Coronavirus live news: France reports another record post-lockdown jump in cases; Russia to start mass vaccine trials
Morocco could return to a complete coronavirus lockdown as cases continue to rise, Moroccan King Mohammed VI said on Thursday, warning of severe economic repercussions.
The warning came as a jump in infections in the once bustling tourist hub of Marrakech strained health services and led to protests by medical staff in recent days.
New cases nationally have surged to more than 1,000 a day since Morocco lifted a strict three-month long lockdown in late June and hit a record high of 1,766 on 15 August.
“If figures continue to increase, the Covid-19 Scientific Committee may recommend another lockdown, perhaps with even tighter restrictions,” the King said in a speech.
The deterioration of the health situation “does not leave much room for optimism,” he said.
As of Thursday, Morocco had recorded a total 47,638 cases, including 775 deaths and 32,806 recoveries.
Pictures posted on social media platforms showed patients with Covid-19 in Marrakech lying on the floor of crowded hospitals.
Medics have staged protests in recent days to highlight the congestion and lack of anti-coronavirus equipment and oxygen.
The health ministry said on Wednesday it will boost capacity at the city’s hospitals.
Morocco has carried out 1.7 million tests and made the wearing of masks mandatory.
An emergency decree giving authorities leeway in restoring restrictive measures has been extended until 10 September.
The Moroccan economy is expected to contract by 5% this year, while the budget deficit is forecast to deepen by 7.5% of gross domestic product.
Brazil reported 45,323 new cases of coronavirus and 1,204 deaths in the past 24 hours, the health ministry said on Thursday.
Brazil has now registered 3,501,975 cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll from Covid-19 has risen to 112,304, according to ministry data.
The death toll reported on Thursday takes the total number of fatalities across Latin America to almost 250,000.
The Venice Film Festival, the first major in-person cinema showcase of the Covid-19 era, is requiring participants to wear face masks during screenings and take a coronavirus test if they are arriving from outside Europe.
According to guidelines published on Thursday, fans and the general public will be kept away from the red carpet during the 2-12 September festival, and movie-goers will have to buy tickets and reserve seats online to ensure every other seat is left vacant.
Nine gates set up at various points around the Venice Lido will take temperatures of movie-goers and media, and stars will have transport and red carpet arrivals arranged by festival organisers to prevent crowds from forming even within official delegations.
Festival-goers attending indoor events will be tracked to guarantee contact tracing if necessary.
The film festival will be the first in-person movie event since the pandemic began and it is one of the first major international events that Italy is hosting after becoming the one-time Covid-19 epicenter in Europe. After getting infections under control with a strict, 10-week national lockdown that ended in May, Italy is now dealing with a rebound in cases as a result of summer vacation travel.
The Toronto and New York film festivals that follow Venice will be largely virtual this year, and the Telluride festival has been reborn as a drive-in series in Los Angeles.
In Italy, movie-goers must wear face masks to enter cinemas but can remove them once seated. Biennale, organisers however, are requiring masks indoors and out as well as throughout the screenings.
In addition, anyone arriving from outside Europe’s open-border Shengen area must take a virus test before arriving and will be tested again courtesy of the Biennale once in Venice, the guidelines said.
Biennale organisers said the guidelines were worked out with local health care officials.
Indigenous protesters on Thursday blocked a key Brazilian grain highway in the Amazon state of Para, the federal highway police said, resuming a protest that halted trucks carrying corn earlier in the week.
The Kayapó tribe say the federal government has failed to protect them from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed four of their elders, and has not consulted them on a plan to build a railway next to their land.
The Kayapó returned to the BR-163 highway in the region of Novo Progresso at 7am local time on Thursday, police said.
The indigenous people blocked the highway in protest of the lack of health resources to face Covid19, against the lack of dialogue by the federal government in the concession processes for the private initiative of the BR-163 highway and for the end of illegal mining and deforestation. Photograph: Fernando Souza/ZUMA Wire/REX/Shutterstock
The BR-163 highway links towns in the nation’s biggest farm state Mato Grosso to the port of Miritituba, an important export river gateway in Para state. With the soy season almost over, the main grain transported on the road at present is corn.
Edeon Vaz Ferreira, executive director of Pro-Logistics Movement, a group linked to the Mato Grosso Aprosoja farmers association, said corn is still being shipped, but the situation is becoming increasingly complex.
“Any stoppage complicates the flow, and the programming of barges and ships,” Ferreira said, without giving further details on how the port has been affected by the protests.
Members of the Kayapó tribe show no sign of backing down permanently as they insist that government representatives meet them for talks. Photograph: Ernesto Carrico/EPA
Earlier this week, the Brazilian Vegetable Oil Industries Association (Abiove) said a blocked BR-163 highway could affect around 50,000 tonnes of soy and corn exports a day on their way towards the port of Miritituba.
A court ruling this week ordered the protesters to leave the road, which the Kayapó complied with temporarily on Wednesday. But they show no sign of backing down permanently as they insist that government representatives meet them for talks.
Simon and Briony Rea from London flew from Heathrow to Split just hours before the news was announced that the UKgovernment would remove Croatia from its travel corridor lsit.
They immediately started to look into how they could leave before 4am on Saturday when the new quarantine rules come into effect.
We are due to go to a friend’s wedding and I really don’t want to let him down by being stuck isolating at home. Indirect flights from Split are currently about £900 each so we are looking at getting an 11-hour ferry from Split to Ancona in Italy and spending the rest of the holiday there.
We had read about the possibility of Croatia being taken off the list but we decided to take the risk because of the financial implications of not going.
The couple estimate that they will lose about £750 on hotel bookings, as well as having to pay for the ferry and hotels in Italy.
We’re just frustrated that there isn’t a testing process on our return to the UK so we can avoid having to isolate. It’s ridiculous.
Moroccan authorities have slapped tight controls on movement in Casablanca and Marrakesh, the country’s economic and tourist capitals, following a rise in coronavirus cases, AFP reports.
Several districts of the two cities were to be sealed off, and opening hours shortened for restaurants, coffee houses, businesses and public parks.
Members of Morocco’s interior ministry auxiliary forces patrol a neighbourhood in Rabat to enforce the reimposed lockdown due to a surge in Covid-19 cases. Photograph: Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images
Several beaches were closed in Casablanca, Morocco’s largest city with 3.3 million inhabitants, following similar measures imposed on Tuesday near the capital Rabat.
Partial lockdowns were ordered in Rabat and the port city of Tangiers, with armoured vehicles deployed on the streets and police manning checkpoints.
Covid-19 infections have been on the rise since the beginning of August and now exceed 1,000 new cases per day in the country of 35 million.
Thursday’s tally was 1,325 new cases and 32 deaths, the latter up from 29 on Wednesday.
Morocco has confirmed a total of over 47,500 cases of coronavirus and 775 deaths.
The health minister Khalid Ait Taleb, who has come under fire on social media, acknowledges the country needs another 62,000 paramedics and 30,000 medical staff.
US senator Bill Cassidy tested positive for coronavirus on Thursday, has decided to self-quarantine for 14 days and is contacting those with whom he may have had contact, according to a statement released by his office.
“I am strictly following the direction of our medical experts and strongly encourage others to do the same,” the Louisiana Republican, himself a physician, said in the statement.
At least 15 other members of the House of Representatives and Senate – eight Republicans and seven Democrats – have tested positive or are presumed to have had Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic earlier this year.
Rand Paul, a Republican, is the only other senator to have tested positive for the virus, back in March. Two other senators, Democrats Tim Kaine and Bob Casey, said in May that they had tested positive for coronavirus antibodies.
Neither chamber is in session at the moment. In July, the House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a mask mandate for the House floor after Louie Gohmert, who often refused to wear a mask, tested positive. Elsewhere in the Capitol, mask wearing is encouraged for lawmakers, but not mandated.
Slovenia has added neighbouring Croatia to its quarantine list, meaning that returning travellers will have to self-isolate.
The decision to put Croatia on the list already comprising nearly 60 countries will come into effect at midnight, said the interior minister, Ales Hojs.
Travellers already in Croatia will be able to avoid a requirement to quarantine themselves for 14 days if they return to Slovenia before midnight on Monday, Hojs added.
Croatia escaped the worst of the first wave of the pandemic owing to swift lockdowns and a lack of tourist arrivals at the tail-end of winter, promoting itself as a safe destination for tourists.
But on Thursday it registered 255 new infections, bringing the total number of cases to 7,329.
Slovenia has recorded 2,356 Covid-19 cases, dozens of which have been traced to people returning from trips to party hotspots in Croatia in the past couple of weeks.
According to Croatia’s tourist board, more than 140,000 Slovenes visited the Adriatic country this month.
On Thursday, the UK also added Croatia to its quarantine list while Germany advised against travel to the regions of Sibenik-Knin and Split Dalmatia, which are popular with tourists, after the public health agency declared them coronavirus risk regions, making tests for returnees mandatory.
Croatia is the source of the third-highest number of infections among people returning to Germany, after Kosovo and Turkey, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases.
Filmgoers boarded boats floating on the shimmering waters of a Tel Aviv lake for a test screening at Israel’s first “sail-in” cinema.
With indoor cinemas shut because of coronavirus restrictions, Tel Aviv municipality launched the floating cinema to allow residents to catch a movie in the open air while keeping a safe distance from each other.
The floating cinema provided seating aboard 70 pedal and rowing boats set in the Yarkon Park lake, two metres apart to maintain social distancing, Tel Aviv municipality said.
Two films would be screened every evening during the last week of August, it added. Thursday’s screening, attended by about 300 people, was a pilot event featuring the family comedy Paddington 2.
After successfully containing the coronavirus in May, Israel has been grappling with a second wave of infections and has reported a total of 98,550 Covid-19 cases and 789 deaths.
Israelis watch Paddington 2 while sitting in distanced pedal boats. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
Tel Aviv municipality’s “sail-in” floating cinema, which the municipality says aims to provide a solution to cultural outings that have been limited by coronavirus. Photograph: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters
The sail-in floating cinema in Tel Aviv’s Hayarkon Park. Photograph: Jack Guez/AFP/Getty Images
If you’re just joining us, here’s a quick recap of the latest coronavirus-related developments over the last few hours:
France reports new post-lockdown record daily cases. The country has reported 4,711 new coronavirus infections over the past 24 hours, a new post-lockdown record and a level last seen during the height of the epidemic in France.
Airbnb bans parties at sites listed on its platform in Covid-19 fight. The short-term home rental company Airbnb has imposed an indefinite global ban on all parties and events at places listed on its platform as it tries to enforce social-distancing norms due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Africa reports ‘hopeful’ daily drop in coronavirus cases. Average daily cases of coronavirus in Africa fell last week, a “hopeful sign” for the continent’s fight against the disease, the head of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Russia to begin Covid-19 vaccine trials on 40,000 people next week. Mass testing of Russia’s first potential Covid-19 vaccine to get domestic regulatory approval will involve more than 40,000 peopleand will be overseen by a foreign research body when it starts next week.
Belgian schools to reopen in September with masks mandatory for older children. Schools will reopen on 1 September when the academic year starts, with children above 12 years old and teachers required to wear masks, prime minister Sophie Wilmes said.
China faces questions over ‘vaccinated’ workers sent overseas. China is facing demands to explain why a state-backed firm claimed it had vaccinated dozens of staff against the coronavirus before sending them back to work at a mine in Papua New Guinea.
Portugal added to UK Covid-19 safe travel list. Portugal is being added to the UK’s travel corridor list, meaning arrivals from the country will no longer have to quarantine, but Croatia, Austria and Trinidad and Tobago are being removed.
Estée Lauder plans to cut up to 2,000 jobs globally after profits dive during the pandemic. The makeup, skincare and perfume company, which also owns brands such as Joe Malone, Clinique, La Mer and MAC, said it intended to shut between 10% and 15% of its freestanding stores, with job cuts amounting to about 3% of its global workforce.
Northern Ireland reduces number of people allowed to meet in new Covid-19 restrictions. Outdoor gatherings are now limited to 15 people, reduced from 30, while indoor gatherings in private dwellings are now limited to six individuals from two households, from 10 previously.
Italy hits new daily record in Covid-19 infections since 16 May. Italy has reported another sharp rise in Covid-19 infections, as the country registered 845 new coronavirus cases, 203 more than Wednesday.
Performers could sing or play softly to reduce Covid risk, study shows. Sing softly and don’t shout to reduce the risk of Covid-19 spread, new research suggests, offering a ray of hope for musicians who have been restricted from performing in public.
That’s all from me today, I’m now handing over to my colleague Lucy Campbell.
Nigeria will bar entry to citizens of countries that do not allow in Nigerians due to coronavirus restrictions, the aviation minister, Hadi Sirika, has said.
Sirika told reporters:
The principle of reciprocity will be applied.
If you ban us from coming to your country, the same will apply the other way.
Earlier this week, Nigeria announced plans to resume international flights on 29 August. All but essential international flights were halted in late March in an attempt to stem the spread of the virus.
The resumption will begin with four flights daily to Lagos and Abuja, but Sirika said that initially the number of passengers would be limited to 1,280 a day.
Nigeria has 50,488 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and has recorded 985 deaths.
