Editor Brian Harrod Provides Comprehensive up-to-date news coverage, with aggregated news from sources all over the world from the Roundup Newswires Network
Plastic face shields are almost totally ineffective at trapping respiratory aerosols, according to modelling in Japan, casting doubt on their effectiveness in preventing the spread of coronavirus.
A simulation using Fugaku, the world’s fastest supercomputer, found that almost 100% of airborne droplets of less than 5 micrometres in size escaped through plastic visors of the kind often used by people working in service industries.
Former real estate mogul was investigated after criticising Xi Jinping over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic
China has sentenced an influential former property executive and critic of President Xi Jinping to 18 years in prison for corruption.
Ren Zhiqiang, the former chairman of Huayuan, a state-owned real estate group, was also fined 4.2m yuan, Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court said on its website on Tuesday.
On one thing, everyone agrees: the UK is at a turning point.
After a summer of crowded beaches and pubs reopening, followed by children returning to school and employees going back to the workplace, new cases of Covid-19 are definitely on the rise.
The UK government’s most senior scientists, England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, and the chief scientific adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance, have given a televised briefing about the recent increases in coronavirus cases, and what to expect – unusually, doing so without a politician there as well. Here is what we learned.
With winter approaching, the UK is entering the traditional seasons for colds and flu, with the additional complication this year that symptoms of those two illnesses can be broadly similar to those experienced by people who have caught the coronavirus and may be at risk of spreading it.
The NHS in England has produced a guide to differentiate between the three types of illnesses, which health experts hope will make it clearer to people whether they have an illness they would have most likely brushed aside last year, but which this year might lead them to think they need to self-isolate or seek to have a coronavirus test.
The UK government has warned of six more months of “very difficult” lockdown restrictions, amid a continuing rise in infections, the Times reports this morning.
According to the paper, the UK prime minister, Boris Johnson, is expected to announce new movement curbs in the coming days, although there is said be a split among members of his cabinet over how extensive these should be, with the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, is resisting a full shutdown of the hospitality sector.
The UK is at a “critical moment” and if people fail to follow coronavirus rules “we’re going to end up back in situations we don’t want to be in,” a senior government minister warned in a broadcast interview this morning.
Grant Shapps, the transport secretary, told Sky News:
We’re certainly at a critical moment this morning.
It is clear we’re just a few weeks behind what we’re seeing elsewhere in Europe.
.@grantshapps says it's important the public adhere to the new social distancing rules as #COVID19 'hospital admissions are creeping up'.
A federal judge in South Carolina has struck down a rule requiring mail-in absentee ballots to be signed by witnesses for the upcoming November election, citing the severity of the coronavirus pandemic.
In a ruling on Friday, US district court judge J. Michelle Childs ordered the state Election Commission to immediately inform voters about the removal of the requirement.
The latest Guardian editorial, on the UK facing its second wave of coronavirus:
The United Kingdom is facing a Covid calamity, and it is a situation that was made in Downing Street. Infections and hospital admissions are rising rapidly.
An exponentially growing epidemic is outpacing the rate at which the testing regime is expanding, meaning that it is not possible to properly track the spread of the disease.
The US is nearing the stark milestone of 200,000 deaths, nine months after the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, as cases in the UK rose to a four-month high and Europe continued to see rising infections.
The number of deaths in the US, the highest in the world, stood at 199,509 on the Johns Hopkins University tracker on Monday morning, roughly a fifth of the global total. Nearly 6.8m of the world’s 30.1m infections are in the US.
By midday on Sunday, the chants of “Unity!” and “Healthcare!” that echoed around a busy crossroads in north-east Madrid had given rise to a more specific demand: “Ayuso resign!”
On Friday, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the president of the Madrid region, announced that 850,000 people – many of them living in some of the poorest parts of the city and surrounding area – would be placed in partial lockdown from Monday in an attempt to arrest the second wave of the virus.
A third of coronavirus patients in intensive care are from black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, prompting the head of the British Medical Association to warn that government inaction will be responsible for further disproportionate deaths.
Chaand Nagpaul, the BMA Council chair, was the first public figure to call for an inquiry into whether and why there was a disparity between BAME and white people in Britain in terms of how they were being affected by the pandemic, in April.
Covid-19 has spread around the planet, sending billions of people into lockdown as health services struggle to cope, Pablo Gutiérrez and Seán Clarke write. Find out where the virus has spread, and where it has been most deadly:
A clown juggled and acrobats launched themselves through the air above a stage in an open field in Seoul at the weekend as the audience watched from the safety of their cars, cocooned from the risk of coronavirus.
The annual circus – usually held in May – was pushed back twice this year because of the virus until organisers turned it into a drive-in event, Agence France-Presse (AFP) reports. Cho Beong-hee, the manager of the Seoul Street Art Creation Centre, said:
The performing arts are very important even during a pandemic. So we came up with different ideas in trying to make this event happen and the drive-in option was chosen as it was deemed the safest idea.
I think watching performances in cars is great. I think it can be done in the future, with other performances like musicals.
As the UK battles with the overwhelming demand for Covid-19 tests, the health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on Friday that the country needs to come together to keep the infection levels down while we await the cavalry on the horizon.
The cavalry, he said, would come in the shape of the science that will bring a vaccine, effective treatments and the ability to undertake mass testing. Detecting cases, tracking contacts and containing the spread of infection remains our strongest weapon.
The first wave of coronavirus swept through a world unprepared. Authorities struggled to test for the disease, and didn’t know how to slow the spread of Covid-19.
Lockdowns brought the virus under temporary control in some places, including the UK, buying a window for the revival of education and the economy, and time to prepare for future waves that epidemiologists said were almost inevitable.
Doctors in England urge tighter restrictions; number of cases worldwide passes 30 million; scaled-down Oktoberfest in Munich begins. Follow all the developments
Kenya’s chief public prosecutor, Noordin Haji, has ordered a probe into $71m in “irregular procurement” linked to the coronavirus by the Kenya Medical Supplies Authority (Kemsa).
Hard-pressed Kenyan hospital staff have staged strikes to highlight what they say are scandalous practices by the authority, which purchases medication and equipment for the nation’s public hospitals, AFP reports.
France has joined a string of other countries in reporting yet another record increase in infections today.
French health authorities reported 13,498 new confirmed coronavirus cases on Saturday, setting another record in daily additional infections since the disease started to spread in the country.
State’s chief health officer says it was ‘inappropriate’ to single out migrant community in Casey
Victoria’s chief health officer, Brett Sutton, has apologised for comments he made singling out Melbourne’s Afghan community in relation to a Covid-19 outbreak in Casey.
Sutton made the apology as the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, announced 21 new coronavirus cases and seven more deaths in the state on Saturday. It was the lowest number of new Covid-19 cases in the state since 24 June.
Coronavirus cases in England almost doubled in the space of a week, with infections becoming more widespread across all ages, leading one expert to say a second wave had begun.
Almost 60,000 people are thought to have had the virus from 4 to 10 September 2020 – one in every 900 people – with about 6,000 new cases per day, according to the ONS survey of randomly selected people in the community.
Iran appears to be in the grip of a “third wave” of the coronavirus outbreak, with the number of new infections above 3,000 a day – as high as at any point since the virus first hit in February.
Iran was one of the first countries to be struck by the virus outside China. Its officials brought the disease under a form of control by early May, but then experienced an increase at the start of June that drifted down to fewer than 1,600 new cases a day in late August.
Scientists have had eyes on Sars-CoV-2, the virus that causes Covid-19, since the beginning of this pandemic.
They can see it is evolving, but it is happening at a glacial pace compared with two other viruses with pandemic potential: those that cause flu and Aids. That is good news for efforts to develop vaccines and treatments, but scientists remain wary that anything could still happen.
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.