Covid-19 news: Coronavirus restrictions reimposed around the world

The latest coronavirus news updated every day including coronavirus cases, the latest news, features and interviews from New Scientist and essential information about the covid-19 pandemic

Hong Kong Disneyland has closed less than a month after it reopened.

Latest coronavirus news as of 5 pm on 14 July

Restrictions reimposed around the world as global cases pass 13 million

Tighter lockdown restrictions and social distancing measures in the US, Hong Kong, the Philippines and other countries are being reimposed as states and cities attempt to control new waves of coronavirus cases. The governor of California yesterday closed all bars in the state and ordered restaurants, cinemas and museums to halt indoor operations, reversing the reopening of these venues in mid-June. Today authorities in Hong Kong imposed new social distancing measures including making masks mandatory on public transport, limiting the size of gatherings to four people and closing Hong Kong Disneyland less than a month after it reopened. In Manila, in the Philippines, a quarter of a million people are expected to be put back under lockdown later this week to try to slow down the spread of infections. In the UK, tighter restrictions could be imposed on people in Blackburn after a spike in coronavirus cases. 

Other coronavirus news

Face coverings will become compulsory in shops and supermarkets in England from 24 July and the police can issue £100 fines for those who don’t comply, the government announced today. Children under 11 and people with certain disabilities will be exempt. The government has been under growing pressure from scientific organisations, including the Royal Society and the recently formed Independent SAGE, to introduce legislation making face coverings mandatory in indoor spaces. World Health Organization guidelines also support the use of face coverings in confined or crowded places where physical distancing isn’t possible. 

More than 5 million workers in the US are estimated to have lost their health insurance this year due to the economic impact of the pandemic, according to a report by Families USA, an advocacy group for healthcare consumers. This is the highest increase since the 2008 financial crisis when 3.9 million adults became uninsured, according to the report. 

The coronavirus may be able to spread from a pregnant person to their fetus, suggests a case study published in Nature Communications. Tests of placental samples from this case study are consistent with transmission in the womb, physician and study author Daniele DeLuca at the Antoine Béclère hospital in Paris told the Guardian. DeLuca said he suspects this isn’t the first such case, but this is the first time it has been confirmed that coronavirus was transmitted in the womb. The baby who tested positive for covid-19 developed brain inflammation a few days after birth, but he and his mother have both since recovered. The study builds on earlier, more preliminary evidence that the coronavirus can be spread via the placenta. 

Coronavirus deaths

The worldwide death toll has passed 574,000. The number of confirmed cases is more than 13.1 million, according to the map and dashboard from Johns Hopkins University, though the true number of cases will be much higher.

Latest on coronavirus from New Scientist

Second wave in winter: A bad winter could bring a second wave of coronavirus infections that leads to around 120,000 deaths in UK hospitals, twice as many as the first wave, according to an estimate of a reasonable worst-case scenario.

How drug cartels get around lockdowns: Like most other industries, the illegal drug trade has been affected by the covid-19 pandemic, but it hasn’t stopped cartels from finding ways around national shutdowns and anti-narcotics police operations. 

The pandemic’s impact on other diseases: The effect of the coronavirus pandemic on healthcare for tuberculosis, malaria and HIV could lead to deaths on a scale similar to those from covid-19 in some parts of the world, a new analysis finds.

Essential information about coronavirus

What is covid-19?

What are the worst symptoms and how deadly is covid-19?

You could be spreading the coronavirus without realising you’ve got it

How can countries know when it’s safe to ease coronavirus lockdowns?

What does the latest research suggest about the coronavirus in pregnancy?

What to read, watch and listen to about coronavirus

Humans of COVID-19 is a project highlighting the experiences of key workers on the frontline in the fight against coronavirus in the UK, through social media.

Coronavirus, Explained on Netflix is a short documentary series examining the on-going coronavirus pandemic, the efforts to fight it and ways to manage its mental health toll.

New Scientist Weekly features updates and analysis on the latest developments in the covid-19 pandemic. Our podcast sees expert journalists from the magazine discuss the biggest science stories to hit the headlines each week – from technology and space, to health and the environment.

The Rules of Contagion is about the new science of contagion and the surprising ways it shapes our lives and behaviour. The author, Adam Kucharski, is an epidemiologist at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK, and in the book he examines how diseases spread and why they stop.

Contagion: The BBC Four Pandemic is a sober documentary about the progression of a hypothetical pandemic which the BBC simulated in 2017. Fronted by science journalist and TV presenter Hannah Fry, and made with the support of some of the country’s best epidemiologists and mathematical modelers, it’s very relevant to today’s covid-19 pandemic.

Previous updates

UK prime minister Boris Johnson walking with a paramedic during a visit to London Ambulance Service in London.

13 July

People may soon have to wear face coverings in shops in England, says Boris Johnson

People should wear face coverings in shops and the government is looking at making it mandatory to do so in England, UK prime minister Boris Johnson said today. Describing face coverings as “extra insurance” to stop the spread of coronavirus, he said that the government was looking at how a change in policy might be enforced.  Face coverings are already compulsory on public transport in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland and the government recommends that people wear them in other enclosed public spaces where social distancing isn’t possible, although this isn’t mandatory. This comes as a growing number of scientists are calling for the UK government to increase legislation on face coverings. Independent SAGE, a group of scientists offering alternative advice to the UK government, has said that face coverings should be made mandatory in indoor spaces wherever possible, including in shops and in entertainment venues, as well as on public transport. Earlier this month, the president of the Royal Society, Venki Ramakrishnan said that not wearing a face covering should be regarded as anti-social.

Other coronavirus news

Antibodies against the coronavirus in a person’s blood may peak about three weeks after symptoms first appear, then decline rapidly, according to a preliminary study that hasn’t been peer-reviewed. The study, led by researchers at King’s College London, monitored antibody levels in the blood of 65 covid-19 patients and 31 healthcare workers who’d had a positive coronavirus antibody test, between March and June. Three months after antibody levels peaked, only 17 per cent of people tested still had an antibody response with the same level of potency against the virus, the study found. In some people, antibody levels fell 23-fold over the same time period. One concern is that a short-lived antibody response might limit the ability of a coronavirus vaccine to induce immunity. But alongside antibodies, there’s evidence that other parts of the body’s immune system – such as immune cells called T-cells – may also contribute to immunity against the coronavirus and could be harnessed by a future vaccine.

Scotland reported no deaths from covid-19 today for the fifth consecutive day, the nation’s first minister Nicola Sturgeon announced during a press briefing. But there are concerns that people travelling across the border from England may make it difficult for Scotland to achieve full elimination of the virus. 

Mexico saw record daily numbers of new coronavirus cases last week and now has the fourth-highest number of recorded deaths from covid-19, after the US, Brazil and the UK. There have been more than 299,000 coronavirus cases and more than 35,000 deaths from covid-19 in Mexico since the pandemic began. Officials in Mexico say these numbers are probably a significant underestimate, because of a limited testing capacity.

Coronavirus deaths

Trump gives in to the mask but takes new risks with schools

President Donald Trump on Saturday finally did the one thing that public health experts and even his own aides have begged him to do to save lives. He wore a mask in public during a visit to wounded service members at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Given his intransigence for so many months, it was a small but significant gesture at a time when coronavirus cases are surging in the US and the President has failed to grasp the depth of the crisis or offer any coherent strategy to control the spread of the virus.

While he was willing to wear the mask to protect US service members, Trump made it clear this week that he viewed the hospital setting as a unique one -- clinging to his insistence that there is a "time and place" for masks amid a raging pandemic that has claimed the lives of at least 134,815 Americans.

His concern about safety does not apparently extend to schools, which he's pressuring to reopen, potentially putting millions of Americans at risk. His delusional view of the virus -- mainly that it's "harmless" -- serves his political agenda of getting the economy moving and the country back to "normal" ahead of the fall election. But if he's going to win back any of the suburban moms the Republican Party lost so badly in the 2018 midterms, he may want to reconsider using America's children as chips in his political games.

View Trump and Biden head-to-head polling

He continues to jeopardize American lives -- including that of his own supporters -- on the campaign trail, too. The President had planned to continue flouting the guidelines of his public health experts by holding a campaign rally for his supporters in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Saturday night -- which was postponed due to weather -- where the campaign said it would encourage but not mandate attendees to wear masks, and there likely would have been little adherence to guidance regarding large gatherings (other than the move outdoors, which can help reduce the rate of spread).

US President continues to sow confusion by pushing for the reopening of schools

'This should not be a lead story in the news'

Underscoring the divide between Trump and the public health experts he doesn't listen to, the President and the nation's top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, have not spoken for weeks. And Fauci has been relegated to podcast and print interviews, likely because he has corrected the President's misinformation campaign about the virus.

While Trump has recently said that the US is in a "good place" when it comes to the coronavirus and has touted the current mortality rate in the United States (an indicator that generally lags behind rising case numbers), Fauci has delivered the blunt, unsettling facts about the direction of the pandemic.

"As a country, when you compare us to other countries, I don't think you can say we're doing great. I mean, we're just not," Fauci said last week on the FiveThirtyEight podcast.

Fauci also said recently that he "would not be surprised if we go up to 100,000 (new infections) a day if this does not turn around." Given that prediction of a frightening increase in cases in the coming weeks, public health experts said Saturday that they were glad the President had finally worn a mask, but as Dr. Peter Hotez put it: "This should not be a lead story in the news."

"Back in February or March, it would have been the lead story, but not now. We are way past that -- we have this terrible public health crisis right now," Hotez, the Dean for the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told CNN's Ana Cabrera during an interview on "Newsroom" Saturday. "The fact that we are still discussing masks is ridiculous. We have to do so much more right now to help slow this terrible onslaught that we are facing from Covid-19. With a steep acceleration, we are going to hit 70,000 cases this week."

Hotez, who is also co-director of the Texas Children's Hospital Center for Vaccine Development, noted that the number of cases will quickly rise to 100,000 new cases per day, as Fauci predicted -- leading to even greater strain on hospitals, ICUs and staff, many of whom are already getting sick in hotspot areas. "We have no national plan, national roadmap how to deal with this and how to stop it," he said.

A relentless focus on reopening

Yet even with that alarming rise in cases, Trump kept a relentless focus on reopening during another confounding week where he sent America's parents into a tailspin by demanding that schools reopen in the fall.

Though many states are pulling back on reopening after seeing their case numbers soar, Trump threatened to withhold federal funding from school districts that do not reopen, while calling the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines on reopening schools "very tough and expensive." While most schools are funded locally, cutting federal funding would likely impact the neediest of America's children and hit schools already squeezed by the pandemic.

In a subsequent press conference of the White House coronavirus task force Wednesday, Vice President Mike Pence created even more confusion by stating that the CDC was going to issue different guidelines to clarify the rules for students to return, suggesting the agency was caving to the President's pressure. (Dr. Robert Redfield, the head of the CDC, then said Thursday that the agency was not revising the guidance but instead providing additional information to help schools plan for reopening.)

Even though some children have become seriously ill and have died from the coronavirus, Pence emphasized last week that the risks to children infected by the virus are lower than they are for other age groups. He said it was a blessing that "apart from having an underlying health condition, children do not appear to be susceptible to serious illness from the coronavirus." (During the discussion of schools, Redfield also said that "in general, this virus does not cause significant illness in children.")

But Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, seemed to imply that the nation does not yet have enough data -- because of the limited testing of children at this point -- to draw conclusions about the infection rate among children.

"If you look across all of the tests that we've done... the portion that has been the lowest-tested portion is the under-10-year-olds," Birx said during Wednesday's coronavirus task force briefing. She said the nation's health experts are still trying "to really figure this out, because parents have done an amazing job of protecting their children."

"We know the mortality rate in under-25 from the CDC data is less than 0.1%, and so that has been holding," Birx said. "But until we know how many have been infected, we have no evidence that there is significant mortality in children without coexisting diseases. And that's what we're looking for right now, is to really make sure we've overturned every rock and understand that in deep detail."

Teachers and other adults at risk

Beyond the health concerns about children, there are growing worries about the health of teachers, and how the virus could spread -- with children as carriers -- from schools back into multi-generational homes with vulnerable older family members.

Teachers' unions around the country, political powerhouses in their own right, balked at Trump's threats this week. A new analysis released Friday evening by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly 1.5 million teachers in America are at higher risk of serious illness if they contract the coronavirus.

Those teachers, who comprise about 24% of the total, have health conditions including diabetes, heart disease or obesity, or are older than 65, which makes them more vulnerable to serious illness if infected with Covid-19, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation analysis.

So far, no one in the Trump administration has explained how schools can actually reopen and maintain social distancing between students -- given that crowded classrooms are essentially the status quo in many school districts across the country.

In that leadership vacuum, the nation's school districts and governors are trying to solve that puzzle on their own (as the need for greater school funding to contend with the virus, rather than less, is apparent to nearly everyone except the President).

There is no question that parents want their children to go back to school, because it will be impossible for most parents to go back to work at full capacity if their kids are not in the classroom. And the most economically disadvantaged families may suffer the most if schools do not reopen.

But parents also have made it clear that they want it to be safe, and many fear a second wave of infections if proper measures are not taken to contain the virus in schools.

A Gallup survey in June found that 56% of parents with children in grades K-12 want their children's instruction to be fully in-person this fall. About 37% preferred a hybrid program that would encompass some part-time school and some distance learning. About 46% of parents said they were very or somewhat worried about their children getting the virus.

The New York Times obtained an internal CDC document last week that warned that fully reopening K-12 schools and universities would create the "highest risk" for the spread of the coronavirus.

It is too soon to know how American parents will respond to the administration's haphazard approach to school reopenings, but Trump's tactics of confusion and obfuscation have not gone over well so far. And putting children at risk in order to satisfy the President's desire for a strong economic reopening this fall may carry a heavy political price.

Global report: India becomes third worst-affected country as giant Covid-19 hospital-opens

Cases reach almost 700,000 to pass Russia in third place; Iran suffers record death toll; alarm in South Africa as cases jump amid easing of lockdown

India has passed Russia as the country with the third-highest number of coronavirus cases in the world after recording a record number of cases for one day.

The health ministry added 23,000 new cases on Monday, taking India’s total to 697,000 and almost 20,000 deaths. On Sunday India racked up nearly 25,000, its highest total for one day.

The increases took India past Russia as the third highest total in the world behind Brazil with 1.6m cases and the United States with 2.88m.

In the Indian capital New Delhi, medical staff started treating patients at a spiritual centre converted into a sprawling isolation facility and hospital with 10,000 beds, many made of cardboard and chemically coated to make them waterproof.

About the size of 20 football fields, the facility on the outskirts of the city will treat mild symptomatic and asymptomatic cases.

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 A new Covid care facility which can accommodate around 10,000 patients in New Delhi. Photograph: Rajat Gupta/EPA

State government officials fear Delhi, home to 25 million people, could record more than half-a-million cases by the end of the month. The city has repurposed some hotels to provide hospital care. It is also converting wedding halls and has several hundred modified railway coaches standing by.

A strict lockdown in place since late March has gradually been lifted, allowing most activities after the economy nose-dived during the shutdown.

Schools, metro trains in cities, cinemas, gyms and swimming pools remain closed and international flights are still grounded. Authorities have made wearing masks mandatory in public places, while large gatherings are banned and shops and other public establishments are required to implement social distancing.

Like India, South Africa imposed some of the strictest stay-at-home measures in the world in late March in a bid to limit the spread of Covid-19, but the number of infections is rising daily as the lockdown rules are gradually eased. South Africa on Saturday reported more than 10,000 new coronavirus infections, the highest daily jump on record for the country. There have been 196,750 cases and 3,199 deaths in the country so far.

The total global number of cases is 11.4 million, according to Johns Hopkins University data. The virus has claimed the lives of 533,780 people.

In the United States, the Centres for Disease Control reported 52,228 new cases on Sunday, marking the fourth day in a row that new cases have been over 50,000 according to its tallies.

Two prominent Texas mayors warned that hospitals in their cities will be “overwhelmed” by cases of Covid-19 inside two weeks, even as Donald Trump continues to portray the coronavirus resurgence nationwide as the embers of a fire he is steadily extinguishing.

The Australian state of Victoria recorded its largest jump in cases at any point in the coronavirus crisis, with 127 cases reported on Monday, as the premier announced the border with neighbouring New South Wales, Australia’s most populous state, would be closed from midnight on Tuesday. The decision marks the first time the border between the two states will be closed in 100 years.

Victoria also recorded one new death, bringing Australia’s total fatalities to 105. The country has 8,583 cases.

In response to the record case increase, New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian says, “what’s occurring in Victoria hasn’t yet happened in Australia. It’s a new phenomenon”.

NSW police commissioner Mike Fuller meanwhile warned that the border was very long, but would be thoroughly monitored.

“Someone could choose to swim across the river, walk through the bush, use dirt tracks,” he said, noting that aerial surveillance, for example with drones, will be used to enforce the restrictions.

Iran broke a sombre record for daily deaths, meanwhile, 163 people in the country dying in 24 hours. The government has introduced compulsory face masks in public spaces after admitting that its efforts to introduce effective voluntary social distancing have failed.

Other key global developments include:

• The governor of Tokyo, Japan, Yuriko Koike, won a second term, propelled to an election victory by public support for her handling of the coronavirus crisis, despite a recent rise in infections.
• Peru on Sunday jumped past 300,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19, the fifth-highest in the world, as the Andean nation of nearly 33 million people slowly reopens its battered economy. Peru’s death toll from the virus now stands at 10,589, the 10th-highest in the world.
• In the US, Tony award-nominated Broadway actor Nick Cordero died in Los Angeles from severe medical complications after contracting coronavirus. He was 41.