Latin American virus cases top 5 million
GENEVA, Switzerland — Latin America and the Caribbean surpassed five million coronavirus cases on Monday as the World Health Organization warned there might never be a "silver bullet" for the pandemic.
Global infections passed 18 million, with Brazil driving the regional surge. South America's largest country has recorded 2.75 million cases, and close to half the region's 202,000 deaths.
Only the United States, with 4.7 million cases and more than 155,000 deaths, has been worse affected.
In the region's second hardest-hit country, Peru, daily cases have almost doubled from 3,300 to 6,300 since bus and air travel resumed a month ago, according to official figures.
The world's hope of ending the current cycle of outbreaks and lockdowns rests on a vaccine, but the WHO said governments and citizens should focus on what is known to work: testing, contact tracing, maintaining physical distance and wearing a mask.
"We all hope to have a number of effective vaccines that can help prevent people from infection," WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a virtual press conference.
"However, there's no silver bullet at the moment -- and there might never be," he said.
"For now, stopping outbreaks comes down to the basics of public health and disease control. Do it all."
Despite months of economically crippling restrictions, the pandemic is gathering pace with the worldwide death toll nearing 700,000 and a White House adviser warning the virus is "extraordinarily widespread" in the United States.
'Pretty demoralised'
There has been a resurgence in countries that had previously brought their outbreaks under control, including Australia, where sweeping new restrictions kicked in for the hard-hit state of Victoria on Monday.
They include a nighttime curfew in state capital Melbourne for the next six weeks, with the city ordering non-essential businesses to close, and a ban on weddings.
Melbourne book store manager Bill Morton said his normally "vibrant, lovely" patch of the city had transformed into a "ghost town".
"People are pretty demoralised," he told AFP. "Pretty well everything is closed around here. So it's a very strange, quite eerie atmosphere."
Authorities in the Philippines have also had to reimpose curbs after infections surged past 100,000, forcing more than 27 million people -- including in the capital Manila -- back into lockdown for two weeks from Tuesday.
The Middle East's hardest-hit nation Iran meanwhile reported its highest single-day infection count in nearly a month, warning that most of its provinces are facing a resurgence.
In the US, Deborah Birx, head of the White House coronavirus task force, warned the country has entered a "new phase".
"What we are seeing today is different from March and April," she told CNN, adding that the virus "is extraordinarily widespread".
The pandemic has spurred a rush for a vaccine that some have compared to the space race, and Russia said on Monday it is aiming to launch mass production in September and turn out "several million" doses per month by next year.
But Vitaly Zverev, laboratory chief at the Mechnikov Research Institute of Vaccines and Sera, told AFP that it was "impossible to ensure a vaccine's safety in the time that has passed since the beginning of this pandemic".
"You can make anything, but who is going to buy it?"
The impositions the pandemic has put on daily life has sparked protests on nearly every continent.
Berlin saw thousands of people rally over the weekend against virus restrictions, with far-left and far-right demonstrators joined by those supporting widely debunked conspiracy theories.
The protesters -- who shouted "We are the second wave" on their "day of freedom" -- were mostly not wearing masks, which the German government blasted as "unacceptable".
On Monday, the country was watching anxiously as 150,000 children returned to school in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania, Germany's first state to restart full-time classes after the summer holidays, with infection numbers on the rise again.
In neighbouring France, Prime Minister Jean Castex urged the nation "not to let down its guard" as surging cases led the Riviera resort city of Nice to become the latest to mandate outside mask-wearing during the summer holiday season.
"The virus has not gone on holiday and neither have we," Castex said.
Party crasher
The pandemic has forced huge changes on many summer events in the northern hemisphere, including China's famous Qingdao beer festival, which opened at the weekend with its "Beer City" limited to only 30 percent capacity.
Still, many were happy just to attend something.
"It's been half a year since I last travelled around," tourist Wang Hua told state broadcaster CCTV. "I feel so happy and relaxed."
And on the Spanish party island of Ibiza, the government has only allowed clubs with a capacity of 300 or less to open -- with mega clubs closed for the season.
Nightclub operators said social distancing would make it impossible to stage the wild parties Ibiza is famous for.
"When we shout, saliva can go as far as two metres (over six feet)," said Jose Luis Benitez, head of the Ibiza Leisure Association.
"Who can keep distances inside a nightclub?" — with Carly Waters in Melbourne and AFP bureaus
Follow this page for updates on a mysterious pneumonia outbreak that has struck dozens of people in China.
New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins says on Sunday that he had contracted COVID-19, testing positive at a key point in his flailing campaign for re-election.
Hipkins saYS on his official social media feed that he would need to isolate for up to five days -- less than two weeks before his country's general election.
The leader of the centre-left Labour Party said he started to experience cold symptoms on Saturday and had cancelled most of his weekend engagements. — AFP
The World Health Organization and US health authorities say Friday they are closely monitoring a new variant of COVID-19, although the potential impact of BA.2.86 is currently unknown.
The WHO classified the new variant as one under surveillance "due to the large number (more than 30) of spike gene mutations it carries", it wrote in a bulletin about the pandemic late Thursday.
So far, the variant has only been detected in Israel, Denmark and the United States. — AFP
The World Health Organization says on Friday that the number of new COVID-19 cases reported worldwide rose by 80% in the last month, days after designating a new "variant of interest".
The WHO declared in May that Covid is no longer a global health emergency, but has warned that the virus will continue to circulate and mutate, causing occasional spikes in infections, hospitalisations and deaths.
In its weekly update, the UN agency said that nations reported nearly 1.5 million new cases from July 10 to August 6, an 80% increase compared to the previous 28 days. — AFP
The head of US intelligence says that there was no evidence that the COVID-19 virus was created in the Chinese government's Wuhan research lab.
In a declassified report, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) says they had no information backing recent claims that three scientists at the lab were some of the very first infected with COVID-19 and may have created the virus themselves.
Drawing on intelligence collected by various member agencies of the US intelligence community (IC), the ODNI report says some scientists at the Wuhan lab had done genetic engineering of coronaviruses similar to COVID-19. — AFP
Boris Johnson deliberately misled MPs over Covid lockdown-breaking parties in Downing Street when he was prime minister, a UK parliament committee ruled on Thursday.
The cross-party Privileges Committee said Johnson, 58, would have been suspended as an MP for 90 days for "repeated contempts (of parliament) and for seeking to undermine the parliamentary process".
But he avoided any formal sanction by his peers in the House of Commons by resigning as an MP last week.
In his resignation statement last Friday, Johnson pre-empted publication of the committee's conclusions, claiming a political stitch-up, even though the body has a majority from his own party.
He was unrepentant again on Thursday, accusing the committee of being "anti-democratic... to bring about what is intended to be the final knife-thrust in a protracted political assassination".
Calling it "beneath contempt", he said it was "for the people of this to decide who sits in parliament, not Harriet Harman", the veteran opposition Labour MP who chaired the seven-person committee. — AFP
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