Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Just back to Donald Trump’s marathon press conference and he is fielding questions on the US naval commander who was fired over his coronavirus memo, suggesting he doesn’t think his life should be “destroyed” as a result, Sam Levin writes:
He made a mistake. He shouldn’t be sending letter. He’s the captain … you don’t send letters and then it leaks into a newspaper. I may get involved ...If I can help two good people, I’m going to help him
Long lines have formed outside supermarkets after Coles, Woolworths and IGA began limiting the number of customers inside stores in a bid to allow physical distancing and keep flattening the curve of Covid-19 infections during the Easter rush.
The Thursday before Easter is traditionally one of the busiest days for supermarkets, as people stock up for the weekend.
The government has been accused of missing an opportunity after it failed to deploy 5,000 contact tracing experts employed by councils to help limit the spread of coronavirus.
Environmental health workers in local government have wide experience in contact tracing, a process used to prevent infections spreading and routinely carried out in outbreaks such as of norovirus, salmonella or legionnaires’ disease. But a spokesperson for Public Health England (PHE), which leads on significant outbreaks, said the organisation did not call upon environmental health workers to carry out contact tracing for coronavirus, instead using its own local health protection teams.
It wasn’t a typical police operation. Two Israeli officers were to go undercover, although not posing as drug dealers or arms traffickers. For this particular assignment, they were to disguise themselves as ultra-Orthodox Jews.
Their mission on Friday was to bust an illegal gathering in a synagogue. People were praying together, a practice that is now against the law in the era of the coronavirus. Once the officers got inside to confirm the crowd, more units barged in and dispersed people.
What are the risks associated with intimacy in the time of coronavirus? Three experts weigh in
With countries on lockdown and millions being made to stay at home, it’s unsurprising many couples and single people are wondering what coronavirus means for their sex lives. With this in mind, we asked three experts five of the most pressing questions about intimacy during the pandemic.
With 400 public health offices forging ahead with testing, the country is a model for others to emulate
As the coronavirus crisis tests the resilience of democracies around the globe, Germany has gone from cursing its lead-footed, decentralised political system to wondering if federalism’s tortoise versus hare logic puts it in a better position to brave the pandemic than most.
Under German federalism – which has roots going back to the Holy Roman Empire but was entrenched after the Nazi era to weaken centralised rule – key policy areas, such as health, education and cultural affairs, fall under the jurisdiction of the country’s 16 states, or Länder.
Covid-19 has exposed the deficiencies of national disease detection and prevention systems in many countries of Europe, and in the United States. In the UK, contact tracing was abandoned early due to lack of capacity. Just three weeks ago the government was prepared to let thousands of Scots travel through England to Wales and back for a rugby match, and it has taken a month to develop a strategy for scaled-up testing. After a decade of austerity and decentralisation, we are trying to recover the lost muscle memory of the public health response.
It will not be 100 years until the next pandemic. Population growth, human invasion of animal habitats and the resumption of fast travel between continents will take care of that. More urgently, we need a system in place after the lockdown to prevent a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic being worse than the first.
The Australian death toll from Covid-19 related illnesses stands at 34, as of 4 April. This story will be updated as further deaths are confirmed and Australia’s coronavirus victims are identified.
Brazil is bracing for a surge in coronavirus cases as doctors and researchers warn that underreporting and a lack of testing mean nobody knows the real scale of Covid-19’s spread.
“What’s happening is enormous underreporting,” said Isabella Rêllo, a doctor working in emergency and intensive care in Rio de Janeiro hospitals, in a widely shared Facebook post challenging official numbers. “There are MANY more,” she wrote.
The Municipality of Livorno in Italy has begun printing stamped and numbered food vouchers which can be obtained by submitting a self-certification. The scheme, which began on Saturday, enables those in need to claim 200-400 euros in vouchers for their shopping.
Bermuda has entered two weeks of lockdown, which will see people given slots to shop according to their surnames, Bermuda’s daily newspaper the Royal Gazette is reporting.
Visits to grocery shops and gas stations will be organised alphabetically, with people with surnames from A to K shopping on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and those with names from L to Z on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Sundays will be reserved for elderly people.
The US has been accused of “modern piracy” after reportedly diverting a shipment of masks intended for the German police, and outbidding other countries in the increasingly fraught global market for coronavirus protective equipment.
About 200,000 N95 masks were diverted to the US as they were being transferred between planes in Thailand, according to the Berlin authorities who said they had ordered the masks for the police force.
When the overcrowded, long-distance bus from Johannesburg arrived at the Malawian border post of Mwanza last week, one passenger was dead. Fearing he had picked up Covid-19 in South Africa and infected all his fellow travellers, the guards sent everyone to a hastily built quarantine centre for 14 days.
The man had died of other causes but Malawi, which is well used to devastating diseases like HIV and Aids, cholera and malaria, is taking no chances. Along with São Tomé, Comoros, South Sudan, Burundi, and Sierra Leone in Africa, it is one of the last countries in the world not to have confirmed a single Covid-19 case yet.
Up to 9.5 million women and girls could miss out on vital family planning services this year because of Covid-19, potentially resulting in thousands of deaths.
Marie Stopes International warned on Friday that travel restrictions and lockdowns could have a devastating affect on women as they struggle to collect contraceptives and access other reproductive healthcare services, such as safe abortions, across the 37 countries in which it works.
Victoria and Queensland register deaths as Western Australia flags border closure and federal government acts on childcare and industrial relations concerns. Follow live updates
The PM stresses that the “health advice we have is that there is no health reasons why children can’t go to school”.
Asked if taxes will increase to pay for its massive stimulus funding, Morrison does not address this directly.
Obviously there will be a heightened debt burden as a result of decisions we have had to take. They have been necessary decisions. Otherwise the calamity for Australian households economic will be disastrous. We have taken that decisions of government to step up and to make this commitment to provide people with an economic lifeline over the many months ahead. But you are right, we will have to then work hard on the other side to restore the economy. Now, that’s why we are being so careful not to have things that tie the economy and the budget down off into the future. We do need to snap back to the normal arrangements on the other side of this.
Morrison says schools have been planning for a “balance – a combination of distance learning” and, for those who can’t “provide a learning environment at home, for the children to be able to return to school”.
School will return after the holidays. They just won’t be holidays that most school students have known for a long time. And when they go back, it’s the learning that matters, and we hope to have an arrangement that can return as much to normal as possible.
But we have to accept that there will be, for some protracted period of time, this combination of distance learning, and for those who can’t do that at home, no child should be turned away.
We are about to wrap up our coverage on this blog for the day, but you can follow all developments on our new global live blog here. In the interim, you can catch up on all the day’s latest news here, on our latest At a Glance: