News Desk :
The death toll from coronavirus reached 1,67, 363 while infected 24,37,911 in 210 countries and territories around the world and recovered 6,38,088, according to worldometer.
The US death toll from the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) rose to 40,565on Sunday, the highest in the world and almost double the number of deaths in the next highest country Italy, according to a Reuters tally.
It took the United States 38 days after recording its first fatality on Feb. 29 to reach 10,000 deaths on April 6, but only five more days to reach 20,000 dead, according to a Reuters tally.
The United States’ toll increased to 40,000 from 30,000 in four days after including untested but probable COVID-19 deaths reported by New York City.
The United States has by far the world’s largest number of confirmed coronavirus cases, with more than 7,64,265 infections – a number that has doubled in 13 days.
New cases on Saturday rose by nearly 29,000, the lowest increase in three days, reports Reuters.
More than 22 million Americans have filed for unemployment benefits in the past month as closures of businesses and schools and severe travel restrictions have hammered the economy.
Governors in US states hardest hit by the coronavirus sparred with President Donald Trump over his claims they have enough tests and should quickly reopen their economies as more protests are planned over the extension of stay-at-home orders.
The region of Maryland, Virginia and Washington DC is still seeing increasing cases. New Jersey reported on Sunday that its new cases rose by nearly 3,900, the most in more than two weeks. Boston and Chicago are also emerging hot spots with recent surges in cases and deaths.
Several states, including Ohio, Texas and Florida, have said they aim to reopen parts of their economies, perhaps by May 1 or even sooner, but appeared to be staying cautious.
Italy said on Sunday that deaths from the coronavirus pandemic rose by 433, the lowest daily tally in a week, and the number of new cases slowed to 3,047 from a previous 3,491.
The death toll as reported by Italy’s Civil Protection Agency had risen by 482 on Saturday, down from 575 on Friday.
The daily tallies of deaths and cases extend the broadly stable situation in place over the last two weeks.
This plateau is down considerably from peaks reached around the end of March, but the downtrend has not proceeded as fast as was hoped in a country that has been in lockdown for six weeks.
Sunday’s number of deaths marked the lowest daily rise since April 12, when it came in at 431, before rising again during the week.
Should the decline be confirmed in the next few days it would add to pressure on the Rome government from business leaders and some regional chiefs to let companies reopen and lift restrictions on people’s movement.
The nationwide lockdown, which was imposed on March 9, will be in force until May 3, but there is not yet any clear plan over to what extent, or how gradually, it will be lifted.
Luca Zaia, the head of the northern Veneto region, which has made particular progress in bringing the outbreak under control, has called for restrictions to be relaxed before May 3.
However, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said late on Saturday that Italy was not yet in a position to loosen the lockdown and ruled out the possibility that some regions could be allowed to reopen before others.
Medical experts have urged caution, saying Italy is still in the first stage of the emergency and cannot yet move to a so-called “Phase 2”.
“It’s way too early, the numbers in some regions are still very much those of a Phase 1 that has not ended yet,” World Health Organization official Walter Ricciardi told Sky Italia TV.
The total death toll since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21 rose to 23,660 on Sunday, the second highest in the world after that of the United States. Total confirmed cases stood at 178,972.
The outbreak remains heavily concentrated in the northern regions of Lombardy, around the financial capital Milan, and neighbouring Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna. Lombardy on Sunday reported a daily increase in the number deaths of 163, or more than a third of the total, and 855 new cases.
The spread of the new coronavirus in Spain seems to be slowing despite more than 200,000 people now having been infected, officials said on Monday, as the Bank of Spain gave wide-ranging forecasts for an economic blow of “considerable severity”.
With 200,210 recorded infections, Spain is second only to the United States in terms of confirmed cases, according to Reuters data.
But Health Emergency Chief Fernando Simon told a news conference that the rate of new infections continues to fall despite an increase in testing, suggesting the overall prevalence of the disease could be lower than expected in the population.
“Fortunately occurrence is falling a lot, even more than we had thought,” he said.
The cumulative death toll from the virus rose to 20,852 on Monday, the ministry said, after 399 fatalities were recorded in the previous 24 hours.
In the northern Basque region, an early hub of the outbreak, ambulance worker Marisa Arguello de Paula said she had noticed that her patients appeared generally calmer as the situation improved.
“You tell them things are going better, that hospitals aren’t so overloaded, and even though they’re on their own, they come more quietly,” she said.
Spain has imposed one of Europe’s strictest lockdown regimes to help rein in the infection rate and the daily death toll, although this has in turn to led to a disruption to the economy of “considerable severity”, the country’s central bank said.
It forecast that the economy would shrink somewhere between 6.8% and 12.4% this year depending on the duration of the lockdown.
Still, it said it expected an upturn in the second half of the year, leading to a “remarkable recovery” in 2021, for which it projected growth of 5.5% to 8.5% as economic activity rebounds.
Some companies in the manufacturing and construction sectors were allowed back to work last week, but the majority of the population remains confined to their homes.
Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said on Saturday he will seek parliamentary approval to extend the lockdown by two weeks to May 9 but will ease some of the restrictions.
The government is considering allowing limited outings for children and for people to practise non-contact sports like jogging or cycling, health chief Simon said on Monday.
However, he added that children would be unable to play freely with their neighbours again for quite some time.
To help soften the blow from the crisis, Spain will propose to its EU partners creating a 1.5 trillion euro ($1.6 trillion) recovery fund, a discussion paper seen by Reuters showed.
Financed through perpetual debt, the package would aid countries hit hardest by the virus.
