High recoveries, new low in UAE active cases
Active coronavirus cases in the UAE have been steadily declining over the past three weeks. On Thursday, they fell below 7,000 with no fatalities in a clear sign that the country is flattening the curve.
The UAE Ministry of Health and Prevention reported 6,798 active cases that included 254 new cases and 494 recoveries. No new deaths were reported.
As many as 54,000 new Covid-19 tests have been carried out, the health ministry added.
Total recoveries have now crossed 50,000, with a recovery rate of 87.22 per cent compared with the global average of 60.4 per cent.
Meanwhile, the total number of coronavirus cases reported in the United States passed four million, reflecting a rapid acceleration of infections detected in the country since the first case was recorded on January 21, a Reuters tally showed.
It took the country 98 days to reach one
million cases, but just 16 days to go from three million to four million, according to the tally. The average number of new US cases is now rising by more than 2,600 every hour, the highest rate in the world.
As the pandemic has spread widely over the country, moving from the early epicenter of New York to the South and West, federal, state and local officials have clashed over how to fight it, including how and when to ease social and economic restrictions aimed at curbing the infection
rate. Whether to order the wearing of masks, a common practice in the rest of the world and recommended by the federal government’s own health experts, has become highly politicised. Some Republican governors in hard-hit states have been particularly resistant to the practice.
President Donald Trump, who faces falling poll numbers over his handling of the health crisis ahead of an election in November, has long resisted wearing a mask but this week he encouraged Americans to do so. Miami Mayor Francis Suarez said on Thursday he believed his city’s strict rule on mask-wearing is making a difference, citing improving numbers there.
“The remediation efforts that we’ve taken, including the mask in public rule, are working,” he told CNN.
Another partisan point of contention is whether schools in the US should start fully opening in August despite concerns that doing so could cause infections to spike.
Trump has threatened to withhold federal funding if schools do not reopen, but he told a press briefing on Wednesday the decision would ultimately be up to state governors. He downplayed the pandemic in its early stages and left it largely to states and cities to coordinate policies to fight the virus, a strategy that was ridiculed by Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee to run against Trump on November 3. Biden sat down with former president Barack Obama, with whom he served as vice-president, for a “socially distanced” conversation released on Twitter.