Coronavirus live news: India death toll passes 300,000; Taiwan criticises WHO’s ‘indifference’ after meeting snub | World news

Hi there, this is Rhi Storer taking over from Clea Skopeliti for the next hour. You can reach me on rhi.storer@guardian.co.uk, or alternatively, you can contact me on Twitter.

Switzerland has signed a deal with the World Health Organization to host a lab storing pathogens that have potential to start pandemics as the UN agency aims to boost its defences against future pandemics.

The BioHub laboratory will store and analyse viruses and bolster the rapid sharing of information between labs globally, AFP reports.

The WHO director general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said it would be a “reliable, safe, and transparent mechanism for member states to voluntarily share pathogens and clinical samples”.

The facility will be located at the Swiss defence ministry’s biological safety laboratories in the lakeside town of Spiez.

At present, individual countries share information about pathogens in an ad hoc manner, which can be slow and leave some countries uninformed. The BioHub lab would aid the WHO in responding to emerging threats rapidly, as the agency’s 194 member states would share biological materials with the facility under pre-agreed terms.

“The Covid-19 pandemic and other outbreaks and epidemics have underscored the importance of rapidly sharing pathogens to help the global scientific community assess the risk and develop counter-measures such as diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccines,” said Tedros.

“The BioHub system is an important step towards facilitating this flow of information.”

World leaders have discussed vaccine sharing, strengthening the World Health Organization and adopting a pandemic treaty on the first day of the UN agency’s main annual gathering.

“We are at war with a virus,” United Nations chief António Guterres told the opening of the 74th World Health Assembly (WHA), as quoted by AFP. “We need the logic and urgency of a war economy, to boost the capacity of our weapons.

The WHO chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said this year’s WHA, which is being held virtually until 1 June, was “arguably one of the most important” in the organisation’s history.

“This is not the time for incremental improvements or tinkering at the edges,” he told the assembly. “This is the moment for bold ideas, bold commitment and bold leadership, for doing things that have never been done before.”

A number of mainly European countries are calling for significant strengthening of the WHO, urging for its independence, flexibility and funding to be boosted. However, there is some disagreement over proposals to hand the agency more power.

Three independent panels have assessed aspects of the global pandemic response, concluding that countries and institutions had been severely unprepared to deal with the crisis. They have argued for a major overhaul of the global alarm system.

A study has found that people who are infected with coronavirus give off a distinct odour, which highly trained dogs can detect with pinpoint precision.

The paper, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, found that dogs could detect Covid-19 on clothing worn by infected people with up to 94.3% sensitivity: they would correctly identify 94 out of every 100 infected people. This compares with a sensitivity of 58-77% for lateral flow tests, and 97.2% for PCR tests.

Read the full report, by Linda Geddes, here:

The mayor of New York has said the city’s schools will return to in-person classes this autumn, with no remote options.

Speaking to MSNBC’s Morning Joe programme, Mayor Bill de Blasio said: “We can’t have a full recovery without full-strength schools, everyone back, sitting in those classrooms, kids learning again.”

The 1 million pupils who attend the city’s state-run schools will continue to follow coronavirus measures, such as mask wearing and Covid-19 testing, de Blasio said.

“It’s time. It’s really time to go full strength now,” he said.

After closing schools in March 2020, New York City was one of the first large US cities to reopen school buildings that autumn, but most parents chose online-only learning for their children.

As India’s coronavirus death toll passed 300,000 on Monday, experts are concerned about the emergence of a usually rare fungal infection called mucormycosis among coronavirus patients.

There have been between 5,424 and 8,848 cases of mucormycosis, also known as “black fungus”, across India, according to government figures. Normally it records fewer than 20 cases a year, according to Reuters.

The fungal disease, which begins in the nose but can then spread into the brain, has a 50% mortality rate.

Doctors say one of the reasons behind the explosion in “black fungus” infections has been excessive use of steroids on virus patients.

Health minister Harsh Vardhan said imports of the main anti-fungal drug, amphotericin B, had started to arrive in the country amid a severe shortage.

Malaysia has reported a 61 further coronavirus deaths – its highest daily toll since the pandemic began.

The south-east Asian country, which has a population of around 32 million, also registered 6,509 new positive cases, taking its total since the pandemic began to 518,600. Malaysia’s death toll stands at 2,309.

Monday’s figures follow a record jump of 6,976 new cases on Sunday.

England’s international traffic light system sorts countries into different lists depending on a number of factors including the percentage of the population that has been vaccinated, infection rates and the prevalence of variants of concern.

However, some countries with large numbers of cases are on the amber list, despite having higher infection rates than other red-list countries. This has prompted concerns that the UK government will allow new cases – and variants – to be imported back into the country.

Pablo Gutiérrez and Ashley Kirk have created this interactive explainer mapping infection rates against vaccination numbers:

At least 115,000 health and care workers have died from Covid-19 since the onset of the pandemic, the World Health Organization chief has said at the organisation’s annual member states’ meeting as he called for more equitable distribution of vaccines.

Director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus acknowledged the sacrifices made by these workers during the health crisis, adding that they have often lacked access to personal protective equipment and, more recently, vaccines.

“For almost 18 months, health and care workers all over the world have stood in the breach between life and death,” he said. “They have saved countless lives and fought for others who, despite their best efforts, slipped away.”

Tedros added: “Many have themselves become infected, and while reporting is scant, we estimate that at least 115,000 health and care workers have paid the ultimate price in the service of others.”

He underlined the inequitable global distribution of vaccines, with more than 75% of the world’s doses going to just 10 countries.

“The number of doses administered globally so far would have been enough to cover all health workers and older people if they had been distributed equitably,” he said.

Foreign climbers are continuing to summit Mount Everest despite reports of a Covid-19 outbreak at the Nepali base camp.

Nepal receives millions of dollars in income from climbers every year. The badly hit country issued 408 climbing permits for the April-May season this year, after closing the peak last year due to the pandemic, according to Reuters.

Following a sharp rise in cases at the mountain’s base camp, Lukas Furtenbach of the Austrian Furtenbach Adventures company evacuated his team this month.

“So far we have about one hundred confirmed cases in Everest base camp, confirmed by doctors, by hospitals, by insurance companies, by expedition leaders, by helicopter pilots who are flying out the patients and of course by the climbers themselves,” Furtenbach told Reuters TV in Kathmandu on Monday.

However, Mira Acharya, a director at the Department of Tourism said the government had not received any notice of a virus outbreak, saying that “If there were a few cases they were managed in time and well”.

Nepal’s caseload rose to 513,241 infections and 6,346 deaths on Sunday.

Singapore health authorities are preparing to trial a Covid-19 breathalyser test that delivers results in under a minute, according to the the startup that developed the technology.

Breathonix, a spin-off company from the National University of Singapore (NUS), said health authorities have provisionally approved the product and are working with the company to run a trial at one of Singapore’s border points with Malaysia, Reuters reports.

The test was found to be more than 90% accurate in a pilot clinical trial, the company said last year, adding that it will be used alongside the compulsory antigen rapid test.

Any individual who is found to be positive will need to undergo a confirmatory polymerase chain reaction (PCR) swab test, the company said.

The kit uses disposable mouthpieces and is designed to ensure there is no cross-contamination.

Hello, I’m Clea Skopeliti and I’ll be running the blog for the next few hours. I’m on Twitter if you’d like to get in touch with any coronavirus updates. Thanks in advance!

• The World Health Organization (WHO) has started its annual member states’ meeting this morning.
• French president Emmanuel Macron called for the body to be empowered to visit countries rapidly in case of outbreaks with potential to spark a pandemic, and to access data.
• In separate pre-recorded remarks, German chancellor Angela Merkel called for funding to be improved and backed the idea of a new international treaty to prevent pandemics.
• Director general Tedros Adhanom is speaking at the moment, and has said a “scandalous inequity” in vaccine distribution is perpetuating the pandemic.
• India’s overall death toll from Covid crossed 300,000 on Monday, as it reported 4,454 deaths over the last 24 hours. Its daily coronavirus infections rose by 222,315.
• Taiwan has recorded six new deaths from Covid-19, and several hundred more cases in the continuing outbreak.
• Australia’s second most populous state of Victoria reported on Monday four new Covid-19 infections, all in the city of Melbourne, the first cases of community transmission in the state in nearly three months.
• The International Olympic Committee’s insistence that “sacrifices” must be made to ensure the Games go ahead in Tokyo regardless of the coronavirus situation in Japan has sparked a backlash and more calls for them to be cancelled. Japan opened its first mass vaccination centres on Monday in a bid to speed up a cautious Covid-19 inoculation programme
• Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer has issued an apology in the US after an image showed her to be apparently violating state-mandated social distancing guidelines at an East Lansing restaurant.
• Prof Ravi Gupta has urged people to get a second vaccine dose, saying “a single dose is not particularly protective and that’s the situation that many adults find themselves in during a period of easing of restrictions”.
• The UK has reported five new deaths with 28 days of a positive Covid test. That puts the seven-day average down to just over seven deaths per day.
• The number of new daily coronavirus infections in Ukraine decreased to 1,334 cases over the past 24 hours, the lowest level since August 2020.
• Bahrain is to suspend entry for India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal from 24 May.
• Israel will end local Covid-19 restrictions following its vaccine rollout that has nearly stamped out new infections, the country’s health minister said.

You can follow UK Covid news with Andrew Sparrow over here. This live blog will continue carrying international coronavirus news with Clea Skopeliti, who will be here shortly.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has started its annual member states’ meeting this morning.

AFP teed it up by reporting that with the Covid-19 crisis still raging and wealthy nations continuing to hoard most doses of life-saving vaccines, the WHO’s main decision-making body has plenty to discuss.

The 74th World Health Assembly (WHA) begins with statements from national leaders, including French president Emmanuel Macron, health ministers and other high-level representatives of the WHO’s 194 member states.

Reuters note that Macron called for the body to be empowered to visit countries rapidly in case of outbreaks with potential to spark a pandemic, and to access data.

In separate pre-recorded remarks, German chancellor Angela Merkel called for funding to be improved and backed the idea of a new international treaty to prevent pandemics.

The discussions will run until 1 June and focus heavily on efforts to rein in the pandemic and on calls to revamp the entire global health approach to help prevent future Covid-like catastrophes.

A key moment will come on Tuesday when ministers and diplomats discuss the findings of three separate independent panels that assessed aspects of the global pandemic response.

Finding that countries and institutions had been woefully unprepared to deal with the crisis, the experts argued for a total overhaul of the global alarm system. They also urged reform of the WHO to boost its independence, transparency and funding.

India’s Cadila Healthcare is aiming to triple monthly production of a Covid-19 vaccine candidate to as many as 30 million doses, its managing director has said.

Headquartered in Ahmedabad in western India, Cadila is looking to increase monthly production of its vaccine candidate ZyCoV-D to up to 30m doses in four to five months, from 10m now, its managing director, Sharvil Patel, told Reuters.

“We still think we should be able to submit (the vaccine for emergency use authorisation) in May,” Patel said today. The company will use both in-house capacity as well as third-party manufacturers to boost production, he added.

It is undergoing late-stage trials in nearly 30,000 adults after being found safe and immunogenic in earlier studies. It is meant to be given in three doses but Cadila is also doing trials on a two-dose application.