Country, Other	Total Cases	New Cases	Total Deaths
World	171,916,681	+447,206	3,575,556
USA	34,136,738	+12,976	610,436
India	28,306,883	+133,228	335,114
Brazil	16,625,572	+77,898	465,312
France	5,677,172	+9,848	109,662
Turkey	5,256,516	+7,112	47,656
Russia	5,081,417	+9,500	121,873
UK	4,490,438	+3,165	127,782
Italy	4,220,304	+2,483	126,221
Argentina	3,817,139	+35,355	78,733
Germany	3,692,908	+2,990	89,316
Spain	3,682,778	+4,388	79,983
Colombia	3,432,422	+25,966	89,297
Iran	2,923,823	+10,687	80,327
Poland	2,872,868	+588	73,856
Mexico	2,413,742	+932	223,568
Ukraine	2,204,631	+2,137	50,699
Peru	1,961,087	+3,384	69,342
Indonesia	1,826,527	+4,824	50,723
South Africa	1,669,231	+3,614	56,601
Czechia	1,661,781	+512	30,124
Netherlands	1,651,780	+2,320	17,632
Chile	1,389,357	+5,011	29,344
Canada	1,383,215	+1,633	25,566
Philippines	1,235,467	+5,177	21,012
Iraq	1,205,522	+4,170	16,405
Romania	1,077,978	+241	30,353
Belgium	1,062,001	+801	24,955
Pakistan	922,824	+1,771	20,850
Portugal	849,538	+445	17,025
Israel	839,511	+36	6,413
Hungary	804,712	+174	29,761
Bangladesh	802,305	+1,765	12,660
Japan	746,713	+1,793	13,048
Jordan	737,284	+750	9,472
Serbia	712,702	+230	6,872
Austria	645,152	+337	10,615
Malaysia	579,462	+7,105	2,867
UAE	572,804	+1,968	1,684
Nepal	566,587	+5,285	7,454
Lebanon	540,630	+242	7,735
Morocco	519,610	+394	9,154
Saudi Arabia	451,687	+1,251	7,377
Ecuador	427,690	+1,653	20,620
Bulgaria	418,813	+236	17,726
Greece	404,163	+1,857	12,122
Belarus	395,075	+636	2,861
Slovakia	389,866	+145	12,353
Kazakhstan	387,672	+1,123	3,974
Panama	378,828	+731	6,377
Bolivia	371,279	+2,805	14,524
Paraguay	358,244	+2,860	9,293
Croatia	356,397	+216	8,034
Tunisia	346,986	+1,512	12,720
Georgia	345,196	+1,233	4,804
Azerbaijan	334,132	+176	4,921
Costa Rica	321,279	+2,293	4,074
Kuwait	310,501	+1,279	1,775
Palestine	308,732	+382	3,503
Uruguay	298,006	+3,503	4,342
Dominican Republic	294,021	+1,235	3,634
Denmark	282,135	+908	2,516
Lithuania	274,783	+382	4,279
Ethiopia	271,790	+249	4,171
Egypt	263,606	+956	15,136
Ireland	262,319	+337	4,941
Guatemala	255,833	+1,416	8,183
Moldova	255,241	+55	6,114
Slovenia	254,045	+323	4,376
Bahrain	242,790	+2,259	1,009
Honduras	238,227	+646	6,353
Venezuela	235,567	+1,402	2,661
Armenia	222,778	+108	4,445
Oman	218,271	+1,047	2,356
Qatar	217,688	+230	560
Sri Lanka	189,241	+2,877	1,527
Libya	186,072	+296	3,127
Kenya	171,084	+349	3,188
Nigeria	166,534	+16	2,099
Thailand	162,022	+2,230	1,069
North Macedonia	155,304	+37	5,423
Myanmar	143,751	+122	3,217
Cuba	143,323	+1,057	965
S. Korea	140,799	+459	1,963
Latvia	133,518	+319	2,379
Albania	132,337	+22	2,451
Estonia	129,674	+131	1,258
Algeria	129,218	+305	3,480
Norway	125,576	+460	783
Kyrgyzstan	105,111	+382	1,815
Uzbekistan	100,495	+160	690
Montenegro	99,652	+29	1,585
Zambia	95,821	+558	1,282
Ghana	94,011	+49	785
Finland	92,642	+154	956
China	91,122	+23	4,636
Suriname	15,128	+174	313
Vietnam	7,572	+251	48

 

Retrieved from:  https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

 

 

Seven European countries begin issuing a digital Covid certificate for travel

By Matina Stevis-Gridneff

 

Monastiraki Square in Athens last month.Credit...Maria Mavropoulou for The New York Times

 

A digital Covid certificate system intended to ease travel within the European Union became operational in seven countries on Tuesday — ahead of schedule — offering a preview of what could become a standard for post-pandemic global mobility.

The document, known as a digital green certificate, records whether people have been fully vaccinated against the coronavirus, recovered from the virus or tested negative within 72 hours. Travelers can move freely if at least one of those three criteria is met.

Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Croatia and Poland made the certificates available to their citizens as of Tuesday and are accepting them for visitors. The European Commission, the bloc’s administrative branch, said the system would be in use for all 27 E.U. countries as of July 1.

The digital green certificate was launched after two months of preparation, a relatively fast turnaround considering that it required coordination among the 27 countries and contains security features to verify the data’s authenticity. Because of concerns about privacy, the system’s data is not retained anywhere, the commission said.

The long-term goal is for all people within the European Union to have the certificates and for visitors from outside the bloc to be able to receive one upon arrival. Providing them to outsiders could be tricky, however, considering that not all countries have been giving people secure vaccination documents.

The European Commission is in talks with the United States about how to verify the vaccination status of American visitors. It has also asked E.U. countries to start waiving testing and quarantine demands for people who are vaccinated or have recently recovered from the coronavirus, and to stop requiring quarantines for people with a negative virus test.

On Tuesday, Britain, which is no longer a member of the union, opened a separate terminal at Heathrow Airport to handle travelers arriving from high-risk “red list” countries. To keep those passengers isolated from other travelers, they are to arrive at Terminal 3, which had been mothballed during the pandemic.

Only British or Irish citizens are allowed to enter from red-list countries, and they must test negative before flying and quarantine afterward. Forty-three nations are on Britain’s red list, nearly all in South America, Africa, the Middle East or South Asia.

So-called vaccine passports have been politically fraught in the United States. States like Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Georgia have banned the use of vaccine passports.

New York State’s Excelsior Pass is the first government-issued vaccine passport in the United States. Only about 1.1 million Excelsior passes have been downloaded onto phones and computers, a small fraction of the 8.9 million New Yorkers who have been fully vaccinated.

Although major sports venues and a growing number of smaller New York businesses are embracing the Excelsior Pass, most businesses are not requiring proof of vaccination to enter.

Many U.S. businesses are also declining to force their workers to get vaccinated. The federal agency that enforces workplace discrimination law issued guidance Friday that reiterated companies can require employees who work on-site to get vaccinated.

A long list of legal considerations might be putting companies off from mandating the shots, executives, lawyers and consultants say. Vaccine mandates must abide by the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said. That means companies must accommodate employees with health concerns like allergies and keep that information confidential.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/world/europe-covid-certificate-travel.html

 

 

 

With most adults vaccinated and case numbers low, Israel removes many restrictions

By  Isabel Kershner

 

Drinking coffee at a market in Jerusalem on Tuesday after Israel eased coronavirus restrictions.Credit...Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

With new coronavirus cases dropping to below 20 a day, Israel on Tuesday retired its Green Pass system and will now allow equal access to restaurants, sports events, cultural activities and the like to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens.

Restrictions on the sizes of gatherings have also been lifted.

The decision came less than three months after Israel, a real-world laboratory for the efficacy of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, pioneered its digitized Green Pass system and became a test case for an inoculated society.

For now, the only remaining pandemic restriction inside the country is a requirement to wear masks in closed public spaces, although that, too, is under discussion by health officials. The main efforts to control the coronavirus are now centered on restrictions for travel in and out of Israel, based on testing and quarantine. Strict limitations remain on the entry of people who are not Israeli citizens.

“The Green Pass project was very successful,” said Tomer Lotan, the policy chief of Israel’s national coronavirus response center, summing up the experiment of the past few months. It was particularly effective, he said, as an incentive to encourage the 16-to-40 age group to get vaccinated and to allow Israel to reopen its economy.

“But anybody who did not get vaccinated by now is probably not going to,” Mr. Lotan said.

About 81 percent of Israel’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, but about 2.6 million children under 16 are still not eligible, out of a total population of just over nine million. Up to a million people have chosen not to be inoculated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.

Even with schools fully open and operating in a regular format, infection rates among children have remained low. In general, national infection rates are down to single digits on some days, from a peak of 10,000 a day in January.

Israel was among the first countries to grapple with some of the legal and moral issues arising from a two-tiered system for vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Because getting vaccinated has been voluntary, some people who chose not to or could not be vaccinated argued that the Green Pass system was discriminatory. Enforcement was also patchy.

With infection rates so low, Mr. Lotan said that the Green Pass had outlived its usefulness. Businesses complained about the additional burden of enforcing the rules. And movie complexes and other leisure attractions did not reopen, because it was unprofitable as long as unvaccinated children could not enter without showing a recent negative Covid-19 test, which many found impractical.

“A few months ago, if you would’ve told us we’d be in this current situation, it would probably seem like science-fiction,” said Nadav Davidovitch of the School of Public Health at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

The big question now, he said, is whether Israel has reached some degree of herd immunity. “Even if we are not there,” he said, “we are probably very close.”

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/world/middleeast/israel-covid-restrictions.html

 

 

 

Covid has killed over 5 percent of lawmakers in Congo’s Parliament

By Abdi Latif Dahir and Steve Wembi

 

Thousands of Congolese on the road after evacuating from the city of Goma last week because of an eruption of the Mount Nyiragongo volcano.Credit...Michel Lunanga/EPA, via Shutterstock

 

The coronavirus has now claimed the lives of 32 lawmakers in the Democratic Republic of Congo — more than 5 percent of its Parliament — the authorities say, a reflection of how the coronavirus continues to pose a widespread threat in some parts of the world even as others increasingly resume pre-pandemic behavior.

The toll of the outbreak in Congo is also rising as the country struggles to roll out Covid-19 vaccines, fight off other deadly diseases and grapple with the eruption of one of the world’s most dangerous volcanoes.

“This pandemic is raging — decimating thousands of human lives and exploding in the process the rate of morbidity,” Jean-Marc Kabund, the first vice president of Parliament’s lower house, told lawmakers last week.

Congo — Africa’s second-largest country, with a population of more than 86 million — has reported over 31,000 coronavirus cases and 786 deaths, although those numbers probably vastly underestimate the scale of the outbreak because testing levels remain low nationwide.

The central African state has also struggled with its vaccination campaign. In early March, it received 1.7 million AstraZeneca shots from Covax, the global vaccine-sharing partnership. But the authorities delayed delivering the shots until mid-April after several European countries suspended their use because of very rare blood clots observed in small numbers of people who had received them.

By early May, fearing that the doses would expire before they could be used domestically, Congo announced the reallocation of 1.3 million of them to five other African countries.

As of Friday, more than 23,000 people — most of them in Kinshasa, the capital — had been vaccinated, according to the health ministry.

Along with concerns about the rare blood clots, vaccine hesitancy has been fueled by misinformation spread on social media, longstanding suspicion in government systems and a belief that diseases like Ebola and measles constitute more of a threat than Covid.

Last month, the United Nations Children Fund warned of a resurgence in other deadly diseases, including measles, polio and yellow fever, as parents remained reluctant to take their children to health centers for fear of exposure to Covid-19.

All of this comes as tens of thousands of people have fled the eastern city of Goma after the eruption of Mount Nyiragongo, one of the world’s most active volcanoes.

Since the beginning of the pandemic, several African leaders have succumbed to the coronavirus. In the Republic of Congo, the opposition presidential candidate Guy-Brice Parfait Kolélas died of Covid-19 in March just hours after voting ended. Abbay Kyari, a former chief of staff to Nigeria’s president, and the South African minister Jackson Mphikwa Mthembu both died of complications related to Covid-19.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/01/world/africa/covid-congo-parliament.html

 

 

 

New York, with the country’s first vaccine passport, needs more people to use it

By Sharon Otterman

 

Showing proof of Covid vaccination before a performance at City Winery in New York last week.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times

 

New York State officials hope that the Excelsior Pass, introduced in March as the first government-issued vaccine passport in the United States, can help people feel confident about the safety of businesses and can jump-start a statewide economy that is still reeling from the pandemic.

For that to happen, they will need more people and businesses to start using it.

The passport — a QR code on a smartphone that indicates a person’s vaccine status — and vaccine passports in general have become a political flash point, as some people argue that the passports violate privacy concerns.

New York says that about 1.1 million Excelsior passes have been downloaded onto phones and computers, a small fraction of the 8.9 million New Yorkers who have been fully vaccinated.

Nationally, states like Alabama, Arizona, Florida and Georgia have banned the use of vaccine passports. And in New York, some lawmakers are backing new legislation that would provide additional privacy protection.

Although major sports venues and a growing number of smaller New York businesses are embracing the Excelsior Pass, most businesses are not requiring proof of vaccination to enter.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/06/01/world/covid-vaccine-coronavirus-mask/new-york-with-the-countrys-first-vaccine-passport-needs-more-people-to-use-it

 

 

 

Vietnam reverses international travel ban

 

International flights to Vietnam’s two biggest cities are to resume, AFP reports, reversing a short-lived ban imposed over fears of a new coronavirus wave.

The Civil Aviation Administration of Vietnam on Monday announced a temporary suspension for international passenger arrivals at Hanoi’s Noi Bai airport from 1-7 June.

A similar decision was in force for the airport in commercial capital Ho Chi Minh City until 14 June, as the country struggles to contain a virus outbreak in more than half of its territories.

But today the aviation authority told airports and airlines that it had reversed the suspension, without mentioning a timeframe or giving an explanation.

Vietnam has managed to keep infection rates low, but cases have more than doubled in the past month and now stand at more than 7,500, with 48 deaths.

 

 

 

Summary

Here are the other key developments from the last few hours:

· The Australian state of Victoria has extended its lockdown for another seven days as it works to control an outbreak in Melbourne.

· The UK has enjoyed a day without a single reported Covid death for the first time since the pandemic began.

· India said it is aiming to triple capacity to 10 million jabs per day by July to avert another wave of Covid-19 infections as deadly as the outbreak suffered since April.

· A Brazilian Supreme Court judge has given president Jair Bolsonaro five days to submit information regarding the government’s decision to host the Copa America football tournament despite the nation’s ongoing struggles with Covid-19.

· A decrease in local Covid-19 vaccine production has slowed the pace of Brazil’s inoculation drive and contributed to a growing number of people not taking their second doses, according to the latest data from the Fiocruz biomedical institute.

· Heathrow airport in London has begun processing arrivals from red list countries in a dedicated terminal following concerns about them mixing with other passengers. Travellers arriving from red list nations on direct flights are being taken to Terminal 3.

· Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa called on faster delivery of vaccines to poorer countries, including by waiving patents on vaccine development.

· Peru has revised its official Covid-19 death toll to 180,764, nearly triple the previous official figure of 69,342, following a government review that shows the severity of the outbreak in the country.

· The World Health Organisation has recommended a new set of names for the coronavirus “variants of concern”, which will be known by letters of the Greek alphabet. Alpha is the new name for UK/Kent (B.1.1.7), Beta for South Africa (B.1.351), Gamma for Brazil (P.1) and Delta for the variant first detected in India (B.1.617.2).

· Malaysia has begun a tough nationwide lockdown to battle a worsening coronavirus outbreak. Of almost 2,800 deaths from Covid-19 recorded in the country of 32 million since the start of the pandemic, over 40 percent were in May alone.

· Israel announced it will begin phasing out coronavirus-related payments to the unemployed and Ireland announced similar steps later this year while maintaining other income and business supports as the economy fully reopens.

· The Coachella music festival will return to the US in April 2022 after being repeatedly delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, organisers have announced.

 

Retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2021/jun/02/coronavirus-live-news-who-sinovac-vaccine-approved-malaysia-lockdown