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TOKYO, Japan (AFP) — Japanese medics are warning more must be done to prevent the coronavirus from overwhelming the country’s healthcare system as confirmed cases passed 10,000, despite a nationwide state of emergency. Experts have been alarmed by a recent spike in COVID-19 infections, with hundreds detected daily. Japan’s outbreak remains less severe than in hard-hit European countries, but its caseload is one of Asia’s highest after China and India, and is roughly on par […]
ROME, Italy (AFP) — Italy’s official daily toll from the novel coronavirus edged down to 433 on Sunday, the lowest figure in one week. The total number of deaths reported by the civil protection services since the start of Italy’s health crisis in February now stands at 23,660 — second only to the United States. Sunday’s fatalities figure was the second-lowest in one month. The 3,047 new virus infections represented a rise of just 1.7 […]
WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AFP) — New Zealand will ease a nationwide COVID-19 lockdown next week after claiming success in stopping “an uncontrolled explosion” of the virus, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said Monday. “We have done what very few countries have been able to do,” Ardern said. “We have stopped a wave of devastation.” She said New Zealand would move its maximum Level Four alert to Level Three from late evening on Monday, April 27, and […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — USThe number of coronavirus deaths in the United States rose by almost 2,000 in the past 24 hours to reach 40,661 on Sunday, a tally from Johns Hopkins University showed. The rise in deaths, by 1,997, is marginally above the 1,891 which Johns Hopkins data showed a day earlier for the previous 24-hour period to Saturday. Sunday’s figure came on the same day that New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said […]
by Catherine TRIOMPHE with Mariette LE ROUX in Paris and AFP bureaus Agence France Presse NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — Hard-hit European nations and the US epicenter New York reported headway Sunday in their battle against the deadly pandemic. Governments across the world are now debating how and when to ease lockdowns that have kept more than half of humanity — 4.5 billion people — confined to their homes and crippled the global […]
by Christopher RICKLETON Agence France Presse Two NASA astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut on Friday made a safe return from the International Space Station to find a “different planet,” transformed by the coronavirus pandemic. Andrew Morgan, Jessica Meir and Oleg Skripochka touched down in central Kazakhstan at 0516 GMT Friday in the first returning mission since the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March. Morgan had been on the ISS since […]
by Thomas URBAIN Agence France Presse NEW YORK, United States (AFP) — American families slammed by the coronavirus pandemic are turning more and more to food banks to get by, waiting hours for donations in lines of cars stretching as far as the eye can see. And with 22 million people out of work seemingly overnight as business after business closes under the Great Lockdown, these charities feeding hungry and scared people fear the […]
BEIJING, China (AFP) — The director of a maximum-security laboratory in China’s coronavirus ground-zero city of Wuhan has rejected claims that it could be the source of the outbreak, calling it “impossible”. Beijing has come under increasing pressure over transparency in its handling of the pandemic, with the US probing whether the virus actually originated in a virology institute with a high-security biosafety laboratory. Chinese scientists have said the virus likely jumped from an animal […]
by Joseph Prezioso with Catherine Triomphe in New York Agence France Presse Hundreds protested Saturday in cities across America against coronavirus-related lockdowns — with encouragement from President Donald Trump — as resentment grows against the crippling economic cost of confinement. An estimated 400 people gathered under a cold rain in Concord, New Hampshire — many on foot while others remained in their cars — to send a message that extended quarantines were not necessary […]
WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) US President Donald Trump warned on Saturday that China could face consequences if it was “knowingly responsible” for the coronavirus pandemic. “It could have been stopped in China before it started and it wasn’t,” Trump told reporters at a White House briefing. “And now the whole world is suffering because of it.” Trump was asked whether China should suffer consequences over the pandemic which began in the Chinese city of […]
by Xavier LETAMENDI Agence France Presse GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador (AFP) — Darwin Castillo’s father died in Guayaquil during the coronavirus pandemic that has caused the Ecuadoran city’s health system to collapse. But when Castillo went to the overwhelmed morgue to recover him, he opened a body bag to find the person inside wasn’t his father. Two weeks have passed and he still hasn’t found the body. Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, is the capital of Guayas […]
PORT VILA, Vanuatu (AFP) — Vanuatu’s rigid coronavirus lockdown is hindering critical relief efforts to rebuild the island country after it was pummelled by Tropical Cyclone Harold, aid agencies said Saturday. Nearly two weeks after the deadly monster storm barrelled through the South Pacific, local media reported that newly homeless families were still sleeping in the open. Australia, New Zealand and China have rushed in emergency aid but distribution has been hampered by strict quarantine […]
