Following record or near-record daily death tolls in Texas, Florida and several other badly hit Sun Belt states yesterday, it looks like the US recorded more than 1,000 deaths for the third day in a row, according to the figures reported yesterday.
Source: The COVID Tracking Project
While the Sun Belt outbreak appears to have passed its peak for new cases, deaths remain elevated, as do hospitalizations. It appears that the measures undertaken by regional leaders have finally caused the rate of infection to plateau.
As a new cluster emerges in the capital of Xinjiang, the far-flung western province where 1 million or more members of a Muslim minority have been sent to a network of prison camps, Beijing has apparently sloughed off its own outbreak scare, and is now allowing movie theaters to reopen in the capital city for the first time since the outbreak began.
“We are hopeful that the situation will be normal by October or the New Year holidays next year,” Beijing #cinema manager tells me on reopening day for theaters in #China capital. “The big draw will be the movies.” How cinemas🎥are reopening during #coronavirus pandemic on @CNBC: pic.twitter.com/vhKnq0M7l3
— Eunice Yoon (@onlyyoontv) July 24, 2020
In Western Europe, fears about a second wave have intensified as a new outbreak in Catalonia, a region of Spain known for its separatist inclinations, has spread seemingly untrammeled.
Even the revival of a lockdown and other containment measures in Lleida and the regional capital Barcelona, the area where the new outbreak is centered, has yet to slow the new outbreak, and in their frustration, Spanish officials have started playing “the blame game”, according to the FT.
José Luis Morales Rull, lead coronavirus doctor at one of the main hospitals in the Catalan city of Lleida, took his first time off in months after Spain’s original lockdown ended on June 21. With a single Covid-19 patient remaining, he looked forward to closing the dedicated ward and going back to normal. But when he returned to work two days later, there were 16 infected patients and the numbers have not stopped rising since.
Dr Morales this week opened a fourth Covid-19 ward to treat the influx of victims after a second wave of infections around Lleida and the regional capital Barcelona prompted authorities to impose new restrictions on the province. Catalonia, with 16 per cent of Spain’s population, has accounted for almost half of its 16,410 Covid-19 cases recorded in the past two weeks. “They underestimated the enemy,” the doctor said.
After recording 99 consecutive days without a single verifiable case of local transmission, Vietnamese health officials in the coastal city of Danang have quarantined more than 50 people who are believed to have come into contact with a man who tested positive in what many fear might be the first locally-transmitted case in months. The unidentified 57-year-old male had tested positive for the virus twice and authorities are waiting for more tests to confirm the situation.
