Coronavirus live news: deaths in Europe exceed 150,000 as UN warns of multiple famine risk
Calls to domestic violence hotlines in Europe are up by as much as three-fifths, as alcohol and drug abuse combine with close confinement in coronavirus lockdowns to fuel abuse of the most vulnerable, the World Health Organization has said.
WHO regional director for Europe, Hans Kluge, cited reports from many countries including Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Ireland, Russia, Spain and Britain of increases in violence against women and men by an intimate partner and against children during the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Although data is scarce, member states are reporting up to a 60% increase in emergency calls by women subjected to violence by their intimate partners in April this year compared to last,” he told an online briefing from Copenhagen.
Online enquiries to violence prevention hotlines had increased by up to five times, the agency said, calling the issue a global problem.
Kluge noted some countries had provided examples of how to address the issue. Italy has an app to ask for help without a phone call, while victims can alert pharmacists in Spain and France through code words.
Hotels in France and Belgium have converted to shelters, and Greenland has limited the sale of alcohol to make homes safer for children. Kluge said:
With job losses, rising alcohol-based harm and drug use, stress and fear, the legacy of this pandemic could haunt us for years.
US scientists are working to understand a rare, life-threatening inflammatory syndrome in children associated with exposure to the coronavirus by quickly assembling clinical trials and patient registries.
Cases were first reported in Britain, Italy and Spain, but now doctors in the United States are seeing clusters of children with the disorder, which can attack multiple organs, impair heart function and weaken heart arteries.
At least one child in Britain has died. No children are believed to have died so far in the US, “but that could change,” said Dr Sean O’Leary, a pediatric infectious disease expert at Children’s Hospital Colorado who serves on the American Academy of Pediatrics committee on infectious disease.
O’Leary said efforts are getting underway to collect information on the disorder: “Every academic centre I know of is looking for these cases and trying to systematically track them.”
The New York department of health reported 64 cases of the new syndrome as of 5 May, and is calling on hospitals to immediately report any cases to the department.
It did not say how many children tested positive for the coronavirus, but said it believes the syndrome is potentially associated with Covid-19.
Georgia will lift its lockdown of the capital Tbilisi on 11 May and allow shops to reopen next week as part of a gradual easing of coronavirus-related restrictions, prime minister Giorgi Gakharia has said.
He told a televised cabinet meeting that a lockdown imposed in another large Georgian city, Rustavi, would be lifted on 14 May, and that the ex-Soviet republic of 3.7 million people would reopen to foreign tourists from 1 July.
Tbilisi, Rustavi, Batumi and Kutaisi were locked down on 15 April, with bans on entry or exit of vehicles, to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Batumi and Kutaisi were taken out of lockdowns last week.
Georgia reported 615 cases of coronavirus infections as of Thursday, with nine deaths.
González Pacheco, who was 73, was nicknamed Billy El Niño (Billy the Kid) for his habit of spinning a gun around his finger while brutalising those he questioned.
González Pacheco could not be tried in Spain because of the amnesty law that helped the country return to democracy following Franco’s death in 1975.
Spain’s socialist-led coalition government had been attempting to strip González Pacheco of his medals and the pension increases to which they entitled the former officer, but had not managed to do so by the time he died.
One of González Pacheco’s most outspoken victims died from the coronavirus at the end of March.
José María “Chato” Galante, a veteran campaigner for truth, justice and historical memory in Spain, was imprisoned and tortured under the dictatorship. By a quirk of fate, the two men ended up living just a 10-minute walk from each other in Madrid.
José María “Chato” Galante in the jail where, as a 24-year old, he was imprisoned for fighting against the dictatorship. Photograph: Almudena Carracedo/BBC/Semilla Verde Productions Ltd./Álvaro Minguito
Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, Galante recalled his torture by “that idiot Billy the Kid, who’d killed other people and could kill you while making Bruce Lee noises”.
He also said that he was still unable to fathom how the regime and its torturers had treated himself and others.
“I couldn’t treat an animal the way they treated me,” he said. “I just couldn’t. No animal could do that; only human beings are capable of torture.”
Despite his experiences, Galante remained optimistic and was determined to see justice done for all Franco’s victims. He was also never deserted by his sense of humour.
When asked how he had come to spend so much time in prison for trying to oppose the regime. he replied: “They arrested me a lot of times; I’ve always been more of a dreamer than an expert.”
InterContinental Hotels expects sales to have plunged by a record 80% in April as the coronavirus outbreak shuts its chains, including Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn.
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the world’s largest hotel operator by number of rooms, added that global revenue per available room – a key industry measure – tanked 55% in March, when the world implemented mass lockdowns to contain the deadly Covid-19 outbreak.
“Covid-19 represents the most significant challenge both IHG and our industry have ever faced,” said chief executive, Keith Barr.
Window lights are illuminated in the shape of a heart at the InterContinental San Francisco hotel in April. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
With around 15% of its hotels currently shut, IHG has offered facilities to frontline health workers and the homeless.
The group franchises, leases, manages or owns about 5,900 hotels, which together comprise almost 882,000 rooms in more than 100 countries.
Iran said on Thursday its coronavirus outbreak was “relatively stable” as it announced another 68 deaths, as well as more than 1,000 infections for a fourth straight day.
The Islamic republic has battled to contain the Middle East’s deadliest outbreak of Covid-19 since reporting its first cases in mid-February.
On Saturday, the government’s official tally of daily infections hit 802 – its lowest level since 10 March.
Iran’s count stayed below 1,000 again on Sunday, however its caseload has bounced back up above that mark on each day since then.
Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said the situation was “relatively stable” as he announced that the latest fatalities took the overall death toll to 6,486.
Jahanpour said there were 1,485 new cases of infection, putting the country’s outbreak total at 103,135.
“More than 986 of these individuals had mild to moderate symptoms, or they were outpatients, or family members of infected patients,” he said.
Of all those infected, he added, 82,744 people had recovered from the illness and been discharged from hospital.
A European coalition is forming around an approach to using smartphone technology to trace coronavirus infections that, its backers hope, could help to reopen borders without unleashing a second wave of the pandemic.
As countries rush to develop apps that would use Bluetooth short-range wireless to identify those who have come into contact with people infected with the virus, controversy has erupted over how best to handle the personal data they collect.
Britain and France argue people should trust their health authorities to hold such information on a central computer server.
A loose coalition of other nations, led by Switzerland and including Germany and Italy, believe data should be kept only on handsets so that it would be impossible for governments to spy on their citizens.
Crucially for the coalition, its approach is compatible with that of US technology giants Apple and Google, whose iOS and Android operating systems run 99% of the world’s smartphones.
Apple has, on privacy grounds, erected a roadblock to centralised apps by preventing the Bluetooth low energy function on its iPhones from monitoring other devices while running in the background.
That means for such apps to work, they would need to be open while the phone is unlocked – a pain for the user and a drain on the battery. Attempted workarounds have proven to be unreliable.
The UK’s contact tracing app which began testing on the Isle of Wight on Monday. Photograph: Department of Health & Social Care/PA
Supporters of the phone-based approach from Austria, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland this week backed a roadmap view to enable national apps to ‘talk’ to each other and handle infections when people travel abroad.
“Everything about these projects has from day one been about how we can make it work on an international level,” said Marcel Salathe, a digital epidemiologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne.
My colleague Dan Collyns has this dispatch from Lima:
In the final hours before Covid-19 claimed her life, Cecilio Sangama watched helplessly as his eldest sister Edith gasped for breath.
Hospitals across Peru’s largest Amazon city had run out of oxygen, and the shortage had pushed the black market price of a cylinder well above $1,000 (£810).
“Her body could not hold on. She needed oxygen but we just couldn’t afford it,” said Sangama, 49, a municipal worker, speaking by telephone from Iquitos.
“I had promised her: ‘Don’t worry sister, today I will find you a cylinder,’… but in the end, there was nothing I could do.” His voice broke and he fell silent for a few seconds. “My sister died just a few hours ago, we are trying to find the way to give her a Christian burial.”
Read the full story here:
A key US senate democrat pushed back on republican majority leader, Mitch McConnell’s, drive to protect employers from coronavirus-related lawsuits when the economy begins to reopen, saying it would be unnecessary if the White House set clearer standards.
Republicans and business groups warn that companies could face a flood of litigation from employees and customers who become infected after operations resume.
Plaintiff advocates counter that employers are protected by legal barriers, including the difficulty of demonstrating where Covid-19 infections occur.
McConnell has made a bill protecting employers a top priority as Congress weighs what next steps to take to address a pandemic that has killed more than 71,000 Americans and thrown more than 26 million out of work.
Republicans, led by president Donald Trump, have pushed for a reopening of state economies, saying Americans can no longer endure the toll of shuttered businesses and lost livelihoods.
“The president is forcing workers back into unsafe plants and Mitch McConnell is trying to slam the courthouse door on the workers who get hurt,” democratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse told Reuters.
Whitehouse, a member of the senate judiciary committee that will hold a hearing on liability protection next week, said clear guidance on worker safety would give employers “a strong ‘standard of care’ defense in court” and would “keep people safer, so there weren’t lawsuits in the first place”.
African nations are facing a surge of Covid-19 cases with less than one intensive care bed and one ventilator per 100,000 people, a Reuters survey has found.
Even in a best-case scenario, the continent could need at least 10 times the numbers it has now as the outbreak peaks, an analysis of researchers’ projections showed.
The shortages across Africa’s national health systems are among the starkest elements to emerge from the survey, which polled 54 countries and received responses from health officials or independent experts in 48 of them.
The results provide the most detailed public picture to date of the continent’s key resources, testing and personnel for the coronavirus, which has killed more than 262,000 people worldwide.
The World Health Organization has warned that Africa, home to 1.3 billion people, could become the next centre of the pandemic.
The continent has recorded over 51,000 Covid-19 cases, a fraction of the 3.76 million recorded globally.
But low levels of testing make it impossible to know the true scale of infection. The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has said Africa could see nearly 123 million cases this year, causing 300,000 deaths.
A health official tests a patient for Covid-19, at a government-run testing center in Lagos, Nigeria. Photograph: Sunday Alamba/AP
Assuming a complete lockdown for an indefinite period, at least 121,000 critical care beds will be needed continent-wide when the pandemic peaks, according to a Reuters analysis of the projections by scientists at Britain’s MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis at Imperial College London, on which the UNECA forecasts are based.
That compares with just 9,800 available intensive care beds found in the survey, conducted through April and May. The survey also revealed severe shortfalls in testing, personnel and oxygen supplies.
Many African nations moved quickly to contain the virus, launching high-profile public health campaigns, restricting movement and repurposing factories to produce protective equipment.
Bewley’s cafe, described by the poet Brendan Kennelly as “the heart and hearth of Dublin”, is likely to permanently close after concluding it will not be able to operate post-lockdown under Ireland’s social distancing rules.
Managers at the historic cafe on Grafton street, long associated with James Joyce and other writers, told employees “with deep regret and great sadness” that it was likely to permanently close in coming weeks, with the loss of 110 jobs.
The cafe closed temporarily in mid-March due to the Covid-19 restrictions and would be allowed to reopen next month under the government’s lockdown easing blueprint.
However social distancing measures, along with high rent and a collapse in tourist numbers, made the business no longer viable, the managing director, Cól Campbell, said in a note to staff.
Opened in 1927, the aroma of coffee and the promise of sticky buns and cakes drew crowds of artists, students and tourists, a bustle that created a unique atmosphere no longer viable under social distancing rules.
pamela mcqueen (@pamelamcq)
The loss of Bewleys Cafe Theatre effects more then Dublin, this is where we get to see new work from around the country and playwrights & actors access press reviews. I can remember theatre from @ConalCreedon@annblake78@CoraFenton but I’m sure there’s many more… t.co/7bZqebSFaJ
Thanks Amy, it’s Jessica here – I’ll be running the live blog for the next few hours as countries across the world tentatively start to ease their coronavirus restrictions after weeks of lockdown.
As always, please do get in touch with your observations and experiences, via email- jessica.murray@theguardian.com – or via Twitter – @journojess_ – and I’ll do my best to respond to as many messages as I can.
For UK-specific coronavirus news, my colleagues Andrew Sparrow and Lucy Campbell are heading up the UK live blog, following the news from the ONS that black people are more likely to die from Covid-19.
That’s it from me, Amy Walker. I’ll be handing over to my colleague Jessica Murray now, who will steer you through global coronavirus updates for the rest of the day.
Summary
Coronavirus cases in India have risen past 50,000 according to the country’s health ministry, with the pace of infection showing no sign of abating.
A gas leak at a chemical factory in India has killed at least nine people and led to hundreds of others being taken to hospital, amid warnings that the death toll could climb higher.
China’s exports saw a shock 3.5% rise in April despite a hit to external demand from the coronavirus pandemic, official figures showed on Thursday.
The number of people who have died after contracting Covid-19 in Europe has surpassed 150,000, with most in the UK, Italy, Spain and France, a tally of official figures by the AFP news agency showed.
Mayor’s in many of the world’s leading cities have warned there can be no return to “business as usual” in the aftermath of the coronavirus crisis if humanity is to escape catastrophic climate breakdown.
The United Nations has warned that the global pandemic could cause “multiple famines”, as it appealed for a further $4.7bn in funding to help more than 50 vulnerable countries.
Poland has postponed Sunday’s presidential election amid the outbreak. The postal-only ballot will now take place “as soon as possible”, but is likely to not happen until at least June.
Every one of the 400,000 protective gowns that were flown to the UK from Turkey has failed to conform to the country’s health standards, with the shipment due to be flown back.
The coronavirus lockdown in Lebanon has sent an economy already in deep trouble into financial freefall, with many people struggling to survive.
In a new video, our multimedia team follow Gino Raidy – an activist who was prominent during the October 2019 anti-government protests – as he helps to keep demonstrators safe during the pandemic.
We fear hunger, not coronavirus: Lebanon protesters return in rage – video
