Новости за 01.04.2020

The World Health Organization said Wednesday it was deeply concerned about the near-exponential escalation of the new coronavirus pandemic, with the number of deaths doubling in a week.

With billions across the world under lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic, one country stands almost alone. In Sweden, daily life has been continuing largely as normal as authorities have taken a radically different approach to tackling the virus.

Much of Europe has closed its external borders to non-citizens – and within the continent’s borders, there are drastic restrictions and severely reduced traffic on major transport routes. FRANCE 24 tells more about what’s moving and what’s stuck around the continent.

Paris’s Louvre, Russia’s Hermitage, and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC: these are some of the world’s great museums offering virtual tours and sneak peeks in lieu of actual visits during the coronavirus pandemic. The list also includes Paris’s Grand Palais, which postponed the scheduled opening of its exhibition on the ancient Roman city of Pompeii. FRANCE 24’s Encore! programme examines the online offerings.

Moscow is rolling out a mobile phone app and scannable bar codes to check whether people are adhering to strict isolation rules during lockdown, an official said Wednesday.

France is likely to unwind its nationwide coronavirus lockdown gradually rather than in one go, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe told parliament on Wednesday while the interior minister noted 359,000 fines for violating the lockdown had been issued since lockdown began in mid-March.

Britain reported 563 daily coronavirus deaths on Wednesday, the first time the national toll has exceeded 500, bringing the total fatalities to 2,352, according to official figures.

Mainland China reported dwindling new infections on Wednesday in a global coronavirus pandemic, and started to publish the daily change in cases that are free of symptoms, although the latter could complicate the picture of trends in the disease.

One by one, elderly residents of French nursing homes are going into forced isolation into their rooms. Their caregivers are walling themselves in as well. They are running out of body bags.

American auto manufacturers General Motors and Ford, French car companies PSA and Renault, and Formula 1 engineers have joined the ranks in response to a massive global shortage of the vital piece of medical equipment.

Five years into the civil war between a Saudi-led coalition and Iran-backed Houthi rebels – a period that included a devastating cholera epidemic – more than half of Yemen’s health facilities are not functioning, and some doctors and nurses have fled the country. Tamuna Sabadze of the International Rescue Committee describes Yemen's situation on FRANCE 24’s Middle East Matters programme.

France’s foreign ministry has evidence dating from early March that French hostage Sophie Pétronin is alive, her son told France Info radio on Wednesday. The ailing aid worker was abducted by armed men in Mali in 2016.

Former Marseille president Pape Diouf has died aged 68 after contracting the new coronavirus, the football club and a family source said on Tuesday.

Brazil's economy minister on Tuesday said the country needed to strike a balance between social isolation policies and protecting the economy, hours after President Jair Bolsonaro said hunger was just as big a threat as the coronavirus itself.

Soldiers tower over youngsters in South Africa's Soweto township, forcing them to do push-ups and roll on the floor as punishment for not adhering to a lockdown meant to halt the spread of coronavirus.

The coronavirus pandemic is the worst global crisis since World War II, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Tuesday, expressing concern that it could trigger conflicts around the world.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday warned of a "very painful" two weeks as the United States wrestles with a coronavirus surge that the White House warns could kill as many as 240,000 Americans.