Coronavirus live news: Global infections near 20m as Australia suffers deadliest day | World news

China’s consumer inflation edged up in July, official data showed Monday, in part due to rising food prices from flood-related disruptions and as the country continues its recovery from the coronavirus outbreak, AFP reports.

The consumer price index (CPI), a key gauge of retail inflation, had been pushed up over the past year by livestock prices after China’s pig herds were ravaged by African swine fever, with the COVID-19 outbreak later hitting supply chains.

Consumer inflation has been easing since January but ticked up again in recent months, with the CPI up 2.7% on-year last month, according to the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), as the world’s second-largest economy continued its recovery from the virus outbreak.

This was just above the 2.6% rise a Bloomberg poll of analysts predicted.

Meanwhile, the producer price index (PPI) fell 2.4% from a year ago in July, better than the three percent drop the month before.

The PPI – which measures the cost of goods at the factory gate – also shrank less than the 2.5% drop forecast by analysts.

Factory gate prices had been dragged by the pandemic fallout but started rising again in June, with analysts noting a recovery in industrial demand.

China is working to bounce back from a historic economic contraction in the first quarter caused by the virus, which had shut down most activity in the country.

The US death toll stands at 162,919, according to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, with cases at 5.04m. The US population is 328.2m:

More from New Zealand with Charlotte Graham-McLay:

A man in New Zealand apparently wanted so badly to see someone in government-run quarantine for travelers returning to the country that he allegedly made a 320km (almost 200 mile) round-trip and forced his way through a 1.8m-tall fence surrounding a facility to do so.

While he managed to make “brief” contact with a quarantined traveler, officials said, things didn’t entirely go to plan for the 33 year-old man who was due to appear in the Auckland District Court on Monday after being arrested by the police. He was charged with failing to comply with a Covid-19 order and unlawfully being in an enclosed area.

The man, who lives in the northern New Zealand city of Whangārei, broke into the isolation facility in Auckland on Friday and managed to return home before he was arrested on Saturday morning.

New Zealand’s managed isolation facilities house travellers returning to the country, who spend two weeks in strict quarantine. There have been a handful of escapes from the hotels – and a couple of break-ins.

Officials said the quarantined traveler the man spoke to while he was briefly inside the facility’s exercise area was a low risk of Covid-19 and had earlier returned a negative test.

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When the Guardian’s Luke Harding began suffering symptoms of Covid-19 he assumed he would be laid low for a couple of weeks. Five months later he is still unwell, and he has found hundreds of people like him:

More from New Zealand with Charlotte Graham-McLay:

New Zealanders who fancy a summer break in the Cook Islands could be in luck, with Jacinda Ardern, the prime minister, telling reporters that a travel “bubble” between the two destinations could be in place by the end of the year.

Tourism operators in the Cook Islands – a tiny nation in the South Pacific with close political ties to New Zealand – are desperate for travel to reopen due to the country’s dependence on tourism. There is no known community transmission of the virus in either country.

Ardern’s Cabinet on Monday agreed to a draft text of how the bubble would work and who would be eligible. It would allow travelers to move between the islands, and New Zealand, without time in quarantine on their return, and apply to New Zealand passport holders based in New Zealand, plus others in the country who qualify for visas.

Officials will begin work on the ground in both countries within the next ten days to ensure quarantine-free travel could be undertaken safely, Ardern said. While she didn’t want to confirm a specific date, she hoped the “bubble” could be in place by the end of 2020.

Currently, only New Zealanders and their families can enter the country, and all arrivals must spend two weeks in government-managed quarantine.

Charlotte Graham-McLay reports for the Guardian:

New Zealand has reported its 101st day in a row with no recorded community transmission of Covid-19 from an unknown source.

All 21 active cases of the coronavirus have been diagnosed in travellers returning to New Zealand from other countries; all of them are in quarantine at the government’s managed isolation facilities. There were no new cases of the coronavirus recorded in the quarantine hotels on Monday.

The absence of known community transmission of the virus means that apart from strict border controls, life in New Zealand has returned to normal and no physical distancing or masks are required.

There have been 1,219 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in New Zealand, with 22 deaths. None of those currently infected are in hospital.

Victoria launches new testing programme for vulnerable people in the state – those who have limited mobility, for example, or chronic health conditions.

Victorian health minister Jenny Mikakos explains:

We are starting a call-to-test program that will enable someone to call our coronavirus hotline, they’ll be assessed by a nurse through that hotline and, with a GP referral, we will go to them.

We will go to people’s homes and we will ensure that they will be able to be tested within a 48-hour period.

This is designed to ensure that approximately 200 vulnerableVictorians every day will have access to this new testing capacity, making sure that people who might have limited mobility due to disability or might have other vulnerabilities due to chronic health conditions can get tested in their own home.

It is a free service and will be available throughout Victoria.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews on the relatively low case numbers reported today:

I know there’ll be questions whether the relative low number today marks any point of significance. Just in advance of that, I understand where those questions come from, but I think we all got to be careful not to begetting ahead of ourselves. We have one day’s data. It’s always be better to be lower than the previous day, but it is only one day’s data and the stage 4 changes, many of which only came into effect at midnight last night, a number of others which came into effect midnight Wednesday last week, the oldest of these being the curfew, that had been in place for one week yesterday as of 8:00pm yesterday. So it is still very early for us to be trying to measure the impacts of stage 4, but we’re certainly seeing perhaps some greater stability that is a result of the cumulative impact of stage 3. I think yesterday or the day before we shared with you what our experts tell us would have been the case, many tens of thousands of cases if we had not gone to stage 3and masks and the other settings we put in place. So that has achieved a lot. It just hasn’t achieved as much as we needed to.

The premier of the Australian state of Victoria, Daniel Andrews, is speaking now about the 19 deaths overnight in the state:

Of those 19 Victorians who have passed away, one male in his 50s, one female in her 60s, two males in their 70s, one male and six females in their 80s, and one male and seven females in their 90s. 14 of those 19 deaths are linked to aged care outbreaks.