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Markets fall again as global Covid-19 cases near 130,000 – as it happened

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Stock markets plunge again; number of cases nears 130,000 around world; Canadian PM Justin Trudeau self-isolating. This blog is closed

 Updated 
Thu 12 Mar 2020 20.06 EDTFirst published on Wed 11 Mar 2020 19.24 EDT
Key events
Shops and pubs close in Italy as prime minister praises citizens' sacrifices – video

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Key events

Summary

  • Markets continued to plummet today as the US and UK stock exchanges suffered their worst performance since Black Monday in 2008.
  • Arsenal coach Mikel Arteta has coronavirus. In a statement the club said they expected a significant number of people, including the full first-team squad will have to self-isolate. The Premier League is holding an emergency meeting tomorrow morning.
  • President Trump’s handling of the virus outbreak was criticised by top federal health official Dr Anthony Fauci who described the US’s lacklustre approach to coronavirus testing “a failing”. Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders also slammed the president’s handling of the health crisis.
  • Former Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt criticised the governments decision to delay social distancing measures. In a Channel 4 interview, Hunt said he was “surprised” and “puzzled” by the move.
  • 121 people at Italy’s Juventus F.C. are self isolating after footballer Daniele Rugani tested positive for the virus.
  • There is heightened concern at the White House after a picture emerged of a top Brazilian government aide, who has tested positive for coronavirus, standing right next to Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago last weekend.
  • President Macron addressed the French nation and announced the closure of all the country’s creches, schools, colleges and universities as part of “strong measures” to address an expected acceleration in the number of people with the virus. He described the outbreak as “the most serious health crisis France had faced in a century”.
  • Spain will inject €14bn into the economy to help Spanish businesses survive economic shocks from the outbreak. Two cabinet ministers have tested positive for coronavirus. The Catalan regional government has ordered around 70,000 people to stay at home for two weeks from 9pm tonight after a steep increase in cases of the virus.
  • Angela Merkel held a press conference where she appealed to Germans to restrict social contact and announced plans to restructure the country’s hospitals in order to boost the number of intensive care beds.
  • Canada’s most populous province to shut down schools for two weeks. All public schools in Ontario will be shut from 14 March to 5 April.
  • Disturbing satellite images of mass graves in Iran suggest the scale of the outbreak there is worse than authorities are admitting.
  • Schools in Belgium will close from midnight tomorrow until the Easter Holidays. Belgium’s prime minister Sophie Wilmès made the announcement. Restaurants and bars have also been ordered to close and only essential shops such as supermarkets and pharmacies may stay open.
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Patrick Greenfield
Patrick Greenfield

The Costa Rican government has announced a new round of social distancing policies to limit the spread of coronavirus following the country’s 23rd confirmed case on Thursday. The public have been asked to keep at least 1.8 metres from other people while restaurants and cinemas have been asked to operate at 50% capacity.

It comes after Costa Rica suspended mass gatherings and asked public sector workers to work from home on Monday. The country’s tourism industry has reported thousands of cancelations and a fall in bookings as the pandemic spreads around the world.

The Central American only has a handful of cases, but there are growing concerns that the deportation of migrants from the US and Mexico could accelerate the spread of coronavirus in the region.

UCL university in London has confirmed that one of their students has tested positive for coronavirus.

In a statement on the university website UCL President Professor Michael Arthur said “UCL’s immediate priority is to support our student, as well as their family and friends. The student has not been on campus in the last ten days and has self-isolated at home. They do not live in UCL student accommodation. Our Student Support & Wellbeing Team is in close communication with them and we ask that their privacy is respected.”

Professor Arthur said “It is inevitable that there will be further cases in the coming days and weeks as cases increase in the UK.”

He said that students would not be penalised for not attending classes if they do not feel comfortable being on campus.

You can read the full statement here: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2020/mar/message-provost-about-confirmed-case-coronavirus-ucl

My colleague Sam Jones reports that the regional government of Catalonia has ordered around 70,000 people in four municipalities in the Barcelona region to remain in their homes for a fortnight from 9pm tonight after a steep increase in Coronavirus cases in the area.

Igualada, Vilanova del Camí, Santa Margarida de Montbui and Òdena have been placed in lockdown after the number of cases linked to a hospital in Igualada rose to 58 on Thursday.

“No one is allowed out of these affected areas,” the regional government said on Thursday evening. “Only emergency personnel and vehicles bringing fuel and food supplies will be allowed to move round the area.”

The move comes almost a week after neighbourhoods in a small town in the northern region of La Rioja were placed in lockdown after a cluster of cases was traced to a funeral in the nearby Basque Country.

Meanwhile, Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, has confirmed he has tested positive for coronavirus days after the party’s general secretary, Javier Ortega Smith, was diagnosed with the virus. Earlier this week, the party apologised for holding a 9,000-person rally in Madrid on Sunday.

Daniel Boffey
Daniel Boffey

Belgium’s prime minister Sophie Wilmès has announced the closure of Belgium’s schools from Friday at midnight until 3 April when the Easter holidays begin.

Restaurants and bars have been ordered to close and only essential shops such as supermarkets and pharmacies may stay open on the weekends. Citizens are being advised to work from home but public transport will continue to run.

Former Health Secretary and current Chairman of the Health Select Committee Jeremy Hunt was interviewed on Channel 4 News earlier this evening about the UK’s response to coronavirus. Hunt challenged the logic of delaying social distancing measures, saying “I’m surprised we’re not moving sooner”.

“The places that have succeeded are the ones that moved earliest to social distancing ...I think people will be concerned that we’re not moving sooner to more social distancing, for example banning external visits to care homes.”

“I am concerned because we’ve got four weeks, We’re four weeks behind Italy and what we do every single day of those four weeks is absolutely critical. I don’t want to second guess the advice that scientists are giving but I would like to see what the modelling is from the behavioural scientists that says we can go too early with some of these measures because I think most peoples priority is their elderly loved ones who are most vulnerable.”

In what was a remarkably frank interview, Hunt said there was “all to play for” in the coming weeks and described the announcement today to delay social distancing measures as “puzzling”.

The Premier League has released a statement:

“In light of Arsenal’s announcement tonight confirming that their first-team coach Mikel Arteta has tested positive for COVID-19, the Premier League will convene an emergency club meeting tomorrow morning regarding future fixtures.”

As it stands all Premier League matches are scheduled to go ahead as planned this weekend.

Arsenal coach Mikel Arteta tests positive for coronavirus

Arsenal coach Mikel Arteta has tested positive for coronavirus. In a statement the club said Arsenal employees who have had recent close contact with Arteta will now self isolate and that they expect this to be a significant number of people from the London Colney training centre including the full first-team squad and coaching staff, as well as a smaller number of people from our Hale End Academy which we have also temporarily closed as a precaution.

Managing director Vinai Venkatesham said: “The health of our people and the wider public is our priority and that is where our focus is. Our thoughts are with Mikel who is disappointed but in good spirits. We are in active dialogue with all the relevant people to manage this situation appropriately, and we look forward to getting back to training and playing as soon as medical advice allows.”

You can read the full statement here: https://www.arsenal.com/news/club-statement-covid-19

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The Tribeca Film Festival, which was due to take place in New York from April 15 to 26, has been postponed, although organisers did not confirm an alternative date.

An update on the 2020 Tribeca Film Festival from our Co-Founder and CEO Jane Rosenthal. pic.twitter.com/x8rTt7xNMx

— Tribeca (@Tribeca) March 12, 2020

Here’s a video of Democratic presidential hopefuls Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders slamming President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus outbreak

Biden and Sanders slam Trump administration's handling of the coronavirus outbreak – video
Denis Campbell
Denis Campbell

Hospital bosses are delighted with Boris Johnson’s continued insistence that school closures would not help combat coronavirus.

“This decision will obviously be welcomed by the NHS and those leading organisations at the frontline of caring for patients with the coronavirus”, said a senior leader in the NHS.

“We are in a very fast moving and unprecedented situation and trust leaders are working hard to ensure that they have the plans, resources and capacity to respond to the inevitable increase in cases and key to that is having enough staff in place. This is one less issue to have to manage at this stage, but they are clearly planning ahead and looking at how they can continue to provide patient care if the situation does change.”

Two hours before Johnson’s press conference Richard Beeken, chief executive of Walsall Healthcare NHS Trust, tweeted his view -- which is widely-shared in the NHS:

I sincerely hope not because if they do, NHS and social care staffing availability plummets as no one available to look after the children. We must all await the national decision on this.

— Richard Beeken (@NHSBeeky) March 12, 2020

One senior hospital executive told me recently that trusts are acutely concerned about school closures because that could produce a very difficult “double whammy” of large numbers of staff off to look after their children at the same time as hospitals are suddenly being hit by a really significant surge in patients left seriously ill by Covid-19.

Boris Johnson’s government was not the only one to get a hammering today from a senior health official for its handling of the virus outbreak. Dr Anthony Fauci, a top federal health official, has said that the U.S lag in coronavirus testing is a failing, and claimed improvements are needed. Experts say the U.S simply isn’t testing enough people.

“The system is not really geared to what we need right now”, said Fauci. “That is a failing. It is a failing, lets admit it.” Large-scale testing is a critical part of tracking the spread of infectious diseases and allocating resources for treatment. The lack of comprehensive figures means U.S. health providers could quickly be overwhelmed by undetected cases.

As of this afternoon, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was reporting about 1,260 U.S. illnesses, a number that trailed independent researchers, who are adding reports from individual states more quickly. Researchers at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles this week estimated that the true count of infections was close to 9,000 about two weeks ago.

Leyland Cecco

My colleague Leylan Cecco reports that Canada’s most populous province will shut down schools for two weeks in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus. All publicly funded schools in Ontario will be shut down from March 14 until April 5, 2020.

“We recognize the significant impact this decision will have on families, students, schools, as well as the broader community, but this precaution is necessary to keep people safe,” the province said in a statement this afternoon, the day before schools closed for a one week spring break. The advice to shutter all schools came from Ontario’s chief medical officer, Dr. David Williams, who also called on people to refrain from attending large events in the coming days.

The surprise decision follows remarks from premier Doug Ford earlier today that appeared out of step with the cautious messaging from neighbouring provinces.

“I just want the families and their children to have a good time. Go away, have a good time, enjoy yourself,” he told reporters Thursday. “We’re going to be monitoring the situation as it changes every single day.”

Ontario now has 59 cases of the coronavirus.

Kate Connolly
Kate Connolly

Our Berlin correspondent Kate Connolly has just followed a press conference in Berlin headed by Angela Merkel, which followed hours of heated discussion between the leaders of Germany’s 16 Länder at an emergency meeting over what steps Germany’s biggest economy should be taking, after the number of people with coronavirus rose to 2695 and the number of dead, rose to six.

Many Germans were glued to livestreams of the press conference, expecting and hoping to hear some decisive measures, such as the closure of schools and kindergartens across the country. What they got was a sense of urgency which we have not heard up until now. In short, the meeting’s participants concluded that Germany is now in crisis mode, with a plan to be unrolled with immediate effect to restructure the country’s hospitals in order to boost the number of intensive care beds (currently there are 28,000 of them, 25,000 of which are equipped with respiratory apparatus). All non-urgent operations are to be postponed. The state will offer financial help to the health insurance companies to ensure this happens, Merkel said.

She appealed to Germans to restrict social contact as much as possible. She also advised on the cancellation of all gatherings which are not strictly necessary. She said the next “4, 5 weeks” would be “very very crucial in determining the question as to what happens next”.

Markus Söder, premier of Bavaria and the leader of the Christian Social Union in Bavaria, admitted that the situation was “far more dramatic than we had thought even one or two weeks ago”. He said that the government’s quick introduction of so-called ‘Kurzarbeit’ - or work reduction policies introduced at the height of the banking crisis, which ensure workers receive their wages, and see employers compensated by the state “send an important signal to German businesses”. He coined a phrase used by Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank at the height of the Euro crisis, “we will do whatever it takes”.

Although many Germans had hoped or expected they might do, the leaders did not decide on:

- a universal policy on closing schools, kindergartens and universities, although Söder did announce this evening that Bavaria (which currently has 500 people with coronavirus, and one death) will do so from tomorrow, becoming the first state to do so.

- Neither did it decide on the closure of German borders (though it will control them including checking temperatures).

- Neither did it decide to stop flights to and from Italy.

Denis Campbell
Denis Campbell

Should schools in Britain shut? Interestingly, although other countries such as Italy and Ireland are doing that, there appears to be no groundswell of medical or scientific opinion in the UK that it should follow suit.

There are slightly mixed opinions among experts surveyed by the Science Media Centre (https://www.sciencemediacentre.org/), but no one urging immediate closures like those seen elsewhere.

“Not closing schools seems understandable to me”, said Dr Jennifer Rohn, a cell biologist at University College London. “Children will be the least likely to be affected and therefore the least likely to be shedding virus, which is directly proportional to more serious symptoms. In contrast, if you close schools you’re keeping a very large number of parents away from work. As long as it is deemed feasible to keep workplaces open, it’s probably better not to harm the economy further in this way.”

Paul Hunter, professor of medicine at the University of East Anglia, is more sceptical. “I would like to see a bit more about why they’re not closing schools and banning large events. We do know, in general, that school holidays lead to a marked reduction of transmission in infections and at the end of school holidays, infection rates take off. Every mother and father knows that when kids go back to school they’re going to get hammered by colds and flus and sore throats.”

He would like to know more about how ministers and government advisers reached their decision. “I’m sure it’s based on good quality science. But we don’t know what that science is. The science isn’t being shared with us in a way that makes it easy for us to understand the logical basis for all of this. I would hope that more of the information and science that the government is relying on to make these decisions would be made available so we could interrogate it and see if it’s valid.”

Dr Charlotte Jackson, from the UCL Institute of Clinical Trials and Methodology, points out that school closures have proven effective against outbreaks in the past.

“There are examples from the UK and elsewhere of school closures reducing transmission of influenza. During the 2009 flu pandemic, the UK saw a reduction in cases following the closure of schools for the summer holiday, and an increase when schools reopened in the autumn. There are also studies from various other settings, including France, Hong Kong and Mexico, suggesting reductions in transmission of seasonal or pandemic influenza associated with school closures. Social distancing measures in general did seem to slow down transmission in US cities during the 1918 flu pandemic”, she says.

However, that does not mean that they would help delay the spread of the Coronavirus, she adds. “With the current coronavirus outbreak, countries have generally used lots of control measures at the same time (this also happened during the 1918 flu pandemic) so it’s difficult to separate any effects of school closures from other interventions. I wouldn’t like to comment definitively on whether closures would be effective for this particular virus.”

What about Boris Johnson’s new policy of advising schools against overseas trips? Deenan Pillay, professor of virology at UCL, says: “Banning overseas school trips is a difficult one, but remember that any trips involve groups of people going to airports, going on boats and coaches and living together, and since this virus is ubiquitous now, anything like that is likely to increase acquisition of the virus. We know that children are less likely to get severe disease from coronavirus, but they nevertheless are likely, if they do get infection, to spread to others. It’s a sensible measure before closing the schools”.

(With thanks to the Science Media Centre).

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