Coronavirus live news: India reports global record of nearly 98,000 new cases

Some positive news for our friends down under. Australia has recorded its lowest one-day rise in Covid cases in nearly three months, prompting hopes that restrictions in some areas will be eased.

Australia said 35 coronavirus cases had been detected in the past 24 hours on Thursday, the lowest one-day rise since 24 June.

Victoria state – Australia’s COVID-19 epicentre – accounted for the bulk of the new cases, with 28 people diagnosed with the virus in the past 24 hours.

“It is a fantastic outcome and a tribute to the hard work, sacrifice and contribution every single Victorian is making and I want to say thank you,” Victoria state Premier Daniel Andrews told reporters in Melbourne, according to Reuters.

The result in Victoria will buoy hopes that residents in Melbourne will soon be granted additional freedoms after more than six weeks under a strict lockdown.

Hello all. Josh Halliday here in Manchester, England. Thanks very much for following.

First, some news from slightly closer to home: some 1.5 million people in north-east England are due to be placed under coronavirus restrictions at midnight on Thursday for the first time since the UK entered full lockdown in March.

The new measures will include a strict 10pm curfew on businesses, including bars and pubs, and – more significantly – a total ban on mixing between households inside or outside. Visits to care homes will also be restricted to essential visitors only and use of public transport will be curbed.

It is the first time such a large swath of England has been placed under such strict measures since 31 July, when additional restrictions came into force in parts of north-west England. It reflects growing unease about the sharp rise in coronavirus cases across the country – they have doubled in the past three weeks – and an ever steeper rise in hotspots in the north-east.

As the UK stares at an imminent second wave, this feels like the first significant government intervention ahead of what could be a very long autumn and winter.

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan, for today. Thanks for following along.

My colleague Josh Halliday will be taking you through the next few hours of pandemic news. In the meantime, here is our global report:

Here are the key developments from the last few hours:

• India reported another global record jump in daily coronavirus infections with 97,894 cases in the last 24 hours, data from the health ministry showed on Thursday. Coronavirus infections in India surged past 5 million on Wednesday, piling pressure on hospitals grappling with unreliable supplies of oxygen that they need to treat tens of thousands of critical patients.
• China has locked down a city on its border with Myanmar and launched a campaign to test the city’s entire population of more than 200,000 people. Officials in Ruili in Yunnan province said the city had entered a state of “wartime” defences against Covid-19 after two new cases emerged among travellers from Myanmar. Residents have been ordered to stay at home and authorities have set up checkpoints to prevent anyone entering or leaving Ruili and restricting access to border areas nearby. Most businesses have been closed.
• The World Health Organization warned Latin American countries not to reopen too fast. WHO regional director Carissa Etienne said on Wednesday that Latin America had started to resume normal social and public life at a time when the pandemic still required major control interventions.
• New Zealand saw its GDP fall by 12.2% in the June quarter, the largest quarterly fall since such records began in 1987, as Covid restrictions affected economic activity, Stats NZ said today.
• The number of confirmed cases in Germany increased by 2,194 to 265,857 on Thursday, the second-highest daily total since April.
• The director of the US CDC said it will take one year before a coronavirus vaccine will be “generally available to the American public”. That estimation contrasts with recent bullish messaging by Donald Trump, who on Tuesday repeated his assertion that “we’re going to have a vaccine in a matter of weeks” even though a successful vaccine has yet to be unveiled from ongoing US trials, and attacked the CDC director on Wednesday as “confused” about the timeline.
• New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is to furlough himself and his staff for a week in order to close a $7bn budget shortfall created by the pandemic.
• The average age of people infected with Covid-19 is coming down, according to a World Health Organization expert Dr Maria Van Kerkhove. She told a Q&A that incidences of hospitalisation among those aged 15 to 49 years are increasing and said it was possible for the same person to be infected with influenza and Covid-19.
• South Africa will reopen its borders to most countries next month, the president said on Wednesday, part of a wider easing of measures announced as figures continue to improve.

India reported another global record jump in daily coronavirus infections with 97,894 cases in the last 24 hours, data from the health ministry showed on Thursday. Deaths are also showing a rise, with the country recording more than 1,000 deaths every day for the last two weeks, Reuters reports.

Coronavirus infections in India surged past 5 million on Wednesday, piling pressure on hospitals grappling with unreliable supplies of oxygen that they need to treat tens of thousands of critical patients.

In the big states of Maharashtra, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, some of the areas worst affected by the virus, demand for oxygen has more than tripled, doctors and government officials said, prompting urgent calls for help.

Paul Karp and Daniel Hurst report:

Australia’s employment rebounded with 111,000 more jobs in August compared with July, but more Victorians are out of work due to the state’s second wave of Covid-19 and Melbourne’s stage-four lockdown.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force data, released on Thursday, confirms Australia’s two-speed economy, with unemployment falling overall by 0.7% to 6.8% but rising in Victoria to 7.1% after the loss of 42,400 jobs.

The treasurer Josh Frydenberg told reporters in Canberra that although the figures show Australia’s economy is “remarkably resilient” and “fighting back”, the road to recovery will still be “long, hard and bumpy”.

The effective unemployment rate – including those who had left the labour market or worked zero hours – fell from 9.8% to 9.3% but “still remains high”, he said:

Covid-19 ethics: should we deliberately infect volunteers in the name of science? Podcast Part 2

Teams around the world are hard at work developing Covid-19 vaccines. While any potential candidate will need to be tested on thousands of volunteers to prove its safety and efficacy, some scientists have argued that the race to the finish line could be sped up by human challenge trials — where participants are infected with a special strain of the virus.

Ian Sample delves into some of the misconceptions and hurdles inherent in this kind of research. In the second of two episodes, Ian explores the importance of rescue treatments, what happens if something goes wrong, and whether it would ever be morally permissible to deliberately infect those most at risk of Covid-19, like volunteer octogenarians:

Health systems across the southern hemisphere were bracing a few months ago for their annual surge in influenza cases, which alongside Covid-19 could have overwhelmed hospitals. They never came.

Many countries in the southern half of the globe have instead experienced either record low levels of flu or none at all, public health specialists in Australia, New Zealand and South America have said, sparing potentially tens of thousands of lives and offering a glimmer of hope as winter approaches in the northern hemisphere.

General practitioners in New Zealand have not detected a single influenza case since they started screening patients in June, health data shows; last year about 57% of the samples they collected were positive:

Germany’s cases today are the second highest since mid-April according to Our World in Data.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 2,194 to 265,857 on Thursday. The last time daily cases were over 2,000 was 21 August, and before that, the last time cases were higher than 2,194 was on 24 April.

South Africa will reopen its borders to most countries next month, the president said Wednesday, part of a wider easing of anti-coronavirus measures announced as figures continue to improve, AFP reports.

The continent’s most industrialised economy shuttered its borders at the start of a strict nationwide lockdown on March 27 to limit the spread of the virus.

Restrictions on movement and business have been gradually eased since June, but borders stayed sealed to avoid importing the virus from abroad.

President Cyril Ramaphosa on Wednesday said most remaining rules will be rolled back from September 20, and that international travel would “gradually and cautiously” resume on October 1st.

“We have withstood the coronavirus storm,” Ramaphosa said in an address to the nation.

“It is time to move to what will become our new normal for as long as the coronavirus is with us.”

Under the new measures, most gatherings will be permitted at 50 percent of a venue’s capacity, with a cap of 250 people for indoor events.

A 10:00 pm curfew will be scaled back to midnight and a 50-person limit at recreational facilities will be lifted.

Restrictions on sporting events remain in place, however, and face-masks will still be required in public.

Travel may also be restricted to and from countries with “high infection rates”, Ramaphosa added, explaining that a list would be determined based on “latest scientific data… from those countries”.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 2,194 to 265,857, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Thursday.

The reported death toll rose by three to 9,371, the tally showed.

The full story on New York City mayor Bill de Blasio furloughing everyone in his office – including himself:

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An official said Wednesday that Mexico City suffered 20,535 excess deaths attributable to Covid-19 between April and August, almost double the number reported in the official death toll of 11,318, AP reports.

The head of the city’s Digital Innovation Agency, David Merino, said there were 30,462 excess deaths in the city between 1 April and the end of August, about two-thirds of which were determined to be due to coronavirus. Excess deaths are computed by comparing the number of deaths in previous years and comparing them to 2020.

Merino wrote in his Twitter account that 92% of those deaths were in hospitals and 7% at private residences. The city of almost 9 million inhabitants, like the rest of Mexico, has had an extremely low testing rate and officials have acknowledged that the numbers of test-confirmed cases and deaths probably underestimate the real figures.

These are figures that describe a tragedy, Merino wrote.

Merino did specify how the city had assigned that number of excess deaths to Covid-19, but city officials have been leading an effort to review death certificates to determine how many untested people had probably died of coronavirus.
It was also unclear whether test-confirmed cases were included in the excess-death figures.