Tag Archives: global alarm

Germany surge sounds coronavirus alarm as world takes steps to reopen

By Douglas Busvine and Michel Rose

BERLIN/PARIS (Reuters) – Germany reported on Monday that new coronavirus infections were accelerating exponentially after early steps to ease its lockdown, news that sounded a global alarm even as businesses opened from Paris hair salons to Shanghai Disneyland.

Germany’s Robert Koch Institute reported that the “reproduction rate” – the number of people each person infected with the coronavirus goes on to infect – had risen to 1.1. Any rate above 1 means the virus is spreading exponentially.

German authorities had taken early steps to ease lockdown measures just days earlier, a stark illustration that progress can swiftly be reversed even in a country with one of the best records in Europe of containing the virus so far.

It follows a new outbreak in night clubs in South Korea, another country that had succeeded in limiting infections.

Governments around the world are struggling with the question of how to reopen their economies while still containing the coronavirus. In Europe, the world’s worst-hit continent, Spain and France began major steps to ease lockdowns, while Britain announced more cautious moves.

Traffic flowed along the Champs Elysees in Paris, a giant tricolor flag billowing under the Arc de Triomphe, as workers cleaned shop-front windows to reopen.

“Everyone’s a little bit nervous. Wow! We don’t know where we’re headed but we’re off,” said Marc Mauny, a hairstylist who opened his salon in western France at the stroke of midnight when new rules took effect.

Mickey Mouse welcomed thinned-out crowds in Shanghai, the first Disney theme park to re-open, with a strict limit on the number of tickets. Parades and fireworks were canceled, and workers and guests were required to wear face masks and have their temperatures screened at the entrance.

“I think (these measures) make tourists feel at ease,” said Kay Yu, a 29-year-old pass holder wearing a Minnie Mouse hat, who said he had woken up at 4 a.m. to make the trip to the park.

“IT’S NOT OVER UNTIL IT’S OVER”

A German health ministry spokesman said the authorities were taking the rise in the infection rate seriously and it did not mean the outbreak was out of control.

Karl Lauterbach, a Social Democrat lawmaker and professor of epidemiology, had warned that the virus could start spreading again quickly after seeing large crowds outside on Saturday in his home city of Cologne.

“It has to be expected that the R rate will go over 1 and we will return to exponential growth,” Lauterbach said in a tweet. “The loosening measures were far too poorly prepared.”

In South Korea, which largely avoided a lockdown by implementing a massive testing and contact-tracing program early on, authorities were rushing to contain a new outbreak traced to night clubs.

“It’s not over until it’s over. While keeping enhanced alertness till the end, we must never lower our guard regarding epidemic prevention,” President Moon Jae-In said on Sunday.

New Zealand, which had success in fighting infection with one of the toughest and earliest lockdowns, said it would open malls, cafes, and cinemas this week.

“The upshot is that in 10 days’ time we will have reopened most businesses in New Zealand, and sooner than many other countries around the world,” Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told a news conference. “But that fits with our plan – go hard, go early – so we can get our economy moving again sooner.”

But some of the countries and territories that were taking steps to open up their economies were acting without yet reporting sustained falls in the spread.

India, which has locked down its population of 1.3 billion people since March, reported a record daily rise in cases. But it said it would begin to restart passenger railway services, with 15 special trains, from Tuesday.

Russia, where the death toll is still comparatively low but the caseload surging, overtook Italy and Britain to report the highest number of cases after the United States and Spain.

In the United States, where unemployment figures released last week were the worst since the Great Depression, President Donald Trump has been trying to shift the emphasis towards reopening the economy. Many states have begun loosening restrictions even though cases continue to rise.

While economies around the world are facing the worst contraction in living memory, stock markets have surged since the start of April, fuelled by unprecedented injections of cash from central banks. That has created unease that financial markets are out of whack with the economies they reflect.

There were signs of a shift in sentiment on Monday, with stock markets giving up their early gains.

“Since late March there has been an extraordinary divergence between the real economy and financial risk, with the latter helped by unprecedented policy accommodation,” said Alan Ruskin, head of G10 foreign exchange trading at Deutsche Bank.

(Reporting by Reuters bureaux, Writing by Peter Graff, Editing by Timothy Heritage)

WHO sounds Ebola alarm as risks intensify

A Congolese health worker administers ebola vaccine to a child at the Himbi Health Centre in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo, July 17, 2019. REUTERS/Olivia Acland

By Tom Miles

GENEVA (Reuters) – The World Health Organization on Wednesday declared Congo’s Ebola outbreak an international health emergency, sounding a rarely used global alarm after the virus threatened to spread to a major city and into neighboring countries.

Despite a highly effective vaccine and a swift international response after it was declared 11 months ago, the outbreak has proved tenacious in an unstable region beset by violence, becoming Congo’s worst ever, with almost 1,700 dead.

A vast campaign of vigilance and vaccination, with almost 75 million screenings, has kept the highly infectious virus almost entirely confined to two provinces in northeastern Congo. The emergency committee of international health experts that advises WHO had thrice declined to declare an emergency.

But this month a pastor died after traveling to Goma, a city of 2 million and a gateway to other countries in the region. On Wednesday, the WHO reported a fisherwoman had died in Congo after four vomiting incidents at a market in Uganda, where 590 people may be sought for vaccination.

“The committee is concerned that a year into the outbreak, there are worrying signs of possible extension of the epidemic,” the committee’s report said.

The committee had been under pressure from many experts who felt the scale of the outbreak and the risks meant it had to be given the emergency status – only the fifth such disease outbreak since the WHO introduced such designations in 2005.

“It shows no sign of coming under control,” said Peter Piot, a member of the team that discovered Ebola and is now director of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

“I hope that today’s decision serves as a wake-up call to drive high-level political action, improved coordination, and greater funding to support DRC in their efforts to stop this devastating epidemic,” he said.

NO BORDER CLOSURES

The previous international emergencies, under a system introduced after the 2004 Asian SARS epidemic, were the 2013-2016 West African Ebola epidemic that killed over 11,300 people, the 2009 flu pandemic, polio in 2014 and the Zika virus that caused a spate of birth defects across Latin America.

The WHO committee’s chairman, Robert Steffen, tempered the outbreak’s designation as an emergency by saying it remained a regional, rather than a global threat, and stressed that no country should react to Ebola by closing borders or restricting trade.

The WHO has warned that the nearby countries of Rwanda, South Sudan, Burundi and Uganda are the most at risk, while Central African Republic, Angola, Tanzania, Republic of Congo and Zambia are in a second tier.

Earlier this week the WHO said hundreds of millions of dollars were needed immediately to prevent the outbreak billowing out of control and costing far more lives and money.

But WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who convened the emergency committee after viewing the Goma case as a “potential gamechanger”, said the designation as an international emergency was not meant to suggest that some countries had been withholding funds and would now unlock them.

One priority was to accelerate the production of the vaccine, which is in short supply. It is produced by Merck and still unlicensed, which means it can only be used in a clinical trial overseen by Congo’s health ministry.

WHO has already begun using smaller doses to ration supplies and the committee recommended taking “all measures to increase supplies”, including contracting supply to other manufacturers and transferring Merck’s technology.

(Reporting by Tom Miles, Kate Kelland and Nairobi newsroom; Editing by Gareth Jones, John Stonestreet and Dan Grebler)