Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
All four of the UK’s chief medical officers rejected suggestions from No 10 that the coronavirus threat level could be reduced because it contradicted evidence that showed the virus was still widespread, the Guardian has been told.
A senior source in one devolved government said the chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland discussed and refused Boris Johnson’s proposal.
The World Health Organization struggled to get needed information from China during critical early days of the coronavirus pandemic, according to recordings of internal meetings that contradict the organisation’s public praise of Beijing’s response to the outbreak.
The recordings, obtained by the Associated Press (AP), show officials complaining in meetings during the week of 6 January that Beijing was not sharing data needed to evaluate the risk of the virus to the rest of the world. It was not until 20 January that China confirmed coronavirus was contagious and 30 January that the WHO declared a global emergency.
When deciding how and when lockdown restrictions will be lifted across the UK, the government has said the R value, denoting how many people on average one infected person will themselves infect, is crucial. But experts say another metric is becoming increasingly important: K.
Five new drugs are to be trialled in 30 hospitals across the country in the race to find a treatment for Covid-19, it has emerged.
Just days after global trials of hydroxychloroquine, the drug promoted by Donald Trump as a cure, were halted, British scientists are looking to sign up hundreds of patients for trials of medicines they hope will prevent people becoming ill enough to need intensive care or ventilators.
Bosnia’s state court has ordered the release of a regional prime minister and two other men suspected of corruption in connection with the import of defective ventilators for coronavirus patients.
The court of Bosnia-Herzegovina said their detention was unnecessary, and turned down the prosecution’s requests to detain the three men for 30 days.
Senior public health officials have made a last-minute plea for ministers to scrap Monday’s easing of the coronavirus lockdown in England, warning the country is unprepared to deal with any surge in infection and that public resolve to take steps to limit transmission has been eroded.
The Association of Directors of Public Health said new rules, including allowing groups of up to six people to meet outdoors and in private gardens, were “not supported by the science” and that pictures of crowded beaches and beauty spots over the weekend showed “the public is not keeping to social distancing as it was”.
When Noopur Raje’s husband fell critically ill with Covid-19 in mid-March, she did not suspect that she too was infected with the virus.
Raje, an oncologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, had been caring for her sick husband for a week before driving him to an emergency centre with a persistently high fever. But after she herself had a diagnostic PCR test – which looks for traces of the Sars-CoV-2 virus DNA in saliva – she was astounded to find that the result was positive.
Monkeys mobbed an Indian health worker and made off with blood samples from coronavirus tests, prompting fears they could have spread the virus in the local area.
After making off with the three samples this week in Meerut, near Delhi, the monkeys scampered up nearby trees and one then tried to chew its plunder.
France announced further easing of lockdown restrictions on Thursday, with life slowly returning to normal for much of the country, writes Kim Willsher, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent. However, certain restrictions will remain in the Paris area and the overseas territories Mayotte and Guyane for at least the next three weeks.
In a 90 minute press conference, the prime minister, Édouard Philippe, said the Covid-19 figures in the country were better than expected, but urged the French to continue respecting the rules and remain careful and vigilant.
French PM Édouard Philippe has arrived for the press conference on Phase 2 of the easing of the lockdown. (I will be trying to translate and type as he speaks, so please forgive lapses in translation and grammar!).
The governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo,has said he would sign an executive order allowing businesses to deny entry to customers who are not wearing masks, the Guardian US coronavirus blog reports.
“That store owner has a right to protect himself,” Cuomo said of the order. “That store owner has a right to protect the other patrons in that store.”
Today I am signing an Executive Order authorizing businesses to deny entry to those who do not wear masks or face-coverings. No mask - No entry.
Tom McCarthy writes that one of the key problems facing American efforts to emerge from the Covid-19 crisis is the population’s aversion to vaccines.
Only about half of Americans say they would get a Covid-19 vaccine if available, according to a poll, as a top US government scientist tempered claims by Donald Trump that the United States would be able to invent, manufacture and administer hundreds of millions of vaccine doses by the end of the year.
Further to our story at 20.29, data from Johns Hopkins University shows that the United States has recorded more than 100,000 deaths from Covid-19, moving past a grim milestone even as many states relax mitigation measures to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus.
The US has recorded more deaths from the disease than any other country in the pandemic, and almost three times as many as the second-ranking country, Britain, which has recorded more than 37,000 Covid-19 deaths.
Longest official mourning period in Spain’s democracy; unrest grows in UK PM’s party over Dominic Cummings lockdown breach; WHO says Americas are new Covid-19 epicentre. Follow the latest updates
There have now been 118,000 confirmed cases of coronavirus across the 54 nations of Africa, according to the World Health Organization’s regional office for the continent.
So far, about 48,000 people in Africa who have tested positive for the virus have recovered, while 3,500 have died, according to the latest updated from WHO African region on Wednesday morning.
Over 118,000 confirmed #COVID19 cases on the African continent - with more than 48,000 recoveries & 3,500 deaths. View country figures & more with the WHO African Region COVID-19 Dashboard: https://t.co/V0fkK8dYTgpic.twitter.com/W1hbvugno1
Hi, this is Damien Gayle taking the reins of the live blog now, bringing you the latest headlines and stories, and the best of the Guardian’s coverage, from the coronavirus pandemic around the world.
If you have any comments, tips or suggestions for coverage please drop me a line, either via email to damien.gayle@gmail.com, or via Twitter direct message to @damiengayle.
WHO warns of second peak as global cases pass 5.5m; Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar denies picnic with friends was rule breach; world health leaders urge green recovery
I’m handing over to my esteemed colleague Kevin Rawlinson shortly, so I’ll leave you with a summary of today’s main global developments on the coronavirus pandemic:
A diplomatic rift has broken out between Tanzania and the US. The East African nation said it had summoned the top official at the US embassy to object to an advisory that warned of “exponential growth” of Covid-19 cases in the country.
Tanzania’s divisive leader John Magufuli has repeatedly played down the gravity of the coronavirus pandemic, appearing to model his response on the early approach taken by Donald Trump in the US.
The World Health Organization has said it will temporarily drop hydroxychloroquine — the malaria drug Donald Trump said he is taking as a precaution — from its global study into experimental coronavirus treatments after safety concerns.
The WHO’s director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in light of a paper published last week in the Lancet that showed people taking hydroxychloroquine were at higher risk of death and heart problems than those who were not, it would pause the hydroxychloroquine arm of its solidarity global clinical trial.
The world’s largest pharmaceutical companies rejected an EU proposal three years ago to work on fast-tracking vaccines for pathogens like coronavirus to allow them to be developed before an outbreak, the Guardian can reveal.
The plan to speed up the development and approval of vaccines was put forward by European commission representatives sitting on the Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI) – a public-private partnership whose function is to back cutting-edge research in Europe – but it was rejected by industry partners on the body.
In 1981, a virus that had jumped the species barrier some decades earlier to infect humans began to wreak havoc among the gay community in San Francisco and New York. A taskforce was set up to study the cause of this disease, and it took a few years to identify HIV as the definitive cause of Aids and its genome to be sequenced, and nearly 15 years before a cocktail of drugs meant that having an HIV infection was no longer a certain death sentence.
Forty years later, the cause of the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan was identified as a new coronavirus Sars-CoV-2, and its sequence determined in a matter of weeks. That, in turn, paved the way for a sensitive test for infection and, now, antibody tests for people who may have had the disease. That we know so much in such record time is due to sustained international investment in science.
The Daily Mail - usually one of Boris Johnson’s supporters in the press - has called on the prime minister to sack Dominic Cummings, trailing its headline with the following:
In the clearest way, Dominic Cummings has violated the spirit and letter of the lockdown. Boris Johnson says he ‘totally gets’ how the public feels about this. Clearly he totally doesn’t. Neither man has displayed a scintilla of contrition for this breach of trust. Do they think we are fools? For the good of the government and the nation, Mr Cummings must resign. Or the prime minister must sack him. No ifs. No buts.
The White House has announced it is prohibiting foreigners from traveling to the US if they had been in Brazil in the last two weeks, two days after the South American nation became the world No. 2 hot spot for coronavirus cases.
White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany said the new restrictions would help ensure foreign nationals do not bring additional infections to the US, but would not apply to the flow of commerce between the new countries.
Covid-19 is nature’s way of making bad situations worse. From the moment it turned the world upside down, you could have predicted that the Chinese Communist party would have arrested whistleblowers and covered up the threat to humanity. It’s what it does best, after all.
You would not have needed mystical powers to divine that Viktor Orbán would have used a pandemic as an excuse to turn Hungary into the European Union’s first dictatorship. Nor did it take a modern Nostradamus to foresee that, if you put men who care nothing for competence, complexity, or the difference between truth and falsehood in power, you will live to regret it. Or in the case of tens of thousands who trusted Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, die needless deaths.
Hydroxychloroquine, the anti-malarial drug Donald Trump is taking to prevent Covid-19, has increased deaths in patients treated with it in hospitals around the world, a study has shown.
A major study of the way hydroxychloroquine and its older version, chloroquine, have been used on six continents – without clinical trials – reveals a sobering picture. Scientists said the results meant the drug should no longer be given to Covid-19 patients except in proper research settings.
Millions of people in the Philippine capital, Manila, have spent more than two months under lockdown. The densely populated city, once notorious for its heaving traffic, has been transformed into a ghost town. Residents who do not perform essential work have been asked to stay at home and are barred from leaving their neighbourhoods. Rights groups have warned over the brutal manner in which the restrictions have been enforced. In one instance, curfew violators were put in dog cages, while others have been forced to sit in the midday sun as punishment. President Rodrigo Duterte has told police they can shoot anyone deemed to be causing trouble during the lockdown.
Last week, the government announced an extension of the lockdown until 31 May, making it one of the strictest and longest quarantines in the world.
Boris Johnson’s insistence that the UK will be able to roll out a “world-beating” coronavirus test, track and trace regime by 1 June has inevitably drawn comparisons with countries around the world that have already set up effective Covid-19 tracing programmes.
It has also raised questions about timing, as some experts insist a system would have been more useful at the beginning of the pandemic.
The prospect of a second wave of coronavirus infection across Europe is no longer a distant theory, according to the director of the EU agency responsible for advising governments – including the UK – on disease control.
“The question is when and how big, that is the question in my view,” said Dr Andrea Ammon, director of the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC).