Coronavirus live news: world may never find ‘silver bullet’ Covid vaccine, says WHO

Indoor soft play centres in the UK have started closing at an “alarming” rate which is much quicker than expected, according to the industry’s trade association.

The British Association of Leisure Parks, Piers and Attractions (BalppaA) said dozens of sites have already shut just a month after it warned almost two-thirds could close by October following the impact of coronavirus.

A survey, which included more than 60 different indoor play businesses, revealed 18% would have to close by the end of August, 24% by the end of September and a further 22% by the end of October.

It comes as Eddie Catz Softplay became the latest company to announce it is permanently closing two venues in south London.

A message on its Facebook page read:

As a small business owner having dedicated the last 15 years of my life to developing Eddie Catz into a national softplay chain the decision not to re-open has been incredibly hard and heart-breaking.

As you may know from media coverage, there is no scheduled opening date for our industry to reopen as a result of Covid-19.

This has been a devastating blow to all indoor soft play operators nationally and the industry is on the verge of collapse.

Other firms to shut in the past few weeks include Little Lambs Softplay & Roleplay Cafe in Coulsdon, The Big Fun House in Canterbury and Riverside Hub in Northampton.

Gordon Forster, of Balppa, told the PA news agency:

The latest closures are a huge kick in the teeth in the fight against obesity; indoor play centres are a hidden gem in keeping children active over the summer holidays, when venues would be at their busiest.

You can see from the outcry of parents on social media after every closure just how much these centres mean for communities.

Our warning last month has come certainly true, the rate of closures has already been alarming and is so quick that by October even more than we predicted could close.

It’s incredibly worrying, these businesses are often owned by individual operators and their personal circumstances are being seriously affected.

The governor of California has said rates of new Covid-19 cases, hospitalisations and intensive care unit admissions were all trending down in the state, according to the latest analysis.

Governor Gavin Newsom said in a briefing that the state’s Central Valley agricultural hub was still being hit disproportionately hard by the pandemic and that the data was not yet enough to consider lifting pandemic restrictions.

Newsom said:

This virus is not going away.

Its not going to take Labor Day weekend off, Halloween off, or the holidays off. Until we have a vaccine we are going to be living with this virus.

California, the nation’s most populous state with some 40 million residents, has recorded a total of 514,901 confirmed Covid-19 infections and 9,388 deaths, according to the governor’s office.

The state has administered more than 8m tests for Covid-19 and has seen the rate of positive results decline to 7% over the last 14 days, compared to 7.5% in the previous two weeks.

The US Treasury Department said it plans to borrow $947bn in the third quarter as it anticipates the government continuing to need to spend heavily in order to reduce the impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the economy.

Congress has already allocated about $3tn for coronavirus-related economic aid so far. Republicans and Democrats are currently at odds on a new coronavirus relief bill, after missing a vital deadline to extend relief benefits to tens of millions of jobless Americans.

The Treasury’s estimates “assume $1tn of additional borrowing need in anticipation of additional legislation being passed in response to the Covid-19 outbreak,” the department said in a statement on Monday.

Senior Treasury officials told reporters the estimates were tentative given uncertainty about the price tag of any future bill.

Tyson Foods is seeking to convince Beijing to lift a ban on US chicken shipments from an Arkansas plant where workers tested positive for Covid-19, says its president Dean Banks.

China has emerged as the largest export market for American poultry, overtaking Mexico this spring, after Beijing in November ended a nearly five-year embargo on imports from the United States.

Since June, China’s customs authority has blocked chicken from Tyson’s plant in Springdale, Arkansas, as part of an all-out effort to control the spread of Covid-19 in China.

Globally, Beijing has suspended imports from more than 20 overseas plants processing pork, beef and poultry.

Banks told reporters:

We’ve been interacting with them and making sure that they have all the information they need about the precautionary measures, the protective measures that plant has taken.

We’d love to continue to export product from that facility, but that’s in the hands of the Chinese government.

More than 16,000 US meatpacking workers have been infected with Covid-19 at dozens of plants, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Jim Sumner, president of the USA Poultry & Egg Export Council, said the United States is lucky Beijing suspended imports from just one American plant. As of last week, China had blocked six Brazilian facilities, according to Brazil’s agriculture ministry.

China is also testing imported meat and seafood for Covid-19, although processors say food cannot transmit the coronavirus.

China has increased imports as a deadly pig disease has decimated its herd over the past two years.

“We’ve seen a bottleneck in ports emerge a little bit due to testing,” Banks said. “Their demand is very, very strong right now and so they’re doing everything they can to keep things moving.”

Hi everyone, this is Jessica Murray taking over the coronavirus live blog for the next few hours.

Please do get in touch with any suggestions or story tips.

Email: jessica.murray@theguardian.com
Twitter: @journojess_

Here are the main headlines from our global coronavirus coverage so far on Monday:

• Confirmed cases of coronavirus passed 18 million, according to the tally kept by the Maryland, US-based Johns Hopkins University. The university’s coronavirus resource centre had counted 18,147,574 cases at the time of writing, with 690,573 deaths. The worst affected countries by caseload were, in order, the US, Brazil, India, Russia and South Africa.
• There might never be a “silver bullet” for Covid-19 in the form of a perfect vaccine, and the road to normality could be long, the World Health Organization said. The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and the emergencies chief, Mike Ryan, exhorted nations to rigorously enforce health measures such as mask-wearing, social distancing, hand-washing and testing.
• The capital of the Philippines and its outlying districts are to go back into lockdown after medical groups warned the country was waging “a losing battle” against the coronavirus. Metropolitan Manila and five densely populated provinces will revert to stricter quarantine restrictions for two weeks starting Tuesday, the president’s spokesman, Harry Roque, said on Monday.
• One person is dying from Covid-19 every seven minutes in Iran, state television said on Monday, as the country’s health ministry reported 215 new deaths from the disease. The combined death toll in Iran rose to 17,405 on Monday, Sima Sadat Lari, the health ministry spokeswoman, said, while the number of confirmed cases rose by 2,598 to 312,035. Of those, 270,228 have recovered.
• Some travellers arriving in Singapore will be required to wear electronic monitoring devices to ensure they are complying with quarantine restrictions, the city state’s government has announced. The devices, which use GPS and Bluetooth signals to track wearers, will be issued to people arriving from a select group of countries who will be allowed to isolate at home.
• The number of coronavirus patients admitted to intensive care units in Belgium has doubled in a month and the epidemic is spreading “intensively”, health officials warned on Monday. On average 2.7 people died of Covid-19 every day in Belgium in the last week of July, up by about a third from two in the previous seven days. At least 9,845 have died since the epidemic arrived.
• The Russian government said it aims to launch mass production of a coronavirus vaccine next month and turn out “several million” doses per month by next year. “We are very much counting on starting mass production in September,” the industry minister, Denis Manturov, said. Russia is pushing ahead with several vaccine prototypes.
• Australia will introduce a pandemic leave payment for workers who have run out of sick leave but need to be quarantined because they have been directed to stay at home due to the novel coronavirus, prime minister Scott Morrison said Monday. The announcement comes as the country deals with a second wave of infections and its second most populous state, Victoria, closes retail shops.

That’s it from me, Damien Gayle, for today.

About 1.5 million Italians – 2.5% of the population of Italy– may have already contracted coronavirus, nationwide antibody tests indicate, according to the Associated Press.

The figure, announced by health officials on Monday, is six times the number of confirmed cases in Italy’s official virus tally. The results — viewed with the country’s overall death toll of close to 35,000 —align with a 2.3% estimated mortality rate of the virus.

Dr Franco Locatelli, a key scientific government adviser, said the tests were designed to understand the virus’s circulation nationwide and not whether Italians with antibodies were safe from the virus.

The interests and input of indigenous peoples must be included in the global response to the coronavirus pandemic and any recovery strategy, the UN secretary general has said.

In a message ahead of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, observed on 9 August, António Guterres said the world’s 476 million indigenous people must be consulted in all recovery efforts.

Indigenous people’s communities have for generations been ravaged by diseases brought from elsewhere, Guterres said, adding that in the present crisis this vulnerability has been exacerbated by a lapsing of environmental protections.

Guterres said:

In the face of such threats, indigenous peoples have demonstrated extraordinary resilience. Indigenous communities with the autonomy to manage their lands, territories and resources have ensured food security and care through traditional crops and traditional medicine.

The Karen people of Thailand have revived their ancient ritual of kroh yee — or village closure — to fight the pandemic. Such strategies have been applied in other Asian countries and in Latin America, with communities closing off entry to their areas.

Realising the rights of indigenous peoples means ensuring their inclusion and participation in Covid-19 response and recovery strategies. Indigenous peoples must be consulted in all efforts to build back stronger and recover better.

Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s chief of staff has tested positive for coronavirus, becoming the seventh Brazilian minister to have contracted the disease.

General Walter Souza Braga Netto’s office announced on Monday that he had tested positive for the virus, adding that he is doing well and has no symptoms, according to Reuters.

He will remain in isolation until a new examination and medical evaluation is carried out, and will continue to work remotely.

Last week, Bolsonaro’s wife and one of his ministers tested positive for COVID-19. Bolsonaro also contracted the disease but his latest test showed he was no longer infected.

Brazil has the second-worst coronavirus outbreak in the world after the United States. The South American country has registered more than 2.73 million cases of the virus since the pandemic began, while the official death toll has risen to 94,104, according to health ministry data.

Spain on Monday reported 968 new coronavirus infections in the past day, showing a slower pace of contagion than last week when the country reported more than 1,000 new cases for three days in a row, according to Reuters.

Cumulative cases, which also include results from antibody tests on people who may have recovered, increased to 297,054 from 288,522, the health ministry said. The number of active clusters grew to 560 from 483 on Thursday, when they were last disclosed.

Researchers in Italy have found that Covid-19 survivors suffer higher rates of psychiatric disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, insomnia and depression, according to Reuters.

The survey by San Raffaele hospital in Milan showed that more than half of the 402 patients monitored after being treated for the virus experienced at least one of the disorders in proportion to the severity of the inflammation during the disease.

The patients – 265 men and 137 women – were examined at a one-month follow-up after hospital treatment. Based on clinical interviews and self-assessment questionnaires, physicians found PTSD in 28% of cases, depression in 31%, anxiety in 42% of patients and insomnia in 40%, and finally obsessive-compulsive symptoms in 20%.

The report was published on Monday in the scientific journal Brain, Behavior and Immunity. The study found that women in particular suffered the most from anxiety and depression, despite the lower severity of the infection, the statement said.

“We hypothesise that this may be due to the different functioning of the immune system,” said professor Francesco Benedetti, group leader of the research unit in psychiatry and clinical psychobiology at San Raffaele, in a statement.

A single cruise ship could have spread the coronavirus to dozens of towns and villages across the western coast of Norway, after an outbreak was discovered aboard which infected at least five passengers and 36 crew.

On Monday the Hurtigruten cruise line halted all trips and apologised for procedural errors which led to its liner, MS Roald Amundsen, continuing to sail as the outbreak spread on board, according to the Associated Press.

The 41 people on the MS Roald Amundsen who tested positive have been admitted to the University Hospital of North Norway in Tromsoe, north of the Arctic Circle, where the ship currently is docked.

Hurtigren said it had suspended the ship and two others – MS Fridtjof Nansen and MS Spitsbergen – from operating for an indefinite period.

It has contacted passengers who had been on the MS Roald Amundsen for its 17-24 July and 25-31 July trips from Bergen to Svalbard. The ship had 209 guests on the first voyage and 178 guests on the second. All other crew members tested negative.

But since the cruise line often acts like a local ferry, traveling from port to port along Norway’s western coast, the virus may not have been contained onboard. Some passengers disembarked along the route and may have spread the virus to their local communities.

As many as 69 towns in Norway could have been affected, Norwegian news agency NTB reported.

“A preliminary evaluation shows that there has been a failure in several of our internal procedures,” Hurtigruten’s CEO, Daniel Skjeldam, said in a statement. He added the company that sails along Norway’s picturesque coast between Bergen in the south and Kirkenes in the north is “now in the process of a full review of all procedures.”