That’s it for me for now. I’m handing you over to my colleague in the UK, Josh Halliday.
World
Coronavirus live news: Jacinda Ardern says Trump’s ‘patently wrong’ on New Zealand’s Covid cases | World news
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India carries out record number of daily tests
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Los Angeles schools to test all 600,000 students
In the most ambitious plan of its kind, Los Angeles Unified has announced plans to test its roughly 600,000 students and 75,000 employees as the nation’s second-largest school district prepares for the eventual return to in-person instruction.
The superintendent of Los Angeles Unified, Austin Beutner, said in a statement the program will provide regular Covid testing and contact tracing for school staff, students and families.
“Extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary actions, and while this testing and contact tracing effort is unprecedented, it is necessary and appropriate,” Beutner said.
The testing program is set to kick off Monday, with additional services to roll out as the school year continues. Over time, testing will be available to all children and staff members in the sprawling school district that has more than 600,000 students. The district said services will also be offered to family members of students and staff who test positive for Covid-19.
Los Angeles county is the worst affected in the country, with more than 220,000 cases.
You can read. the full story below:
01:17
Australia: 90% of cases in Victoria since end May traced back to single outbreak in hotel quarantine
In Australia the vast majority of the cases of Covid-19 in Victoria can be traced back to a single family that returned to Australia in mid-May who were kept in hotel quarantine at the Rydges Hotel in Melbourne, an inquiry has heard.
Dr Charles Alpren, an epidemiologist with the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, confirmed to the hotel quarantine inquiry over 90% of cases since the end of May could be linked to the one outbreak at the Rydges Hotel, while almost all of the other cases could be linked to an outbreak at the Stamford Plaza Hotel.
The family of four returned to Australia on 9 May, and all four were symptomatic and were diagnosed with Covid-19 on 15 May. On that date they were moved to the Rydges Hotel on Swanston Street in Melbourne.
Then on 25 May, three staff working at the hotel tested positive for Covid-19. From there, the number of cases linked to the outbreak grew to 17. Alpren said 14 of those 17 that were genomically sequenced were linked to the family.
Alpren said that based on the data obtained by the department from 3,234 of the over 12,000 cases in the past month, 3,183 are linked to the Rydges Hotel cluster.
You can read Josh Taylor’s full report below.
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00:59
Jacinda Ardern tells Donald Trump he’s ‘patently wrong’ on NZ’s Covid cases
New Zealand, prime minister, Jacinda Ardern hit back on Tuesday against Donald Trump for saying her country is experiencing a “big surge” in Covid-19, calling the remarks “patently wrong”.
Trump sparked uproar in New Zealand when he told a crowd in Minnesota that the country of 5 million people was in the grip of a “terrible” upsurge in COVID-19 cases, having earlier succeeded in eliminating the disease.
Thirteen new infections were confirmed in New Zealand on Tuesday, taking the country’s total number of cases since the pandemic began to 1,293, with 22 deaths. This compares with the U.S. tally of more than 5.2 million cases and 170,000 deaths.
“Big surge in New Zealand, you know it’s terrible. We don’t want that,” Trump said.
Ardern said there was no comparison between New Zealand’s handful of new cases a day and the “tens of thousands” reported in the United States.
“I think anyone who’s following Covid and its transmission globally will quite easily see that New Zealand’s nine cases in a day does not compare to the United States’ tens of thousands, and in fact does not compare to most countries in the world,” she told reporters.
“Obviously it’s patently wrong,” she said of Trump’s comments.
“We are still one of the best-performing countries in the world when it comes to COVID … our workers are focused on keeping it that way.”
New Zealand’s death rate per 100,000 people, at about 0.44, is one of the lowest in the world thanks to strict lockdowns enforced early in the pandemic. The United States has a death rate of 5.21 per 100,000, one of the highest in the world.
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Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador says he would be among the first to receive a Russian coronavirus vaccine if it is shown to be effective.
Russia’s announcement last week that it was the first in the world to approve a coronavirus vaccine was met with caution from Western scientists who said it still needed to be proved safe and effective.
“I would be the first to get vaccinated, because it matters a lot to me, but we have to … ensure that it’s something effective and that it’s available to everyone,” Lopez Obrador said at his daily news conference.
The Mexican leader added that he would personally reach out to Russia or China if they are first to develop an effective vaccine.
“In this important matter, there should be no ideologies… health comes first,” he said.
The Latin American country has recorded more than 56,000 coronavirus deaths – the world’s third-highest toll – and over half a million infections.
Mexico announced a deal last week with British-Swedish pharmaceuticals giant AstraZeneca to manufacture its vaccine now under development if clinical trials show it to be effective.
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South Korea: 400 cases now linked to church cluster
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Nigeria to resume international flights
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Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, says the city is “still in a very severe situation as far as the Covid-19 epidemic is concerned” as she unveiled a third round of pandemic stimulus funding. It comes as the strict social distancing measures currently in place were extended for at least another week, and authorities said the economic situation was dire.
Lam said:
There are several indicators that don’t give us a sense of comfort that this is time to relax social distancing measures. We are not in a downward trend yet… [The numbers] are still fluctuating from one day to another day … and we are seeing some worrying clusters emerging …Our testing has not been as comprehensive or speedy as we’d like to see. With these factors it’s simply not possible to do significant relaxation.
Until an effective vaccine is discovered, produced, and widely supplied, we’ll probably have to live with this virus for a pretty long time under this new normal set of circumstances.
Her comments come amid a continuing third wave of the virus in the city – its worst since the pandemic began. After a long run of cases in the triple figures, the daily case rates are beginning to drop, and Monday reported 44 new cases.
As has occurred in other countries, like Singapore, the region which had previously had great success in containing the virus has seen a resurgence off the back of apparent complacency or mass exemptions to quarantine and other measures – particularly around cohorts of lower paid workers.
Lam told media a short time ago there were two clusters still of concern. One was at the shipping container terminal where there were about 60 active cases, Lam said.
“Our response is to carry out tests as soon as possible … and cut the transmission chain. But so far we have not done enough in terms of testing,” she said. Health authorities had handed out specimen bottles among the 7000-odd employees but only a little more than 1,000 had been returned so far.
The other cluster of concern centres around foreign domestic workers who are living in temporary boarding houses accommodation while they are in between jobs. As many as 6,000 people have moved in and out of the accommodation as they waited for the immigration department to approve their new live-in jobs.
“We have sent specimen bottles hoping they’d take the test but as of last night only about 900 bottles have been returned to us,” said Lam.
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22:14
Russia’s Mariinsky ballet hit by coronavirus
The world-famous Mariinsky ballet company has called off performances after some 30 members, mostly dancers, contracted the coronavirus, St Petersburg health authorities said on Monday.
Three have been hospitalised while the others are following treatments at home, Irina Chinjeria of the city’s health authority said, quoted by the Interfax news agency.
Nearly 300 other dancers have been told to confine themselves to home as a precaution.
Performances scheduled for last week were called off and only operas will be staged for the rest of August.
As of Monday, Russia had recorded 927,745 cases of Covid-19, and 15,740 deaths, according to official figures.
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China reports 22 Covid cases
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