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 the number of coronavirus deaths worldwide looked set to pass a million within days, Rio de Janeiro delayed its annual Carnival parade for the first time in a century because of Brazil’s continued vulnerability in the pandemic.
The global death toll passed 980,000 on Friday, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker. With the number of deaths confirmed daily averaging more than 5,000, it looks likely the toll will pass 1 million within days. There are 32m cases worldwide.
Experts believe virus is probably becoming more contagious but US study did not find mutations made it more lethal
The Covid-19 virus is continuing to mutate throughout the course of the pandemic, with experts believing it is probably becoming more contagious, as coronavirus cases in the US have started to rise once again, according to new research.
The new US study analyzed 5,000 genetic sequences of the virus, which has continued to mutate as it has spread through the population. The study did not find that mutations of the virus have made it more lethal or changed its effects, even as it may be becoming easier to catch, according to a report in the Washington Post, which noted that public health experts acknowledge all viruses have mutations, most of which are insignificant.
Italy’s president, Sergio Mattarella, said its citizens “also love freedom, but we also care about seriousness”, responding to Boris Johnson’s suggestion that the UK’s rate of coronavirus infection was worse than both Italy and Germany’s because Britons loved their freedom more.
Mattarella’s comments came at the end of a ceremony in Sardinia, in memory of the former Italian president Francesco Cossiga.
Starmer says Johnson said the opposite yesterday. Everyone can read it in Hansard. He says a week ago the PM acknowledged that there was a problem. Is the PM saying capacity is the problem, as Dido Harding says? Or he is saying that too many healthy people are requesting tests, as Matt Hancock says?
Johnson says the attacks on Harding from Labour are unseeming. He says the government is going to get testing up to 500,000 per day. He says he wants to hear “more of the spirit of togetherness” that was on display yesterday.
So why did Johnson says yesterday it had “very little” to do with the spread of the disease, Starmer asks.
Johnson says it is an “epidemiological fact” that transmission takes place human to human. And capacity today is at a record high, he says.
A pledge to hit 500,000 coronavirus tests a day in the UK by the end of next month could be missed as vital chemicals and analysing machines needed to hit the target are “a few weeks” behind schedule, the body representing their manufacturers has said.
Boris Johnson has insisted the UK will hit the target by the end of October, up from about 260,000 capacity now, despite a number of problems including people told to travel hundreds of miles and delays in getting results back.
Travel restrictions around Europe aimed at curbing coronavirus contagion ravaged Spain’s tourism industry during the crucial month of August, depriving it of millions of tourists, Reuters reports.
The number of nights booked in Spanish hotels fell 64% last month from a year ago, data from the National Statistics Institute showed on Wednesday. In the first eight months of the year, hotel bookings slumped 70% from the same period in 2019.
The Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz has announced the cancellation of this year’s Vienna Opera Ball, a glamorous society event that usually marks the peak of the Austrian ball season.
The government cited rising Covid-19 infection rates in the Alpine country as the reason for calling off the event, which was planned for 11 February 2021. While the Vienna State Opera put a lot of effort into security concepts, the wellbeing of participants could not have been guaranteed, the government said.
The EU Council, scheduled for later this week, has been postponed after its president tested positive, reports Euronews political editor, Darren McCaffery.
MEANS: EU Council due to be held this Thursday and Friday has been postponed until next week, 1st and 2nd of September
The UN summit is proving to be a bad-tempered event.
In a recorded video, the US president, Donald Trump, called Covid-19 the “China virus”, adding: “We must hold accountable the nation that unleashed this plague upon the world.”
The weekly number of new recorded coronavirus infections worldwide was last week at its highest level to date, the World Health Organization has announced, as deaths from Covid-19 in Europe increased by more than a quarter week on week.
Almost 1 million people have now died from the coronavirus since it emerged in China at the beginning of the year.
Larger economies have been flexible and creative coping with Covid’s impact – the same mindset needs to be applied to helping poorer countries
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts Africa will suffer its worst recession since the 1970s. For the first time since the 1990s, extreme poverty will increase. The annual death toll from HIV, tuberculosis and malaria is set to double. We also fear a near doubling in the number of people facing starvation. Many girls out of school will never go back. Life expectancy will fall.
All this will fuel grievances, and in their wake conflict, instability and refugee flows, all giving succour to extremist groups and terrorists. The consequences will reach far and last long. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development and G20 nations will feel the blowback just as some start to see light at the end of the Covid tunnel.
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.