LEADERS TO HOLD TALKS AS DEATHS HIT 21,000

PITTSBURGH: World leaders are to hold online crisis talks on Thursday ( Friday in Manila) on the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) pandemic that has forced 3 billion people into lockdown and claimed more than 21,000 lives.

With the disease tearing around the globe at a terrifying pace, warnings are multiplying over its economic consequences, with experts saying it could cause more damage than the Great Depression.

Amid squabbling between the leaders of China and the United States over who is to blame, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for the world to act together to halt the menace.

He suggested that Group of 7 (G7) leaders initiate the talks so there will be a collective effort to combat the deadly virus. The G7 leaders are US President Donald Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Prime Ministers Shinzo Abe, Japan;

Boris Johnson, Great Britain; and Justin Trudeau, Canada.

“Covid-19 is threatening the whole of humanity — and the whole of humanity must fight back,” Guterres said, launching an appeal for $2 billion to help the world’s poor.

“Global action and solidarity are crucial,” he added. “Individual country responses are not going to be enough.”

The death toll from the virus, which emerged in China late last year, continued to grow, with the US becoming the sixth country to hit four figures.

At least 1,041 people are now known to have died in the US, with almost 70,000 confirmed infections, a tally by Johns Hopkins University showed, while globally the number of infections is closing in on half a million.

The rocketing infection rate in the US has sparked a rush to buy weapons, gun store owners told the Agence France-Presse, with customers panicking about social breakdown.

“A lot of people are buying shotguns, handguns, AR-15 (semiautomatic rifles), everything,” said Tiffany Teasdale, who sells guns in Washington state.

In related news, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the G7 powers were united in opposing China’s coronavirus “disinformation,” but European allies emphasized cooperation to fight the global pandemic.

Foreign ministers from the major industrialized democracies spoke about the crisis by videoconference, scrapping a meeting scheduled in Pittsburgh, but any hope of showing a common front was eroded by the absence of a joint statement.

Pompeo, a sharp critic of Beijing who has gone on the offensive over what he calls the “Wuhan virus,” said he shared a common view with the top diplomats of the other G7 countries — Britain, Canada, France,

Germany, Italy and Japan.

“Every one of the nations that were at that meeting this morning was deeply aware of the disinformation campaign that the Chinese Communist Party is engaged in to try and deflect from what has really taken place,” he told reporters.

He said China “has been and continues to be engaged in” a campaign through social media that had included conspiracy theories of US involvement.

“This is crazy talk,” Pompeo added.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman infuriated Trump’s administration by suggesting on Twitter that US troops brought the virus to Wuhan, the metropolis where it was first detected late last year.

Scientists widely believe the Covid-19 virus came from a Wuhan meat market that butchered exotic animals.

The virus has killed more than 21,000 people globally, but Beijing has appeared to bring it under control and has sent aid overseas — including 40 tons of medical supplies to US ally Italy, which has the world’s highest death toll.