Case today a construction yesterday; The Greek fitness government recorded the largest number of new instances since 22 April; one death every 15 seconds international as accumulated instances
More than 18.63 million international people have become inflamed with Covid-19 and 701,506 have died, according to a Reuters account released Wednesday afternoon.
Infections have been reported in more than 210 countries and territories since the first instances were known in China in December 2019.
One of Brazil’s highest vital indigenous leaders, Aritana Yawalapit, died as a result of Covid-19, causing a wave of anger and pain and highlighting the risk of the pandemic for the descendants of the first population of South America. He spent decades fighting for the rights of indigenous communities: he died in a Midwest hospital in Goiania after a fortnight of intensive care. He fell last month at his home in Xingu, Brazil’s oldest and most highest indigenous reserve.
The death of Yawalapiti’s leader sparked an immediate protest in Brazil, where nearly 100,000 people have died as a result of the epidemic and President Jair Bolsonaro’s anger is intensifying.
Victims come with a lot of indigenous people, who fear being vulnerable to the virus.
Edmilson Rodrigues, a leftist in the Amazon, tweeted: “What happens to indigenous peoples is so unhappy [and] Bolsonaro is the main culprit for these deaths because he blocked the plan to fight the Covids in the indigenous territories. Array! It’s genocide!
Luciano Huck, a prominent television presenter who is widely knew of having presidential ambitions, tweeted: “Another non-public tragedy in this national tragedy. Soon, Brazil will have suffered 100,000 deaths. It is surprising because these deaths could have been prevented if we had fought the virus with duty and coordination.
Spain reported today 1,772 new coronavirus infections, the largest buildup since the lifting of a national blockade in June and surpassing the record increase of the previous day, Reuters reports:
The rate of increase in new cases, which does not include data from two regions, sharply rose from the previous day, while one more death was registered, bringing the total to 28,499.
Cumulative cases, which include results from antibody tests on people who may have recovered, increased to 305,767 from 302,814, the health ministry said in a statement.
Amsterdam has begun ordering the use of face masks in crowded areas, including in its red light district.
Last week the Dutch government decided not to advise the public to wear masks, saying their effectiveness against the disease has not been proven and they may weaken adherence to social distancing rules.
The World Health Organization has recommended using masks in areas where it is impossible to maintain social distancing since June
Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, ordered the measure in agreement with health authorities as part of an experiment to see whether they may be effective after all, as some scientific studies have found, her spokesman said. Sebastiaan Meijer said:
We do think it can have an immediate effect. We want people to wear masks and be aware of the pandemic, so we do think it’s going to help stop the virus from spreading.
The city’s workers distributed leaflets to tourists and citizens explaining the new rules. Failure to wear the mask may result in a fine of 95 euros.
Like other European countries, the Netherlands is facing a build-up of coronavirus cases after facilitating blocking measures on 1 July. On Tuesday, the fitness government reported that the new instances had doubled last week to 2,588, with groups among young adults and in primary cities.
During the following week, Amsterdam ordered the closure of several bars and a strip club where groups among recent clients have been detected.
The Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, is cutting short a vacation to address the country on Thursday about the rising number of cases.
One of Belgium’s biggest meat processing plants has sent 225 staff home to quarantine after a cluster of coronavirus cases was discovered, the firm and the local mayor said.
Abbatoirs and meat-packing plants have become infection hotspots in other countries, and the big Westvlees facility in Staden, in north-west Belgium, is the latest to come under scrutiny.
The mayor or mayor of Staden, Francesco Vanderjeugd, told the AFP that six of them had been reported earlier in the day and that the number had increased to 18 in a few hours.
Two of the first six cases concerned French frontier workers, two were from Staden and two from West Flanders, he added.
According to a Westvlees spokesman, Manuel Goderis, several cases of Covid-19 infection have been discovered in recent days in the plant’s red meat cutting segment, which employs 225 of the more than 800 employees at the site.
“We must not take any danger and check all the personnel in this production unit and quarantine them,” he said. The staff was reviewed today and effects are expected on Thursday.
Westvlees is one of Europe’s biggest producers of fresh and processed pork. It butchers 1.4 million pigs per year and supplies 140,000 tonnes of meat to clients worldwide.
Belgium has one of the world’s capita-consistent Covid-19 rates and infection rates are emerging again after effectively controlling the epidemic. Of a population of approximately 11 million, 9,852 died.
Quarantine checkpoints must be established at key access ports in New York City for certain travelers in 35 states to comply with their 14-day quarantine, Mayor Bill de Blasio said.
“Travelers in those states will get quarantine data and be reminded that it is mandatory and optional,” de Blasio said at a press conference.
He added that, in some circumstances, fines for non-compliance with the quarantine order can be as high as $10,000.
The sheriff’s office, in coordination with other law enforcement agencies, will begin deploying checkpoints on the city’s main bridges and tunnels on Wednesday.
“This is a serious matter and it is time for everyone to realize that if we need to maintain this point of fitness and protection in this city, and we improve, we will have to face the fact that quarantine will have to be implemented consistently. anyone who has traveled, ” said de Blasio.
The 350,000 students attending public schools in Chicago, the third-largest district in the United States, will begin the school year by taking all of its categories remotely amid the Covid-19 pandemic, school officials said Wednesday.
The decision to go to all-remote learning came after the city saw an uptick in virus cases in recent weeks that made public health officials concerned about the implications of in-person learning, Chicago Public Schools said in a statement.
The French government has been criticised over its free-for-all Covid-19 testing policy as queues snaked out of some testing centres in Paris and at sites across the country amid a flare-up in infections.
One leading federation of laboratories said an abrupt decree on 25 July to make testing free of charge and without prescription had piled on the pressure at a time many staff go on holiday. Political opponents lampooned a policy in disarray.
“Testing anyone achieves nothing. You have to be targeted,” Didier Pittet, an epidemiologist who heads a government-appointed taskforce monitoring the handling of Covid-19, told Europe 1 radio.
France, like many of its European neighbours, is witnessing a mushrooming of new coronavirus clusters.
The number of coronavirus patients in intensive care increased on Tuesday by the time on a consecutive day, reversing a 16-week downward trend. The disease has killed more than 30,000 people in France.
Lately, France is testing another 576,000 people a week, Reuters was told by a spokesman for the ministry of fitness on Wednesday, up from 200,000 when President Emmanuel Macron began to ease one of Europe’s strictest locks.
The health minister, Olivier Véran, said over the weekend that the strategy was working. “The virus is no longer tracking us, we are tracking it,” he told Le Parisien. The ministry’s spokesman acknowledged “localised problems” but was adamant that France had chosen the right strategy.
But Lionel Barrand, who heads the Syndicat National des Jeunes Biologistes, said the open testing strategy amounted to hunting for a needle in a haystack and put laboratories under strain.
“The government threw sand in our wheels. It sent a lot of people to labs without prior warning,” Barrand told Reuters.
Covid-19 cases in Gambia, mainland Africa’s smallest country, have surged by more than 60% in the last week, to a total of nearly 800, health ministry data showed on Wednesday.
Authorities attributed the rise to people relaxing their guard on protective measures that had so far kept Gambia’s case total the lowest in Africa. Testing has also increased in the country, where the number of deaths is 16.
“There is increased enforcement of mask-wearing and other measures across the country,” said a government spokesman, Ebrima Sankareh.
Gambia will increase police, paramilitary, marine and immigration presence on its border as scores of Senegalese return from celebrating Eid al-Adha at home, he added. Senegal has recorded more than 10,400 cases.
The Gambian health ministry said six people who were confirmed cases were still at large, while two other positive cases had fled from a treatment centre in the capital.
On Sunday the government said three cabinet ministers had tested positive for Covid-19, and the health minister Ahmadou Lamin Samateh is in self-isolation.
The vice-president, Isatou Touray, tested positive on 29 July, leading the president, Adama Barrow, to enter self-isolation. The government said on Tuesday that the president had tested negative.
Police in Thailand have summoned five organisers of student-led protests against the government, saying they had violated a coronavirus emergency decree that forbids large gatherings.
Among those called for questioning was Anon Nampa, a human rights lawyer, who on Monday had demanded reforms of the country’s powerful monarchy, a highly sensitive topic.
Police told Reuters that Nampa, 35, was summoned over an earlier protest in July outside the army’s headquarters.
That demonstration was among a series of near-daily, student-led rallies around Thailand since mid-July that have demanded the resignation of the prime minister, Prayuth Chan-ocha, and amendments to a military-drafted constitution that critics say maintains army influence over the political system.
The five organisers were “summoned for questioning and to hear the charge of breaching the emergency decree,” police lieutenant colonel Athich Donnanchai, the deputy director of Nanglerng police, told Reuters.
Asked about his summons, Anon said in a text message that the decree was “a law to gag and stop activism”.
Last month the government said the emergency decree in place since March would only be used as a measure against the coronavirus, and from August onwards would not be used to prevent political rallies.
Six protest leaders or political activists in two different provinces were summoned last month for breaching the emergency decree, among other alleged offences.
Portugal’s Azores Islands, 1,400km from the Portuguese coast, breached the national constitution by forcing air passengers to quarantine for 14 days, the country’s constitutional court has ruled.
The court said authorities on the islands had treated people as if they were serving a short prison sentence by confining them to hotels regardless of whether they had symptoms.
“The competence to legislate on rights, freedom and guarantees lies with the parliament or the [national] government, and only with those two sovereign bodies,” the court ruled.
The regional government of the Azores had decided in March that all arriving air passengers had to stay in confinement for two weeks in a hotel.
Authorities initially paid for the hotel but those arriving from 8 May onwards were told they had to pay for their own stay.
The constitutional court’s ruling, made on 30 July and made public on Wednesday, came after a man launched a legal appeal over having to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel in Sao Miguel, the Azores’ biggest island.
A lower court decided that the man, who had a family home in Sao Miguel, had been deprived of his freedom and ordered authorities to release him immediately.
Court documents state that the man’s meals were sent to his room three times a day, he was not able to see his family or friends, and he had to clean his room himself.
Most UK holidaymakers would cancel a holiday if they had to wear a mask in public on a trip, according to a YouGov survey released this week. It found that two-thirds of people (65%) would cancel if masks were mandatory at all times, 43% would still cancel if only compulsory inside, while 70% would scrap the holiday if they had to quarantine on return.
The tourism industry continues to face cancellations and redundancies after Spain was removed from the UK government’s travel corridor list on 26 July. The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) has forecast 3 million job losses across the UK tourism sector, with “uncoordinated” restrictions deterring travellers.
The survey also found that 93% would cancel if quarantine was required on arrival in their holiday destination. Rules on quarantine measures and masks vary from country to country and can change without warning, as spikes in some regions result in restrictions and safety measures being reinstated.
You can read the full report from my colleague Antonia Wilson here:
Switzerland has become to latest country to impose a strict quarantine on travellers from Spain to curb the spread of coronavirus.
The 10-day quarantine period does not apply to those arriving from the Balearic and Canary Islands, which have experienced a smaller number of infections than mainland Spain.
The measure will take effect from Saturday, Patrick Mathys, the head of crisis management for the federal public health office, told a briefing in Bern on Wednesday.
So far, the UK, Ireland and Norway have imposed quarantine measures on travellers arriving from Spain. Meanwhile, there are travel warnings in place for Spain in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Austria, Belgium, Finland and Poland.
New restrictions have been imposed in the city of Aberdeen in Scotland following an outbreak. Under the measures, pubs and restaurants have been ordered to close and visitors have been asked to stay away.
“We are at a stage of this pandemic where extreme caution is necessary, and also in my view, sensible,” Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said at a press conference after a meeting with officials.
Sturgeon advised Aberdeen residents against travelling other than for work or education, and said people should not visit other households. Hospitality venues in Aberdeen will be required to close by 5pm on Wednesday. There is more detail in the UK coronavirus live blog.
The Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has blamed “complacency” for the country’s “significant rise” in coronavirus cases in recent days.
In a week deemed crucial for containing further transmission spread, the centre-right leader echoed the mounting concern of infectious disease experts over an abrupt increase in infections. Greek health officials registered 121 new coronavirus cases on Tuesday, the most since 22 April.
In comments made at the start of a teleconference call with health officials handling the response to the pandemic – and before a mini cabinet reshuffle – Mitsotakis appealed to what is seen as the Greeks’ particular sense of honour and pride, saying only 10% of cases had been traced to people entering the country.
“In recent days we have seen a significant rise in positive cases which essentially differs, however, from the first wave of the pandemic, and that, naturally, is something that troubles and worries us,” he said. “It must be said that the increase in cases is due mainly to the noted relaxation towards compliance measures within our country in July. And for that I believe we all bear a responsibility. Just 10% of cases are imported; most cases right now are domestic.”
The government has repeatedly warned it will re-introduce restrictions including local lockdowns if need be. Face coverings have been made compulsory in enclosed spaces, and officials have said masks must be worn in open-air decks on ferries as the country gears up for a mass exodus expected to occur before 15 August – the date of a major religious celebration in the Orthodox calendar.
Mitsotakis, who has only intermittently addressed Greeks on the issue of coronavirus, deferring at the height of the initial lockdown to scientists instead, urged citizens not to let down their guard, saying masks should be seen as “a constant companion”. He said face coverings must be donned not only in closed spaces but also outside in circumstances where it is impossible to maintain social distancing. “The mask should now become a constant companion, like our keys, our glasses, our mobile phone,” he added, before calling on Greeks to reject conspiracy theories doing the rounds debunking the efficacy of face coverings and other precautionary measures.
The abrupt rise – especially noticeable among younger people in recent weeks – has brought the total number of cases to 4,855, and epidemiologists have described the coming days as make-or-break for the country’s continued ability to keep the virus under control. A total of 209 people have died from Covid-19 related illnesses to date in Greece. Big social gatherings including religious festivals, weddings and baptisms have been linked to the sudden increase in infection rates.
Vietnam has reported an additional 41 new coronavirus cases, bringing the country’s total caseload to 713, with eight deaths.
All but one of the new infections are linked to the tourist hotspot of Danang, where the first locally transmitted coronavirus case in more than three months was detected on 25 July. Earlier on Wednesday, Vietnam’s health ministry reported two other new coronavirus cases.
Since the virus resurfaced in Danang, 264 cases have been recorded there, while all eight of the country’s coronavirus-related deaths have occurred in the city.
Infections have since been found in at least 10 other locations in Vietnam.
Test results for a man suspected of being North Korea’s first coronavirus case were inconclusive, but authorities have quarantined more than 3,635 primary and secondary contacts, according to a World Health Organization official.
On 26 July, the country said it had declared a state of emergency and locked down the border city of Kaesong after a person who defected to South Korea three years ago returned across the fortified border with what state media said were symptoms of Covid-19.
At the time, state media were unclear over whether the man had been tested, saying an “uncertain result was made from several medical checkups”. But the leader, Kim Jong-un, declared that “the vicious virus could be said to have entered the country”.
If confirmed, the case would have been the first officially acknowledged by North Korean authorities, but since then state media have continued to say no cases have been reported.
“The person was tested for Covid-19, but test results were inconclusive,” Dr Edwin Salvador, the WHO representative for North Korea, told Reuters on Wednesday.
As many as 64 first contacts and 3,571 secondary contacts of the suspected case have been identified and quarantined in government facilities for a period of 40 days, Salvador said. Kaesong remains under lockdown and household doctors continue to conduct surveillance in the city, he said.
Despite having no confirmed cases, North Korea had imposed a widespread lockdown and conducted contract tracing, he added.
France’s prime minister, Jean Castex, has said the the country’s wine sector, which has faced “major difficulties” due to the pandemic, will receive an extra €250m ($295m) in state support.
He made the announcement during a visit to the Menetou-Salon and Sancerre vineyards in the Cher department in centre-Val de Loire region. Earlier, Castex had tweeted that state support “must continue and intensify” to save the wine industry from collapse.