Coronavirus latest: Qatar enforces mandatory masks or prison; Brazil’s death toll tops 15,000
- The Philippine government on Sunday called for vigilance against the coronavirus, a day after hordes of people trooped to shopping malls
- China and South Korea have asked Japan to join them in relaxing controls on business travel as new virus cases tail off
While the US has launched a daily barrage of attacks on China, including suggesting the virus escaped from a laboratory in the central city of Wuhan, the European Union and Australia are set to play a key role pushing for a probe into the virus’s origin when the World Health Assembly – the WHO’s decision making body – gathers on Monday for an annual meeting in Geneva.
That comes as Brazil emerges as a new global hotspot for Covid-19. The country added more cases after a record number of infections this weekend, overtaking Spain as the nation with the world’s fourth-highest number of confirmed patients.
Still, some governments sought to restart economic activity while treading cautiously amid the lingering – though in many cases waning – pandemic. Germany’s Bundesliga became the first major European football league to resume, and Italy, for a long stretch the world’s worst-hit country, announced that European Union tourists would be allowed to visit from June 3 and a 14-day mandatory quarantine would be scrapped.
Since first detected in China late last year, the coronavirus has whipped up a catastrophic economic storm.
In the US, the world’s worst-affected country with more than 88,000 deaths, unemployment has surged and retail sales have plummeted with no certainty when they might recover.
