6:10 a.m. India began its first human trials of a novel coronavirus vaccine candidate
1:10 a.m. Woman on Air Canada flight from Toronto to St. John’s tests postive for coronavirus
The latest coronavirus news from Canada and around the world Friday. This file will be updated throughout the day. Web links to longer stories if available.
9 p.m.: North Korea locked down a city near the border with South Korea and declared a “maximum” national emergency after finding what leader Kim Jong Un said could be the country’s first case of COVID-19. The alert was issued after a North Korean who had defected to South Korea three years ago, but secretly crossed back into the North’s Kaesong City last Sunday, was “suspected to have been infected with the vicious virus,” the North’s official Korean Central News Agency reported.
8:30 p.m.: U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Republicans were set to roll out the next COVID-19 aid package Monday and assured there was backing from the White House after he and President Donald Trump’s top aide met to salvage the $1-trillion proposal that had floundered just days before.
Mnuchin told reporters that extending an expiring unemployment benefit — but reducing it substantially — was a top priority for Trump. The secretary called the $600 weekly aid “ridiculous” and a disincentive for people to go back to work. He also promised a fresh round of $1,200 stimulus cheques would be coming in August.
7:40 p.m.: Florida jumped ahead of New York in confirmed cases of COVID-19 after the Sunshine State reported another 12,199 infections on Saturday. The state says 414,511 people have been diagnosed with the disease, No. 2 in the U.S. in front of New York State and its 406,506 cases. California leads the way with 425,616, based on the COVID Data Tracker from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
6:20 p.m.: Spiking infections in Windsor-Essex and Ottawa are fuelling a recent rise in Ontario COVID-19 case numbers that’s not yet being felt equally across the province.
According to the Star’s count, the overall rate of infections has begun to rise again in the province after slowing through the first half of July. As of Saturday, Ontario’s 34 regional health units had reported an average of 158 new cases per day over the previous week. That’s up about 35 per cent from July 12 — when the same average hit a recent low of 117 cases daily — but still well down from the peak of nearly 600 per day in late April.
In a tweet, Ontario Health Minister Christine Elliott said two-thirds of Saturday’s new infections were among people under 44.
Unlike during the April peak, the recent rise has been being fuelled by a growing number of infections outside the GTA. For the second day in a row, Windsor-Essex reported the largest number in the province: 32, tied with Toronto, which has a much larger population and is continuing to see case counts fall to their lowest levels since late March.
Read the full story here
4:45 p.m.: A German vessel operated by travel giant TUI Cruises is testing the industry waters — the first large cruise ship to resume operations following months of shutdowns amid the pandemic.
According to German public broadcaster DW, the Mein Schiff 2 (My Ship 2) set sail late Friday night from the northern city of Hamburg. The ship headed for Norway for a three-night scenic cruise in the North Sea. Without stopping at any other ports, it’s scheduled to return to Germany on Monday morning.
The German news agency DPA reported that the ship, with room for 2,900, is carrying 1,200 guests.
4 p.m.: Apple Maps is sending alerts to international travellers, reminding them to self-quarantine. The alerts, which include a link to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website, are likely based on geolocation data, according to the Apple news platform 9to5mac.
Apple and Google also joined forces to create contact tracing technology that can help people figure out if they’ve been exposed to the virus.
Read the full story here
12:50 p.m.: Quebec continues to see a rise in COVID-19 infections, reporting 171 new confirmed cases, but the number of people in hospital dropped by 14 to 206. Of those, 12 were in intensive care, the same as one day earlier.
11 a.m. Ontario is reporting another 138 cases of COVID-19 in its daily update Saturday, down from nearly 200 the day prior.
As has been the case in recent days, the increase included significant case spikes in Ottawa — 28 new cases — and Windsor-Essex — 33 cases.
Windsor-Essex, which continues to see new infections from outbreaks in its agricultural sector, has emerged as one of the hardest-hit regions during a recent uptick in cases in the province.
The province reported a single new death Saturday.
Ontario has seen a total of 38,543 lab-confirmed infections, including 2,759 deaths, according to the province’s count.
The Star maintains a separate count of COVID-19 cases based on the public reports of Ontario’s 34 public health units. That count includes patients with “probable” infections, meaning they very likely have the virus but have not received a positive lab test.
10:01 a.m. A German cruise ship has set sail for the first time since the industry was shut down because of the coronavirus, with strict precautions for passengers and crew.
The TUI cruise ship “Mein Schiff 2” — “My Ship 2” — set sail for the weekend cruise in the North Sea on Friday night, the dpa news agency reported.
Occupancy was limited to 60% so passengers can keep their distance. There were 1,200 people on board compared the ship’s normal 2,900 capacity. The ship sailed from the port of Hamburg toward Norway, and passengers will spend the weekend at sea with no land stops before returning to Germany on Monday.
Passengers and crew are required to stay 1.5 metres (5 feet) away or wear protective masks and won’t serve themselves at the ship’s buffet. All passengers filled out a health questionnaire before boarding and had temperatures checks.
After being shut down for months, German cruise ship companies hope shorter, strictly controlled trips will help restart the business.
8:59 a.m. Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said Saturday that he has tested negative for the new coronavirus, based on a fourth test since he said July 7 that he had the virus.
“Good morning everyone,” Bolsonaro wrote on Facebook after reporting that the test was “negative.”
The 65-year-old leader didn’t say when he did the new test. On Wednesday, he had tested positive for the third time.
Bolsonaro also posted a photo of himself with a box of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine, although it has not been proven effective against the virus.
Now that Bolsonaro is clear of the virus, he is expected to return to mingling in crowds as he used to do before his diagnosis. He had spent many weekends since the beginning of the pandemic in close proximity to supporters, sometimes without wearing a mask.
On Thursday, he was photographed without a mask while talking to some sweepers in the garden of the presidential residence.
Brazil, Latin America’s largest nation, is one of the outbreak’s epicenters. According to the Brazilian government, on Friday there were 85,238 confirmed deaths due to the new coronavirus. The country has 2,343,366 confirmed cases. The real numbers are believed to be higher.
7 a.m. The latest numbers of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Canada as of 4:00 a.m. on July 25, 2020:
There are 113,208 confirmed cases in Canada.
Quebec: 58,243 confirmed (including 5,663 deaths, 50,615 resolved)
Ontario: 38,405 confirmed (including 2,758 deaths, 34,100 resolved)
Alberta: 10,086 confirmed (including 178 deaths, 8,567 resolved)
British Columbia: 3,419 confirmed (including 191 deaths, 2,934 resolved)
Saskatchewan: 1,099 confirmed (including 16 deaths, 848 resolved)
Nova Scotia: 1,067 confirmed (including 63 deaths, 1,003 resolved)
Manitoba: 371 confirmed (including 7 deaths, 319 resolved), 13 presumptive
Newfoundland and Labrador: 265 confirmed (including 3 deaths, 259 resolved)
New Brunswick: 170 confirmed (including 2 deaths, 163 resolved)
Prince Edward Island: 36 confirmed (including 31 resolved)
Yukon: 14 confirmed (including 13 resolved)
Repatriated Canadians: 13 confirmed (including 13 resolved)
Northwest Territories: 5 confirmed (including 5 resolved)
Nunavut: No confirmed cases, 2 presumptive
Total: 113,208 (15 presumptive, 113,193 confirmed including 8,881 deaths, 98,870 resolved)
6:10 a.m. Swimming pools and gyms in England are reopening for the first time since the U.K. went into lockdown as public health officials extol the benefits of exercise in fighting COVID-19.
The government has announced a fresh attack on obesity as part of the move, hoping that a fitter nation might be able to minimize the impact of future waves of the virus.
But Jane Nickerson, chief executive of Swim England, says that there had been financial pressure on pools even before the pandemic and that without government support many won’t open this year — or ever.
She told the BBC that funding pools actually saves money because of the impact they have on social cohesion, crime prevention, education attainment and health benefits. Learning to swim is also a life skill.
“One of our biggest, biggest fears is that there will be a lost generation of children this year who don’t learn to swim,” she said.
6:10 a.m. A Pakistani health official says 14 Chinese engineers and experts have tested positive for the coronavirus while working on a power project in central Pakistan.
Rana Yousaf, a medical doctor at the state-run Behawalpur hospital, said Saturday that the Chinese were brought to the hospital a day earlier amid tight security and that all of them were listed in stable condition.
It is the first time that authorities have confirmed infections among Chinese working in the country.
Currently, an unspecified number of Chinese are working in various parts of Pakistan on CPEC-related projects.
The development came hours after Pakistan reported 24 new deaths from COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, the country’s lowest number of daily fatalities from the virus in more than a month.
Pakistan has recorded 271,887 cases and 5,787 fatalities.
6:10 a.m. France’s coronavirus infection rate is continuing its worrisome upward creep, with health authorities saying the closely watched “R” gauge is now up to 1.3, suggesting that infected people are on average contaminating 1.3 others.
Also increasing is the daily number of new cases, up to 1,130 on Friday. In their daily statement on the French outbreak that has claimed 30,192 lives, health authorities warned that the country is going backward in its battle and that infection indicators now again resemble those seen in May when France was coming out of its strict two-month lockdown.
“We have thus erased much of the progress that we’d achieved in the first weeks of lockdown-easing,” health authorities said.
They appealed for a return to “collective discipline,” asking that people work from home and get tested if they have any suspicions of infection.
6:10 a.m. Africa’s total number of confirmed coronavirus cases has surpassed 800,000.
That’s according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
South Africa has well over half the reported cases on the 54-nation continent, but infections are now climbing rapidly in other countries including Kenya, East Africa’s economic hub, with more than 16,000.
Africa was a major concern even before the first case was reported on the continent on Feb. 14, as the World Health Organization’s declaration of a global health emergency in January cited the threat to fragile health care systems.
Africa’s are the least-equipped in the world, and health experts have warned the virus could “smoulder” in parts of the continent for a long time. Africa now has 810,008 confirmed cases.
6:10 a.m. India began its first human trials of a novel coronavirus vaccine candidate as the world’s second-most populous country recorded nearly 49,000 new cases.
The additional infections take India’s total to more than 1.3 million on Saturday, with surges seen in a quarter of the country’s 36 states and union territories.
India has tallied 31,358 deaths, including 757 in the last 24 hours. It has reported a much lower death rate than the world’s two other worst-hit countries, the United States and Brazil. Johns Hopkins University showed that the U.S. has more than 4.1 million cases, while Brazil has a caseload of nearly 2.3 million.
The All India Institute of Medical Sciences, a premier teaching hospital in the capital of New Delhi, says it has administered the first dose of a trial COVID-19 vaccine on Friday.
The candidate vaccine, Covaxin, is among nearly two dozen that are in human trials around the world. AIIMS is among the 12 sites selected by the Indian Council for Medical Research for conducting the two-phase randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials of Covaxin.
Countries are making giant bets on various vaccine candidates, entering into purchasing agreements with pharmaceutical companies for delivery if and when regulators deem the doses safe and effective.
6:10 a.m. Vietnam has reported the first local case of COVID-19 in over three months.
The 57-year-old man from central Da Nang city was hospitalized on Thursday with a fever and respiratory distress. The Health Ministry says his condition worsened and he was put on a ventilator.
Health workers have not been able to trace the source for his infection. For over a month, he did not travel outside his hometown, where no case of COVID-19 has been reported since April.
Da Nang city authorities have isolated the hospital he had visited and those who had been in contact with the man in the past weeks. His family members and over 100 others have initially tested negative for the coronavirus.
The news of a local infection after most activities had resumed in mid-May caused many to cancel or prematurely end their holidays in Da Nang, one of Vietnam’s most popular beach destinations.
Vietnam has reported 416 confirmed cases and no deaths.
6:10 a.m. Five more Victoria residents died from COVID-19 as the Australian state recorded 357 new cases in the past 24 hours.
Victoria Premier Daniel Andrews refused to rule out further restrictions but said Saturday the mandatory wearing of masks was the current strategy to stop the spread.
Andrews says, “If they are worn by everybody, we may not need to go further. We can’t rule out going further with rule changes, but it’s a big game changer.”
There are now nearly 4,000 active cases in the state and of those, 313 are health care workers.
The deaths take Victoria state toll to 61 and the national figure to 145. Victoria recorded 300 new cases on Friday, down from 403 on Thursday.
6:10 a.m. South Korea has reported 113 newly confirmed cases of COVID-19 over the past 24 hours — its first daily jump above 100 in nearly four months.
But the rise was expected as health authorities had forecast a temporary spike driven by imported infections found among cargo-ship crews and hundreds of South Korean construction workers flown out of virus-ravaged Iraq.
The figures released Saturday by South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention brought the national caseload to 14,092, including 298 deaths.
The agency says 86 of the new cases are linked to international arrivals, while the other 27 involved local transmissions. It says the imported cases include 36 South Korean workers who returned from Iraq and 32 crew members of a Russia-flagged cargo ship docked in the southern port of Busan.
6:10 a.m. New Orleans’ mayor is shutting down the city’s bars because of rising coronavirus numbers and is also forbidding restaurants to sell alcoholic drinks to go.
Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Friday that some lines of people waiting to buy drinks were so long they became “a gathering in themselves, and no mask-wearing and the like.”
Cantrell says the city is seeing daily increases in confirmed coronavirus cases about double its threshold of 50 a day for more relaxed rules. The rule against take-out sales of alcoholic drinks takes effect at 6 a.m. Saturday.
The mayor’s orders came as the Louisiana Department of Health reported more than 2,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases, for a total of 103,734. New Orleans’ total rose 103, to 9,752.
6:10 a.m. Mississippi’s governor is setting new restrictions on bars and social gatherings to curb the spread of the coronavirus among a group that he describes as “young, drunk, careless folks.”
Gov. Tate Reeves said Friday that coronavirus infections have been rising steadily in people in their 20s who are not being responsible under the current regulations.
Bars and restaurants in the state have been able to open if they use only 50% of their capacity. Under the new rules, they also must require that customers be seated to order alcohol and alcohol sales will end at 11 p.m.
The governor says that “our bars must look more like restaurants and less like mobs of COVID-19 spread.”
6:10 a.m. The Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra has cancelled its 2020-21 indoor season due to the coronavirus outbreak and “unforeseen economic pressures.”
Orchestra management and the Orchestra Committee that represents musicians released a joint statement announcing the cancellation.
It says management and musicians are is “committed to collaboratively exploring creative ways to continue to connect with our patrons and return to performing if conditions allow.”
The statement didn’t elaborate on the ”unforeseen economic pressures.”
6:10 a.m. A humanitarian group says 97 medical workers in Yemen have died of the coronavirus, the first reliable estimate to give a glimpse into the pandemic’s impact on the devastated health sector in the war-torn country.
The report by MedGlobal relies on accounts from Yemeni doctors tracking the deaths of colleagues to gauge the toll of the virus. The 97 dead include infectious disease experts, medical directors, midwives and pharmacists.
Even before the pandemic Yemen had just 10 doctors for every 10,000 people. The country’s health system is in shambles after five years of war that has spawned the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Half of its medical facilities are dysfunctional.
Yemen’s internationally recognized government has reported 1,674 confirmed coronavirus infections and 469 deaths.
6:10 a.m. The first hurricane to threaten the United States since the start of the coronavirus pandemic is presenting new challenges for Hawaii, even though officials there are long accustomed to tropical storms.
Meteorologists say Hurricane Douglas should weaken by the time it hits Hawaii with strong winds, heavy rainfall and dangerous surf beginning Sunday.
But Honolulu authorities are having to prepare extra shelter space so people can maintain physical distance from others.
Evacuees at Honolulu shelters also will have their temperatures taken. Those with high temperatures or with a travel or exposure history will either be isolated at that shelter or taken to a different site.
Officials are reminding people to make sure they have masks and hand sanitizers in their emergency supply kits.
6:10 a.m. Health officials in Oregon say nine more people have died from COVID-19 — the highest number of deaths reported in one day in the state since the pandemic began.
The Oregon Health Authority said Friday the newly recorded deaths raise the state’s toll for the pandemic to 282.
The authority also said there were 396 new confirmed or suspected cases of COVID-19, bringing Oregon’s case total to more than 16,100.
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown’s expanded face-covering mandate for anyone 5 years or older went into effect Friday.
6:10 a.m. California prosecutors have charged two brothers in an alleged assault of Target security guards during a brawl in May after they refused to wear face masks because of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Los Angeles city attorney said Friday that Phillip and Paul Hamilton refused to wear masks at the Target store in Van Nuys and started a melee as they were being escorted out. One of the security guards suffered a broken arm.
It was not immediately clear if the brothers had attorneys who could speak on their behalf.
Los Angeles has required face coverings since April 10.
1:10 a.m. Newfoundland and Labrador has its third active case of COVID-19 in a week.
The latest case is a female resident in the 20-39 age range who recently returned from travel to Southeast Asia.
The Department of Health says she was symptomatic en route to the province, but self-isolated upon arrival.
Contact tracing is under way and anyone considered a close contact will be advised to quarantine.
Because she was symptomatic while travelling, the department has issued an alert to passengers who flew on Air Canada Flight AC8006 departing Toronto for St. John’s on Thursday, July 16, to monitor for symptoms of COVID-19 and call 811 for testing.
“While the risk of exposure to COVID-19 is considered low at this time, Public Health is asking people to monitor themselves and call 811 out of an abundance of caution,” read a statement.
Two other cases of COVID-19 in the Central Health region remain active. They are close contacts of each other and contact tracing has so far turned up no other cases.
The total cumulative cases in the province is now 265. Three people have died from the disease.
More than 23,000 people have been tested.
Friday 7:43 p.m. A outbreak of COVID-19 on Haida Gwaii has resulted in 13 confirmed cases, which health officials say are all linked to local residents and off-island travel.
It comes amid friction between Indigenous groups on Haida Gwaii and local fishing lodges over the resumption of operations and the potential for spread of COVID-19 from visitors.
Health officials report 27 news cases and one more death in B.C., for a fatality toll of 191 people.
A statement from the Health Ministry and provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry says an outbreak in Kelowna continues to grow and anyone who may have been exposed needs to monitor themselves closely.
Figures from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control show the Okanagan has had 107 positive tests between July 10 and July 23.
During the same period, 58 people were diagnosed south of the Fraser River, 49 in Vancouver and just four in Richmond.