Madrid shuts, US toll near 2 lakh UK medical adviser: Covid cases could rise exponentially

Madrid, Sept. 21: A million people in and around the Spanish capital on Monday were under a new lockdown to contain another Coronavirus surge, as the US death toll neared

200,000.

The global death toll stood at 961,531 at 1100 GMT on Monday, according to an AFP tally based on official statistics, with more than 31 million infections.

The restrictions in Madrid will last for two weeks, affecting people living mainly in densely populated, low-income neighbourhoods who will be allowed only to travel for essential reasons such as work, medical care or taking children to school.

Police cars stopped vehicles at random on a main avenue in Puente de Vallecas, a working class neighbourhood in southern Madrid, to check if people had a valid reason to leave the area.

Most accepted the measures with resignation but some complained that the restrictions were not imposed across the affected region.

“You can’t close one part of a neighbourhood and not another one, one street yes, and one street no. So, either you close everything, which will be catastrophic, or you close nothing,” said Alejandro Campos, a 30-year-old travel agent.

The United States remains the hardest-hit nation in the world, with more than 6.8 million cases and deaths approaching

200,000 people.

London, Sept. 21: Britain has turned a corner in the coronavirus pandemic in a “bad sense”, which means infections will rise at a dangerous pace unless tougher action is taken, the UK’s top medical adviser said on Monday.

Chief Medical Officer (CMO) Chris Whitty joined the government’s Chief Scientific Adviser, Patrick Vallance, at a Downing Street briefing to present a host of charts and data to warn that the rate at which Coronavirus is spreading across the country could see 50,000 new cases a day by mid-October without further restrictions. Their warnings indicate that tighter lockdown measures on household interactions and hospitality businesses are imminent.

“We have, in a bad sense, literally turned a corner, although only relatively recently,” said Whitty. “If this continued, the number of deaths directly from Covid will continue to rise, potentially on an exponential curve, that means doubling and doubling and doubling again. And you can quickly move from really quite small numbers to really very large numbers because of that exponential process,” he warned.

Both senior scientific experts, addressing their first briefing without being accompanied by either PM Boris Johnson or a senior Cabinet minister, were brought in to issue a stark warning that the UK was headed in the “wrong direction” and lay the groundwork for further UK-wide curbs.