Coronavirus: IMF agrees assistance package for Egypt – as it happened

This blog is now closed. Our coverage continues here

Again on the China travel warning regarding Australia, Australian opposition spokesman for housing Jason Clare, told the ABC there had been a “spike in racist abuse” but said Australia is one of the safest countries in the world.

“The borders are shut. They’ll probably be shut for some time until we’ve got a treatment or a vaccine. But I’m sure I speak on behalf of all of the tourist operators up and down and right across Australia when I say that we want to get tourists back when it’s safe to do so. So I hope that the government is working with the Chinese government to ensure that when we can open the border again, we can get Chinese tourists back.9:36 AM

Government MP Jason Falinski said the relationship with China was “strained” and there had been unfortunate incidents in Australia, and it was something Australia and China needed to resolve.

One Australian senator, Rex Patrick from one of the minor parties - Centre Alliance, has responded to the China news, calling for a parliamentary inquiry into Australia’s relationship with China.

California governor Gavin Newsom has said film and TV productions can resume from June 12 if local health officials approve.

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro threatened to pull the country out of the World Health Organization (WHO) unless it stops being a “partisan political organisation.”

In comments to journalists broadcast on CNN Brasil, Bolsonaro also said hydroxychloroquine “is back” after “sham” studies regarding its efficacy were retracted.

Bolsonaro has touted the drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus despite a lack of scientific evidence about its effectiveness.

The Lancet paper that halted global trials of hydroxychloroquine for Covid-19 because of fears of increased deaths was retracted on Thursday after a Guardian investigation found inconsistencies in the data.

In New York, the Associated Press reports that arrests from a week of protests have started to put a strain on the city’s justice system amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

There have been well over 2,000 arrests as police seek to impose order across the city.

Public defenders say too many of those arrested have been detained for too long in cramped and unsanitary conditions while authorities figure who should receive summonses for minor violations and go free, or be charged in criminal complaints and face arraignments remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic.

The backlog prompted The Legal Aid Society to file a lawsuit demanding the New York police department release people held in violation of a requirement to get them in front of a judge within 24 hours, a situation that one defense lawyer said “appears to be designed to retaliate against New Yorkers protesting police brutality.”

Patricia Miller, who heads the city’s Special Federal Litigation Division, called the allegation “disingenuous” and “exceptionally unfair”.

The NYPD and court system are “working within the confines of a pandemic and now suddenly called upon not only to secure orderly protesting, but also to address rioters who are committing burglaries, destroying private property, and assaulting fellow New Yorkers,” Miller said.

A council in England has “strongly” advised its schools to delay wider reopening until at least June 22 over concerns about the R rate in the North West.

Tameside Council’s director of public health Dr Jeanelle de Gruchy has written to all headteachers following new data which suggested the reproductive rate of coronavirus is now around one in the region.

The letter said: “Members of SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies) and the Association of Directors of Public Health advised caution and concern about the too rapid easing of lockdown and the increased risk of a second pandemic wave.

“Balancing this concern, the national R number being between 0.7 to 1.0 and estimated at 0.73 in the North West and the importance of having our children back at school, I supported the limited increase in the number of children attending planned in the Borough from Monday 8th June.

“However information released at 2pm today estimates the R value is now above the critical value of 1 for the North West, at 1.01.

“Because of this change in R, and despite the excellent work undertaken, I am therefore strongly advising all schools and childcare settings to delay wider opening until at least 22 June for us to be more assured that the rate of infection is reducing and R is firmly below 1.”

The council said the situation would be monitored and reviewed on a weekly basis.

China’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism has advised the public to avoid traveling to Australia, citing racial discrimination and violence against the Chinese in connection with the Covid-19 pandemic.

“There has been an alarming increase recently in acts of racial discrimination and violence against Chinese and Asians in Australia, due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,” the ministry said in a statement reported by Reuters.

It did not give any specific examples of such discrimination or violence.

People of Asian origin have said they have been harassed since the outbreak of the coronavirus including in the United States.

China issued a warning to tourists traveling there earlier this year after some said they were mistreated in connection with the outbreak.

The front page of Friday’s UK edition of The Guardian.

Public trust in science may have been shaken by the publication of academic papers based on false data in leading medical journals, according to renowned infectious disease doctors and former World Health Organization advisers.

The director of Australia’s Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, Professor Sharon Lewin, said she and colleagues were “gobsmacked” by the saga and said it should be “a wake-up call” in a global rush to publish studies about Covid-19.

View image in fullscreen

At a primary school in the Canadian province of Quebec, nine children have tested positive for Covid-19 out of a class of 11, health officials said.

The class was small because the school has been operating at half capacity.

Health officials confirm the school in Trois-Rivières had taken preventative measures, such as handwashing reminders and marking spaces on the floor to encourage social distancing.

Primary schools opened across Quebec outside the city of Montreal on 11 May, despite the province being Canada’s biggest coronavirus hotspot, with 52,398 total cases and 4,935 deaths currently recorded.
Ontario, the site of Canada’s second largest hotspot, has closed schools for the remainder of the school year.

An IMF team has agreed a one-year, $5.2 billion financing package for Egypt to help the country alleviate the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The IMF board must still approve the financing from the fund’s Rapid Financing Instrument (RFI), which allows nations to circumvent the lengthy negotiations usually needed to secure a full economic assistance program.

The new funding comes on top of $2.8 billion the IMF board approved a month ago, although at the time officials acknowledged that more help would be needed.

Cairo requested the aid, known as a Standby Arrangement, to support its efforts “to maintain macroeconomic stability amid the Covid-19 shock while continuing to advance key structural reforms,” IMF mission chief Uma Ramakrishnan said in a statement.

“This will safeguard the gains achieved by Egypt over the past three years and put the country on strong footing for sustained recovery as well as higher and more inclusive growth and job creation over the medium term,” she said.

It also will open the doors to financing from other lenders and help support job creation by the private sector.

The IMF team held virtual negotiations with Egyptian officials on the terms of the package, which the fund’s board is expected to approve in “coming weeks,” she said.

Egypt has suffered over 1,100 Covid-19 fatalities with over 31,000 cases, according to Johns Hopkins University’s tally.

Wall Street surged on Friday after a strikingly upbeat May jobs report unexpectedly provided the clearest evidence yet that the US economy is headed for a quicker-than-anticipated recovery.

The Dow Jones rose 829.16 points, or 3.15%, to 27,110.98, the S&P gained 81.58 points, or 2.62%, to 3,193.93 and the Nasdaq added 198.27 points, or 2.06%, to 9,814.08.

Joe Biden has argued that President Trump deserved no credit for the US jobs report which showed unemployment had dropped slightly to 13.3% from 14.7% a month earlier.
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee said Trump had still failed to acknowledge how his response to the coronavirus pandemic had hampered the country’s economy. “He has no idea the depth of the pain that so many people are still enduring. He remains completely oblivious to the human toll of his indifference,” the former vice president said.

“It’s time for him to step out of his own bunker, take a look around the consequences of his words and his actions.”
Biden added: “Let’s be clear: a president who takes no responsibility for costing millions and millions of American their jobs deserves no credit when a fraction of them return.”

View image in fullscreen

More than a third of Americans misused cleaners and disinfectants to try to prevent infection by the coronavirus, according to a survey taken shortly after Donald Trump publicly asked whether injecting such products could treat Covid-19, reports Reuters.

Washing food with bleach, using household cleaning or disinfectant products on bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting the products were some of the most commonly reported “high-risk” practices in a 4 May online survey of 502 US adults, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported.

The survey’s lead author said it was undertaken following a “sharp increase” in calls to poison control centres.

In late April, Trump asked scientists during one of his coronavirus task force briefings whether inserting disinfectant into the bodies of people infected with the virus might help clear the disease, horrifying health experts. Makers of household cleaners were compelled to urge people not to drink or inject their products.

Some 39% of people surveyed reported intentionally engaging in at least one high-risk practice, including using bleach to clean food or misting the body with a disinfectant spray. Four per cent drank or gargled with diluted bleach solutions, soapy water or disinfectants.

• The World Health Organization has updated its stance on masks to curb the spread of Covid-19. People over 60 or with health issues should wear a medical-grade mask when they are out and cannot physically distance, according to new guidance from the WHO, while all others should wear a three-layer fabric mask.
• The UK became the second country to officially record more than 40,000 coronavirus-related deaths, as officials said another 357 people who had tested positive for the virus had died. So far, 40,261 virus deaths have been recorded, giving the UK the world’s second-highest death toll behind the United States.
• Hydroxychloroquine does not work against Covid-19 and should not be given to any more hospital patients around the world, say the leaders of the biggest and best-designed trial of the drug. “If you are admitted to hospital, don’t take hydroxychloroquine. It doesn’t work,” said Martin Landray, deputy chief investigator of the Recovery trial and professor of medicine and epidemiology at Oxford University.
  
• There were 85 new coronavirus fatalities in Italy on Friday, down from 88 on Wednesday, while new infections leapt by 518, up from 177 within the last 24 hours. The majority of the new infections – 402 – were in the worst affected Lombardy region.
• A judge in Australia banned a Black Lives Matter protest planned to take place in Sydney on Saturday, citing the coronavirus crisis, after a legal application from police. New South Wales state Supreme Court Justice Des Fagan ruled the rally was not an authorised public assembly.