Coronavirus live news: WHO reports record daily global case increase as known infections pass 8.9m

The owners of Europe’s largest meat processing plant must be held to account for a mass outbreak of the coronavirus among over 1500 of its workers, Germany’s labour minister has said.

Hubertus Heil said an entire region had been “taken hostage” by the factory’s failure to protect its workers, most of whom come from Romania and Bulgaria.

Germany’s coronavirus reproduction rate or ‘R’ rate, leapt to 2.88 over the weekend largely as a result of the outbreak at the plant at Gütersloh in North Rhein Westphalia (NRW). Around 7000 people have been sent into quarantine as a result of the outbreak, and schools and kindergartens in the region that had been gradually reopened, have been forced to close until at least after the summer holidays.

Tönnies, the family-run business at the heart of the affair is accused of breaking a series of regulations introduced to dampen the spread of coronavirus. It has also been reluctant to give authorities access to its workers’ contact details, allegedly hampering the tracking and tracing of them and their contacts.

Clemens Tönnies, the company’s billionaire CEO, held a press briefing at the weekend at which he apologised for his company’s management of the crisis, and said it would take “full responsibility” for what had to be done to combat it.

Within his own family there have also reportedly been attempts to oust him from his role.

India has reported a record number of new coronavirus cases and a death toll of more than 400 people in the past 24 hours, Reuters reports.

The 15,000 new cases brought India’s total to more than 425,000, behind only the United States, Brazil and Russia, according to data from the federal health ministry.

Nearly 14,000 people have now died from the disease caused by the virus since the first case in India in January.

The death toll in India remains low when compared to countries with similar numbers of cases but public health experts fear its hospitals will be unable to cope with a rise in cases.

The German embassy has sent messages to its citizens living in New Delhi warning them that there was “little to no chance” of admission to hospital for treatment for coronavirus as well as other intensive care needs.

The message was not an order to evacuate the country but to consider whether India remained safe depending on individual circumstances, a diplomat said.

The German advisory follows Ireland in suggesting that its citizens leave India due to the availability of hospital beds.

A dashboard run by the Delhi state government showed more than 7,000 hospital beds available for coronavirus patients today, although most of those were in a handful of government hospitals. Patients looking for beds have questioned the accuracy of the data.

Despite the peak of infections projected to be weeks if not months away Prime Minister Narendra Modi relaxed most curbs of a near three-month lockdown on 8 June in order to ease economic pain.

RIVM, the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands, has reported zero Covid-19 deaths for the first time since early March.

It reported 69 new infections and two hospital admissions.

The total number of deaths in the country remains at 6,090 and the total number of people who have tested positive has risen to 49,658.

The effects of the coronavirus pandemic will be felt for decades, the World Health Organization’s director general warned an online conference today, after the WHO reported a record increase in global cases on Sunday.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual health forum organised by Dubai authorities that the greatest threat facing the world was “the lack of global solidarity and global leadership”. He said:

We cannot defeat this pandemic with a divided world. The politicisation of the pandemic has exacerbated it. None of us is safe until all of us are safe.

The total number of cases rose by 183,020 on Sunday. While Europe is easing lockdowns, Covid-19, which has killed more than 465,000 people and infected almost 9 million worldwide, is surging in the Americas and parts of Asia.

The WHO chief said:

The pandemic is still accelerating. We know that the pandemic is much more than a health crisis, it is an economic crisis, a social crisis, and in many countries a political crisis. Its effects will be felt for decades to come.

Concerns that Donald Trump’s inner circle might pressure the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to rush a coronavirus vaccine to market in time for the presidential election have risen after the White House attacked the agency for reversing itself on an experimental drug treatment.

Critics say the FDA’s decision in April to approve hydroxychloroquine for emergency use – an approval that the agency revoked last Monday – demonstrated that the regulator is vulnerable to political pressure from the White House.

But other outside experts said regulatory approval for any vaccine would require a degree of data transparency that would prevent the process from being unduly rushed.

The coronavirus outbreaks that have struck workers in meat plants around the world are due to poor working conditions and living quarters in a sector that is in a “disastrous race to the bottom” in the quest for cheap meat, trade union representatives have said.

Meat plants have persistently been centres for outbreaks, with some of the biggest clusters in the US and Canada focused on slaughterhouses. According to the Food and Environment Reporting Network (Fern), which has been tracking the outbreaks, nearly 30,000 meat plant workers across the US and Europe have been infected with the virus and more than 100 have died.

“The entire sector is in a disastrous race to the bottom, driven by the market and by consumer demand for cheap meat,” said Peter Schmidt, the head of international affairs at the German food workers union NGG. Schmidt claimed modern plants in Germany brought in contract workers from eastern Europe who were prepared to put up with low wages.

A two-day lockdown in which residents will be barred from leaving their homes, except for work or urgent necessities, is to be imposed in a northern city of Kazakhstan after a rise in Covid-19 cases.

The move continues a trend towards weekend restrictions in the oil-rich nation of 19 million, where the number of coronavirus cases has more than quintupled to about 28,000 since a nationwide lockdown was lifted in mid-May.

Residents of Kostanay and four towns, including the mining hubs Rudny and Lisakovsk, will be subject to the restrictions, the local newspaper Kostanayskiye Novosti reported.

This is Ben Quinn picking up the blog now in London. I’ll be bringing you all the latest updates on the global coronavirus crisis. If you think I’m missing something, email me on ben.quinn@theguardian.com or contact me on twitter on @BenQuinn75.

Three areas in the north-eastern Spanish region of Aragón have been ordered back into the penultimate phase of the lockdown de-escalation process after 33 new coronavirus cases were reported on Sunday.

“We tackled the outbreak very early and managed to identify cases because we were looking for them,” said the region’s director general of public health, Francisco Javier Falo.

Spain’s health minister, Salvador Illa, said the outbreak – concentrated in the Aragonese areas of La Litera, Cinca Medio and Bajo Cinca – was “being brought under control” on Monday morning.

Illa said 36 Covid-19 outbreaks had been detected in Spain in recent days, adding that all were under control.

Spain emerged from its three-month state of emergency on Sunday, meaning people can once again travel between different regions. The country also opened its borders to visitors from the EU and the Schengen area on Sunday.