Tag Archives: Coronavirus

Most Americans to avoid sports, other live events before coronavirus vaccine: Reuters/Ipsos

By Rory Carroll

Fewer than half of Americans plan to go to sports events, concerts, movies and amusement parks when they reopen to the public until there is a proven coronavirus vaccine, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Tuesday.

That includes those who have attended such events in the past, an ominous sign for the sports and entertainment industries hoping to return to the spotlight after being shut down by the pandemic.

Only about four in 10 who follow sports avidly and go to arts and entertainment venues and amusement parks said they would do so again if they reopened before a vaccine was available, the poll found.

Another four in 10 said they were willing to wait, even if it takes more than a year to develop a vaccine.

The rest said they either “don’t know” what to do or may never attend those events again.

“Just because people say we can go back, until people feel fully safe … they aren’t going to go back,” said Victor Matheson, a specialist in sports economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

“We go to games for entertainment and you’re not going to be very entertained if you’re not worrying about who the next player to bat is and instead worrying about that person who just coughed two rows down.”

The United States leads the world with almost 1 million coronavirus infections and more than 56,000 deaths as of late Monday.

While as many as 100 potential vaccines are in development around the world, scientists are projecting that bringing one to market could take 18 months.

SPORTS SIDELINED

Only 17% of American adults said they would attend professional sporting events when they reopen to the public, while 26% said they would rather wait until there is a vaccine.

Among those who have attended a professional sporting event in the past year, 42% said they would return whenever it reopens to the public and 39% said they would rather wait for a vaccine, even if that means waiting more than a year.

Cincinnati resident Angie Hopkins, who has gone to pro games in the past, said she would not attend them again before there is a vaccine, out of concern for her health and that of her son.

“The risk of being with all those people, crammed in together, I think that would be unsettling,” she said.

“I have fibromyalgia, which could make me at risk for more serious complications. And my son has asthma, so I wouldn’t want to expose him either.”

About 59% of sports fans agreed that before a vaccine is available, professional sports leagues that have seen their seasons upended – like Major League Baseball, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League – should hold games with no in-person fans, while 33% disagreed.

That could spell trouble for tennis’ U.S. Open, which is scheduled to kick off in hard-hit New York City on Aug. 24. Organizers have said it was highly unlikely that they would hold the largest and loudest Grand Slam tournament without fans.

It is also unclear whether the NFL will delay the scheduled Sept. 10 start of its 101st season. Commissioner Roger Goodell said last week he believed the season could begin on time, but did not specify whether the league would consider doing so without fans.

TROUBLE FOR TINSELTOWN?

The poll showed that only 27% of those questioned would go to a movie theater, concert or live theater performance when venues reopen, underscoring the hurdles faced by the entertainment industry as it tries to get back on its feet.

Thirty-two percent said they would wait for a vaccine before going back to the movies, theater or concerts.

In all, 55% of Americans said those events should not resume before a vaccine is available.

Movie buff and music fan Ana Morales of Bristow, Virginia, said she did not plan to visit a theater where she has a membership or attend a summer country music series until there is a vaccine.

“It would be a bit reckless for us to go,” she said, adding that she would be afraid of spreading the disease to her in-laws, who are over 60 years old.

She said that even if theaters implemented social-distancing rules, she would worry that shared surfaces like seats had not been cleaned thoroughly.

Hollywood has been tentatively hoping movie theaters could reopen partially by late July and recoup some losses from the normally lucrative summer season.

While dozens of summer movie releases have already been moved to the autumn or into 2021, Walt Disney Co’s “Mulan” and Warner Bros. “Wonder Woman 1984” are scheduled for release in July and August respectively.

Most musicians, including Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift and the Rolling Stones have canceled or postponed their 2020 tour dates.

The annual Coachella music festival in Southern California, which usually draws about 90,000 people, shifted its April dates to October in the hope the worst of the coronavirus pandemic would be over by then.

Enthusiasm for amusement and theme parks was even bleaker. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they should not reopen until a vaccine is available. Only 20% said they would visit a theme park when they reopen.

Universal Studios has extended its closures in California and Florida until at least May 31, while Disneyland and Walt Disney World are closed indefinitely.

Disney Executive Chairman Bob Iger said earlier in April that temperature checks for visitors were one of the measures under consideration for any eventual reopening.

Broadway theaters were forced to shut down in mid-March and extended the closure to June 7, with several producers saying their plays would not return at all.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll surveyed 4,429 American adults from April 15 to 21, asking about their previous attendance at sports events and live concerts and their interest in attending if they reopened before a coronavirus vaccine is available. The poll questions noted a vaccine might not be available for more than a year.

Hello, social distancing. Goodbye, handshakes?

By Omar Younis and Clare Baldwin

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – It started centuries ago as a symbol of peace, a gesture to prove you weren’t holding a weapon, and over time it became part of almost every social, religious, professional, business and sporting exchange.

But the new coronavirus has forced a rethink of the handshake. No matter how friendly, it is an exchange of potentially infectious microorganisms.

“Hands are like a busy intersection, constantly connecting our microbiome to the microbiomes of other people, places, and things,” a group of scientists wrote in the Journal of Dermatological Science. Hands, they said, are the “critical vector” for transmitting microorganisms including viruses.

But if it is no longer automatically acceptable, what will replace the handshake as a fixture of post-coronavirus social etiquette? A fist or elbow bump? Maybe a traditional Japanese bow or hat doff? How about Spock’s Vulcan salute from Star Trek?

We are social beings. When we meet one another, we press flesh. We take our largest organ, skin, and mash it together with someone else’s – naked. In the middle of the coronavirus it has become clear just how intimate such a gesture is.

The human hand is fecund. We have hundreds of species of bacteria and viruses on our palms.

“Think about it,” says Charles Gerba, a microbiologist and public health researcher at the University of Arizona, who also answers to Dr Germ. “Every time you touch a surface, you may be picking up up to 50 percent of the organisms on that surface.”

Our hands can carry Salmonella, E. coli, norovirus and respiratory infections like adenovirus and hand-foot-mouth disease. And, given how frequently scientists find poop on our fingers and palms, our hygiene habits are far less fastidious than we think.

BACTERIAL EFFERVESCENCE

We can’t see any of this with the naked eye.

And so we rely on scientists with agar plates to make visible the arching, spiraling, exploding patterns of bacterial effervescence that show just what our intermingling of fingers risks, something so simple as a handshake rendered in terrifying technicolor.

Scientists can also show us viruses. Those must be studied in animal cells, in a mosaic of tiny semi-circles that scientists often stain purple or red.

The cells are lovely, says Gerba, “and then when they die, they become colorless.”

Gerba studies the movement of viruses. He’ll put a virus on an office doorknob or in a hotel room or someone’s home.

He says it takes just four hours for a virus on an office doorknob to reach half the hands and half the surfaces in an office building, or about 90 percent of the surfaces in someone’s home. A virus in a hotel often moves from room to room and sometimes to nearby conferences.

Gerba says he himself stopped shaking hands during the first SARS outbreak, in 2003. “I always say I have a cold,” he says. “That way I don’t have to shake their hand.”

Top U.S. infectious diseases expert Dr Anthony Fauci sees it the same way since the pandemic hit.

“You don’t ever shake anybody’s hands,” Fauci said this month. “That’s clear.”

LONG, HARD SQUEEZE

Handshakes have long been a way for humans to signal one another, and part of the ritual of seeking common ground.

“The handshake is what gets photographed at the time of any agreement,” says Dorothy Noyes, a professor of folklore at Ohio State University.

The long, hard squeeze of U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in 2018 was a classic display of two males seeking dominance. Some handshakes, like the bouncing clasp of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, take months to negotiate.

Awkward or smooth, handshakes are a hard habit to break, even if we want to.

Minutes after announcing a ban on shaking hands to combat COVID-19, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte enthusiastically pumped the hand of Jaap Van Dissel, the head of the Dutch Centre for Infectious Disease Control.

“Sorry, sorry! No, that’s not allowed! Let’s do that again,” Rutte said, breaking into a laugh.

(Additional reporting by Cath Turner; Editing by Kieran Murray)

Piglets aborted, chickens gassed as pandemic slams meat sector

By Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter

CHICAGO (Reuters) – With the pandemic hobbling the meat-packing industry, Iowa farmer Al Van Beek had nowhere to ship his full-grown pigs to make room for the 7,500 piglets he expected from his breeding operation. The crisis forced a decision that still troubles him: He ordered his employees to give injections to the pregnant sows, one by one, that would cause them to abort their baby pigs.

Van Beek and other farmers say they have no choice but to cull livestock as they run short on space to house their animals or money to feed them, or both. The world’s biggest meat companies – including Smithfield Foods Inc, Cargill Inc, JBS USA and Tyson Foods Inc – have halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America since April as workers fall ill, stoking global fears of a meat shortage.

Van Beek’s piglets are victims of a sprawling food-industry crisis that began with the mass closure of restaurants – upending that sector’s supply chain, overwhelming storage and forcing farmers and processors to destroy everything from milk to salad greens to animals. Processors geared up to serve the food-service industry can’t immediately switch to supplying grocery stores.

Millions of pigs, chickens and cattle will be euthanized because of slaughterhouse closures, limiting supplies at grocers, said John Tyson, chairman of top U.S. meat supplier Tyson Foods.

Pork has been hit especially hard, with daily production cut by about a third. Unlike cattle, which can be housed outside on pasture, U.S. hogs are fattened up for slaughter inside temperature-controlled buildings. If they are housed too long, they can get too big and injure themselves. The barns need to be emptied out by sending adult hogs to slaughter before the arrival of new piglets from sows that were impregnated just before the pandemic.

“We have nowhere to go with the pigs,” said Van Beek, who lamented the waste of so much meat. “What are we going to do?”

In Minnesota, farmers Kerry and Barb Mergen felt their hearts pound when a crew from Daybreak Foods Inc arrived with carts and tanks of carbon dioxide to euthanize their 61,000 egg-laying hens earlier this month.

Daybreak Foods, based in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, supplies liquid eggs to restaurants and food-service companies. The company, which owns the birds, pays contract farmers like the Mergens to feed and care for them. Drivers normally load the eggs onto trucks and haul them to a plant in Big Lake, Minnesota, which uses them to make liquid eggs for restaurants and ready-to-serve dishes for food-service companies. But the plant’s operator, Cargill Inc, said it idled the facility because the pandemic reduced demand.

Daybreak Foods, which has about 14.5 million hens with contractor-run or company-owned farms in the Midwest, is trying to switch gears and ship eggs to grocery stores, said Chief Executive Officer William Rehm. But egg cartons are in shortage nationwide and the company now must grade each egg for size, he said.

Rehm declined to say how much of the company’s flock has been euthanized.

“We’re trying to balance our supply with our customers’ needs, and still keep everyone safe – including all of our people and all our hens,” Rehm said.

DUMPING HOGS IN A LANDFILL

In Iowa, farmer Dean Meyer said he is part of a group of about nine producers who are euthanizing the smallest 5% of their newly born pigs, or about 125 piglets a week. They will continue euthanizing animals until disruptions ease, and could increase the number of pigs killed each week, he said. The small bodies are composted and will become fertilizer. Meyer’s group is also killing mother hogs, or sows, to reduce their numbers, he said.

“Packers are backed up every day, more and more,” said Meyer.

As the United States faces a possible food shortage, and supermarkets and food banks are struggling to meet demand, the forced slaughters are becoming more widespread across the country, according to agricultural economists, farm trade groups and federal lawmakers who are hearing from farmer constituents.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, along with both U.S. senators from a state that provides a third of the nation’s pork, sent a letter to the Trump administration pleading for financial help and assistance with culling animals and properly disposing of their carcasses.

“There are 700,000 pigs across the nation that cannot be processed each week and must be humanely euthanized,” said the April 27 letter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said late Friday it is establishing a National Incident Coordination Center to help farmers find markets for their livestock, or euthanize and dispose of animals if necessary.

Some producers who breed livestock and sell baby pigs to farmers are now giving them away for free, farmers said, translating to a loss about $38 on each piglet, according to commodity firm Kerns & Associates.

Farmers in neighboring Canada are also killing animals they can’t sell or afford to feed. The value of Canadian isoweans – baby pigs – has fallen to zero because of U.S. processing plant disruptions, said Rick Bergmann, a Manitoba hog farmer and chair of the Canadian Pork Council. In Quebec alone, a backlog of 92,000 pigs waits for slaughter, said Quebec hog producer Rene Roy, an executive with the pork council.

A hog farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada euthanized 270-pound hogs that were ready for slaughter because there was no place to process them, Bergmann said. The animals were dumped in a landfill.

DEATH THREATS

The latest economic disaster to befall the farm sector comes after years of extreme weather, sagging commodity prices and the Trump administration’s trade war with China and other key export markets. But it’s more than lost income. The pandemic barreling through farm towns has mired rural communities in despair, a potent mix of shame and grief.

Farmers take pride in the fact that their crops and animals are meant to feed people, especially in a crisis that has idled millions of workers and forced many to rely on food banks. Now, they’re destroying crops and killing animals for no purpose.

Farmers flinch when talking about killing off animals early or plowing crops into the ground, for fear of public wrath. Two Wisconsin dairy farmers, forced to dump milk by their buyers, told Reuters they recently received anonymous death threats.

“They say, ‘How dare you throw away food when so many people are hungry?’,” said one farmer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They don’t know how farming works. This makes me sick, too.”

Even as livestock and crop prices plummet, prices for meat and eggs at grocery stores are up. The average retail price of eggs was up nearly 40% for the week ended April 18, compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data. Average retail fresh chicken prices were up 5.4%, while beef was up 5.8% and pork up 6.6%.

On Van Beek’s farm in Rock Valley, Iowa, one hog broke a leg because it grew too heavy while waiting to be slaughtered. He has delivered pigs to facilities that are still operating, but they are too full to take all of his animals.

Van Beek paid $2,000 to truck pigs about seven hours to a Smithfield plant in Illinois, more than quadruple the usual cost to haul them to a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughterhouse that the company has closed indefinitely. He said Smithfield is supposed to pay the extra transportation costs under his contract. But the company is refusing to do so, claiming “force majeure” – that an extraordinary and unforeseeable event prevents it from fulfilling its agreement.

Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, declined to comment on whether it has refused to make contracted payments. It said the company is working with suppliers “to navigate these challenging and unprecedented times.”

Hog farmers nationwide will lose an estimated $5 billion, or $37 per head, for the rest of the year due to pandemic disruptions, according to the industry group National Pork Producers Council.

A recently announced $19 billion U.S. government coronavirus aid package for farmers will not pay for livestock that are culled, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer trade group. The USDA said in a statement the payment program is still being developed and the agency has received more requests for assistance than it has money to handle.

Minnesota farmer Mike Patterson started feeding his pigs more soybean hulls – which fill animals’ stomachs but offer negligible nutritional value – to keep them from getting too large for their barns. He’s considering euthanizing them because he cannot find enough buyers after Smithfield indefinitely shut its massive Sioux Falls plant.

“They have to be housed humanely,” Patterson said. “If there’s not enough room, we have to have less hogs somehow. One way or another, we’ve got to have less hogs.”

(Reporting By Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago. Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Writing by P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Brian Thevenot)

As U.S. states ease restrictions, projected coronavirus death toll rises

By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As Georgia lifted a ban on eating in restaurants and a handful of other U.S. states began easing other restrictions aimed at fighting the coronavirus pandemic, scientists warned the death toll would climb if governors reopen businesses prematurely.

The outbreak could take more than 74,000 U.S. lives by August, compared with an earlier forecast of 67,000, according to the University of Washington’s predictive model, often cited by White House officials and state public health authorities.

The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said late on Monday that the number of U.S. deaths caused by the virus was not abating as quickly as previously projected after hitting a daily peak on April 15 with about 2,700.

IHME director Christopher Murray said the death toll would climb if states reopen their economies too early.

With President Donald Trump’s administration forecasting an unemployment rate of more than 16% for April and residents chafing under stay-at-home orders, states from Alaska to Mississippi are seeking to restart their battered economies despite a lack of large-scale virus testing.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on Monday he would allow the state’s stay-at-home order to expire and begin reopening businesses including restaurants and retail shops in phases beginning on Friday.

The White House released a blueprint on Monday that put the onus on states to implement testing and rapid response programs, despite pleas from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and others for federal help. It said states were responsible for identifying, and overcoming barriers to, efficient testing.

The U.S. government’s role was to “act as supplier of last resort,” the blueprint said. It would provide guidelines for easing restrictions and administering diagnostic tests, while providing technical assistance on how to best use testing technologies and align supplies with anticipated lab needs.

U.S. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from hard-hit Washington state, on Tuesday criticized the Republican Trump’s testing blueprint as “nothing new.”

“It doesn’t set specific, numeric goals, offer a timeframe, identify ways to fix our broken supply chain, or offer any details whatsoever on expanding lab capacity or activating needed manufacturing capacity,” she said in a statement.

“Perhaps most pathetically, it attempts to shirk obviously federal responsibilities by assigning them solely to states instead,” she said.

After crowds jammed beaches over the weekend in California, Governor Gavin Newsom said social-distancing enforcement would be stepped up.

Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, urged Americans on Monday to go on sheltering in place and maintain social distancing until authorities lift their orders.

“We’re beginning to understand more and more that there may be an inverse relationship for how severe the disease is and your age. So younger people could actually be infected and not know they are infected and unintentionally pass the virus on,” she told Fox News on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington, additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Writing by Maria Caspani, Editing by Howard Goller)

U.S. coronavirus cases approach one million, one-third of global infections: Reuters tally

By Lisa Shumaker

(Reuters) – U.S. cases of the novel coronavirus were approaching 1 million on Tuesday, having doubled in 18 days, and made up one-third of all infections in the world, according to a Reuters tally.

More than 56,000 Americans have died of the highly contagious respiratory illness COVID-19 caused by the virus, an average of about 2,000 a day this month, according to the tally.

The actual number of cases is thought to be higher, with state public health officials cautioning that shortages of trained workers and materials have limited testing capacity.

About 30% of the cases have occurred in New York state, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak, followed by New Jersey, Massachusetts, California and Pennsylvania.

Globally, coronavirus cases top 3 million since the outbreak began in China late last year. The United States, with the world’s third-largest population, has five times as many cases as the next hardest-hit countries of Italy, Spain and France.

Of the top 20 most severely affected countries, the United States ranks fifth based on cases per capita, according to a Reuters tally. The United States has about 30 cases per 10,000 people. Spain ranks first at over 48 cases per 10,000 people, followed by Belgium, Switzerland and Italy.

U.S. coronavirus deaths, the highest in the world, now exceed the total number of Americans killed in the 1950-53 Korean War – 36,516. Coronavirus deaths total just below the 58,220 Americans killed during the Vietnam War that ended in 1975.

The coronavirus has killed more people in the United States than the seasonal flu in recent years, except for the 2017-2018 season, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/past-seasons.html.

Flu deaths range from a low of 12,000 in the 2011-2012 season to a high of 61,000 during 2017-2018.

Coronavirus deaths in the United States fall far short of the Spanish flu, which began in 1918 and killed 675,000 Americans, according to the CDC.

Unprecedented stay-at-home orders to try to curb the spread of the virus have hammered the economy, with the number of Americans seeking unemployment benefits over the last five weeks soaring to 26.5 million.

About a dozen states are beginning to relax the stay-at-home restrictions despite the warning of health experts that premature actions could cause a surge in new cases.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey this month found that a bipartisan majority of Americans want go on sheltering in place to protect themselves from the coronavirus, despite the impact on the economy.

(GRAPHIC: Reuters online site for coronavirus – https://www.reuters.com/live-events/coronavirus-6-id2921484)

(Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Howard Goller)

Russia overtakes China with coronavirus cases at 87,000

By Katya Golubkova and Anastasia Lyrchikova

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia overtook China in the number of confirmed coronavirus cases on Monday when its tally climbed above 87,000, as pressure rose on the government to consider easing lockdown restrictions for businesses to help shore up the rattled economy.

Russia, the world’s largest country by territory, has been on lockdown since President Vladimir Putin announced the closure of most public spaces on March 25. These measures are due to expire on April 30 and Putin has not yet said if he plans to extend them.

Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s safety watchdog Rospotrebnadzor, told state television on Monday that, in her view, restrictions should be in place until May 12.

Earlier Prime Minister Mikhail Mishushin asked his government to submit proposals by Thursday to ease some of the restrictions on businesses. Many firms have warned that they risk going bankrupt if the lockdown continues, and thousands of jobs have been laid off.

“As soon as situation will be changing for good, we would need to consider a step-by-step cancellation of restrictions on certain companies… operations,” Mishustin told an online government meeting.

On Monday, the authorities reported 6,198 new cases of the new coronavirus, bringing the total to 87,147, with 794 deaths.

ENERGY SECTOR IN FOCUS

Russia, one of the world’s top oil and gas exporters, is particularly vulnerable to the spread of the coronavirus at production sites. Most are located in remote areas accessible by only air, meaning the workers in close proximity, increasing their risk of infection.

Citing local officials, Interfax said on Monday that an airport in Sabetta in the northern Yamal peninsula had been shut down for quarantine after cases of the new coronavirus were detected at the Yamal LNG production site controlled by Novatek.

A total of 143 cases were confirmed in Sabetta, the local crisis response center said separately.

In the northwestern region of Murmansk where Novatek is building a plant to supply its next LNG project, the Arctic LNG 2, over 800 workers tested positive for coronavirus, the local crisis response centre said on Sunday.

Velesstroy, a sub-contractor for the plant, temporarily suspended work at the site near Murmansk but said in a statement to Reuters that the project will remain on schedule.

To limit the risk of contagion at over 1,000 power plants in Russia, including nuclear ones, over 200,000 employees – or nearly a third – were recently tested for the virus, the energy ministry said.

It did not say how many of those tests returned positive.

Mainland China, where the new coronavirus first emerged, reported a total of 82,830 cases on Monday. China is now fighting an increased number of new cases coming from Russia.

(Reporting by Gleb Stolyarov, Maria Tsvetkova, Anton Zverev, Vladimir Soldatkin and Anastasia Lyrchikova; Writing by Katya Golubkova; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)

Latest on the spread of the coronavirus around the world

(Reuters) – Reported cases of the coronavirus have crossed 2.7 million globally and 189,970 people have died, according to a Reuters tally as of 0200 GMT on Friday.

DEATHS AND INFECTIONS

* For an interactive graphic tracking the global spread, open https://tmsnrt.rs/3aIRuz7 in an external browser.

* For a U.S.-focused tracker with state-by-state and county map, open https://tmsnrt.rs/2w7hX9T in an external browser.

AMERICAS

* The U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a $484 billion coronavirus relief bill on Thursday.

* An array of U.S. merchants in Georgia and other states prepared to reopen for the first time in a month.

* A preliminary survey of New York state residents found that nearly 14% of those tested had antibodies against the coronavirus.

* California recorded its deadliest day of the coronavirus pandemic on Thursday.

* Drugmaker Gilead disputed a report that said its experimental coronavirus drug failed a trial in China, saying results were inconclusive as the study was terminated early.

* Canada pledged new money to develop and eventually mass-produce vaccines.

* Costa Rica has for the past week reported a steady fall in the number of people currently infected.

* Ecuador’s authorities added 11,000 new infections that resulted from delayed testing.

* Cuba’s decades-old rationing system is staging a comeback in a bid to prevent virus transmission during frantic shopping hunts.

EUROPE

* France offered retailers some relief on Thursday, saying it wanted them to reopen when a nationwide lockdown ends on May 11.

* Spain’s daily increase in fatalities further steadied at around 2%, as the government apologised for confusion over lockdown rules for children.

* Germany has chosen a home-grown technology for smartphone-based tracing of infections, putting it at odds with Apple Inc.

* Britain’s health minister Matt Hancock promised to expand testing to all those considered key workers.

* Greece extended its general lockdown by a week to May 4.

* Irish hospital admissions of COVID-19 patients have fallen from an average of around 100 per day at the start of April to around 40 now.

ASIA-PACIFIC

* South Asia’s infections have crossed 37,000, with more than half in India.

* China is preparing to buy more than 30 million tonnes of crops for state stockpiles to help protect itself from supply chain disruptions.

* Thousands of Hong Kong students were among the first in the world to take their final secondary school exams on Friday, all wearing face masks and having their temperatures checked.

* As many as 91 crew of an Italian cruise ship docked in Japan’s southwestern port of Nagasaki are infected with coronavirus. Tokyo’s first drive-through coronavirus test centre was launched this week.

* Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has extended a strict lockdown in the capital Manila until May 15.

* Indonesia will temporarily ban domestic air and sea travel starting Friday, barring a few exceptions.

* Malaysia will extend travel and other curbs by two weeks to May 12.

* Australia will push for an international investigation into the coronavirus pandemic at next month’s annual meeting of the World Health Assembly.

MIDDLE EAST AND AFRICA

* South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said the government will allow a partial reopening of the economy on May 1.

* The governors of Nigeria’s 36 states agreed to ban interstate movement for two weeks.

* Algeria will ease confinement measures from the first day of the holy month of Ramadan on Friday.

* Israel’s religiously devout Jews, who traditionally shun the use of internet or smartphones, are increasingly going online to shop, study and video chat.

ECONOMIC FALLOUT

* Asian shares and U.S. stock futures fell on Friday, spurred by doubts about progress in the development of drugs to treat COVID-19 and new evidence of U.S. economic damage. [MKTS/GLOB]

* The UK’s government borrowing is soaring to the highest levels in peacetime history.

* The closure of bars and restaurants may have slashed global wine sales and winemakers’ revenues in Europe by half.

* Japan’s core consumer inflation eased in March for the second straight month.

* Half of German companies are using the government’s short-time work facility as most see a decline in revenues.

* Italian government debt yields fell after EU leaders agreed to move towards joint financing of a recovery.

* Latin America’s biggest economies, Brazil and Mexico, will likely struggle with increasing deficits this year.

(Compiled by Milla Nissi, Devika Syamnath and Ramakrishnan M.; Editing by Tomasz Janowski, Shounak Dasgupta and Sriraj Kalluvila)

New Yorkers sing ‘Lean on Me’ to honor essential workers during coronavirus pandemic

By Aleksandra Michalska

(Reuters) – It starts as it has around the world with people leaning out of windows and standing on balconies clapping, cheering and banging pots and pans to honor essential workers still operating during the coronavirus pandemic.

And then a rousing collective rendition of the Bill Withers 1972 song “Lean on Me” begins.

“It’s amazing,” said Robert Hornsby, director of fundraising at the Peace of Heart Choir non-profit in New York City, after he had finished playing the song from his window in Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

“The amount of energy that we’ve received, and the amount of energy that we’re giving, has really lifted the spirits of New Yorkers, and we hope people across the nation, too.”

Organizers of the “New York Sings Along” event said the goal was to boost morale and honor all workers on the front lines battling the COVID-19 pandemic, and to share the healing power of music while obeying social distancing rules.

Every week, the nonprofit picks one song, and plays it after the applause for essential workers on Thursday nights.

Last week, it was Frank Sinatra’s “New York” and next week, it will be the Ben E. King classic “Stand by Me.”

U.S. coronavirus deaths have topped 48,000, with the number of lives lost in April rising by an average of 2,000 a day, according to a Reuters tally.

Withers, a soulful singer best known for the 1970s hits “Lean on Me,” “Lovely Day” and “Ain’t No Sunshine,” passed away at the age of 81 from heart complications, his family had said earlier this month.

(Reporting by Aleksandra Michalska, Editing by Karishma Singh and Michael Perry)

Explainer: How Trump has sealed off the United States during coronavirus outbreak

By Mica Rosenberg and Ted Hesson

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Donald Trump has taken drastic steps to curb the entry of foreigners into the United States since his administration declared a public health emergency over the new coronavirus outbreak.

Here are some of the most significant additional immigration changes the U.S. government has made in response to the pandemic.

CLOSING THE BORDERS

The United States, Canada and Mexico closed their shared borders to tourist and recreational travel in late March to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus. The closures have since been extended until May 21.

At the same time, the Trump administration implemented new rules that allow U.S. border officials to swiftly deport migrants who attempt to cross into the country illegally, bypassing standard legal processes.

More than 10,000 migrants have been expelled under the new border rules, including more than 500 children, according to preliminary data obtained by Reuters. From April 2 to April 10, 70% of those “expelled” under the new rules were Mexican, a quarter were from Central American and the rest from other countries, the data showed.

Deportation flights of immigrants who have been arrested in the United States are continuing even as some countries are expressing concern that migrants who have been held in U.S. detention centers are being sent back to their home countries infected with the virus. U.S. immigration officials plan to start testing deportees for the virus, a U.S. official told Reuters.

SHUTTERING IMMIGRATION COURTS

The U.S. Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts as part of the U.S. Department of Justice, has extended the cancellation of all hearings for migrants not in detention until May 15, 2020.

Another controversial program put in place by the administration last year, known as the “Migrant Protection Protocols,” has sent tens of thousands of asylum seekers to wait in Mexico for court hearings. But those proceedings have been put on hold through at least May 1.

SUSPENDING VISA PROCESSING

The United States suspended all routine visa services in most countries worldwide due to the coronavirus outbreak on March 18, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. The State Department said at the time that embassies would resume the services as soon as possible but gave no end date.

That same day, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said it was temporarily halting all routine in-person services through at least May 3, and canceled all asylum interviews and naturalization oath ceremonies for new citizens.

Some experts have said the pause on naturalizations could affect people who had hoped to vote the first time as U.S. citizens in November’s presidential election.

HALTING REFUGEE RESETTLEMENT

The U.N. refugee agency and the International Organization for Migration said in mid-March they would temporarily stop resettling refugees due to travel disruptions caused by the coronavirus. But before the pandemic, the United States had already slashed the number of refugees it would accept in the 2020 fiscal year to 18,000, the lowest level in decades.

(Reporting by Mica Rosenberg in New York and Ted Hesson in Washington; Editing by Ross Colvin and Jonathan Oatis)

Buildings closed by coronavirus face another risk: Legionnaires’ disease

By John Shiffman

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Commercial buildings shuttered for weeks to stem the spread of the coronavirus could fuel another grisly lung infection: Legionnaires’ disease.

Public health experts are urging landlords across the globe to carefully re-open buildings to prevent outbreaks of the severe, sometimes lethal, form of pneumonia.

The sudden and sweeping closures of schools, factories, businesses and government offices have created an unprecedented decline in water use. The lack of chlorinated water flowing through pipes, combined with irregular temperature changes, have created conditions ripe for the bacteria that causes Legionnaires’ disease, they said.

If diagnosed early, Legionnaires’ disease poses less of a health risk than COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus. Most cases can be successfully cured with antibiotics, and Legionnaires cannot be spread from human to human contact.

But as communities consider reopening, any commercial facility vacated or underutilized for more than three weeks is at risk for a Legionnaires’ outbreak, unless the water pipes are properly flushed and otherwise sanitized, health experts and government officials say.

“After surviving COVID-19, who wants to open a building and have another set of significant safety issues?” said Molly Scanlon, an Arizona environmental health scientist who is leading a coronavirus task force for the American Institute of Architects. “Our medical system is already under enough stress as it is.”

Those at risk include schools, gyms, factories, hotels, restaurants and outpatient surgical centers, Scanlon said. According to guidance updated Wednesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the threat also applies to hot tubs, water fountains, sprinkler systems and millions of water cooling towers atop commercial buildings.

“It’s a worldwide problem, one that can be solved with precautions,” said British microbiologist Susanne Surman-Lee, who co-drafted reopening guidelines for the European Society of Clinical Microbiology and Infectious Diseases. “Most major corporations with consultants are likely to be aware of the stagnant water systems issue, but this is going to be a challenge for smaller retail-style shops, health clubs and hotels.”

Water and sanitation organizations have joined the call for caution during reopening.

“To be honest, this hasn’t really been part of a business continuity planning on the real estate side of the world,” said Chris Boyd of NSF International, an independent standards organization based in Michigan and formerly known as the National Sanitation Foundation. “Right now, very few companies are thinking through how water systems factor into their continuity and reopening efforts. They’ve never had to deal with such low occupancy.”

WATERBORNE RISKS

Legionnaires’ disease, a pneumonia named after a deadly 1976 outbreak at an American Legion convention in Philadelphia, is the chief waterborne illness in the United States. Nearly 50,000 people were infected between 2000 and 2015, according to the CDC.

People with Legionnaires’ disease develop pneumonia. Healthy people usually recover, but often require hospitalization and antibiotics to treat the lung infection. About one in 10 die, according to the CDC, but among those who get Legionnaires’ during a hospital stay, one in four do not survive.

After a 2015 Legionnaires’ outbreak in which 10 New Yorkers died and at least 100 people became ill, the city began regulating water cooling towers, the suspected culprit. The same year, 12 deaths in Flint, Michigan were linked to a Legionnaires’ disease outbreak, after officials switched the city’s water source from a lake to a river without taking proper precautions.

Legionnaires’ disease infects people when legionella bacteria is disseminated into the air as an aerosol from water sources, such as hot tubs, showerheads, fountains and industrial water cooling systems.

The threat from Legionnaires’ disease is compounded, some experts said, because its victims tend to display the same symptoms as coronavirus patients, including cough, chills and fever, making misdiagnosis a possibility.

“WE CANNOT RELAX”

A recent paper published by Chinese doctors in The Lancet found that 20 percent of coronavirus patients also had Legionnaires’ disease.

In a paper for the International Society of Travel Medicine, Japanese doctors wrote of an 80-year-old man who died shortly after returning from a Nile cruise in March. He was infected with both legionella and coronavirus. Although doctors could not determine which he caught first, they noted that legionella has been linked to cruise ships, not hospitals.

“Our case, although fatal, highlights the importance of differential diagnosis during the current COVID-19 epidemic, so we do not miss the opportunity to diagnose other treatable causes of disease with similar symptoms,” the doctors wrote.

Dr. Xiang-Yang Han of the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, who has long studied Legionnaires disease, said he is less worried about misdiagnoses and more concerned about prevention and planning as communities reopen.

“We cannot relax, even with the manpower shortage,” Han said. “Do we have enough manpower to flush every facility? Of course, I’m concerned. People are eager to get their businesses running, but these are highly technical jobs and people need to know what they are doing.”

Han said that anyone servicing water pipes before a reopening should take the same precautions as one might to prevent the spread of the coronavirus: wear gloves and a mask.

On April 6, Canada’s Public Services and Procurement agency issued a warning to government offices about the risk and said pipes in any building that go more than one week with low or no occupancy should be thoroughly flushed for at least 30 minutes.

Steve Via of the American Water Works Association, which represents utilities, scientists and academics, said small business owners in particular should be vigilant. Any device dormant during the shutdown and connected to the water system should be flushed.

“It’s not the landlord’s responsibility to check things like the ice machine, the soda machine, those kinds of things, but they’ve been sitting there for a long time,” Via said. “What we need to be doing is just getting people to start thinking about this as if you went to a house that you used as a summer place — when you open it up, you have a protocol you follow.”

Via added, “People don’t need to be frightened about this, but they do need to be thoughtful.”

(Additional reporting by Charlie Szymanski in New York and Jane Ross in Los Angeles. Editing by Jason Szep)