Brazil death toll exceeds 60,000; West Bank goes into lockdown – as it happened

We’re closing this blog now. But you can follow all the day’s developments at our new live blog here:

We will close this live blog now, and take up our coverage on a new live blog shortly. My many thanks all for your company and correspondence. Be well.

A summary of developments today.

• Covid-19 cases pass 10.6 million across the globe. There are now 10,644,064 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 514,527 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
• Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
• Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
• Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
• Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
• California closed down indoor bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities. The measures, which will be in place for three weeks, follow a surge in infections.
• Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• The World Health Organisation warns the Middle East is at a “critical threshold” with more than a million cases recorded across 22 countries.
• West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
• NZ’s health minister, David Clark, has resigned, after a series of political missteps, and repeated breaches of his own government’s lockdown rules.

Dr David Clark, NZ’s health minister since 2017, has made a series of political and and public blunders, even as his country has weathered the Covid-19 crisis remarkably well.

First, during the height of New Zealand’s strict lockdodown regime, he was forced to apologise for breaching lockdown rules by going for a mountain bike ride. Three days later, he again apologised, this time to the prime minister, for taking a 20-kilometre drive to go for a beach walk.

Last week, he face public opprobrium for blaming border quarantine errors at NZ’s director of health Ashley Bloomfield, while Dr Bloomfield was standing nearby.

“I’ve made the call it is best for me to stand aside,” Clark said, saying he had become a distraction for the government in its effort to combat Covid-19.

“It has been a privilege to serve in this role.”

New Zealand has recorded only 1528 cases of Covid-19, with 22 deaths.

2 Jul 202019.02 EDT

Matilda Boseley

The response here is very, very Australian.

Some context: Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city, has seen a spike in community transmission cases (albeit from a very low base) so 10 suburbs across the city have been forced back into lockdown. But the measure has had some perverse outcomes, including in Summerhill Road, where one side of the street is locked down, the other is not.

As our interlocutor here says: “what a stitch-up”.

Good morning, day, or evening, wherever this coverage finds you. Ben Doherty here in Sydney. My many thanks to my colleagues Kevin Rawlinson et al for their stewardship thus far.

The Middle East has recorded a million cases of Covid-19, and is at a “critical threshold”, the World Health Organisation has warned.

The global health body confirmed on Sunday there were more than one million confirmed cases of the Covid-19 disease across the 22 countries that the WHO’s Eastern Mediterranean region covers, stretching from Morocco to Pakistan.

Over 80% of all deaths in the region were reported in five countries: Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

“We are at a critical threshold in our region,” the WHO’s Middle East head, Ahmed al-Mandhari, said in an online press conference.

Mandhari said it was a “concerning milestone”.

“The number of cases reported in June alone is higher than the total number of cases reported during the four months following the first reported case in the region on 29 January,” he said.

He attributed the rise in cases to increased testing, but also to the lifting in recent weeks of restrictions put in place to combat the virus’ spread.

Colombia’s confirmed number of infections has tipped across the 100,000 case threshold, as the country’s quarantine measures roll on and intensive care units fill.

They now number 102,009, the health ministry said, 54,941 of which are active. Some 3,470 people have died. Wednesday also marked the highest-ever daily increase in confirmed cases with an uptick of 4,163.

1 Jul 202018.27 EDT

Kenya Evelyn

Health experts are warning that young people of color face a growing threat from the coronavirus pandemic as young Americans drive record-setting coronavirus outbreaks in several US states.

Data from the Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (CDC) has shown the majority of coronavirus hospitalizations among Black and Latino Americans are of those under the age of 50. Dr Mary T Bassett, te director of the Center for Health and Human Rights at Harvard University and a former health commissioner for New York City’s health department, said:

The risk is multifold because young people are more often susceptible to the same conditions that increase the risk of exposure, including working on the frontline.

In the UK, the British Medical Association has criticised the government over reports that millions of items of personal protective equipment (PPE) were found to be faulty.

The country’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has issued safety warnings, notices for disposal and distribution stoppages for some 85m masks and respirators, according to an investigation by Channel 4 News.

The broadcaster reports that the masks and respirators were stored in the government’s pandemic stockpile and have been distributed to hospitals, care homes and GP surgeries since March.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, the chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA) Council, said it was a “dereliction of duty” if healthcare workers had been supplied with faulty PPE during the epidemic.

These reports, if true, are nothing short of a national scandal. If doctors and health and care workers have been supplied with, and worn, faulty, re-dated masks, this is clearly a dereliction of duty to ensure the safety of NHS staff and patients.

Wearing substandard PPE places doctors at risk of becoming infected and also spreading the illness to patients.

We know that doctors and healthcare staff have become infected and died from this virus and therefore nothing short of 100% fit for purpose PPE should have been supplied from the outset.

A Department for Health and Social Care spokeswoman told the broadcaster:

The quality of PPE released to the frontline is critically important to us. Rigorous checks were made to ensure products were safe before being distributed to the frontline and all products purchased for the stockpile in 2009 met the essential safety requirements required by law.

As soon as we are alerted to any potential issues we take immediate action to ensure the safety of our health and care staff, and work to resolve those issues as quickly as possible.

Nigeria will resume domestic flights from 8 July, the government has said, as Africa’s most populous country relaxes restrictions despite mounting cases and deaths.

The airports for the capital Abuja and Lagos will open that day, while a handful of others are set to open three days later and the rest after another four days, the government said on its official Twitter account.

No date was given for the resumption of international flights.

Nigeria had confirmed more than 25,000 cases and almost 600 deaths as of Wednesday, with little sign of the outbreak slowing. Officials have expressed their concern that the outbreak there might become much worse.

Yet the government is keenly aware of the economic toll, which has crushed the price of oil, on which Nigeria depends. Officials have steadily eased measures aimed at curbing the outbreak, believing the economic damage of a stringent lockdown could be worse than the harm done by the pandemic.

Crucial data that could help prevent fresh local waves of coronavirus is being withheld from some of the parts of England most in danger of further lockdowns, Robert Booth, Dan Sabbagh, Heather Stewart and Ashley Kirk write.

Council leaders have told the Guardian they are either not getting test results needed to prevent new outbreaks, or the results were incomplete and without sufficient detail to allow them to quell local surges in infection.

The complaints come as Labour accuse the UK prime minister Boris Johnson of presiding over a “lost week” that has let the virus spread, threatening fresh lockdowns as physical distancing restrictions are loosened this weekend. The government hit back, claiming councils had the information they needed to keep the virus at bay.

Here’s a summary of the latest news:

• Covid-19 cases pass 10.5 million across the globe. There are now 10,501,482 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 511,909 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
• Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
• Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
• Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
• Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
• California closed down indoor bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities. The measures, which will be in place for three weeks, follow a surge in infections.
• Ryanair pilots agree to 20% pay cut in attempt to limit job losses. The pilots’ union Balpa announced 96% of its Ryanair members had voted to accept the temporary pay cut as part of efforts to avoid up to 3,000 job cuts at Europe’s biggest budget airline.
• Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.

Israel’s parliament has voted to allow the country’s domestic intelligence agency to track the cellphones of coronavirus carriers for the next three weeks amid a resurgence in new cases, Reuters reports.

The Shin Bet surveillance technology has been used on and off to track carriers since March, when the prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s cabinet circumvented parliament and approved the program through emergency regulations as cases first spiked.

Those emergency measures drew challenges from privacy watchdog groups and the supreme court cited worries over dangers to individual liberty in demanding Netanyahu’s government regulate the surveillance through legislation.

The new law allows the Shin Bet to access carriers’ phone location data for 14 days before they were diagnosed. That data is used to identify anyone they came into contact with, which proponents say is crucial to identify new cases.

Indoor activities at bars, restaurants, cinemas and other facilities will be banned in most of the US state of California for at least three weeks as infections surge, its governor Gavin Newsom has announced.

The UN Security Council has finally backed the UN chief Antonio Guterres’ 23 March call for a global truce amid the pandemic, adopting a resolution after months of talks to win a compromise between the United States and China, Reuters reports.

The resolution, drafted by France and Tunisia, calls for “all parties to armed conflicts to engage immediately in a durable humanitarian pause for at least 90 consecutive days” to allow for the delivery of humanitarian aid.

Negotiations were stymied by a standoff between China and the US over whether to urge support for the World Health Organization (WHO). The latter country did not want a reference to the global health body, while the former did.

The US president Donald Trump said in May that Washington would quit the Geneva-based agency over its handling of the pandemic, accusing it of being “China-centric” and promoting China’s “disinformation”. The WHO denies the claims.

The resolution does not mention the WHO explicitly, but does reference a UN General Assembly resolution that does. Richard Gowan, International Crisis Group UN director, said:

We have really seen the body at its worst. This is a dysfunctional security council.

The pandemic is exacerbating inequality throughout the world by hitting hardest those without a social safety net in developing countries while central bank asset purchases in advanced countries benefit the richest, the World Bank president David Malpass has said.

During a webcast event hosted by the Council of the Americas, he warned of a “catastrophe” for the developing world that will bring long-term damage and global economic output would not recover to its pre-pandemic level for years.

The US has suffered 560 more deaths and registered another 43,644 cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has said, taking the respective totals to 127,299 and 2,624,873.

• Covid-19 cases pass 10.5 million across the globe. There are now 10,501,482 confirmed cases worldwide, according to the Johns Hopkins university tracker, with at least 511,909 deaths across 188 countries and regions.
• Brazil death toll passes 60,000. On Wednesday afternoon a coalition of Brazilian news outlets announced that the country’s total death toll had risen by 538 to 60,194, meaning it had doubled in the last month.
• Global tourism stands to lose up to $3.3tn from Covid-19. The US standing to lose the most - $538bn, or 3% of GDP - according to a UN study published on Wednesday
• Over 160,000 coronavirus cases reported every day in past week. The global coronavirus pandemic is accelerating, the World Health Organization said, pointing out that June saw more than half of all cases reported since the start of the pandemic.
• Oxford Covid-19 vaccine developers encouraged by immune response. A leading scientist behind the University of Oxford’s potential Covid-19 vaccine said the team has seen the right sort of immune response in trials, but declined to give a firm timeframe for when it could be ready.
• Ryanair pilots agree to 20% pay cut in attempt to limit job losses. The pilots’ union Balpa announced 96% of its Ryanair members had voted to accept the temporary pay cut as part of efforts to avoid up to 3,000 job cuts at Europe’s biggest budget airline.
• Brazil restricts entry to foreigners due to Covid-19. The government will restrict the entry of foreigners to the country for 30 days due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• West Bank goes into lockdown as virus numbers soar. The Palestinian Authority has announced a five-day lockdown across the West Bank after the total confirmed coronavirus infections in the territory more than doubled following the easing of previous restrictions.
  

Alitalia has resumed international flights from Milan as Italy gradually reopens its airports to foreign travellers and scraps restrictions imposed to contain the outbreak.

The carrier, which is in the process of being nationalised after 11 years of troubled private management, will fly from Milan Malpensa airport to Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris and London.

France has suffered 18 more deaths, taking its overall total to 29,861, its health department has said. That figure is in line with the daily average of 18 seen over the last week.

In May, France counted 143 additional deaths every day on average. This decrease has allowed the government to gradually reopen businesses, restaurants and some schools since 11 May.