The United States recorded 1,169 COVID-19 fatalities in a single day, the Johns Hopkins University tracker showed Thursday, the highest one-day death toll recorded in any country since the global pandemic began.

The toll reflected figures reported by the university between 8:30pm Wednesday (0030 GMT) and the same time Thursday.

The grim record was previously held by Italy, where 969 people died on March 27.

The US has now recorded around 6000 coronavirus deaths since the pandemic began.

Trump changes his position on masks

US President Donald Trump’s administration appeared to join local officials on Thursday in advising Americans to wear masks when venturing out during the still-exploding coronavirus pandemic.

Speaking at a White House briefing, Deborah Birx, a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force, said the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would issue guidelines in the coming days on the use of face coverings.

Birx however cautioned that Americans, who have been admonished to stay at home except for essential outings, should not develop a “false sense of security” that they are fully protected from the respiratory illness by wearing a mask.

Trump, answering questions from reporters at the same briefing, said only that “if people want to wear them, they can.”

Global cases surpassed 1 million on Thursday with more than 52,000 deaths, according to a Reuters tally based on country by country data.

White House medical experts have forecast that between 100,000 to 240,000 people could be killed even if Americans follow the sweeping lock-down orders.

The Trump administration, CDC and public health officials have all wavered on the issue of face masks since the pandemic broke out, initially telling healthy people such measures were unnecessary or even counter-productive.

Lack of resources

In New York City, the center of the US outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio urged residents to wear face coverings, citing studies showing that the virus can be transmitted by infected people who are showing no symptoms.

“What that means is when you put on that face covering you’re protecting everyone else,” de Blasio said. The Democratic mayor suggested New Yorkers use scarves or other home-made masks because medical-grade protective gear was in short supply.

An emergency stockpile of medical equipment maintained by the US government has nearly run out of protective garb for doctors and nurses.

In New York City, where at least 1,400 people have been killed by the virus, hospitals and morgues struggled to treat the desperately ill and bury the dead.

New York City funeral homes and cemetery directors described a surge in demand not seen in decades as cases surpassed 50,000 in the city.

Crematories extended their hours and burned bodies into the night, with corpses piling up so quickly that city officials were looking elsewhere in the state for temporary interment sites.

“We’ve been preparing for a worst-case scenario, which is in a lot of ways starting to materialise,” said Mike Lanotte, director of the New York State Funeral Directors Association.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP and REUTERS)

Latest updates on the spread of the new coronavirus pandemic around the world show that the number of confirmed cases of the infection has exceeded one million.

Figures provided online by Johns Hopkins University on Thursday said that more than 51,000 people had died of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, while 208,000 had recovered.

The figures showed that Italy topped the list of countries with the highest number of deaths from the virus while the United States had the highest number of confirmed cases.

More than three months have passed since the new coronavirus was detected in the central Chinese city of Wuhan where tens of thousands were infected before the disease was mostly contained last month. Wuhan and surrounding regions are now set for a reopening of schools and businesses in the upcoming days.

However, many countries around the world have yet to see the worst of COVID-19 with the World Health Organization saying on Wednesday that the number of confirmed cases had doubled in less than a week.

However, reports on Thursday suggested that scientists and researchers were making progress in the initial stages of developing vaccines for COVID-19 as efforts are underway to immunize a substantial portion of the global population from the virus and allow a return to normal life in many countries.

Australia’s national science agency said that a first stage of testing a potential vaccine had begun on animals in a lab near Melbourne.

A US biotechnology company, whose efforts for developing a vaccine enjoys the support of the federal government in Washington, also said that it would carry out the first phase of testing the vaccine on humans in late spring or early summer.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh also said on Thursday that they had made promising progress on finding a protein that could induce immunity against the new coronavirus.

They said that their prototype vaccine, called PittCoVacc, had caused a surge of antibodies against the new coronavirus two weeks after it was tested in mice.

However, the researchers said the animal should be tracked for a longer period for the vaccine to prove immune and effective.

All governments and institutions around the world have declared that it would take between 12 to 18 months before a vaccine with a decisive ability to induce immunity against COVID-19 could be accessible to the public.

Source: Presstv

The World Health Organization said Wednesday it was deeply concerned about the near-exponential escalation of the new coronavirus pandemic, with the number of deaths doubling in a week.

WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus urged citizens around the globe to stand together to fight COVID-19, as he braced for the millionth confirmed case.

“As we enter the fourth month since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am deeply concerned about the rapid escalation and global spread of infection,” he told a virtual news conference.

“Over the past five weeks, we have witnessed a near exponential growth in the number of new cases, reaching almost every country.

“The number of deaths has more than doubled in the past week. In the next few days we will reach one million confirmed cases and 50,000 deaths.”

Since emerging in China in December, COVID-19 has spread across the globe, claiming more than 43,000 lives, and infecting more than 860,000 people, according to an AFP tally of officially confirmed cases.

The coronavirus pandemic has killed more than 30,000 people in Europe alone. Italy and Spain account for three in every four deaths on the continent.

Debt relief call

However, the virus is expected to gain a greater foothold in parts of the world that have not, so far, seen such large numbers of cases and deaths.

“While relatively lower numbers of confirmed cases have been reported from Africa, and from Central and South America, we realise that COVID-19 could have serious social, economic and political consequences for these regions,” Tedros warned.

“It is critical that we ensure these countries are well equipped to detect, test, isolate and treat COVID-19 cases, and identify contacts.”

He urged governments to implement social welfare measures to ensure that vulnerable people have access to food during the crisis — and called for debt relief for poorer states.

“Many developing countries will struggle to implement social welfare programs of this nature. For those countries, debt relief is essential to enable them to take care of their people and avoid economic collapse,” said Tedros.

He said there were many “unknowns” about how COVID-19 will behave, as it is the “first-ever coronavirus pandemic in the world”.

A safe vaccine is thought to be 12 to 18 months away, while WHO emergencies director Michael Ryan stressed: “There is no therapy that has been proven to be effective in the treatment of COVID-19.”

As regards the use of face masks, the WHO recommends that those people who are infected and health workers who care for them should use medical masks.

(AFP)

President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned of a “very painful” two weeks as the United States wrestles with a coronavirus surge that the White House warns could kill as many as 240,000 Americans.

“This is going to be a very painful, a very, very painful two weeks,” Trump told a press conference at the White House.

Trump described the pandemic as “a plague”.

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead,” he said.

White House coronavirus coordinator Deborah Birx displayed charts demonstrating data and modeling that showed an enormous jump in deaths to a range of 100,000 to 240,000 people from the virus in the coming months.

Trump said 2.2 million people could have died, according to the modeling, if no mitigation efforts had been put into place.

He cited those high projections when announcing on Sunday that he planned to extend the federal guidelines rather than pursuing his earlier stated desire to get the US economy moving again by Easter on April 12.

“There’s no magic bullet. There’s no magic vaccine or therapy. It’s just behaviors: Each of our behaviors translating into something that changes the course of this viral pandemic over the next 30 days,” Birx told reporters, predicting a peak in deaths in the coming two weeks.

Vice President Mike Pence said the mitigation efforts were having an impact. “We have reason to believe that it’s working,” Pence said of the guidelines. “Do not be discouraged.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who has said previously that the pandemic could kill between 100,000 and 200,000 people in the United States, said all efforts were being made to make those numbers lower.

“We’re doing everything we can,” he said.

(FRANCE 24 with REUTERS and AFP)