Daily covid roundup aka You’re not alone, America
The slow fall in the numbers being infected by Coronavirus in Iran has ended and now gone into complete reverse with the health ministry reporting official figures for new infections reaching its highest figure for a month.
Health ministry spokesman Kianoush Jahanpour said 2,102 new cases were confirmed across the country in the past 24 hours, bringing the overall total to 116,635. The number of dead in the last 24 hours was 48, still relatively low in comparison with the pandemic’s highpoint, and bringing the death total to 6,902.
The new infections figure is the highest Iran has announced for a single day since April 6.
The worrying aspect for the government is that there appears to be a steady week long reversal in the trend ikn new infections suggesting Ministers may lifted the lockdown prematurely. But the Ministry said 80 % of the new infections were mild, and the national press contained little criticism of the government.
A keenly-watched COVID-19 vaccine will be priced to allow as wide as possible access to it, if it proves successful, the Oxford University professor co-leading its development told Reuters.
Adrian Hill, director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute, which has teamed up with the drugmaker AstraZeneca to develop the vaccine, said ensuring wide distribution and low cost have been central to the project from the start. He said:
This not going to be an expensive vaccine.
It’s going to be a single dose vaccine.
It’s going to be made for global supply and it’s going to be made in many different locations. That was always our plan.
The UK death toll has risen by 384 to 33,998 on Friday, the Department Health Social Care said.
As of 9am 15 May, there have been 2,353,078 tests, with 133,784 tests on 14 May.
1,663,492 people have been tested of which 236,711 tested positive.
As of 5pm on 14 May, of those tested positive for coronavirus, across all settings, 33,998 have sadly died.
Single men and women in the Netherlands are being advised to organise a seksbuddy (sex buddy) after criticism of rules dictating that home visitors maintain a 1.5-metre distance from their hosts during the coronavirus lockdown.
In a typically open-minded intervention, official guidance from the Dutch National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) has been amended to suggest those without a permanent sexual partner come to mutually satisfactory agreements with like-minded individuals.
On the advice of scientists at the RIVM, the Netherlands has been on what the government describes as an “intelligent lockdown” since 23 March, allowing up to three visitors into homes on the strict condition that they keep their distance.
But the RIVM now concedes that “it makes sense that as a single [person] you also want to have physical contact” while warning that the risks of such intimacy should be managed.
Austria has outlined plans to start allowing seated cultural events of up to 100 people in two weeks’ time, ramping up to 1,000 people from 1 August, Reuters reports.
Austria flattened its curve of infections with an early lockdown and has been loosening curbs for a month. Shops have reopened in phases and on Friday, restaurants, bars, cafes, churches and some museums followed suit, under strict social-distancing rules and with face masks required in many places.
Theatres and cinemas, however, have remained closed and the conservative-led government has come under growing pressure from the cultural sector to allow events, to the point that the junior minister for culture resigned on Friday.
The Czech Republic is to allow gatherings of up to 300 people later this month as its coronavirus infection rate remains among the lowest in Europe, AFP reports.
Gatherings including sports events will be allowed from 25 May, when businesses including restaurants and pubs will also be allowed to open, the health minister, Adam Vojtech, said.
Shopping centres, cinemas, barbers and restaurant terraces opened on Monday after nearly two months under lockdown.
The country of 10.7 million people had registered 8,352 confirmed coronavirus cases and 293 deaths by Friday morning.
“If the epidemiological situation remains favourable, the limit will grow to 500 people on 8 June and to 1,000 on 22 June,” Vojtech said of the size of gatherings that would be permissible.
He said restaurants and bars would not be allowed to stay open after 11pm after a recent upsurge of cases in South Korea was linked to nightclubs.
Further easing would take place only if daily infection counts did not increase after staying well under 100 cases daily throughout May, said the epidemiologist Rastislav Madar, part of an official advisory team.
Some credit the success in stemming infections to the mandatory face mask rule, which will be eased from 25 May, when they will only be required in shops, offices and on public transport.
The Spanish government has hailed a large-scale antibody study as a key tool in the fight against the coronavirus, but warned that any premature or irresponsible relaxation of restrictions could have “enormous consequences” given that only 5% of Spaniards have had the disease.
The country’s Socialist-led coalition government is under growing pressure from political opponents to end the two-month state of emergency that underpins one of the strictest lockdowns in Europe.
On Friday, the health ministry was due to decide whether the Madrid region would be granted permission to follow other areas into the next stage of the de-escalation, which allows up to 10 people to meet and permits the reopening of cafe and restaurant terraces at 50% capacity.
Travellers arriving to Germany from the European Union and the Schengen passport-free zone will no longer have to go into quarantine for two weeks as has been the case since March, according to the interior ministry.
The new measure is on condition that the country the visitor has travelled from does not have a high number of coronavirus infections. Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Britain are also included. But as soon as the virus rate in those states rises, the quarantine rule will be immediately reintroduced, the ministry spokesman said. The two-week quarantine still applies to arrivals from all other countries.
Denmark has reported zero coronavirus-related deaths in the last 24 hours for the first time since 13 March, Reuters reports.
Impressions conveyed abroad that Sweden has adopted a “business as usual” approach to the coronavirus are wrong, its prime minister said on Friday, Reuters reports.
Sweden has not declared a full lockdown, in sharp contrast to many of its European neighbouring countries, instead adopting a mix of legislation and recommendations in response to the virus. Some foreign newspapers and broadcasters have widely labelled a relatively soft policy.
Stefan Lofven said he rejected that narrative: “The image that Sweden is doing so totally different than other countries, that’s not the case.”
The Swedish model for managing society was built on trust between citizens, who had “a responsibility to do the right thing”, and lawmakers and other authorities, he told a briefing with foreign media.
“Life is not carrying on as normal in Sweden. It is not business as usual.”
Current guidelines have banned large gatherings, while high schools and universities are closed. The government has recommend social distancing, protecting the elderly, working from home and staying at home if unwell.
Elementary schools however remain open, people have not been obliged to stay indoors and can meet in small groups, and stores have not been forced to close.
Sweden has registered more than 3,500 coronavirus-linked deaths – a toll far lower than many large EU countries but around five times higher than Denmark and more than 10 times that of its other Nordic neighbours.
The Robert Koch Institute, Germany’s leading public health body monitoring and advising how to tackle the coronavirus, has said it is revising its “R” evaluation, or reproduction rate, which is the number of people an individual infected with coronavirus infects, after much confusion.
It will now release a weekly R value instead, which takes into account all the dips and rises in registered cases in a week and most importantly takes into account the regional differences. The new R value is being referred to as the geglätterte or “smoothed” R.
Germany’s current seven-day R value is 0.88 – every infected person is infecting less than one further person. Under the old system, Tuesday’s value would have been 0.75.
