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US death toll surpasses 130,000; India's cases third-highest in world – as it happened

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Donald Trump’s handling of US crisis under microscope; Israel reimposes restrictions after infections spike. This blog is now closed

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Mon 6 Jul 2020 19.06 EDTFirst published on Sun 5 Jul 2020 19.23 EDT
Beachgoers on the Pacific Beach Pier in San Diego, California.
Beachgoers on the Pacific Beach Pier in San Diego, California. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images
Beachgoers on the Pacific Beach Pier in San Diego, California. Photograph: Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images

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Brazilian president suffers symptoms – reports

Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right president of Brazil, is suffering Covid-19 symptoms and is awaiting the results of a test, according to CNN Brasil.

Bolsonaro, who has previously tested negative after people close to him were infected, has repeatedly dismissed the risks posed by the virus, even as his country’s suffering increased. Brazil is the second worst-hit nation in the world after the US, whose own rightwing president Donald Trump has also sought to play down the dangers posed by the pandemic.

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Republican senator to miss Trump nomination over virus concerns

The US senator Chuck Grassley will skip Donald Trump’s presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in August due to coronavirus concerns, a spokesman for the senator has confirmed.

Reuters has reported that the 86-year-old Iowa Republican has attended each of his party’s conventions since he was first elected to the Senate in 1980. His decision not to travel to Florida for this year’s event underscores broader concerns about holding mass gatherings as coronavirus cases there surge.

“I’m not going to go because of the virus situation,” Grassley told reporters on Monday, according to a report in the Des Moines Register.

The bulk of the Republican convention was moved from North Carolina after the state’s Democratic governor Roy Cooper would not commit to allowing a full convention because of pandemic concerns.

Some 330 delegates will travel to Charlotte, North Carolina, from 22 to 24 August to nominate Trump as the Republican candidate to take on Democrat Joe Biden in the 3 November election. The more than 2,000 remaining delegates will perform a ceremonial vote between 24 and 27 August in Jacksonville, in Florida, to confirm the nomination, according to the Republican National Committee.

The decision to relocate to Florida was made prior to the state’s recent spike in cases, which have grown from 667 new cases on 1 June to more than 10,000 new cases on Monday.

The state has seen more than 200,000 total infections and 3,730 deaths as of Monday.
The RNC plans to make testing available to all attendees but is discussing whether to make the testing mandatory.

Newly identified cases soared in California over the 4 July weekend, stressing some hospital systems and leading to the temporary closure of the state capitol building in Sacramento for deep cleaning, local officials have said.

The number of people hospitalised has increased by 50% over the past two weeks to about 5,800, according to the state governor Gavin Newsom.

The Reuters news agency reported that state and local records showed about a third of those hospitalised were in Los Angeles County, with about 630 confirmed and suspected virus patients requiring intensive care.

And 25% of the hospitalisations in the county in July were among patients aged between 18 and 40 years, health officials said, as new cases increasingly hit a younger population that may have been lax about safety precautions in recent weeks.

Further north, nearly 1,400 inmates at San Quentin state prison have contracted the virus, putting pressure on hospitals in Marin County, where the facility is located, Newsom said.

In all, 271,684 Californians have tested positive, including 11,529 in the past 24 hours, state records show. About 6,300 have died.

Egypt has reported 969 new cases the health ministry has said, the first drop below 1,000 registered daily since 27 May.

In total, 76,222 cases and 3,422 deaths have been reported, including 79 deaths on Monday, the ministry said.

Egypt reopened resorts to foreign tourists last week after tourism came to halt in March under measures to curb the epidemic. But Egypt was not on an initial “safe list” of 14 countries for resumption of non-essential travel to the EU, announced last week.

Tourism accounts for 5% of Egypt’s economic output, according to the government. But analysts put the figure as much as 15% if jobs indirectly related to the sector are included.

Brazil has suffered 620 more deaths and registered 20,229 additional cases over the last 24 hours, the country’s health ministry has said. The nation has now registered a total of 1,623,284 cases and 65,487 deaths attributable to the virus, Reuters has reported.

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Eleanor de Jong
Eleanor de Jong

The New Zealand government and Air New Zealand have agreed to “manage” incoming international flights together, as the country struggles with huge numbers of Kiwis returning home, and requiring two weeks of quarantine at the government’s expense.

This week, more than 3,000 Kiwis are booked to return home, and management and consistency problems have plagued quarantine hotels, including returnees being allowed to leave isolation early, and hundreds released without taking a test – meaning they then had to be tracked down in the community.

Air New Zealand has agreed to put a temporary hold on new bookings in the short term, as well as to look at aligning daily arrivals with the capacity available at managed isolation facilities,” said Megan Woods, a government minister.

People who have already booked flights with Air New Zealand will still be able to enter New Zealand subject to availability of quarantine space.

Woods added that the government was also in talks with other airlines about managing their flows.

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In the UK, care leaders, unions and MPs have rounded on Boris Johnson after he accused care homes of failing to follow proper procedures amid the pandemic, saying the prime minister appeared to be shifting the blame for the high death toll, Peter Walker, Kate Proctor and Rajeev Syal write.

With nearly 20,000 care home residents confirmed to have died with Covid-19, and estimates that the true toll is much greater, there has been widespread criticism about a lack of personal protective equipment (PPE), testing and clear guidelines for the sector. On Monday, the total UK’s death toll rose to 44,236, up 16 on the day before.

The Guardian has previously revealed how public health officials proposed a radical lockdown of care homes at the height of the pandemic, but they were rejected by the government. Agency staff were found to have spread the virus between homes. But a health department plan published in April mentioned nothing about restricting staff movements. Around 25,000 patients were discharged into care homes without being tested, an official report said.

The US saw a 27% increase in new cases in the week to 5 July, compared to the previous seven days, with 24 states reporting positivity test rates above the level that the World Health Organization has flagged as concerning.

Nationally, 7.5% of diagnostic tests came back positive last week, up from 7% the prior week and 5% two weeks ago, according to a Reuters analysis of data from The Covid Tracking Project, a volunteer-run effort to track the outbreak.

The WHO considers a positivity rate above 5% to be a cause for concern because it suggests there are more cases in the community that have not yet been uncovered, Reuters has reported.


Deaths, which health experts say are a lagging indicator, continued to fall nationally to 3,447 people in the week ended 5 July. A handful of states, however, have reported increases in deaths for at least two straight weeks, including Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, Texas and Tennessee.

The prime ministers of the UK and Israel, Boris Johnson and Benjamin Netanyahu, have discussed the crisis this evening, Downing Street has said.

The leaders also underlined their ongoing commitment to UK-Israel trade and discussed the global response to coronavirus, agreeing to continue working together to tackle the pandemic.

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The state of the epidemic in the US is “really not good” and a “serious situation that we have to address immediately”, the top White House health official Dr Anthony Fauci has said.

The nation is still “knee-deep” in the first wave, having never got the case number as low as planned, Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said during a live internet interview with National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins.

It’s a serious situation that we have to address immediately.

Fauci said that he expects an eventual vaccine, now in development by several companies, to work well and provide protection at least for some period of time, but that it will not be infinite protection such as the vaccine for measles.

Severin Carrell
Severin Carrell

Air travellers arriving in Scotland from Tuesday will be subject to quarantine spot checks for the first time, after the country reported four days without deaths from Covid-19.

Nicola Sturgeon, the first minister, said her officials and advisers were still deciding which countries would not be subject to quarantine checks, four days after the Home Office released its list of 74 “air bridge” countries and territories.

The US has suffered 235 more deaths and registered 44,361 new cases, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has said. That takes the respective totals to 129,811 and 2,886,267.

Summary

Lucy Campbell
  • The US coronavirus death toll passed 130,000 following a massive surge of new cases that has put Donald Trump’s handling of the crisis under the microscope and derailed efforts to restart the economy. Cases reached almost three million, the highest tally in the world and double the infections reported in the second most-affected country, Brazil. New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo said the president was “enabling” the virus if he failed to acknowledge the severity of the situation
  • Israel reimposed certain restrictions after a surge in cases, to avoid a wider lockdown that could devastate the economy. Bars, nightclubs, gyms and event halls have been closed in Israel as restrictions are reimposed to combat a rise in infections. Restaurants, buses and synagogues will limit the number of entrants also.
  • Covid-19 cases in Qatar exceeded 100,000, as it recorded another 546 cases in the last 24 hours. With a population of about 2.8 million people, the Gulf state has one of the world’s highest per capita number of confirmed cases.
  • Flights between Greece and the UK will resume from 15 July. Greek government sources said the UK’s “greatly improved epidemiological data” had finally convinced the committee of scientists advising the prime minister to lift the ban, after it was initially extended for two weeks on 1 July.

Ireland will judge whether to ease quarantine restrictions on people travelling from abroad from 20 July on the amount of new cases, the trend and the quality of testing and tracing in qualifying countries, the country’s government has said.

Ireland, which has been more cautious than much of Europe on the reopening of its economy and air travel, has advised its citizens against non-essential travel since March and requires anyone arriving in the country to self-isolate for 14 days.

The outgoing government had promised to produce by a “green list” of exempt countries with similar or lower risk to Ireland by 9 July but the new administration delayed that date amid increased warnings from public health officials. The taoiseach Micheál Martin said:

We know we are still dealing with a very internationally volatile situation, as witnessed in Spain, as witnessed in the UK and that is informing our view as second waves are emerging.

On 20 July, we’ll be in a position to say whether any country or whether a number of countries make the green list ... At the moment, there would be a number of countries in that position but that can change.

The number of deaths in France from the new coronavirus has risen by 27 since Friday to 29,920, the country’s health department said on Monday.

The number of people in intensive care units fell by 12 to 548, continuing a downtrend over recent weeks, the ministry said.

New York’s governor Andrew Cuomo on Monday called on Donald Trump to not be a “co-conspirator” of the coronavirus and acknowledge the “major problem” it poses as cases spiked in dozens of states after some rushed to reopen, Reuters reports.

The number of US coronavirus deaths exceeded 130,000 on Monday (see 3.59pm.), following a massive surge of new cases that has put Trump’s handling of the crisis under the microscope and derailed efforts to restart the economy.

Andrew Cuomo said the president was enabling the coronavirus pandemic by not wearing a mask and downplaying the problem. Photograph: Timothy A Clary/AFP/Getty Images

“So, Mr. President, don’t be a co-conspirator of Covid,” Cuomo said at a news briefing.

Acknowledge to the American people that Covid exists, it is a major problem, it’s going to continue until we admit it and each of us stands up to do our part.

Cuomo said the president was “enabling” the virus if he failed to acknowledge the severity of the situation, and slammed the president’s comments that the surge in US cases was due to increased testing.

“He makes up facts. He makes up science,” Cuomo said, citing several past Trump statements on the virus such it would disappear like a miracle as the weather got warmer.

He said all those things, none of them were true. And now we have a problem in 38 states because some people believe him.

Cuomo said coronavirus hospitalisations in New York dropped to 817 - the lowest since 18 March - and nine people died from Covid-19 on Sunday, adding:

The numbers have actually declined since we started reopening.

Cuomo warned about complacency now that the worst seemed to be over in New York, pointing to reports of some July Fourth celebrations, including in Manhattan and on Fire Island and upstate, where revellers ignored social distancing and face covering rules. He said:

That curve was purely a function of what we did. If we change what we’re doing, you’re going to change the trajectory of the virus.

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Puerto Rico’s government reported a new daily high in Covid-19 cases on Monday, but critics said the numbers were deeply flawed.

The health department reported 530 new coronavirus cases, topping a spurt of 485 on 4 June.

But the numbers include both molecular swab tests for current infections and serological tests for antibodies, and independent health experts complained that some of the results date back as far as April, so they don’t provide an accurate picture of the current situation.

“We keep watching the virus through a rearview mirror”, Puerto Rico epidemiologist Roberta Lugo told the Associated Press, adding that the government keeps taking decisions based on faulty and incomplete data.

Puerto Rico was one of the first US juristictions to impose tight restrictions to fight Covid-19 and it is lifting those in stages. Photograph: Ricardo Arduengo/AP

The US territory of about 3.2 million people has reported 8,585 confirmed or probable cases of Covid-19 and at least 155 deaths.

A spokeswoman for Puerto Rico health secretary Lorenzo González said he was not immediately available. The secretary told WAPA TV on Monday that while the government has seen a progressive increase in cases, there is currently no strain on health resources. He said 115 patients are hospitalised, with 18 of those in the intensive care unit and another 11 on ventilators.

González said he might recommend rolling back recent re-openings if the increase in cases continues.

Puerto Rico was one of the first US juristictions to impose tight restrictions to fight the disease and it is lifting those in stages. Governor Wanda Vázquez last week announced strict new rules for anyone flying into Puerto Rico, including a mandatory Covid-19 molecular test within 72 hours before travelling.

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