Coronavirus live news: Russia records 10,000 new cases in a day as Wuhan prepares to test 11m residents

Day one of post-lockdown in France and the pavements flanking Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin and the pedestrianised roads along the banks of the Seine were invaded with newly liberated Parisians on Monday, forcing the police to evacuate the popular spots and issue a hastily drawn up ban on drinking alcohol in public places, writes Kim Willsher, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent.

Day two, and police moved in to shoo away people sitting on the steps leading to Sacré Coeur on Tuesday evening. City Hall says people are not actually breaking the rules, but “if everyone decides to go to the same place at the same time, that’s a problem”, an official said. French ministers have urged everyone to behave “responsibly and civically”.

Day three, and Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo repeated her wish to see the capital’s parks and gardens opened. Hidalgo has been lobbying the government for this, but without success. Health minister Olivier Véran said it would be too much of a health risk, given that the Paris region remains “red” on the coronavirus map, where the virus is still circulating and the hospital intensive care units are saturated.

On Wednesday, Hidalgo told BFMTV: “We have to open the parks and gardens as a matter of public health. You can take the metro but not walk in a park? If we don’t open them, Parisians will gather in other spaces, like pavements and (river) banks.”

The mayor agrees the end of lockdown measures have to be “progressive and with extreme care”, and said she would make it mandatory to wear a mask in parks and gardens if they were allowed to reopen.

There was a small spike in the number of Covid-19 hospital admissions reported at the daily update on Tuesday evening and an increase of 348 deaths in the previous 24 hours, bringing the total to just under 27,000. France has so far recorded 178,225 confirmed cases of coronavirus.

In a vision of what may become the future for workers in many sectors, Twitter will allow its employees to work from home “forever”, chief executive officer Jack Dorsey said in a company-wide email on Tuesday, according to a report by Guardian US technology writer Kari Paul.

A spokesperson from Twitter confirmed the decision to the Guardian, saying the company was “one of the first companies to go to a work-from-home model” due to Covid-19, but does not anticipate being one of the first to return to its offices.

The company said in a blogpost:

We were uniquely positioned to respond quickly and allow folks to work from home given our emphasis on decentralisation and supporting a distributed workforce capable of working from anywhere.

The past few months have proven we can make that work. So if our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen.

The number of confirmed cases of coronavirus has passed 5,000 in Afghanistan as the health ministry warned that easing lockdowns will bring a “catastrophe”, writes Akhtar Mohammad Makoii in Herat.

Out of 619 suspected patients tested over the last 24 hours, 259 came back positive, pushing the total number of infections to 5,226. The death toll now stands at 132, after five more patients died overnight,. There has so far been 648 recoveries.

Wahid Majrooh, the deputy health minister, warned people to heed the precautions and stay at home, adding: “If people continue to crowd on the streets and don’t heed [warnings], the catastrophe of coronavirus will continue to surge in cities.”

The northern province of Balkh recorded its worst day, after 49 patients tested positive. There have so far been 437 infections and 17 deaths in the province.

The number of transmissions continued to surge in Kandahar on Wednesday, with 29 new cases confirmed in the southern province. The governor of Kandahar is also struggling with the virus after he was infected last week.

The capital, Kabul, which is Afghanistan’s worst-affected area with 1,368 confirmed cases, reported 27 new infections. Kabul has so far recorded 18 deaths from Covid-19.

The western province of Herat, which has the highest number of deaths, recorded 22 new confirmed cases. The first case of Covid-19 in Afghanistan was reported in Herat and thousands of Afghan migrants poured back from Iran in February and March, fanning out across the country without being tested or quarantined.

Confirmed cases in the remote province of Zabul reached 30 after three more infections confirmed today. The province’s only hospital was destroyed in a Taliban attack last year.

Majrooh also said the death toll of Tuesday’s attack on a maternity hospital in Kabul reached 24, with 16 wounded, while 18 newborn babies were rescued from the scene.

Scientists say that the dramatic improvements in air quality associated with the coronavirus lockdown may bring warmer temperatures and heavier monsoon rains this year, writes Kate Ravilious for the Guardian’s science desk.

With factories closed and roads relatively empty, air pollution in cities across Asia, Europe and the US has dropped by as much as 60% in recent weeks. The lack of haze has made skies bluer and some people in northern India have been able to see the Himalayas for the first time in 30 years.

It also means that with fewer particles and polluting gases to hinder its path, more sunlight is able to reach the Earth’s surface.

Earlier this year, scientists confirmed that cleaner skies in recent decades have caused a brightening of the Earth’s surface. Satellite measurements show that Europe experienced a surface dimming effect until the late 1980s, followed by a brightening effect as air pollution regulations kicked in. China followed a similar pattern, but had to wait until 2005 for brightening to set in.

The cleaner skies resulting from lockdown are likely to have enhanced the brightening effect even further, but measuring the impact on climate is not straightforward.

“Aerosols can scatter and absorb radiation. They can also modify clouds to make them more reflective and longer lived,” explains Laura Wilcox, a climate scientist at the University of Reading.

Rightwing militia groups in Michigan plan to rally at the state capitol building on Thursday to protest Democratic governor Gretchen Whitmer’s stay-at-home orders, writes Tom Perkins in Detroit.

Thursday’s demonstration will be the latest in a series of protests that started as a demonstration against the lockdown policy but are now generating fears of an eruption of political violence.

The state is currently investigating what the Michigan attorney general, Dana Nessel, characterized on Monday as “credible threats” against state Democratic politicians. Her comments followed a report of threats of violence on rightwing social media pages.

Residents posting in the Michiganders Against Excessive Quarantine Facebook page called for Whitmer’s assassination. “Wonder how long till she’s hit with a shotgun blast,” one wrote. Another said they hope Thursday’s protesters are “armed to the teeth” because “voting is too late”.

Dramatic images from a 30 April protest showed militia members carrying assault rifles while glaring and shouting from the galleries of the state legislature as an emotional debate over extending a stay-at-home order took place. In response, a black lawmaker last week came to Michigan’s capitol with an escort of armed black citizens.

New coronavirus hotspots are emerging in Republican heartland communities across multiple states, contradicting Donald Trump’s claims that infection rates are declining across the nation.

At a fraught press briefing on Monday, the president declared: “All throughout the country, the numbers are coming down rapidly.”

Yet county-specific figures show a surge in infection rates in towns and rural communities in red states such as Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, Kentucky and North and South Dakota, according to data tracking by the New York Times.

Trump’s claim is also contradicted by data used by the White House’s own pandemic taskforce to track new and emerging hotspots.

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A Russian healthcare watchdog has suspended the use of a domestically manufactured ventilator suspected to have caused two deadly fires in Russian hospitals in the last week.

Six people died and hundreds were forced to evacuate hospitals in Moscow and St Petersburg after the Russian-made ventilators were said to have ignited, apparently while patients were attached.

On Wednesday, Russia’s federal service for surveillance in healthcare said it would suspend the use of new Aventa-M ventilators produced after 1 April pending a safety review, a decision that will affect hundreds of machines.

Aventa-M ventilators were also sold to the United States last month during a controversial aid mission negotiated by Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. US hospitals reportedly had not used the ventilators because they were manufactured for the wrong voltage. It is not clear when those ventilators were produced.

The US federal emergency management agency (FEMA) said on Tuesday that the ventilators were not in use in US hospitals and that local authorities would return the machines to FEMA.

Russia’s Investigative Committee has said it is investigating the fires in Russian hospitals. The decision by the Russian watchdog could affect hundreds of ventilators that have been produced since April as Russian hospitals sought new supplies to prepare for a flood of coronavirus cases.

Five coronavirus patients, some reportedly attached to ventilators, died in the early hours of Tuesday after a fire broke out at the St George hospital in St Petersburg. A fire last week at a Moscow hospital treating coronavirus patients also killed one person. That fire may also have been tied to a faulty ventilator. Both hospitals were reportedly using Aventa-M ventilators produced by a state-run factory in Russia’s Urals region.

An April tender showed that last month the St George hospital had ordered 237 ventilators from the factory, which is the only manufacturer of that ventilator in the country.

The continuing ban on public and religious gatherings in Nigeria has led to increasingly divided reactions from Churches in Nigeria.

In recent weeks, two of the most influential mega-church pastors in the country have grown in hostility to the government’s lockdown measures, and questioned the severity of the pandemic altogether.

Bishop David Oyedepo, the founder of Living Faith Tabernacle has been among the most ardent critics of the ban on places of worship. Its main branch on the outskirts of Lagos draws 50,000 people. Earlier this week Oyedepo said the closure of churches while hospitals and markets were open amounted to a conspiracy against Churches.

“There is something wrong; for people to be allowed to be in the market for six hours and can’t be in church for two hours. I can smell a rat,” he said this week. “The voice of darkness is influencing people at various levels, targeting the church because the growth and expansion of the church is the greatest headache of the devil. I declare churches open.”

Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s Christ Embassy is spread around the world with a main branch in Lagos seating 30,000 people. The pastor has been a consistent critic of measures to tackle the pandemic. “The lockdown is not science,” he said in a sermon on Tuesday. The wearing of facemasks in public was “an embarrassment to science”, he added. He has also previously linked Covid-19 to 5G mobile phone networks, fuelling a conspiracy theory that has spread around the world.

Both church leaders have faced criticism for their comments, not least from fellow church pastors. Pastor Tunde Bakare, the head of The Citadel Global Community Church, where the main hall in Lagos seats 5,000, this week donated two church buildings and a private residence to Nigerian states for isolation centres.

“Churches with multiple facilities, rather than their leaders criticising the government should collaborate with them,” he said. “They must be prepared to offer some of their halls to the government as isolation centres, in support of the efforts of the government.”

In a further boost to Nigeria’s Covid-19 response, the Catholic Church in Nigeria this week donated all of its 425 medical facilities across the country to the government to serve as isolation and treatment centres. Nigeria’s predominantly deeply religious population is evenly split between Christians and Muslims according to government surveys.

The effect of the lockdown on religious life has been immense. Yet many Nigerian Christians are increasingly calling on the country’s mega churches to donate their now empty auditoriums as the country rushes to build its health capacity. New infections of Covid-19 in Nigeria are growing, now at 4,787, doubling in the last 12 days. 158 people have lost their lives and 959 people have recovered.