Confirmed worldwide Covid-19 death toll passes 100,000 – as it happened

That’s it from this blog. My colleague Rebecca Ratcliffe has just launched a new one where you can follow developments for the next 24 hours or so.

But to wrap up, here’s something mournful yet joyful to enjoy:

Donald Trump has announced a special council to convene to discuss reopening the US economy as it tries to emerge from the Covid-19 shock.

“This is beyond economic,” he told reporters at his daily briefing in Washington earlier. “I call it the ‘opening our country taskforce’ or ‘opening our country council’ so we don’t get it confused with Mike’s [Pence] taskforce, which has done so great.

“And we’re going to have the great business leaders, the great doctors, we’re going to have a group of people. We’ll probably do it by teleconference because we don’t really travelling in for their own purposes. I don’t think it would look good, also.”

Here’s the full story:

A very good piece from Guardian Australia reporter Ben Doherty about whether or not the government in Canberra can afford to risk relaxing controls as the curve continues to flatten.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/apr/11/the-covid-19-exit-strategy-when-will-australia-know-the-coronavirus-battle-is-over

Panama has annouced it has another 222 cases. It now has 2,974 cases of coronavirus and 74 deaths.

The US has approved 661,000 loans to small businesses totalling $168bn (£134bn) under a programme to address the pandemic’s fallout, the White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow says.

A $2.3tn economic stimulus enacted last month allocated $349bn to loans to small businesses hurt by the crisis that can be turned into grants if they meet certain conditions.

Albert Chambers, a 99-year-old second world war veteran, has been discharged from hospital after recovering from Covid-19.

Chambers, who will be 100 in July, was wounded in the war and spent three years in a prison camp. He praised the treatment he had received from the NHS, saying: “It couldn’t have been better.”

In Washington, Trump has said that deciding whether to ease recommendations on social distancing might be one of the biggest decisions, if not the biggest one, he’ll have to make.

Pressed on whether the United States has enough medical equipment and whether Trump offers too rosy a picture at his briefings, the president said he believes the country has enough equipment and that he did not enjoy speaking at these press conferences.

The comments from the president came in response to a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta.

These are the saddest conferences I’ve ever had. I don’t like doing them. Why? Because I’m talking about death ... there’s no happy talk Jim. This is the real deal. And I’ve got to make the biggest decision of my life and I’ve only started thinking about that. This is by far the biggest decision of my life.

Trump went on to say the country has enough equipment.

“It’s not ‘no no no’ it’s yes yes yes,’” Trump said.

Yemen has confirmed its first case, its internationally recognised government has announced.

The case is a 73-year-old Yemeni national who works at the port of al-Shahr in Hadramawt province, Yemen’s minister of health Nasser Baoum has told the Associated Press. The man is in stable condition, the minister added, without providing further details.

The news is stoking fears that an outbreak could devastate the war-torn country’s already crippled health care system.

Yemen is a uniquely dangerous place for the virus to spread. Repeated bombings and ground fighting over five years of war have destroyed or closed more than half its health facilities. Deep poverty, dire water shortages and a lack of adequate sanitation have made the country a breeding ground for disease.

Health officials have dreaded the virus eventual appearance in the country. Altaf Musani, a representative of the World Health Organization in Yemen, said:

We have been saying since the declaration of the pandemic that the introduction of such a case in Yemen would be catastrophic.

The Saudi-led coalition fighting the Iran-backed Houthi rebels declared a ceasefire on Thursday on humanitarian grounds – partly, they claimed, to prevent the spread of the pandemic. However, fighting continued unabated on Friday, diminishing hopes of a truce that could open doors for peace talks.

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro – already under fire for his cavalier reaction to the pandemic – has sparked further outrage by ignoring social distancing rules twice in the last 48 hours and being caught on camera shaking the hand of an elderly woman just seconds after wiping his nose with his wrist.

The nose-wipe handshake was caught on camera by one of Brazil’s major TV networks, Globo, and quickly went viral on social media.

Bolsonaro’s political foes and critics responded immediately. Humberto Costa, a leftwing senator, accused Brazil’s president of being “an ally of the virus” and “repeatedly committing crimes against public health”.

Another critic, the journalist William De Lucca, tweeted: “I think perhaps this is the best video showing how NOT to act during a pandemic”.

Bolsonaro has repeatedly attacked what he calls the media “hysteria” over coronavirus and thumbed his nose at his own health ministry’s social distancing guidelines on Thursday and Friday with high-profile trips to a bakery and a pharmacy. During both outings Bolsonaro was booed by detractors.

On Friday, Brazil’s coronavirus death toll rose to 1,057, up from 941 the previous day and nearly three times higher than last Friday’s figure.

Trump has said he plans to announce a second coronavirus task force, creating a council to focus on re-opening the country after the worst of the pandemic passes.

The council is expected to include the treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, and White House senior economic adviser Larry Kudlow, among others, a senior administration official said earlier in the week. Trump said on Friday that state governors will also serve on the council.

The UK’s health minister, Matt Hancock, has promised to ramp up tests and personal protective equipment for NHS staff:

Asked whether he would open up the US again next month if his advisers presented him with evidence that there would be a dramatic spike of coronavirus cases, Trump has said he wants to get it open as soon as possible. But he isn’t determined, the president said in response to a question from CNN’s Jim Acosta.

I do say this Jim: I want to get it open as soon as possible. I would love to open it. I’m not determined.

He said that he would unveil a new task force of council to advise him on dealing with coronavirus and when to reopen the country. He said he would discuss it more next week Trump said it would be bipartisan.

The one thing I didn’t ask: ‘Are you a Republican or Democrat?’ And I want their views on what they think.

Turkey is imposing a two-day lockdown in 31 provinces, including Istanbul, Ankara and other major cities, its Interior Ministry says, adding that the curbs will begin at midnight (TRT) and end at the same time on Sunday. The country’s known death toll stands at 1,006 people.

The Liverpool legend, Kenny Dalglish, has tested positive while in hospital for treatment for a different infection, his family have announced.

The 69-year-old was admitted to hospital on Wednesday for a course of intravenous antibiotics and, in line with current procedures, underwent a test for Covid-19 despite displaying no symptoms of the illness. The test was positive and Dalglish, who remains asymptomatic, will remain in hospital for further treatment.

It is enormously frustrating to see people ignoring physical distancing rules, England’s chief nursing officer has said.

Ruth May told a Downing Street briefing the best way to thank healthcare workers during the pandemic is to stay at home - especially during the Easter weekend.

I was only on the way here, going over Westminster Bridge, seeing a whole hoard of cyclists coming together. It is enormously frustrating. The reason that is frustrating is because there’s also still occasions where my colleagues are getting abuse from their neighbours for driving off to work ...

You may have seen some TV coverage this week about what’s happening in our hospitals. Dedicated, skilled, professional NHS staff calmly dealing with the mounting numbers of patients with coronavirus.

They are frank about the toll it takes, both physical and emotional. And of course nurses, healthcare assistants, midwives, and other NHS staff are now among the victims of this coronavirus.

Some have lost their lives. The NHS is a family and we feel their loss deeply.

The UK government must urgently investigate if and why black, Asian and minority ethnic people are more vulnerable to Covid-19, the head of the British Medical Association has said after it emerged that the first 10 doctors in the UK named as having died from the virus were all BAME.

Those doctors have ancestry in regions including Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Even allowing for the overrepresentation of BAME staff in the NHS – they comprise 44% of medical staff compared with 14% of the population of England and Wales – the fact that they were all from ethnic minorities was “extremely disturbing and worrying”, Dr Chaand Nagpaul said.

At face value, it seems hard to see how this can be random – to have the first 10 doctors of all being of BAME background. Not only that, we also know that in terms of the BAME population, they make up about a third of those in intensive care. There’s a disproportionate percentage of BAME people getting ill.

We have heard the virus does not discriminate between individuals but there’s no doubt there appears to be a manifest disproportionate severity of infection in BAME people and doctors. This has to be addressed – the government must act now.

Apple and Google have announced an unprecedented collaboration to open up their mobile operating systems to allow for the creation of advanced contact-tracing apps, the two companies have announced.

In theory, such apps could help allow nations to lift their lockdowns earlier, by letting authorities much more readily identify new clusters of infection and help those who have been exposed to a person with Covid-19 self-isolate before they themselves become infectious.

They would work by using the bluetooth technology in mobile phones to keep track of every other phone a person comes into close contact with over the course of a day; if that person later finds they have Covid-19, they can use the same system to alert all those people, dating back to before they would have become infectious.

Similar apps have already been trialled in nations including Singapore, but they have been held back by a combination of reduced uptake – the Singaporean app is used by 12 percept of the city, limiting its effectiveness – and difficulties in working around privacy protections built into the iOS and Android operating systems.

It is those limits that Apple and Google will be lifting, the companies announced today.

Canadian life could soon return to a semblance of normality if people bear down now to stop the virus’s spread, Justin Trudeau, the country’s prime minister, has said. But he said the risk of resurgence remained until a vaccine was developed.

If we do things right, this will be the first and worst phase that we go through as a country in terms of Covid-19.

Once the first phase of contagion passes, “we will be able to talk about loosening up some of the rules that are in place” to get some people back to work and “get things rolling again”, he said.

Chile has received early plaudits for its handling of the coronavirus crisis and boasts Latin America’s highest testing rate for the infection. But health workers on the frontline of the outbreak fear authorities are overestimating hospitals’ capacity to care for critically ill patients, writes Charis McGowan in Santiago.

The country’s health minister, Jaime Mañalich, has praised Chile’s health system as “one of the best on the planet” and insisted that enough beds had been available for critical patients.

So far, Chile’s Covid-19 mortality rate is 0.95% – well below the global average of 4.7% – but medics say this figure is giving authorities a false sense of security.

“It’s far too soon to say whether Chile is tackling this successfully,” said Dr Claudia Cortés, an infectious disease specialist in the capital, Santiago.

Despite increases in the numbers of coronavirus cases in Chile’s capital, the majority of the city is not under quarantine. Several districts have been on lockdown for the past two weeks, but these measures will be lifted next week in six affected neighbourhoods.

Early Covid-19 cases were concentrated in Santiago’s rich neighbourhoods, imported by wealthy families returning from their summer holidays in Europe. Most of those cases were treated in private hospitals.

But Cortés works between private and public hospitals attending to coronavirus patients – and she fears death rates will rocket as the virus spreads to poorer areas.

Poland’s ruling nationalists have come under fire after failing to observe health advice issued by their own government to curb the spread of coronavirus at a memorial service for the country’s former president.

Those who turned on the television to watch a scaled back memorial service to commemorate the 10th anniversary of a plane crash in Russia that killed president Lech Kaczynski, as well as top politicians and military officers, were shocked to see the country’s leading politicians standing side by side.

Critics accused Law and Justice Party (PiS) officials of flouting coronavirus restrictions that limit public gatherings and have left many cemeteries in the country closed to the public.

“This is not all right. With all certainty there was a way to mark today’s anniversary by following the rules that all Poles must follow, and that Poles pay fines for breaking,” said Jan Grabiec, spokesman for centrist opposition party Civic Platform (PO).

During the service, senior officials laid wreaths at a monument in the capital Warsaw to honour Kaczynski who died in the crash. They walked in single file, guarded by police wearing surgical masks to protect them from the coronavirus pandemic.

The president, Andrzej Duda, an ally of PiS which was founded by Kaczynski and twin brother Jaroslaw, who was present at the service, expressed regret that the coronavirus outbreak in Poland made it impossible to mark the tragedy properly.

The death toll from coronavirus in Italy rose by 570 to 18,849 on Friday, Lorenzo Tondo reports.

Currently, 98,273 are infected with an increase of 1,4% compared with Thursday (+1,396). In th past 24 hours, 1,985 have recovered, bringing the total number of recoveries to 30,455.

The Civil Protection said the overall total of cases in Italy, including the deceased, the currently infected and those who have recovered, is now 147,577, up 4,204 on Friday.

The president of the Higher Health Institute, Silvio Brusaferro, told a press conference that “the curve clearly shows us a situation of decrease and that is a positive sign, but it must not make us let our guard down”.

Italy is set to extend the lockdown measures to stop the spread of coronavirus until 3 May. Giuseppe Conte, the prime minister, is expected to announce the new extension this afternoon.

South Africa’s health minister this afternoon announced an expansion of an ambitious strategy of screening and tracing to fight Covid-19 which he said had already resulted in the country parting ways with those suffering “rapid spread”, Jason Burke, the Guardian’s Africa correspondent, reports from Johannesburg.

“For South Africans let’s be ambitious and say together we want to part ways with the trends of the west and Europe. I’m not saying we are there, but … It is possible that we may be able to buck the trend and chart our own path,” Zweli Mkhize told reporters, pointing to the example of South Korea as an inspiration.

South Africa, the most-developed economy in sub-Saharan Africa, now has a total of just over 2,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 24 deaths.

The president, Cyril Ramaphosa, announced on Thursday that a strict lockdown that began two weeks ago would continue until the end of April. Officials credit the measures with a drastic reduction of the spread of the disease but acknowledge the social and economic burden to many people is very heavy.

The country faces major challenges with up to a third of its 56m population living in over-crowded townships often with poor sanitation, as well as significant numbers of HIV and tuberculosis sufferers who are vulnerable to Covid-19.

However it has a relatively youthful population and one of the best health systems in Africa. A key resource is an extensive network of community health workers who, reinforced by government staff and volunteers, have been deployed to spread advice on how to fight the disease, trace contacts of potential cases of the disease and help screen entire communities.

Thousands of traditional healers have also been asked to help detect cases of infection.

Mkhize said tests would”scale up” in the coming weeks but that South Africans should get used to “a new culture of social distancing and no hugs, kissing or shaking of hands”.

“Internal transmission is slowed due to the lockdown ... However when we open those pockets that’s when the problem will come, so we will anticipate a few more peaks,” he said.

Widespread testing has even been a challenge in North America and Europe, where some countries with large outbreaks resorted to only testing patients who are hospitalised.

Ukraine has announced it is to start treating its coronavirus patients with hydroxychloroquine, an anti-malaria drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against Covid-19 but which has been touted as effective by figures such as the US president Donald Trump.

In a statement published on the Ukrainian government’s website, the country’s health ministry said it was expecting to receive 320,000 hydroxychloroquine tablets - enough to treat 22,000 patients - as humanitarian aid.

Maxym Stepanov, the health minister, was quoted as saying:

The Ministry of Health is doing its best to combat coronavirus as effectively as possible. Therefore, we have asked manufacturers to provide us with humanitarian assistance. This amount will be enough to treat over 22,000 patients with Covid-19.

The ministry’s statement is in a slightly odd syntax and hard to decipher. It seems to say both that the drug has already been distributed and that delivery is expected at the beginning of next week. Stepanov is quoted as saying that it will be provided “free for those patients who really need it for medical reasons.”

In view perhaps of the controversy surrounding the use of hydroxychloroquine for treating Covid-19, the statement adds:

It should be noted that drugs with the active substance Hydroxychloroquine are used to treat patients with Covid-19 in the United States, Japan, Germany and other Western countries having advanced healthcare sector.

Ukraine has so far recorded 2,203 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and 69 deaths.

Kuwait has reported 83 new confirmed cases of coronavirus in the last 24 hours, taking the total number of infections to 993, with 26 patients in intensive care, Akhtar Mohammad Makoii reports.

A health ministry spokesman said two of new confirmed cases are related to travel to the UK, 77 contracted the virus after direct contact with previously positive cases, and three others were under investigation.

Kuwait has imposed several strict measures to contain spread of coronavirus, including cancelling all international flights and suspending schools and universities until August.

Residents remain under 11-hour a day curfew.

A baby born in a Mexican city stricken with an especially nasty Covid-19 outbreak has been named for the respiratory disease – and the country’s coronavirus czar, David Agren in Mexico City reports.

Gatell Covid Chávez Lizárraga was born in the city of Monclova, a steel town of 400,000 people in northern Coahuila state, where a Covid-19 outbreak has infected more than 30 healthcare workers.

The baby’s parents haven’t publicly stated why they christened their child “Gatell Covid”, though the country has history of people picking odd baby names such as “Robocop”, “Terminator” and “Anivdelarev” (Anniversary of the revolution) – to the point that curious choices have been outlawed in some states.

The name “Gatell” refers to Hugo López-Gatell, the country’s 51-year-old health undersecretary, who has become the public face of Mexico’s Covid-19 response and whose nightly briefings attract millions of viewers.

Gatell’s celebrity has surged in since he was appointed coronavirus czar by the president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador – to the point that polls show him as being more trusted on handling the pandemic the president. Mexico has recorded 3,441 Covid-19 cases and 194 deaths as of 9 April.

The undersecretary has drawn comparisons to Dr Anthony Fauci as a public health official being thrust suddenly into the public eye and having to deftly deal with a difficult president, who has shown reticence in recognising the scope of the coronavirus pandemic

France’s defence ministry has confirmed that 50 members of crew aboard the aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle have tested positive for the coronavirus, Kim Willsher, the Guardian’s Paris correspondent, reports.

Three of the sailors have been evacuated from the nuclear powered vessel by helicopter as a “preventative measure”.

“No worsening of the health of the sailors on board has been reported,” the ministry said.

A specialist medical team was flown to the Charles de Gaulle, the pride of France’s naval fleet, on Wednesday after several “suspected” cases of coronavirus were reported. Out of 66 tests carried out, 50 were positive, the ministry said in a statement.

The origin of the infection is not known; the vessel left its base at Toulon in the south of France on 21 January and has reportedly not been in contact with the outside world since 15 March.

The Charles de Gaulle, which was in the Atlantic, is currently heading back to France.

A gruelling ordeal for 112 Australian and New Zealand passengers on board a coronavirus-stricken Antarctic cruise ship anchored for the last 14 days off the coast of South America is nearing its end, writes Uki Goñi.

The fortunate passengers will be disembarking the Greg Mortimer cruise ship in Uruguay at 6.30pm Friday to fly home on a specially-chartered medical flight. Twenty other less fortunate European, US and UK passengers will have to remain on board pending negotiations for their own return.

A “humanitarian corridor” has been set up to shuttle the passengers from the port of Montevideo to Carrasco international airport “with all the sanitary guarantees necessary for them and for society in general,” Uruguayan authorities said in a statement on Friday morning.

The fate of the remaining 20 passengers, and the ship’s crew of 85, mostly Swiss and Swedes, is still unclear.

“The government has not yet told Aurora [the cruise company operator] whether the ship will be allowed to remain at port or will be required to go back out to anchor,” Brian Meier from Chicago, one of the six Americans on board, who has been in quarantine in his cabin since 23 March, told the Guardian via WhatsApp Friday morning.

The Greg Mortimer cruise ship anchored 20 kilometres off the coast of Uruguay on 27 March with at least 128 passengers and crew testing positive for coronavirus so far.

The ship had left from the Argentinian southern port of Ushuaia on 15 March, for an Antarctic cruise that had to be interrupted when passengers started developing symptoms.

A specially-equipped Airbus 343 with medical personnel on board, chartered from the Portuguese Hi Fly air company, will be departing for Melbourne at 1.40am on Saturday.

“The plane will be set up into risk zones, with passengers seated by test results,” Aurora Expeditions informed the passengers.

Migration formalities have already been processed digitally to avoid any physical contact with the passengers, Uruguayan authorities said. A convoy of buses will transport them from the port to the airport, from which they will descend on the tarmac to board the plane directly. Only hand luggage is being allowed “without manipulation of luggage to avoid contact.”

The fate of the remaining 20 passengers will probably depend on the results a new round of coronavirus testing by Uruguayan doctors. “The non-AU/NZ passengers were tested Wednesday evening but we haven’t gotten any results back yet,” Meier said.

For what seems like months the coronavirus outbreak has dominated headlines around the world, but other crises are still continuing amid the pandemic. The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs has compiled a list of of 10 of them.

While we are all affected by Covid-19, it’s important to take time to remember how other people are trying to stay healthy in the midst of famine, war and economic crises. The present crisis is only compounding their struggles.

A sixth person infected with the coronavirus has died in Taiwan, health minister Chen Shih-chung said on Friday.

The island also recorded two new infections, bringing the total to 382 cases, he told a news conference.

Movement and travel restrictions in Malaysia have been extended until at least the 28 April, even as the country reports a slowdown in new Covid-19 infections.

Malaysians have been under the partial lockdown since 18 March, with only essential services open. The order had been originally due to expire on 14 April but in a televised address on Friday prime minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced the two week extension.

Channel News Asia quoted him as saying:

This is in line with WHO’s (World Health Organization) views requesting countries not to end movement control prematurely. As has happened in a few countries, the pandemic spreads again when the movement control ends.

We must be prepared for this situation for a few months. It might continue until we are truly sure we have overcome the spread of this pandemic 100%.

Malaysia has the highest number of coronavirus infections in south-east Asia, reporting 4,346 cases with 70 deaths as of noon on Friday.

Reuters reported Muhyiddin as saying that Malaysia had done well to keep the infection rate at 7% of patients screened, which is below the 10% benchmark set by the World Health Organization (WHO), while its 1.6% death rate is well below the 5.8% global average.

Separately, the health ministry said Malaysia had likely experienced its peak in cases. The country saw its highest daily jump on March 26 when 235 new infections were reported.

Health authorities in Japan appear to have published updated figures for coronavirus infections in the country.

According to a report by NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, a total of 589 new cases of coronavirus have been confirmed in the past 24 hours, increasing the total number of cases in the country to 6,134.

Singapore has reported 198 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, including 79 linked to clusters at dormitories for foreign workers that have recently been identified as transmission hotspots.

Health authorities also reported that 32 more patients had recovered from the disease and been discharged from hospital or quarantine in the past 24 hours, bringing the total number of recoveries in the city state to 492.

Belgium has officially recorded 325 deaths in the last 24 hours, Daniel Boffey, the Guardian’s Brussels bureau chief, reports.

A further 171 deaths in care homes in Flanders in late March have also been belatedly added to the death toll. The total national number of deaths is 3,019, the Belgian federal crisis centre said on Friday.

The figures suggest that Belgium is disproportionately suffering during the crisis and that there is no sign of the number of deaths yet peaking.

In one positive development, the number of people in intensive care has dropped slightly to 1,278 compared to the previous day of 1,285.

Zambia has reported a second death from coronavirus. As in a number of African countries, its health authorities have conveniently reported the latest statistics of the coronavirus outbreak in the country as a Twitter thread.

Governments in the Arab world have been told to ensure the safety and security of women and girls as they implement lockdowns and curfews to curb the spread of coronavirus.

In a joint letter to governments in the Middle East, the regional directors of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and UN Women, and the executive director of the UN Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, say:

The Arab States are host to large numbers of refugees and internally displaced persons as well as vulnerable women migrant workers. Women and girls in these settings face multiple burdens and risks in accessing services. More efforts are needed to ensure their safety and well-being.

We ... urge governments in the region to ensure that their message on zero tolerance to domestic violence is highlighted in their public announcements and policies, including a commitment to increase investment in services and organisations that provide services to survivors of domestic violence.

The statement comes as reports come in from around the world of increases in the rates of domestic violence in countries subject to lockdowns. Outlining a number of measures for countries to take to guarantee the safety of women, and ensure their participation in decision making about how to tackle the pandemic, the UN officials add:

The Covid-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis; it is also a crisis of care. Globally women represent more than 70 per cent of all health care workers and in the home, women are predominantly the carers of the elderly, people with disabilities and children. With more people quarantined at home, the burden of unpaid care for women will most likely increase.

Therefore, we call on all governments in the region to assess and respond to the needs of all care workers, and to ensure that essential services for survivors of domestic violence are maintained and accessible to all women and girls. Ensuring gender justice and equality before the law remains a vital path to implementing the SDGs and protecting all people, everywhere.

This is Damien Gayle, taking back the reins of the liveblog now. You can send your comments, tips and suggestions to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or by direct message to my Twitter profile, @damiengayle.

Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, the president of Portugal, said on Friday he would propose next week extending a national lockdown until 1 May as the number of coronavirus cases in the country rose above 15,000.

Portugal declared a 15-day state of emergency on 18 March and last week approved its extension by a further 15 days until 17 April.

He said: “We have to be very focused on a fight that we haven’t fully won yet. We cannot let our guard down.”

Rebelo de Sousa was in quarantine for two weeks last month despite testing negative for coronavirus.

Portugal has so far reported 15,472 confirmed cases and 435 fatalities, far below neighbouring Spain’s death toll of 15,843, the second highest in the world after Italy.
Speaking at a morning show on TVI television on Friday, Antonio Costa, the prime minister, said:

It would be a wrong signal for the country to lift the state of emergency.

Both Costa and Rebelo de Sousa said it was critical that the Portuguese stay home during the Easter weekend, a period of time which usually incredibly busy, to avoid spreading the virus.

The government has tightened restrictions further over the Easter holiday period, closing all airports to commercial flights and banning domestic travel from 9-13 April, Reuters reports.

New York state is getting help from Google to overhaul a decades-old unemployment benefits system that has left laid-off workers frustrated and awaiting help, Associated Press reports.

Google helped New York design a revamped website that launched on Thursday evening. The state also added 300 workers to its 700-person staff to process unemployment benefit applications.

Governor Andrew Cuomo said the state Department of Labors system had crashed because of a record-breaking surge in claims amid outbreak-related layoffs.

There have been 350,000 claims in the last week. So far600,000 claims over the past three weeks have been successfully processed and over 200,000 are still in partial status, according to Cuomo.

The state is also trying to reduce call volume by having state workers call up individuals to follow-up with incomplete applications. Previously, applicants who left fields blank were told to call the state’s unemployment system.

German foreign minister Heiko Maas has criticised the United States’ handling of the coronavirus outbreak as too slow, the latest sign of tensions between the two allies as they respond to the crisis, Reuters reports.

China took “very authoritarian measures, while in the US, the virus was played down for a long time”, Maas said in an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in a preview sent to the media on Friday.

These are two extremes, neither of which can be a model for Europe.

Germany was among countries that last week accused the United States of “Wild West” tactics in outbidding or blocking shipments to buyers who had already signed deals for vital medical supplies.

Maas told Der Spiegel that he hoped the United States would rethink its international relationships in light of the coronavirus crisis. He added that aggressive trade policies may have hurt the country’s ability to procure protective equipment

He said:

Let’s see to what extent the actions of the American government will lead to discussions in the US about whether the ‘America First’ model really works.

Hello, this is Gregory Robinson, taking over the live blog for the next hour. If you want to follow me or contact me on Twitter to share insight or send tips, I’m on @Gregoryjourno or send me an email at gregory.robinson@guardian.co.uk

Japan has reported 473 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number of cases in the country to 6,003 on Friday, according to a report on public broadcaster NHK.

Earlier this week, Japan declared a state of emergency to fight the spread of the coronavirus in major population centres. It has so far recorded 112 deaths from the virus.

On Friday, Kyoto became the latest prefecture to ask to be placed under the state of emergency, with the governor saying that infections were rising, and Tokyo governor Yuriko Koike said that the metropolitan government would request many businesses, including night clubs, karaoke parlours and pachinko pinball parlours to close from Saturday.

The measure currently covers seven regions, including Tokyo, and gives authorities the power to ask people to stay indoors and request that businesses close. However there are no enforcement mechanisms and no penalties for those who fail to comply.

The governor of Aichi prefecture had earlier called on the central government to include his region in the state of emergency.

However, as coronavirus public information efforts go, my favourite is still the exercise video recorded and circulated online by the Ugandan president, Yoweri Museveni, yesterday.

The official death toll from coronavirus in the US is likely to be an underestimate, according to a researcher at Johns Hopkins University, which collates tally that the Guardian relies on to gauge the extent of the pandemic.

“We definitely think there are deaths that we have not accounted for,” Jennifer Nuzzo, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security, told the New York Times.

The paper reports that many coroners in rural areas do not have the testing kits they need to identify the disease, and now believe that some deaths in February and early March that were blamed on influenza may have in fact been due to Covid-19.

Last week the US Centers for Disease Control issued new guidance instructing officials unable to test for Covid-19 to report deaths as caused by the disease “if the circumstances are compelling within a reasonable degree of certainty.”

Three new cases of coronavirus were confirmed in Rwanda on Thursday, the country’s ministry of health reports, bringing the total number of cases in the country to 113.

Two of the newly identified cases were in travellers quarantined on arrival to the country, while the third was identified in a person who had been in contact with a previously identified patient. No one has yet died from Covid-19 in the country.

In a statement the ministry said that all the new cases had been isolated and that contact tracing was underway. The majority of patients were asymptomatic, with none in a critical condition.

Rwanda was one of the first countries in Africa to impose a lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus, including closing non-essential businesses, restricting travel between districts and cities, and ordering all people to stay indoors except for essential outings.

In Mexico the Catholic church is launching an aerial assault on the coronavirus, Tom Phillips, the Guardian’s Latin America correspondent, reports.

Yesterday two senior Church figures - from the dioceses of Cuernavaca and Querétaro - took to the skies to scatter blessings and ask for an end to the pandemic.

“We want to provide hope at this moment of crisis, this difficult moment. People shouldn’t feel unprotected by the hand of God, for God is present,” José Martín Lara Becerril, Querétaro’s vicar general, told reporters before taking a helicopter flight over the state.

According to the newspaper El Universal, the bishop of Cuernavaca, Ramón Castro Castro, also went flying, using a small plane to take to the skies over Morelos state against Covid-19. Castro told reporters:

We are using the most beautiful instrument we have - which is the blessing of God - at a difficult time, a moment when the outlook is so difficult, because of what is drawing near. But we know that the power of God is far greater.

But Castro said divine intervention was no substitute for social distancing.

“Stay at home,” the bishop urged followers before boarding his flight.

Many brothers and sisters still haven’t grasped the severity of the moment. This is a very tricky situation. We are asking for God’s help. But each of us should also contribute their little grain of sand .. because otherwise the situation could become even more complicated.

Thirteen more people have tested positive for coronavirus in Malta, including a resident and two members of staff working at care homes, bringing the total number of cases in the Mediterranean archipelago to 350.

Malta’s superintendent of public health, Charmaine Gauci, said on Friday that the new cases were linked to the St Vincent de Paul and Zammit Clapp care homes, the Times of Malta reports.

The resident who tested positive was an 88-year-old woman living in the St Francis Ward of the St Vincent de Paul home, who had developed a cough. The two carers, a 58-year-old man and a 51-year-old women, are volunteers working at the Zammit Clapp home.

Two people, an 80-year-old and a 92-year-old have so far died from Covid-19 in the country. People aged over 65 or who have underlying health conditions have been warned not to go out in public unless necessary.

EU and Afghan officials have discussed the solutions to mitigate economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic in Afghanistan, as the number of confirmed cases in the country reached 521 after a surge of infections in Kabul, Akhtar Mohammad Makoii reports from Herat.

Thirty-seven new patients tested positive for Covid-19 in last 24 hours, 16 of them in the country’s capital, Kabul, bringing the total in the city to 111. Kabul went under full lockdown on Wednesday, in a bid to contain spread of coronavirus in the city of around 6 million people.

Eight new cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Herat, Afghanistan’s worst affected area so far with 265 confirmed cases and four deaths. No suspected patients had tested for two days in Herat after the city ran out of testing kits.

Two more infections were confirmed in Kandahar, one of Afghanistan’s most populated provinces, bringing the total there to 32, amid rising concerns over thousands of migrants who returned from Pakistan in recent days.

Meanwhile, members of the European Union business council in a video conference with Afghan Special Envoy discussed the solutions which can mitigate the risks of coronavirus for private sector of Afghanistan.

The council also raised their concerns regarding access to food and medicines as well as raw materials for the manufacturing industry, and the importance of keeping all borders open, according to a statement.

Afghanistan has so far reported 15 deaths from coronavirus and 32 recoveries.

The president of Sierra Leone has announced a ban on travel between districts, as part of a bundle of coronavirus control measures falling short of a complete lockdown.

In a statement published on Friday, Julius Bio also imposed a nationwide curfew between 9pm and 6am, cut the hours of civil servants, and advised people to wear masks in public.

“Citizens who have no strong reason to be in public places are advised to stay at home at all times,” he added.

The measures, due to start on Saturday and last 14 days, come after a three-day lockdown earlier this week, that local media report was marred by “teething problems” including police brutality.

On Friday, health authorities in the country reported they had no new cases of coronavirus. Seven confirmed cases have been detected so far, and 255 people are in quarantine.

Nigeria has reported 14 new confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number so far in Africa’s most-populous country to 288.

Thirteen of the newly detected infections were in Lagos, Nigeria’s financial capital, and one was in Delta State, the location of the oil reserves that power the Nigerian economy.

So far seven people have died and 51 have recovered.

Lagos and Abuja, the Nigerian capital, are in their second week of a lockdown to curb the spread of the coronavirus, and many states have also imposed their own restrictions.

While vast numbers of countries have told citizens to stay home and practice social distancing, there is growing concern about the millions of prison inmates who remain stuck inside cramped and often squalid facilities, Rebecca Ratcliffe, the Guardian’s south east Asia correspondent, reports.

Footage taken inside a prison in Cambodia, released by Amnesty International, shows inmates lying side-by-side, in some cases with limbs stretched over another, because there is such little space.

Last month, the UN high commissioner for human rights, Michelle Bachelet, urged governments to reduce overcrowding, warning that the virus risks “rampaging through such institutions’ extremely vulnerable populations”.

Some countries have taken action, including Iran, Indonesia and India. In Cambodia, some prisons are thought to be up to 463% over capacity.

“These conditions were never acceptable. Today they are completely unconscionable,” said David Griffiths, director in the office of the secretary-general at Amnesty International.

The principle of “herd immunity”, at one stage touted by the UK government as a possible solution to the coronavirus outbreak, has taken an apparent blow after a study in Austria found less than 1% of the population is infected with coronavirus.

The first such study in continental Europe, led by pollster SORA which is known for projecting election results, aimed to provide a clearer picture of the total number of infections, given gaps in testing, Reuters reports.

“Based on this study, we believe that 0.33% of the population in Austria was acutely infected in early April,” SORA co-founder Christoph Hofinger told a news conference. Given the margin of error, the figure was 95% likely to be between 0.12% and 0.76%.

Sebastian Kurz, Austria’s chancellor, whose government commissioned the study and saw initial findings a few days ago, said on Monday that the rate of infection was around 1%. He said that disproved the idea of herd immunity - which requires widespread infection - as a viable policy option.

In March the UK government had suggested herd immunity could provide the cornerstone to the nationwide response to the coronavirus outbreak, contrasting sharply with the detect, trace and quarantine approach taken by countries in Asia first affected and endorsed by the World Health Organization.

Officials soon abandoned the plan after modelling by scientists at University College London suggested it could lead to as many as 250,000 deaths.

Italy is set to extend its lockdown measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus until 3 May, Lorenzo Tondo reports from Palermo.

The prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, is expected to announce the new extension in the afternoon. Meanwhile, on Thursday, the interior minister, Luciana Lamorgese, sent a directive to prefects to beef up coronavirus lockdown controls over Easter.

Lamorgese said numbers of Italy’s Covid-19 emergency are slowing down, but measures “should be fully operational in view of the upcoming Easter festivities, traditionally marked by an increase in traffic flows, in particular on motorways and on the main connecting extra-urban arteries of our country”.

Despite fears that the official figures may be seriously underestimating the number of deaths in Spain, the latest statistics from the country’s health ministry suggest that the lockdown strategy is continuing to work and that the virus is being slowed in its tracks, writes Sam Jones in Madrid.

Between Thursday and Friday, 605 people died from the virus - down from 683 during the previous 24 hours. The numbers were also well down on earlier this week, when the death toll rose about 740 for two consecutive days.

The growth rate of new cases is currently 3%, compared with a daily average of 12% at the end of March and 20% in mid-March.

Spain has now recorded 157,022 cases of Covid-19 and 15,843 deaths.
However, questions persist over the numbers: recently released data from judicial authorities in Madrid suggest that 6,600 more people than usual died in the last two weeks of March, compared with the official tally of 3,500 Covid-19 deaths in the region.

On Thursday, the Spanish congress approved another extension of the national lockdown that has been in force since a state of emergency was declared on 14 March. The confinement period will now last until 26 April, although the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, has said another extension seems inevitable.

“I’m sure that in two weeks’ time I’ll have to extend the state of emergency again,” he told parliament.

This is Damien Gayle taking over the coronavirus world news live blog for the next eight or so hours. I will be focusing on picking up what hasn’t yet been reported from Asia, on the Middle East, Africa and Europe, and later on the east coast of the Americas as people there begin to wake up.

If you have any tips or suggestions for coverage, or any comments, please send me an email to damien.gayle@theguardian.com, or a direct message to my Twitter profile, @damiengayle.

That’s it from me today, I’m handing over the global coronavirus liveblog to my colleague Damien Gayle now, so please do contact him with any stories.

A group of wealthy would-be holidaymakers who flew from Britain to France in a private jet for a few days on the Côte d’Azur have been turned back by police, writes my colleague Kim Willsher in Paris.

Ten people arrived on the chartered aircraft from London to Marseille-Provence airport - three women and seven men. Helicopters were waiting to fly them on to Cannes on the French Riviera where they had rented a luxury villa.

French police who met the flight were unimpressed. The men, aged 40-50, and women, aged 23-25, were refused permission to enter France and ordered to fly back to the UK.

“They were coming for a holiday in Cannes and three helicopters were waiting on the tarmac,” a border police spokesperson told AFP.

“We notified them they were not allowed to enter the national territory and they left four hours later.”

A police source told BFMTV the pilot had been advised not to land the Embraer Legacy jet at Marseille-Provence, but did so anyway. On landing, the group made up of several nationalities - Croat, German, French, Romanian and Ukrainian - reportedly tried to pull a few strings to continue their journey.

“They tried to make use of their connections and made a few phone calls,” the source said.

The helicopter pilots were told to return to their base and fined for breaking the strict lockdown rules.

The jet, chartered by a Croatian businessman reportedly in “finance and property”, arrived last Saturday, but details were only released on Thursday. French police said they would be carrying out strict checks on private aircraft arriving in France over the Easter period.

All non-essential travel inside France has been banned since 17 March and a recent tightening of the lockdown restrictions mean anyone entering the country should hold an international travel certificate showing the journey is essential.

The authorities in France and Britain have made it clear that travelling to a second home in either country does not qualify as “essential”.

“Crossing borders needs a legitimate or urgent reason,” a police spokesperson said.

BFMTV reported that nine of the jet passengers returned to the UK and the tenth chartered a private jet to Berlin.

As New York deals with a mounting coronavirus death toll and dwindling morgue space, the city has shortened the length of time it will hold unclaimed remains before they are buried in its public cemetery on Hart Island. Aerial video captured workers digging graves on the island, a one-mile, limited-access strip near the Bronx.

Normally, about 25 bodies a week are interred on the island, mostly for people whose families can’t afford a funeral, or who go unclaimed by relatives. Operations have now increased from one day a week to five days a week, with around 24 burials each day. Warning: video contains sensitive material

Palestinian health authorities have confirmed three new Coronavirus cases, amid fears that the virus is spreading in Gaza, reports Akhtar Mohammad Makoii.

Three news cases have been recorded in the West Bank, pushing the total number of infections to 266 in Palestinian territories, including 13 in Gaza.

All patients in Gaza are at currently in quarantine facilities. But officials have voiced concerns that a shortage of critical equipment and medical supplies could set off a rapid spread amongst the enclave’s two million people.

“Testing at our central laboratory has stopped, after coronavirus test kits completely ran out,” Gaza health ministry spokesman Ashraf al-Qidra said Wednesday. The ministry is run by the enclave’s Islamist rulers, Hamas.

The coronavirus crisis has produced some interesting ear worms, but this techno offering from Swiss TV Morning Show trio - which mixes techno track, the sound of a dripping tap and the voices of interior minister Alain Berset and president Simonetta Sommaruga telling people to stay home - is perhaps my favourite.

Thanks to Guardian reader Andrea Freiermuth for sending this!

A Chinese writer who published a diary during her time under lockdown in Wuhan has been subjected to widespread online criticism for publishing her book in English and German, writes my colleague Helen Davidson.

Fang Fang has been accused of contributing to a negative international narrative on China’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.

The popular Wuhan writer began chronicling the lockdown in late January, including criticism of the official response.

“How many people have died in Wuhan and their families destroyed?” she wrote on 31 January. “But so far not a single person has said sorry or taken responsibility. I’ve even seen a writer use the phrase ‘complete victory’. What are they talking about?”

Her posts were shared widely on social media even as each was quickly deleted by censors, according to the Diplomat magazine.

Indonesia has reported 219 new coronavirus cases, putting the country’s total to 3,512 according to its health ministry.

Oman’s capital, Muscat, went under full lockdown this morning as number of confirmed coronavirus cases reach 484 in the sultanate with 27 recorded in last 24 hours, writes Akhtar Mohammad Makoii.

The government announced that the isolation procedure will be implemented until April 22. The plan started 10 am this morning by “activating control and checkpoints”.

Oman reported its third death to Covid-19 yesterday.

Just a reminder that for all our UK-facing coronavirus news please do follow the updates on our UK coronavirus liveblog

Here is the latest update from Reuters on the global coronavirus situation:

EUROPE

* Spain’s prime minister warned that nationwide confinement would likely last until May even though he said the worst should soon be over and the death toll slowed.

* The Italian government is planning to extend its lockdown until May 3, two trade union sources told Reuters on Thursday after meeting ministers.

* British Prime Minister Boris Johnson left intensive care on Thursday evening as he continues to recover from Covid-19, but he remains under close observation in hospital.

* The British government defended its early handling of the outbreak after a Reuters investigation found its scientific advisers were too slow to communicate their growing concerns.

* Britain urged its citizens to stay at home over the coming Easter holidays, amid fears that the pull of wanting to see family and friends over the Christian festival could undermine efforts to stop the virus spread.

* Social distancing measures have helped Germany to slightly slow the spread of the coronavirus, Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

* The number of confirmed infections in Germany rose by 5,323 in the past 24 hours to 113,525 on Friday, climbing for a fourth straight day, data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases showed.

* Russia reported a record one-day rise in cases, pushing its tally to more than 10,000.

* The Czech Republic plans to roll out a system of quickly tracking and isolating contacts of people with the virus to eventually allow the lifting of blanket restrictions.

* Slovakia closed off several Roma settlements in the eastern part of the country after reports of virus clusters in five of them.

* Bulgaria’s prime minister said the country’s Orthodox churches and temples will be open for traditional Palm Sunday and Easter services despite the outbreak.

AMERICAS

* Americans must resist the impulse to ease social-separation measures at the first glimpse of progress now being seen in the coronavirus battle, state government and public health leaders warned. Meanwhile, total cases topped 459,000, with the death toll reaching 16,400.

* The Trump administration’s top economic officials said they believe the U.S. economy could start to reopen for normal business in May.

* Canada’s coronavirus death toll is set to soar from more than 500 currently to as high as 22,000 by the end of the pandemic, health officials said, while the economy lost a record 1 million jobs last month.

* Lockdowns in Brazil’s largest cities are beginning to slip, according to new data this week seen and analysed by Reuters, with more people leaving their homes as President Jair Bolsonaro continues to criticize the measures.

* Chile will start handing out certificates to people who have recovered from the coronavirus that will exempt them from adhering to quarantines or other restrictions.

* Mexico has recorded its first two deaths of pregnant women from the coronavirus as the number of fatalities reached 194, the health ministry said on Thursday.

ASIA AND THE PACIFIC

* China will allocate more resources to prevent the spread of the virus from its land borders, as the country still faces risks of a comeback after new clusters are identified in some regions.

* Mainland China reported on Friday 42 new coronavirus cases, including 38 cases involving travellers from overseas.

* Tokyo and Japan’s central government resolved a high-profile feud over what businesses should shut down during a month-long emergency to fight the coronavirus, the city’s governor said. The number of cases in Japan rose to 5,548 on Thursday, public broadcaster NHK said. There have been 108 deaths.

* India claimed initial success in its fight against the epidemic, saying it would have been hit with 820,000 cases by next week had it not imposed a nationwide lockdown.

* Vietnam said more than 1,000 healthcare workers and 14,400 others linked to an outbreak at a Hanoi hospital have tested negative.

* Singapore confirmed 287 new infections on Thursday, its biggest daily increase yet, with more than 200 of them linked to outbreaks in dormitories for foreign workers.

* Indonesia reported its biggest daily jump in deaths on Thursday, while neighbouring Malaysia had its second-lowest daily increase since a partial lockdown was imposed on March 18.

* Australian police said they have taken the “black box” of a cruise ship which disembarked hundreds of infected passengers in Sydney, as part of a homicide investigation into the country’s deadliest infection source.

* South Korean’s Daegu city, which endured the first large coronavirus outbreak outside of China, on Friday reported zero new cases for the first time since late February, as new infections across the country dropped to record lows.

* Thailand reported 50 new cases and the death of a 43-year-old woman on Friday.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* South Africa’s President Cyril Ramaphosa extended a lockdown by two weeks to the end of April.

* A South African public sector union withdrew a court case against the government over shortages of protective gear for frontline health workers.

* All Botswana’s parliamentarians including the president will be quarantined for two weeks and tested, after a health worker screening lawmakers for the virus tested positive.

* Lebanon extended its almost month-long shutdown by another two weeks until April 26.

* Political and physical divisions in the West Bank and Gaza have induced two very different responses, with a strict lockdown in the first and crowds milling about freely in the second.

* Yemen reported its first coronavirus case in Hadhramaut Governorate, the supreme national emergency committee tweeted.

The UK Foreign Office has chartered 12 more flights to bring more than 3,000 stranded UK nationals back from India, the Press Association reports.

They follow seven flights that have already been arranged between April 8 and April 12 and will take the total number of Britons repatriated from India to around 5,000.

A £75m operation to charter flights from destinations where commercial routes have been severed due to the coronavirus pandemic was launched by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office last week.

But efforts to bring people home from India have previously been criticised by travellers complaining about lengthy waiting lists and expensive fares.

The new flights will leave from Goa, Amritsar, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata and Thiruvananthapuram between April 13 and April 20, with bookings opened on Friday.

The Foreign Office’s Minister for South Asia and the Commonwealth, Lord (Tariq) Ahmad of Wimbledon, said:

We are doing all we can to get thousands of British travellers in India home. This is a huge and complex operation which also involves working with the Indian government to enable people to move within India to get on these flights.

Over 300 people arrived from Goa on Thursday morning, 1,400 more will arrive over the Easter weekend, and these 12 flights next week will bring back thousands more.

The Foreign Office said India is one of its priority countries for arranging charter flights, along with South Africa and Peru, due to the large number of Britons seeking to return.

Cambodia’s parliament passed a law on Friday to prepare the way for a state of emergency, which Prime Minister Hun Sen has said he might have to declare to reinforce the campaign against the coronavirus, Reuters reports.

Human rights groups say an emergency would give sweeping powers to Hun Sen, who Western countries have long condemned for crackdowns on opponents, civil rights groups and the media.

The law allows the government under an emergency to monitor communications, control media and social media, prohibit or restrict distribution of information that could generate public fear or unrest, or that could damage national security.

Ministry of Justice spokesman Chin Malin said:

The purpose of making this law for Cambodia is not unique, as there is this law already in many other democratic countries. The law is intended to protect public order, security, people’s interests, lives, health, property and the environment.

Cambodia reported one new coronavirus case on Friday, taking its confirmed tally to 119, the health ministry said.

Hun Sen was initially sceptical about the threat posed by the coronavirus but cases have been increasing and in recent weeks the government has ordered restaurants, bars and casinos to close and limited entry visas for foreigners.
Hun Sen has said he might need emergency powers to help stem the outbreak.

Brad Adams, Asia director at Human Rights Watch, said Cambodia should be passing laws to protect public health not using the coronavirus as an excuse to extend government powers. He said:

The Cambodian government is using the COVID-19 pandemic as a pretext to assert absolute power over all aspects of civil, political, social, and economic life all without any time limits or checks on abuses of power.

The rights group Amnesty International said the law had been rammed through the legislative process with no transparency, no consultation and no due process.

Group official David Griffiths said:

The idea of concentrating even more unchecked power into the hands of this government is worrying in the extreme.

Residents in Wuhan, where the global coronavirus pandemic began, are still being tested regularly despite relaxing its tough two-month lockdown, with the country wary of a rebound in cases even as it sets its sights on normalising the economy, writes Brenda Goh for Reuters.

Concerns remain over an influx of infected patients from overseas as well as China’s ability to detect asymptomatic patients, and the government in Wuhan has tried to reassure the public that it remains vigilant.

Feng Jing, who runs a group of community workers looking after the Tanhualin neighborhood in Wuhan, said during a government-run tour for journalists on Friday that they would continue to carry out extensive checks on residents. She said:

We carry out comprehensive heath checks everyday and keep detailed records of their health condition. Currently our neighbourhood is an epidemic-free community - it’s been 45 days so far, so we don’t have this situation.

China reported a fall in new coronavirus cases on Friday after leaders promised to accelerate the country’s economic recovery, boost domestic demand and put more people back to work.

The country reported 42 new cases on Thursday, down from 63 a day earlier. Of the daily total, 38 were imported, down from 61 on Wednesday.

China’s central government coronavirus taskforce chaired by Premier Li Keqiang said on Thursday that they would speed up efforts to revive the economy while at the same time introducing targeted measures aimed at preventing infected people from crossing the country’s border.

It said China now needed to “actively create favourable conditions” to restore normality in the economy, though it warned there was still a risk of a rebound in cases.

With the government now promising to deploy resources to tackle high-risk areas, much of the focus has shifted to Heilongjiang, which reported 28 new imported cases crossing the border from Russia on Thursday. The province has so far found 154 cases of imported infections.

The Guardian and Observer’s photographers have been documenting the UK coronavirus lockdown and the results are both eerie and very beautiful.

This is Alexandra Topping, at the helm of the liveblog for the next four hours. My thanks to the ever excellent Helen Sullivan.

If you want to get in touch, if you think we have missed a story or want to bring our attention to something - please do contact me on:

alexandra.topping@theguardian.com and I’m @lexytopping on Twitter. My DMs are open.

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan for today.

It’s rough out there, but at least we have Olive, Mabel, sports commentator Andrew Cotter and their lesson in the importance of being patient (ie staying home this weekend):

“Still waiting, still believing...A famous win built on patience.”

The WHO v coronavirus: why it can’t handle the pandemic

If, like me, you have been confined to your home, glued to the news and nursing ever greater anxiety about the state of the world, you have probably become familiar with the sight of the World HealthOrganization’s director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, and his daily press briefings. Tedros, as he is known, is a calming presence in the midst of the crisis. Flanked by an international cast of scientists, he always seems confident that if we have hope, listen to the experts and pull together, we will get through this.

Watching this reassuring spectacle, it is possible to imagine a world in which every nation respects the WHO’s authority, follows its advice and lets it coordinate the flow of information, resources and medical equipment across national boundaries to areas of greatest need.

That is not the world we live in.

Australia will deploy helicopters, set up police checkpoints and hand out hefty fines to deter people from breaking an Easter travel ban, officials warned on Friday, in their toughest crackdown against the coronavirus, even as its spread slows, Reuters reports.

More than half of Australians identify themselves as Christians, with many in past years attending church services or going on trips to visit family and friends during Easter public holidays that run until Monday.

Police have said they will block roads and use number plate recognition technology to catch those infringing the bans. Fines for breaking social distancing rules start at A$1,000 ($620), but vary between states.

The long weekend was in many ways “the most important weekend we may face in the whole course of the virus,” Health Minister Greg Hunt said on Thursday.

Australia had 6,152 infections by Friday, up 100 from the previous day, government figures showed, with 53 virus-related deaths.

More on South Korea’s cases now, which have fallen below 30 for the first time since late February. There were also new cases in the city of Daegu, until recently the epicentre of the country’s outbreak, according to the Korea Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (KCDC).

The KCDC reported 27 new cases on Friday, the ninth day in a row the number has stayed below 100.

Despite the encouraging figures, health authorities say they are still on high alert over cluster infections at churches and hospitals, as well as those linked to overseas travel, the Yonhap news agency said.

The vice health minister, Kim Ganglip, urged people to continue practicing social distancing over the Easter weekend and in the run-up to next week’s national assembly elections.

One place where masks and toilet paper are in no short supply at the moment is on Easter rabbits and lambs.

Here are some of the best pictures of chocolate as this most unusual of Easter weekends begins.

A reminder that you can (and are encouraged to) get in touch with me directly on Twitter @helenrsullivan with comments, tips and news from where you live.

Coronavirus threat to global peace and stability, UN chief warns

Here now is the full story on UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’ comments on Thursday and other important developments in the pandemic.

The head of the United Nations has called the coronavirus pandemic the “fight of a generation” and a threat to world peace and security.

The secretary general, Antonio Guterres, warned the UN security council that the pandemic had the potential to increase social unrest and violence, which would greatly undermine the world’s ability to fight the disease.

It was, he said, the UN’s most grave test since it was founded 75 years ago and had already hindered efforts to resolve international, regional and national conflicts.

A US judge on Thursday said some abortions can continue in Texas while the state battles the coronavirus pandemic, dealing a new legal setback to officials attempting to dramatically restrict access to the medical procedure, Reuters reports.

US District Judge Lee Yeakel in Austin said Texas officials violated the Constitution by classifying abortion providers as covered by a state order that required postponement of non-urgent medical procedures to preserve hospital beds and equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.

Yeakel’s ruling, if upheld by an appeals court, would allow Texas abortion providers to proceed with medication abortions as well as procedural abortions for women who risk meeting the state’s cutoff at 22 weeks of pregnancy.

In a medication abortion pills are administered to terminate a pregnancy. Yeakel in his ruling described a procedural abortion as a non-surgical procedure that early in pregnancy is performed employing a technique in which a clinician uses gentle suction from a narrow, flexible tube to empty the contents of the patient’s uterus.

Boeing is considering a plan to cut its workforce by about 10%, which could involve buyouts, early retirements and involuntary layoffs, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday.

The potential job cuts are expected to largely target Boeing’s commercial arm, the report added.

Boeing was not immediately available for comment outside office hours.

Mass burials on Bronx island

New York has since the 19th century used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral.

Typically, 25 bodies are interred each week by low-paid jail inmates working on the island, which sits off the east shore of the city’s Bronx borough and is accessible only by boat.

That number began increasing in March as the new coronavirus spread rapidly. They are now burying about two dozen bodies a day, five days a week, said Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the department of correction, which oversees the burials.

Singapore has suspended the use of video-conferencing tool Zoom by teachers, its education ministry said on Friday, after “very serious incidents” occurred in the first week of a coronavirus lockdown that has seen schools move to home-based learning.

One of the incidents involved obscene images appearing on screens and strange men making lewd comments during the streaming of a geography lesson with teenage girls, according to local media reports.

Zoom has been plagued with safety and privacy concerns about its conferencing app which has seen a surge in usage as offices and schools around the world shut to try curb coronavirus infections.

Taiwan and Germany have already put restrictions on Zoom’s use, while Alphabet Inc’s Google banned the desktop version of Zoom from corporate laptops on Wednesday. The company also faces a class-action lawsuit.

Concerns have grown over its lack of end-to-end encryption of meeting sessions, routing of traffic through China and “zoombombing” when uninvited guests crash meetings.

To address security concerns, Zoom has embarked on a 90-day plan to bolster privacy and security issues, and has also tapped former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an adviser.

A 101-year-old man has returned home after being treated in hospital for coronavirus.

Keith Watson was admitted to the Alexandra Hospital in Redditch for surgery last month and tested positive for Covid-19, PA media reports.

But he was discharged on Wednesday and a post celebrating the recovery from the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust has been shared thousands of times on Facebook. It said:

This is Keith, he’s 101 years old. He went home today after beating Coronavirus. Well done to everyone on Ward 12 at the Alexandra Hospital for looking after Keith so well for the past two weeks!”

Mr Watson’s daughter-in-law Jo Watson told the BBC the reaction had been “a bit mad”.
She added: “We didn’t know anything about this Facebook page until a member of the family had it pop up and it’s gone a bit mad.
“He was in hospital having taken a tumble at his care home and needed surgery and that was a big enough ordeal at 101, but he got through that.

“Having gone in for the operation is one thing and then when we learnt he was tested positive we were thinking the worst... but he’s amazing for his age.”

The world’s biggest maker of medical gloves, Top Glove Corp Bhd, plans to start producing face masks to meet rising demand from the coronavirus outbreak, aExecutive Chairman Lim Wee Chai told Reuters.

The Malaysian company, which makes one out of every five gloves in the world, will have a facility ready in two months with a production capacity of 110 million masks a year.
Unprecedented demand for medical and testing materials has made it harder and longer for countries to source essential equipment.
Malaysia this week warned of a potential shortage of reagents, a chemical used in diagnostic tests to detect the presence of the coronavirus.

The ministry said on Tuesday it had only one week’s supply of reagents and it was optimising the use of the substance while it tries to secure supplies.

More on Japan now.

Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, and Japan’s government have reportedly resolved a row over how the capital’s restaurant and entertainment scenes should be covered by a month-long state of emergency declared this week in response to a sharp rise in Covid-19 infections.

Koike had been at loggerheads with the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, over his refusal to support stricter restrictions on businesses in Tokyo and six other areas covered by the declaration.

On Friday, Japanese media reported that Koike had bowed to pressure to permit hair salons, barber shops, DIY and hardware stores to stay open, but would ask restaurants to close at 8 pm.

Koike will create a fund for businesses that meet her requests to close, the public broadcaster NHK said. Abe had rejected calls to compensate such businesses, triggering concern that many would remain open throughout the state of emergency.

Kenji Shibuya, head of the Institute for Population Health at King’s College, London, warned that friction between Koike and the Abe administration risked blunting the impact of social distancing measures intended to ward off the kind of explosive outbreaks seen in China, the US and parts of Europe.

“The tension between Koike and the cabinet will definitely damage the impact of the emergency declaration,” Shibuya said. “There is zero chance of achieving 80%,” he added, referring to Abe’s social distancing target.

The Associated Press reports that three astronauts flew to the International Space Station on Thursday, departing the planet with little fanfare and no family members at the launch site to bid them farewell.

Nasa’s Chris Cassidy and Russians Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner arrived at the orbiting lab in their Soyuz capsule six hours after blasting off from Kazakhstan. They joined two Americans and one Russian who will return to Earth in a week.

There was no social distancing 260 miles (420km) up: As they floated into the space station one by one, the new astronauts embraced the three already there. They had been in pre-launch quarantine for the past month.

In lighter news, Australians are celebrating their bin nights – when they are allowed to leave their homes to wheel the trash out.

An Australian Facebook group called Bin isolation outing has amassed almost half a million members in under two weeks. Its premise is that with social distancing measures in full force, the country’s wheelie bins spend more time outside than we do – so why not dress up for those weekly walks to the curb?

More now on the strong statement delivered at the United Nations’ most powerful body, the Security Council, by UN chief António Guterres.

The Secretary-General called the coronavirus pandemic a “significant threat to the maintenance of international peace and security – potentially leading to an increase in social unrest and violence that would greatly undermine our ability to fight the disease.”

“This is the fight of a generation -- and the raison d’être of the United Nations itself,” he said.

Guterres outlined eight threats to international peace and security posed by the pandemic:

1. The further erosion of trust in public institutions.
2. The economic fallout could create major stressors, particularly in fragile societies, less developed countries and those in transition. Economic instability will have particularly devastating impacts for women, who make up the vast majority of those sectors worst affected.
   
3. The postponement of elections or referenda, or the decision to proceed with a vote can create political tensions and undermine legitimacy.
4. Uncertainty created by the pandemic may create incentives for some actors to promote further division and turmoil in conflict settings.
5. Terrorist groups may see a window of opportunity to strike while the attention of most governments is turned towards the pandemic.
6. The weaknesses and lack of preparedness exposed by this pandemic provide a window onto how a bioterrorist attack might unfold – and may increase its risks.
7. The crisis has hindered international, regional and national conflict resolution efforts, exactly when they are needed most.
8. The pandemic is triggering or exacerbating various human rights challenges.

Regarding that fairly all-encompassing eighth point, he said:

We are seeing stigma, hate speech, and white supremacists and other extremists seeking to exploit the situation. We are witnessing discrimination in accessing health services. Refugees and internally displaced persons are particularly vulnerable. And there are growing manifestations of authoritarianism, including limits on the media, civic space and freedom of expression.”

The Japanese government is considering widening its state of emergency after two prefectures asked to be covered by the measures.

The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, asking 56 million residents in the seven hardest-hit of Japan’s 47 prefectures to cut contact with other people by 70-80%, but took a more relaxed attitude towards businesses amid warnings that Japan is heading for a deep recession.

The declaration covers Tokyo and six other prefectures but omits others with large urban areas.

They include Aichi prefecture, home to the city of Nagoya, the carmaker Toyota and other major firms. The local governor, Hideaki Omura, said he would declare a state of emergency on Friday even if the central government refused to add Aichi to the nationwide list.

“If we look at what’s happened in the last week, it doesn’t look good and so we’re making preparations,” Omura said. Aichi has about 300 confirmed Covid-19 cases.
The governor of Kyoto prefecture, which has more than 160 cases, said on Friday he would also ask to be covered by the state of emergency.

What New Zealand’s coronavirus response can teach the world

Michael Baker and Nick Wilson write for the Guardian:

New Zealand only embraced the elimination strategy in mid-March. Up until then, the country was taking a similar approach to Australia. Both countries were following their pandemic plans, which were based on managing influenza pandemics. Both were applying increasing border restrictions to “keep it out”, with controls increased after 15 March to require 14-day periods of self-isolation for all arrivals. Familiar methods of case isolation, contact tracing and quarantine to stamp out cases were also being used.

But then the countries diverged. On 23 March New Zealand committed to an elimination strategy. Both countries had relatively low case numbers at that time: New Zealand had reported 102 cases and no deaths and Australia had reported 1396 cases and 10 deaths. On that day the prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, announced that New Zealand was going to rapidly escalate levels of physical distancing and travel restrictions, reaching the level of a full national lockdown on 26 March (level four on the alert scale).

Read the full opinion piece below:

An Australian minister in the New South Wales government has been fined AU$1,000 (US$620) after staying at his Central Coast holiday home and breaching a coronavirus public health order.

The arts minister, Don Harwin, was spotted earlier this week at his million-dollar Pearl Beach house which is more than an hour’s drive from his east Sydney primary residence.

The NSW police commissioner, Mick Fuller, said police would investigate, alleging there was photographic evidence of another person in the holiday home.

Podcast: 100 days that changed the world (part 2)

After spreading from China into parts of east Asia, the coronavirus hit Europe with a major cluster in northern Italy. But while much of the continent scrambled to shut down cities, Britain left it late to go into lockdown. Michael Safi and Patrick Wintour continue the story of the outbreak’s first 100 days.

As the US grapples with 16.8 million job losses in the last three weeks – representing roughly one in 10 working Americans – the below image shows people waiting in their cars on Thursday for the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas.

The latest dispatch from Olive and Mabel now:

Here is our story on the sporty pair:

A maritime patrol has filmed fin whales powering through Mediterranean waters off the coast of southern France – showing how wild animals are roaming more freely while people isolate indoors because of coronavirus.

Didier Reault, who heads the park’s board, says it is very rare for them to be spotted and filmed at such close quarters in the reserve’s waters. ‘The absence of human activity means the whales are far more serene, calm and confident about rediscovering their playground that they abandon when there is maritime traffic,’ Reault said

Early voting in South Korea’s parliamentary election kicked off on Friday, with coronavirus patients casting ballots at designated stations and candidates adopting new ways of campaigning to limit the risk of contagion.

Polling stations were disinfected on Thursday ahead of opening, and all voters are required to wear a mask, use sanitisers and wear gloves. Officials conducted temperature checks at the entrance.

The National Election Commission (NEC) set up eight polling stations to be used by more than 3,000 coronavirus patients receiving treatment as well as 900 medical staff at treatment centres in hard-hit areas, including the capital Seoul and Daegu city.

The election itself is on April 15, but officials are hoping that people will take advantage of early voting options to reduce the number of voters crowding polling locations on that day.

The government is still debating plans to allow for voting by the roughly 46,500 people who have not tested positive but are in self-quarantine.

The number of Americans getting on airplanes has sunk to a level not seen in more than 60 years as people shelter in their homes to avoid catching or spreading the new coronavirus, AP reports.

The Transportation Security Administration screened 94,931 people on Wednesday, a drop of 96% from a year ago and the second straight day under 100,000.

Historical daily numbers only go back so far, but the nation last averaged fewer than 100,000 passengers a day in 1954, according to figures from trade group Airlines for America. It was the dawn of the jet age.

The de Havilland Comet, the first commercial jetliner, was just a few years old, and Boeing was running test flights with the jet that would become the iconic 707.

An unassuming civil servant has become the unlikely hero of New Zealand’s coronavirus crisis, earning thousands of fans online and being nominated for the country’s highest honour.

Dr Ashley Bloomfield is the director-general of health and the public face of the country’s battle against the disease, alongside prime minister Jacinda Ardern.

Since March, Bloomfield has been fronting near-daily televised press conferences and has swiftly become a figure of fascination in a nation that has enjoyed early success in the global fight against coronavirus.

New Zealand writer Anna Connell jokingly changed her Twitter handle to The Ashley Bloomfield Fan Club after repeatedly admiring his cool during press conferences. Overnight, her followers began to grow, and she is now the unofficial leader of the nation’s Bloomfield devotees.

It is no secret that wealthy New Yorkers have fled the city in recent weeks, hoping to ride out the pandemic at their second homes, but it might still come as a surprise to learn one businessman has paid almost $2m to rent a coronavirus hideout.

Property developer Joe Farrell told the New York Post he had rented out a sprawling mansion in the Long Island neighborhood of the Hamptons, a popular, expensive, summer retreat two hours east of New York City, to a “textile tycoon” fleeing the pandemic.

The near $2m may prove to have been ill-spent, given Long Island is now one of the worst-hit areas of New York state, but the unnamed businessman will at least have plenty of room to roam in the gigantic pile.

The big drop-off in aircraft flights due to the coronavirus pandemic has created a problem for weather forecasting.

Aircraft make a vital contribution to forecasts by routinely sending reports of in-flight weather conditions, and more than 1m aircraft observations were collected each day last year around the world.

Thanks to Covid 19 there has been huge decline in these aircraft reports during the past month, and further reductions across the world are expected in the coming weeks. Without these reports, the quality of forecasts is likely to suffer.

Hundreds of UK care home deaths not added to official coronavirus toll

Hundreds of people are dying in care homes from confirmed or suspected coronavirus without yet being officially counted, the Guardian has learned.

More than 120 residents of the UK’s largest charitable provider of care homes are thought to have died from the virus in the last three weeks, while another network of care homes is reported to have recorded 88 deaths.

Care England, the industry body, estimated that the death toll is likely to be close to 1,000, despite the only available official figure for care home fatalities being dramatically lower. The Office for National Statistics said this week that 20 people died in care homes across the whole of England and Wales in the week to 27 March.

Care homes across globe in spotlight over Covid-19 death rates

Care homes for older people across much of Europe and North America are struggling to cope with the global coronavirus pandemic, prompting allegations of inhumane treatment and calls for high-level inquiries.

Appalling stories have emerged from residential homes, which have emerged as a key location for infections. People aged 70 and older are at higher risk of getting very sick or dying from the coronavirus. And people 85 and over are even more vulnerable, global figures show.

In Spain, the army has reported finding dead and abandoned people in their beds after it was drafted in to help disinfect care centres.

In France almost a third of all coronavirus deaths have been of residents in care homes.

A Zaandam crew member who was hospitalized for days after two ill-fated cruise ships with coronavirus patients were finally allowed to dock in Florida has died, officials said.

Broward County Medical Examiner Craig Mallak on Thursday confirmed the death of Wiwit Widarto, 50, of Indonesia. Widarto had tested positive for Covid-19, raising the Zaandam ship’s coronavirus-related death toll to four.

The man died Wednesday, six days after the Zaandam and a sister ship docked in the Fort Lauderdale port after spending two weeks at sea rejected by South American ports, said Holland America Line spokesman Erik Elvejord. He had been taken to a Florida hospital the same day the ship docked.

Four elderly passengers had already died before the cruise ships arrived, and the medical examiner said earlier this week that three of those men tested positive for Covid-19. The fourth man’s death was caused by a viral infection. Mallak said he tested negative for the new virus but had been dead for 12 days before he was examined.

New York sees record coronavirus deaths again as Cuomo warns economic toll ‘worse than 9/11’

New York broke its record for the largest single-day coronavirus death toll for the third consecutive day, the governor announced on Thursday, as he warned the effect of the outbreak on the state’s economy is expected to be more devastating than 9/11.

The grim milestone came as New York City officials hired contract laborers to bury the rising number of dead in its potter’s field on Hart Island, an area which has for decades been used to bury those with no known next of kin.

New York recorded 799 deaths from coronavirus on Wednesday, bringing the state’s total death toll to 7,067. New York has lost about the same number of people to coronavirus as the UK.

As the state mourns the loss, there are also signs that social distancing is flattening the curve. Yesterday, the state recorded the lowest number of new hospitalizations since the crisis started. The number of ICU admissions and intubations are also down.

Opec and its allies led by Russia agreed on Thursday to cut their oil output by more than a fifth and said they expected the United States and other producers to join in their effort to prop up prices hammered in the coronavirus crisis.

A reminder that you can (and should be encouraged to!) get in touch with me directly on Twitter @helenrsullivan with comments, tips and news from where you live.

Meanwhile in Zambia, the national broadcasting body on Thursday revoked the license of a private TV channel after it refused to air public messages about coronavirus, claiming it was still due payment by the government for past services.

Prime Television, a popular pro-opposition channel, told authorities last month that it would not air information about Covid-19 unless it was paid for government-commissioned campaign messages during elections in 2015 and 2016.

The Independent Broadcasting Authority (IBA) cancelled its licence with “immediate effect” on Thursday, citing “the interest of public safety, security, peace and welfare”.

Prime Television director Gerald Shawa declined to comment on the IBA’s decision.

President Edgar Lungu on Thursday extended a March 25 ban on public gatherings and non-essential business operations for another two weeks, advising Zambians to observe social distance and limit movements.

Unlike most of his regional counterparts, Lungu has refrained from imposing a complete lockdown for the time being.

Religious leaders around the globe Thursday urged people to celebrate Good Friday and Easter from the safety of their homes.
Governments warned that the hard-won gains against the scourge must not be jeopardized by relaxing social distancing over the weekend. Across Europe, where Easter is one of the busiest travel times of the year, authorities set up roadblocks and otherwise discouraged family gatherings.

Amid widespread restrictions on public gatherings, major religious denominations are holding virtual services where members can watch on TV, online or on their phones. Others are arranging prayer at drive-in theaters, where people can stay in their cars.

Other churches plan to move ahead with Easter, especially in states like Texas, where the governor declared religious gatherings essential services. A Houston church has installed hand-washing stations and rearranged the 1,000-person sanctuary to hold about 100 people with 6 or more feet (2 meters) between them.

Pope Francis will celebrate Easter Mass in a nearly empty St. Peters Basilica instead of the huge square outside. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury will deliver his Easter sermon by video.