Coronavirus live news: Melbourne goes back into lockdown; Italy stops Bangladesh flights after new infections

Canada handled the coronavirus outbreak better than many of its allies, including the United States, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday in a rare public comment on the faltering US effort, Reuters reports.

Canada – with a population a tenth of the size of the United States – has so far recorded 8,711 deaths and 106,167 cases and Trudeau said the situation was stabilising, although some hotspots remained.

In contrast, the United States has recorded more than 3 million cases and 131,000 deaths. Authorities have reported alarming upswings of daily case loads in roughly two dozen states over the past two weeks.

“We were able to control the virus better than many of our allies, particularly including our neighbour,” Trudeau told a briefing, saying this would help efforts to restart the economy.

Canada and the United States have blocked nonessential travel between the two nations since March and are discussing whether to extend the ban when it expires on 21 July.

Although Trudeau’s relations with the US president, Donald Trump, have been good over the last 18 months, he skipped a Washington meeting today to herald the start of a new continental trade agreement with the United States and Mexico.

Trudeau, who would have had to enter a 14-day quarantine period on his return, repeated concerns about the possible imposition of US tariffs on Canadian exports of aluminium.

In an update to a truly horrific story, French prosecutors have today charged two men with attempted murder after a bus driver was assaulted and left brain dead for refusing to let aboard a group of people who were not wearing face masks.

Four men set upon 59-year-old Philippe Monguillot in the southwestern town of Bayonne on Sunday after he asked three of them to wear masks and tried to check another man’s ticket.

Face masks remain mandatory on public transport in France to slow the Covid-19 outbreak, which has claimed nearly 30,000 lives in the country.

The US president, Donald Trump, has threatened to cut off funding to schools that do not open in the fall and criticised a federal health agency’s guidelines for reopening schools as “very tough & expensive”. From Reuters:

The Republican president, who is seeking re-election in November, accused Democrats of wanting to keep schools shut for political reasons, despite a surge in coronavirus cases across the country.

It was not clear what specific federal aid the Republican president had in mind. States are responsible for primary and secondary education under the US constitution, but the federal government provides some supplementary funding.

Trump also took aim at the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the nation’s health protection agency whose director sits on the White House coronavirus task force.

The White House did not elaborate on which CDC guidelines Trump took issue with.

The CDC has recommended a number of considerations for schools, including testing, dividing students into small groups, serving packaged lunches in classrooms instead of cafeterias, and minimiSing sharing of school supplies. It advised sneeze guards and partitions be put in place when social distancing is not possible, and that seats be spaced at least six feet apart.

Yesterday, Trump held meetings about school reopenings at the White House and said he would pressure state governors to open schools in the fall. The White House coronavirus task force is meeting at the Department of Education today and will hold a news briefing afterward.

Business and conservative groups have urged reopening schools safely as important to getting parents back to work and reviving the US economy.
Educators say socialisation and other benefits such as school food programs are critically important. Experts have also shown online learning exacerbates the divide between poorer and more wealthy Americans, who have greater access to technology.

The alarming surge in cases in the United States, however, has raised concerns about the increased risk of spread of the virus by children to vulnerable adults at home as well as to older teachers and school staff.
New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said today he planned to reopen state schools in the fall, but reserved the right to “tweak that if it means saving lives.

Residents of Moscow will be permitted to visit the theatre again from next month, authorities said today as coronavirus infections in Russia – the fourth highest in the world – edged past 700,000.

Theatre audiences at 50% capacity will be allowed, President Vladimir Putin’s special representative for international cultural cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoy was quoted as saying by the Tass news agency. Shvydkoy added that he hoped this percentage could be increased by September. Theatres will have been closed for four months by the time they reopen.

Russia’s nationwide case tally stood at 700,792 as of today, behind only India, Brazil and the US, while 10,667 people have died from the virus, according to official data.

However, since measures meant to slow the spread of the virus began to be eased in May, the number of new cases recorded each day has been on a downward trend. Russia says 472,511 people have recovered from the virus.

Some businesses returned to work in May, following a nationwide non-working period in April, while in Moscow, the epicentre of Russia’s outbreak, the phased reopening of shops, restaurants and gyms came in June.

Also today, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the country’s coronavirus situation was leaning towards improving and that there was cause for more optimistic forecasts.

You can read about the details of Melbourne’s lockdown here. It bars visiting other people’s houses except for giving or receiving care or if you are in an “intimate personal relationship” with them.

The coronavirus pandemic is showing the limits of “fact-denying populism,” the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has told the European parliament, as she set out her country’s plans for its six-month presidency of the European Union, the Associated Press reports.

Germany took over the task of chairing EU meetings on 1 July and faces the challenge of seeking a compromise on a coronavirus recovery fund for the 27-nation bloc as well as the EU’s budget for the next seven years as the continent faces up to the task of pulling out of a deep recession.

“The depth of the economic decline demands that we hurry,” Merkel told MEPs. “We must waste no time — only the weakest would suffer from that. I very much hope that we can reach an agreement this summer. That will require a lot of readiness to compromise from all sides — and from you too.”

“We must not be naive: In many member states, opponents of Europe are just waiting to misuse the crisis for their ends,” she said. “We must show them all where the added value of cooperation in the European Union lies. We must show that a return to nationalism means not more, but less control.”

Without naming any countries or politicians, Merkel pointed to cautionary examples elsewhere.

“We are seeing at the moment that the pandemic can’t be fought with lies and disinformation, and neither can it be with hatred and agitation,” she said.

“Fact-denying populism is being shown its limits,” she added to applause. “In a democracy, facts and transparency are needed. That distinguishes Europe, and Germany will stand up for it during its presidency.”

Britain’s last governor of Hong Kong has accused China of “taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic to bully other countries, as he urged the west to stand up to Beijing, French news agency AFP reports.

Chris Patten, who served as the former British colony’s governor for five years from 1992 and oversaw its 1997 return to Chinese rule, also said Chinese authorities had exploited the global health emergency to impose a controversial security law on the territory.

“What’s happened in Hong Kong is just part of a broader series of actions taken by the Chinese communist party taking advantage of the fact that we’re all of us focused very much on dealing with the coronavirus,” he told an online discussion organised by British MPs.

“From India to Japan… to Australia to Canada, the Chinese have been bullying their way around the world,” he added.

“We have to learn how to contain China when it behaves badly.”

Beijing imposed the security legislation on Hong Kong last week, in response to huge and often violent democracy protests that erupted last year. It targets acts of subversion, secession, terrorism and foreign collusion.

The law’s imposition, which bypassed the territory’s legislature, is the most radical change in its freedoms and autonomy since the 1997 handover. Police have already arrested people voicing certain political views now deemed illegal, such as advocating independence or greater autonomy.

Armenia’s defence minister, Gabriel Balayan, is among a further 535 people in the country who have tested positive for coronavirus, bringing its total caseload to 29,820, according to Xinhua, China’s official news agency.

In its latest update, the national centre for disease control and prevention said that 18 people had died from Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, raising the death toll to 521. The number of recoveries so far in the country is 17,427, with a further 520 patients listed as having shaken off the virus.

Austria’s government has announced travel restrictions for fellow EU members Romania and Bulgaria after a spike in the number of coronavirus cases in both countries, AFP reports:

Speaking after a cabinet meeting, chancellor Sebastian Kurz said he was issuing an urgent appeal to Austrians not to travel to those countries. Returning travellers would have to undergo a mandatory 14-day quarantine or provide a recent negative test, he added. The restrictions will also apply to Moldova.

“We have seen that there are more and more imported coronavirus cases from these countries,” Kurz said.

In recent weeks, there have been about 170 imported cases recorded in Austria, most of them having originated in the Balkans, said Kurz.

Austria last week issued travel warnings for several other Balkan states, including Serbia and Montenegro, despite an EU recommendation to lift travel restrictions.

Checks along Austria’s borders with Slovenia and Hungary will also be doubled, targeting travellers coming from the Balkans.

Romania today reported 555 new infections, the biggest one-day increase yet, which Raed Arafat, an emergency department official blamed on people not respecting the rules.

“We’ve seen an increase in the number of campaigns denying that the virus is real,” Arafat told the Digi24 TV station.

In Bulgaria, the number of weekly cases has doubled from between 500 and 550 in mid-June to more than 1,100 over the past week.

Austria has been spared the worst of the pandemic, with 18,444 cases and 706 deaths.

However, there has been a marked recent rise in infections, averaging 92 per day over the past week.

Hello, this is Damien Gayle taking over the blog for a little while, while Haroon takes a break. If you have any comments, tips or suggestions drop me a line at damien.gayle@theguardian.com or via Twitter to @damiengayle.