Health News at Your Fingertips

The World Health Organisation is giving its regular Friday press conference on the virus from Geneva.

You can follow it here:

WHO is also providing Twitter updates:

The UK has reported 274 more deaths and 24,405 new cases.

Follow our UK coronavirus blog more more details soon:

Canada needs to adopt a stronger response now to tackle a second wave of the coronavirus that has already killed more than 10,000 people and is growing worse, health authorities have said according to Reuters.

They also released modeling updates showing the cumulative death toll could increase to a range between 10,285 and 10,400 by 8 November. Its current death toll stands at 10,132, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker.

Cumulative cases could increase to between 251,800 and 262,200 by 8 November. The current total of cases is 231,535.

The Czech parliament’s lower house has approved extending a state of emergency for three more weeks, as the country struggles with surge of coronavirus cases, Reuters reports.

The state of emergency does not automatically bring any new measures, but creates the legal framework for the government to slap restrictions on people’s movement or operation of businesses.

On Monday the Czech government imposed an overnight curfew as the country continued to record some of the worst coronavirus figures across the European Union.

On Thursday the government announced 13,051 cases, down from the record 15,633 new cases announced on Tuesday.

AFP quoted health minister Jan Blatny as saying: “What is happening now is probably the beginning of a slowdown. But we’re definitely not past the worst.”

Ladislav Dusek, head of the Institute of Health Information and Statistics, said the next two weeks would show whether the country is really on the mend.

“We can see the growth is slowing down, but it’s not a victory yet” as the number of new infections reported daily is still considerable, he said.

Dusek added the figure of how many people a sick person will infect had dropped from 1.53 in early October to 1.13 now.

Schools, restaurants and most shops have been closed, as well as public gatherings restricted and an overnight curfew put into place to combat the spread of the

Iceland further tightened its restrictions to curb a spike in coronavirus infections on Friday, lowering its limit on public gatherings to 10 people from 20 and suspending sporting activities and stage performances.

The new restrictions will take effect on Saturday and remain in force until 17 November. Iceland has an infection incidence of 213 per 100,000 on a two-week average, down from a spike in mid-October to 291.5. Only 12 people have died with the virus in Iceland.

European countries are calling for the World Health Organization to be given greater powers to independently investigate outbreaks and compel countries to provide more data.

After a meeting between EU ministers to discuss how the UN health agency should be strengthened, the German health minister, Jens Spahn, said on Friday the WHO should receive more political support and financial backing for its international efforts to manage acute health crises.

“The WHO can’t be on its own and carry the weight of this pandemic alone,” he said. Stella Kyriakides, the EU health commissioner, noted that EU institutions provided $100m to the WHO last year.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals said on Friday that an independent data monitoring panel had recommended placing enrolment on hold for its trial of a Covid-19 antibody treatment in hospitalised patients requiring high-flow oxygen or mechanical ventilation.

The committee, however, backed the enrolment in non-hospitalised patients, as well as hospitalised patients requiring either no or low-flow oxygen.

Shortages of medical staff are threatening a widely watched scheme to test nearly all of Slovakia’s 5.5 million population for Covid-19 this weekend, the prime minister said on Friday.

The premier, Igor Matovič, called for the last push to make it work. The president, Zuzana Čaputová, who had voiced reservations about the plan, called on authorities to step back and ease pressure on people to participate.

The nationwide programme – which has drawn attention from countries trying to find ways to fight a resurgence of infections across Europe – is voluntary. But anyone without evidence of a negative result will have to go into lockdown next week.

Matovic has said it will identify a large proportion of infected people, slow the spread of the epidemic and help avoid wider restrictions. But he said on Friday more than a third of testing teams did not have enough personnel.

“Let’s show … that in this decisive moment we can pull together and make this,” he said in a post on Facebook. “Otherwise the only thing that remains in our hands is a total lockdown.”

The eurozone economy rebounded much more than expected in the third quarter from its coronavirus-induced slump, but the recovery is likely to be cut short as countries reintroduce restrictions to stem a second wave of the pandemic.

Gross domestic product in the 19 countries sharing the euro surged 12.7% quarter-on-quarter in the third quarter after contracting 11.8% in the second, the European Union’s statistics office, Eurostat, said. Economists polled by Reuters had expected a 9.4% quarterly rise.

“A whopping 12.7% rebound in GDP in the third quarter is a bittersweet result with new lockdowns just being announced. That makes a double-dip unavoidable,” said the ING economist Bert Colijn.

A record surge of coronavirus cases in the United States is pushing hospitals to the brink of capacity and killing up to 1,000 people a day, the latest figures show, with much of the country’s attention focused on Tuesday’s presidential election.

The United States broke its single-day record for new coronavirus infections on Thursday, reporting at least 91,248 new cases, as 21 states reported their highest daily number of hospitalised Covid-19 patients since the pandemic started, according to a Reuters tally of publicly reported data.

More than 1,000 people died of the virus on Thursday, marking the third time in October that milestone has been passed in a single day. The number of hospitalised Covid-19 patients has risen over 50% in October to 46,000, the highest since mid-August.

Covid-19 infections are rocketing across the western Balkans with hospitals close to being overwhelmed by incoming patients, prompting a race to build additional clinics with case numbers likely to peak in coming weeks.

Croatians queued up in hundreds of cars before the Zagreb Fair gate in the capital on Friday waiting to get a Covid-19 test, with new daily cases in the small European Union member country approaching 3,000.

Authorities reported 2,776 infections and 20 deaths in Croatia, a nation of 4 million people, over the past 24 hours, but epidemiologists warned numbers could rise to up to 4,000 a day in the coming weeks.

“We expect to see a peak in infections in two to three weeks,” said Kresimir Lujetic, head of Croatia’s Medical Chamber. He added that Zagreb hospital wards treating coronavirus patients had reached full capacity and that a sports hall would be turned into a makeshift hospital to take in more.

The climate activist Greta Thunberg said on Friday she would stop her regular protest outside Sweden’s parliament because of the surge in Covid-19 infections, and return to only campaigning online.

Sweden reported 2,820 new coronavirus cases on 28 October, the highest since the pandemic began.

“The situation is worsening, so therefore it’s back to #ClimateStrikeOnline for me,” Thunberg told her roughly 4 million followers on Twitter.

Thunberg has been skipping school on Fridays since August 2018 to stand outside parliament in Stockholm to demand her government take action on climate change.

What started as a lone protest with a hand-painted sign quickly developed into a global phenomenon, mostly due to the attention it gained on social media.

She urged activists to protest online in March as the pandemic started building, but she returned to her place outside parliament in September.