Coronavirus live news: Beijing says outbreak ‘extremely severe’ as dozens more cases emerge

The World Health Organization’s regional director for the Americas, Carissa Etienne, has said the region is fast approaching four million cases of coronavirus and the pandemic continues to accelerate.

Etienne said Brazil accounts for 23% of the more than 3.8 million cases in the Americas and 23% of the almost 204,000 deaths in the region, and “we are not seeing transmission slowing down.”

Swedish truckmaker Volvo, one of the world’s largest, has said it will slash 4,100 white-collar jobs as the Covid-19 pandemic continues to ravage economies around the world.

The company said the pandemic and measures to curb the spread of the virus had “led to a market situation impacting our industry severely”.

“The effects are expected to be lower demand going forward and we need to continue to adjust our organisation accordingly,” Martin Lundstedt, the chief executive of the Volvo Group, said in a statement. The company said in April it had reduced the number of employees by almost 5,000 in the first quarter, to just under 100,000.

Of the 4,100 job cuts announced on Tuesday, about 15% will be made up of consultants and will be carried out in the second half of 2020. Around 1,250 of the positions will be in Sweden.

Volvo, which also owns brands such as Renault Trucks and UD Trucks, said the need for “staff reductions would have been higher without various governmental support packages enabling short-term layoffs and other similar measures”.

In April, the group reported it had been severely impacted by the pandemic in the first quarter of the year.

Chinese operations started being affected in February and worldwide the group was hit in mid-March when the “global supply chain was disrupted and production halted in most parts of our operations”.

In 2019, Volvo Group delivered 232,769 trucks.

People with underlying health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes are six times more likely to be hospitalised with Covid-19 and have a risk of coronavirus-related death 12 times higher than otherwise healthy individuals, a US study found.

Men were more likely than women to have bad outcomes, and the prevalence of hospitalisations and deaths were highest among patients aged 70 years and older, according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report that confirmed similar reports from outbreak hotspots in recent months.

“These findings are consistent with previous reports that found that severe outcomes increased with age and underlying condition, and males were hospitalised at a higher rate than were females,” the CDC wrote in its report issued on Monday.

By analysing data from over 1.3 million Covid-19 patients between 22 January and 30 May, the CDC found that the most prevalent underlying health conditions in more severe cases were cardiovascular disease, diabetes and chronic lung disease.

About 45% of patients who had underlying health conditions were hospitalised, compared with 7.6% of those without such chronic health issues.

Death due to Covid-19 was reported in 19.5% of patients with health complications, compared with 1.6% of people who did not suffer from chronic illnesses.

This highlights the continued need for mitigation strategies, especially for people at risk, the agency said.

Mexico has paused its migrant farm worker program in Canada, the country’s foreign ministry spokesman said on Tuesday.

It comes after a coronavirus outbreak in Ontario killed two workers from Mexico, although Canadian farm groups said the suspension was limited.

The outbreak has hit at least 17 farms, killing two Mexicans aged 24 and 31, and prompting the testing of about 8,000 migrant farm workers.

Spokesman Daniel Millan said the program was on a “temporary pause.” However, the farm groups said the suspension was limited only to workers destined for affected farms, and not for the whole program.

Canadian farmers rely on 60,000 short-term foreign workers, predominantly from Latin America and the Caribbean, to plant and harvest crops.

Ken Forth, president of Foreign Agricultural Resource Management Services (FARMS), which helps administer the foreign worker program in Canada, said the Mexican government is looking for assurances from farms hit by the coronavirus that workers will be safe.

“No additional workers will go to the farms where there’s an outbreak until they can demonstrate to the Mexican government that they’ve done all the protocol for the new workers to come in,” Forth said.

In South Africa people wearing face masks and keeping a distance, marked the country’s Youth Day holiday, the 44th anniversary of the 1976 Soweto students’ uprising which helped to bring about the end of apartheid.

Lined up along a Soweto street, the young people sang anti-apartheid anthems and held up posters urging people to work together to stop the spread of the Coronavirus. Some held up a banner saying Use the spirit of June 16 to fight Covid-19.

Others held up placards in support of the Black Lives Matter movement and calling for an end to domestic violence against women.

The commemoration marked June 16, 1976 when students in Soweto demonstrating against the white minority government were fired upon by security forces and several students were killed.

The Soweto demonstration was a galvanizing point in the battle to end the oppression of white minority rule. South Africa achieved democracy with majority rule elections in 1994.

In London a study into the steroid dexamethasone has been found to reduce the risk deaths in serious coronavirus cases by a third, trial results show.

Researchers led by a team from the University of Oxford administered the widely available drug to more than 2,000 severely ill Covid-19 patients.

Among those who could only breathe with the help of a ventilator, dexamethasone reduced deaths by 35%, and by one-fifth in other patients receiving oxygen only, according to preliminary results.

A survey conducted in Italy on the psychological impact of coronavirus lockdowns on children has shown youngsters were more irritable, had trouble sleeping and in some cases regressed developmentally.

Those symptoms were more pronounced in families in which the parents were particularly stressed and in families with elderly relatives at high risk of becoming seriously ill with Covid-19, the national survey by the Giannina Gaslini Pediatric Hospital in Genoa in conjunction with the University of Genoa found.

Italy’s health ministry on Tuesday released the results of the anonymous survey of 6,800 people who voluntarily responded to an online questionnaire between 24 March and 3 April.

The questionnaire on the Gaslini website, which started two weeks into a 10-week lockdown in Italy, asked a series of questions about how respondents and their families were experiencing the government-ordered measures.

Among those with children under age 6, 65% reported their children suffered behavior problems and regression. The most common problems cited were increased irritability, sleep issues and separation anxiety. Some respondents also reported their children wept inconsolably, the researchers found.

In the dog-loving nation of Thailand, volunteer pet groomer Kriengkai Thatwakorn is thrilled to be back helping out strays, some in urgent need of a shearing after waiting three sweltering months for a trim.

A domestic travel ban to contain coronavirus was lifted recently following Thailand’s success in keeping infections under control, giving Kriengkai a chance to tackle a backlog of hundreds of haircuts in each dog shelter he visits.

“I was so stressed for the past three months of lockdown because I couldn’t travel and there was unfinished work,” he told Reuters, removing the coat of a wriggling mongrel held down by a fellow volunteer.

“The group of dogs before we faced Covid-19 were the ones that are super unfriendly but in need of extreme grooming. No one dares to touch them,” he added, speaking over dozens of barking canines.

“They must have been in agony because of the heat.”

Thailand is a nation of dog-lovers but its urban stray population can get out of control without resources to sterilise or care for them properly.

Kriengkai, 43, started helping out man’s best friend seven years ago after being inspired by a documentary about a volunteer group that provided grooming to strays to find homes for them faster.