Europe reopens borders but China battles new virus outbreak
BRUSSELS, Belgium — A raft of EU nations reopened their borders to fellow Europeans on Monday after months of coronavirus curbs, but China was battling a new outbreak that has stoked fears of a second wave.
As caseloads have declined in recent weeks across many parts of Europe, governments have been keen to ease punishing lockdowns that have saved lives but devastated economies and wearied confined populations.
Belgium, France, Germany and Greece were among those lifting border restrictions Monday, while Spain experimented with a pilot project that saw a planeload of German tourists fly into the Balearic islands.
In England, shops and outdoor attractions welcomed their first customers since March, while in Paris, cafes and restaurants were allowed to fully reopen.
"I'm happy to be able to shop again after all this time," said Precious, an 18-year-old student on London's crowded Oxford Street.
The pandemic is gathering pace in Latin America, and Iran, India and Saudi Arabia have reported worrying increases in deaths and infections — adding to concern over challenges the world will face in the long fight against COVID-19.
Mass testing
China, where the virus emerged late last year, was the first country to implement extreme restrictions on movement early this year, driving local transmission down to near-zero as the crisis hammered the rest of the world.
The World Health Organization said there were more than 100 new confirmed cases in Beijing where the fresh cluster has been linked to a wholesale food market.
"The origin and extent of the outbreak are being investigated," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.
Streams of people queued in a Beijing stadium as mass testing was carried out, and a strict lockdown was extended across 21 Beijing neighbourhoods.
Almost 433,500 people worldwide have died from COVID-19, nearly halfway through a year in which countless lives have been upended and the global economy ravaged by the crisis.
The United States is by far the hardest-hit country, with more than 115,700 recorded fatalities.
But while some states have seen new flare-ups, President Donald Trump's administration insists there will be no shutdown of the economy even if a new wave arises.
Global stock markets tumbled again on fears that an upsurge of infections could put the brakes on the easing of lockdowns and dash hopes of dragging economies out of recession.
Morgues overflowing
Iran, the Middle East's worst-hit country, warned it might have to reimpose tough measures to ensure social distancing, after reporting more than 100 deaths for a second straight day.
And the number of deaths in Saudi Arabia topped 1,000 amid a new spike in infections just weeks before the annual hajj pilgrimage to Islam's holiest sites.
In India, officials said 15 million people in the city of Chennai and neighbouring districts would go back under lockdown, as cases surged there.
The rise in infections in India — a country of 1.2 billion — has highlighted the precarious state of its healthcare system and in the capital Delhi morgues are overflowing with bodies.
'It's been five months'
Despite fears over fresh clusters, many countries are making moves towards semi-normality.
The European Union has even launched an app "Re-open EU" — available in 24 languages — to help travellers find out which EU countries they can travel to.
At Brussels Zanatem airport, Joy Kamel, a student travelling to join her father in France, waited to board a flight to Marseille after the transport hub finally reopened.
"It's been five months since I've seen him," she told AFP. "I'm in the middle of an exam but since I'm taking them online, I might as well take advantage of it."
In Paris, delighted restaurant and cafe owners were cleared to reopen their dining rooms, three months after the lockdown closed them — finally catching up with the rest of France.
"The question now is whether clients will come back," Albert Aidan, manager at L'Ami Georges in the heart of Paris, told AFP. "Most companies are still having their employees work from home."
Across the Channel, thousands of non-essential retailers such as bookshops and electronics outlets in England welcomed their first customers since halting in-store business in late March.
Places of worship also welcomed the faithful back for individual prayer.
Britain, which has the highest virus toll in Europe, is anxious to get back to work after figures last week showed the economy shrank by a fifth in April.
Greece was among those reopening to EU travellers to help revive its devastated tourist industry, but people were wary.
"Everyone's scared, maybe we'll catch the coronavirus," says Orestis Papoulias, manager of a beach bar on the black sand beach of Perissa on the island of Santorini.
Egypt, another tourist hub, said it will open its beach resorts in July, and Peru's Machu Picchu will also reopen next month, albeit with sharply reduced numbers of visitors.
And in European football, the English Premier League makes its long-awaited comeback this week, days after Spain's La Liga.
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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