Coronavirus live news: pandemic accelerating across Africa; over 2 million cases in US
A US woman who survived Covid-19 has received a double lung transplant, making her the first in the country known to have a received a transplant after her lungs were badly damaged by the disease, reports Kenya Evelyn for the Guardian US.
“She’s awake, she’s smiling, she FaceTimed with her family,” Dr Ankit Bharat, chief of thoracic surgery and surgical director of the lung transplant program at Northwestern Medicine, told the New York Times.
Bharat added the woman, who is in her 20s, had no serious underlying medical conditions. She has a long way to go, but is recovering.
The 10-hour surgery took several hours longer than expected because inflammation left the patient’s lungs “completely plastered to tissue around them, the heart, the chest wall and diaphragm”.
Hospital authorities said the young woman is still on a ventilator. Although the transplanted lungs are healthy, the virus has left the patient’s chest muscles too weak for independent breathing.
Bharat said the transplant was her only chance for survival. However, the medical team emphasised that even though the operation could save some desperately ill coronavirus patients, the transplant option “is not for every Covid patient”.
Kazakhstan has locked down several towns and villages and tightened restrictions in one of its provinces following a rise in new Covid-19 cases, a month after ending its nationwide state of emergency.
In the central Karaganda region, retailers and public transit will work shorter hours and private cars will be banned from moving at night from 13 June, Reuters reported, citing a government statement.
Several towns and villages would be locked down again and 70% of public sector employees in the province will work from home, it said, adding that many local residents and businesses were disregarding social distancing rules.
Earlier this month, the central Asian nation tightened restrictions, although to a lesser extent, in two other provinces that had also reported high rates of new cases.
Kazakhstan, a former Soviet republic of 19 million people bordering China and Russia, has confirmed 13,558 Covid-19 cases, after an additional 239 were reported on Thursday, with 67 deaths.
It has also separately reported 2,529 asymptomatic cases.
Rohingya leaders have urged Bangladesh to lift an internet ban imposed on one million refugees in the city of Cox’s Bazar, warning that rumours and panic over Covid-19 is deterring people from getting tested, write Rebecca Ratcliffe and Rizwan Ahmed.
Limits on communication are exacerbating already dire conditions for the Rohingya refugees from Myanmar, who live in cramped bamboo huts, with as many as eight family members to a room, and are dependent on communal taps and toilets. In some areas, basics such as soap are lacking.
People shop for vegetables at the Kutupalong Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Photograph: Shafiqur Rahman/AP
Aid agencies in the city in south-east Bangladesh, 20 miles from the border with Myanmar, have warned repeatedly that the virus could thrive in the camps and that medical facilities would be unable to cope. As of 10 June, 35 refugees have tested positive for Covid-19, according to the World Health Organization, while three have died. In total, 30 are in quarantine, though it is feared that there are more undetected cases.
The outbreak has coincided with flu season, adding to confusion over symptoms, but community members say that people are avoiding going to clinics because they are worried about being moved to isolation facilities.
Last week, two people fled quarantine because they believed they would be sent to centres far from their families, according to reports.
Finland will be opening borders to tourists from neighbouring Baltic and Nordic countries, excluding Sweden, from 15 June, writes Antonia Wilson, for the Guardian’s travel desk. In a similar move to Denmark and Norway, Sweden has been excluded from Finland’s list based on current rates of infection.
Finnish borders are due to open to tourists from Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania from 15 June. Tourists from other EU countries may be permitted after 14 July (the Finnish government is expected to review restrictions again in two weeks’ time).
For the latest updates to coronavirus-related travel restrictions, click through below.
In Russia, President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov,has been asked if there is anything “strange” about the country’s official coronavirus death figures.
He gave a fairly straightforward answer: “No.”
Peskov earlier said the low mortality rate was due to a highly efficient Russian healthcare system, rather than statistical manipulation as some experts in Russia and abroad have suggested.
Last month Russian officials defended the country against claims that its unusually low mortality rate from Covid-19 was suspicious, saying its method of ascribing cause of death is “exceptionally precise”.
Reports that Moscow will report 57% more deaths for the month of May than in the three previous years, meanwhile, indicated the city’s coronavirus death toll for the month may be at least double the official tally, casting further doubt on the accuracy of Russia’s Covid-19 death figure.
The Russian capital reportedly had 5,799 “excess deaths” for the month of May but has recorded only 2,750 deaths primarily due to coronavirus. The data is in line with other major cities, including St Petersburg, where total mortality rates have shown thousands of deaths not reflected in official coronavirus tallies.
Russia has so far reported more than 500,000 cases, the world’s third-largest number, and 6,532 deaths – a tally that is significantly lower than in many other countries with serious outbreaks.
The World Health Organization said this week that Russia’s low death rate was “difficult to understand”.
They said the new tally included even the most “controversial, debatable” cases.
Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has said the latest scientific estimates are that the R rate, the rate at which Covid-19 infections are spreading in the community, has fallen in Scotland to between 0.6 to 0.8, confirming a steep decline in the number of people in hospital and deaths.
Sturgeon told the daily coronavirus briefing that “under that estimate we expect that the virus will continue to decline”. She cautioned that there was still a risk of a resurgence in infections, but added: “We should continue to celebrate the progress.”
As a result, she announced that workers would be allowed now to return to construction sites, while observing social distancing, but added that “we still have some way to go” before seeing building at full capacity.
In her daily summary, she announced five further deaths of those with confirmed Covid-19, with 909 people in hospital, 78 fewer than on Wednesday. Many of the key numbers have fallen in Scotland to the levels of mid- to late-March, leading Sturgeon to confirm the lockdown may be eased in Scotland more quickly.
The R number in Scotland had been between 0.7 and 0.9, and the number of infected people in Scotland last week is judged to have been 4,500.
The UK’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said 41,279 people had died in hospitals, care homes and the wider community after testing positive for coronavirus in the UK as of 5pm on Wednesday. That is a rise of 151 from 41,128 the day before.
The government’s figures do not include all deaths involving Covid-19 across the UK, which is thought to have passed 52,000.
The DHSC also said in the 24-hour period up to 9am on Thursday, 197,007 tests were carried out or dispatched, with 1,266 positive results.
Overall, a total of 6,240,801 tests have been carried out and 291,409 cases have been confirmed positive.
The figure for the number of people tested has been “temporarily paused to ensure consistent reporting” across all methods of testing.
Department of Health and Social Care (@DHSCgovuk)
As of 9am 11 June, there have been 6,240,801 tests, with 197,007 tests on 10 June.
291,409 people have tested positive.
As of 5pm on 10 June, of those tested positive for coronavirus, across all settings, 41,279 have sadly died.
You can follow all our UK coronavirus news over on our live blog
Another 1.5 million people in the US filed for unemployment benefits last week even as states continued to relax their coronavirus quarantine measures, writes Dominic Rushe and Amanda Holpuch in New York.
In just 12 weeks, more than 44m claims have been made for benefits as people lost their jobs. Rehiring appears to have started. Last week the labor department said the unemployment rate had dipped in May to 13.3% from 14.7% in April – although officials said difficulty collecting data meant the figure was probably 3% higher.
Yesterday Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve, said the central bank expected unemployment to dip to 9.3% by the year end, it was 3.5% in February. Powell warned that while the trend was positive, it would be “difficult for many people to find work” for “an extended period”.
Last week was the second week in a row that unemployment claims were below 2m, a sign that layoffs are slowing from the peak of 6.6m in April. However, the numbers remain historically high. In the last recession, the highest number of weekly unemployment claims peaked at 665,000 in March 2009, and the previous all-time mark was 695,000 in October 1982.
“The downward trend is obviously good news, but in the context of an economy that is reopening it is extremely high, especially when viewed against previous recessions,” James Knightley, the chief international economist at ING, wrote in a note to investors.
Nearly three-quarters of new cases of coronavirus are coming from 10 countries, mostly concentrated in the Americas and south Asia, the director general of the World Health Organization has said.
Speaking at the UN health agency’s member state briefing on Thursday, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the global situation was deteriorating, even as Europe appeared to be over the worst of the outbreak.
The biggest threat was complacency, he warned, as he called on countries to continue with “active surveillance” to ensure there was no rebound in infections in those countries past the peak of transmission.
Tedros said:
More than 7 million cases of Covid-19 have now been reported, and more than 408,000 deaths.
Although the situation in Europe is improving, at the global level, it is getting worse. More than 100,000 new cases have been reported each day for the most part of the past two weeks.
Almost 75% of recent cases come from 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and south Asia. Many countries in the African region are also experiencing an increase, although so far, in most, the caseload is still relatively small. We also see increasing numbers of cases in parts of eastern Europe and central Asia.
At the same time, we are encouraged that some countries around the world are seeing positive signs. The biggest threat now is complacency. Studies show that most people are still susceptible to infection. Countries must continue with active surveillance to ensure the virus does not rebound, especially as mass gatherings of all kinds are starting to resume.
Without proper safeguards and monitoring, a resurgence is a real threat.
Reuters has more from the coronavirus briefing earlier today by the World Health Organization’s regional office from Africa.
According to the Canadian-owned news agency, Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s Africa regional director, said that the Covid-19 pandemic is accelerating in Africa, spreading to the hinterland from capital cities where it arrived with travellers.
Ten countries are driving Africa’s epidemic, accounting for 75% of the roughly 207,600 cases recorded on the continent, with 5,000 deaths reported, according to Moeti. There was no indication that severe cases and deaths were being missed, nor had the virus caused significant infections in refugee camps across the continent, she said.
“Even though these cases in Africa account for less than 3% of the global total, it’s clear that the pandemic is accelerating,” Moeti told the briefing, according to Reuters. “We believe that large numbers of severe cases and deaths are not being missed in Africa.”
Africa’s population was relatively youthful and many countries had already established “point of entry” screening measures against Ebola fever – two factors which may have so far limited the spread of Covid-19, she said.
But lockdowns and market closures intended to contain coronavirus contagion had taken a heavy toll on marginalised communities and low-income families, Moeti said.
In South Africa, the region’s worst-affected country, high numbers of daily cases and deaths were being reported in Western Cape and Eastern Cape, she said, adding: “Specifically in the Western Cape where we are seeing a majority of cases and deaths, the trend seem to be similar to what was happening in Europe and in the US.”
A major challenge on the continent remained the availability of test kits, Moeti said.
“Until such time as we have access to an effective vaccine, I’m afraid we’ll probably have to live with a steady increase in the region, with some hotspots having to be managed in a number of countries, as is happening now in South Africa, Algeria, Cameroon for example, which require very strong public health measures, social distancing measures to take place.”
