Coronavirus threat to global peace and stability, UN chief warns
Here now is the full story on UN secretary general Antonio Guterres’ comments on Thursday and other important developments in the pandemic.
The head of the United Nations has called the coronavirus pandemic the “fight of a generation” and a threat to world peace and security.
The secretary general, Antonio Guterres, warned the UN security council that the pandemic had the potential to increase social unrest and violence, which would greatly undermine the world’s ability to fight the disease.
It was, he said, the UN’s most grave test since it was founded 75 years ago and had already hindered efforts to resolve international, regional and national conflicts.
A US judge on Thursday said some abortions can continue in Texas while the state battles the coronavirus pandemic, dealing a new legal setback to officials attempting to dramatically restrict access to the medical procedure, Reuters reports.
US District Judge Lee Yeakel in Austin said Texas officials violated the Constitution by classifying abortion providers as covered by a state order that required postponement of non-urgent medical procedures to preserve hospital beds and equipment during the coronavirus pandemic.
Yeakel’s ruling, if upheld by an appeals court, would allow Texas abortion providers to proceed with medication abortions as well as procedural abortions for women who risk meeting the state’s cutoff at 22 weeks of pregnancy.
In a medication abortion pills are administered to terminate a pregnancy. Yeakel in his ruling described a procedural abortion as a non-surgical procedure that early in pregnancy is performed employing a technique in which a clinician uses gentle suction from a narrow, flexible tube to empty the contents of the patient’s uterus.
Mass burials on Bronx island
New York has since the 19th century used Hart Island to bury New Yorkers with no known next of kin or whose family are unable to arrange a funeral.
Typically, 25 bodies are interred each week by low-paid jail inmates working on the island, which sits off the east shore of the city’s Bronx borough and is accessible only by boat.
That number began increasing in March as the new coronavirus spread rapidly. They are now burying about two dozen bodies a day, five days a week, said Jason Kersten, a spokesman for the department of correction, which oversees the burials.
Singapore has suspended the use of video-conferencing tool Zoom by teachers, its education ministry said on Friday, after “very serious incidents” occurred in the first week of a coronavirus lockdown that has seen schools move to home-based learning.
One of the incidents involved obscene images appearing on screens and strange men making lewd comments during the streaming of a geography lesson with teenage girls, according to local media reports.
Zoom has been plagued with safety and privacy concerns about its conferencing app which has seen a surge in usage as offices and schools around the world shut to try curb coronavirus infections.
Taiwan and Germany have already put restrictions on Zoom’s use, while Alphabet Inc’s Google banned the desktop version of Zoom from corporate laptops on Wednesday. The company also faces a class-action lawsuit.
Concerns have grown over its lack of end-to-end encryption of meeting sessions, routing of traffic through China and “zoombombing” when uninvited guests crash meetings.
To address security concerns, Zoom has embarked on a 90-day plan to bolster privacy and security issues, and has also tapped former Facebook security chief Alex Stamos as an adviser.
The world’s biggest maker of medical gloves, Top Glove Corp Bhd, plans to start producing face masks to meet rising demand from the coronavirus outbreak, aExecutive Chairman Lim Wee Chai told Reuters.
The Malaysian company, which makes one out of every five gloves in the world, will have a facility ready in two months with a production capacity of 110 million masks a year.
Unprecedented demand for medical and testing materials has made it harder and longer for countries to source essential equipment.
Malaysia this week warned of a potential shortage of reagents, a chemical used in diagnostic tests to detect the presence of the coronavirus.
The ministry said on Tuesday it had only one week’s supply of reagents and it was optimising the use of the substance while it tries to secure supplies.
More on Japan now.
Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, and Japan’s government have reportedly resolved a row over how the capital’s restaurant and entertainment scenes should be covered by a month-long state of emergency declared this week in response to a sharp rise in Covid-19 infections.
Koike had been at loggerheads with the prime minister, Shinzo Abe, over his refusal to support stricter restrictions on businesses in Tokyo and six other areas covered by the declaration.
On Friday, Japanese media reported that Koike had bowed to pressure to permit hair salons, barber shops, DIY and hardware stores to stay open, but would ask restaurants to close at 8 pm.
Koike will create a fund for businesses that meet her requests to close, the public broadcaster NHK said. Abe had rejected calls to compensate such businesses, triggering concern that many would remain open throughout the state of emergency.
Kenji Shibuya, head of the Institute for Population Health at King’s College, London, warned that friction between Koike and the Abe administration risked blunting the impact of social distancing measures intended to ward off the kind of explosive outbreaks seen in China, the US and parts of Europe.
“The tension between Koike and the cabinet will definitely damage the impact of the emergency declaration,” Shibuya said. “There is zero chance of achieving 80%,” he added, referring to Abe’s social distancing target.
Second death in New Zealand
A second death has been linked to Covid-19 in New Zealand, the ministry of health said.
A woman in her 90s who contracted the disease at a Christchurch nursing home.
New Zealand’s first covid death was on March 29 on the West Coast; a woman in her 70s with underlying health conditions.
Following four days of declining numbers, 44 new cases of corona were announced today, up from 29 yesterday. “We can continue to report more people recovered than new combined cases,” the ministry said in a statement. “The combined total of confirmed and probable cases in New Zealand is 1283.”
16 people are being treated in hospital for the illness, including 5 in ICU.
Yesterday, 4520 tests were conducted around the country, with 40% of cases having links to overseas travel.
The Associated Press reports that three astronauts flew to the International Space Station on Thursday, departing the planet with little fanfare and no family members at the launch site to bid them farewell.
Nasa’s Chris Cassidy and Russians Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner arrived at the orbiting lab in their Soyuz capsule six hours after blasting off from Kazakhstan. They joined two Americans and one Russian who will return to Earth in a week.
There was no social distancing 260 miles (420km) up: As they floated into the space station one by one, the new astronauts embraced the three already there. They had been in pre-launch quarantine for the past month.
More now on the strong statement delivered at the United Nations’ most powerful body, the Security Council, by UN chief António Guterres.
The Secretary-General called the coronavirus pandemic a “significant threat to the maintenance of international peace and security – potentially leading to an increase in social unrest and violence that would greatly undermine our ability to fight the disease.”
“This is the fight of a generation — and the raison d’être of the United Nations itself,” he said.
Guterres outlined eight threats to international peace and security posed by the pandemic:
- The further erosion of trust in public institutions.
- The economic fallout could create major stressors, particularly in fragile societies, less developed countries and those in transition. Economic instability will have particularly devastating impacts for women, who make up the vast majority of those sectors worst affected.
- The postponement of elections or referenda, or the decision to proceed with a vote can create political tensions and undermine legitimacy.
- Uncertainty created by the pandemic may create incentives for some actors to promote further division and turmoil in conflict settings.
- Terrorist groups may see a window of opportunity to strike while the attention of most governments is turned towards the pandemic.
- The weaknesses and lack of preparedness exposed by this pandemic provide a window onto how a bioterrorist attack might unfold – and may increase its risks.
- The crisis has hindered international, regional and national conflict resolution efforts, exactly when they are needed most.
- The pandemic is triggering or exacerbating various human rights challenges.
Regarding that fairly all-encompassing eighth point, he said:
We are seeing stigma, hate speech, and white supremacists and other extremists seeking to exploit the situation. We are witnessing discrimination in accessing health services. Refugees and internally displaced persons are particularly vulnerable. And there are growing manifestations of authoritarianism, including limits on the media, civic space and freedom of expression.”
The Japanese government is considering widening its state of emergency after two prefectures asked to be covered by the measures.
The prime minister, Shinzo Abe, declared a state of emergency on Tuesday, asking 56 million residents in the seven hardest-hit of Japan’s 47 prefectures to cut contact with other people by 70-80%, but took a more relaxed attitude towards businesses amid warnings that Japan is heading for a deep recession.
The declaration covers Tokyo and six other prefectures but omits others with large urban areas.
They include Aichi prefecture, home to the city of Nagoya, the carmaker Toyota and other major firms. The local governor, Hideaki Omura, said he would declare a state of emergency on Friday even if the central government refused to add Aichi to the nationwide list.
“If we look at what’s happened in the last week, it doesn’t look good and so we’re making preparations,” Omura said. Aichi has about 300 confirmed Covid-19 cases.
The governor of Kyoto prefecture, which has more than 160 cases, said on Friday he would also ask to be covered by the state of emergency.
As the US grapples with 16.8 million job losses in the last three weeks – representing roughly one in 10 working Americans – the below image shows people waiting in their cars on Thursday for the San Antonio Food Bank in Texas.
