Coronavirus live news: Boris Johnson in hospital as Japan prepares for state of emergency | World news

European shares rebounded on Monday as a slowdown in coronavirus deaths raised hopes that nationwide lockdowns were starting to show results.

Italy reported its lowest death toll in two weeks, Spanish fatalities dropped for the third straight day and France recorded its fewest deaths in a week.

“The curve has started its descent and the number of deaths has started to drop,” said top Italian health official Silvio Brusaferro, adding the next phase could be a gradual easing of a strict month-long lockdown.

A powerful tropical cyclone made landfall on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu on Monday, witnesses said, levelling buildings in a country already in a state of emergency due to concerns about the coronavirus.

Tropical Cyclone Harold, which claimed 27 lives when it swept through the Solomon Islands last week, strengthened to a scale-topping category five superstorm overnight, Vanuatu’s meteorology service said.

The cyclone approached Sanma province, an island north of the capital Port Vila, with winds of up to 215 km (133 miles) per hour. There were no immediate reports of injuries.

“There is lots of damage in Sanma, they lost lots of buildings,” said Jacqueline de Gaillande, CEO of Vanuatu Red Cross, from the capital Port Vila.

“We don’t know if we can provide any supports to the island because we are not allowed to travel inter-island and we are waiting for the government to make that decision,” added de Gaillande, referring to travel restrictions associated with the coronavirus.

Vanuatu has reported no cases of the coronavirus but has nonetheless declared a state of emergency, banned most international and domestic air travel and limited public gatherings to five people as it tries to prevent a local outbreak.

A day earlier, Solomon Islands police said they retrieved five bodies in their search for 27 people who were swept off a ferry by the cyclone as it passed over the country.

Singapore has put nearly 20,000 migrant workers under quarantine for two weeks after a growing number of coronavirus infections were detected in their dormitories.

Authorities reported 120 new virus cases on Sunday, the highest jump for the country in a single day, with many linked to foreign workers’ dorms.

Many workers from less affluent countries, particularly parts of South Asia, come to Singapore to work in construction and are typically housed in large dormitory complexes.

Meanwhile Asian markets rose as some of the world’s worst-hit countries reported falling death rates, providing some much-needed hope in the battle against the coronavirus, though oil prices were rocked after a meeting of top producers was delayed.

Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe has pledged to craft an “unprecedented” stimulus package to respond to the downturn inflicted by Covid-19, with a draft document referring to the pandemic as the “biggest crisis” the global economy has faced since World War Two.

Abe’s government is to pledge to take “all steps” encompassing fiscal, monetary and tax policies to battle the deepening fallout from the coronavirus in a stimulus package to be approved on Tuesday, a draft document reviewed by Reuters showed.

The package would exceed the size of one compiled in the wake of the 2009 financial crisis totalling 56 trillion yen ($514 billion) in size, with fiscal spending of 15 trillion yen.

Neither the size of the coronavirus package nor the amount of fiscal measures has yet been determined, according to the document, but features direct payments to households and financial backstops to companies.

Japan has been spared the kind of explosive surge seen in Europe, the United States and elsewhere, with some 3,500 cases and 85 deaths as of Monday, but the rate of new infections has been increasing, particularly in Tokyo itself, and the government looks set to declare a state of emergency.

A New York paramedic has said the US surgeon general referring to the coronavirus crisis in the country as a “Pearl Harbor moment” is not hyperbole and believes the worst is yet to come.

Michael Greco, a paramedic in New York and vice-president of the FDNY EMS union that represents emergency service workers, said on Sky News this morning: “It’s not hyperbole. This is probably some of the saddest most destructive eight days we’ve seen in a long time.

“The PPE shortage is one of our biggest challenges, country-wide as well as in New York. The amount of cardiac arrests we’re getting in any single day is unfortunately hitting a very high level.”

Greco said calls for paramedics began to spike two weeks ago, and their average 4,500 calls a day soon jumped to 7,000 a day. “We’ve been on record-breaking call volumes for nine days now,” he added.

Although New York recorded a lower number of coronavirus deaths on Sunday (594 fatalities, lower than the 630 deaths reported on Saturday), Greco said it is too soon to draw any conclusions.

“I don’t know if we’ve turned a corner yet, I think we’re going to need to see a couple of days straight of numbers declining to really feel that this has past the apex,” he said

“I still unfortunately believe we haven’t seen the worst of it yet. Our men and women are having to make decisions out in the field that nobody was trained for.”

This is Jessica Murray taking over the blog for the next few hours to bring you all the latest coronavirus pandemic developments from around the globe.

Feel free to get in touch with tips, comments and questions via email (jessica.murray@theguardian.com) or Twitter (@journo_jess).

Switzerland is facing a shortage of the raw material needed to make disinfectant to tackle Covid-19, after the country abandoned its emergency reserve of 10,000 tonnes of ethanol two years ago, newspaper Tages-Anzeiger reported on Monday.

Switzerland keeps emergency stockpiles of everything from coffee, wheat, rice and cooking oil. In 2018, the country ended its longtime practice of stocking ethanol as part of efforts to privatise the country’s alcohol market, the Swiss newspaper said.

The decision has contributed to shortages of disinfectant – it disappeared weeks ago from many store shelves as people stocked up – prompting distilleries, wineries and even beer brewers to begin making it.

Some Swiss politicians are frustrated by the move to give up the stockpile, the paper said.

“It just can’t be that an important raw material like alcohol is suddenly missing when a pandemic starts,” said parliament member Alois Gmuer, the paper reported.

That’s it from me, Helen Sullivan for now. My colleague Jessica Murray is taking over the blog. She will be bringing you rolling coverage of the coronavirus pandemic in what looks likely to be a particularly eventful 24 hours, even by the standards of this crisis.

Here are the most important pieces of news from the last few hours:

• Japan is expected to declare a state of emergency that may go into effect as early as Tuesday. Under a law revised in March to cover the coronavirus, the prime minister can declare a state of emergency if the disease poses a “grave danger” to lives and if its rapid spread could have a huge impact on the economy.
• In airlines news, British Airways announced it would suspend direct flights between the UK and Japan and American Airlines Group Inc said late on Sunday it would suspend more flights in and out of New York City’s three main airports for about a month.
• Donald Trump said the US government had ordered 29m doses of hydroxychloroquine, a drug used to treat malaria for which testing for its use to treat coronavirus is still under way. The drug has potentially harmful side-effects. Personal protective gear is also being airlifted to US affected states, including millions of masks, gloves, and sterile gowns.
• The United Nations’ biodiversity chief called for a global ban on wildlife markets – such as the one in Wuhan, China, believed to be the starting point of the coronavirus outbreak – to prevent future pandemics.
• UK prime minister Boris Johnson was admitted to hospital for tests after showing persistent symptoms of coronavirus 10 days after announcing that he had tested positive for the virus. The pound fell against the dollar in response to the news.
• South Korea for the first time since 29 February reported fewer than 50 new coronavirus cases. For the last month, South Korea has been reporting around 100 new coronavirus cases per day.
• Germany reported its fourth straight drop in daily cases. Germany’s confirmed coronavirus infections rose by 3,677 in the past 24 hours to 95,391 on Monday, the fourth straight drop in the daily rate of new cases, according to data from the Robert Koch Institute for infectious diseases.
• Scotland’s chief medical officer Catherine Calderwood resigned after being criticised for not following her own social distancing guidance by visiting her second home.
• Ireland’s premier Leo Varadkar re-registered as a medical practitioner and will work one shift a week during the coronavirus crisis.
• A tiger at New York City’s Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the coronavirus, in the first known case of Covid-19 in an animal in the US, a zoo spokesman told Reuters on Sunday. Six other tigers and lions are also believed to have been infected.
• Pakistan has quarantined 20,000 worshippers and is looking for tens of thousands of others who attended a religious event in Lahore in March. Authorities want to test or quarantine 100,000 people who were at the event held by the Tablighi Jamaat, an Islamic missionary movement.
• Daily death tolls slowed on Sunday in Italy, Spain and France. Italy registered 525 new coronavirus deaths on Sunday, the lowest daily rate since March 19. Spain recorded 674 deaths in the past 24 hours – the lowest daily death toll reported since March 26. In France, 357 people died from Covid-19 in hospitals, compared with 441 in the previous 24 hours.
  

‘All I think of is my brother’: UK refugee family reunions disrupted by Covid-19

After seven months of waiting, Ahmed* had everything ready for his younger brother. Finally, 18-year-old Wahid was due to arrive from the Greek island of Samos under family reunion laws.

But on 19 March, as Covid-19 took hold across Europe, the Greek authorities called to tell him the transfer had been cancelled because of the growing restrictions on flights. Greece had suspended direct flights to the UK but indirect routes are still available.

The UN refugee agency told the Guardian that most European countries have suspended transfers. According to charity Safe Passage, Greek authorities have stopped 52 family reunion transfers to the UK alone. The charity say they are concerned that the numbers of cancelled reunions could stretch into the hundreds.

UK house sales will collapse in 2020 as market goes into deep freeze, says study

House sales in the UK will collapse this year as the coronavirus pandemic puts the property market into deep freeze. But prices will fall by only 3% and will rebound next year, according to global consultancy Knight Frank.

Coronavirus cases worldwide are climbing towards 1.3 million as deaths approach 70,000.

There are 1,275,542 confirmed coronavirus cases worldwide and 69,498 people have lost their lives so far in the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Below are the 10 worst-affected countries:

1. US: 337,637
2. Spain: 131,646
3. Italy: 128,948
4. Germany: 100,123
5. France: 93,780
6. China: 82,641
7. Iran: 58,226
8. United Kingdom: 48,440
9. Turkey: 27,069
10. Switzerland: 21,100