Coronavirus live news: WHO reports record new global cases; Israel first country to reimpose national lockdown

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan for today. I’ll be here same time tomorrow – and in the meantime a series of talented colleagues will be helming the blog.

Here is today’s global report:

A collective failure by political leaders to heed warnings and prepare for an infectious disease pandemic has transformed “a world at risk” to a “world in disorder”, according to a report on international epidemic preparedness, Reuters reports.

“Financial and political investments in preparedness have been insufficient, and we are all paying the price,” said the report by The Global Preparedness Monitoring Board (GPMB).

“It is not as if the world has lacked the opportunity to take these steps,” it added. “There have been numerous calls for action … over the last decade, yet none has generated the changes needed.”

The GPMB, co-convened by the World Bank and the World Health Organization, is chaired by former WHO director-general Gro Harlem Brundtland, who now also chairs an independent watchdog that monitors the WHO.

The board’s 2019 report, released a few months before the novel coronavirus emerged in China, said there was a real threat of “a rapidly spreading pandemic due to a lethal respiratory pathogen” and warned such an event could kill millions and wreak havoc on the global economy.

This year’s report – entitled “A World in Disorder” – said world leaders had never before “been so clearly forewarned of the dangers of a devastating pandemic”, and yet they had failed to take adequate action.

The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed “a collective failure to take pandemic prevention, preparedness and response seriously and prioritise it accordingly”, it said.

“Pathogens thrive in disruption and disorder. Covid-19 has proven the point.”

Here are the key developments from the last few hours:

• US President Donald Trump held a Nevada campaign rally at an indoor venue on Sunday despite public health professionals’ warnings against large indoor gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic. People in the crowd were seated close together and many did not wear masks.
• The World Health Organization reported a record single-day increase in global coronavirus cases on Sunday, as the tally surged by a further 307,930 infections in just 24 hours.
• Israel’s government will impose a new three-week nationwide lockdown that will start on Friday, after the rate of infection during the past two weeks became the highest recorded since the outbreak began.
• South Africa’s finance minister, Tito Mboweni, warned Sunday the economy could shrink by more than the 7% forecast for 2020, stressing that public finances are “overstretched”.
• Australia’s second most populous state of Victoria on Monday reported seven deaths from the new coronavirus in the last 24 hours and 35 new cases, its lowest daily rise in infections since late June.
• New Zealand will remain at its current Covid-19 alert level for at least another week. The country is under low-level restrictions due to continued community transmission of the coronavirus in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. Physical distancing is required, and masks are legally mandated on public transport.
• Saudi Arabia will partially lift its suspension of international flights as of 15 September to allow “exceptional categories” of citizens and residents to travel.
• About 4,000 health workers demonstrated in Brussels on Sunday, calling for more spending on the healthcare system.

China on Monday reported 10 new coronavirus cases in the mainland for 13 September, the same as a day earlier, the health authority said.

All of the new infections were imported, the National Health Commission said in a statement. There were no new deaths.

China reported 39 new asymptomatic patients, compared with 70 a day earlier.

As of Sunday, mainland China had a total of 85,194 confirmed infections of the coronavirus, it said. The Covid-19 death toll remained unchanged at 4,634.

In open defiance of state regulations and his own administrations pandemic health guidelines, President Donald Trump on Sunday hosted his first indoor rally since June, telling a packed, nearly mask-less Nevada crowd that the nation was making the last turn in defeating the virus.

Eager to project a sense of normalcy in imagery, Trump soaked up the raucous cheers inside the warehouse venue. Relatively few in the crowd wore masks, with one clear exception: those in the stands directly behind Trump, whose images would end up on TV, were mandated to wear face coverings.

Not since a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was blamed for a surge of coronavirus infections has he gathered supporters indoors. There was no early mention from the president that the pandemic had killed nearly 200,000 Americans and was still claiming 1,000 lives a day.

“We are not shutting the country again. A shutdown would destroy the lives and dreams of millions Americans,” said Trump:

Here is the full story on New Zealand, from Charlotte Graham-McLay in Wellington:

New Zealand will remain at its current level of Covid-19 restrictions for another week, the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, said on Monday as she urged the public to stay the course on the county’s “cautious” approach to quashing the virus.

“New Zealand has followed a plan that has worked,” she said, referring to her government’s strict, early lockdown of the country in March as New Zealand’s coronavirus cases started to rise. “This has both saved lives, but also meant our economy has been able to be more open in a more sustained way than nearly any other country in the world.”

Restrictions on Auckland – which include a 10-person limit on social gatherings – would remain in place for a further week, until 21 September, Ardern said on Monday. She had earlier met with her cabinet about the Covid-19 protocols.

Milder rules for the rest of the country – where no community transmission has been recorded – will also remain in place until 21 September, when they will be jettisoned if case numbers remain contained, Ardern said. At present, social gatherings outside Auckland are limited to 100 people.

Throughout the country, she added, physical distancing would no longer be required on planes or public transport, effective immediately; previously, all travellers had been required to leave empty seats between them. Masks are legally mandated for all passengers.

The number of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins seen around Hong Kong has jumped as the pause in high-speed ferry traffic due to the coronavirus allows the threatened species to make something of a comeback, scientists said.

Marine scientist Lindsay Porter of the University of St. Andrews said the mammals – also known as Chinese white dolphins and pink dolphins – were moving back into parts of the Pearl River Delta that they typically avoided due to the ferries that connect Hong Kong and Macau.

Dolphin numbers in the area had jumped by up to 30% since March when the ferry traffic was suspended, allowing scientists a rare opportunity to study how underwater noise affected their behaviour, she said.

Scientists think there are about 2,000 dolphins in the entire Pearl River estuary. A Hong Kong government survey from 2019 found only about 52 dolphins entered the waters around the Asian financial hub, but Porter believes the real number may be slightly higher.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 927 to 260,355, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed on Monday.

The reported death toll rose by one to 9,350, the tally showed.

US President Donald Trump held a Nevada campaign rally at an indoor venue on Sunday despite public health professionals’ warnings against large indoor gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic, Reuters reports.

People in the crowd were seated close together and many did not wear masks.

Biden has criticized Trump for holding campaign events that put people at risk of contracting the coronavirus, which has killed more than 194,000 people in the United States.

Trump played down the virus in its early stages and has alternately embraced and disregarded advice from public health experts, who encourage mask-wearing and maintaining social distance to prevent its spread.

The president’s campaign portrayed the rally at a large warehouse in Henderson as an opportunity for supporters to exercise their rights to peaceful assembly under the US Constitution’s First Amendment.

“If you can join tens of thousands of people protesting in the streets, gamble in a casino, or burn down small businesses in riots, you can gather peacefully under the First Amendment to hear from the president of the United States,” spokesman Tim Murtaugh said in a statement.

Participants were to have temperatures taken before entry and be given a mask they would be encouraged to wear, the campaign said.

Asian shares firmed on Monday on renewed hopes for a coronavirus vaccine after AstraZeneca resumed its phase-3 trial though sentiment was still cautious ahead of a big week of central bank meetings in UK, Japan and the United States, Reuters reports.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was up 0.7%, poised for its second straight session of gains.

Australian shares climbed 0.6% while Japan’s Nikkei added 0.7%. Chinese shares started firm with the blue-chip index rising 0.6%.

U.S. stock futures, the S&P 500 e-minis, jumped more than 1% after a mixed session on Wall Street last week.

Friday marked six months since the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a pandemic on 11 March.

Since then, major global economies have slipped into recession and millions have lost their jobs, prompting central banks around the world to launch unprecedented stimulus.

Podcast: How an Austrian ski resort became the centre of Europe’s Covid-19 outbreak

When Nigel Mallender headed to Ischgl in March, he was looking forward to a fun-packed break with friends. Just four days later, he and thousands of other tourists were desperately trying to leave after authorities became aware of coronavirus cases. Mallender and the Guardian’s Philip Oltermann discuss the fallout from that week:

Singapore is battling new clusters of coronavirus infections in migrant dormitories that had won the all-clear from authorities, highlighting the difficulty of stamping out the disease, even in a closely monitored population, Reuters reports.

As the wealthy city-state tumbled into recession, officials facing intense pressure to revive the economy are opting for limited isolation measures rather than the wide clampdowns earlier, but most low-wage workers are still penned in.

“There is little choice,” said Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious diseases expert at the city’s Mount Elizabeth Hospital. “We need to be realistic. We need the economy to go on.”

The dormitories, home to more than 300,000 workers in industries such as construction and shipbuilding, with several allocated to a room, contribute nearly 95% of Singapore’s tally of more than 57,000 infections.

When authorities uncovered the virus raging through the dormitories they sealed off their occupants, launched vigorous testing and ordered a nationwide lockdown.

Still, an average of 45 daily new infections has shown up there since authorities declared last month that all residents had recovered or been shown by testing to be virus-free. Outside, the daily average is just two local cases.