Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
The world is facing widespread famine “of biblical proportions” because of the coronavirus pandemic, the chief of the UN’s food relief agency has warned, with a short time to act before hundreds of millions starve.
More than 30 countries in the developing world could experience widespread famine, and in 10 of those countries there are already more than 1 million people on the brink of starvation, said David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Programme.
Violence against women is endemic in Afghanistan; with services closed by the pandemic, those working with abused women are terrified for their clients
Every morning Marzia Akbari, a 25-year-old psychologist from the western Afghan city of Herat, wakes up, picks up her phone and starts calling women. Most calls go unanswered. Since Herat was put in lockdown two weeks ago, Akbari’s work as one of Afghanistan’s only healthcare workers helping victims of domestic abuse has ground to a halt and many of the women she was trying to protect have disappeared.
“I’m very scared for them,” she says. “Many women in Herat may survive coronavirus but won’t survive the lockdown.”
How long should you remain in isolation if you have symptoms of Covid-19? It depends on who you ask. The UK government guidelines recommend seven days from the onset of symptoms, whereas the World Health Organization advises 14. To get to the bottom of this apparent disparity, Nicola Davis discusses viral shedding with Dr Charlotte Houldcroft, and asks what the evidence currently tells us about how long we stay infectious for
Only a tiny proportion of the global population – maybe as few as 2% or 3% – appear to have antibodies in the blood showing they have been infected with Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization, a finding that bodes ill for hopes that herd immunity will ease the exit from lockdown.
“Easing restrictions is not the end of the epidemic in any country,” said WHO director-general Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus at a media briefing in Geneva on Monday. “So-called lockdowns can help to take the heat out of a country’s epidemic.”
Hospital leaders have directly attacked the government for the first time during the coronavirus crisis over the shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) after a desperately needed consignment of surgical gowns that had been announced by ministers failed to arrive.
In an unprecedented intervention, which hospital leaders privately say is the result of “intense frustration and exasperation”, the organisations representing NHS trusts in England urged ministers to “just focus on what we can be certain of” after weeks of “bitter experience” with failed deliveries.
Chris Lewis is staying on usually uninhabited Hildasay until charity challenge can resume
A former paratrooper is isolating on a usually uninhabited Shetland island after lockdown measures were introduced when he was on a fundraising challenge to walk the UK coastline.
Chris Lewis, 39, has walked 12,000 miles since setting off from Llangennith beach on the Gower peninsula near his home city of Swansea, south Wales, in August 2017.
The government’s failure to record and publish real-time data on the ethnicity of Covid-19 patients is a scandal that is endangering lives, according to the chair of the British Medical Association.
Speaking to the Observer, Dr Chaand Nagpaul said: “This is not an issue that should require further campaigning. It would be a scandal if it requires further lobbying as data recording needs to start now, not tomorrow. When you have stark statistics like this, it is an instruction for government to act.”
Governments in Europe and the US can learn from Hong Kong, which has kept infections and deaths from Covid-19 low without resorting to the socially and economically damaging lockdown that the UK and other countries have imposed, scientists say.
Hong Kong, with a population of nearly 7.5 million, has had just 715 confirmed cases of Covid-19 infection, including 94 asymptomatic infections, and four deaths.
Ex-chair of DB Group Kim Jun-ki ‘forgot his responsibilities’, says Seoul court
The former head of a South Korean conglomerate who was convicted of raping his maid and sexually assaulting a secretary has been given a suspended sentence.
Kim Jun-ki, the 75-year-old former chair of DB Group, which has activities in finance and steel, repeatedly violated the two women, the Seoul central district court found.
Hundreds of foreign-born doctors, including refugees, have signed up to become medical support workers as part of a new scheme aimed at helping the NHS tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
NHS England launched the initiative for international medical graduates and doctors after calls to fast track the accreditation of overseas medics.
Campaigners call for action as majority of big countries fall short of 0.7% aid target
The world’s major powers have failed to make progress towards meeting their commitments on aid spending, according to new data, prompting calls for countries to step up in the face of the Covid-19 outbreak.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s (OECD) update on spending in 2019, published on Thursday, showed aid contributions by its forum of the largest donors were less than half the targeted 0.7% of their gross national income.
Proposal would ban terminations even on grounds of serious foetal abnormalities
Poland’s parliament has deferred a final decision on a bill that seeks to tighten the country’s already strict abortion legislation.
The bill would outlaw abortion on the grounds of serious foetal abnormalities, one of a small number of exceptions to a near-total ban on abortion currently in place in the country. It has been sent back to a parliamentary committee for further work.
The writer-director’s comedies – from Office Space to Silicon Valley – always sum up the spirit of their times. So why has he made an LSD-soaked cartoon about George Clinton and Bootsy Collins?
Few writer-directors have been as consistent and ruthless at capturing the moment as Mike Judge, although he never actually intends to do so. “It’s always a shock when something comes out and it feels so relevant,” he says, in his laconic surfer-dude tone, talking to me by phone from his home in Los Angeles. “But I tend to look at stuff that feels as if it’s everywhere, but nobody’s talking about.”
Judge, 57, is so beady at spotting what’s everywhere, his shows themselves end up becoming ubiquitous, the thing everybody’s talking about. It is impossible to imagine 90s TV without his seminal hits, Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill, the former satirising the worst of youth culture, the latter fondly depicting gentle American conservatism acclimatising itself to the Bill Clinton era.
Gilberto ‘Fuminho’ Aparecido dos Santos caught after more than 20 years on the run
One of Brazil’s most wanted people, an alleged drug baron accused of running international cocaine operations for the country’s biggest gang, has been arrested in Mozambique.
Gilberto “Fuminho” Aparecido dos Santos, believed to be the leader of the First Capital Command (PCC), was arrested in an international sting that included agents from Brazil, Mozambique and the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Mozambican police confirmed the arrest on Tuesday.
I am a junior doctor. In the past few weeks I have seen dozens of people die from Covid-19. I am 25 years old. I’ve been working in the NHS for just over eight months at a major metropolitan hospital. When my colleagues and I decided to apply for medical school six years ago, we knew that we were signing up for a challenge. We were under no illusion that it would be an easy ride. But I don’t think any of us imagined that we would be on the frontline of a pandemic less than a year into our careers.
I have cared for patients from admission until death and I have held their hands when they have been too breathless to speak. I have fought hard for a patient to be considered for ventilation despite knowing that they didn’t meet the criteria. I stayed with them after my shift had ended, gowned and gloved, and watched them take their last breaths, knowing that a few months ago they might have stood a chance. I ring families to tell them that their loved one who came into hospital for something totally unrelated now has coronavirus and will not survive.
NEW: OBR publishes an economic scenario (not forecast) for what might happen to the UK economy as a result of #Covid19. It assumes a 3 month lockdown.
Unemployment: ⬆️by 2 million.
GDP (2020) ⬇️ 13% in 2020.
If so, would be the worst economic contraction for a century.
Here is an excerpt from the report published by the Office for Budget Responsibility today looking at what impact the coronavirus lockdown could have on the economy. It says GDP could fall by 35% in the second quarter of the year.
Here is an extract.
In addition to its impact on public health, the coronavirus outbreak will substantially raise public sector net borrowing and debt, primarily reflecting economic disruption. The government’s policy response will also have substantial direct budgetary costs, but the measures should help limit the long-term damage to the economy and public finances – the costs of inaction would certainly have been higher ...
We do not attempt to predict how long the economic lockdown will last – that is a matter for the government, informed by medical advice. But, to illustrate some of the potential fiscal effects, we assume a three-month lockdown due to public health restrictions followed by another three-month period when they are partially lifted. For now, we assume no lasting economic hit.
Britain missed three opportunities to be part of an EU scheme to bulk-buy masks, gowns and gloves and has been absent from key talks about future purchases, the Guardian can reveal, as pressure grows on ministers to protect NHS medics and care workers on the coronavirus frontline.
European doctors and nurses are preparing to receive the first of €1.5bn (£1.3bn) worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) within days or a maximum of two weeks through a joint procurement scheme involving 25 countries and eight companies, according to internal EU documents.
Police taskforce head says Covid-19 lockdown has not led to fewer young drug runners being used
Children and vulnerable adults are still being forced by gangs to travel from cities to towns and villages as part of “county lines” drug trafficking, according to the head of a police taskforce set up to tackle the problem.
Det Sgt Gareth Williams, head of intelligence and covert policing at British Transport Police (BTP), told the Guardian the restrictions on public transport during the coronavirus lockdown had not resulted in a reduction in the number of mostly juvenile drug runners identified across the country.
UN warns of ‘alarming and unprecedented threat’ to food security and livelihoods in the region
A second wave of desert locusts is threatening east Africa with estimates that it will be 20 times worse then the plague that descended two months ago.
About half of all Covid-19 deaths appear to be happening in care homes in some European countries, according to early figures gathered by UK-based academics who are warning that the same effort must be put into fighting the virus in care homes as in the NHS.
Snapshot data from varying official sources shows that in Italy, Spain, France, Ireland and Belgium between 42% and 57% of deaths from the virus have been happening in homes, according to the report by academics based at the London School of Economics (LSE).