By Damien Gayle (now); Josh Halliday and Helen Sullivan (earlier)
Shortage of test kits ‘leading to virus spread in Africa‘; Mexico confirms record daily infections; Brazil deaths near 40,000
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- US cases near 2 million
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11.35am BST
Africa will have a “steady increase” in Covid-19 cases until a vaccine is developed, the director general of the World Health Organization’s regional office for the continent said on Thursday.
Matshidiso Moeti, the UN health agency’s Africa regional director, spoke as the latest collated figures for the continent, which has so far avoided the kind of mass outbreak seen in the rest of the world, showed about 6,500 more cases were reported since Wednesday.
Until such time as we have access to an effective vaccine, I’m afraid we’ll probably have to live with a steady increase in the region, with some hotspots having to be managed in a number of countries, as is happening now in South Africa, Algeria, Cameroon for example, which require very strong public health measures, social distancing measures to take place.
Over 207,000 confirmed #COVID19 cases on the African continent – with more than 94,000 recoveries & 5,600 deaths. View country figures & more with the WHO African Region COVID-19 Dashboard: https://t.co/V0fkK8dYTg pic.twitter.com/WZZuo2XIaf
11.20am BST
In Germany, the number of active Covid-19 cases has gone up to 5,460 – the first rise in total cases in two months, writes Philip Oltermann, the Guardian’s Berlin bureau chief.
On Thursday, health authorities recorded 555 new confirmed infections and 400 new patients who had recovered from the disease, bringing the total number of Covid-19 cases to be recorded in Germany so far to 185,416. 8,755 people have died of the virus in Germany so far, a day-on-day rise of 26.
Source: Coronavirus live news: pandemic accelerating across Africa; over 2 million cases in US
