Covid feeding global crises
The head of the World Food Programme, this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, says the number of people ‘‘marching toward starvation’’ has jumped from 135 million to 270 million since the Covid-19 pandemic began, and is again urging billionaires to donate just a few billion to save millions of lives.
WFP executive director David Beasley said the global wealth of some 2200 billionaires rose by about US$2 trillion between April and July as the pandemic raged. He was referring to a study by Swiss bank UBS and accounting firm PwC published last week.
Beasley said the WFP was ‘‘greatly concerned about 2021’’ because its budgets weren’t calculated to take into account the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic.
He said wealthy countries put US$17 trillion into economic stimulus packages in their countries to tackle the coronavirus and its fallout, and ‘‘that’s US$17t that isn’t going to be available for 2021’’. This was why a one-time infusion of cash from the billionaires was essential for 2021.
Beasley said humanitarian crises were worsening, with Yemen ‘‘the worst of the worst of the worst’’, Africa’s Sahel region ‘‘undoubtedly one of the worst’’, Congo ‘‘just horrific’’, and Syria ‘‘deteriorating’’. Many other countries were also deteriorating, including Nigeria, South Sudan and Ethiopia.
A large study led by the World Health Organisation suggests that the antiviral drug remdesivir did not help hospitalised Covid-19 patients, in contrast to an earlier study that made the medicine a standard of care in the United States and many other countries.
The WHO study was not as rigorous as the earlier one, led by the US National Institutes of Health. But it adds to concerns about how much value the pricey drug provides, because none of the studies have found that it can improve survival.
The drug has not been approved for Covid-19 in the US, but it was authorised for emergency use after the previous study found that it shortened recovery time by five days on average. It is approved for use against Covid-19 in the United Kingdom and Europe, and is among the treatments US President Donald Trump received when he was infected earlier this month.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has threatened to force the Greater Manchester region into England’s most severe level of Covid-19 restrictions, after local officials refused to accept the government’s financial package to implement measures targeting areas with the highest infection rates.
Johnson yesterday appealed to leaders of the region’s 2.8 million people to reconsider the government’s offer.
The Greater Manchester Council said it was not convinced that a lockdown was the only option, and it wanted to examine other measures.
Johnson this week introduced a three-tier regional approach to combating the coronavirus pandemic, with each tier bringing in progressively tighter restrictions.
Earlier yesterday, the northwestern county of Lancashire, home to 1.5 million people, agreed to accept the most severe level of Covid-19 restrictions.
The British government is sticking to its regional strategy amid mounting political and scientific pressure for stronger nationwide measures to prevent the coronavirus pandemic spiralling out of control.
■ The World Health Organisation says the number of coronavirus cases in Europe last week was triple the number reported during the first week in March.
Greece yesterday reported its highest daily coronavirus case count, exceeding 500 for the first time since the start of the pandemic. There were 508 confirmed cases and eight deaths, taking the totals to 24,450 cases and 490 confirmed deaths.
Spain’s health ministry reported 15,186 new infections, including 6591 in the previous 24 hours.
Spain leads Europe with 936,560 confirmed cases. With 222 deaths reported in the last 24 hours, Spain’s total has reached 33,775.
Meanwhile, a Swedish hospital says a woman has been infected with the coronavirus twice, but the illness was very mild the second time around.
The Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Goteborg, southwestern Sweden, said the 53-year-old woman had different strains of the virus in May and August.
It was the first such reported case in Sweden, which has opted to keep parts of its society open. It has 103,200 confirmed cases and 5918 deaths.