With that, I’ll hand over to my colleague Jessica Murray.
Thanks for following along and stay safe.
Thailand has reported seven new coronavirus cases and two deaths, bringing the total death toll to 54 and total number of infections to 2,938.
2,652 people have recovered from the disease, the government said.
We should add that the Australian app does not track your location, or access your GPS. It exchanges Bluetooth handshakes with other phones with the app if you are near them for 15 minutes.
My colleague Josh Taylor has a full explainer here.
In Australia, the federal police have been called in to investigate a potential hoax about the country’s new coronavirus tracking app.
The Australian government yesterday released its contact tracing app, called Covidsafe, which is based on Singapore’s.
However, an image has been circulating on social media that claims to show a text from the app – telling the user they’ve been detected venturing outside their home and have 15 minutes to provide an excuse.
Crucially, it’s not clear if the hoax text has actually been sent as a text to people’s phones, or it is a photoshop.
Regardless, Australia’s health minister Greg Hunt said today it had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.
“That investigation has begun, and anybody who is found responsible will be charged with a significant criminal offence,” he said.
“To have a few people, or it may just be one person, who are doing something contrary to the public health messages, this isn’t a game. This is about life and death. This is about saving lives and protecting lives.”
“The more people that are able to download and register, the more people who will be protected against inadvertently contracting a life-threatening disease,” he said.
Germany has recorded 163 new deaths from Covid-19 and 1,144 new infections, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases
The total death toll is now at 5,913 and total cases at 156,337.
In Nigeria, authorities have denied that Covid-19 is responsible for a surge in deaths from pneumonia.
Doctors in Kano in the country’s north-west have reported a rise in fatal cases of pneumonia, but authorities have blaming malaria, meningitis, hypertension and other illnesses.
In non-coronavirus news, the Pentagon has released footage of US Navy pilots encountering three unidentified flying objects.
The videos were previously leaked, and show encounters from 2004 and 2015. The Pentagon said they released them to “to clear up any misconceptions by the public on whether or not the footage that has been circulating was real or whether or not there is more to the videos” .
The video, and a full story is here:
The UN’s humanitarian affairs chief has said that the full impact of the pandemic has not yet hit the world’s poorest, but will in the next three to six months.
Mark Lowcock said in a video briefing that it would cost $90bn to provide income support, food and health care to 700 million vulnerable people.
He said two-thirds of the $90bn could come from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, and the remaining third could be financed by a one-off increase in development assistance.
The $90bn would be only 1 percent of the total combined stimulus packages that the world’s 20 richest countries have already put in place.
“$90 billion is a lot of money but it is an affordable sum of money”, he said.
Updated
The South Korean president, Moon Jae-in, has said that the economic impact from the coronavirus will worsen in future, Reuters also reports.
That’s after the pandemic already pushed South Korea’s economy in the first quarter into its biggest contraction since 2008.
In Hong Kong, leader Carrie Lam has said most civil servants will gradually return to work from May 4, Reuters reports.
Hong Kong has reported no new infections for the second day in a row, and Lam said said outdoor sports facilities, libraries and museums would also reopen from Monday although they would still be subject to a ban on gatherings of more than four people.
But the government had not yet decided whether to ease travel and social distancing restrictions that are due to expire next week.
A key consideration for Lam will also be whether to ease cross-border travel restrictions with mainland China.
Hong Kong has confirmed 1,038 cases and four deaths since the outbreak began in January.
And here is our piece for Australians in NSW on what the relaxed restrictions (from Friday) will mean:
