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Covid-19 spreads to every African country - as it happened

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Coronavirus may never be eradicated, warns WHO as Spanish study reveals 5% of the population has antibodies

 Updated 
Wed 13 May 2020 19.31 EDTFirst published on Tue 12 May 2020 19.28 EDT
Coronavirus may never be eradicated, says WHO official – video

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The WHO’s director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, added:

The trajectory is in our hands, and it’s everybody’s business, and we should all contribute to stop this pandemic.

Ryan said “very significant control” of the virus was required in order to lower the assessment of risk, which he said remained high at the “national, regional and global levels”.

As countries around the world seek a way to ease lockdown measures, public health experts say extreme caution is needed to avoid new outbreaks. Ryan said opening land borders was less risky than easing air travel, which was a “different challenge”.

“We need to get into the mindset that it is going to take some time to come out of this pandemic,” the WHO epidemiologist Maria Van Kerkhove said.

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Virus may never be eradicated – WHO

The coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could become endemic like HIV, the World Health Organization has said, warning against any attempt to predict how long it would keep circulating and calling for a “massive effort” to counter it. The organisation’s emergencies expert, Mike Ryan, said:

It is important to put this on the table: This virus may become just another endemic virus in our communities, and this virus may never go away.

I think it is important we are realistic and I don’t think anyone can predict when this disease will disappear. I think there are no promises in this and there are no dates. This disease may settle into a long problem, or it may not be.

However, he said the world had some control over how it copes with the disease, although this would take a “massive effort” even if a vaccine was found – a prospect he described as a “massive moonshot”.

More than 100 potential vaccines are being developed, including several in clinical trials, but experts have underscored the difficulties of finding vaccines that are effective against coronaviruses.

Ryan noted that vaccines exist for other illnesses, such as measles, that have not been eliminated.

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France’s cumulative death toll has risen by 83 to 27,074, with the rate of increase slowing after accelerating the three previous days, local authorities have said.

The number of hospitalised people fell again to 21,071 from 21,595 on Tuesday, continuing an uninterrupted downward trend now entering its fifth week, according to the health ministry.

On the third day after the end of a 55-day lockdown, the number of people in intensive care also continued a similar downtrend and fell by 114 or 4.7% to 2,428. Confirmed cases were up 0.4% at 140,374.

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Summary

Here are the latest lines in our global coronavirus coverage:

  • At least 4.3 million people are known to have been infected with the coronavirus worldwide, while at least 293,514 people have died. The figures collected by Johns Hopkins University are likely to be a great underestimate of the true scale of the pandemic.
  • Every African country is now affected by the outbreak, after Lesotho announced its first case. The virus was detected in one of 81 people tested after arriving last week from Saudi Arabia and neighbouring South Africa, Lesotho’s health ministry said.
  • Afghanistan reached 5,000 confirmed cases, as the country’s health ministry warned that easing lockdowns would bring a “catastrophe”. Out of 619 suspected patients tested in the last 24 hours, 259 came back positive, pushing the total number of infections to 5,226. The death toll reached 132, after five more patients died overnight. The number of recoveries is 648.
  • Sweden announced it would hire up to 10,000 more care workers to address shortcomings in elderly care exposed by the pandemic. About half of Sweden’s 3,460 coronavirus-related deaths have been among nursing home residents, and another quarter among those receiving care at home.
  • Mexico said it would reopen parts of the economy after 51 days of lockdown, despite the country reporting its highest number of daily deaths so far. Mexico has confirmed 1,992 new cases and 353 deaths, bringing the total death toll to 3,926 and the total number of cases to 38,324.
  • Hotels and restaurants across Europe have been asked to enforce physical distancing between guests to allow Europeans to take their annual summer holiday. The EU executive called for a “gradual and careful easing of lockdown restrictions across the continent”.
  • The car manufacturer Ford announced plans to restart production, including at two factories in the UK. Work will resume on 18 May at the company’s engine plants in Dagenham in Essex and Bridgend in south Wales. The move, along with the reopening of the Valencia engine plant in Spain, will open all of Ford’s European manufacturing facilities.
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A zoo in Canada is to send two giant pandas back to China after disruptions to international travel meant it was unable to import enough bamboo to feed them, Reuters reports.

The pandas, Er Shun and Da Mao, arrived in Canada in 2014 as part of a 10-year agreement between Canada and China. After spending five years at Toronto zoo, the two adult giant pandas arrived at Calgary zoo in March 2018 with cubs Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue.

Da Mao, one of two giant pandas being sent back from Canada to China, in an undated photograph provided by Calgary zoo. Photograph: Calgary zoo/Reuters

Calgary zoo officials now fear a second wave of Covid-19 could cut off the pandas’ food supply entirely. Giant pandas consume 40kg of bamboo a day and it makes up 99% of their diet, the zoo said.

The zoo’s president and CEO, Clément Lanthier, said in a statement:

We believe the best and safest place for Er Shun and Da Mao to be during these challenging and unprecedented times is where bamboo is abundant and easy to access.

On Wednesday, Canada reported 329 new cases of coronavirus and 40 new deaths. So far 71,486 people in the country have tested positive for the virus, of whom 5,209 have died and 34,496 recovered.

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Melissa Davey
Melissa Davey

Australia’s e-safety commissioner has warned that child abusers have created and shared an online grooming manual describing ways to manipulate and exploit the increased number of children at home and online during Covid-19, writes Melissa Davey, the Guardian’s Melbourne bureau chief.

Covid-19 restrictions have coincided with a significant increase in reports to the eSafety Office about child sexual abuse material, Julie Inman Grant told Guardian Australia. She said investigators had seen a jump in searches by predators on the dark web seeking information on how to abuse children.

“I think of it like bees in a hive, gathering around the honey,” Inman Grant said. “Abusers see Covid-19 as a honeypot for them, with at-risk boys and girls spending much more time at home and online, often without supervision, and often while feeling isolated and lonely.”

The Covid-19 predator handbook contained details about how to coerce children online to share sexual images and videos of themselves, she said. “The handbook advises predators to get their kicks online rather than trying to meet children face-to-face because of restrictions and heightened vigilance of law enforcement on the streets,” Inman Grant said.

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Yemen’s Saudi-backed government reported the first coronavirus case in Marib province and four other infections elsewhere, taking the tally of cases in areas under its control to 70, including 12 deaths, according to Reuters.

#Yemen has reported five new #coronavirus cases and two deaths, pushing the total number of infections to 70 and death toll to 12. Two of new cases and one death reported in Aden. The port city of Aden has so far been the country's worst affected area with 41 cases and 5 deaths. https://t.co/4vHUmxiMBN

— Akhtar Mohammad Makoii (@akhtar_makoii) May 13, 2020

Parks in Turkey filled with the sound of children on Wednesday as authorities allowed those aged 14 and under to leave their homes for the first time in 40 days, the Associated Press reports.

The country’s children were allowed to venture out for four hours between 11am and 3pm as Turkey eased some restrictions in place to fight the coronavirus outbreak. Youngsters between the ages of 15 and 20 will be able to leave homes for a few hours on Friday, while older people were briefly allowed out for the first time in seven weeks on 10 May.

Children play in a park in Istanbul. Photograph: Xinhua/Rex/Shutterstock

In the city’s Birlik Mahallesi neighbourhood, two children were seen riding their scooters up and down a street while a voice from a loudspeaker on the top of the minaret of a nearby mosque called on the public not to be “fooled by the arrival of spring and good weather”.

“The danger of infection is not over yet,” the announcement said.

Health officials reported 58 more deaths from Covid-19 on Wednesday, as 1,639 further people tested positive for the coronavirus that causes it. It brings the total number of cases in Turkey to 143,114, of whom 3,952 have died.

Infections peaked last month, with 5,138 reported on 11 April, and since then have declined steadily. Shopping centres, hairdressers, barber shops and hair salons were allowed to reopen on Monday, as part of a “normalisation plan” set out by the government.

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Nightly curfew hours in Tunisia are to be relaxed after the country recorded three consecutive days without detecting any new coronavirus infections, according to Reuters.

The north African democracy imposed the curfew in March, aiming to slow the spread of the virus by keeping people at home, combined with a lockdown that shuttered all but key shops and services.

The president, Kais Saied, has cut the curfew hours to 11pm to 5am, instead of 8pm to 6am, the state news agency TAP reported, 10 days after the start of a gradual reopening of the bureaucracy and economy.

It follows the government’s announcement that no new coronavirus cases have been recorded for three days in a row. So far it has reported 1,032 confirmed cases in total and 45 deaths.

Senior health and hospital officials in different parts of the country told Reuters there were very few coronavirus patients still in care, indicating the reduction in the number of new cases is not down to a lack of testing.

Women wearing protective face masks walk in the Tunisian capital, Tunis, on Tuesday. Photograph: Fethi Belaid/AFP via Getty Images
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Chile is to implement a general quarantine across Santiago, the national capital, and a nationwide quarantine for all people over 75, after a surge in coronavirus infections, Reuters reports.

The “extraordinary, tough new measures” were announced by the health minister, Jaime Mañalich, on Wednesday, after 2,660 new cases of the virus were recorded in the country overnight, up 60% from the previous day.

“The month of May is proving very tough on our country,” said Mañalich, who added that the quarantine, which takes effect on Friday, was necessary to bring down the contagion rate.

Chile has 34,381 total confirmed cases and 14,865 recovered victims of the virus. Eleven new deaths have brought the total toll from Covid-19 in the country to 346.

Mañalich called on citizens to pull together and take the measures seriously, and report anyone not wearing masks or observing physical distancing.

“In reality the battle for Santiago is the crucial battle in the war against coronavirus,” said Mañalich.

Some 313,750 PCR tests have been carried out on the population of 18 million people.

Asked about claims that some public hospitals were close to collapse, he insisted that patients and medical resources had already been transferred to avoid overwhelming particular areas.

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