The raging coronavirus pandemic has the potential to get far worse if all nations do not adhere to basic health-care precautions, the World Health Organization warned on Monday. Here’s a look at what’s happening around the world.
The World Health Organization says it is possible to control COVID-19 and get on with our lives but a return to the ‘old normal’ is a long way off. 2:12
The latest:
- Canada adds health officials at U.S. border crossings to screen for COVID-19.
- Ontario details Stage 3 of reopening plan as COVID-19 cases decline.
- Why it may be harder to catch COVID-19 from surfaces than we first thought.
- Lives remembered: Honouring the Canadians who have died from COVID-19.
The United States opened the week grappling with the worst coronavirus outbreak in the world, after Florida shattered the national record for a state’s largest single-day increase in new confirmed cases and the World Health Organization warned that the pandemic is worsening globally and that “there will be no return to the old normal for the foreseeable future.”
The WHO director general said that while numerous countries have now brought their previously explosive outbreaks under control, namely those in Europe and Asia, “too many countries are headed in the wrong direction.”
Without naming specific politicians, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus also chastised political leaders for their “mixed messages” amid the coronavirus outbreaks, saying that they are “undermining the most critical ingredient of any response: trust.”
“If the basics aren’t followed, there is only one way this pandemic is going to go,” Ghebreyesus said Monday. “It’s going to get worse and worse and worse.”
WATCH | Safest way to return children to school is to keep virus numbers low, says WHO:
Communities that want to open schools need a broad effort to suppress the coronavirus, and not play ‘whack-a-mole’ with emergencies, says WHO health emergencies lead, Dr. Mike Ryan. 1:04
Deaths from the virus have been rising in the U.S., especially in the south and west, though they are still well below the numbers reached in April, according to a recent Associated Press analysis of data from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
Top U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci on Monday attributed the current surge in coronavirus cases to the United States not having shut down completely to snuff out outbreaks of the disease.
“We did not shut down entirely and that’s the reason why when we went up,” Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said in an interview with Stanford Medicine.
“We started to come down and then we plateaued at a level that was really quite high — about 20,000 infections a day. Then as we started to reopen, we’re seeing the surges that we’re seeing today as we speak in California — your own state — in Arizona, in Texas, in Florida and several other states.”
In Florida, where parts of Walt Disney World reopened Saturday, 15,299 people tested positive, for a total of 269,811 cases, and 45 deaths were recorded, according to state Department of Health statistics reported Sunday.
WATCH | Florida shatters COVID-19 case record as Disney World reopens:
Florida hits a new record in daily COVID-19 cases just as Disney World reopens and as U.S. officials insist they’re not losing the battle against COVID-19. 1:56
California had the previous record of daily positive cases — 11,694, set on Wednesday.
The numbers come at the end of a record-breaking week as Florida reported 514 fatalities — an average of 73 per day. Three weeks ago, the state was averaging 30 deaths per day.
Researchers expect deaths to rise in the U.S. for at least some weeks, but some think the count probably will not go up as dramatically as it did in the spring because of several factors, including increased testing.
The coronavirus was also affecting Americans abroad.