Coronavirus live news: Spain eases restrictions in major cities; Japan to end state of emergency
Hello, it’s Frances Perraudin here again. I’ll be taking over the live blog while Damien has a break. You can contact me with hints and tips on frances.perraudin@theguardian.com and on twitter @fperraudin.
The Spanish arm of the international charity Médecins Sans Frontières has ended its coronavirus operations in the country, writes Sam Jones, the Guardian’s Madrid correspondent.
For the past two months, MSF Spain has been running field hospitals and working to relieve some of the strains on the country’s overstretched health system.
On Monday, the NGO said it was winding up its activities as Spain’s hospitals “have passed the most critical point”. But it warned that the hard-won gains against the virus could not be taken for granted and that systemic problems needed to be addressed.
David Noguera, the head of MSF Spain, said:
Everyone now appreciates what this epidemic means for the most vulnerable sectors of the population, such as older people in care homes. It would be unacceptable for our system not to be more prepared in order to avoid the repetition of the tragic situations and deaths we’ve seen.
Noguera pointed out that more than 19,000 people had died in Spanish care homes, adding: “The dignity of the most vulnerable people in our society need to be our common focus.”
The Netherlands reported 209 more confirmed cases of coronavirus on Monday, taking its cumulative total to 45,445, as officials said a second Dutch worker may have been infected by a mink.
According to the latest update from the Dutch national institute for public health and the environment, eight more people have died from Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the new virus, taking the country’s total death toll from the outbreak to 5,830.
It came as the agriculture minister said on Monday that another person had been infected while working on a mink farm. The case follows a reported infection last week on one of two farms near the southern city of Eindhoven, where the disease was discovered in April among mink that are bred for their valuable fur.
“A second case has become known where on one of the mink farms SARS-CoV-2 has been passed from a mink to a human,” Carola Schouten said, according to AFP.
“The case is similar to the previous one,” she said in a letter to the Dutch parliament.
The infection happened before it was known the mink were carrying the virus, meaning workers did not wear protective clothing at the time.
Newspapers in Brazil continue to rebel against President Jair Bolsonaro’s response to Covid-19, writes Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent.
On Monday, with Brazil’s official death toll at 22,666, Rio de Janeiro’s O Dia newspaper led its coverage with this striking front page:
Tom Phillips
(@tomphillipsin)Wow: the front page of one of Rio’s major papers this morning asks: “Where will this end?” Its answer: in a Bolsonaro-shaped grave ht @mvitorodrigues pic.twitter.com/VcuUBv2Sge
Bolsonaro continues to cause outrage in Brazil by playing down the pandemic and flouting social distancing guidelines. On Saturday he was branded a “killer” by opponents as he popped out for a Saturday night hotdog on the day a further 965 of his citizens were reported to have died.
Foreign newspapers have also joined the criticism of Bolsonaro. On Monday the Telegraph in the UK branded Bolsonaro “the man who broke Brazil”.
Thirty-four more people in Iran have died from Covid-19 in the past 24 hours, the health ministry reports. But the lowest daily Covid-19 death toll in the country since March comes amid an apparently rise in new coronavirus cases.
In his daily update, Kianoush Jahanpour, the health ministry spokesman, said 2,023 more Iranians had tested positive for the virus since yesterday, taking the total cumulative total number of cases in the country to 137,724. Daily new cases have been rising, on average, since 2 May, when the country recorded 802 new infections, but are still well short of a high of 3,186 reported on 30 March.
The Covid-19 death toll in Iran is 7,451, while 107,713 have recovered, Jahanpour said.
A fortnight after the end of France’s strict eight-week lockdown, parks and gardens in Paris remain closed to city-dwellers, many of whom spent the confinement cooped up in apartments with no outside space, writes Kim Willsher, in the French capital.
While the city’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, continues her battle with the government to have the spaces opened – so far unsuccessfully – an unlikely hero has emerged from the night-time shadows.
An anonymous lock-picker calling himself José, who says he has a full-time and perfectly respectable day job, is spending his evenings cracking park padlocks.
“I’m not a thief, I steal nothing …,” he said.
“But everything is closed, it’s worse than before the lockdown. I saw some children playing in the road in front of a locked-up park and it seemed so stupid. So I decided to open up a green corridor. I leave the gates open and people can do what they want.”
José says the smiles on childrens’ faces when they discover their local park is open is worth the risk. If caught he risks five years in prison and a maximum €75,000 fine.
Greece has taken another step towards normality today, reinstating ferry links with islands and allowing restaurants, cafes and bars to reopen, writes Helena Smith in Athens.
The moves, designed to kick-start the country’s tourist industry ahead of seasonal hotels reopening on 15 June, follow almost three months of enforced closure thanks to coronavirus. In central Athens cafes began filling up from early morning – although it wasn’t quite business as usual. Waiters wore face coverings and, though not everywhere, hand sanitisers were visible on tables.
Yachting industry activities also kicked off as the Greek government gradually opens up the sector in advance of seasonal hotels accepting guests in mid-June and international flights resuming to popular destinations on 1 July.
In a nation so reliant on tourism – one in five Greeks work in the sector, which accounts for almost 25% of GDP – officials are desperate to capitalise on the country’s successful handling of the pandemic and salvage what is left of the season.
But reopening borders is also replete with risk. With less than 3,000 confirmed coronavirus cases to date and a death toll of 172, questions are mounting over the ability of rudimentary health services on popular islands to deal with any outbreak of the virus. So far Greek isles have remained remarkably coronavirus-free.
Civil protection officials and personnel from the national public health organisation have been dispatched to remote isles such as Kimolos, Folegrandos and Sikinos to look at boosting medical infrastructure in advance of tourists arrivals.
To hunker in a medieval castle while a pandemic rages outside sounds like a Black Death chronicle but Laura Jamieson and Michael Smith have rather enjoyed their lockdown, writes Rory Carroll, the Guardian’s Dublin correspondent.
The young couple have been the sole occupants of Ashford Castle, a five-star hotel with 83 rooms on the shores of Lough Corrib in county Mayo that is one of Ireland’s premier tourist magnets.
Jamieson, from Surrey, and Smith, from Perthshire in Scotland, usually live in the nearby village of Cross and commute to the castle for work but have spent the past two months living there while maintaining the buildings and 350-acre estate until tourists return. “It’s like being in a TV reality show that’s nobody watching,” Smith told RTE.
Duties include flushing 160 toilets, dusting chandeliers and fielding emails and phone calls. The working day often ends with a visit to the school of falconry to check on the owls and hawks. For date night they choose a bottle from the wine cellar to accompany a film at the 32-seat private cinema.
The couple consider their quarantine there a once-in-a-lifetime adventure – a story of happy isolation in a big hotel that could be a Ladybird book reworking of Stephen King’s The Shining.
Ashford Castle was built in the 13th century, rebuilt in Victorian times and subsequently refurbished. US presidents, Barbra Streisand and Brad Pitt have stayed there. Jamieson and Smith are due to move back to their more modest digs before the castle reopens on 20 July.
Afghanistan’s health ministry has pledged to establish three more medical centres for Covid-19 patients in Kabul, as the capital experienced a record rise in infections and the number of confirmed cases nationwide passed 11,000, Akhtar Mohammad Makoii reports from Herat.
Ferozuddin Feroz, the health minister, said in a meeting with his deputies on Monday that three more centres will be established in Kabul for Covid-19 patients. Last week the ministry said it had run out of hospital beds for treating patients with the disease in most parts of the country.
“The hospitals which had empty beds until 10 days ago and we were sending patients to, are packed, with no more beds. We should launch more hospitals immediately,” Wahid Majroh, deputy health minister said last week.
The health ministry said it had tested 1,095 more suspected patients, of whom 591 were positive, taking the total number of confirmed infections to 11,173. The official death toll reached 219 after one more patient died overnight. There have been 1,097 recoveries.
The ministry has pledged to increase the number of daily tests – it has tested 31,718 suspected patients since the outbreak began.
Most of the new infections were reported in Kabul, where 390 cases came back positive out of 697 tests. Kabul is the country’s worst-affected area in number of transmissions, with 4,141 confirmed cases and 29 deaths.
The eastern province of Nangarhar and the western province of Herat, which have both recorded surges in the number of new infections in recent days, recorded 80 new cases combined. Herat is the country’s worst-affected area for deaths, with 36.
Sunday was the first day of Eid in Afghanistan and concerns are high as streets are crowded with people, despite the government-mandated lockdown, According to a Guardian tally, Afghanistan recorded 3,920 new cases in the seven days before Eid – a record high.
Meanwhile, after recent violence, the country is experiencing a rare period of calm, with the Taliban and Afghan government announcing a three-day Eid ceasefire. Local media reported there were only two security incidents recorded on the first day of Eid.
Read the original article at The Guardian