Coronavirus news: Malaysia rounds up migrants as UN warns of crackdown on vulnerable – as it happened

We’ve launched a new liveblog at the link below, where I’ll be bringing you the latest developments in the pandemic from around the world:

Something to look forward to:

Here are the main developments in the pandemic worldwide from the last few hours:

• European leaders join forces to combat Covid-19. European leaders have pledged to raise billions of pounds to help find a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19 as part of an “international alliance” fighting the disease.An online pledging conference due to be held on Monday will aim to pull in €7.5bn (£6.6bn) in funding to support the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• YouTube has deleted conspiracy theorist David Icke’s account. The video-sharing site said the 68-year-old violated its policies on sharing information about coronavirus.The former footballer has made controversial unproven claims about the virus on several internet platforms, including one that it is linked to the 5G mobile network.
• Primary schools in England and Wales could reopen for all in June. Children aged five to 11 could return to school from Monday 1 June as part of government plans to gradually ease lockdown measures, the Sunday Telegraph has reported.
• Italy reports surge in deaths but figure is misleading. Reported coronavirus deaths in Italy rose by 474, after 269 new fatalities were recorded on Friday, but the figures were distorted by late registrations of 282 hospital deaths which had occurred in April, according to La Repubblica newspaper. The daily tally of new infections nationwide was broadly stable for a third day running at 1,900 against 1,965 on Friday.
• Malaysian authorities have rounded up and detained hundreds of undocumented migrants, including Rohingya refugees, as part of efforts to contain coronavirus, officials said. The UN said the move could push vulnerable groups into hiding and prevent them from seeking treatment.
• Migrants allowed off Italy’s quarantine ferry. About 180 migrants rescued at sea and held in isolation on an Italian ferry off the coast of Sicily will be disembarked in Palermo on Monday, AFP reports, citing the Avvenire daily.
• UK death toll rises further. Another 621 people are confirmed to have died from the virus in the UK, bringing the total to 28,131 – just short of Italy which has so far had the world’s second most deadly outbreak after the US – as criticism mounts over the government in London’s handling of the crisis in the early stages.
• Spain eases lockdown as people emerge to exercise. As of first thing Saturday, adults across Spain are allowed to exercise between 6am and 10am and then 8pm til 11pm, while the children’s slot is midday til 7pm. The streets are reserved for older people and those who need assistance from 10am til midday and then 7pm til 8pm.
• Hairdressers in Austria reopen. Austrians visited newly reopened hairdressers, beauticians and electronics shops on Saturday after the further relaxation of its seven-week lockdown. Protective measures remain in place, while bars are set to reopen within a fortnight.
• Thousands protest in California against lockdown. Amid demonstrations across the state in defiance of the lockdown, California’s governor Gavin Newsom promised meaningful adjustments to stay-at-home orders in the coming days which would affect how businesses, including restaurants, can operate.
• Controversial Chinese virologist dismisses defection rumours. Shi Zhengli, a researcher of bat coronaviruses whose work has been at the centre of an extremely controversial claim about the origin of coronavirus, has reportedly dismissed rumours that she has defected from China.
• Mick Jagger and Will Smith to perform in India Covid-19 concert. Dozens of international and Indian celebrities including cricket captain Virat Kohli and actor Priyanka Chopra will appear and perform from their homes on Sunday as part of a four-hour concert to raise funds for the battle against coronavirus in India, where the number of cases is surging.

Hello, Helen Sullivan with you now and for the next few hours. You can get in touch on Twitter @helenrsullivan with questions, comments and news from your part of the world.

European leaders have pledged to raise billions of pounds to help find a vaccine and treatments for Covid-19 as part of an “international alliance” fighting the disease.

An online pledging conference due to be held on Monday will aim to pull in £6.6bn in funding to support the global response to the coronavirus pandemic.

The leaders of France, Germany, Italy and Norway and senior EU officials told of how the outbreak had “caused devastation and pain in all corners of the world”.

They wrote in the Independent:

This poses a unique and truly global challenge. And it makes it imperative that we give ourselves the best chance to defeat it. This means bringing together the world’s best – and most prepared – minds to find the vaccines, treatments and therapies we need to make our world healthy again, while strengthening the health systems that will make them available for all, with a particular attention to Africa.

The politicians declared their support for the World Health Organisation and backed the recent launch of the “Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator”.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Wellcome Trust were also said to be joining forces with the leaders. Funding will be directed to health organisations such as CEPI, Gavi, the Vaccines Alliance, the Global Fund and Unitaid.

There have been 421 new deaths 4,970 further confirmed coronavirus cases in Brazil over the last 24 hours, the health ministry has announced.

The nation now has 95,559 confirmed cases of the virus and 6,750 deaths. New cases increased roughly 5.4% on Saturday from the previous day, while deaths rose by roughly 6.7%.

On Tuesday, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off news that the country had recorded a record number of deaths within 24 hours. “So what?” he told reporters. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to do?”

Since Brazil confirmed its first coronavirus case on 26 February, Bolsonaro has continually minimised the pandemic and purposefully undermined physical distancing guidelines.

Families in a city just outside Mexico’s capital have protested to demand news about their relatives who have coronavirus and urge for the return of the bodies of the dead after videos showed corpses inside a hospital.

One video of the Las Americas general hospital in Ecatepec that was posted to social media showed several bagged bodies on stretchers, some in a small room and others outside lined against a courtyard wall.

“The only thing I demand is that they give me the full body of my son,” Maria Dolores Carrillo told television program Imagen on Friday evening after her son died at the hospital.

Ecatepec, a working class city of more than 1.7 million inhabitants outside Mexico City, has registered 407 confirmed cases of the coronavirus and 28 deaths, according to data from Mexico’s health ministry. It is among the Mexican municipalities worst affected by the coronavirus.

State of Mexico authorities said in a statement that the Las Americas hospital, which is run by the state health ministry, would try to hasten deliveries of bodies to families.

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YouTube have deleted conspiracy theorist David Icke’s account.

The video-sharing site said the 68-year-old former footballer violated its policies on sharing information about coronavirus.

The former footballer has made controversial unproven claims about the virus on several internet platforms, including one that it is linked to the 5G mobile network.

The video service, owned by Google, told the BBC:

YouTube has clear policies prohibiting any content that disputes the existence and transmission of Covid-19 as described by the WHO and the NHS. Due to continued violation of these policies we have terminated David Icke’s YouTube channel.

The ban follows a similar move by Facebook, who removed Icke’s page from their site on Friday.

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) claimed Icke’s conspiracies over Covid-19 have been viewed more than 30m times and welcomed the move.

CCDH’s chief executive Imran Ahmed said:

We commend YouTube on bowing to pressure and taking action on David Icke’s channel. However, there remains a network of channels and shadowy amplifiers, who promote Mr Icke’s content (and) need to be removed.

It is time for Instagram and Twitter to follow Facebook and YouTube by acting to remove Icke and his content from their platforms. Lies cost lives in a global pandemic, and their failure to act promptly puts us all at risk.

Icke, the self-described ground breaking author and public speaker, tweeted: “YouTube delete David Icke - the man the Elite are terrified of - after complaint from CCDH. The reason is made-up. Where are you gutless media? Silent or cheering.”

Businessman Warren Buffett has given an upbeat assessment of the US’ ability to withstand crises.

The 89-year-old Buffett spoke at Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s annual meeting in Omaha, Nebraska, which was held virtually for the first time, without shareholders, because of the pandemic. The meeting was streamed by Yahoo Finance.

Buffett said the potential impact of the pandemic, which has already had a serious impact on the global economy, had a “extraordinarily wide” range.

But he remained optimistic that the US would weather it successfully and cited its emergence from crises such as World War Two and the influenza pandemic a century ago.

“This is quite an experiment,” Buffett said. “I remain convinced ... that nothing can basically stop America.”

The annual meeting came hours after Berkshire reported a record almost $50bn billion first-quarter net loss following the market meltdown.

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Saudi Arabia is to isolate an industrial area of the eastern city of Dammam from Sunday, preventing entry and exit until further notice, to curb the spread of coronavirus, the state news agency has said.

Freight shipments will be able to come and go from the area, Dammam Second Industrial City, SPA said, citing an interior ministry official. The decision allows vital factories to operate at a third of their capacity, SPA added.

A number of Gulf states have implemented lockdowns in parts of cities where large numbers of low-paid mostly foreign workers live and work in close proximity.

Boris Johnson has said that doctors were considering intubating him while he was in intensive care with coronavirus.

The prime minister told the Sun On Sunday:

It was a tough old moment, I won’t deny it. They had a strategy to deal with a ‘death of Stalin’-type scenario. I was not in particularly brilliant shape and I was aware there were contingency plans in place.

The doctors had all sorts of arrangements for what to do if things went badly wrong. They gave me a face mask so I got litres and litres of oxygen and for a long time I had that and the little nose jobbie.

Johnson told the paper “the bloody indicators kept going in the wrong direction” and that he kept asking himself: “How am I going to get out of this?”

He said:

It was hard to believe that in just a few days my health had deteriorated to this extent. I remember feeling frustrated. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t getting better. But the bad moment came when it was 50-50 whether they were going to have to put a tube down my windpipe.

That was when it got a bit ... they were starting to think about how to handle it presentationally.

Johnson said he was “in denial” initially about how serious his illness was, and that doctors were right to “force” him to go to St Thomas’s where he spent three nights in intensive care.

Here is our inside story of his illness from a fortnight ago.

Children aged five to 11 could return to school from Monday 1 June as part of government plans to gradually ease lockdown measures, the Sunday Telegraph has reported.

Boris Johnson is to reveal the UK government’s plans to edge the country back to normal in an address next Sunday, according to the paper. It cited plans to ask companies to routinely test asymptomatic staff to isolate those who are infected and allow workplaces to reopen.

Whitehall sources told the newspaper that pupils from Year’s 10 and 12 would form the first wave of secondary school children returning to school at a later date, so long as the current reduced infection rate holds.

The earmarked date for return of primary schoolchildren – which will undoubtedly face questions – is said to be intended to minimise the threat to early development and help parents swiftly return to work.

Schools have been closed for the vast majority of children since 23 March, but the children of key workers were allowed to continue going in. Schools in Ireland, which shares a land border with the UK, are to remain closed until September.

The Sunday Times reports that the government will only tweak the lockdown this week, encouraging building sites to reopen, relaxing rules on outdoor activities and urging people to cover their faces on public transport.

On Wednesday, the education secretary Gavin Williamson said schools across England would reopen in phases, with headteachers given as much notice as possible.

The news comes as a new poll suggests that fewer than one in five of the British public believe the time is right to consider reopening schools, restaurants, pubs and stadiums.

The prime minister’s former business adviser Andrew Griffith wrote in the Sunday Telegraph that “every additional day the phone rings unanswered in ‘lockdown’ Britain is an order lost to an overseas competitor whose own economy is open for business”, as opposed to the world’s fifth largest economy.

Coronavirus deaths in Canada have risen from 3,223 to 3,446, as confirmed cases increased by about 2,000 to 55,572, official data released earlier today shows.