Coronavirus live news: Belgrade declares state of emergency; South Africa cases surge after lockdown lifted

The mayor of Florida’s biggest city has imposed an indefinite nightly curfew after the number of coronavirus cases in the state jumped again on Friday, according to Reuters.

The Miami-Dade county mayor, Carlos Gimenez, announced an indefinite nightly curfew from 10 pm to 6am as the 4 July holiday weekend began and halted the reopenings of venues, such as casinos and theaters that had been set for Friday.

“Let’s celebrate Independence Day by respecting one another’s right to life, liberty and happiness,” Gimenez said in a video on Friday, citing the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The move came after Florida recorded 9,488 new cases on Friday, according to the state health department, on top of more than 10,000 new cases the previous day.

Thursday’s figure marked Florida’s largest daily spike so far and put it on a level that exceeded single-day tallies from any European country at the height of the outbreak there.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, has announced he has tested positive for the coronavirus, as the number of confirmed cases in the country passed 220,000 on Friday.

He said he felt a ’slight fever,” immediately quarantined at home and later tested positive, according the Associated Press.

Qureshi is the senior most government official to contract the virus. Pakistan’s infection rate has been steadily climbing since the prime minister, Imran Khan, eased restrictions saying the country’s fragile economy would collapse under a strict lockdown and the poorest would suffer the most.

Khan has gone on national television to ask Pakistanis to wear masks and social distance, but the vast majority largely have ignored the precautions. Confirmed infections reached 221,896 on Friday and more than 4,500 deaths. Pakistan has pulled back on testing to around 20,000 tests a day from a high of more than 32,000.

Four MPs have died of Covid-19, one from the federal legislature and three provincial parliamentarians.

Spain will reopen its borders to visitors from 12 non-EU countries from Saturday, the country’s official state bulletin has announced, according to Xinhua.

Australia, Canada, South Korea, Georgia, Japan, Montenegro, New Zealand, Rwanda, Thailand, Tunisia, Serbia and Uruguay, were selected from an initial list of 15 agreed by the European Union, China’s official news agency reported.

Spain reopened its borders to countries of the EU and the Schengen passport-free area on 21 June.

Coronavirus restrictions in South Africa are posing an existential problem for one of the country’s youngest Christian sects, with a ban on drinking effectively banning their idiosyncratic ceremony for communion.

When the country began easing its coronavirus lockdown in May, it allowed religious worshippers to gather in groups of up to 50, but maintained a ban on people assembling to drink alcohol, Reuters reports.

That’s a problem for the “Gabola” church — the name means ‘drinking’ in the local Tswana language — for whom a tipple is an integral part of their religious worship.

Founded just two years ago, the church tried to hold its usual meetings in local bars, called shebeens, to praise God while downing whisky, but they soon got arrested, said its leader and self-styled pope, Tsietsi Makiti, 55.

“They can arrest us until Jesus comes back,” said Makiti, wearing a bishop’s mitre with a miniature bottle of spirits hanging off it. But he added they had nevertheless been moving services from place to place to avoid a run-in with the authorities.

On Sunday worshippers met in a rubbish-strewn field in Evaton, south of Johannesburg. As the service started, clergy blessed beer bottles in prayer. “At Gabola church you (bring)… the liquor of your choice… and the pastor will bless the liquor so that it will not be poisonous to your body,” Makiti said.

Wearing flowing black robes and coloured scarves, Makiti and five clergymen sat before a table strewn with empty bottles of alcohol.

Makiti’s sermon included such proclamations as: “We are a church that will remake the world.”

“People call me a drunkard,” said one worshipper, Nthabiseng Kotope, 38, who said she joined the church in March. “I agree with them. I do God’s work while drinking.”

Apart from the ban on alcohol, the congregants observe all other coronavirus rules, including the limit of 50 people, the spacing out of chairs and use of hand sanitisers.

The UK is in talks to join a European Union plan to secure supplies of potential coronavirus vaccines, in a test of the cooperation required to tackle international emergencies after Brexit, the Financial Times reported on Friday, according to Reuters.

London is assessing whether the advantages of the European bloc’s bargaining power to strike deals with international drugs companies outweigh the broader political desire to sever ties with Brussels, the report said, citing UK officials.

Life in Russia is unlikely to return to normal until next February at the earliest, the country’s health minister has said, according to Reuters.

Mikhail Murashko told the Interfax news agency that 3,500 people in Russia were still receiving treatment via artificial lung ventilators, which he said was a “serious figure”. He added that millions would have died had preventative measures not been taken.

Some restrictions have already been eased, with restaurants, gyms and domestic travel all permitted within social distancing guidelines and certain parameters. But with thousands of new cases still being reported every day, and a death toll approaching 10,000, some measures remain in force, including a ban on international flights, extended on Thursday until August.

“What is normal life? It’s going to concerts, taking flights, fully fledged work and travel. In my view, it’s unlikely that this will happen before February,” Murashko said, without elaborating on his choice of month.

Russia has reported 667,883 cases of the novel coronavirus – the world’s third-highest tally – but just 9,859 deaths, far lower than death tolls in other countries, which has prompted some scepticism.

The Moscow health department last month said the number of deaths was around 50% higher in May than in the same month last year.

Murashko said that official data for the country as whole in May was not yet available but that the coronavirus had increased Russia’s mortality rate by around 1.5%-2% since the beginning of 2020.

Several dozen prostitutes armed with an inflatable sex doll staged a protest in Berlin on Friday against coronavirus restrictions they say are preventing them from making a living, AFP reports.

The protesters gathered outside the Bundesrat upper house of parliament with red umbrellas and placards bearing slogans such as “Let us work,” “Open the brothels now” and “Our sector is being driven underground”.

Prostitution is legal and regulated in Germany, with sex workers entitled to employment contracts and social security benefits. But sex work has been banned since mid-March as part of efforts to control the spread of the coronavirus.

The Federal Association for Erotic and Sex Services said this was “incomprehensible in view of the developments in other sectors”.

“Hairdressers, massage parlours, beauty salons … fitness studios, tattoo shops, saunas, restaurants and hotels have been allowed to reopen,” it said in a statement, but sex workers “seem to have been forgotten by politicians”.

Brothels have been allowed to reopen in neighbouring countries including Switzerland, Belgium, Austria, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands, the association pointed out.

“Prostitution facilities are subject to particularly strict regulations and are obliged to offer their sex workers a safe, hygienic working environment,” it said.

A junior minister in the Ghanaian government resigned on Friday after failing to self-isolate after testing positive for coronavirus, the presidency said, according to AFP.

The president, Nana Akufo-Addo, accepted Carlos Kingsley Ahenkorah’s resignation “with immediate effect”, according to a statement from Akufo-Addo’s office.

“This follows the admission by the deputy minister of his breach of the Covid-19 protocols, when, as a person certified to be positive of the virus, he visited a registration centre in his constituency before the period of self-isolation was complete,” it said.

The presidency said that the Ahenkorah, who was deputy minister of trade and industry, ought to have led by example rather than violate self-isolation protocols.

The embattled minister told AFP that as an asymptomatic patient he was not a major threat to other people. “I have Covid-19, but I’m asymptomatic. There is nothing shameful in catching covid. I never got in the midst of people at the registration centre. I spoke to a few people at the centre and left,” Ahenkorah added.

The authorities in Ghana have introduced a raft of measures, including self-isolation, lockdown, mask-wearing and social distancing to curb the spread of the virus.

The disease has so far infected more than 18,000 people and claimed 117 lives in the west African nation.

Hong Kong’s new security law has prompted a sharp uptick in inquiries from families looking to relocate to Canada, but Ottawa’s strict Covid-19 border control measures are making it nearly impossible to get in.

Even before the law took effect this week, refugee claims from Hong Kong in the first three months of 2020 nearly tripled to 25 compared with nine in all of 2019 and just two in all of 2018, Canadian government data shows.

Admissions of new permanent residents from Hong Kong jumped 75.7% in January and February 2020 compared to the previous year, as Beijing’s crackdown on pro-democracy protesters escalated.

Claims from all countries have plunged since March amid Covid-19 closures.

Beijing imposed the legislation on Hong Kong this week despite protests from Hong Kongers and Western nations, setting China’s freest city and a major financial hub on a more authoritarian track.

Canada was a preferred destination for Hong Kongers who fled the island city ahead of the British handover to China in 1997, and some 300,000 people in Hong Kong hold Canadian passports.

Most who came in the 1990s have left and interest in relocating from Hong Kong to Canada has been tepid in recent years.

But in the days since China imposed the security law, Vancouver immigration lawyer Richard Kurland has found himself consulting with people by phone, email and Zoom on how to get from Hong Kong into Canada.

“This week is the game-changing week with the new security law,” said Kurland. “Now families are taking things seriously.”

Moving to Canada will not be as easy as it was in the ‘90s. A programme that allowed wealthy foreigners to buy admission to Canada was scrapped in 2014.

And the border is currently closed until at least the end of July due to the coronavirus pandemic, with only citizens, permanent residents and others deemed essential allowed in.

“Until the travel restrictions are lifted from Covid, I can’t imagine how someone would manage to even board a flight at this point,” said Toronto immigration lawyer Chantal Desloges.