Coronavirus live news: deaths surge in Brazil and Russia as Trump says US is quitting WHO
The government is facing increasing pressure from its scientific advisers over the decision to ease England’s lockdown.
Prof Peter Horby has become the latest adviser to express his concerns, saying on Saturday that while thousands of people a day are still becoming infected with coronavirus, lockdown measures may be being eased too soon.
Horby, of the University of Oxford, joined Sir Jeremy Farrar and Prof John Edmunds, all members of the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (Sage), in warning that ministers were taking risks.
Boris Johnson has announced a gradual easing of the lockdown in England from Monday, when friends and relatives will be able to meet in parks and gardens in socially distanced groups of six.
“Happy Monday” will also signal the reopening of schools – allowing children in nurseries, early-years settings, reception, year 1 and year 6 to return to class – as well as more shops, with outdoor retail and car showrooms able to resume operations.
Horby told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “You know, we have still got 8,000 cases a day. We have been very successful in bringing it down, decreasing the numbers because of the social distancing.”
But he said it was vital “we don’t lose control again”.
For the first time in years, the few remaining local residents of Budapest’s party district can fall asleep without a nocturnal chorus of drunken stag groups outside their windows. The sweeping expanse of Kraków’s central square is no longer teeming with tour groups, and it is possible to traverse Prague’s Charles Bridge without elbowing through hordes of selfie-takers.
Coronavirus travel restrictions are proving tough to bear for the hundreds of thousands who work in the region’s hospitality industry, but are also giving the many beautiful cities of central Europe time and space to think about how to deal with their overtourism problems.
Budget flights and low prices have been a mixed blessing for these places, as a trickle of tourists turned to a flood in the decades since the Iron Curtain fell. “The residents have been complaining for a very long time that the city doesn’t belong to them any more,” said Barbora Hrubá of Prague City Tourism, a municipal body that works on the Czech capital’s tourism strategy.
With 9 million international visitors a year, Prague has become Europe’s fourth most visited city, after Paris, London and Rome. Tourists are not usually interested in seeing the rest of the country, or even much of the city. The average length of stay is just 2.4 days, and the majority of tourists crowd into the city’s old town, which over the years has pushed out much local life from the area.
“This is a great opportunity for us to rebuild and restart tourism in the city differently. We want a different type of visitor who visits more than the most famous monuments in the centre,” said Hrubá.
Temperatures in some California cities this week broke decades-old records. The heatwave that cooked Las Vegas over the past few days brought temperatures over 37.8C (100F). And in Phoenix, highs this weekend are expected to approach or exceed 43.3C (110F).
This year is on track to be one of the hottest on record, and public health officials worry that in cities across the US, summer heatwaves will collide with the coronavirus pandemic, with deadly consequences for poor, minority, and older populations.
Even before the pandemic hit, heat was killing more Americans than all other natural disasters combined.
People who live in cities are especially vulnerable to heatwaves because of a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect – cities with populations of 1 million or more can be up to 5F hotter than surrounding areas due to high population density, a lack of greenery and shade, and because materials like steel, concrete and asphalt tend to absorb more heat.
Studies have also found that cities’ poorest neighbourhoods tend to be hotter, and that many low-income families have been struggling to cope for years. In some neighbourhoods of Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, up to a third or more households lack air conditioning.
Due to the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, many more are unable to pay to run their ACs. And even as cities begin reopening after lockdown, many of the malls, public libraries and recreation centres where overheated Americans traditionally went to cool down remain risky, especially for older people and others with a heightened risk of dying from Covid-19.
Rwandan medical workers have deployed robots to minimise contact between patients infected with the coronavirus and doctors and nurses.
Reuters reports the country has deployed the three robots to carry out simple tasks such as taking temperatures and monitoring patients.
Judges in Milan have placed Uber Italy under special administration for allegedly exploiting its food delivery riders during the coronavirus emergency.
Italy’s Guardia di Finanza (Finance Police) are investigating Uber Italy over an alleged gang-mastering case, following an investigation by the Italian national daily newspaper Corriere della Sera.
According to judicial sources, reported by Italy’s news agency ANSA, “the riders are not formally employed by Uber but by two other intermediary firms in the logistics sector including Flash Road City which has been placed under investigation.” One said his pay was always €3 per delivery no matter what the day or time.
Sources reported by Reuters said: “Uber Eats is alleged to have paid much higher sums to two recruitment companies that took on and managed the riders, most of them foreigners recruited from migrant reception centres.’’ According to Repubblica, riders were mainly from Mali, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Guinea, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
The company denies exploiting the riders and said it had made its “Uber Eats platform available to restaurants and couriers in full respect of the law and it condemned any form of illegal intermediation”.
“We participate actively in the debate around regulation which we believe will give the food delivery sector the necessary legal security to prosper in Italy,” Uber Italy said in an emailed statement reported by Reuters.
The Milan court said the firms had hired riders in an “uncontrolled” way during the Covid-19 emergency.
Afghanistan has recorded its biggest one-day rise of new coronavirus cases, with the capital, Kabul, and western Herat province experiencing the worst day of the crisis.
The health ministry confirmed 866 new Covid-19 cases across the war-torn country, pushing the total number of infection to 14,525. Three patients died overnight, bringing the death toll to 249. There have been 1,303 recoveries.
More than 60% of tests done in a 24-hour period came back positive across the country. The health ministry, which tested 1,425 suspected patients, has pledged to increase the number of daily tests. It has so far tested 37,348 patients.
In the capital, the health ministry recorded 411 new confirmed cases. Kabul is the country’s worst affected area for number of transmissions, with the total number of infections in the capital at 5,775.
Herat, which borders Iran, recorded 177 new cases. The first case of the virus were reported in the province after thousands of Afghan migrants poured back from Iran in February and March, fanning out across the country without being tested or quarantined. The total number of infections in Herat is 2,461 with 51 deaths.
The situation in southern province of Kandahar is also concerning as no one has been tested in more than a fortnight due to problems in the testing process.
Wahid Majroh, the deputy health minister said he instructed the health sector of Kandahar and nearby provinces to send samples to Kabul.
“We have a serious problem in Kandahar, PCR machine is off and there is no flight toward Kandahar so our engineers fix that, there will be a UN flight to Kandahar in coming days and our team will go with that,” Majroh said this week.
Majroh said 40% of total confirmed cases were recorded in the 10 days before Eid and added that previously he was “warning that the flood [of coronavirus] will come, but now the flood has arrived and many people are sinking”.
Everywhere in the country, the eastern province of Nangarhar and the northern province of Balkh saw a surge in the number of new infections recorded with 74 new cases combined.
It’s not the carefree city Celia Topping is accustomed to, but as more restrictions are lifted in Berlin, she writes a dispatch on the happy unmasked faces as campsites, lidos and lakes reopen for the summer.
Pollution from human and agriculture waste spilling into the seas off Rome has decreased 30% during Italy’s coronavirus lockdown, according to an AP report on preliminary results from a nationwide survey of seawater quality.
Authorities said it was too soon to give the lockdown sole credit for the change, saying that shifting sea currents and limited rainfall in April and May also could have been responsible for reduced runoff of livestock and fertiliser waste.
Marco Lupo, the director general of the Lazio regions environmental agency, said the reduction in tourism from March could have reduced the amount of sewage produced by the 30 million tourists who normally visit Rome each year.
Read the original article at The Guardian