France reports 1,695 new instances, Spain 1,772; The Greek fitness government recorded the number of new instances since 22 April. This blog is now closed.
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Hi, Helen Sullivan joining you now.
I’ll bring you the latest news for the next few hours. Contact us on Twitter @helenrsullivan or email: [email protected].
Here are the latest coronavirus-related stories from the past few hours:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is cutting down another 353 workers as the coronavirus pandemic wreaths havoc in museums around the world due to movement restrictions and considerations of public gatherings.
The relief will come as a combination of homework cuts, voluntary retirements and licenses, a museum spokeswoman said.
The museum is projecting a $150m loss in revenue due to the pandemic, the spokeswoman said. Its annual budget is $320m.
The Met fired more than 80 people in April after the final in March when the pandemic spread to New York City. The most recent discounts will raise the number of workers to about 1,600, compared to 2,000 in March.
The New York Times cited a memorandum sent to the museum Wednesday, stating that 79 members had been dismissed, 181 on leave, and 93 had volunteered to retire.
General Manager Dan Weiss said:
We recognize that the Museum we will return to, whatever the date, will be very different from what we left just six months ago.
We have worked to ensure that these painful staff reductions are distributed across the entire Museum so that no one area or group is taking on an outsized burden.
Florida has surpassed 500,000 coronavirus cases as testing ramps up following a temporary shutdown of some sites because of Tropical Storm Isaias.
On Wednesday morning, a long line of cars waited outside Miami Gardens’ Hard Rock Stadium for a coronavirus control site to reopen after it was closed due to the storm.
Florida reported 225 new deaths Wednesday, a who averaged more than seven days of daily deaths reported to a peak of 185, Texas at 197.
The Florida rate is a quarter of the one noted in New York at its peak in mid-April.
The number of people treated in hospitals statewide for the coronavirus continued a two-week decline, with 7,622 patients late Wednesday morning, a decrease of 175 from the previous day and down from highs of 9,500 two weeks ago.
The Florida Department of Health reported 5409 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday.
Overall, Florida reported 502,739 instances at the time in California, with more than 527,000 instances, and in Texas with more than 466,000, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The Hard Rock site soon closed Wednesday due to lightning in the area. Tests resumed once the weather cleared.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis this week announced that quicker testing, with results in about 15 minutes, would be offered at the stadium and at Marlins Park.
“Obviously if you are somebody that is symptomatic and you don’t get your result back for seven days that is not helpful. For asymptomatic test takers, if it takes seven days then the test is basically useless at that time,” DeSantis said.
Brazil has reported 57,152 new cases of Covid-19 and 1,437 deaths from the virus in the past 24 hours.
The country has registered 2,859,073 cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 97,256, according to ministry data, in the world’s worst coronavirus outbreak after the United States.
Turkey has expressed concern over the rising number of coronavirus cases as the daily infection toll exceeded 1,000 for the second day in a row on Wednesday.
Ankara has eased to the maximum restrictions that have been applied since the first case in March, peaking at more than 5,000 infections per day in April.
But after nearly a month of instances of around 900, Turkish Health Minister Fahrettin Koca said 1,178 infections had been reported in the last 24 hours.
Koca suggested Wednesday citizens take precautions for further increases.
“We are involved in the accumulation in the number of cases, in the past limited to some provinces, that are spreading across the country in the coming days,” said Monday, which recorded 995 cases shown.
On the day, Turkey recorded 1,083 infections.
The total number of deaths is now 5,784 and infections are 236,112.
Koca said this weekend that “the first wave had reached the beaches” when Turks and foreign tourists visited the country’s famous turquoise coast, especially the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha last week.
The epidemic appears to have worsened in the capital, Ankara, Turkey’s most populous moment after Istanbul.
The Ankara Medical Chamber said Tuesday that “pandemic hospitals and their sprawling care facilities in Ankara are 100 percent full” and cannot accommodate new patients with Covid-19.
But Ankara’s provincial fitness directorate contradicted the statement, saying extensive care facilities were 63% complete in the city and insisted that the pandemic remained in control.
One of the most affected regions is the southeast, especially the provinces of Diyarbakir, Mardin and Sanliurfa, according to the Turkish Medical Association.
Canadian finance minister Bill Morneau said he is hosting a call with his counterparts from the US, Britain, Australia and New Zealand to discuss the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Morneau tweeted that the participants were also looking at “how we can work together to ensure a successful recovery”.
Italy’s national civil aviation authority, ENAC, has threatened to suspend Ryanair’s permit to fly the country for alleged non-compliance with protection regulations opposed to coronaviruses, but the cheap airline has denied having violated them.
The authority accused the Irish airline of “repeated infringements of the existing Covid-19 fitness standards imposed by the Italian government on the suitability of passengers”.
“Not only is the legal responsibility to withdraw passengers fulfilled, but situations to make an exception to this rule are also ignored,” he said in a statement.
If Ryanair continued to break the rules, ENAC would “suspend all air transport activities at domestic airports, forcing the airline to divert all passengers who already have the tickets,” he said.
“The claims made in ENAC’s press release today are factually incorrect,” Ryanair responded.
“Ryanair complies fully with the measures set out by the Italian government and our customers can rest assured that we are doing everything to reduce interaction on both our aircraft and at airports to protect the health of our passengers.”
Italy was the first European Union country to be seriously affected by the pandemic, which has officially killed over 35,000, but its contagion rate is currently far below levels seen in other parts of the bloc.
Dr Anthony Fauci, the top US government official on infectious diseases, expects drug manufacturers will have tens of millions of coronavirus vaccine doses at the start of 2021.
Speaking in an interview with Reuters, he said production would likely increase to one billion doses until the end of 2021.
Fauci said he has not seen any pressure from the White House to announce a vaccine close to the 3 November election, in the hopes of boosting President Donald Trump’s re-election chances.
He added that regulators have promised that they will “allow political considerations to interfere” with the approval of a Covid-19 vaccine and that “safety and efficacy” will be the main considerations.
Colombia’s former president, Alvaro Uribe, tested positive for Covid-19 just a day after he was placed under space arrest as a component of a witness manipulation investigation.
Uribe, a very debatable figure, will be a component of the at-risk population. Due to his detention, he will already be far from his property near the Caribbean coast of the country.
Rumors began circulating in the early hours of Wednesday that the besiegged statesman would possibly be in poor physical condition after the hounds camped outdoors and his box saw an ambulance arrive.
He later announced that he had tested positive, although he was reportedly not displaying any symptoms other than a soar throught.
The announcement came less than 24 hours after Colombia was rocked by the Supreme Court decision to place Uribe under house arrest.
He served as Colombia’s president from 2002 to 2010, during which he lead a brutal campaign against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Farc), a Marxist rebel group that took up arms against the Colombian government in 1964.
Yet despite leaving office a decade ago, he remains as divisive and influential as he did when he lead the country. His supporters say he neutered a violent leftist group that had terrorized the country since the 1960s. His critics say he did so at an inexcusable cost to human rights.
During his tenure, right-wing paramilitary groups flourished, often terrorizing civilians suspected of collaborating with rebels.
Since leaving office, he has twice proved himself a kingmaker. In 2016, he lead the campaign to vote down a referendum on a peace deal with the Farc. That deal was later ratified in congress. In 2018, his protege, current president Iván Duque, won office with his crucial backing.
Recently, Colombia has been affected by the coronavirus pandemic, with more than 335,000 cases shown Tuesday night and 11315 deaths. New newspapers are expanding to more than 10,000.
The country has been quarantined since March.
British American Tobacco South Africa (BATSA) gave the impression in court during the first day of hearings in a case opposed to a government ban on tobacco sales to restrict the spread of coronavirus.
South Africans have been unable to legally purchase cigarettes since the country went into a strict nationwide lockdown on 27 March.
While confinement measures are being gradually lifted, tobacco products have remained banned for the time being due to “health risks” associated to smoking.
BATSA, which covers 78% of the legal cigarette market in South Africa, decided to sue the state in May after talks with the government fell through.
Speaking before the Western Cape High Court on Wednesday, BATSA advocate Alfred Cockrell argued the ban was “unconstitutional” and “unscientific”.
Cockrell said the measure had “devastated” tobacco in an economy that was already suffering and that charges the state about 38 million rand ($2.2 million) per day in excise duty.
Government rep Andrew Breitenbach argued that the case involved “lives and livelihoods,” but said the prohibition minister had “taken steps” to allow the industry between tobacco manufacturers and cigarette manufacturers.
“The ban deals with prohibiting sales,” Breitenbach added. “So infringements on rights are just incidental.”
BATSA estimates that South Africa has around one million smokers.
Its legal action has been backed by Japan Tobacco International and by groups and organisations representing consumers, retailers and tobacco farmers, who agree that the ban is fuelling an illicit cigarette market.
The Fair Trade Independent Tobacco Association (FITA) legally challenged the “irrational” ban last month, claiming it has diverted revenue away from a multi-million dollar business and into the black market.
The court has since ruled in favour of the government but granted FITA leave to appeal.
BATSA’s case is scheduled to resume on Thursday.
South Africa was already in recession before the coronavirus arrived in March and the economy is now expected to contract more than six% this year as a result of the pandemic.
The country is the hardest-hit in Africa with at least 521,318 infections diagnosed so far, accounting for more than half the continent’s cases.
Its mortality rate has remained low however, with just over 8,800 deaths reported to date.
Customers flock to a coffee shop in downtown Wellington after a QR code is displayed on the door that allows others to sign up for the New Zealand government’s Covid-19 tracking app.
None pause to pull out their phones. Down the footpath outside, crosses of tape – denoting physical distancing measures for shoppers that ended months ago – feel like a reminder of a bad dream.
New Zealand has attained the status of one of the world’s safest countries when it comes to the coronavirus; there is no known community transmission in the country and life has largely returned to normal.
But with one eye on nations where the virus was once quashed before spiralling out of control again, officials and the government have changed their language in recent days in order to fight a new battle – this time against complacency.
“We have to be absolutely on our toes,” Ashley Bloomfield, New Zealand’s top health official, said in a Radio New Zealand interview on Wednesday. “That’s not just the health system … it’s everybody.”
It has been 96 days since the last domestic case of Covid-19 was transmitted from an unknown source in New Zealand; all 24 diagnosed instances of the virus are among travellers returning to the country who are in quarantine at government-managed isolation hotels. But it was inevitable, Bloomfield said on Wednesday, that New Zealand would have an outbreak beyond the isolation facilities.
“It’s a matter of when, not if,” he said. “We’re working on the basis that it could be any time.”
A group of Senate Republicans have backed extending a $25bn payroll assistance programme for US airlines after warnings carriers may be forced to cut tens of thousands of jobs without government action, according to a letter seen by Reuters.
Airline stocks moved sharply higher on the news. Shares of American Airlines were up 8.9% in afternoon trading while shares of United Airlines rose 6.3%.
The letter was the first public disclosure of significant support in the Republican-led Senate for additional emergency funding for US airlines.
The senators who signed the letter said they backed a new six-month extension of the $25bn payroll support program “to avoid furloughs and further support those workers”.
Airline officials and unions have been urging US lawmakers to extend new assistance in the face of the coronavirus epidemic’s devastating impact on airline travel. The letter said:
With air travel anticipated to remain low in the near future, Congress should also consider provisions to support and provide flexibility for businesses across the aviation industry similarly impacted, such as airport concessionaires and aviation manufacturing.
On 27 July, a majority of the Democratic-controlled US House of Representatives signed a letter also calling for a six-month extension for the payroll aid programme that they argue is crucial to keeping hundreds of thousands of aviation workers employed through 31 March.
That letter was signed by 195 Democrats and 28 Republicans.
Congress awarded $25bn in payroll assistance to US passenger airlines in March, along with $4bn for cargo carriers and $3bn for airport contractors. Most of the bailout funds do not have to be paid back.
Airlines and unions have warned that mass layoffs could take place after the existing $25bn in aid expires on 30 September, just over a month before the 3 November US elections.
Between American Airlines and United Airlines, more than 60,000 frontline workers have received warnings that their jobs are on the line.