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Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
From: The New York Times
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert and a central figure in the government’s response to the coronavirus, intends to warn the Senate on Tuesday that Americans would experience “needless suffering and death” if the country opens up too quickly.
Dr. Fauci, who has emerged as perhaps the nation’s most respected voice during the coronavirus crisis, is one of four top government doctors scheduled to testify remotely at a high-profile hearing on Tuesday before the Senate Health Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
It will be his first appearance before Congress since President Trump declared a national emergency in March, and a chance for him to address lawmakers and the public without President Trump by his side. He has been largely out of public view since last week, when Mr. Trump abandoned his daily briefings with his coronavirus task force.
In an email to the New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg late Monday night, Dr. Fauci laid out what he intended to tell senators.
“The major message that I wish to convey to the Senate HLP committee tomorrow is the danger of trying to open the country prematurely,” he wrote. “If we skip over the checkpoints in the guidelines to: ‘Open America Again,’ then we risk the danger of multiple outbreaks throughout the country. This will not only result in needless suffering and death, but would actually set us back on our quest to return to normal.”
Dr. Fauci was referring to a three-phase White House plan, Opening Up America Again, that lays out guidelines for state officials considering reopening their economies. Among its recommendations: States should have a “downward trajectory of positive tests” or a “downward trajectory of documented cases” of coronavirus over two weeks, while conducting robust contact tracing and “sentinel surveillance” testing of asymptomatic people in vulnerable populations, such as nursing homes.
From: The New York Times
New guidance released to Trump administration employees will require them to wear masks when inside the West Wing, according to an internal memo released on Monday and obtained by The New York Times.
“As an additional layer of protection, we are requiring everyone who enters the West Wing to wear a mask or face covering,” read the memo, which was distributed to staff members through the White House management office.
The new guidance is an abrupt establishment of a policy after two aides working near the president — a military valet and Katie Miller, the vice president’s spokeswoman — tested positive for the coronavirus last week.
The new rules are not expected to apply to President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, who for weeks have downplayed the need to wear masks, an attitude that had trickled down to staff members. The policy was first reported by The Washington Post.
But hours after the White House instituted the new rule, Mr. Trump denied that any system designed to keep aides safe had broken down. He said he had required that everyone wear masks, insisting that the disease was “very well-contained” at the White House.
“It can happen,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s the hidden enemy. Remember that.”
From CNN’s Sophie Jeong
At least 102 coronavirus cases have been linked to nightclub cluster in South Korea, the head of the country's National Institute of Health, Kwon Jun-wook, said.
The cluster emerged in Seoul's Itaewon district.
Two people among the cases first started showing symptoms on May 2, Kwon said, adding that the outbreak may have “various epicenters or sources."
South Korea's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic has been widely praised but the official said recent lapses had caused the latest spike in cases.
“Lowering our guard can call in another infection. That’s the case with the infection in Itaewon clubs," he said.
"The distancing regulation wasn’t carried out properly, the list was not accurate, and therefore, the delay in voluntary report and tracing is very concerning.”
Local media has linked the cases to what it has described as the capital's "gay clubs," raising fears that the LGBT community will be further stigmatized. Government officials have condemned the language used in some press reports.
“Prejudice or discrimination does not help in our epidemic prevention activity. Such prejudice and discrimination in our whole society are actually harmful to epidemic prevention," Kwon said, while speaking to media on Tuesday.
From CNN's Max Ramsay in London
Spain will implement a 14-day mandatory quarantine for travelers arriving from overseas starting May 15, the country's health minister announced today.
The decree covers “people coming from other countries, on their arrival in Spain.” Travelers will be required to provide a completed passenger location card to the authorities so they can be contacted during quarantine, and will have to quarantine at home or in their place of accommodation.
They will be allowed out for essential needs like food, pharmaceutical products, visiting healthcare centers and for emergency situations, but are required to wear a mask if they go outside.
Some people, like freight carriers and healthcare workers, will be exempt from the quarantine rules as long as they haven’t been in contact with any known patients.
Emergency restrictions: Spain remains under a state of emergency, which began on March 14 with strict stay-at-home confinement orders. It is in place until at least May 23, but officials have begun to ease some restrictions in low-risk territories.
From CNN's Sandee LaMotte
In this Tuesday, April 14 photo, a woman holds her hand out to have blood collected for a coronavirus antibody test in Hempstead, New York. Seth Wenig/AP
You're about to get a blood test to see if you have been exposed to Covid-19.
You're hoping it will tell you that you have -- that your blood is full of beautiful antibodies, the body's soldiers called to fight when a known enemy invades our systems again, and that this may mean immunity to the virus in the future.
Not so fast.
In today's reality, testing positive for antibodies to Covid-19 means nothing of the sort. In fact, it may not mean much at all -- at least right now. There are still too many unknowns, both about the accuracy of the antibody tests that are available and about the nature of the virus itself.
What is an antibody test? An antibody test can only be administered by gathering blood, either through a finger prick or from a vein. It's designed to detect antibodies, the Y-shaped proteins called immunoglobulins that circulate in our blood to help fight off infections in our bodies.
Even if you've never had any symptoms of Covid-19, the presence of antibodies in your blood would show your body has encountered the virus.
How accurate is the test? There are some complicating factors:
From CNN's Manveena Suri in New Delhi
Police personnel stand guard outside the entrance of a railway station in New Delhi on May 12. Sajjad Hussain/AFP/Getty Images
Rail services in India partially resumed on Tuesday despite an ongoing nationwide lockdown.
Thirty special trains were operating today in accordance with government guidance, according to the Ministry of Railways.
All passengers will be screened, and only asymptomatic passengers will be allowed on the trains, according to the Home Ministry. Passengers must also wear face coverings during the journey, and should maintain social distancing.
The partial rail reopening includes cities like New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bengaluru.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said today that the train services were “needed to rev up the economic activity,” but only a limited number of routes would be operational.
Indian railways stopped passenger services for the first time in 167 years on March 24 after a nationwide lockdown was announced. The lockdown will continue through at least May 17.
From CNN’s Nathan Hodge and Mary Ilyushina in Moscow
Five coronavirus patients were killed in a fire at a hospital in Russia today, Russian state news agencies reported.
The victims were connected to a ventilator on the sixth floor of an intensive care unit at the St. George Hospital in St. Petersburg, state news agency TASS reported. TASS, citing medical personnel, said the patients were seriously ill with coronavirus.
Some 150 people were forced to evacuate from the hospital, according to TASS.
Initial findings suggest the fire may have been caused by a short circuit in the ventilator or its malfunction, state news agencies said.
Russia's top law-enforcement body, the Investigative Committee, said a criminal investigation had been opened into the matter.
This is the second deadly hospital fire in recent days: On Saturday, a fire broke out in a Moscow hospital treating coronavirus patients, killing one patient and forcing 200 people to be evacuated, Russian state news agencies reported.
TASS, citing preliminary data, said the fire occurred in an intensive care unit due to the malfunction of medical equipment.
From CNN's Fred Pleitgen in Berlin
Germany today reported 933 new coronavirus cases in just 24 hours, according to the Robert Koch Institute, the national agency for disease control and prevention.
That's a dramatic jump from the 357 cases reported just the day before. It brings the national total to 170,508 cases, the institute said.
The coronavirus reproduction rate in Germany has been above 1 for the past three consecutive days, the institute said.
A rate of 1 means that on average, each infected person is infecting one other person.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has previously warned that if the number -- also known as the R0 value -- rises above 1, the country's health system would eventually be overwhelmed.
The institute said it's too early to tell whether the virus is on the rise again due to statistical uncertainties.
"The rise of the (reproduction rate) makes it necessary to carefully observe the developments in the coming days," the institute wrote in its daily data brief.
New clusters: Merkel warned on Monday that while Germany is easing lockdown restrictions, it remains "important for people to keep social distancing," urging citizens to ''stick to the basic commandments.''
Germany has registered several larger coronavirus outbreaks over the past few days. Three meat processing plants across the country have recorded between 100 to 350 cases each in separate outbreaks.
From CNN's Laura He and Vanesse Chen in Hong Kong and Steven Jiang in Beijing
A medical worker prepares to administer a coronavirus test in Wuhan in China's central Hubei province on April 16. Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
Wuhan, the central Chinese city at ground zero of the coronavirus pandemic, will conduct citywide testing for all citizens within 10 days amid fears of a second wave of infections.
Authorities announced the testing plan in an "emergency notice" yesterday, according to state-run media outlet The Paper.
"After research, it was decided to carry out a '10-day battle' for the screening of nucleic acids of all new coronavirus in Wuhan," said a report in The Paper today. "Each district will make arrangements for the nucleic acid screening plan for all staff in its jurisdiction within a 10-day period."
This measure comes in response to six new infections that emerged in Wuhan this past week after over a month of no new cases, according to The Paper.
The emergency notice was issued "to strengthen social prevention and control, prevent the rebound of the epidemic, and strengthen the normalization of epidemic prevention and control," the outlet reported.
From CNN's Michelle Toh in Hong Kong
Marriott's profits were slammed in the first quarter of this year, plunging about 92%.
The world's biggest hotel chain on Monday reported net income of just $31 million from January to March compared to $375 million in the same period last year.
Revenue per available room, an important industry metric that assesses a hotel's ability to fill its rooms, fell 22.5% throughout the quarter and as much as 90% in April "as the pandemic moved around the world," the company said.
About a quarter of Marriott's hotels worldwide are currently closed, mostly in Europe and the United States.
But there was a "glimmer of good news," said Marriott International CEO Arne Sorenson.
He told investors in a call that demand appears to be picking up, especially in Greater China, where bookings are coming in mostly from domestic travelers.
Occupancy levels there have reached "just over 30%, up from the lows of under 10% in mid-February," Sorenson said.
From CNN's Jacqueline Howard
There was a surge of coronavirus cases over the weekend in some countries where stay-at-home measures and other restrictions were lifted, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a media briefing in Geneva on Monday.
"Over the weekend we saw signs of the challenges that may lie ahead. In the Republic of Korea, bars and clubs were shut as a confirmed case led to many contacts being traced," Tedros said.
"In Wuhan, China, the first cluster of cases since their lockdown was lifted was identified," Tedros said. "Germany has also reported an increase in cases since an easing of restrictions. Fortunately, all three countries have systems in place to detect and respond to a resurgence in cases."
Tedros said the WHO has released guidance and six criteria for countries to consider before lifting lockdown measures.
"WHO is working closely with governments to ensure that key public health measures remain in place to deal with the challenge of lifting lockdowns," he said. "Until there is a vaccine, the comprehensive package of measures is our most effective set of tools to tackle."
From CNN's Gul Tuysuz
Barbers cut hair while wearing protective face masks in a barber shop in Istanbul on May 11. Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty Images
Turkey will implement a four-day curfew from May 16-19, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on Monday.
The country has not implemented countrywide lockdowns, instead opting for curfews that prohibit people from leaving their homes on weekends and holidays.
Turkey has also imposed an age-specific curfew for people over the age of 65 and under 20. Those restrictions will be eased slowly with certain age groups being allowed out on specific days, according to Erdogan.
Travel restrictions have been lifted in nine provinces, while 15 other provinces -- including Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir -- remain closed to nonessential entry and exits, Erdogan said.
Turkey will manage the easing of restrictions “dynamically” and will relax or tighten depending on developments, Erdogan said. Hair stylists, barbers and shopping malls reopened today as a part of what Turkish authorities are calling the “controlled socialization” stage of the Covid-19 pandemic plan.
Source；https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-05-12-20-intl/index.html
French economic activity plunged 27% in April compared with its expected trajectory before the coronavirus pandemic but this was still a slight improvement on March, the Bank of France said.
The economy had been predicted to grow 0.1% in the first quarter of the year, the central bank said, with the 27% drop counted from where it would have reached in April.
While the lost output was massive, the outcome actually represented an improvement on the last two weeks in March after the lockdown began, when the downturn was running at an estimated 32%, it said.
“With a full month of lockdown in April, economic activity hit a particularly low level,” it said.
Industrial capacity use, for example, fell from 77% in February to 56% in March and then 46% in April, “the lowest level ever recorded,” the Bank of France said in a regular report.
For April alone, industrial capacity in use varied from 77% in the pharmaceutical sector to just 8% in the auto industry.
The central bank noted that companies had adapted to the new conditions, putting in place health measures for workers and this meant fewer plant closures and the resumption of output.
Services such as restaurants and hotels were badly hit, with closures running at 24 days for the month of April, while other sectors such as programming and consultancy suffered much less.
“For the month of May and after the lockdown, companies expect a pickup in activity, with the exception of hotels and restaurants, but this will be a long way from making up for the losses of the two previous months,” the central bank said.
Separately, Bank of France governor Francois Villeroy de Galhau said the two-month coronavirus lockdown from mid-March had already knocked nearly six percentage points off GDP and worse could be to come.
“The loss for the whole year will be larger than that because as things get going again, activity will remain partial,” he told France Inter.
Here are the key developments from the last few hours:
Global cases approach 4.2 million. The number of people known to have died since the pandemic began has reached at least 286,330, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. They say at least 4,177,584 people are known to have been infected. The figures are likely to significantly underestimate the true scale of the pandemic.
South Korea’s Seoul nightclub cluster grows to 64. In the country so often cited as a beacon of success in tackling the coronavirus, 64 cases have now been connected to a cluster in Seoul’s nightclub district that was visited on 1 May by a man in his late 20s before he tested positive for the virus, Yonhap reported. Since mid April, the country had been adding fewer than 15 cases per day, including some days when there were no domestic infections.
China reports no new domestic cases after spike on weekend. China reported zero new domestic coronavirus infections on Tuesday, after two consecutive days of double-digit increases fuelled fears of a second wave of infections. A new cluster reappeared over the weekend in the city of Wuhan, where the pandemic first emerged, while the northeastern city of Shulan was placed under lockdown Sunday after another outbreak emerged. On Monday, China’s National Health Commission reported 17 new cases, five of them in Wuhan. Seven of the new cases were imported.
New York City’s death toll may be 5,000 higher than official toll. Between 11 March and 2 May, about 24,000 more people died in the city than researchers would ordinarily expect during that time period, a report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said. That’s about 5,300 more deaths than were blamed on the coronavirus in official tallies during those weeks.
Fauci to tell US senate reopening early risks ‘needless suffering and death. The New York Times reported that Dr Anthony Fauci, the leading US expert on infectious diseases and a key member of the White House coronavirus taskforce, will on Tuesday tell the US senate that reopening the economy early risks “needless suffering and death”.
Trump accused of racism over press conference comments. The president was criticised for telling an Asian-American journalist to direct her questions on the US’s epidemic to China, instead of to him. Trump insisted he would have answered the question the same way regardless of who had asked it. Trump refused to take further questions and abruptly ended the press conference. CNN’s influential chief media correspondent, Brian Stelter, said Trump’s actions had “racist overtones”. Trump also declared victory over the “invisible enemy” as US deaths pass 80,000. The White House has directed staff working in the West Wing to wear masks.
WHO warns ‘extreme vigilance’ needed as lockdowns eased. The World Health Organization says “extreme vigilance” is needed as countries begin to exit lockdowns imposed to curb the virus’ spread. The warning comes after Germany reported an acceleration in new infections after easing its lockdown, and South Korea, another country that succeeded in limiting infections, saw a new outbreak in nightclubs.
Easing restrictions to boost Australian economy by US$6bn a month. Once Australia removes most social distancing restrictions by July, its economy will be boosted by AU$9.4bn (US$6.15bn) each month, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg will say on Tuesday in a speech updating lawmakers on his budget planning.
All mosques in Iran will reopen temporarily on Tuesday. The temporary reopening marks a further step in the government’s plans to ease restrictions that aimed to contain the spread of the new coronavirus, the official IRIB news agency reported. Mosques will only be open for three days commemorating specific nights for the holy month of Ramadan and it was unclear whether they would stay open, according to the Fars news agency.
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