Country, Other	Total Cases	New Cases	Total Deaths
World	43,770,528	+411,363	1,164,236
USA	8,962,783	+69,841	231,045
India	7,945,888	+36,838	119,535
Brazil	5,411,550	+17,422	157,451
Russia	1,531,224	+17,347	26,269
France	1,165,278	+26,771	35,018
Spain	1,156,498	+17,396	35,031
Argentina	1,102,301	+11,712	29,301
Colombia	1,025,052	+9,167	30,348
UK	894,690	+20,890	44,998
Mexico	891,160	+4,360	88,924
Peru	890,574	+1,859	34,197
South Africa	716,759	+891	19,008
Iran	574,856	+5,960	32,953
Italy	542,789	+17,012	37,479
Chile	503,598	+1,535	14,003
Iraq	455,398	+3,691	10,671
Germany	450,258	+12,621	10,182
Bangladesh	400,251	+1,436	5,818
Indonesia	392,934	+3,222	13,411
Philippines	371,620	+1,597	7,039
Turkey	363,999	+2,198	9,874
Ukraine	348,924	+5,426	6,464
Saudi Arabia	345,232	+357	5,313
Pakistan	328,602	+707	6,739
Belgium	321,031	+15,622	10,810
Israel	310,851	+905	2,453
Netherlands	301,597	+10,343	7,072
Czechia	268,370	+10,273	2,365
Poland	263,929	+10,241	4,483
Canada	220,213	+4,109	9,973
Romania	212,492	+2,844	6,470
Morocco	199,745	+2,264	3,373
Ecuador	162,178	+543	12,573
Nepal	159,830	+1,741	862
Bolivia	140,853	+74	8,645
Qatar	131,432	+262	230
Panama	129,751	+551	2,638
UAE	126,234	+1,111	480
Dominican	124,843	+316	2,225
Kuwait	122,317	+682	749
Portugal	121,133	+2,447	2,343
Oman	113,354	+422	1,190
Kazakhstan	110,542	+140	1,796
Egypt	106,707	+167	6,211
Guatemala	104,894	+107	3,651
Costa Rica	104,460	+511	1,312
Japan	97,074	+540	1,718
Ethiopia	93,707	+364	1,437
Belarus	93,707	+884	961
Honduras	93,214	+490	2,623
Venezuela	90,047	+482	777
China	85,810	+20	4,634
Austria	83,267	+2,456	992
Bahrain	80,533	+278	316
Armenia	78,810	+973	1,196
Lebanon	72,186	+796	579
Moldova	71,811	+308	1,700
Uzbekistan	65,667	+360	552
Nigeria	62,111	+119	1,132
Hungary	61,563	+2,316	1,472
Paraguay	60,109	+515	1,333
Ireland	58,067	+939	1,885
Singapore	57,973	+3	28
Libya	57,223	+1,210	801
Algeria	56,419	+276	1,922
Kyrgyzstan	56,170	+420	1,134
Jordan	55,055	+1,968	624
Tunisia	52,399	+1,418	983
Palestine	50,952	+510	454
Azerbaijan	50,486	+527	679
Kenya	49,997	+276	920
Ghana	47,775	+85	316
Myanmar	46,200	+1,426	1,122
Slovakia	45,155	+1,312	165
Denmark	41,412	+1,056	708
Bulgaria	40,132	+2,243	1,136
Serbia	39,827	+341	793
Croatia	37,208	+828	452
El Salvador	32,925	+173	953
Greece	31,496	+714	581
Georgia	30,303	+1,872	215
Malaysia	27,805	+1,240	236
Australia	27,527	+7	905
North Macedonia	27,199	+245	934
S. Korea	25,955	+119	457
Slovenia	24,080	+1,130	251
Cameroon	21,793	+223	426
Ivory Coast	20,486	+16	122
Albania	19,445	+288	480
Norway	18,342	+433	279
Montenegro	16,909	+112	270
Zambia	16,200	+63	348
Senegal	15,565	+14	322
Finland	14,970	+122	354
Luxembourg	14,399	+195	147
Sudan	13,747	+5	837
Namibia	12,675	+15	133
Uganda	11,557	+114	101
Maldives	11,532	+27	37
DRC	11,174	+31	305
Lithuania	10,949	+766	136
Tajikistan	10,819	+43	81
French Guiana	10,385	+9	69
Angola	9,644	+263	270
Jamaica	8,749	+35	192
Zimbabwe	8,303	+27	242
Botswana	6,283	+360	21
Malawi	5,894	+4	183
Eswatini	5,863	+9	116
Syria	5,461	+53	272
Suriname	5,180	+10	110
Aruba	4,422	+2	36
Thailand	3,743	+7	59
Cyprus	3,636	+91	25

 

 

Retrieved from:  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

 

 

Giving up control of the virus is dangerous, WHO Director General says

From CNN Health’s Naomi Thomas

 

World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus attends a daily press briefing on Covid-19 virus at the WHO headquaters in Geneva, Switzerland, on March 9. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty 

 

World Health Organization Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said giving up on control of the coronavirus is dangerous and called for an end to the politicization of Covid-19 at a news briefing in Geneva on Monday.

“Science continues to tell us the truth about this virus, how to contain it, suppress it and stop it from returning and how to save lives among those it reaches,” Tedros said.  

Many countries and cities have followed the science, he said, and been able to suppress the virus and minimize deaths. "Quick and deliberate leadership helps to suppress it,” he said.  

"What will save lives is science, solutions and solidarity," Tedros said. 

On Sunday, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told CNN the US is "not going to control" the coronavirus pandemic. “We are going to control the fact that we get vaccines, therapeutics and other mitigation areas," Meadows told CNN's Jake Tapper on "State of the Union."  

Tedros said countries can do both and pointed out that many European nations have done so.

“We should not give up and that’s why we are saying -- although we agree with the Chief of Staff that ... protecting the vulnerable is important,” Tedros said.

“But giving up on control is dangerous and control should also be part of the strategy,” Tedros added. Governments and citizens should both do their share, otherwise “this virus is dangerous. If it’s let go freely, it can create havoc,” he said. 

This is especially the case when there isn’t a vaccine or therapeutics at hand, Tedros said.

 

 

Russia imposes a nationwide mask mandate in new set of coronavirus restrictions 

From CNN’s Mary Ilyushina in Moscow

 

Russia is introducing a nationwide mask mandate starting Wednesday as daily increases in Covid-19 cases remain high.

According to a decree published by Russia’s health and consumer rights regulator, Rospotrebnadzor, on Tuesday, citizens across the country must wear masks in public spaces, public transport, parking lots and elevators.

Rospotrebnadzor is also limiting opening hours for “entertainment venues,” including bars and restaurants, which will only be able to open between 6 a.m. and 11 p.m.

On Tuesday, Russia reported 16,550 Covid-19 cases and its highest number of deaths within a 24-hour period, with 320 fatalities.

 

 

British study shows evidence of waning immunity to Covid-19

From CNN's Jen Christensen

 

 

A study of hundreds of thousands of people across England suggests immunity to the coronavirus is gradually wearing off -- at least according to one measure.

Researchers who sent out home finger-prick tests to more than 365,000 randomly selected people in England found a more than 26% decline in Covid-19 antibodies over just three months.

"We observe a significant decline in the proportion of the population with detectable antibodies over three rounds of national surveillance, using a self-administered lateral flow test, 12, 18 and 24 weeks after the first peak of infections in England," the team wrote in a pre-print version of their report, released before peer review.
"This is consistent with evidence that immunity to seasonal coronaviruses declines over 6 to 12 months after infection and emerging data on SARS-CoV-2 that also detected a decrease over time in antibody levels in individuals followed in longitudinal studies."

The study was published Monday by Imperial College London and Ipsos MORI, a market research company. At the beginning of the study, in June, 6% of those who took the tests had IgG antibody responses to the coronavirus, they reported. By September, just 4.4% of them did. For health care workers, the rates stayed about the same.

Antibodies are the proteins your body naturally generates to fight infection. IgG are one type -- the tests were not designed to detect other types of antibodies. Other research teams have found that other types of antibodies may persist longer than IgG does.

The results also confirm earlier studies that showed that people who did not have symptoms of Covid-19 are likely to lose detectable antibodies sooner rather than those who had more severe infections.

 

Retrieved from: https://edition.cnn.com/world/live-news/coronavirus-pandemic-10-27-20-intl/index.html

 

 

 

Italy, resisting another coronavirus lockdown, shows peril of piecemeal restrictions

By Chico Harlan and Stefano Pitrelli

 

 

Police officers patrol the city center of Rome to enforce a mask requirement. (Rocco Rorandelli for The Washington Post)

 

 

ROME — The team of city police officers had been assigned to look for coronavirus rule-breakers, so one evening last week, they parked their cars in the middle of one of Rome's liveliest neighborhoods and walked from one restaurant to the next.

In 90 minutes on patrol, they didn’t find a single violator.

What they found, instead, was nightlife that conformed to the rules but nonetheless posed risks for spreading the novel coronavirus. Italy had imposed a mandate for mask-wearing outdoors — but it didn’t apply to the people eating at packed alfresco tables. The country had banned dining in groups of seven or more, but there were plenty of tables of four, five and six under mood lighting on the cobblestone streets.

“And it’s even busier than this on Friday nights,” one officer, Giovanni Cipriani, said.

At the beginning of the pandemic, Italy was a lockdown pioneer — the first among democracies to control the virus by ordering life to a standstill. But as a second wave of the virus explodes, Italy and other countries across Europe have been reluctant to return to such a harsh, economy-sapping approach, and so they are now demonstrating the perils of an alternate strategy.

Covid-19 surge in Belgium leads to shortage of doctors, teachers and police

The strategy is premised on the idea that more targeted, piecemeal measures can slow the infection rate while preserving jobs and businesses. It is also an acknowledgment that people, as their alarm has worn off and fatigue has set in, will be less tolerant of an order that again sends them back into their homes.

But experts say it’s hard to know which combination of targeted measures will be sufficient. Given the incubation period of the virus and the lag time between the onset of symptoms and when somebody might get tested, it can take 15 to 20 days to get a sense of whether restrictions are helping. By that time, the virus may have raced further out of control, with serious consequences for the health system.

“We are living in a delayed situation; when you do something today, you see the results 15 or 20 days later,” said Roberto Burioni, a professor of microbiology and virology at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan. “You’ll know in 15 days, and if it wasn’t enough, then you’ll take stricter measures. And they will come too late.”

 

Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/covid-italy-second-wave/2020/10/26/467c5f0e-123f-11eb-a258-614acf2b906d_story.html

 

 

As the coronavirus surges, it is reaching into the nation’s last untouched areas

By Karin Brulliard

 

A snowstorm approaches Anaconda, Mont., on Oct. 21. It sits in Deer Lodge County, where several guests who attended a wedding later fell ill with covid-19. (Tony Bynum for The Washington Post)

 

Few places would seem better able to ride out an infectious-disease pandemic than Petroleum County, Mont., whose 500 people spread over 1,656 square miles, much of it public lands and cattle ranches. For most of this year, it did just that, becoming the last county in the state and one of the final few in the nation to have logged no cases of the novel coronavirus.

Then came October. Three residents tested positive, knocking Petroleum off zero-case lists, forcing the county’s lone school to close for a week and proving, as Sheriff Bill Cassell put it, that “eventually we were going to get it,” and that the virus “ain’t gone yet.”

That is a lesson people in many other wide-open places have been learning as the coronavirus surges anew. Months after it raced in successive waves along the nation’s coasts and through the Sun Belt, it is reaching deep into its final frontier — the most sparsely populated states and counties, where distance from others has long been part of the appeal and this year had appeared to be a buffer against a deadly communicable disease.

In Montana, which boasts just seven people per square mile, active cases have more than doubled since the start of the month, and officials are warning of crisis-level hospitalization rates and strains on rural health care. In Wyoming, which ranks 49th in population density, the National Guard has been deployed to help with contact tracing. Those two states, along with the low-density states of Idaho, North Dakota and South Dakota, now have some of the nation’s highest per capita caseloads. Even Alaska, the least-crowded state, is logging unprecedented increases, including in rural villages.

“People here make the joke that we’ve been socially isolating since before the state was founded,” said Christine M. Porter, an associate professor of public health at the University of Wyoming. “In terms of the reason this happened now and it didn’t happen before, it was essentially luck-slash-geography. It’s a disease that spreads exponentially once it’s taken root, unless you take severe measures to stop it.”

The bulk of these states’ cases are clustered in their relatively small cities, but infections are fanning out. In Montana, about 55 percent of cases were in population centers by mid-month, down from nearly 80 percent over the summer. And although the caseloads may look low, they loom large for local public health officials and facilities.

Sue Woods directs the Central Montana Health District, a Massachusetts-sized area that includes Petroleum and five other rural counties. The district has about 120 active cases, and Woods is working 10- to 12-hour days, mostly on contact tracing.

“The numbers of cases that we see are so small compared to large population centers, but when you take our population into account, we’re right in the same percentages,” Woods said. “Two of us are doing the bulk of the patient contacts. It is overwhelming.”

Some officials point to the positive side of being hit by the coronavirus later in the pandemic. It gave jurisdictions and health-care facilities the opportunity, they say, to collect personal protective equipment, ramp up testing and learn more about the virus and how to treat covid-19, the disease it causes.

“Up until a few weeks ago, we had been very successful in limiting transmission,” said Alexia Harrist, Wyoming’s state health officer and state epidemiologist. “It did buy us very important time to be better prepared for this surge.”

But with that delay came another risk, others say. As the virus rolls through regions that for months felt relatively sheltered from the disease but not the broader effects of shutdowns and shortages, there is concern that weariness will stymie efforts to stunt the spread. Wyoming, like the Dakotas and Idaho, has no statewide mask mandate, and leaders in the red states have expressed no interest in implementing them.

At a recent news conference, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (R) pointed to a slide showing alarming test positivity rates for states in the upper Midwest and eastern Rockies. North Dakota’s hovers around 10 percent.

“This chart would have been quite boring” until the surge began in September, Burgum said. “Perhaps that gave us a sense of complacency, or maybe a sense of invulnerability, or even a sense of pride that we were somehow going to avoid this thing.”

But now, Burgum warned, the state was on track to add 504 deaths by Christmas.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2020/10/26/covid-last-counties-without-cases/

 

 

 

Covid: Melbourne's hard-won success after a marathon lockdown

 

By Phil Mercer BBC News

 

In early July, the nights were long and dark, and Australia's cultural capital was confronting the terrifying reality of another deadly wave of infections.

More than 110 days later, experts say it is emerging as a world leader in disease suppression alongside places including Singapore, Vietnam, South Korea, New Zealand and Hong Kong.

Raina McIntyre, a biosecurity professor at the University of New South Wales' Kirby Institute, told the BBC that Australia's response had been "light years ahead" of the US and the UK.

"It is just thoroughly shocking. When we think of pandemics we don't think that well-resourced, high-income countries are going to fall apart at the seams, but that is exactly what we have seen," she said.

At the end of Tuesday, Melbourne's five million residents will see an end to strict stay-home orders that put an entire city into a type of protective custody.

When the restrictions are lifted, Melburnians will have endured one of the world's longest and toughest lockdowns.

It's been controversial, calamitous for jobs and crushingly hard for many, but health specialists believe it has worked.

There is cautious optimism that with very low case numbers, the worst is over.

 

 

Summary

 

Here are the key developments form the last few hours:

·  Stock markets have opened sharply down in Asia Pacific on Tuesday, taking their cue from the US and Europe where shares fell on Monday amid concerns that the second wave of coronavirus is not being contained. In Sydney the ASX200 has fallen 1.2% and the Dow Jones New Zealand is down 1.3%. Markets in Asia are set to follow suit.

· Trump to announce plan to cover vaccine costs – report. The US Trump administration will this week announce a plan to cover out-of-pocket costs of Covid-19 vaccines for millions of Americans who receive Medicare or Medicaid, Politico reported late on Monday, citing four people with knowledge of the plan.

· Mainland China reported 16 new confirmed Covid-19 cases on 26 October, down from 20 a day earlier, the country’s health authorities said on Tuesday. The number of new asymptomatic cases also fell to 50, from 161 reported a day earlier amid a fresh wave of symptomless infections being reported in the northwestern Xinjiang region.

· Victoria, Australia recorded zero new cases for second time. The epicentre of Australia’s Covid-19 infections said on Tuesday it had gone 48 hours without detecting any new cases for the first time in more than seven months. The state will allow restaurants and cafes in Melbourne to reopen from Wednesday after more than three months under a stringent lockdown.

· With the US Election Day just over a week away, average deaths per day across the country are up 10% over the past two weeks, from 721 to nearly 794 as of Sunday, according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Newly confirmed infections per day are rising in 47 states, and deaths are up in 34.

· Protesters turned out by the hundreds in Turin, Milan and other Italian cities and towns Monday to vent their anger, sometimes violently, at the latest pandemic restrictions that force restaurants and cafes to close early and shutter cinemas, gyms and other leisure venues.

· ‘We cannot give up’ warned the WHO chief. The World Health Organization chief warned Monday that abandoning efforts to control the coronavirus pandemic, as suggested by a top US official, was “dangerous”, urging countries not to “give up”. He acknowledged that after months of battling the new coronavirus, which has claimed more than 1.1 million lives globally, a certain level of “pandemic fatigue” had set in.

· Pope Francis will have to forego meeting Catholics at the annual Advent and Christmas masses in the Vatican owing to the resurgent coronavirus pandemic, the specialist Catholic News Agency reported on Monday. The 83-year-old pontiff was deprived of a congregation at Easter when he had to celebrate mass at Saint Peter’s with very few people present.

· France alone may be experiencing 100,000 new coronavirus cases per day – double the latest official figures – Prof Jean-François Delfraissy, who heads the scientific council that advises the government on the pandemic, said. Tougher coronavirus containment measures could be announced in the country later this week.

· Czech government tightens coronavirus measures with curfew and retail curbs. The Czech government has ordered a 9pm curfew and will limit retail sales on Sundays, as part of tighter measures adopted to stem a surge in Covid-19 infections.

· Germany is on the verge of losing control of its fight against the coronavirus, Angela Merkel has reportedly warned colleagues. In an indication of the growing concern, Merkel brought forward a meeting on additional coronavirus restrictions with the leaders of Germany’s 16 states from Friday to Wednesday.

· Belgium’s intensive care units will be overrun in a fortnight if the rate of infection continues, a spokesman for country’s Covid-19 crisis centre has said. Dr Yves Van Laethem said the 2,000 intensive care beds would be full with patients without a change of course. On Monday morning, new regulations came into force in Brussels.

· Italians have been advised against trips to other European countries because of surging coronavirus cases, with the foreign ministry warning they could get trapped overseas if travel bans became necessary.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/oct/27/coronavirus-live-news-we-cannot-give-up-warns-who-chief-protests-flare-in-italy?page=with:block-5f97b8f88f080b5e8c5b0c17#block-5f97b8f88f080b5e8c5b0c17