Coronavirus-stricken British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fever started easing as he remained in intensive care Wednesday — as Queen Elizabeth II sent a message of support to his pregnant fiancée, according to reports.
Johnson, 55, showed promising signs as he spent his second night in an intensive care unit, where he still did not need a ventilator, The Times of London reported.
“He’s comfortable and in good spirits,” health minister Edward Argar told ITV’s “Good Morning Britain,” according to The Times.
The New York-born leader is being cared for in London’s St Thomas’ Hospital by a team led by the UK’s leading lung doctor, Dr. Richard Leach, according to the Daily Telegraph.
“Richard is a brilliant doctor who knows everything there is to know about respiratory care. He’s saved thousands of lives,” a former colleague told the UK paper.
“The Prime Minister couldn’t be in better hands.”
As he remained in ICU, the Queen revealed she sent a personal message to the PM’s fiancée, Carrie Symonds, who has been isolating at home while also stricken with symptoms of the virus, isolating at home.
“Her Majesty said they were in her thoughts and that she wished the Prime Minister a full and speedy recovery,” stated the official Royal Family Twitter account.
Not everyone was so supportive, however — with a town mayor sparking outrage by writing on Facebook that “he completely deserves this” because he is “one of the worst PMs we’ve ever had.”
Sheila Oakes, the mayor of Heanor in Derbyshire, later apologized, telling the BBC she “made a mistake.”
“I didn’t think what I said would upset so many people. It came across as not a nice thing to say,” she said of the huge backlash.
BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union finance ministers failed in all-night talks to agree an economic support package for their coronavirus-hit economies but will reconvene on Thursday to iron out remaining issues, which officials said were not insurmountable.
FILE PHOTO: Eurogroup President Mario Centeno arrives at the European Union leaders summit in Brussels, Belgium, June 21, 2019. REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw/File Photo
Officials said a feud between Italy and the Netherlands over what conditions should be attached to euro zone credit for governments fighting the pandemic was blocking progress on measures worth half a trillion euros.
“After 16 hours of discussions we came close to a deal but we are not there yet,” Eurogroup chairman Mario Centeno said. “I suspended the Eurogroup and (we will) continue tomorrow.”
The finance ministers, who began talks at 1430 GMT on Tuesday and continued all night - with numerous breaks for bilateral negotiations - were trying to agree on measures to help governments, companies and individuals.
The package is aimed at providing a cushion against the economic slump that the pandemic is expected to cause and to show solidarity among European Union countries in the crisis.
But French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire was quoted as saying at one point during the night in allusion to the wrangling, according to one official who participated: “Shame on you, shame on Europe. Stop this clownish show.”
Officially, in a coordinated Twitter message with German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz, Le Maire said:
“We call on all European states to be up to the challenge posed by these exceptional times so that we can arrive at reaching an ambitious agreement.”
Officials said the ministers could not settle on a common text because the Netherlands insisted credit from the euro zone for governments should come with conditions that would take into account, at a later stage, country-specific economic criteria.
Italy was ready to accept a generic reference to the need to stick to EU budget rules, but nothing more specific. Officials said that with the uncertainty of the epidemic’s effect on economies it was impossible to design any specific criteria.
SEMANTICS
“This is largely about language,” one official present at the talks said. “There is a broad understanding that in the short run conditionality should focus on health, and in the long run on the effort to return to a stable position.
“This is broadly understood, but the language proved to be extremely difficult to agree,” said the official.
The credit lines from the euro zone’s European Stability Mechanism (ESM) bailout fund could provide cash of up to 2% of a country’s GDP or 240 billion euros in total for the euro zone.
The ministers did agree to give the European Investment Bank guarantees that would boost its lending by an additional 200 billion euros, as a measure to prop up companies.
And they were in support of a European Commission proposal that the EU borrow 100 billion euros on the market to subsidise wages of individuals so that companies can cut working hours, not jobs.
Separately, there was broad agreement among the ministers that the EU would need a recovery fund to help the euro zone economy rebound from the recession, which in Germany alone will have shrink output by 9.8% in the second quarter.
But the ministers steered clear away from going into any detail of how such a recovery fund should be funded because such a discussion involved the highly contentious issue of whether the EU should jointly issue debt for that purpose.
Mutualised debt is a red line for the Netherlands, Germany, Finland and Austria, while Italy, France, Spain and several other countries believe that the extraordinary challenge of the pandemic calls for such extraordinary steps.
Paolo Gentiloni, the Economics Commissioner, argued this week that joint debt issuance would give all countries equal chances to recover - as they would all borrow at the same low rate - rather than deepen already existing economic divergences and in this way fuelling eurosceptic and nationalist sentiment.
But rather than creating a separate fund, officials hint that the recovery money could be linked to the EU budget.
The EU Commission could borrow on the market for the whole of the EU against a suitably increased long-term EU budget now under negotiation, and then lend on to individual governments, additionally boosting the resources through leveraging.
To support economies burdened by coronavirus lockdowns, the EU has already suspended limits on state aid and allowed member states to inflate their debt to spend more.
Additional reporting by Michelle Martin, Editing by Giles Elgood and Mark Heinrich
WUHAN, China (Reuters) - The Chinese city where the coronavirus epidemic first broke out, Wuhan, ended a two-month lockdown on Wednesday, allowing people to leave the city, if they were healthy, amid concerns of a second wave of infections as cases in mainland China rose.
A man wearing a protective face mask rides a bicycle on a street, following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Beijing, China April 7, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
China sealed off the city of 11 million people in late January to stop the spread of the flu-like virus to other parts of the country. Over 50,000 people in Wuhan caught the virus, and more than 2,500 of them died, according to official figures.
But restrictions have eased in recent days as new infections dropped to a trickle. Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, saw just three new confirmed infections in the past 21 days.
Around 55,000 people are expected to leave Wuhan by train on Wednesday. More than 10,000 travellers have left the city by plane so far as flights resume at Wuhan Tianhe airport. Flights to Beijing and international locations have not been restored.
“I’m very happy, I’m going home today,” migrant worker Liu Xiaomin told Reuters as she stood with her suitcases inside Wuhan’s Hankou railway station, bound for Xiangyang city.
Wuhan residents have also been urged not to leave their neighbourhood, their city and even the province unless absolutely necessary.
People from Wuhan arriving in the Chinese capital will have to undergo two rounds of testing for the virus.
China maintains strict screening protocols, concerned about any resurgence in domestic transmissions due to virus carriers who exhibit no symptoms and infected travellers arriving from overseas.
IMPORTED CASES
Asymptomatic patients and imported infections have become China’s chief concern.
Mainland China’s new coronavirus cases doubled in 24 hours as the number of infected overseas travellers surged, and new asymptomatic infections more than quadrupled.
New confirmed cases rose to 62 on Tuesday from 32 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said, the highest since March 25. New imported infections accounted for 59 of the cases.
The number of new asymptomatic cases rose to 137 from 30 a day earlier, the health authority said on Wednesday, with incoming travellers accounting for 102 of the latest batch.
Chinese authorities do not count asymptomatic cases as part of its tally of confirmed coronavirus infections until patients show symptoms such as a fever or a cough.
As of Tuesday, 1,095 asymptomatic patients were under medical observation in China, with 358 of them travellers arriving from abroad.
To stem infections from outside its borders, China has slashed the number of international flights and denied entry to virtually all foreigners. It also started testing all international arrivals for the virus this month.
Screening of travellers arriving overland was also recently tightened.
As of Tuesday, the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China stood at 81,802, including 3,333 fatalities, the National Health Commission said.
Reporting by Brenda Goh in Wuhan and Ryan Woo and Se Young Lee in Beijing; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Michael Perry
WUHAN, China (Reuters) - The Chinese city where the coronavirus epidemic first broke out, Wuhan, ended a two-month lockdown on Wednesday, but a northern town started restricting the movement of its residents amid concerns of a second wave of infections in mainland China.
A man wearing a protective face mask rides a bicycle on a street, following an outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Beijing, China April 7, 2020. REUTERS/Carlos Garcia Rawlins
China sealed off Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, in late January to stop the spread of the virus. Over 50,000 people in Wuhan caught the virus, and more than 2,500 of them died, about 80% of all deaths in China, according to official figures.
Restrictions have eased in recent days as the capital of Hubei province saw just three new confirmed infections in the past 21 days and only two new infections in the past fortnight.
But even as people leave the city, new imported cases in the northern province of Heilongjiang surged to a daily high of 25, fuelled by a continued influx of infected travellers arriving from Russia, which shares a land border with the province.
Suifenhe City in Heilongjiang restricted the movement of its citizens on Wednesday in a similar fashion to that of Wuhan.
Residents must stay in their residential compounds and one person from a family can leave once every three days to buy necessities and must return on the same day, said state-run CCTV.
In Jiaozhou City in the eastern province of Shandong the risk level had risen from low to medium, according to a post on an official website, but it gave no details why.
LEAVING WUHAN
Around 55,000 people are expected to leave Wuhan by train on Wednesday. More than 10,000 travellers have left the city by plane so far as flights resume at Wuhan Tianhe airport. Flights to Beijing and international locations have not been restored.
“I’m very happy, I’m going home today,” migrant worker Liu Xiaomin told Reuters as she stood with her suitcases inside Wuhan’s Hankou railway station, bound for Xiangyang city.
Wuhan residents have also been urged not to leave their neighbourhood, their city and even the province unless absolutely necessary.
People from Wuhan arriving in the Chinese capital Beijing will have to undergo two rounds of testing for the virus.
China maintains strict screening protocols, concerned about any resurgence in domestic transmissions due to virus carriers who exhibit no symptoms and infected travellers arriving from overseas.
IMPORTED CASES
Asymptomatic patients and imported infections have become China’s chief concern.
Mainland China’s new coronavirus cases doubled in 24 hours as the number of infected overseas travellers surged, and new asymptomatic infections more than quadrupled.
Mainland China’s new coronavirus cases doubled in 24 hours as the number of infected overseas travellers surged, and new asymptomatic infections more than quadrupled.
New confirmed cases rose to 62 on Tuesday from 32 a day earlier, the National Health Commission said, the highest since March 25. New imported infections accounted for 59 of the cases.
The number of new asymptomatic cases rose to 137 from 30 a day earlier, the health authority said on Wednesday, with incoming travellers accounting for 102 of the latest batch.
Chinese authorities do not count asymptomatic cases as part of its tally of confirmed coronavirus infections until patients show symptoms such as a fever or a cough.
As of Tuesday, 1,095 asymptomatic patients were under medical observation in China, with 358 of them travellers arriving from abroad.
To stem infections from outside its borders, China has slashed the number of international flights and denied entry to virtually all foreigners. It also started testing all international arrivals for the virus this month.
Screening of travellers arriving overland was also recently tightened.
As of Tuesday, the total number of confirmed cases in mainland China stood at 81,802, including 3,333 fatalities, the National Health Commission said.
Reporting by Brenda Goh in Wuhan and Ryan Woo, Lusha Zhang, Liangping Gao and Se Young Lee in Beijing; Writing by Engen Tham; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Michael Perry
A member of the Afghan police mans a position at the Thrikh outpost in the district of Nawa in Helmand province, Afghanistan.
KABUL — The Taliban halted prisoner swap negotiations with the Afghan government Tuesday after accusing leaders in Kabul of refusing to comply with a key part of the U.S. peace deal — a major setback to what many hoped would be the start of formal talks between the two Afghan sides.
Representatives of the Taliban and the Afghan government were negotiating the release of more than 100 prisoners. The U.S.-Taliban peace deal called for thousands of prisoners to be released within days of its signing, but the Afghan government quickly objected to that timeline, citing logistical constraints.
The release was already weeks behind schedule, and when the two sides finally met in Kabul, negotiators quickly hit a snag. Taliban representatives wanted their senior leaders included in the first round of releases, while the Afghan government balked at releasing anyone who had helped orchestrate large-scale attacks.
The repeated delays to the start of formal talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government are threatening to upend the fragile U.S.-Taliban peace deal. Since it was signed in late February, violence in Afghanistan has escalated and a power struggle over the Afghan presidency has deepened.
Lorenzo Tugnoli for The Washington Post
Taliban fighters drive on a road in Khogiani district of Nangarhar province, Afghanistan, in December.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Monday dismissed the impasse over the prisoner releases as “posturing” and said the United States expected issues to arise as the two sides move toward formal talks.
“There was no doubt that there would be steps forward and steps backward,” Pompeo said in a news conference, adding that some progress had been made since the agreement was signed last month. “But we see them posturing in the media.”
Pompeo traveled to Kabul on March 23 to broker a deal between President Ashraf Ghani and his rival, Abdullah Abdullah. Ghani was declared the winner of the September election by a slim margin; Abdullah decried the result as fraudulent and has threatened to set up a parallel government. After Pompeo’s visit failed to resolve the crisis, he threatened to cut $1 billion in U.S. aid to the country.
Statements from Pompeo’s senior diplomats suggest the Trump administration has increased pressure on Afghan leaders in recent days.
“Donors are frustrated and fed up by personal agendas being advanced ahead of the welfare of the Afghan people,” Alice Wells, the State Department’s top official for South and Central Asia, said in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday.
Afghanistan needs billions in foreign aid every year to provide its citizens with basic services, and expert projections estimate the country will remain dependent on aid for years to come. That dependence is expected to be exacerbated if the coronavirus outbreak in Afghanistan worsens. Afghanistan has had more than 400 confirmed coronavirus cases and 14 deaths, but officials warn that the true number could be much higher, as testing has been limited.
Hopes were high when a Taliban delegation arrived in Kabul last week. The visit came after Ghani announced the creation of a negotiating team and Abdullah issued a statement expressing his support for its members. The Afghan government and the Taliban had also agreed on a compromise: The prisoner releases would occur in smaller batches rather than all at once.
The peace deal signed by the United States and the Taliban called for up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners to be released in exchange for 1,000 members of the Afghan security forces and government employees in Taliban custody.
But after days of talks, the Taliban issued a statement Tuesday announcing that the group would no longer participate in “fruitless meetings” and accused the Afghan government of “just wasting time.” Hours later, Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen announced in a tweet that the Taliban delegation would return to Doha, Qatar, where the group has a political office.
The Afghan government said the Taliban’s move “indicates a lack of seriousness about peace,” according to a statement from Javid Faisal, spokesman for the Afghan national security adviser’s office.
Faisal said discussions “had entered an important phase” before Taliban officials backed out. Regardless, he added that the Afghan government remains open to continuing talks.
But as peace talks with the Taliban are repeatedly delayed, violence in Afghanistan has spiked. On Sunday, the Taliban accused the United States of violating the terms of the peace deal by carrying out attacks on Taliban fighters and drone strikes on Afghan civilians.
The Taliban statement warned that continued violations would “create an atmosphere of mistrust that will not only damage the agreements, but also force mujahideen to a similar response and will increase the level of fighting.”
A U.S. military spokesman, Col. Sonny Leggett, denied the Taliban allegation, saying that U.S. forces in Afghanistan are upholding the terms of the agreement and that “any assertion otherwise is baseless.”
Leggett said that the U.S. military will continue to come to the aid of Afghan forces and that the Taliban must reduce violence.
The U.S. military is continuing to draw down its forces from Afghanistan, as mandated by the peace deal with the Taliban. The United States began reducing the roughly 12,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in March and is on track to bring down the number to 8,600 by early July, within the 135-day time period stipulated by the peace deal.
George reported from London. Carol Morello in Washington and Haq Nawaz Khan in Peshawar, Pakistan, contributed to this report.
BEIJING (Reuters) - As the world grapples with the escalating coronavirus pandemic, China reopened the city of Wuhan on Wednesday, allowing its 11 million residents to leave for the first time in over two months, a milestone in its effort to combat the outbreak.
FILE PHOTO: A man wearing a face mask walks next to barriers set up to block buildings from a street in Wuhan, Hubei province, the epicentre of China's coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak, March 29, 2020. REUTERS/Aly Song
But while the operation to contain Wuhan’s coronavirus outbreak has been hailed as a success by China and many international health experts, it didn’t come easy.
Using virus case data, official reports and over a dozen interviews with officials, residents and scientists in Wuhan, Reuters has compiled a comprehensive account of how the military-style quarantine of the city unfolded.
SCIENTIST TOUR
Wuhan health authorities reported the first case of what turned out to be the new coronavirus in December, and the first known death linked to the virus in early January.
City officials insisted the situation was under control for the first two weeks of January, downplaying the possibility of human-to-human transmission as they focused on a seafood and wildlife market where the outbreak was believed to have started.
But troubling signs were emerging.
Hospital respiratory wards began reaching capacity by around Jan 12, and some people were being turned away, a half dozen Wuhan residents told Reuters.
But at least up to Jan. 16, Wuhan’s government said that no new cases of the disease had occurred for about two weeks, and the city continued as normal. Diners packed restaurants, shoppers flocked to commercial districts, and travellers headed to train stations and airports for their Lunar New Year holidays.
Minimal measures were put in place to take the temperatures of residents in public places, or encourage them to wear protective masks, residents said.
“We ordinary people did not know that we needed to take protective measures,” said Wang Wenjun, whose uncle died of the coronavirus on Jan 31.
But that changed after Jan 18, when a team of scientists sent by the central government in Beijing arrived in Wuhan.
Leading the group was 83-year-old Zhong Nanshan, an epidemiologist credited with raising the alarm in China about the spread of another coronavirus, SARS, in 2003. Over two days, the team investigated the source and scale of Wuhan’s outbreak, inspecting the seafood and wildlife market and other sites.
As the scientists toured Wuhan, their mood darkened as the scale of the crisis became clear, said a source familiar with the trip.
A day before the scientists arrived, four new cases were confirmed in Wuhan, none of which had apparent links to the market.
That cast doubt over local authorities’ previous assertions that there was no substantial evidence of human-to-human transmission, which would have required them to impose drastic containment measures on the city.
The scientists’ visit was the third by an expert group since the end of December as suspicion in Beijing grew that the virus was transmissible and local officials had concealed the challenges they faced containing the disease, according to an academic on the Jan 18 trip and a scientist who visited on Jan 2. Another trip took place on Jan 8.
During the Jan 18 visit, the team made several discoveries that had been previously undisclosed to the public by local officials.
Over a dozen healthcare workers had been infected, efforts to track close contacts with other confirmed cases had dwindled, and hospitals had not conducted a single test before Jan. 16, Zhong and other experts on the team announced a few days after their trip to Wuhan.
On Jan 19, the group of about a half dozen scientists returned to Beijing, where they reported their findings to the National Health Commission, which formulates China’s health policy.
The experts recommended that Wuhan be put under quarantine and that hospital capacity be rapidly expanded, according to two sources who were briefed on the discussions. Zhong himself had suggested the lockdown measures, they said. Zhong and the commission did not respond to requests for comment.
One of the sources said the proposal was initially rejected by Wuhan government officials because they feared the economic impact, but they were overruled by the central authorities.
On the evening of Jan 20, the central government set up a taskforce in Wuhan to spearhead the fight against the epidemic.
The lockdown of Wuhan had been put in motion.
Ye Qing, deputy chief of the statistics bureau in Hubei province, where Wuhan is located, said it was only when Zhong announced his findings that he began to realize the seriousness of this epidemic.
Wuhan officials, he said, reacted far too late. “If the government had sent out a notice, if they had asked everyone to wear masks, to do temperature checks, maybe a lot fewer people would have died.”
He added: “It’s a painful lesson with blood and tears.”
Later tracing of virus patients showed that people confirmed to have the virus travelled from Wuhan to at least 25 provinces, municipalities and administrative regions across China before the lockdown plan went into action.
The Wuhan government and the National Health Commission in Beijing did not respond to requests for comment.
LOCKDOWN
The ripple effects of events in Beijing were soon felt in Wuhan.
On Jan 22, senior officials in Wuhan received a written government notice telling them not to leave the city, or report their whereabouts if they had, according to two local government sources.
The directive offered no further details, but at about 8 p.m. that night, some officials received notice by telephone that the city would be shut off the next morning, the sources said.
The lockdown was publicly announced at 2 a.m., sending thousands of Wuhan residents scrambling to find a way out.
But access into and out of the city was quickly closed off, with public transportation shut down and the use of private cars banned. Residents were soon after restricted to their homes.
Having seized control of the crisis, Beijing also removed a number of key officials from Wuhan and Hubei province.
Wuhan’s mayor, Zhou Xianwang, who kept his job, made a frank admission in an interview with state media a few days later that party-reporting mechanisms had stifled early action.
“Information should have been released more quickly,” he said. The process had been slowed by officials in Wuhan being “obliged to seek permission” before fully disclosing information to the public, he said.
‘NEW NORMAL’
Almost two months after the lockdown was imposed, China has started allowing residents to leave the city, as well as permitting domestic flights and inter-city trains. Wuhan has reported just one new case in the past week, and around 93% of all cases have recovered, according to official data.
As other countries consider Wuhan-style quarantines, those numbers have come under increased scrutiny, however. U.S. President Donald Trump said last week that China’s numbers were “on the light side,” drawing the ire of Beijing.
Slideshow (2 Images)
China has also only just begun reporting data on asymptomatic cases – those in which carriers can transmit the disease without feeling symptoms - in the past week. That followed a public backlash on social media in China that the key numbers had been omitted from the official tally, raising concerns that such cases could lead to a second wave of infections.
Xue Lan, a professor at Tsinghua University who is a member of a government coronavirus task force, said precautions put in place for the lockdown – like social distancing - would likely become a part of life in the future in China.
“From now on our social lives will enter a new normal,” Xue said.
Reporting by Cate Cadell and Yawen Chen; additional reporting was contributed by Keith Zhai in Singapore, David Kirton in Shenzhen, and Gabriel Crossley in Beijing. Editing by Philip McClellan
