Turkish authorities continue to ease quarantine measures. Crowded holidays are allowed again in the country, but wedding ceremonies now look like this.
Epidemiologists in the U.S. are urging authorities to take urgent action to contain the coronavirus before it’s too late, the U.N. is calling for a freeze on military conflicts worldwide for at least three months, and France is preparing for the second wave of the pandemic and stockpiling masks.
According to Johns Hopkins University, there are currently 10.7 million infections and 516 thousand deaths worldwide. The most affected country remains the United States, which far exceeds other countries in both indicators.
The latest news on the Covid-19 pandemic in our daily review. The UN Security Council passed the first resolution since the pandemic began, calling on all warring parties around the world to declare a three-month ceasefire to prevent the further spread of Covid-19. Earlier, the World Health Organization warned that countries in the Middle East have exhausted their options in the fight against the coronavirus. According to WHO experts, health workers in conflict zones such as Syria and Yemen are unable to control the spread of the disease.
In the USA, a new daily record of infections has been set – 52 thousand new cases in one day. The situation is worst in such large states as Texas, Florida and California. Some states have reinstated quarantine measures.
California officials have ordered bars closed in ten or more regions of the state, including Los Angeles, Sacramento and Santa Barbara. Against the background of the spread of the infection, Donald Trump has changed his opinion about medical masks. Previously, he considered them useless, but now he declared that he supports this means of protection, although he emphasized that it is not mandatory. “I’m all for masks,” Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Wednesday. When asked if he would wear a mask himself, the president replied, “If I find myself in a difficult situation with people, then yes, of course.” Trump also said he actually “kind of likes” how he looks in a mask, joking that it makes him look like the Lone Ranger – an American western character who fights criminals.
The mask worn to prevent the spread of infection (left) is quite different from the one worn by the Lone Ranger. The chief epidemiologist of the United States, Anthony Fauci, warned that the epidemic will reach catastrophic proportions unless a mechanism is urgently found to contain it. “We have suffered greatly, worse than any other country, both in terms of the number of cases and the number of deaths. Now we have a problem: while the government is trying to bring the country back to a relatively normal state and partially reopen businesses, there is a sharp increase in infections in certain states,” Fauci said in an interview with the BBC.
In one of the Los Angeles parks, coronavirus testing kits are given to those who want them. Comparing the measures taken in the U.S. and Europe, he noted that many European countries had an average of 97% lockdown, while the U.S. had only 50%, which led to further spread of the virus. In his opinion, many people in the US, especially young people, lack social responsibility. Since the epidemic began in the U.S., nearly 2.7 million people have become ill and 128,000 have died. These are the worst indicators in the world.
France is waiting for the second wave of the epidemic. The country’s authorities are advising companies and institutions to stock up on masks for at least 10 weeks. “We are already preparing for the start of the next academic year and there is a risk that the virus will return,” said the French Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Hospital workers in Paris and several other cities in France are protesting the government’s inadequate response to the pandemic, especially in light of the high likelihood of a second wave.
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According to Johns Hopkins University, nearly 203,000 people have been infected and 29.8 thousand have died since the epidemic began in the country. Since the beginning of June, France has begun to gradually ease its quarantine measures at a rapid pace. Serbia has reintroduced quarantine measures in certain regions of the country after infection rates rose again. The country was recently added to the European Union’s list of safest countries to visit, but Austria has said it may impose restrictions on travel from Serbia.
Norwegian television station NRK reports that webcams at the Norwegian Border Service have caught people entering the country from Sweden, despite Oslo’s strict restrictions on communication with the neighboring country. The NRK publication states that these webcams were used to monitor the presence of police posts at the border, which some violators took advantage of. After journalists contacted the Border Guard about this issue, the webcams at the border were turned off.
The final game of the Danish Football Cup had to be interrupted because fans of one of the teams refused to leave the stands. The police had to remove an entire group of people from the stadium, after which the game resumed.
The incidence of COVID-19 is also increasing in Latin American countries. In Brazil, which ranks second in the world after the United States in the number of cases and deaths, more than 60,000 people have died from the coronavirus.
In South Africa, the most affected country in Africa, a trial vaccine developed by the University of Oxford is being tested. Initially, two thousand people will be vaccinated. In South Africa, 8728 new cases were detected in the last 24 hours, the highest number since the beginning of the epidemic. The situation in South Africa is the worst on the entire African continent, with nearly 160 thousand infected and 2844 deaths.
The New Zealand Minister of Health has resigned. It was previously known that he had violated quarantine rules, and the public demanded a public apology from him. New Zealand is considered the most successful country in dealing with the epidemic. There have been 1530 cases and 22 deaths. The country’s authorities closed its external borders and imposed a lockdown earlier than others.
The Israeli Knesset voted to allow the security services access to information stored in the cell phones of citizens with a confirmed diagnosis of Covid-19 for a period of three weeks. Primarily, the places a person visited within 14 days before being diagnosed will be monitored. The authorities took this step in light of the growing number of infected people. A total of 26.2 thousand people are infected in Israel, with 322 deaths.