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U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been moved out of the intensive care unit of a London hospital where he has battled coronavirus, a spokesman for the prime minister said Thursday.
“The Prime Minister has been moved this evening from intensive care back to the ward, where he will receive close monitoring during the early phase of his recovery,” the spokesman said. “He is in extremely good spirits."
Johnson told the public on March 27 that he tested positive for the virus and that he had "mild symptoms," but he kept working in self-isolation -- appearing at the doors of 10 Downing Street to applaud the National Health Service in the evening. He kept briefing the public in daily videos.
On Friday, he said that was extending his isolation as he was still suffering from symptoms of the contagious virus.
"Although I'm feeling better and I've done my seven days of isolation, alas I still have one of the symptoms, a minor symptom,” he said on a video message posted to Twitter.
But he was admitted to a hospital on Sunday because of worsening coronavirus symptoms and on Monday moved into intensive care. Downing Street said throughout his spell in the hospital that Johnson was “in good spirits,” and assured the public that he was conscious not on a ventilator -- although he was receiving oxygen assistance.
Johnson's move had raised questions and concerns about how the British government would run, especially considering that the line of succession is not explicitly set out in the unwritten British constitution.
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab had been deputized "where necessary" in Johnson’s absence and was conducting daily cabinet meetings as well as daily government briefings to the public in Johnson's place.
The Daily Telegraph reported that Downing Street foresaw a possible constitutional dilemma and started drawing up a "designated successor" plan with Raab picked as first successor.
Britain has put in place a strict, police-enforced lockdown across the country -- limiting Brits to only short trips out for exercise and necessities.
WUHAN, China—Chinese doctors who have for months treated coronavirus patients with chloroquine say there is no clear evidence the anti-malarial drug is effective against the deadly pathogen, raising questions about a remedy President Trump has touted as a potential cure.
One of them, however, saw some promise for Kaletra—an antiretroviral drug for HIV.
In hospital interviews arranged Thursday by government authorities in Wuhan, the central Chinese city of 11 million where the new coronavirus crisis erupted late last year, doctors called for further research into chloroquine’s effectiveness against the virus.
The doctors also cautioned that some recovered patients had tested positive again, while expressing concern about asymptomatic cases, dozens of which have been disclosed in recent days across China.
The sobering assessment from doctors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight for months came one day after Chinese authorities eased their lockdown of Wuhan, and as the U.S. braces in the coming days for what is expected to be the worst of its surge in infections.
Chloroquine has been the subject of fierce debate within the U.S. administration. In recent days, Mr. Trump has advised even those without symptoms to take the drug, in defiance of advice from public health experts and some of his own medical advisors.
White House trade advisor Peter Navarro has cited a study from Wuhan, among other evidence, to argue for the federal government to distribute its stockpile of one form of the drug—hydroxychloroquine—to hard-hit areas of the U.S.
Zhang Dingyu, the head of Wuhan’s Jinyintan Hospital, which has handled hundreds of coronavirus cases since December, said the evidence on chloroquine was so far inconclusive.
A health worker in Nantong City, China, on a production line of chloroquine phosphate in February.
Photo:
Xu Congjun/Utuku/Ropi/Zuma Press
“Some patients took it by themselves, and after taking it, there were good and bad” results, Dr. Zhang said Thursday, adding that some patients hadn’t tested negative even seven to 10 days after taking the drug. “There’s no scientific conclusion.”
He expressed concern too about the drug’s recommended dosage. Local health authorities warned in February that an overdose of chloroquine could be fatal.
At the peak of the epidemic in Wuhan, Dr. Zhang said Jinyintan Hospital was treating as many as 500 patients. It still has 123 patients, of which three were in serious condition on Thursday. None were in intensive care, he said.
While Dr. Zhang expressed uncertainty about chloroquine, he said Kaletra —a drug made by U.S. pharmaceutical giant
AbbVie Inc.
that blocks the enzymes some viruses need to replicate—appeared to have been effective with patients and infected colleagues, even though a recent study concluded it didn’t work.
Desperation and the lack of a proven cure have prompted doctors around the world to experiment with remedies that haven’t yet passed clinical trials.
On Feb. 18, China’s National Health Commission added chloroquine phosphate—one common form of the drug—to a list of officially approved treatments for coronavirus patients, though clinical trials haven’t yet finished.
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The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on March 28 authorized the emergency use of chloroquine phosphate and hydroxychloroquine in hospitalized coronavirus patients who weren’t able to participate in a clinical trial. That allowed the government to distribute millions of doses donated by drug companies.
Zhang Junjian, a doctor who ran a field hospital in Wuhan that treated more than 1,700 coronavirus cases, said in a separate group interview on Thursday that 20 to 30 patients had been treated with chloroquine—with the patients’ permission—but it was unclear if the drug was effective.
Dr. Zhang Junjian, who heads another hospital in Wuhan, said Thursday it was unclear if chloroquine was effective in treating Covid-19.
Photo:
QIANWEI ZHANG/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Given the drug’s unproven effects, “we were extremely careful,” said Dr. Zhang, who is vice president of Wuhan’s Zhongnan hospital, another institution that treated thousands of coronavirus cases. “You can’t see any difference between it and other treatments.”
Dr. Zhang, the Jinyintan Hospital chief, said that several of his patients—and three of his infected colleagues—had taken Kaletra.
“After taking it, the changes in their entire lungs were really dramatic,” he said, adding that none of them needed critical care. “If I had a chance to do things again, I would definitely have patients take this drug within three to five days of getting sick.”
A study published last month in the New England Journal of Medicine, based on a test on severe coronavirus cases at Jinyintan, concluded that Kaletra wasn’t effective. But Jinyintan’s Dr. Zhang said supplementary data in the study suggested it had potential.
China ended the 76-day lockdown on Wuhan with a light show as many people stepped outside for the first time in weeks. WSJ’s Jonathan Cheng discusses the challenges ahead as ground zero of the pandemic tries to return to normal. Photo: CCTVPLUS
Many of the cases at Jinyintan took Kaletra in conjunction with bismuth subcitrate potassium, which had also been effective, he said. Bismuth subcitrate is used in combination with other drugs to treat a common bacterial stomach infection.
Dr. Zhang of Jinyintan also recommended convalescent plasma treatment, which involves transfusing blood plasma from someone who has recovered from the coronavirus into someone who is sick with the virus, in hopes that the donor’s antibodies help the recipient recover.
The FDA says the treatment hasn’t yet been shown to be safe and effective for Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, but the agency approved its emergency use on a case-by-case basis in March and issued broader recommendations on its use and study on Wednesday.
The Chinese doctors said that 34 of their patients had tested positive again after recovering and being discharged, but they suspected that was because of flawed tests giving false negative results, rather than the patients having been reinfected.
They also both said they didn’t expect a big second wave of infections in China, although they allowed that smaller outbreaks in certain locations were still possible.
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Most worrying was a small number of patients—still in hospitals—who had been infected for several weeks, including several for more than 60 days, said Dr. Zhang of Jinyintan. Another focus of concern, he said, was the number of asymptomatic cases and their level of infectiousness.
“This virus may be with mankind for a long time, so what we need to work on is how to take the next steps,” he said. “We used to pay attention to the flu, AIDS and hand, foot and mouth disease. Now we may need a special ward for this.”
Zhongnan’s Dr. Zhang said his field hospital, in a converted exhibition center, had been closed due to the winddown in the number of cases. But he cautioned that it would not be dismantled for some time—a reflection of lingering concern around how the pandemic will develop in Wuhan in the coming weeks.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel attends a media briefing about measures of the German government to avoid further spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) at the chancellery in Berlin, Germany, April 9, 2020. Markus Schreiber/Pool
BERLIN (Reuters) - Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday rejected demands by Italy for common euro zone bonds to mitigate the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, adding that Germany would back other instruments to help countries hard-hit by the crisis.
“I spoke today with Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte for a long time and we agree that there is an urgent need for solidarity in Europe, which is going through one of its most difficult hours, if not the most difficult,” Merkel said.
“And Germany is ready for this solidarity and committed to it. Germany’s wellbeing depends on Europe being well. Now, which instruments are fit for this purpose, here there are different views. You know that I don’t believe we should have common debt because of the situation of our political union and that’s why we reject this,” she added during a news conference.
“But there are so many ways to show solidarity and I believe we will find a good solution.”
Reporting by Joseph Nasr; Editing by Alison Williams
On Thursday, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mick Fuller said investigators spoke with the ship’s captain, who was “extremely helpful,” and also gathered the liner’s electronic logs.
“Ships have a black box very similar to that of international planes, and that and other evidence has been seized for further investigation,” Fuller said during a televised press briefing on Thursday, per Reuters.
The Ruby Princess cruise ship, seen here docked at Port Kembia in New South Wales on April 6, is at the center of a criminal investigation by New South Wales police.
(Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images)
On April 4, Fuller confirmed a criminal probe into the disembarkation of the Ruby Princess, which is operated by Princess Cruises, itself a subsidiary of the Carnival Corporation. At the time, the ship was linked to at least 662 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and 11 deaths. By Thursday, the death toll had risen to 15, Reuters reports.
In the weeks that followed the ship’s docking, controversy had ignited over the disembarkation of nearly 2,700 passengers on March 19. New South Wales Health officials said at the time that about a dozen passengers had felt unwell and been tested for COVID-19 — though other passengers were not alerted of this update, ultimately departing the ship without screening, and then traveling home.
“The key question that remains unanswered… was Carnival, or crew, transparent in contextualizing the true patient/crew health conditions relevant to COVID-19?” he stated during the April 4 press briefing.
“There is clear evidence that [COVID-19] has been brought off that ship,” Fuller said during the briefing, while also confirming that the investigation would seek to find out if Carnival had downplayed the symptoms of passengers and crew prior to docking.
“The only way I can get to the bottom of whether our national bio-security laws and our state laws have been broken is through a criminal investigation,” he later added.
A representative for Carnival has said it would “vigorously respond” to the probe in a statement shared with Fox News earlier this week.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Saudi Arabia on Wednesday announced that the kingdom and its allies would observe a unilateral cease-fire in the war in Yemen starting at noon on Thursday, a move that could pave the way for ending the brutal five-year-old conflict.
Saudi officials said the cease-fire sought to jump-start peace talks brokered by the United Nations and had been motivated by fears of the coronavirus spreading in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world, where the health care system has been ravaged by years of blockade and conflict.
The gesture is the first by any government entangled in an international armed conflict to halt hostilities at least in part because of the coronavirus pandemic, which has traumatized the world. The leader of the United Nations, Secretary General António Guterres, pleaded for a worldwide humanitarian cease-fire two weeks ago because of the pandemic.
While Yemen is one of the few countries in the world yet to have a confirmed case of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, aid workers fear that an outbreak there would be devastating for the war-torn country. Saudi Arabia itself has struggled to stop the virus from spreading, including inside its own sprawling royal family.
The cease-fire, the Saudi officials said, would last for two weeks and include Saudi Arabia’s Arab allies and the internationally recognized Yemeni government, which was effectively toppled in 2014 when a rebel group aligned with Iran and known as the Houthis took over much of the country’s northwest and its capital, Sana.
Saudi Arabia and its allies have been fighting since March 2015 to push the Houthis back and restore the Yemeni government — with little success.
The Houthis were not consulted before the cease-fire was announced, Saudi officials said, speaking on condition that they not be identified by name, and the kingdom reserved the right to respond if the Houthis fired missiles into Saudi territory.
But shortly before the Saudi announcement, a senior Houthi official, Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, posted a detailed, eight-page plan to end the war on his Twitter account, raising questions about whether the warring parties were competing to appear more interested in peace than their enemies.
When asked why the Saudis would suddenly, after five years of war, propose a nationwide cease-fire, Elana DeLozier, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who studies Yemen, attributed it to the pandemic.
“Coronavirus is the answer,” she said. “Coronavirus has freaked out everyone in Yemen.”
She called the Saudi announcement “the biggest concession and the biggest confidence-building measure that the Saudis have given since the beginning of the war.”
And the Saudis appeared to be using it as a way to gauge the Houthis’ willingness to negotiate.
“It really is a test case,” she said.
That meant that the cease-fire’s immediate success will largely depend on compliance by the Houthis, whose leaders did not immediately respond to the Saudi announcement.
Their forces have been making gains against Saudi-backed Yemeni forces in recent months, which may make them hesitant to give concessions. But they could see benefits to engaging in a peace process, if they feel that it recognizes the power they have gained during the war.
Saudi officials said the Yemeni government, most of whose officials live in Riyadh at the kingdom’s expense, had agreed to the cease-fire as well, but no Yemeni officials were on a telephone conference call with journalists to announce the cease-fire.
After the cease-fire was announced, Khalid bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s deputy defense minister, wrote on Twitter that the kingdom would give the United Nations $500 million for humanitarian work in Yemen and $25 million to fight the coronavirus.
Despite the cease-fire’s tenuousness, Martin Griffiths, the United Nations special envoy to Yemen, hailed the announcement in a statement, saying it should create a fertile environment for peace talks.
“The parties must now utilize this opportunity and cease immediately all hostilities with the utmost urgency, and make progress towards comprehensive and sustainable peace,” Mr. Griffiths said.
Even before the coronavirus pandemic, the United Nations described Yemen as the world’s worst man-made humanitarian disaster. A large majority of the country’s 28 million people face hunger, disease and other deprivations.
Ben Hubbard reported from Beirut, and Saeed Al-Batati from Al Mukalla, Yemen.
Johnson was continuing to receive "standard oxygen treatment" and thanked health staff for their brilliant care, the spokesman said.
"(Johnson) had a good night and continues to improve," the spokesman added. "He's in good spirits."
Rishi Sunak, the UK's top finance minister, said at the daily Downing Street press briefing Wednesday that Johnson was "sitting up in bed and engaging positively with the clinical team."
Sunak added: "The news about the Prime Minister reminds us how indiscriminate this virus is."
The 55-year-old was taken to London's St. Thomas' Hospital on Sunday because he was displaying "persistent" symptoms ten days after testing positive for the virus.
On Monday, Johnson's condition worsened and he was taken to the ICU, but on Tuesday, Downing Street said he was in a stable condition.
He did not require mechanical or invasive ventilation and did not have pneumonia, said Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab, who is deputizing for the Prime Minister.
The UK government's emergency committee -- Cobra -- was meeting Thursday to discuss options to review the coronavirus restrictions, but officials have played down the possibility of the lockdown being lifted any time soon.
Britain's Prime Minister Boris Johnson leaves Downing Street on his way to Buckingham Palace after the general election in London, Britain, December 13, 2019.
Thomas Mukoya | Reuters
U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson "continues to improve," his spokesman said Thursday, after spending a third night in intensive care with coronavirus.
Speaking to journalists, the spokesman also said Johnson had a good night and is "in good spirits." The prime minister, who is currently at at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, has been receiving "standard oxygen treatment," indicating that he is not on a ventilator.
Culture Minister Oliver Dowden earlier Thursday commented on Johnson's condition, telling the BBC that Johnson is "stable, improving, sat up and engaged with medical staff," adding: "I think things are getting better for him."
Johnson's battle in hospital comes as the U.K. reported on Wednesday its largest daily rise in deaths so far — 938 fatalities — raising the overall death toll to 7,097 people.
The government's emergency committee are convening Thursday to discuss lockdown measures and to review scientific data around the spread of the coronavirus in the U.K. since restrictions on public life were introduced in late March.
Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, is currently deputizing for Johnson and will chair the meeting.
Almost all businesses remain closed, except for those deemed essential, and the public have been told to stay at home unless they need to buy food, fetch medicine or exercise once a day.
Johnson, 55, was moved to the intensive care unit at St. Thomas' Hospital on Monday evening after his coronavirus symptoms worsened.
He announced on March 27 that he had tested positive for COVID-19, but wasn't admitted to hospital until Sunday for "tests" due to persistent symptoms of the virus, including a cough and a fever.
Sunak said Wednesday that Johnson's infection showed COVID-19 was an "indiscriminate" disease that is impacting people across the U.K. He offered support for the prime minister, who he called his "friend," and said "my thoughts are with him and his family."
Johnson was the first world leader to contract the coronavirus and his admission to intensive care has shocked many. On Tuesday, he was sent best wishes from leaders in Europe, and President Donald Trump, who called him a "very good friend."
— CNBC's Ryan Browne contributed reporting to this story.
