Global cases pass 6.3m; alert issued in Tokyo amid fear of new surge in cases – as it happened

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3 Jun 202019.02 EDT

Brazil deaths pass 30,000

Tom Phillips

A record 1,262 Covid-19 deaths have been recorded in Brazil today - taking the country’s total death toll to 31,199 - but the president continues to downplay the pandemic.

The figures were announced on Tuesday evening by Brazil’s health ministry, which also said the number of coronavirus cases had risen to 555,383, second only to the United States.

The South American country is now on the verge of overtaking Italy, where 33,530 deaths have been recorded, as the country with the third highest number of deaths.

But Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, who has dismissed Covid-19 as a “little flu”, again brushed off the tragedy on Tuesday.

“I regret each of the deaths - but that’s everyone’s destiny,” Bolsonaro told supporters outside his palace in the capitalBrasília.

Brazil’s most populous state, São Paulo, registered a record number of deaths on Tuesday taking the total number of fatalities there to nearly 8,000. Rio de Janeiro has Brazil’s second highest death toll with 5,686 deaths, followed by the northeastern state of Ceará where 3,421 people have died.

For all Bolsonaro’s dismissiveness, scientists and medical experts believe the situation is dire and likely to get worse. “Not even in our most dreadful nightmare could we have imagined the situation we are now in,” Drauzio Varella, a doctor and broadcaster, wrote in one of Brazil’s top newspapers last week.

2 Jun 202018.42 EDT

Yemen aid funding falls short by US$1bn

Patrick Wintour

Yemen remains on the brink of “a macabre tragedy”, the UN has warned after a humanitarian fundraising summit raised only $1.35bn (£1.05bn) for this year, around $1bn short of the target and only half the sum raised at the equivalent pledging conference last year.

The UN’s humanitarian chief, Mark Lowcock, said unless more money was raised Yemen “will face a horrific outcome at the end of the year”.

Despite the shortfall “the UN will not abandon the people of Yemen”, he said, adding that pledging would continue because some of last year’s large donors had not yet contributed.

Dr Abdullah al-Rabiah, the head of the King Salman Centre for Relief and Humanitarian Aid in Saudi Arabia, which co-hosted the virtual summit, put the overall shortfall down to the impact of coronavirus on national budgets and concerns about the restrictions on aid flows imposed by the parties to Yemen’s five-year civil war. “We want to be sure that the money will go to those in need,” he said.

2 Jun 202018.26 EDT

Rupert Neate

The UK’s EasyJet and cruise operator Carnival are set to lose their place in the FTSE 100 index of the UK’s biggest companies following the collapse in their share prices due to the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on the travel industry.

The budget airline has lost half of its market value since the start of the pandemic as almost all flights have been cancelled, and the aviation industry warns it will take years to convince people to take to the skies in the same numbers they did before the virus struck. EasyJet last week announced plans to cut 4,500 jobs, although it plans to restart flights on the majority of its routes this summer.

Hi, I’m Helen Sullivan and I’ll be bringing you the latest news in the coronavirus pandemic for the next few hours.

As always, I’d love to hear from you – please get in touch on Twitter @helenrsulivan or via email: helen.sullivan[at]theguardian.com with comments, questions and news tips from where you live.

In the UK, the home secretary is threatening foreign travellers who disobey forthcoming quarantine rules with deportation, according to new restrictions laid out by ministers.

The rules, due to be set out by Priti Patel on Wednesday, have caused unease in the Tory ranks and been condemned by businesses. The plans, coming into force on 8 June, will see people arriving in the UK told to isolate for 14 days to prevent cases being introduced from overseas.

The Home Office said removal from the country would be considered “as a last resort” for foreign nationals who refuse to comply with the order to stay at a single residence.

George Morgan-Grenville, the chief executive of tour operator Red Savannah, said:

By pursuing its quarantine plans without due regard for the economic consequences, the Government is choosing to ignore the devastation it will cause to companies, to employment and to the lives of all those whose jobs will be lost.

The quarantine measures are a blunt weapon which will bring only economic disaster.

2 Jun 202016.30 EDT

Rowena Mason

For the last two months, Keir Starmer has been cautious about criticising the UK government’s coronavirus response.

The opposition leader has preferred to be forensic rather than furious, accepting that ministers have a difficult job.

But it appears that his patience has finally run out.

The calamitous events of the past week, from the Dominic Cummings affair to the mixed messages over the easing of the lockdown, has changed the mood of the new Labour leader. He has a tougher message now.

I am putting the prime minister on notice that he has got to get a grip and restore public confidence in the government’s handling of the epidemic.

If we see a sharp rise in the R rate, the infection rate, or a swath of local lockdowns, responsibility for that falls squarely at the door of No 10. We all know the public have made huge sacrifices. This mismanagement of the last few weeks is the responsibility of the government.

Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak today include:

• The number of officially confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world has passed 6.3 million. According to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, 6,309,107 people are known to have been infected, while 376,445 are known to have died since the outbreak began.
• Hopes were raised of the possible availability of a vaccine. A senior US army researcher said it was reasonable to expect that some sort of vaccine could be available to some parts of the US population by the end of the year.
• France’s death toll rose by more than a 100 in a 24-hour period for the first time in 13 days. It came as the country enacts a new easing of lockdown measures.
• Iran confirmed its second highest number of new cases in a 24-hour period since its outbreak began, with the health ministry saying 3,117 people tested positive. The number of new daily infections in Iran has now returned to levels previously seen at the peak of its outbreak in late March.
• Germany’s travel warning for Europe will be lifted on Wednesday, its foreign minister, Heiko Maas, announced. The worldwide travel warning still applies. But, for the countries of the EU and associated states, the warning will be replaced by travel advice that will give travellers detailed information about the situation in each state.
• The pandemic is exposing “endemic inequalities” that must be addressed, according to the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, who highlighted the protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd and data showing the crisis has had a worse impact on ethnic minority groups.
• The UK’s official death toll passed 50,000, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. The total differs from the government’s daily counts, which only include deaths in hospitals and care homes where the person had tested positive.
• The UK statistics watchdog criticised the government’s testing data. Whitehall’s use of testing data appears to be aimed more at making it look like a lot is being done than actually painting a clear picture, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority warned the health secretary, Matt Hancock.
• A Wuhan doctor who worked with the whistleblower Li Wenliang died of the virus last week, Chinese state media reported. Hu Weifeng, a urologist at Wuhan central hospital, reportedly became China’s first Covid-19 fatality in weeks when he died on Friday after being treated for more than four months.
• Meanwhile, Chinese officials sat on releasing the genetic map of the coronavirus for more than a week after multiple government labs had fully decoded it, according to an Associated Press report.
• The rise in unemployment slowed in Spain. The number of new jobseekers was close to 27,000 in May, about 10 times lower than in March and April during the country’s lockdown, the labour ministry said.

The USA has confirmed 14,790 more cases and 761 more deaths in the past 24 hours, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). That takes the cumulative totals to 1,802,470 and 105,157, respectively.

In the UK, fewer than 2,000 people were contacted in the first four days of the NHS test and trace scheme, according to leaked data.

The government has yet to publish figures but Channel 4 News has seen the data from Thursday – the day the system was launched – up to Sunday, and it shows that 4,456 confirmed cases reported to the test and trace programme.

Of those, 1,831 self-registered on the website or have been called and completed the form providing information about their contacts. The number of contacts they provided was 4,634, of whom just 1,749 have been contacted, Channel 4 News reported.

That comes the day after Parisian cafes and restaurants reopen for the first time in 11 weeks.

The ministry said the number of people in hospital fell by more than 260, or 1.8%, to 14,028, and the number of people in intensive care fell by 49, or 3.8%, to 1,253. Both numbers have been on a downward trend since mid-April.

France’s death toll has risen by more than a 100 in a 24-hour period for the first time in 13 days, as the country enacts a new easing of lockdown measures.

The French health ministry said that the number of fatalities has risen by 107, or 0.4%, to 28,940, the fifth-highest tally in the world.

The US and Brazilian presidents, Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, are pushing for a joint research effort on using a drug to treat Covid-19 that has been linked to increased deaths in virus patients.

Trump has repeatedly touted use of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, even admitting to taking it himself as a preventative measure. US health bosses have cautioned against its use outside of a hospital setting because of a risk of heart problems.

The White House said Trump and Bolsonaro “expressed their mutual appreciation for the longstanding collaboration on health issues between the two countries”, discussing the US delivery of 2m doses of the controversial drug to Brazil and a “joint research effort to help further evaluate the safety and efficacy of hydroxychloroquine for both prophylaxis and the early treatment of the coronavirus”.

Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak today include:

• The number of officially confirmed cases of coronavirus around the world has passed 6.3 million. According to researchers from Johns Hopkins University, 6,309,107 people are known to have been infected, while 376,445 are known to have died since the outbreak began.
• Iran confirmed its second highest number of new cases in a 24-hour period since its outbreak began, with the health ministry saying 3,117 people tested positive. The number of new daily infections in Iran has now returned to levels previously seen at the peak of its outbreak in late March.
• Germany’s travel warning for Europe will be lifted on Wednesday, its foreign minister, Heiko Maas, announced. The worldwide travel warning still applies. But, for the countries of the EU and associated states, the warning will be replaced by travel advice that will give travellers detailed information about the situation in each state.
• The pandemic is exposing “endemic inequalities” that must be addressed, according to the UN human rights chief, Michelle Bachelet, who highlighted the protests triggered by the killing of George Floyd and data showing the crisis has had a worse impact on ethnic minority groups.
• The UK’s official death toll passed 50,000, according to the latest figures from the Office for National Statistics. The total differs from the government’s daily counts, which only include deaths in hospitals and care homes where the person had tested positive.
• The UK statistics watchdog criticised the government’s testing data. Whitehall’s use of testing data appears to be aimed more at making it look like a lot is being done than actually painting a clear picture, the chairman of the UK Statistics Authority warned the health secretary, Matt Hancock.
• A Wuhan doctor who worked with the whistleblower Li Wenliang died of the virus last week, Chinese state media reported. Hu Weifeng, a urologist at Wuhan central hospital, reportedly became China’s first Covid-19 fatality in weeks when he died on Friday after being treated for more than four months.
• Meanwhile, Chinese officials sat on releasing the genetic map of the coronavirus for more than a week after multiple government labs had fully decoded it, according to an Associated Press report.
• The rise in unemployment slowed in Spain. The number of new jobseekers was close to 27,000 in May, about 10 times lower than in March and April during the country’s lockdown, the labour ministry said.

Thats it from me, Damien Gayle, for another day. See you tomorrow.

Reuters has posted this interesting video report on the potential for the spread of coronavirus during the demonstrations against the police killing of George Floyd in the US.

In particular, one expert warns, the collapse of trust in the authorities is likely to have an impact on contact tracing. After all, when someone from the government calls you up to ask you who you went to the demo with, are you going to tell them?

There have now been more than 6.3 million confirmed cases of coronavirus across the world since the outbreak was first detected in China at the end of 2019, according to the tally kept by Johns Hopkins University.

The US-based university said that countries had reported a total of 6,318,040 cases of the virus on Tuesday, of which 376,885 had led to deaths.

The US continues to lead the world in confirmed cases, reporting 1,817,785, more than twice as many as the second-place country, Brazil, which has reported 526,447. Russia is the third worst-affected country, with 423,186 confirmed cases. The UK is fourth, with 277,738.

However, testing for the virus is not widespread even in many of the world’s richest countries, meaning that the true extent of the outbreak is likely to be much larger.

A senior US army vaccine researcher said on Tuesday it was reasonable to expect that some sort of coronavirus vaccine could be available to some parts of the US population by the end of the year, Reuters reports.

The defence secretary, Mark Esper, vowed on 15 May that the US government would collaborate with the private sector to produce a vaccine to treat US citizens and partners abroad by the year-end.

Col Wendy Sammons-Jackson, director of the military infectious disease research programme, told a Pentagon news briefing it was “reasonable to expect that there will be some form of a vaccine that could be available at some level, to a certain population by the end of the year”.

The World Health Organization’s representative in Equatorial Guinea has been ordered to leave the country, after officials accused her of falsifying coronavirus case numbers.

In a document seen by AFP on Tuesday, the foreign ministry asked the UN health agency’s regional office in Africa “to end the duties” of its representative in Equatorial Guinea, Triphonie Nkurunziza, “and immediately oversee her departure from Malabo.”

The prime minister, Pascual Obama Asue, appearing at the Senate last Friday, accused Nkurunziza of “falsifying the data of people contaminated” by the coronavirus. “We don’t have a problem with the WHO, we have a problem with the WHO’s representative in Malabo,” he said in remarks broadcast on state television.

A source at the UN office in Malabo, speaking on condition of anonymity, confirmed the government’s request but declined to go into details. “The government has asked her to go, we have received a document - she is accused of falsifying Covid-19 figures,” the source said. However, Nkurunziza is still in Malabo, Equatorial Guinea’s island capital, as there are no flights enabling her to leave, the source said.

Officials say that as of Monday there were 1,306 recorded cases of coronavirus, 12 of them fatalities, in a population of 1.3 million. The official tally used to be updated daily, but this practice stopped on 28 April, and the update is now being published only from time to time.

Figures put forward by the WHO have sometimes been somewhat higher than the national tally, although both tolls are the same right now.