Authorities in Australia are stepping up their battle against coronavirus with the second biggest city of Melbourne announcing the introduction of mandatory face coverings from Wednesday. The move came as the global death toll from Covid-19 passed 600,000, following another daily record increase in cases.
The premier of the Australian state of Victoria said people in Melbourne, and the adjacent shire of Mitchell to its north, would have to wear a mask or a face covering from 11.59pm on Wednesday. It’s the first time masks have been made compulsory in the country, with a threat of a A$200 (US$140) fine for non-compliance.
The premier, Daniel Andrews, announced another 363 cases of Covid-19 as he introduced the face-coverings requirement on Sunday, marking a fortnight of triple-figure rises in new daily cases in and around the city.
“We’re going to be wearing masks in Victoria and potentially in other parts of the country for a very long time,” Andrews said.
“There’s no vaccine to this wildly infectious virus,” he said. Masks are “a simple thing, but it’s about changing habits, it’s about becoming a simple part of your routine”.
Australia, with a population of 25 million, has recorded about 11,800 coronavirus cases, a fraction of what has been seen in other countries or even some US states. It had been held up as one of the success stories of the pandemic until the recent clusters in Melbourne, which came after a number of parts of the country had reported very low or no community transmission for significant lengths of time.
The adjacent state of New South Wales, Australia’s most populous, has seen new cases in the low double digits in recent weeks. Cases there are growing, after a significant period with very little community transmission, and NSW reported 18 new cases on Sunday, the highest figure since 19 April, when 21 cases were reported.
Residents were instructed to avoid non-essential travel, gatherings of more than 10 people and attending crowded events. Overseas travellers arriving in Sydney will be limited to 350 people a day to ensure the NSW health system isn’t overwhelmed from Monday.
The changes in Australia were preceded by the World Health Organisation on Saturday reporting a record one-day rise in coronavirus cases, with more than a quarter of a million cases confirmed in 24 hours. On Sunday the global pandemic death toll passed 600,000. The WHO also recorded the highest daily death toll since since 10 May, with 7,360 reported fatalities. Deaths have been averaging 4,800 a day in July, up slightly from an average of 4,600 a day in June.
The United States is by far the worst-affected country globally, in terms of both cases and deaths, with 139,960 fatalities. Brazil, with the next-worst toll, has 78,772 deaths.
Meanwhile in Europe, a stand-off between EU leaders at a summit in Brussels on Saturday threatened to derail plans for a massive stimulus fund to breathe life into their coronavirus-hammered economies. Leaders on Saturday extended their summit by an extra day in the hope they were finally closing in on a deal for an unprecedented €1.85tn (US$2.1tn) EU budget and coronavirus recovery fund.
“We are in an impasse now. It is more complex than what was expected,” Italian prime minister Giuseppe Conte said in a video on Facebook as the 27 European Union leaders neared the end of a second day of talks.
With the pandemic dealing Europe its worst economic shock since the second world war, leaders gathered on Friday to haggle over the proposed fund and 2021-27 EU budget. But a group of wealthy and fiscally “frugal” northern states led by the Netherlands have blocked progress in the first face-to-face EU summit since spring lockdowns across the continent.
They favour repayable loans rather than free grants for the hard-hit indebted economies mostly on the Mediterranean rim, and they want control over how the funds are spent.
Hopes for an agreement grew earlier on Saturday when the summit’s chairman, European Council president Charles Michel, proposed revisions to the overall package that were designed to assuage the Dutch concerns.
Other key global developments in the pandemic include:
In Spain, more than 4 million people in Barcelona were advised to stay at home on Friday except for necessary trips from this weekend onwards, after Alba Vergés, the Catalan health minister, said the measure was the best way to avoid a new lockdown.
In Israel, police used water cannon to disperse demonstrators around prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s residence on Saturday as protests mounted against him over alleged corruption and his handling of the coronavirus crisis, Reuters reports.
South Africa now ranks fifth in the world for confirmed coronavirus cases, after reporting 13,285 new confirmed cases on Saturday, for a total of 350,879. That makes up roughly half the cases in Africa.
Russia’s ambassador to London has denied accusations by Britain and its allies of helping hackers target labs conducting coronavirus vaccine research, in a UK television interview to be broadcast on Sunday.
In the US, a health official on the Texas Gulf Coast says that 85 infants have tested positive for the coronavirus. Corpus Christi Nueces County public health director Annette Rodriguez said Friday that the 85 infants are each younger than one, but offered no other details, including how the children are suspected to have become infected.