Coronavirus live news: thousands turn out for Belarus VE Day parade, as Russia infections near 200,000
As Spain’s daily death toll fell to its second lowest since mid-March on Saturday, half of the country prepared to move into the next phase of exit from one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns.
The first phase includes a considerable easing of measures, allowing people to move around their province as well as attending concerts and the theatre. Gatherings of up to 10 people will be allowed.
On Monday, 51% of the population will progress to phase one of a four-step easing plan after the government decided the regions in which they lived met the necessary criteria.
In regions that made the cut, including the Canary and Balearic Islands, bars, restaurants and shops will open at reduced capacity, and museums, gyms and hotels will open their doors for the first time in nearly two months. However, the country’s two biggest cities – Madrid and Barcelona – do not currently meet the criteria for easing.
It comes as the Covid-19 daily death toll in the country fell to 179 on Saturday, down from 229 the previous day and a fraction of highs above 900 seen in early April. The cumulative death total rose to 26,478, while the number of diagnosed cases rose to 223,578 from 222,857 the day before, the health ministry said.
It is known as the city of love so it’s perhaps fitting that in Paris last night there was a touching amendment requested to the French government’s “state of health emergency” bill when MPs debated it at the Assemblée Nationale.
Discussing the bill, which will extend the coronavirus measures until 23 July, MP Mireille Clapot suggested that “love” be added to the “compelling reasons” that must be given for anyone to travel more than 100km (62 miles).
Presenting what she called her “lovers amendment”, the MP for Emmanuel Macron’s ruling LREM party said the strict lockdown – which will be eased from Monday – had led to couples being separated since mid-March. “The law has put so many restraints on public freedoms that it has more or less banned love,” Clapot told the house.
She said the current reasons justifying long journeys after Monday for “compelling professional or family reasons” meant couples who were geographically separated – whether married, in civil partnerships or simply together – were suffering.
The health minister, Olivier Véran, said the government did not want to increase the number of exceptions to the rules and could not accept the amendment. However, before anyone could accuse him of being hard-hearted, he thanked the MP for “this tender moment” in the house.
Czech Airlines will restart part of its operations later this month after a six-week interruption.
The airline will resume some of its services on 18 May, with flights to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Paris and Stockholm among those reopened in the first wave. On 24 May the route to Kiev will reopen, followed by Odessa and Bucharest on 25 May, it said.
Passengers will be required to wear face masks during the entire flight, and a distance of two metres from person to person will be enforced. The cabin will undergo disinfection before and after each flight, the airline said.
Indonesia has reported its biggest daily increase in coronavirus infections, with 533 new confirmed cases taking the total number to 13,645.
But with Indonesia’s low testing rate criticised by medical experts, the number of infections in the country – which has the fourth biggest population in the world – is feared to be far higher than official figures show.
Achmad Yurianto, a health ministry official, said 16 more people had died from the disease, taking the total to 959, while 2,607 had recovered. Nearly 108,700 people had been tested as of Saturday, he added, and he urged Indonesians to continue obeying stay-at-home orders.
Meanwhile, Malaysia’s health authorities reported 54 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, making a total of 6,589 in the country. One new death was recorded, bringing total fatalities to 108.
Japan’s capital, Tokyo, reported 36 new cases of coronavirus infections on Saturday, TV Asahi said, three fewer than a day earlier, meaning a seventh consecutive day that new infections remained below 100. The latest figures, for which the broadcaster cited unnamed sources, bring total coronavirus infections in Tokyo to 4,846.
Spain’s daily Covid-19 death tolls are continuing to fall, with 179 new fatalities reported on Saturday, down from 229 the previous day.
Overall deaths rose to 26,478, from 26,299 on Friday, with the number of confirmed coronavirus cases rising to 223,578 from 222,857 the day before, the country’s health ministry said.
Elsewhere, Slovakia recorded no new cases of coronavirus on Friday for the first time since 10 March. The country of 5.5 million has had fewer cases and deaths than neighbouring nations, with cases totalling 1,455 and 26 people dying after contracting the disease. On Wednesday the country reopened all shops outside shopping malls, hotels, museums, galleries and outdoor tourist attractions and allowed religious services and weddings with limited numbers of guests.
Schools remain closed, however, and international passenger travel is still not possible. People returning from abroad must go to state-run quarantine centres for 14 days
Thousands of people, including elderly veterans of the second world war, have turned out for Belarus’s Victory Day military parade despite the coronavirus epidemic.
Images from the parade showed crowds packed on to parade bleachers as the country’s leader, Alexander Lukashenka, boasted of holding the only parade in the former Soviet Union to mark the defeat of Nazi Germany.
Russia and other countries have cancelled their s and move many of the celebrations online.
“In this insane, disoriented world, there will be people who condemn us for the time and place of this sacred act,” Lukashenka said defiantly. “Don’t rush to conclusions or condemn us, descendants of the victory of Belarusians. We couldn’t have acted differently. We had no other choice. And even if we had one, we would have done the same.”
But one Belarusian journalist expressed concern at higher-risk attendees at the parade.
Hanna Liubakova
(@HannaLiubakova)These are pictures of people at higher risk attending the parade (c)@Reuters. It is hard to say whether they came voluntarily. But one thing is certain:dangers and risks were not explained to them properly.The level of ignorance of the authorities is just scary #Belarus #COVID19 pic.twitter.com/H28njlPRyd
Meanwhile, the BBC’s Moscow correspondent wrote on Twitter:
Sarah Rainsford
(@sarahrainsford)Belarus marks the 75th anniversary of Victory Day as if there was no such thing as coronavirus. Even veterans turned out.
The country suffered massive losses in WWII, there’s a lot to commemorate. But in a pandemic?
So far, more than 21,000 have tested + for Covid19. pic.twitter.com/HLSOhsfIRb
Lukashenka has publicly downplayed the epidemic, appearing at Orthodox Easter services and other public events and telling reporters that the virus is not as deadly as has been claimed. Belarus is the only country in Europe to continue holding football matches during the crisis.
The country officially has 21,101 cases of coronavirus and 121 deaths from the disease. Local activists have played an important role in crowdfunding the country’s response to the disease and making up for shortages at local hospitals.
In Moscow, Vladimir Putin laid flowers at the eternal flame near the Kremlin this week and vowed to hold the parade and a memorial march called the Immortal Regiment by year’s end.
The former French president François Hollande has spoken of his concern for women suffering domestic abuse during the lockdown, as he endorsed a new app to help female victims of violence.
In an interview with the Guardian, Hollande called for schoolchildren to be taught that violence at home was unacceptable but that it affected every social group. “There’s this idea that it’s just a problem in working-class settings or immigrant areas, but this is so wrong. It happens in all types of families,” he said.
For too long violence against women has been pushed aside because it was considered part of the personal, the private, and not something that concerned society.”
Hollande was speaking to support a new phone app developed in France but also available in the UK and a dozen other countries, to help female victims of violence whether at home, in the workplace or in public.
App-Elles, available for Android or iOS, allows women and girls to discreetly alert three trusted contacts when they are being attacked, allowing them to call the police if necessary. As well as a GPS alert, a recording is made of the attack in real time on the victim’s and contacts’ phones.
The coronavirus death toll in the Philippines has passed 700 as the country recorded eight new fatalities.
Confirmed Covid-19 infections increased by 147 to 10,610, the country’s health ministry reported. Meanwhile, 108 recovered, bringing total recoveries to 1,842. The country recorded eight new coronavirus deaths, with the total climbing to 704, the health ministry said in a bulletin.
On Tuesday the Philippines’ biggest broadcaster, ABS-CBN, was forced off air by a cease-and-desist order that has been condemned as a brazen attack on press freedom.
The media group, which has been repeatedly attacked by the country’s president, Rodrigo Duterte, has faced months of uncertainty over its future, but it had been expected that the network would be allowed to continue broadcasting during the coronavirus lockdown, when access to reliable information is crucial to public health.
Russia has been hit with more than 10,000 new Covid-19 cases in the last day, as the country approaches nearly 200,000 confirmed infections with lockdown measures continuing.
The country’s coronavirus taskforce confirmed 104 people had died overnight, bringing the nation’s coronavirus death toll to 1,827.
On Saturday, the total number of confirmed cases in Russia reached 198,676 after 10,817 new infections were recorded. It is a slightly higher rise than previous day, when there were 10,699 new cases. Russia’s coronavirus cases overtook France and Germany this week to become the fifth highest in the world.
Confirmed coronavirus cases in Afghanistan have passed 4,000 following the highest one-day rise in infections in the country’s third largest city, Herat.
Six patients died overnight, increasing the Covid-19 death toll in the country to 115, with the total number of infections reaching 4,033, including 392 health workers. Six health workers have died from Covid-19.
Of the new infections, 71 were recorded in the western province of Herat, which borders Iran. More than 250,000 Afghans have returned home from Iran – which has recorded in excess of 100,000 confirmed cases – since the beginning of the year, fanning out across the country without being tested or quarantined.
Afghanistan’s health ministry has warned of a human catastrophe amid intensified conflict with the Taliban, which killed 43 civilians in the first 10 days of Ramadan.
Wahid Majroh, a deputy health minister, said on Saturday that a “big human catastrophe will take place” if people continued to break lockdown rules, adding that concerns had reached the “highest level”.
Despite a government-authorised lockdown in several provinces, cities are still crowded, raising fears among experts that the true number of Covid-19 infections may be significantly higher than official figures.
Some 529 suspected patients have been tested in the last 24 hours in the war-torn country, with 253 positive results. The deputy health minister insisted that patients with severe symptoms were tested, adding that the ministry is increasing hospital beds for Covid-19 patients.
Ferozuddin Feroz, the health minister, who was infected with the virus on Thursday, is in a “good condition”, Majroh said.
Akhtar Mohammad Makoii
(@akhtar_makoii)Total infections: 4,033
New infections: 253
May8: 215
May7: 171
May6: 168
May5: 330
May4: 190
May3: 235
May2: 179
May1: 164
Apr30: 232
Apr29:110
Ap28: 125
Ap27: 172
Ap26: 68
Ap25: 133
Ap24: 95
Ap23: 83
Ap22:51
Ap21:66
Ap20:30Death toll: 115
Recoveries: 502
After three days of recording numbers below 20 in Kandahar, the number of transmissions increased in the southern province as 43 patients tested positive. The capital, Kabul, which is Afghanistan’s worst-affected area, recorded four new patients with Covid-19 out of 43 tests, Majroh said.
As debates rage in other countries about the return of professional football, games will be played on the Faroe Islands today for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak.
The north Atlantic archipelago, located 370 miles north of Scotland with a population of just 50,000, will provide some much-needed respite to football fans when games restart in the country’s 10-team top flight.
Normally, matches in the country’s league are watched by fewer than 1,000 fans in the terraces but now, given the lack of football elsewhere, TV audiences will be tuning in from Norway and Denmark for the first game, which is being held behind closed doors.
Mikkjal Thomassen, manager of KL KLasksvik, the top league’s reigning champions, told BBC Breakfast: “It’s just strange times, we are excited of course, very excited to be back.”
He added: “We are privileged to be in the spotlight for a moment, we will enjoy it and give it our best.”
Thomassen said he was thankful no one had died on the Faroe Islands after contracting Covid-19. “Last night, officially, we came down to zero incidents in the Faroes. There’s been a really loyal and active fight against corona and people have respected and so it went very well. There’s been no deaths, as you know.”
Any staff or players with symptoms have been tested and all have returned negative results, Thomassen added. “There has been a massive testing in the Faroes, more than 10% of the population has been tested,” he said.
South Korea’s K league restarted yesterday and Germany’s Bundesliga has been given the green light to resume on 16 May. The Belarusian Premier League prompted controversy by carrying on with matches despite the outbreak.
China is set to reform its disease prevention and control system, a senior health official has confirmed, after mounting criticism that the country was initially slow to react to the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Reuters, Li Bin, a vice-minister of the China National Health Commission, told reporters on Saturday:
This coronavirus epidemic is a big test of our country’s governance and governing ability, and it exposed the weak links in how we address major epidemic and public health systems.”
The commission will build a “centralised and efficient” chain of command, and modernise the disease prevention and control system, he said.
It is also aiming to improve the use of big data, artificial intelligence and cloud computing to better trace and analyse diseases and distribute resources.
Li Bin said the commission was also planning to step up research on core technology, improve medical insurance and ensure better availability of emergency materials.
As China eases lockdown measures, it has not recorded any new deaths from coronavirus for 24 days.
Read the original article at The Guardian