China lifts Wuhan travel ban, Britain, New York report record deaths
WASHINGTON, United States — China lifted a travel ban on Tuesday on residents of Wuhan, where the coronavirus pandemic began last year, and reported no new deaths, but the situation remained grim elsewhere as Britain and New York State recorded their highest number of fatalities yet.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson remained in intensive care, meanwhile, after being admitted to a London hospital on Monday evening, 10 days after being diagnosed with the virus.
His spokesman said the 55-year-old Conservative leader was in stable condition and "good spirits." He was receiving "standard oxygen treatment" and has not required a ventilator.
The shocking hospitalization of a major world leader underscored the global reach of COVID-19, which has put more than four billion people — over half of the planet — on some form of lockdown, upended societies and battered economies worldwide.
Amid warnings that worse is yet to come, death tolls mounted in a crisis that has now claimed more than 80,000 lives out of nearly 1.4 million confirmed cases around the world.
While other major cities around the world remained locked down, thousands of people rushed to leave Wuhan after the Chinese authorities lifted a more than two-month ban on travel from the city in Hubei Province.
"Wuhan people have paid a big price," a 21-year-old man surnamed Yao said at the Wuchang train station.
"Now that the lockdown has been lifted, I think we're all pretty happy," said Yao, who was heading back to his restaurant job in Shanghai.
Flights also resumed at Wuhan's international airport and roadblocks were removed around the city.
The National Health Commission said Tuesday that no new deaths had been logged in the preceding 24 hours, the first fatality-free day since China began publishing figures in January.
China's official tally is some 81,000 overall infections and more than 3,300 deaths but there are suspicions Beijing has under-reported the real numbers.
'Eye of the storm'
Britain reported 786 new deaths and New York state saw 731 in 24 hours, after Spain, France and Italy all recorded new surges in fatalities.
New research showed Britain's toll on a steeper trajectory than other nations and predicted as many as 66,000 deaths by July, far more than in Italy, which has the highest fatalities to date — 17,127.
Paris on Tuesday banned daytime jogging to keep people from bending anti-coronavirus lockdown rules as France breached 10,000 deaths.
But there were glimmers of hope in the statistics.
Spain said its downward trend in new infections and deaths was continuing and increases in fatalities on Monday and Tuesday were the result of weekend deaths being tallied.
Eduardo Fernandez, a 39-year-old nurse at Madrid's Infanta Sofia Hospital, said there had been fewer admissions in recent days.
"But we remain much above our usual capacity," he cautioned.
"I don't know if my colleagues who are in the eye of the storm are able to see (the decrease) because the work pressure is very high."
Iran's parliament convened for the first time since late February as the country reported a drop in new infections for the seventh straight day.
China and other Asian nations have raised alarm over a possible second wave of infections, and Beijing only started gradually easing restrictions in Wuhan in recent weeks.
'This is ridiculous'
In New York, the epicenter of the US outbreak, Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state appeared be nearing the peak of its pandemic, with a three-day average of hospitalizations down.
Intensive care admissions and intubations also declined.
He said social distancing was working and urged New Yorkers to remain indoors.
"I know it's hard but we have to keep doing it," Cuomo said.
Despite stay-at-home orders in another US state, Wisconsin, voters were going to the polls to cast ballots in the Democratic presidential primary and local elections.
The governor of the midwestern US state attempted to postpone the election through executive order, citing the risks to poll workers and voters, but was overruled by the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel showed a mask-wearing woman in line to vote at a high school holding a sign bearing a message summing up her view of voting during a pandemic: "THIS IS RIDICULOUS."
As the virus continues to exact a deadly toll worldwide, people have been forced to improvise, with bodies packed in cardboard coffins in Ecuador and a city official in New York raising the possibility of carrying out temporary burials in a public park.
New York City funeral home director Pat Marmo said he was dealing with three times more bodies than normal. "It's almost like 9/11, going on for days and days and days," he said.
Economic fallout
Governments are scrambling to put together rescue packages to stem the economic damage from effectively shutting down global commerce, as fears loom of a devastating recession.
The UN's International Labour Organization said 81 percent of the global workforce of 3.3 billion people are now affected by "the worst global crisis since the Second World War."
Japan, which declared a month-long state of emergency on Tuesday, has promised a $1-trillion stimulus package, a staggering 20 percent of GDP in the world's third-largest economy.
With the ink barely dry on a $2-trillion economic rescue package passed by Congress, US President Donald Trump has said he favors another massive spending program, worth another roughly $2 trillion, but this time targeting infrastructure projects.
EU finance ministers were working on a deal to use the eurozone's 410-billion-euro ($447 billion) bailout fund to fight the virus but the bloc remains divided on pooling debt to issue "coronabonds."
Stock markets were up across Asia and Europe but Wall Street finished slightly lower.
The EU announced it would put up 15 billion euros to help developing countries fight the epidemic, which is only starting to spread in some of the world's poorest countries. — with Jing Xuan Teng in Wuhan
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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