Coronavirus Cases:
301,627
Deaths:
12,955
Recovered
94,625
The World Health Organization has said that the number of COVID-19 cases has reached 301,627 with 12,955 fatalities across the globe.Italy on Friday saw the biggest day-to-day rise in deaths with 627 new deaths reported, bringing the total number of deaths to 4,032, surpassing China. The lockdown will be extended.
WHO and Global Citizen launched #TogetherAtHome, a virtual, no-contact concert series to promote physical distancing and action for global health. Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, kicked it off earlier this week with a performance from his home. More Solidarity Sessions are planned to promote health, show support for people who are staying at home to protect themselves and others from COVID-19, and encourage donations to the COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund.
The COVID-19 outbreak was first reported in the city of Wuhan, central China’s Hubei Province, in December 2019. Experts have attributed the outbreak to a novel coronavirus that has since spread across China and abroad with confirmed cases exceeding 303,827 globally.
Iran’s death toll from the coronavirus outbreak rose on Saturday by more than 100 to 1,556, and the total number of people infected now exceeds 20,000, a health ministry official said.
The total number of people diagnosed with the disease stood at 20,610 on Saturday, health ministry spokesperson Kianoush Jahanpour said on state TV.
President Hassan Rouhani said on Saturday that social distancing measures to combat the coronavirus outbreak in Iran, including travel restrictions, will apply for only two to three weeks, expecting the crisis to ease by then.
Iran “has to do everything necessary to return economic production to normal,” he said in comments broadcast on state TV. He also accused “counter-revolutionaries” of plotting to shut down economic production.
The death toll from an outbreak of coronavirus in Italy has leapt by 793 to 4,825, officials said on Saturday, an increase of 19.6% — by far the largest daily rise in absolute terms since the contagion emerged a month ago.
On Thursday, Italy overtook China as the country to register most deaths from the highly contagious virus.
The total number of cases in Italy rose to 53,578 from a previous 47,021, an increase of 13.9%, the Civil Protection Agency said.
The hardest-hit northern region of Lombardy remains in a critical situation, with 3,095 deaths and 25,515 cases.
Of those originally infected nationwide, 6,072 had fully recovered on Saturday compared to 5,129 the day before. There were 2,857 people in intensive care against a previous 2,655.
A new study reports that people who became sick from the coronavirus in the Chinese city where the outbreak began likely had a lower death rate than previously thought.
The study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Medicine, calculated that people with coronavirus symptoms in Wuhan, China, had a 1.4 percent likelihood of dying. Some previous estimates have ranged from 2 percent to 3.4 percent.
Assessing the risk of death in Wuhan is instructive because it provides a snapshot of the epidemic from the beginning, when doctors were scrambling to treat people with the brand-new virus and hospitals were overwhelmed. Some experts say that such a benchmark — known as the symptomatic case fatality rate — could be lower in countries like the United States if measures like widespread business and school closures and appeals for social distancing have the desired effect of slowing the spread of the disease.
“The experience gained from managing those initial patients and the increasing availability of newer, and potentially better, treatment modalities to more patients would presumably lead to fewer deaths, all else being equal,” wrote the study authors, a team that included scientists from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
But a 1.4 percent case fatality rate still means many deaths. By comparison, the average seasonal flu kills about 0.1 percent of the people it infects in the United States.
The new study calculated estimates based on cases in Wuhan as of Feb. 29, when there had been 48,557 confirmed patients and 2,169 deaths. The risk of death increased with age, “unlike any previously reported pandemic or seasonal influenza,” the researchers wrote.
While the overall symptomatic case fatality rate was 1.4 percent, for people who were 60 and older it was 2.6 percent. That makes the older age group about five times more likely to die than people with symptoms who were 30 to 59 years old, whose risk of dying was 0.5 percent. For those under 30, it was 0.3 percent.
The risk of developing symptomatic infection itself also increased with age, about 4 percent per year for people aged 30 to 60, the study said. The authors estimated that people 60 and older were twice as likely to develop symptoms as people aged 30 to 59 and that people under 30 have about one-sixth the chance of developing symptoms from the infection. That suggests, as has other research, that many young people may be unknowingly infected and able to spread the virus to others.
The researchers noted that their estimates faced some limitations, including that the study would not reflect the many people who were not tested and diagnosed, and that the data might not adequately capture people who were infected in Wuhan and traveled elsewhere. And although their estimated risk of death is lower than previous guesses, the authors make it clear that the virus will undoubtedly leave many casualties in its wake.
The findings “indicate that Covid-19 transmission is difficult to control,” they wrote, adding that “we might
Two people died in the United Arab Emirates; the first deaths suffered by the country. The country’s official news agency, WAM, said each had suffered from previous health conditions.
Israel also announced its first death. The country’s health ministry has said an 88-year-old man who had been suffering from previous illnesses had died.
A member of the US vice president’s staff tested positive. The employee, who was not identified, had not come into close contact with either the US president, Donald Trump, or his boss, Mike Pence, who is in charge of the US’s coronavirus response.
