Coronavirus live news: entire Dynamo Dresden team quarantined, Russia infections near 200,000

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The novel coronavirus has killed at least 277,127 people since the outbreak first emerged in China last December, according to a tally from official sources compiled by news agency AFP.

At least 4,001,437 cases of coronavirus have been registered in 195 countries and territories. Of these, at least 1,312,900 are now considered recovered.

The tallies, using data collected by AFP from national authorities and information from the World Health Organization (WHO), probably reflect only a fraction of the actual number of infections, as many countries are testing only the most serious cases.

The US has the highest number of total deaths worldwide at 78,320, with the UK second-highest at 31,587 deaths. Italy, Spain and France follow, with China, the home of the virus, recording less than 5000 fatalities.

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Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak today include:

Russia hit by 10,000 new cases as total infections near 200,000

Russia has been hit with more than 10,000 new Covid-19 cases in the last day, as the country approaches nearly 200,000 confirmed infections and lockdown measures continue.

Lagos could be put on lockdown again after social distancing rules disregarded

Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, could return to lockdown if residents continue to ignore social distancing rules, its governor warned on Saturday.

UK death toll rises by 346 as coastguard warns lockdown flouters

The UK death toll has risen by 346 to 31,587 across all settings, while 215,260 have tested positive, an increase of 3,896 cases on Friday. Meanwhile, the coastguard recorded the highest number of incidents in one day since the lockdown began as people “ignored” the government’s message to stay at home.

Indonesia records biggest daily increase in infections

Indonesia has reported its biggest daily increase in infections, with 533 new confirmed cases, taking the total to 13,645. But with Indonesia’s low testing rate criticised by medical experts, the number of infections in the country – which has the fourth biggest population in the world – is feared to be far higher than official figures show.

Germany’s plans to restart football suffer setback

Germany’s plans to restart competitive football next Saturday suffered an early setback after the entire Dynamo Dresden team were placed in a two-week quarantine following two positive coronavirus tests among the players.

Germany’s plans to restart competitive football next Saturday suffered an early setback after the entire Dynamo Dresden team were placed in a two-week quarantine following two positive coronavirus tests among the players.

The Bundesliga 2 club announced on their website that tests taken on Friday had revealed two new positive cases and local health authorities had ordered the team into quarantine. Dresden were scheduled to play Hannover 96 next Sunday in their first game back following the stoppage caused by the coronavirus outbreak.

“After an intensive analysis of the situation, the health authority in Dresden … decided on Saturday that the entire second division squad, including the coaching and support team, must now go into a 14-day quarantine at home,” the club said. “Due to the quarantine measures, [we] will not be able to travel to Lower Saxony for the away game on matchday 26 as planned.”.

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Here’s an article we published a few days ago which explains the background to this.

Nigeria’s largest city Lagos could return to lockdown to halt the coronavirus if residents continue to ignore social distancing rules, the governor warned on Saturday.

The city emerged on Monday from a five-week stay at home order that left the city’s large number of poor struggling to make ends meet.

But since the easing of the restrictions people have been seen thronging markets and banks despite orders remaining in place to avoid mass gatherings.

“It is disappointing to see the crowd at banks and markets across the state flouting the guidelines,” Lagos governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu wrote on Twitter.

“We will be forced to take the painful decision of bringing the state under lockdown if it remains clear that Lagosians are determined to flout the rules.”

Nigeria has confirmed 3,912 infections and 117 deaths from the novel coronavirus. Lagos, a city of some 20 million people, has been the country’s main hotspot and the daily increase in recorded cases has doubled in the past few days.

Sanwo-Olu said that Lagos state would change its “isolation strategy” and that district healthcare facilities would handle “mild-to-moderate” cases.

Half of Nigeria’s 200 million population live in dire poverty, making it a major challenge to impose lockdowns cutting them off from daily earnings.

Measures introduced in place of the total lockdown include a night-time curfew and the mandatory wearing of masks in public.

At least 12 Russian clerics have died since the start of the coronavirus outbreak, according to a list published by “Orthodoxy and the World”, an online media outlet that focuses on religious and social issues.

Father Andrei Molchanov, the latest Russian Orthodox priest to die from the novel coronavirus, was buried on Saturday by his heartbroken daughter who said she wished the Moscow church where he served had closed earlier.

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Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, called in late March for believers to pray at home. However tough government lockdown measures at the end of that month, which closed down restaurants and most stores, and told people to stay at home, did not order churches to shut.

“I believe above all else that we should have closed churches, along with restaurants and other places,” Anastasia Molchanova, the late priest’s daughter, told Reuters after his burial.

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Despite the patriarch’s call, most churches in Moscow, including Molchanov’s, remained open until mid-April before Russia’s consumer health watchdog, a government agency, issued an order to shut them.

The consumer health watchdog and the Russian Orthodox Church did not immediately respond to requests for comment, according to Reuters.

The number of people who have died from coronavirus infections in France rose by 80 to 26,310 on Saturday, the health ministry said.

This is a much smaller daily increase than the previous day when it was 243.

The ministry said the number of people in intensive care units – a key measure of a health system’s ability to deal with the epidemic – fell by 56, or about 2%, to 2,812. That is less than half the peak of 7,148 seen on 8 April.

The number of people in hospital with the coronavirus also fell, to 22,614 from 22,724, continuing an uninterrupted three-week fall, and down 30% from a 14 April peak of 32,292.

France will start lifting its almost two-month-old national lockdown from Monday.

Three children in New York have died from a rare inflammatory syndrome believed to be linked to the coronavirus, governor Andrew Cuomo told a daily briefing on Saturday.

Cuomo had on Friday disclosed the death of a five-year-old linked to the coronavirus and a syndrome that shares symptoms with toxic shock and Kawasaki disease, which was the first known fatality tied to the rare illness in New York.

The governor told a daily briefing on Saturday that the illness had now taken the lives of at least three young people across the state. He did not provide details of their ages or the circumstances of their deaths.

But Cuomo said he was increasingly worried that the syndrome posed a newly emerging risk for children, who had previously been thought to be largely immune to severe illness from Covid-19, the respiratory disease caused by the virus.

Indian authorities used drones and fire engines to disinfect the city of Ahmedabad on Saturday, AFP reports.

The city of 5.5 million people in Narendra Modi’s home state has become a cause for concern, accounting for 343 of the almost 2,000 coronavirus deaths reported nationwide and almost 10% of India’s cases. Other cities in Gujarat state have also been badly hit.

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Locals watched from their balconies as drones sprayed disinfectant while fire engines and other vehicles toured the empty streets sending out clouds of the cleaning agent.

The acting chief administrator, Rajiv Gupta, said all zones of the city would be disinfected.

India has been in the grip of the world’s biggest lockdown since 25 March, and measures were tightened in Ahmedabad on Friday because of the accelerated spread of the virus.

Hundreds of paramilitaries kept people off the streets and virtually all stores have been closed for at least a week.

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The virus is spreading quickly in other cities including the capital, Delhi, and the finance hub of Mumbai.

While the number of fatalities is low compared with the US and the worst-hit European nations, health specialists say India’s pandemic curve may not peak until June and July.

Shamika Ravi, an economic adviser to the government, said on Saturday that the “infection is way ahead of our knowledge” in Gujarat and Maharashtra, which includes Mumbai, because authorities were not carrying out enough tests.

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A child was among 16 migrants rescued four miles off the coast of France when their makeshift vessel bound for Britain ran into difficulties in the middle of the night, authorities said.

The group was picked up 3.8 miles off the French port of Calais after calling for help, French maritime authorities confirmed to AFP. A French maritime surveillance vessel rescued the migrants at around 5am and transported them to the Channel port of Dunkirk, where they were handed over to border police.

A charity leader said last month that migrants living in makeshift camps in northern France are dangerously exposed to Covid-19, warning that conditions were “the worst I’ve ever seen”.

Vladimir Putin has told Russians they are invincible when they stand together, as he sought to send a message of unity after the country’s tally of Covid-19 cases reached the fifth highest in the world.

Addressing the nation in a speech as he presided over Victory Day celebrations, a sombre Putin invoked the memory of the country’s veterans who fought in the second world war.

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“Our veterans fought for life and against death, and we will always try to live up to their spirit of unanimity and resilience,” he said after laying a bouquet of red roses at the Eternal Flame war memorial near the Kremlin.

We are united by our shared memory, hopes and aspirations, as well as a sense of shared responsibility for the present and the future. We know and strongly believe that when we stand together, we are invincible.”

It comes after Russia’s total confirmed infections neared 200,000. Victory Day, marking the defeat of Nazi Germany, is one of Russia’s most revered public events and provides Putin with a platform to promote the patriotism that is a cornerstone of his popular support. But the pandemic forced him to postpone the main highlight, a huge annual parade on Moscow’s Red Square showcasing Moscow’s most sophisticated military hardware.

In his first public appearance for weeks, Putin took part in a low-key remembrance ceremony, but he made clear he still planned to hold the usual parade to mark the anniversary when the time was right.

South Korea’s capital, Seoul, has shut down thousands of nightclubs, hostess bars and discos after a cluster of Covid-19 infections were linked to clubbers who went out last weekend after the country relaxed social distancing rules.

More than 2,100 venues have been ordered to close in measures imposed today by Seoul’s mayor, Park Won-soon, reports Associated Press. The national government urged venues to close or otherwise enforce anti-virus measures including distancing, temperature checks, keeping customer lists and requiring employees to wear masks.

The entry bans will be maintained until the city concludes that risks of infection have been meaningfully lowered, Park added. South Korea’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said earlier in the day that 18 new cases were reported in the 24 hours to midnight yesterday, all but one of them linked to a 29-year-old man who visited three clubs in Seoul’s Itaewon district last Saturday before testing positive days later.

South Korea has confirmed at least 10,840 cases of the coronavirus, and 256 deaths.

It is a city more commonly associated with the vast wealth of the financial world, but more than 1,000 people queued up in Geneva on Saturday to get free food parcels.

In a sign of the devastating impact of the Covid-19 epidemic on Switzerland’s poorest, including undocumented migrants, a line of people stretched more than half a mile outside of an ice rink where volunteers handed out around 1,500 parcels. Some of those queuing had arrived as early as 5am. A small child was pictured among the crowd waiting in line.

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“At the end of the month, my pockets are empty. We have to pay the bills, the insurance, everything,” Ingrid Berala, a Geneva resident from Nicaragua who works part-time, told Reuters. “This is great, because there is food for a week, a week of relief … I don’t know for next week.”

As many as 660,000 people in the country of 8.6 million were poor in 2018, according to charity Caritas, particularly single parents and those with a low level of education unable to find work after losing work.

More than 1.1 million people were at risk of poverty, meaning they receive less than 60% of the median income, which was 6,538 Swiss francs ($6,736) for a full-time job in 2018.

Geneva is the second-most expensive global city for a family of three to live in, behind only Zurich. Although average incomes are also high, that helps little for people struggling to make ends meet.

“I think a lot people are aware of this, but it is different to see this with your own eyes,” said Silvana Matromatteo, head of the aid group Geneva Solidarity Caravan.

We had people in tears who said ‘It is not possible that it is happening in my country’. But it is here and maybe the Covid-19 brought everything out and this is good, because we will be able to take measures to support all these workers, because they are workers above all.”

Patrick Wieland, chief of mission for the Doctors Without Borders group, said a survey last week showed just over half the food recipients interviewed were undocumented, while others had attained legal status, were Swiss or were seeking asylum. Just over 3% had been tested positive for Covid-19, three times the overall rate in Geneva, which he attributed to poor and overcrowded housing.

One undocumented immigrant who called himself Fernando said he lost his restaurant job during the crisis and had no pay. “I’m very grateful to receive this help and if the situation changes for me, I am committing to do the same thing that they are doing for me,” he said.

In the UK, a trade body has said that an expected 14-day quarantine period for all travellers coming to the country would have a devastating impact on the aviation industry and wider economy.

It is anticipated that Boris Johnson will announce the quarantine tomorrow as part of measures to prevent a second peak of the coronavirus pandemic. It will affect people arriving at airports, ports and Eurostar railway stations, including Britons returning from abroad.

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Under the plan, set to be in place by the end of early June, arrivals will be asked to provide the address at which they will self-isolate for two weeks by filling out a digital form.

But Karen Dee, the chief executive of the Airport Operators Association, said it would “not only have a devastating impact on the UK aviation industry, but also on the wider economy”.

However, some have questioned why the quarantine measure was not introduced sooner, and what the scientific reasoning is for it to be introduced at this point in the government’s response. Other countries including Australia and New Zealand ordered 14-day isolation periods for visitors as early as March.