosted the weekly totals in recent weeks but economists believe the unprecedented wave of claims is near its peak.
Nomura economist Lewis Alexander said the labour market remains “under severe strain” but said that “states that imposed lockdowns relatively early are seeing claims activity improve somewhat.”
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Muslim world prepares for Ramadan under lockdown
If astronomers, clerics and officials agree, tomorrow will mark the first day of Ramadan. And amid a global pandemic, this year’s month of fasting and reflection for the world’s Muslims will be very different, writes Martin Chulov, the Guardian’s Middle East editor.
Normally a sociable time, where abstaining from food and water during daylight hours gives way to sumptuous meals and gatherings at dusk, the 2020 rituals have been modified to fit public health directives that urge people to maintain a distance from each other while the coronavirus remains active.
Mosques will remain closed to evening prayers and feasting will become a more intimate affair, within the confines of family homes. Large public banquets, provided by authorities, or benefactors, have been outlawed in much of the Islamic world, where curfews and lockdowns remain rigidly enforced.
Ahead of the fast there was even discussion about whether going without sustenance for much of the day may have an effect on immunity – and hence people’s capacity to fight off Covid-19. However, with no clarity about whether this is the case, and evidence to support the contrary – that fasting may in fact be beneficial – the premise of this year’s Ramadan remains unchanged.
“Muslim religious authorities around the world are advocating wide restrictions on gatherings, in or out of mosques, as a result of the corona pandemic,” said Dr HA Hellyer, senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “The mosques will remain virtually closed; the usual charity meal tables will be absent from the streets; and the frequent family socialising associated with Ramadan will be suspended.”
Ramadan under lockdown is the antithesis of the festival. But, as Covid-19 took hold in the lead up to the fast, religious authorities and governments remained determined to ban congregational activities – a move that could deny the impoverished more than the chance to socialise. Charity is also an important part of the month, with cash, food and other donations regularly given to those with few means to afford them.
Mosques across the Middle East and north Africa – in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Iraq and the United Arab Emirates – have largely been shuttered throughout the crisis and will not offer shelter or seclusion to those fasting this year.
Some regional states have amended their curfew times to make it easier for people to shop during fasting hours. Coronavirus has even taken a toll on traditional Ramadan TV fare, with social distancing disrupting filming in the run-up, leaving shows unfinished. Clerical bodies, meanwhile, have encouraged people to embrace this year’s restrictions by focusing on close family members.
In a statement earlier this month, Egypt’s Grand Mufti, Shawki Allam, said: “We must look to the positive aspects during these exceptional times that have compelled many people to be quarantined in their homes and turn this into an opportunity for bonding and forgiveness and restoring the spirit of serenity and cooperation.”
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In most of the world, medical staff have been lauded as heroes for their response to the coronavirus pandemic. But in Mexico, the growing number of Covid-19 cases has brought with it a wave of violence against nurses and doctors who have wrongly been accused of spreading the disease, reports Analy Nuño in Guadalajara.
At least 21 medical workers have been attacked in 12 states across the country, according to Fabiana Zepeda, the head of nursing for the Mexican Social Security Institute.
So far, Mexico has seen 9,501 confirmed coronavirus cases, and 857 deaths, but health officials admit that the true infection level is at least eight times higher as the country has limited testing capacity.
On Tuesday, the health undersecretary Hugo López-Gatell who has led Mexico’s response to the pandemic, announced that the virus had reached the stage of rapid spread, and warned that “a large number of infections and hospitalisations” were imminent.
Greece is extending coronavirus lockdown measures by a week to 4 May, the government said on Thursday, AFP reports.
“Restrictive measures that apply until 27 April are extended by a week to 4 May,” government spokesman Stelios Petsas told reporters.
Next week Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis will be announcing steps to remove some of the nationwide lockdown measures imposed on 22 March, Petsas added.
“Transition to the new normality will be slow and will unfold progressively in May and June,” he said, adding that the effects on public health would be evaluated on a “week-to-week” basis.
The spokesman noted that the lockdown extension would delay the planned removal of hundreds of elderly and ailing asylum seekers from overstretched migrant camps on Greek islands.
“Naturally this plan will now be slightly delayed,” he said.
Greece has so far officially announced 2,408 cases of coronavirus and 121 deaths, with 55 people still in intensive care.
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Bank of England warns of worst slump ‘in centuries’
One of the Bank of England’s top policymakers has warned that, because of the coronavirus crisis, the UK faces potentially its worst economic shock in several hundred years.
Jan Vlieghe, a member of the Bank’s interest-rate setting committee, made this warning in a speech just released:
Based on the early indicators, and based on the experience in other countries that were hit somewhat earlier than the UK, it seems that we are experiencing an economic contraction that is faster and deeper than anything we have seen in the past century, or possibly several centuries.
As the world’s oldest central bank, the Bank of England has an institutional memory going back longer than most, so when it makes such epochal warnings, it is worth listening to.
According to Vlieghe, the Covid-19 virus, and the lockdown, has created both a supply shock (because people can’t work) and a demand shock (because normal consumption patterns are disrupted by the lockdown).
This economic shock is also “highly asymmetric”, he adds – as some sectors are much worse hit than others. If you want to know more, head over to our business blog, where Graeme Wearden has written a slightly longer post on Vlieghe’s comments (from which my own borrows rather liberally), and is also reporting the latest economic developments live.
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Regular readers of the blog will have tracked how Singapore has shifted from one of the world leaders in tackling the coronavirus outbreak, to in recent weeks facing accelerating transmissions.
It turned out that even while the city state had been aggressive in testing, contact tracing, quarantining, and blocking travel from infected areas, the disease was silently spreading through the army of migrant workers it relies upon to carry out basic services. Yesterday, after days of recording more than a thousand new infections a day, the number of cases in Singapore passed 10,000
Rebecca Ratcliffe, the Guardian’s south-east Asia correspondent, has written this dispatch on how the coronavirus crisis has finally shone a light on the conditions faced by the unseen workers that Singapore relies on.
The dormitories in which Singapore’s migrant workers live have, until recently, been almost hidden from view. The vast, steel buildings are mostly on the outskirts of town, tucked inside industrial estates, far away from the city-state’s glittering skyscrapers and luxury hotels.
Inside, the men who carry out back-breaking work to build Singapore’s infrastructure sleep on bunk beds, crammed into rooms with as many as 20 people. The biggest dormitory complex houses up to 24,000 workers.
In recent weeks, as the coronavirus has ripped through the facilities, their unsanitary and overcrowded conditions have quickly become the subject of international attention. Singapore, recently lauded for its gold-standard approach to testing and tracing, now demonstrates both the dangers of neglecting marginalised communities, and the vulnerability of nations to a second wave of infections.
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Iran reports lowest new daily infections for a month
Iran has reported its lowest daily number of new coronavirus cases since 21 March, with 1,030 detected in the past 24 hours according to its health ministry spokesman.
Ninety more people had died from Covid-19 since Wednesday, Kianoush Jahanpour said, while 3,105 patients with the disease remain in a critical condition. However the latest figures suggest that the epidemic in the country, which has so far suffered the Middle East’s worst coronavirus outbreak, is on a downward curve.
Jahanpour, the head of the health ministry’s public relations office, said on Thursday that 64,843 people out of a total of 87,026 infected with the coronavirus had survived and recovered, the Islamic Republic News Agency reports.
The total death toll in Iran is 5,481.
While Iran held back from a full lockdown, public employees are constantly disinfecting and sanitising public areas, according to IRNA. Schools and universities have also been shut down.
Updated
Summary
World is on track for ‘unprecedented’ post-war recession
Ratings agency Fitch says the world is heading for a recession of “unprecedented depth in the post-war period” with global gross domestic product to tumble by 3.9% in 2020. “This is twice as large as the decline anticipated in our early April GEO [global economic outlook] update and would be twice as severe as the 2009 recession,” said Fitch’s chief economist.
Global death pass 180,000
The global death toll from the coronavirus has exceeded 183,000, with the number of cases worldwide at more than 2.6m. The US accounts for more than 842,000 cases and almost 47,000 deaths. The UK has more than 134,000 cases and more than 18,000 deaths.
Missing Wuhan citizen journalist reappears
A Chinese citizen journalist has reappeared, having gone missing for almost two months after posting videos from Wuhan during the outbreak. Li Zehua claims he was detained by police and forcibly quarantined.
He was one of three Chinese journalists reporting in Wuhan during some of the worst weeks of the epidemic. He was last seen on 26 February after posting a video in which he was chased by a white SUV and an hours-long livestream that ended when several agents entered his apartment.
China coronavirus cases might have been four times official figure, says study
More than 232,000 people might have been infected in the first wave of Covid-19 in mainland China, four times the official figures, according to a study by Hong Kong researchers.
WHO receives both criticism and support from members
Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said all members of the World Health Organization (WHO) should cooperate with a proposed independent review into the spread of coronavirus. (04.35) And the US government announced that it will assess whether the World Health Organization is being run the way that it should be. (02.30) Meanwhile Germany’s Angela Merkel called the WHO an “indispensable partner” (08.55) and China donated a further $30 million to the organization, which is seeking more than $1 billion to fund its battle against the coronavirus pandemic. (10.02)
Germany: cases increase by 2,352 to 148,046, deaths increase by 215 to 5,094
Germany’s confirmed virus cases have increased by 2,352 to 148,046, officials said on Thursday. The number of deaths linked to Covid-19 has risen by 215 to now 5,094.
Spain: cases increase by 4,635, deaths up by 440
The Spanish health ministry said on Thursday that 440 people died from the coronavirus in the previous 24 hours, which brought total fatalities to 22,157. That figure ids slightly higher than the previous day when 435 people died. The number of diagnosed cases rose to 213,024 from 208,389 the day before.
Philippines: 271 new confirmed infections, 16 new deaths
The Philippines’ health ministry on Thursday reported 16 new coronavirus deaths and 271 confirmed infections. The health ministry said total deaths have increased to 462 while infections have risen to 6,981. But 29 more patients have recovered, bringing the total recoveries to 722.
Updated
Vietnam eased social distancing measures on Thursday, after reporting no new coronavirus infections for six consecutive days.
After a decisive - and early - response to the pandemic, including mass quarantines and aggressive contact tracing, the Southeast Asian nation has recorded just 268 virus cases and zero deaths, according to official tallies.
Vietnam was one of the first nations to ban flights to and from mainland China and in early February, when it had barely more than a dozen cases, villages with 10,000 people close to the country’s capital Hanoi were placed under quarantine.
Nguyen Trinh Thang, a 72-year-old Hanoi resident, told AFP how he and a team in his community had zeroed in on any suspected cases, falling back on grassroots Communist Party networks in charge of overseeing neighbourhoods.
We go to each and every alley, knocking on each and every door. We follow the guidance from our government that ‘fighting the pandemic is like fighting our enemy’.
After reporting no new infections for the sixth consecutive day on Wednesday, the government said some shops and services will be allowed to reopen.
On Thursday, a few of the capital’s cafes had resumed service, although the streets were still fairly quiet.
Updated
New infections fall in Russia for second day
The number of new coronavirus cases has fallen in Russia for a second day and remained below record levels for four days, raising hopes that the disease may have reached a plateau in the country, Andrew Roth, the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, reports.
But concerns remain that the disease’s progress into the regions beyond Moscow may fuel a new explosion of cases in the weeks to come.
Russia posted 4,774 new cases on Thursday, bringing the country’s official total to 62,773. Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, sidestepped questions from journalists about whether the disease had plateaued in the country, saying the situation “remains fairly tense.”
Russia confirmed a record 6,060 new cases on Sunday, capping more than a week of explosive growth that saw the number of new cases recorded per day nearly quadruple.
Mos of Russia’s confirmed cases of coronavirus are in Moscow. Most of the city’s 12 million residents have been under shelter-at-home orders since March 30. On Friday, a city official predicted that the city’s highest death rates from the disease would come in the next two to three weeks.
More than 24,000 Covid-19 cases have been reported on the African continent, with over 6,250 recoveries and 1,100 deaths, the World Health Organization reported on Thursday morning.
In his press conference yesterday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the WHO director general, said he believes that Africa is still at the beginning of its coronavirus outbreak.
This is Damien Gayle taking the reins of the live blog now, keeping you up to date with the latest in coronavirus world news for the next eight or so hours.
I’m always interested in hearing about any tips, suggestions or updates from where you are in the world. If you have anything to share, please send me an email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or a direct message on Twitter to @damiengayle.
I can’t be alone in finding evidence of wildlife benefiting from the absence of humans heartening in these times.
This is an excellent example - Thai authorities have released drone footage of a herd of dugongs - a rare sea mammal - cruising off an island in the south of the country.
Watch: Thai authorities have released drone footage of a herd of dugongs – a rare type of sea mammal – cruising slowly off an island in the south of the country. Travel restrictions imposed to counter the COVID-19 pandemic have left coastal regions undisturbed pic.twitter.com/GYcYF9EXEd
— TIME (@TIME) April 23, 2020
And with that, I’ll leave you in the more than capable hands of my colleague Damien Gayle.
The Spanish government has just given more details on what the loosening of lockdown restrictions means for children in Spain, who have been confined to their homes since 14 March, writes the Guardian’s Sam Jones in Madrid.
From Sunday, children who are 14 or under will be allowed out to walk and play in the streets for an hour a day between 9am and 9pm.
They will need to stay within one kilometre of their homes and be accompanied at all times by an adult, who will be permitted to take a maximum of three children out at a time.
Parks and communal play areas will remain out of bounds because of the risk of infection, but children will be allowed to take toys, balls and scooters with them.
Announcing the measures at a press conference on Thursday morning, the deputy prime minister and Podemos leader Pablo Iglesias added: “Children will be allowed to run and jump and do exercise, but social distancing must always be observed.”
Iglesias said children who live in rural areas will be allowed to walk through the countryside and in woods, but must still observe social distancing. He also said that children or adolescents with a fever or symptoms consistent with the coronavirus should stay at home in quarantine.
The deputy prime minister also asked children in Spain to forgive the confusion the government had caused on Tuesday after it said children would be allowed out only to accompany a parent to buy food or medicine. A huge public outcry resulted in a u-turn within hours, and the government insisting that children would have more room to roam.
“I want to say sorry because over the past few days and hours, the government hasn’t been as clear as it could have been when it came to explaining how you’ll be allowed to go out for walks with your families from Sunday,” said Iglesias.
“I know this confinement hasn’t been at all easy for you - you’ve had to stop going to school and seeing your teachers and friends. You’ve not been able to see many of your relatives and you’ve had to stay at home and play instead of going out. I want to thank you and I want you to know that we sometimes get things wrong when we make very difficult decisions.”
Spain has recorded 4,635 news cases of the virus and 440 deaths overnight - a slight rise on Wednesday’s figures. The country now has a total of 213,024 confirmed cases and 22,157 deaths.
The latest figures from the health ministry show the number of new cases grew by 2.2% over the past 24 hours - roughly in line with recent days and vastly down on the 38% daily rise seen when the state of emergency was declared just over a month ago.
The ministry also said that 34,355 of the country’s cases - 16% of the total - are among healthworkers.
Germany agrees further aid package
Germany has agreed on a further aid package to help its economy survive the coronavirus crisis. The extra 10.8bn euros (£9.4bn, $11.7bn) will go towards tax cuts for businesses and further employment benefits for workers. Families are to be given help to buy equipment like computers for home learning.
Workers staying at home due to the lockdown will now receive 70-77% of their net salary from the fourth month of unemployment, a 10% increase over what they got for the first three months. From the seventh month, they will receive 80-87%.
The additional package comes Germany takes tentative steps to reopen the economy : bookshops, florists, fashion stores, bike and car outlets and other shops smaller than 800 sq m were permitted to reopen on Monday morning.
Spain: cases increase by 4,635, deaths up by 440
The Spanish health ministry said on Thursday that 440 people died from the coronavirus in the previous 24 hours, which brought total fatalities to 22,157.
That figure ids slightly higher than the previous day when 435 people died. The number of diagnosed cases rose to 213,024 from 208,389 the day before.
China steps up support for WHO
China said on Thursday it would donate a further $30 million to the World Health Organization (WHO), which is seeking more than $1 billion to fund its battle against the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 180,000 people worldwide, Reuters reports.
The pledge comes about a week after U.S. President Donald Trump suspended funding to the WHO and accused the Geneva-based organisation of promoting Chinese “disinformation” about the virus, which emerged in the central city of Wuhan last year.
Hua Chunying, a spokeswoman of China’s foreign ministry, tweeted:
China has decided to donate additional $30 million in cash to WHO to support its global fight against #COVID19, in particular strengthening developing countries' health systems. China already donated $20 million in cash to WHO on March 11.
— Hua Chunying 华春莹 (@SpokespersonCHN) April 23, 2020
The donation aimed to support the global fight against COVID-19, in particular strengthening health systems in developing countries, she said, adding that China had already donated $20 million to the WHO on March 11.
On Wednesday, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he hoped the Trump administration would reconsider its decision:
I hope the U.S. believes that this an important investment, not just to help others, but for the U.S. to stay safe also.
The United States contributed more than $400 million to the WHO in 2019, or roughly 15% of the organisation’s budget.
In the UK, vaccine trials on humans lead by Oxford University are due to start on Thursday.
The New York Times says that Germany has joined the race for a vaccine, giving the green light to human trials of potential vaccines.
Germany gave the green light for human trials of potential coronavirus vaccines developed by German biotech company BioNTech, which is racing teams in Germany, the U.S. and China to develop an agent that will stop the pandemic.
The trial, only the fourth worldwide of a vaccine targeting the virus, will be initially conducted on 200 healthy people, with more subjects, including some at higher risk from the disease, to be included in a second stage, German vaccines regulator the Paul Ehrlich Institut said on Wednesday.
Thanks to Guardian reader Claus Schrøder-Hansen for sending me the link to this story.
Philippines: 271 new confirmed infections, 16 new deaths
The Philippines’ health ministry on Thursday reported 16 new coronavirus deaths and 271 confirmed infections, ahead of President Rodrigo Duterte’s decision whether to lift or extend quarantine measures on the country’s main island
In a bulletin, the health ministry said total deaths have increased to 462 while infections have risen to 6,981. But 29 more patients have recovered, bringing the total recoveries to 722.
Afghanistan has recorded its biggest one-day rise of coronavirus cases as the number of confirmed patients with Covid-19 reached 1,226, triggered by a surge of infections in Kandahar and Kunduz, writes my colleague Akhtar Mohammad Makoii in Herat.
In the last 24 hours 83 new cases have been reported, most in the southern province of Kandahar.
There has been a four-day pause in testing in several regions because of a shortage of testing kits, but it has resumed, according to officials.
Afghanistan is struggling with a shortage of diagnostic testing equipment known as “RNA extraction kits”, which scientists use to isolate the RNA (ribonucleic acid) in samples of the novel coronavirus.
Wahidullah Mayar, a health ministry spokesman, said yesterday that the ministry had received some kit from the World Health Organization and would distribute that among the provinces facing shortage.
Kabul has recorded six new cases, pushing the total number of infections to 419 in the capital, and making it Afghanistan’s worst affected area. In Herat, the number of confirmed cases stands at 363, an increase of 21 in the last 24 hours.
On Thursday Kabul’s governor said restrictions on movements would be tightened as people continue to move freely on the streets despite a lockdown.
Meanwhile, the ministry of higher education has extended the closure of all higher education institutions, universities and other training programmes for another 20 days – until 9 May 9 – as part of efforts to slow the spread of coronavirus.
The country has so far recorded 40 deaths and 177 recoveries.
Updated
Germany: cases increase by 2,352 to 148,046, deaths increase by 215 to 5,094
Germany’s confirmed virus cases have increased by 2,352 to 148,046, officials said on Thursday. The number of deaths linked to Covid-19 has risen by 215 to now 5,094.
Merkel backs WHO
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has thrown her support behind the embattled World Health Organization, distancing her government from President Donald Trump’s pause in US funding to the global body.
Speaking in the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, Merkel said:
The WHO is an indispensable partner and we support it in its mandate.
Merkel, who was frequently applauded during her address, urged a “clever and cautious” approach during the next phase of the coronavirus epidemic.
Speaking in parliament, she said:
It’s not the end phase but still just the beginning. We will be with it for a long time.
I know how difficult the restrictions are, it’s a challenge to democracy, it limits our democratic rights.
But she called for “maximum discipline”, saying it was the only route to “get back to living in security faster”, adding that without it there was a higher likelihood of stop-start lockdowns. “We must not waste what has been achieved already,” she said.
It’s the biggest challenge since World War Two, for the life and health of our people.
Her government’s decisions in this crisis “have no historical model”, she said.
The question of how we can prevent the virus from overwhelming our health system and subsequently costing the lives of countless people, this question will for a long time be the central question for politics in Germany and Europe.
Merkel said Europe must strengthen its capacity to produce specialised medical kit, instead of depending on global supplies, which are now very stretched.
Updated
New cases in Russia fall for the third day running
Russia recorded 4,774 new coronavirus cases in the last 24 hours, a fall in the number of daily new cases for the third day running, bringing its nationwide tally to 62,773, the Russian coronavirus crisis response centre said on Thursday.
Forty-two people with the virus had died in the last 24 hours, pushing the death toll to 555, it said.
Updated
Summary
European Union leaders are expected to sign off on a huge rescue package for countries hardest-hit by the coronavirus crisis when they hold a video conference later on Thursday.
The €500bn (£438bn) package was agreed after fierce debate between richer countries in the north of the EU and weaker economies in the south which have suffered most from the pandemic.
Updated
The French interior minister, Christophe Castaner, has said he does not think this week’s outbreak of violent clashes in French housing estates will result in scenes similar to the 2005 riots that broke out throughout the country.
“We are not in this sort of scenario,” Castaner told BFM TV.
Stringent restrictions on public movements ordered by President Emmanuel Macron to tackle the coronavirus have exacerbated tensions in the low-income neighbourhoods around Paris, with clashes having broken out this week.
For more on the unrest in France, do read this report from my colleague Kim Willsher:
Updated
More than a thousand Hong Kong residents are still stuck in India, after the country went into a sudden lockdown last month, writes my colleague Helen Davidson.
The Hong Kong legislator Priscilla Leung has told reporters today the government is working on bringing them home in groups, but that the 200 or so citizens among the group should be first priority. The rest are Hong Kong permanent residents with Indian or other passports.
“We are willing to help all HK permanent residents to come back if the flights can be arranged,” she said.
“We need to consider the acceptability and capability of Hong Kong, how to ensure the testing facilities as well as the quarantine accommodation.”
Leung said some of the people in the group were sleeping on the streets, and had no access to medical care.
She said relevant authorities had given “positive feedback” on the transfer proposal.
“We are willing to help.”
Updated
This story from my colleagues in the US is worth flagging:
A senior US government doctor who worked on the search for a coronavirus vaccine has claimed he was fired after resisting Donald Trump’s push to use the unproven drug hydroxychloroquine as a treatment, the New York Times reported on Wednesday.
Rick Bright was this week ousted as director of the US health department’s Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or Barda, and as the deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response.
In a stunningly candid statement, Bright highlighted his refusal to embrace hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug relentlessly promoted by the president and Fox News despite a lack of scientific studies. He said:
Specifically, and contrary to misguided directives, I limited the broad use of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine, promoted by the administration as a panacea, but which clearly lack scientific merit.
While I am prepared to look at all options and to think ‘outside the box’ for effective treatments, I rightly resisted efforts to provide an unproven drug on demand to the American public.
The full story here:
I’m sure that the whole world now shares an aversion to using handles to open doors, or cupboards or fridges in supermarkets or literally anything else.
Well, those good folk in Finland have starting thinking about this tricky problem and come up with the below. Once again proving beyond doubt that Finland is the best country in the world.
Hands-free door handles at this Finnish supermarket allows customers to open doors with their arms pic.twitter.com/a1fSJOID5z
— Reuters (@Reuters) April 23, 2020
My thanks to the ongoing efforts of Helen Sullivan. I’ll be with you for the next few hours before my colleague Damien Gayle takes over.
If you think we have missed a story or want to tip us off about something, plewase do get in touch. I’m on alexandra.topping@theguardian.com and on Twitter I’m on @lexytopping. My DMs are open.
That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. I’ll now be handing over to my colleague Alexandra Topping – but before I go, here’s a Welsh minister not switching off his mic and being caught ranting about one of his colleagues on an especially crowded Zoom chat:
And a few of the reactions from the other people on the call:
— Alain Tolhurst (@Alain_Tolhurst) April 22, 2020
Updated
Summary
- World is on track for ‘unprecedented’ post-war recession. Ratings agency Fitch says the world is heading for a recession of “unprecedented depth in the post-war period” with global gross domestic product to tumble by 3.9% in 2020. “This is twice as large as the decline anticipated in our early April GEO [global economic outlook] update and would be twice as severe as the 2009 recession,” said Fitch’s chief economist.
- Trump signs immigration order. Trump said he had signed the order halting immigration to the US just before coming into the room to deliver the White House press briefing.
- World Health Organization under fire. The US government will assess whether the WHO is being run the way that it should be, John Barsa, acting administrator of the US agency for international development said on Wednesday, as Australia called for all WHO members should participate in a coronavirus inquiry.
- Missing Wuhan citizen journalist reappears. A Chinese citizen journalist reappears, having gone missing for almost two months after posting videos from Wuhan during the outbreak. Li Zehua claims he was detained by police and forcibly quarantined.
- Two pet cats test positive in New York state. The two cats are the first confirmed cases of the coronavirus in companion animals in the US, federal officials said on Wednesday.
UK papers, Thursday 23 April 2020
GUARDIAN: Revealed: scale of coronavirus’s deadly toll on ethnic minorities #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/mYntYpDCyn
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 22, 2020
Army of thousands to help trace virus victims#TomorrowsPapersToday@hendopolis pic.twitter.com/HvDrfJZEXt
— The Times Pictures (@TimesPictures) April 22, 2020
Tomorrow's @independent front page #tomorrowspaperstoday To subscribe to the Daily Edition: https://t.co/XF8VnDpHYF pic.twitter.com/ViWtn4oWgm
— The Independent (@Independent) April 23, 2020
TELEGRAPH: Social disruption will last for a year #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/mP1BlMfnlw
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 22, 2020
FT: Universities plea for £2bn rescue falls on deaf ears in the Treasury #TomorrowsPapersToday pic.twitter.com/WXRzV3E3ZS
— Neil Henderson (@hendopolis) April 22, 2020
The world-famous song “Pata Pata”, a South African dance hit from 1967, is being re-released with new lyrics to spread information about coronavirus to vulnerable communities.
Meaning “touch touch” in the Xhosa language, “Pata Pata” was written by Grammy-winning singer Miriam Makeba who named it after a dance move popular in Johannesburg at the time:
The new version sung by Beninese artist Angelique Kidjo includes lyrics such as, “We need to keep our hands clean so ‘no-Pata Pata’... Don’t touch your face, keep distance please and ‘no-Pata Pata’”:
This new Angélique Kidjo version of Miriam Makeba's Pata Pata – coronavirus edition – SLAPS: https://t.co/rjDoCqVqPk
— Helen Sullivan (@helenrsullivan) April 23, 2020
It will be played on more than 15 radio stations across African countries on Thursday, said the UN Children’s Agency (UNICEF), which organized the release.
UK ethnic minorities dying of Covid-19 at higher rate, analysis shows
Caelainn Barr, Niko Kommenda, Niamh McIntyre and Antonio Voce have this report for the Guardian:
The UK government has been urged to recognise that race and racial inequalities are a risk factor for Covid-19 after Guardian research which has revealed that ethnic minorities in England are dying in disproportionately high numbers compared with white people.
The revelation that people from minority groups appear to be over-represented among the coronavirus deaths, by as much as 27%, “confirmed the worst fears” of campaigners who said there was now no question of an excessive toll.
The Guardian analysis found that of 12,593 patients who died in hospital up to 19 April, 19% were Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) even though these groups make up only 15% of the general population in England.
And the analysis revealed that three London boroughs with high BAME populations - Harrow, Brent and Barnet – were also among the five local authorities with the highest death rates in hospitals and the community.
China coronavirus cases might have been four times official figure, says study
More than 232,000 people might have been infected in the first wave of Covid-19 in mainland China, four times the official figures, according to a study by Hong Kong researchers.
Mainland China reported more than 55,000 cases as of 20 February but, according to research by academics at Hong Kong University’s school of public health published in the Lancet, the true number would have been far greater if the definition of a Covid-19 case that was later used had been applied from the outset.
China has now reported more than 83,000 cases. Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus has exceeded 183,000, with the number of cases worldwide standing at more than 2.6 million.
China’s national health commission issued seven versions of a case definition for Covid-19 between 15 January and 3 March, and the study found these changes had a “substantial effect” on how many infections which were detected as cases.
It comes as China’s ambassador to the US called for “a serious rethink of the foundations” of the two countries’ relationship, while also criticising US politicians for ignoring scientists and making “groundless” accusations.
Thanks for following along. A reminder that you can get in touch with me on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
Global deaths near 185,000
At least 183,441 people have lost their lives in the coronavirus pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University data, with the number of confirmed cases worldwide at more than 2.6 million.
The US accounts for more than 842,000 cases and almost 47,000 deaths.
The UK has more than 134,000 cases and more than 18,000 deaths.
Updated
As the coronavirus lockdown continues, many of us holed up at home with family will be wondering how much more of it we can take. But what is it like if you have 11 kids or live with your extended family? We asked some of Britain’s biggest families how they are coping.
Here’s the full story on the Australian billionaire who was allowed to self isolate at home, despite the Australian government having ordered 11 days earlier that everyone arriving from overseas would be held in a hotel or other accommodation for a period of supervised quarantine
Australian media mogul Kerry Stokes and his wife were allowed to avoid mandatory hotel quarantine on medical grounds when they arrived in the state of Western Australia by private jet two weeks ago, and instead spent 14 days holed up in their Perth mansion.
Stokes is one of the richest and most powerful men in Australia, with interests in mining, construction and media, and an estimated net worth of US$2.4bn.
The exemption was granted despite the couple having been in the Colorado ski fields at the time of a coronavirus outbreak in luxury ski resort villages in mid-March.
On the same day the Stokeses landed, authorities in WA launched an inquiry into how a 71-year-old man in mandatory hotel quarantine with his wife ended up in intensive care in a coma after waiting nine hours for a response to his wife’s request for medical assistance.
Germany’s confirmed coronavirus cases increased by 2,352 to 148,046, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Thursday, marking a third consecutive day of new infections accelerating.
The reported death toll rose by 215 to 5,094, the tally showed.
Hydroxychloroquine and coronavirus: a guide to the scientific studies so far
With endorsements from a controversial French physician, Fox News, and Donald Trump, hydroxychloroquine – an old anti-malarial drug that is today more commonly used to treat lupus – has received a disproportionate amount of attention as a potential treatment for Covid-19.
The limited evidence around hydroxychloroquine so far has come in a steady stream of scientific studies, often as soon as they are posted online as “preprints” – ie before they have gone through the rigorous vetting process known as peer review. None of the studies that have been released meet the gold standard for demonstrating a drug’s effectiveness – a large-scale, double-blinded randomized controlled trial (RCT), though multiple trials of that kind are under way.
While the world awaits those results, here’s a guide to some of the studies released thus far:
Updated
UK's NHS urged to avoid PPE gloves made in 'slave-like' conditions
The government must not ignore the “slave-like” conditions of migrant workers making rubber medical gloves in Malaysia in its rush to source protective equipment to keep frontline NHS staff safe from coronavirus, human rights groups say.
Malaysia is the world’s largest producer of rubber gloves, but the industry has been accused of grossly exploiting its workforce, mostly impoverished migrants from Bangladesh and Nepal.
Illegal recruitment fees, long hours, low pay, passport confiscation and squalid, overcrowded accommodation are commonplace, workers have claimed. Experts say such conditions leave them vulnerable to forced labour and debt bondage, which are modern forms of slavery.
Thailand reported 13 new coronavirus cases on Thursday and one more death, a 78-year-old woman who had other health complications.
Of the new cases, five were linked to previous cases and five had no known links, Reuters reports.
Three other new cases were reported from the southern island of Phuket where the authorities are aggressively testing the population because the infection rate there is severe, said Taweesin Wisanuyothin, a spokesman for the government’s Centre for Covid-19 Situation Administration.
Since the outbreak escalated in January, Thailand has reported a total of 2,839 cases and 50 fatalities, while 2,430 patients have recovered and gone home.
How Covid-19 poured cold water on Netherlands’ EU romance
Isolated in a recent European Union council of ministers, with attitudes described by European leaders past and present as “repugnant”.
It sounds like an old script of Britain in the EU. Yet it is the Netherlands that has found itself at the heart of the union’s most bitter row during the coronavirus pandemic. As EU leaders meet on Thursday for their fourth virtual crisis summit in seven weeks, the Dutch will once again be in the vanguard of opposition to plans for big spending on the recovery:
Podcast: how do you find drugs to treat the Covid-19?
Summary
- The world is on track for a recession of “unprecedented depth in the post-war period”, ratings agency Fitch says with world gross domestic product to tumble by 3.9% in 2020. “This is twice as large as the decline anticipated in our early April GEO [global economic outlook] update and would be twice as severe as the 2009 recession,” said Fitch’s chief economist.
- South Korean economy shrinks 1.4% over coronavirus. South Korea’s economy saw its worst performance in more than a decade in the first quarter as the coronavirus epidemic raged across the country, the central bank said Thursday.
- Trump signs immigration order. Trump said he had signed the order halting immigration to the US just before coming into the room to deliver the White House press briefing.
- Trump also said he discouraged Georgia’s governor from reopening. The US president says he told Georgia governor Brian Kemp that he disagreed “very strongly” with the decision to reopen businesses in the state. “I think it’s too soon,” he says.
- The US government will assess whether the World Health Organization is being run the way that it should be, the US Agency for International Development’s Acting Administrator John Barsa said on Wednesday.
- Australia says all WHO members should participate in a coronavirus inquiry. All members of the World Health Organization (WHO) should cooperate with a proposed independent review into the spread of coronavirus, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday.
- Two pet cats in New York state have tested positive for the coronavirus, marking the first confirmed cases in companion animals in the US, federal officials said Wednesday.
- Missing Wuhan citizen journalist reappears. A Chinese citizen journalist who was missing for almost two months after posting videos from Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak has re-appeared, claiming that he was detained by police and forcibly quarantined.
- World has ‘a long way to go’, warns WHO chief. The director general of the World Health Organizsation has said that there is still “a long way to go” in tackling the coronavirus crisis around the world.
- Covid-19 infections in Singapore pass 10,000. The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Singapore has passed 10,000, despite concerted and strenuous attempts to contain the spread of the infection in the city state.
- “US handling Covid-19 like 3rd world country,” says Nobel prize economist. Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a third world country and on course for a second Great Depression, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said.
- The first coronavirus case has been recorded at among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The outbreak of the virus at crowded camps has been feared since the start of the crisis.
-
Spain announced it plans to phase out its lockdown in the second half of May. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, also asked lawmakers to extend the country’s state of emergency until 9 May.
- Germany approved its first human trials for a Covid-19 vaccine. 200 healthy people between 18 and 55 will receive several variants of the vaccine candidate.
- Pope Francis called for unity among EU member states on the eve of European Ccouncil summit to discuss a huge but divisive economic stimulus package to respond to the coronavirus crisis. EU states have clashed repeatedly over financial responses to the epidemic.
- At least 34 crew members have tested positive for coronavirus on a cruise ship docked in Japan for maintenance. The outbreak onboard the Italian-operated Costa Atlantica adds to concerns about testing and hospital capacity in Nagasaki, where only 102 beds are available.
- Half of France’s working population has signed up to the country’s temporary unemployment scheme, according to the minister of labour, Muriel Pénicaud. 10.2 million private sector workers have applied for support, or one employee out of two and six companies out of 10, she said.
- Coronavirus-related deaths in the UK may be as high as 41,000, according to a Financial Times analysis of the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Their findings include deaths that occurred outside hospitals updated to reflect recent mortality trends.
- The European commission has said the UK was well aware of its coronavirus procurement initiative when it decided not to participate. Its account contradicts the UK government claim that a “misunderstanding” was to blame for the UK not getting involved.
- Officials in Beijing dismissed the US state of Missouri’s move to sue the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak as “nothing short of absurdity” and lacking any factual or legal basis.
Updated
In case you haven’t seen it yet, and need a little something to pick you up, this video, showing the perils of videoconferencing is truly one for the ages.
Wales’s health minister, Vaughan Gething apparently left his microphone live after addressing the assembly, the minister could be heard loudly decrying his fellow Labour assembly member Jenny Rathbone.
“What the fuck is the matter with her?” he said, before complaining about Rathbone’s questions in an earlier part of the session, which was held via Zoom.
Elin Jones, the assembly’s llywydd – equivalent to speaker – attempted to rescue the situation as Gething continued his rant.
“I think Vaughan Gething needs to turn his microphone off,” she said, to no avail.
Asian stock markets rose on Thursday as the combination of a rebound in crude prices from historic lows and the promise of more US government aid to cushion the coronavirus-ravaged economy helped calm nervous markets, Reuters reports.
Better-than-expected US corporate earnings also lifted equities, analysts said, though overall sentiment remained fragile as the pandemic cut a destructive path through the world economy.
MSCI’s broadest index of Asia Pacific shares outside of Japan bounced from two-week lows to be up 0.5% at 460.43 points.
Australian S&P/ASX added 0.4%, Chinese shares opened firm with the blue-chip index up 0.3% and Japan’s Nikkei climbed 0.8%.
The gains followed a strong overnight lead from Wall Street with the Dow up 2%, S&P 500 adding 2.3% and Nasdaq rising 2.8%.
Australia says all WHO members should participate in a coronavirus inquiry
All members of the World Health Organization (WHO) should cooperate with a proposed independent review into the spread of coronavirus, Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Thursday.
Morrison on Wednesday spoke with several world leaders including U.S. President Donald Trump to canvass support for a review into the origins and spread of coronavirus, which emerged in China late last year, Reuters reports.
Escalating his calls, Morrison said all members of the WHO should be obliged to participate in a review.
“If you’re going to a member of a club like the World Health Organization, there should be responsibilities and obligations attached to that,” Morrison told reporters in Canberra.
“We’d like the world to be safer when it comes to viruses... I would hope that any other nation, be it China or anyone else, would share that objective.”
And here’s South Korea’s response to the coronavirus pandemic explained in video form:
Test, trace, contain: how South Korea flattened its coronavirus curve
Late last week millions of South Koreans queued patiently at polling stations to cast their votes for a new national assembly.
Going out for dinner, let alone voting in a national election, would have seemed almost inconceivable weeks earlier when the coronavirus threatened to exact the same relentless toll on South Koreans as it has in the US and parts of Europe.
Long before politicians in Britain accepted that the illness posed a serious threat to public health, South Korea watched the rise in reported daily infections with growing alarm. After the country reported its case on 20 January, numbers initially remained low before climbing sharply, reaching a peak of 909 daily infections on 29 February.
Then something extraordinary happened. The steep rise in cases began to plateau. By late March, daily infections were being counted in the dozens, and then in single digits. In the space of a few weeks, South Korea had flattened the curve.
Podcast: Surviving ICU, a story of recovery from Covid-19
Dave Lewins is a healthy, 60-year old helicopter pilot, who in March found himself in intensive care with Covid-19. He describes the experience and how it has changed his life:
South Korean economy shrinks 1.4% over coronavirus
South Korea’s economy saw its worst performance in more than a decade in the first quarter as the coronavirus epidemic raged across the country, the central bank said Thursday, with officials warning of a bigger impact still to come, AFP reports.
The world’s 12th-largest economy endured one of the worst early outbreaks of the disease outside China, although it appears to have largely been contained thanks to an extensive “trace, test and treat” programme.
Gross domestic product shrank 1.4% year-on-year during the January to March period, the Bank of Korea said, its biggest decline since the fourth quarter of 2008 during the global financial crisis.
Private consumption fell 6.4% - the sharpest fall in more than two decades, the central bank said.
Exports contracted by 2% due to decreases in automobiles, machinery and chemical products, while imports fell 4.1%.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has forecast the world economy will contract three percent this year, as it is expected to “experience its worst recession since the Great Depression” over the pandemic.
The IMF has predicted the South Korean economy will shrink 1.2 percent in 2020.
Staying in Asia Pacific for now: Australian treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has announced that Australians have withdrawn a total of AU$3.8bn (US$2.4bn) from their superannuation (Australia’s compulsory retirement savings scheme).
The government has allowed early access to superannuation savings as part of its response to the coronavirus pandemic. 456,000 people have applied for early access.
The pandemic has also, Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced today, seen 587,686 jobseeker applications being processed – more than the service that handles these usually does in a year.
These figures are an insight into the economic toll on an economy that famously avoided a recession after the Great Financial Crisis – and last year celebrated 28 years of uninterrupted growth.
Updated
The New Zealand government will spend NZ$50m (£25m) on ailing media businesses during the coronavirus-induced downturn.
News organisations have pleaded with Jacinda Ardern’s government for support over the past month, given the advertising streams that funded commercial operations have all but dried up.
On Thursday, two deaths and three new cases were recorded. More than 1,450 people have been infected with coronavirus in New Zealand. A total of 16 have died and eight are in hospital.
Every media business in New Zealand has taken up the government’s wage subsidy program, which covers a portion of salaries for a 12-week period for workers in struggling industries.
Trump disagrees with Georgia governor’s decision to reopen businesses
Donald Trump has rebuked a state governor and Republican ally over his decision to reopen bowling alleys, hair salons and other businesses on Friday “in violation” of the phased federal guidelines.
Trump was speaking on Wednesday at a wide ranging coronavirus task force briefing in which he announced he had signed a “very powerful” order curbing immigration, contradicted experts on how long the virus will linger and compared the crowd size at his last 4 July celebration to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.
Georgia’s huge gamble is likely to be watched with closely by state governors across the nation. Trump released national guidelines last week for states to pursue a staggered reopening of their economies once they achieve 14 days of declining new infections – criterion that the Peach State has not met:
Updated
Australian billionaire Kerry Stokes has been “exempted from [the country’s] strict quarantine rules after arriving in Perth from Aspen by private jet,” The Sydney Morning Herald reports.
The exemption, granted by WA Police after advice from the State Health Incident Coordination Centre, meant Mr and Mrs Stokes could self-isolate in their Dalkeith home rather than be locked down in a hotel room like thousands of other West Australians returning from overseas.
🚨🚨 @WAtoday scoop: Kerry Stokes exempted from strict WA quarantine rules after arriving in Perth from Aspen by private jet https://t.co/mpGlMkVH7G
— Kylar Loussikian (@kloussikian) April 23, 2020
Updated
Australia has called on G20 nations to end wet wildlife markets over concerns they pose a threat to human health and agricultural markets, a move which could further strain ties with China after Canberra called for an international inquiry into the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reports.
The pandemic which originated in China was thought to have started in a wet market in the city of Wuhan. Wet markets are a key facet of China’s daily life, and not all sell wildlife.
China imposed a temporary ban on selling wildlife on 23 January and is now reviewing its legislation to restrict commercial wild animal trading on a permanent basis.
Minister for Agriculture David Littleproud said on Thursday he had asked government officials from the Group of 20 major economies to back a plan to end wet wildlife markets.
“There are risks with wildlife wet markets and they could be as big a risk to our agricultural industries as they can be to public health,” Littleproud told Australia’s Channel 7 television.
US officials have also called for wet wildlife markets across Asia to be closed.
New Zealand Says It Has Recorded Two New Deaths Related To Covid-19, and three new cases.
The deaths announced today take the country’s total to 16.
Despite the new cases, the official total number of cases remains at 1451, however. NewsHub has this handy explainer:
Two of the three new cases are confirmed and one is probable. However there is no change in the overall total of confirmed and probable cases, the number remaining at 1451. This is because the ministry understands that the three cases linked to the Greg Mortimer Cruise Ship, reported on Wednesday, were tested in Uruguay. Therefore, the cases may have been reported by Uruguay to the World Health Organisation (WHO). The ministry is currently investigating this, as the cases would therefore be counted under Uruguay’s total rather than New Zealand’s.
Fourteen more cases of coronavirus infections have been confirmed on an Italian cruise ship docked for repairs at Japan’s Nagasaki prefecture, bringing the total to at least 48, public broadcaster NHK said on Thursday.
As of Wednesday, 34 crew members on the Costa Atlantica had tested positive for the new coronavirus, raising concerns about the impact on the local community.
Nagasaki prefecture will hold a press conference from 10:30am (01:30 GMT), according to NHK.
The Costa Atlantica infections come after the cases on the Diamond Princess in Yokohama two months ago, where more than 700 were found to be infected, although this time only crew members were on board.
The Italian cruise ship is carrying 623 crew members and no passengers, officials have said.
US says review of WHO to assess if the body is run in the way it should be
The US government will assess whether the World Health Organization is being run the way that it should be, after President Donald Trump paused US funding to the global body, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s Acting Administrator John Barsa said on Wednesday.
Reuters reports Washington will also use this pause to look for alternative partners outside the WHO to continue to carry out “important work” such as vaccines, to ensure it does not have a disruption in its aid efforts, said Barsa, who heads USAID, the key US government agency that administers foreign aid.
“The review is going to be all encompassing, get into all manners of management operation questions,” Barsa told a news conference at the State Department.
“There’s numerous questions in terms of the management of the WHO; how they have been operating holding member states accountable in their actions.”
“Is the management of the World Health Organization running it the way it should be run?,” was the question at the heart of Washington’s review, Barsa added.
Trump announced a halt to US funding for the Geneva-based WHO last week while Washington reviews the organization’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
Two cats in New York state become first US pets to test positive for coronavirus
Two pet cats in New York state have tested positive for the coronavirus, marking the first confirmed cases in companion animals in the US, federal officials said Wednesday.
The cats, which had mild respiratory illnesses and are expected to recover, are thought to have contracted the virus from people in their households or neighborhoods, the US Department of Agriculture and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said.
The finding, which comes after positive tests in some tigers and lions at the Bronx Zoo, adds to a small number of confirmed cases of the virus in animals worldwide. US authorities say that while it appears some animals can get the virus from people, there is no indication pets are transmitting it to human beings.
China has reported ten new coronavirus cases today, six of which are imported infections, according to the People’s Daily.
There were 27 new asymptomatic cases, and no coronavirus-related deaths for the sixth day in a row.
On Wednesday, the Chinese mainland reported:
— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) April 23, 2020
- No new #COVID19 deaths
- 4 new domestic cases and 6 more imported cases
- 27 asymptomatic cases
- 959 active cases in total, including 63 in critical condition pic.twitter.com/SD0QJLb98o
My escape from Covid-19-free Samoa to the US felt ironic from the start
Hayley Canal writes for the Guardian:
As international borders were shut and airlines stopped flying, I scrambled to get out of what may just be the safest place on earth at the moment – Samoa, one of the last countries without a case of coronavirus.
Fighting to come home to the US as the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic became apparent felt ironic from the start. The feeling has only grown stronger as I sit alone, writing these thoughts with a fever as the death toll from coronavirus in the US continues to climb.
A federal appeals court has allowed Arkansas to enforce a ban on most surgical abortions, as part of a state directive aimed at postponing medical procedures not deemed urgent during the coronavirus outbreak.
The ruling from the eighth US circuit court of appeals in St Louis, Missouri, lifted a federal judge’s order which had allowed abortions to continue. The new ruling does not affect abortion induced through medication in the early stages of pregnancy, which is still allowed.
The ruling comes two days after another federal appeals court, the fifth circuit, allowed Texas to enforce curbs on abortions via medication, as part of its response to the pandemic.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Wednesday said the United States strongly believes that China’s ruling communist party failed to report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely manner to the World Health Organization, Reuters reports.
Speaking at a State Department news conference, Pompeo also accused Beijing of failing to report human-to-human transmission of the virus “for a month until it was in every province inside of China.”
Citing WHO rules implemented in 2007, Pompeo said, “We strongly believe that the Chinese Community Party did not report the outbreak of the new coronavirus in a timely fashion to the World Health Organization.” He said that even after Beijing notified the WHO of the outbreak “it did not share all of the information it had. Instead it covered up how dangerous the disease is.”
China has rejected charges that it mishandled the outbreak, saying it has been transparent and open about the spread of the virus.
In fresh criticism of the WHO, Pompeo said the organization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom, had failed to use his ability “to go public” when a member state failed to follow the new rules.
US President Donald Trump last week suspended US funding for the WHO, charging that the organisation promoted China’s “disinformation” about the outbreak of the virus.
The UK is embarking on a large-scale study of 300,000 people to find out what proportion of the population has already had the coronavirus and how many may have some immunity to it as a result.
Studies are being undertaken around the world to work out how widespread the infection is. So far, they have found the proportion of people with antibodies showing they have been infected is low. The World Health Organization said this week it appears that only around 2 to 3% of people in the general population have been infected – with or without symptoms.
The results of the new major British study will be crucial for planning a strategic endgame to the pandemic in the UK. Some 25,000 people will be invited to take part in the first wave of the study in England. It is expected it will be extended to 300,000 people over the next 12 months.
World faces recession of "unprecedented depth in post-war period" says Fitch
The world is on track for a recession of “unprecedented depth in the post-war period”, ratings agency Fitch says.
In a note issued on Thursday, Fitch chief economist Brian Coulton said the agency now expected world gross domestic product to tumble by 3.9% in 2020.
“This is twice as large as the decline anticipated in our early April GEO [global economic outlook] update and would be twice as severe as the 2009 recession,” he said.
Fitch said the slump implied a US$2.8tn fall in global income levels from last year. Coulton said unprecedented floods of cash pumped into the economy by governments “will serve to cushion the near-term shock”.
“But with job losses occurring on an extreme scale and intense pressures on small and medium-sized businesses, the path back to normality after the health crisis subsides is likely to be slow,” he said.
Updated
Other things that happened in that White House press briefing include Trump saying he would hold Independence Day celebrations on the Washington Mall on July 4th this year, before comparing photographs of the crowd at his celebrations last year to Dr Martin Luther King Jr’s address at the Washington Mall in 1963, during the civil rights March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
On Trump’s crowds:
The day Trump is talking about was also when Dr King delivered his “I have a dream” speech.
On Trump’s speech last year:
Trump also announced he had signed an executive order halting immigration to the US for 60 days – he flagged earlier this week that he would be doing so.
The Guardian’s Washington Correspondent, David Smith, will be bringing you the full story on the ban shortly.
The US president also took the opportunity to say he had discouraged Georgia’s governor from reopening the state. The US president says he told Georgia governor Brian Kemp that he disagreed “very strongly” with the decision to reopen businesses in the state. “I think it’s too soon,” he says.
Just to recap that appearance by the Director of the US Centers for Disease Control at today’s White House Press briefing:
Trump said Dr Robert Redfield, current Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, was misquoted in the media.
Dr Redfield warned yesterday that a wave of coronavirus next winter would coincide with the normal influenza season.
Dr Redfield was then called upon to confirm that he was misrepresented, and said it was important to emphasise that he didn’t say next season would be “worse”, but that it would be “more difficult and potentially complicated”.
Trump took particular issue with the Washington Post’s coverage of Dr Redfield’s comments.
Dr Redfield was asked by a reporter whether he was accurately quoted by the Washington Post. He was, he said. Trump then jumped in to say the headline was the problem.
The Post’s headline was “CDC director warns second wave of coronavirus is likely to be even more devastating”. Here is their response to Trump’s criticism.
Dr Redfield was then asked why he retweeted the article if it was inaccurate. Trump stepped in, immediately, to say that the journalist speaking wasn’t called upon to ask a question.
Here is our coverage of Dr Redfield’s comments yesterday:
Updated
Summary
Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic.
I’m Helen Sullivan and I’ll be with you for the next few hours. A reminder that you can get in touch at any time on Twitter @helenrsullivan.
In today’s White House press briefing, which included an extraordinary appearance by CDC chief Dr Robert Redfield (more on this in a moment), Trump announced that he had signed the order halting immigration to the US for 60 days. The text of that oder has not yet been released to the public.
The US president also said he had discouraged Georgia’s governor from reopening the state.
Here are the most important recent developments from around the world:
- Trump signs immigration order. Trump said he had signed the order halting immigration to the US just before coming into the room to deliver the White House press briefing.
- Trump also said his discouraged Georgia’s governor from reopening. The US president says he told Georgia governor Brian Kemp that he disagreed “very strongly” with the decision to reopen businesses in the state. “I think it’s too soon,” he says.
- Missing Wuhan citizen journalist reappears. A Chinese citizen journalist who was missing for almost two months after posting videos from Wuhan during the coronavirus outbreak has re-appeared, claiming that he was detained by police and forcibly quarantined.
- World has ‘a long way to go’, warns WHO chief. The director general of the World Health Organizsation has said that there is still “a long way to go” in tackling the coronavirus crisis around the world.
- Covid-19 infections in Singapore pass 10,000. The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus in Singapore has passed 10,000, despite concerted and strenuous attempts to contain the spread of the infection in the city state.
- “US handling Covid-19 like 3rd world country,” says Nobel prize economist. Donald Trump’s botched handling of the Covid-19 crisis has left the US looking like a third world country and on course for a second Great Depression, Nobel prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz has said.
- The first coronavirus case has been recorded at among Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. The outbreak of the virus at crowded camps has been feared since the start of the crisis.
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Spain announced it plans to phase out its lockdown in the second half of May. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, also asked lawmakers to extend the country’s state of emergency until 9 May.
- Germany approved its first human trials for a Covid-19 vaccine. 200 healthy people between 18 and 55 will receive several variants of the vaccine candidate.
- Pope Francis called for unity among EU member states on the eve of European Ccouncil summit to discuss a huge but divisive economic stimulus package to respond to the coronavirus crisis. EU states have clashed repeatedly over financial responses to the epidemic.
- At least 34 crew members have tested positive for coronavirus on a cruise ship docked in Japan for maintenance. The outbreak onboard the Italian-operated Costa Atlantica adds to concerns about testing and hospital capacity in Nagasaki, where only 102 beds are available.
- Half of France’s working population has signed up to the country’s temporary unemployment scheme, according to the minister of labour, Muriel Pénicaud. 10.2 million private sector workers have applied for support, or one employee out of two and six companies out of 10, she said.
- Coronavirus-related deaths in the UK may be as high as 41,000, according to a Financial Times analysis of the latest data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS). Their findings include deaths that occurred outside hospitals updated to reflect recent mortality trends.
- The European commission has said the UK was well aware of its coronavirus procurement initiative when it decided not to participate. Its account contradicts the UK government claim that a “misunderstanding” was to blame for the UK not getting involved.
- Officials in Beijing dismissed the US state of Missouri’s move to sue the Chinese government over its handling of the coronavirus outbreak as “nothing short of absurdity” and lacking any factual or legal basis.
