Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
As chaos continues to engulf Britain’s test and trace system, attention has focused on how successful other countries have been in using testing and contact-tracing to suppress coronavirus transmission.
While many have embraced test/trace regimes, comparing the relative successes – and failures – is complicated by the fact that different countries count things even as basic as the number of daily tests using different methods.
Victoria police have fined 76 people over the past 24 hours, including eight for not wearing a face mask.
Examples include three men “located in a carpark with no legitimate reasons for being there” and one man and one woman who drove from Tarneit to St Kilda East “to buy fried chicken”.
Queensland will re-open its border to people from the ACT from 25 September, the health minister Steven Miles has just announced.
Gongs also awarded for research into vibrating earthworms, French kissing and bellowing alligators
The annals of science brim with researchers who pushed the boundaries of sense and good taste in a laudable quest for knowledge. With the unveiling of the 30th annual Ig Nobel awards, another case shall be added.
To test the validity of a story in a work of ethnographic literature, Metin Eren, an anthropologist at Kent State University in Ohio, made a knife from his frozen faeces. He then set about butchering an animal hide, an endeavour that ended in failure.
Experts say discovery of 120,000-year-old prints could shed new light on spread of Homo sapiens out of Africa
A set of seven footprints made at a lake about 120,000 years ago have been hailed as the earliest evidence of modern humans on the Arabian Peninsula – a discovery experts say could shed light on the spread of our species out of Africa.
The path by which Homo sapiens spread around the world was full of twists and turns. Genetic studies suggested it was not until 60,000 years ago that a migration of modern humans out of Africa led to a successful spread across Europe.
The global economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic may take as much as five years, the World Bank’s chief economist Carmen Reinhart has said.
“There will probably be a quick rebound as all the restriction measures linked to lockdowns are lifted, but a full recovery will take as much as five years,” Reinhart said in a speech during a conference held in Madrid.
The Czech Republic has reported more than 2,000 new Covid cases in a single day for the first time as it battles a surge in infections that is among the fastest in Europe.
The health ministry recorded 2,139 cases of the new coronavirus on Wednesday, up from a previous record of 1,675 reported the previous day, Reuters reports.
Tracers express their fears as infected people reveal multiple close contacts in multiple locations
In the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Ireland’s contact tracers often made calls to people who were very sick, with some struggling to breathe.
“In a lot of cases people were suffering extreme physical distress,” said Eamonn Gormley, a tracer at University College Dublin. “One person collapsed on the floor and we could hear them gasping for air. You got questions like: ‘Am I going to die?’ Some nights I had trouble sleeping.”
Research reveals Vikings were genetically diverse group and not purely Scandinavian
They may have had a reputation for trade, braids and fearsome raids, but the Vikings were far from a single group of flaxen-haired, sea-faring Scandinavians.
A genetic study of Viking-age human remains has not only confirmed that Vikings from different parts of Scandinavia set sail for different parts of the world, but has revealed that dark hair was more common among Vikings than Danes today.
The coronavirus pandemic has peaked earlier than expected in many African countries, confounding early predictions, experts have told MPs.
Scientists do not yet know why, but one hypothesis is the possibility of people having pre-existing immunity to Covid-19, caused by exposure to other infections.
US President Donald Trump on Tuesday said a vaccine against the deadly coronavirus could be three or four weeks away, underscoring predictions made by US public health officials and Pfizer Inc earlier this month, Reuters reports.
Trump, speaking at a town hall hosted by ABC News in Philadelphia, defended his handling of the coronavirus crisis, and said a vaccine could be ready for distribution soon.
“We’re very close to having a vaccine,” he said. “If you want to know the truth, the previous administration would have taken perhaps years to have a vaccine because of the FDA and all the approvals. And we’re within weeks of getting it you know could be three weeks, four weeks.”
The average age of people infected with Covid-19 is coming down, according to a World Health Organization (WHO) expert, Dr Maria Van Kerkhove. She has told a Q&A that incidences of hospitalisation among those aged 15 to 49 years are increasing.
She also said it was possible for the same person to be infected with influenza and Covid-19, adding that the WHO was looking into the prevalence of that.
Earlier, we posted that the Czech Republic had reported its highest daily count since the beginning of the pandemic. The country’s health minister, Adam Vojtěch, has told its parliament the government plans to ban stand-up indoor events as of Friday to help stabilise the situation.
Inevitably the numbers in the coming days will be very similar to the current increases.
We have to calculate with that, although we are hoping for a certain decline or at least stabilisation from the measures adopted.
While many European countries are seeing their infection rates surge to levels not seen since the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweden – whose light-touch approach has made it an international outlier – has recorded the fewest daily cases since the virus emerged.
The Scandinavian country’s rolling seven-day average of new cases stood at 108 on Tuesday, its lowest level since 13 March. Data from the Swedish national health agency showed only 1.2% of its 120,000 tests last week came back positive.
As cases continue to rise in the Netherlands, the Dutch government has said it will maintain heavy public spending in an effort to counter the losses from the pandemic despite its finances worsening.
In his annual speech outlining the government’s new budget on Tuesday, King Willem-Alexander said:
In these insecure times, the government chooses not to cut spending, but to invest, in job security, social safety nets and a stronger economy.”
New coronavirus cases in the Netherlands have hit a daily record of 1,379 in the past 24 hours, according to Dutch daily newspaper de Volkskrant.
On Monday, health authorities in the country recorded 1,300 new infections, it said.
Pandemic could result in a ‘lost decade’ for developing countries says co-chair of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in stark report
The world’s poorest countries risk a lost decade of development unless leaders move quickly to help them recover from the fallout of Covid-19, Melinda Gates told the Guardian.
The co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has committed $350m (£270m) to support the global response to the pandemic, said it was in the hands of the global community to decide the long-term impact.
Phosphine, released by microbes in oxygen-starved environments, was present in quantities larger than expected
Traces of a pungent gas that waft through the clouds of Venus may be emanations from aerial organisms – microbial life, but not as we know it.
Astronomers detected phosphine 30 miles up in the planet’s atmosphere and have failed to identify a process other than life that could account for its presence.
Spending $5 (£3.90) per person annually on global health security over the next five years could prevent a future “catastrophic” pandemic, according to a former head of the World Health Organization (WHO).
It would cost the world billions of dollars, but that amount would be a huge saving on the $11tn response to Covid-19, said Gro Harlem Brundtland, who, with other prominent international experts, sounded the alarm over the threat of a fast-spreading deadly pandemic last September.
French health authorities on Monday reported 6,158 new Covid-19 infections over the past 24 hours, sharply down from Saturday’s record high since large-scale testing began of 10,561 and Sunday’s tally of 7,183.
The Monday figure always tends to dip as there are fewer tests conducted on Sundays.
The Chinese city of Ruili will test all people there after authorities reported two new coronavirus cases imported from neighbouring Myanmar, state media reported late on Monday.
Ruili is part of Dehong Prefecture in China’s southwestern province of Yunnan. The city asked residents to quarantine at home, according to state television CCTV.
Seeing meaning in the unexpected can help turn mistakes into opportunities, says researcher Dr Christian Busch
Dr Christian Busch has had a lucky life. He narrowly escaped a catastrophic car accident at the age of 18. The car was wrecked but he walked away without a scratch. It was just the wake-up call he needed. “I turned my life around. Before that I’d been a reckless teenager who lived in the moment, having fun. The accident instilled a sense of urgency to try to find meaning.”
Luck continued to play a positive role in his life. An accidental coffee spillage in Starbucks led to romance and though the person in question is no longer his girlfriend they are still close. In his work as an entrepreneur, researcher and community-builder, he co-founded several social enterprises and teaches at both New York University and the London School of Economics – enjoying plenty of lucky breaks along the way. But Busch noticed that he wasn’t the only “lucky” one among his friends and colleagues. In fact, many of the most successful and happiest people he encountered also seemed to be on a permanent lucky streak.
An Israeli cabinet minister, who heads an ultra-orthodox Jewish party in Benjamin Netanyahu’s conservative coalition, has tendered his resignation in protest at a looming coronavirus lockdown. Housing minister Yaakov Litzman argued the restrictions would unfairly impede religious celebrations of Jewish holidays.
The rules - the most extensive Israel will have imposed since a lockdown that ran from late March to early May - are expected to go into effect on Friday, the Jewish new year Rosh Hashana, and span into the Yom Kippur fast day on 27 September.
This wrongs and scorns hundreds of thousands of citizens. Where were you until now? Why have the Jewish holidays become a convenient address for tackling the coronavirus...?
We have to move on, to make the decisions necessary for Israel in the coronavirus era, and that is what we will do in this session.
India has reported 94,372 new cases of the novel coronavirus on Sunday, taking total cases past 4.7 million.
The daily increase was down on the record global spike in the previous 24 hours of 97,570 new cases and came after three days of recording more than 95,000 new cases. Infections have been growing faster in India than anywhere in the world.
An hour or so before lunch on Thursday, Ángela Falcón stepped out of the church of Our Lady of the Assumption and on to the hot and busy streets of Parla.
“I’m scared and I very seldom come out but when I do, I stop by the church to pray,” said the 71-year-old.