Police have surrounded Geneva’s main prison after some 40 prisoners
refused to return to their cells from their daily walk, complaining
about measures taken due to the pandemic. Laurent Forestier, the spokesman for prisons in Geneva, has said:
There was a refusal to go back to their cells. At the end of the
afternoon, the prisoners who were finishing their walk inside the prison
refused to go back to their cells Discussions are continuing and it’s
not over yet.
There has been one confirmed infection in the facility, Forestier said,
adding that the person had been hospitalised. French-language Swiss
broadcaster RTS said on Twitter that police have surrounded the area.
The chronically-overcrowded Champ-Dollon prison, located in the Geneva
countryside, was built for 400 inmates but had some 600 last month, the
daily Le Temps said.
Muhammad Siddique, the father of my Guardian colleague Haroon Siddique, died
last week after being hospitalised with coronavirus symptoms. Haroon
has written this beautiful obituary in his father’s memory:
Albania has reported 27 new cases – its second biggest daily surge – and
ordered a third 40-hour lockdown over the weekend to halt the spread of
the highly contagious pathogen that has killed 17 in the country so
far.
Albania had reported its largest single day of confirmed cases on March 26 with 28. After
declaring the coronavirus a natural calamity, Albania extended the
shutdown of any activity, its borders, businesses and transport, except
for a few essential industries during an eight-hour daily window, until
the end of the coronavirus epidemic.
Telecoms engineers are facing verbal and physical threats during the
lockdown, as baseless conspiracy theories linking coronavirus to the
roll-out of 5G technology spread by celebrities such as Amanda Holden prompt members of the public to abuse those maintaining vital mobile phone and broadband networks.
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Warehouse workers for the fast fashion brands Pretty Little Thing and
Boo Hoo are begging consumers to stop ordering non-essential items such
as £6 boob tubes and £8 false eyelashes after orders at one depot more
than tripled in a week, Helen Pidd and Amy Walker write.
Morale is said to be “rock bottom” at Pretty Little Thing’s fulfilment
centre in Tinsley, Sheffield, where workers doing 12-hour shifts said
they were processing orders for 400,000 items this week, up from 120,000
in a “normal” week.
They also complain it is “practically impossible” for hundreds of staff
on each shift to keep two metres apart and still meet their hourly
targets of picking 80 items. They also clock on using an unhygienic
fingerprint scanner, though Pretty Little Thing (PLT) says a staff
member thoroughly wipes the equipment after every use.
The work of the Reuters news agency in Iraq has been suspended for three
months after the outlet reported that the country’s government was
underreporting confirmed cases.
Reuters was also fined 25 million Iraqi dinars (about £17,000 or
$20,800), according to a statement posted on the official Communication
and Media Commission website.
The Reuters story cited multiple sources who said the government was
vastly misreporting cases of coronavirus in the country, saying the true
number of those infected was in the thousands.
The country’s health ministry said on Friday there were 820 confirmed
cases and 54 deaths. The Reuters report said the true number ranged from
3,000 to 9,000.
Reuters said it has not received any notification from Iraqi authorities
regarding their license and were seeking clarification on the matter.
The agency said it stood by its report.
The scale of the coronavirus outbreak and the response it has required
from the UK government means a large-scale public inquiry is now
inevitable, a former head of the country’s civil service has said. Sir Bob Kerslake said the scope of the decision-making
undertaken by politicians and officials had been vast, and, as some of
it had already been challenged, there would need to be a chance to
reflect upon the UK’s response in case of another pandemic.
There will need to be some sort of inquiry after we get through this to
learn lessons. This is one where we might face the same situation again.
I hope that even during this clear crisis moment there is a proper
record being kept of who made decisions and why, because that will be
very, very important. Not to lay blame – though clearly there will be a
bit of that – but to plan for the future. We could face this again and
it could be even worse.
Disney is delaying the release of upcoming films because of the pandemic.
The action epic “Mulan” will come out in July and Marvel’s “Black Widow”
will be available in November. Among other changes, Disney postponed
the release of a new “Indiana Jones” film by one year to July 2022.
The UK government’s pledge to carry out 100,000 tests per day by the end
of the month is “realistic”, Public Health England’s director of public
health improvement has said. Prof John Newton has told Channel 4 News:
It is realistic. We have some really good progress. We’re using tried
and tested technology, this is not innovation – it’s massive,
industrial-scale rollout of these three big mega-labs in Milton Keynes,
Manchester and Glasgow.
And they are already delivering tests – many thousands of tests a day –
and we are really looking forward to seeing that number go up soon.
The number of funerals in Jakarta rose sharply in March, a development
the governor of Indonesia’s capital city said suggested that deaths from
the new coronavirus may be higher than officially reported.
Nearly 4,400 burials occurred in the month; 40% higher than any month
since at least January 2018, according to a Reuters review of statistics
from the city’s Department of Parks and Cemeteries.
Jakarta’s governor, Anies Baswedan, and some public
health experts suspect the number of infections and deaths in Jakarta
has been significantly under-reported due to one of the world’s lowest
rates of testing.
It is extremely disturbing. I’m struggling to find another reason than unreported Covid-19 deaths.
Known global death toll passes 55,000. At least
55,781 people across the world have now died as a result of the
pandemic, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The
number of confirmed cases passed a million on Thursday and at least
1,056,777 people are now known to have been infected. The true scale of
the outbreak is likely to be greater due to suspected underreporting by
some nations.
UK endures deadliest day so far.It is confirmed that 684 more people have died in UK hospitals,
bringing the total to 3,605 and making the 24 hours to 5pm on Thursday
(BST) the deadliest since the outbreak began. The country’s Department
of Health and Social Care says 173,784 people have been tested; of whom
38,168 were positive.
New York reports nearly 3,000 deaths. The state’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, announcesd that 2,935 people have now died.
The toll, up from from 2,373 a day earlier, represents the highest
single-day rise since the coronavirus crisis struck. There are 102,863
confirmed cases in New York. Cuomo said that hospitals havein effect
turned into ICU hospitals for Covid-19 patients.
Italy records 766 more deaths – but infection rate slows. The number of deaths on Friday was relatively steady,
when compared to those seen the previous day. But new infections
continue to slow down, raising hopes of turnaround. Some 85,388 people
are currently infected, with an increase of 2,339 new cases; 138 fewer
than Thursday. Italy remains the world’s worst-hit country, having
suffered a total of 14,681 deaths.
More than 250,000 EU citizens stranded abroad. Some 350,000 have been repatriated but
that still leaves a quarter of a million EU citizens trying to get
home. Josep Borrell, the bloc’s foreign policy chief, says operations
are under way to retrieve them. But he adds: “One could not imagine that
there are so many Europeans stranded in the world: tourists; visitors;
short-term workers.”
Swiss death toll rises to 484.The Swiss government announced an increase in the number of deaths,
adding that the number of positive cases now stands at 19,903.
Switzerland has closed schools and many businesses, as well as banning
gatherings of more than five people.
WHO said countries must avoid a cycle of lockdown, relaxation, and further lockdown. The organisation called on countries to develop a just transition strategy that gets them in control of the virus.
English Premier League asks players to take 30% wage cut.Premier League clubs announce they are “committing £20m to support the NHS, communities, families and vulnerable groups during the pandemic”.
While older people are more likely to die if they contract coronavirus,
evidence continues to show that younger people are also being severely
impacted.
Dr David Hepburn, ICU consultant at Newport’s Royal Gwent hospital in south Wales, has said all the patients there are under-50.
Speaking to Channel 4 News, he said:
The pattern of illness that we’ve seen in Gwent, and I can’t speak for
anywhere else, is much younger patients than we were expecting. When the
reports started coming out of Wuhan, we were led to believe that this
was something that was particularly dangerous for the more elderly
patients but I would say all the patients we’ve got an intensive care
are in their 50s or younger at the moment.
Our youngest patient is in her early 20s. And there are, you know, there
are patients who are very well, you know, a chap who’s a fitness
professional but you know there are a lot of patients who are not, do
not have any pre-existing medical conditions. They’re not diabetic or
anything like that.
We’ve got 16 ventilated patients in the intensive care unit at the
minute, which has led us to completely run out of space. So we’ve taken
over theatre recovery, and we’ve got a further eight there. I think by
the end of today, we will fill recovery. So that’ll bring us up to 25
patients.
And then we have another area prepared, which is the old high dependency
unit and coronary care that we’ve taken over as well. We can fit a
further 22 patients in that area. The way things are going at the
minute, the rate of growth and the amount of admissions that we’re
seeing, I would say we will fill that by the end of the week, probably.
