News Desk :
The death toll from coronavirus reached 1,29,099 while infected 20,17,810 and recovered 4,92, 115, according to worldometer.
US coronavirus deaths have risen by a single-day record 2,228 to top 28,300, according to a Reuters tally, as officials debated how to reopen the economy without reigniting the outbreak.
The United States, with the world’s third-largest population, passed a second milestone late on Tuesday with over 600,000 reported cases, three times more than any other country.
The previous single-day record was 2,069, set last Friday.
The increase of 2,228 deaths excludes a revision by New York City to include deaths presumed to be due to the novel coronavirus but never tested dating back to March 11.
Officials reported 3,778 “probable” deaths, where doctors were certain enough of the cause of death to list it on the death certificate, and 6,589 confirmed by a lab test. Combined, that would put the total fatalities in the city to over 10,000. As the numbers continue to rise, officials debate over how and when to reopen the US economy and start easing restrictions.
The coronavirus restrictions put in place to contain the spread of the virus have crippled the economy, with businesses forced to close and millions of Americans losing their jobs. President Donald Trump has floated a May 1 target for restarting the economy, which his top infectious disease adviser said on Tuesday was “overly optimistic” after a battle erupted between Trump and state governors over who had the power to lift restrictions aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic.
Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said public health officials must be able to test for the virus quickly, isolate new cases and track down new infections before social-distancing restrictions can be eased.
“We have to have something in place that is efficient and that we can rely on, and we’re not there yet,” Fauci told the Associated Press news agency.
Trump, a Republican running for re-election in November, lashed out at Democratic state governors, suggesting they were “mutineers” after New York’s Governor Andrew Cuomo said he would refuse any order by the president to reopen the economy too soon.
“If he ordered me to reopen in a way that would endanger the public health of the people of my state, I wouldn’t do it,” Cuomo told CNN earlier on Tuesday, referring to Trump.
At a news conference later, Cuomo said Trump was “clearly spoiling for a fight on this issue” and that he did not want a partisan battle, but added, “We don’t have a king in this country, we have a constitution and we elect the president.”
Offering an expansive assessment of the powers of the presidency, Trump on Monday asserted he has “total” authority to decide on reopening the economy even though he earlier had deferred to the governors in putting social distancing orders in place.
Cuomo, a Democrat whose state has been the epicentre of the US outbreak, and governors of six other northeastern states have announced plans to formulate a regional plan to gradually lift restrictions. On the Pacific Coast, the governors of California, Oregon and Washington state announced a similar regional approach.
Trump, whose attacks on Democrats appeal to his conservative political base, posted tweets attacking Cuomo individually and Democratic governors in general.
Trump rejected the idea that governors should determine when and how to reopen state economies, insisting “the president of the United States calls the shots”.
“The governors know that,” Trump told a Monday briefing.
But governors were moving forward with their planning. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, a Democrat, on Tuesday offered her own framework for eventually restarting public life and business in the state.
Some Republicans, including the governors of Ohio, Maryland and New Hampshire, also said states have the right to decide when and how to reopen.
The political posturing coincided with fresh signs the pandemic has been slowing in New York and other early hot spots even as the death toll mounts.
New York hospitalisations have fallen for the first time since the pandemic’s onset, Cuomo said, adding, “We think we are at the apex on the plateau.”
Cuomo said 778 New Yorkers died in the past day, up from 671 a day earlier, which had marked the lowest daily toll since April 5. A total of 10,834 New Yorkers have died due to COVID-19.
David Reich, president of New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, said even if hospital admissions there had levelled off, it still remained an extraordinary time of strain for staff and resources.
“The plateau is not a very comfortable place to live,” Reich said in a telephone interview. “So I don’t think people should be celebrating prematurely.”
Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy rose by 602 on Tuesday, up from 566 the day before, posting a second consecutive daily increase, but new infections slowed to 2,972 from 3,153, seeing the smallest daily tally since March 13.
The total death toll since the outbreak came to light on Feb. 21 rose to 21,067, the Civil Protection Agency said, the second highest in the world after that of the United States.
The number of officially confirmed cases climbed to 162,488, the third highest global tally behind those of the United States and Spain.
The euro zone’s third largest economy is in tatters after more than a month of a nationwide lockdown to try to curb the contagion, with most businesses closed except those considered essential to the country’s supply chain.
The International Monetary Fund forecast on Tuesday that Italian gross domestic product would shrink 9.1% this year.
That compared with a projected 7.5% drop for the euro zone as a whole and would be the steepest contraction of any large European country.
Italy, which has been the euro zone’s most sluggish economy since the start of monetary union, was already teetering on the brink of recession before the coronavirus hit, with GDP falling 0.3% in the last quarter of 2019 from the previous three months.
The Civil Protection Agency said there were 3,186 people in intensive care on Tuesday against 3,260 on Monday – an 11th consecutive daily decline.
Of those originally infected, 37,130 were declared recovered against 35,435 a day earlier.
The number of deaths from the coronavirus in Spain in 24 hours fell again on Wednesday to 523 from 567 reported the previous day, the country’s health ministry said.
The daily death toll brought the total number of fatalities to 18,579.
The overall number of cases in the country rose to 177,633 on Wednesday from 172,541 the day before.
France on Tuesday reported 762 more COVID-19 deaths in hospitals and nursing homes, bringing its total toll from the epidemic to 15,729.
The number of confirmed cases in France now exceeds 100,000, health official Jerome Salomon told reporters, adding however that the total number of patients in intensive care fell for the sixth day in a row, by 91 to 6,730.
Despite the heavy new death toll, Salomon said that the latest data confirmed that France’s month-long lockdown was beginning to have an effect.
‘We have observed a plateau over the last days. Thanks to your efforts and the lockdown we have managed to limit the spread of the virus,’ he said.
The new toll was released after president Emmanuel Macron on Monday said that the epidemic ‘was beginning to steady’ in France and added the lockdown could begin to be eased from May 11.
The details of how the lockdown will be eased have yet to be made clear and interior minister Christophe Castaner emphasised that the date was not set in stone and depended on positive trends continuing.
‘May 11 is an objective,’ he told France Inter radio. ‘It is a date that we must achieve by respecting the lockdown,’ he said.
The most controversial announcement by Macron was that schools would open gradually from May 11, even though cafes and cultural venues would stay shut.
‘We have found contradictions in this speech,’ Francette Popineau, general secretary of Snuipp-FSU teachers’ union told AFP.
‘We understood that there was to be an end to the confinement as of 11 May, but what we did not understand was why restaurants would be closed and why canteens would be open, why cinemas would be closed and why schools would be open,’ she added.
Macron in his speech also indicated that a COVID-19 vaccine would be the only long-term solution, adding there was no evidence of so-called herd immunity among people in France with only a minority of people infected.
Salomon said the estimates based on modelling indicated that around 5 to 10 per cent of the French population had been infected, but it varied according to region.
The official number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in France is now 103,573 but officials believe this is vastly understated due to a lack of testing.
The COVID-19 death toll in hospitals across the United Kingdom rose to 12,107 as of 1600 GMT on April 13, up by 778 on the day before, the health ministry said.
“302,599 people have been tested of which 93,873 tested positive,” the health ministry said.
With 94 new deaths reported in Iran, the death toll from the new coronavirus rose to 4,777, state media said on Wednesday.
The Iranian state TV reported Kianoush Jahanpour, a spokesman for the Health Ministry, as saying that 1,512 more people have tested positive for COVID-19 in the past 24 hours, bringing the total infections to 76,389.
Jahanpour said 49,933 people have recovered so far and been discharged from hospitals, while 3,643 patients are in critical condition.
Since the virus emerged in China last December, it has spread to at least 185 countries and regions.
There are more than 1.98 million confirmed infections globally with nearly 127,000 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University. Almost 495,000 have recovered.
