Coronavirus live news: Israel health chief quits in protest at lockdown easing; Bolsonaro tests positive

Intensive care units at 54 hospitals in Florida are full as Covid-19 cases surge, according to data published on Tuesday morning by the state’s Agency for Health Care Administration.

Almost 214,000 people in the Sunshine State have now tested positive, with 7,361 new cases recorded on Monday. In total 3,841 people in Florida have died from coronavirus.

Florida’s governor Ron DeSantis is a Donald Trump loyalist who has refused to slow Florida’s reopening or implement a statewide mask mandate.

At a press conference on Tuesday at the Miami Care Centre he did don a face covering, however — not while speaking himself, but when his interpreter began to translate his words into Spanish.

Talking to the media, DeSantis announced that another Covid-specific nursing home will open with 150 beds. This will be the 12th of its kind in the state, he said at a press conference.

Latin America and the Caribbean now account for 50% of coronavirus cases in the Americas, and the number of registered cases continues to accelerate, Reuters reports.

“This is a pandemic of staggering proportions and we have no option but to continue to put all our energy into controlling it,” said the regional director of the World Health Organisation (WHO), Carissa Etienne, in a virtual briefing with Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) directors on Tuesday.

Marcos Espinal, PAHO director for communicable diseases, said Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s positive test result showed that “this virus in unpredictable and does not respect race, class or people in power, despite security around any president.”

Bolsonaro’s infection proves the need to strengthen social distancing recommendations and the use of masks to mitigate the spread of coronavirus in Brazil, he added.

Two months ago, the United States accounted for 75% of the COVID-19 cases in the Americas, Etienne said, warning that the WHO sees acceleration of cases in several US states, most of Central America and most of South America.

Some of Latin America’s most persistent problems have contributed to the scale of the pandemic in the region, Etienne said: inequality, political division and health systems that have been weakened by years of under-investment.

For the Portuguese speakers among you, here’s a clip of Bolsanaro whipping off his facemask in front of journalists and insisting he is fine today, following his positive Covid test:

Announcing his positive test result on TV, Bolsanaro insisted he wasn’t afraid:

“There’s no reason for fear. That’s life. Life goes on. I thank God for my life and the role I’ve been given to decide the future of this great nation that is called Brazil.”

In an interview broadcast on state-run TV Brasil, Bolsonaro said he began feeling ill on Sunday and has been taking hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malarial drug with unproven effectiveness against Covid-19.

US president Donald Trump has also claimed to take the drug, which last month was withdrawn by US health regulators for Covid-19 treatment amid growing evidence it doesn’t work and could cause serious side effects.

Trump criticised the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decision to revoke emergency approval for hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, saying: “I took it and I felt good about taking it. I don’t know if it had an impact, but it certainly didn’t hurt me.”

More than 200,000 people in Europe have now died from Covid-19, the news agency AFP has calculated.

A little reminder of Bolsonaro’s boast in March that his “athletic history” would ensure he would just “catch a little cold” were he to be infected with Covid-19.

Here is a photo of Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro at lunch with the US ambassador on the weekend. He is in the middle in the white shirt on the front row.

The Brazilian president, Jair Bolsonaro, has announced he has tested positive for coronavirus live on television, my colleague Tom Phillips reports from Rio de Janeiro.

“It came back positive,” a mask-wearing Bolsonaro told a handpicked group of reporters on Tuesday lunchtime.

Bolsonaro, 65, has repeatedly trivialised the pandemic and flouted social distancing, even as Brazil became the second-worst hit country after the US, with more than 65,000 deaths and 1.6m confirmed cases.

Israel’s public health director has quit amid a spike in new coronavirus cases, saying the country had been too hasty to reopen its economy and had lost its way in dealing with the pandemic.

Reuters reports that Siegal Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, announced her resignation a day after prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet reimposed a series of restrictions, including the closure of bars, gyms and event halls.

After a national lockdown in April, Israel flattened the coronavirus infection curve in May to about 20 new cases a day.

But since the reopening of schools and many businesses two months ago, the number of cases has soared, reaching more than 1,000 a day last week. The health ministry said it expected the number of patients on ventilators – now 32 – to reach 2,000.

In a statement on Facebook (in Hebrew), Sadetzki said she decided to resign because her warnings about attempting to return to normal conditions too quickly had been ignored. She wrote:

“It has been several weeks since Israel’s compass for handling the pandemic has lost its bearings. The achievements in dealing with the first wave (of infections) were cancelled out by the broad and swift opening of the economy” that outpaced many other countries.

With only 37% of Israelis trusting the government’s handling of the pandemic, according to a survey published on Monday by N2 News, against 59% who distrust it, her criticism of official policy could add to a sense of public unease.

At a cabinet session on Monday, Netanyahu said Israel needed to take “limited actions” now to avoid a wider lockdown later that could paralyse its economy, where unemployment is just above 20%.

In her statement, Sadetzki recommended that Israel limit gatherings to no more than 20 people and reimpose greater social distancing in work places and schools.

Israel, with a population of 9 million, has reported more than 31,000 coronavirus cases and 338 dead.

Wondering which countries UK citizens can visit without restrictions on arrival? My colleagues on the travel desk are updating this handy list as the government expands its programme of travel corridors.

Regardless of whether the UK government says it is safe to travel to a country, each destination has its own rules on who can enter. Some countries may not permit UK nationals to enter and they may ban anyone who has been in the UK in the previous 14 days.

Security measures could also be in place at borders to prevent potential loopholes for passengers attempting to transit through other “safe” countries in order to dodge travel bans.

Italy’s health minister has proposed “sectioning” people who refuse hospital treatment for Covid-19 and has suspended flights from Bangladesh, my colleague Angela Giuffrida in Rome reports.

The potential move towards forced hospitalisations came after a cluster of infections arose in the northern Veneto region, triggered by a man who developed coronavirus symptoms on the day he returned from a business trip to Serbia and initially resisted treatment in hospital.

Roberto Speranza, the health minister, said;

“I am evaluating with my legal department the hypothesis of compulsory health treatment in cases where a person must be treated but [refuses] to be. At the same time, my thoughts on how Italians have behaved during this crisis are positive, as without this fundamental harmony we would not have bent the [rate of infection] curve.”

Read Angela’s full story here.

The Republican party will provide mandatory coronavirus testing at its national convention in Florida next month, Reuters reports.

The plan to require thousands of attendees to get tested for the coronavirus before entering the convention site in Jacksonville illustrates the efforts the party is undertaking to ensure President Donald Trump speaks to a packed house when he accepts the nomination.

Quite how the tests would be conducted is not yet clear.

“Everyone attending the convention within the perimeter will be tested and temperature checked each day,” wrote Erin Isaac, communications director for the host committee, in a memo to reporters.

The convention was originally supposed to take place in North Carolina but was moved to Florida amid concerns over the pandemic.

The decision to relocate was made prior to Florida’s recent spike in coronavirus cases, which have grown from 667 new cases on 1 June to more than 10,000 new cases on Monday.

There have been teething problems in Australia with the permit system allowing people to cross the border between New South Wales (NSW) and Victoria when the border closes tomorrow, according to ABC News.

Forty-five minutes after launching on Tuesday, the webpage to apply for a permit apparently stopped working.

Although functional when it launched shortly before 7:30pm on Tuesday night local time, by 8:15pm visitors were unable to apply for permission to enter NSW.

The border between Australia’s two most populous states is to close on Wednesday after a spike in Covid-19 cases in Melbourne.

The outbreak in Victoria’s capital has seen hundreds of cases in the past two weeks – more than 95% of new Australian infections.