Confirmed cases around the world pass 600,000

Another 38 people have died in Switzerland from the coronavirus over the past 24 hours, the health ministry has said.

The Alpine country’s death toll is now 235 people, and the number of cases has also increased to 13,213 from 12,161.

Army medical units have been deployed at hospitals to help in crisis regions like Ticino, which borders Italy, and it is drawing upon its strategic stockpile of pharmaceuticals to cover rising demand, Reuters reported.

Like other European countries, Switzerland is pumping money into its crisis-hit economy, and state-backed loans worth 20 billion Swiss francs ($21 billion) became available on Thursday.

Finance minister Ueli Maurer made clear on Saturday the government was happy to help with state-backed loans worth more than US $20 billion, but that it needed the money back and could not compensate for income losses.

Greeks should brace themselves for the long haul and prepare for lockdown to continue for some time yet, the country’s development and investment minister warned today.

In the first hint of government thinking on the issue, Adonis Georgiadis said measures to contain the spread of the coronavirus will be in place “until scientists tell us we have beaten the virus.”

Restrictions on movement in Greece – already some of the most stringent in Europe – have extended to citizens being forced, with few exceptions, to remain at home.

The controls have turned cities across the country into ghost towns after prime minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis announced the measures last Sunday.

But Georgiadis said there was no prospect of the restrictions being relaxed by April 6 – the original cut-off date. “The measures prohibiting circulation in our country will last much longer than April 6th,” he told Open TV.

Officials are privately voicing fears that April will be the most difficult month yet. Transmission rates and fatalities, as a result of Covid-19, are both expected to rise even if the spread of the disease has, so far, been kept under relative control.

Latest figures show the total number of confirmed coronavirus cases jumping to 966, according to the government, with 28 fatalities recorded as of Friday. But experts believe in the absence of widespread testing – only 13,477 people to date have been tested for the virus – the real number is almost certainly higher.

Media reports on Saturday suggested that the centre-right government is considering enforcing even stricter measures, including a ban on all flights in and out of the country, and perhaps even clamping down further on movement. People are currently allowed to venture out of their homes for exercise, upon the condition they stay in the vicinity of their immediate neighbourhood and inform authorities beforehand.

China has sent medical personnel and supplies on a plane to Pakistan to help stop the spread of the coronavirus, the Pakistani foreign ministry said on Saturday.

The plane carrying aid to Pakistan was met at the capital’s airport on Saturday by its foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureishi, who greeted the arriving Chinese doctors and officials, the Associated Press reported. China last week sent ventilators, masks and other medical equipment to the South Asian country.

Pakistan, with a population of 220 million, currently has 1,408 confirmed cases of the virus, including 11 deaths from Covid-19. It has closed its borders with both Iran and Afghanistan, but has been criticised for its initial lax response to the virus.

Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan has refused to impose a countrywide lockdown saying it would devastate the country’s poor, but ordered non-essential businesses closed, including restaurants, money changers and wedding halls.

According to Pakistan’s federal health authorities, the outbreak has been largely concentrated in the Punjab – which borders India – with 490 confirmed cases there, and Sindh which has 457 confirmed infections.

Other cases are spread throughout several other regions, including the capital, Islamabad, and on Saturday a woman in the northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province became the latest person in Pakistan to die from Covid.

Health authorities said the woman fell sick after returning from a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, before dying in a government hospital where she tested positive for the coronavirus.

A group of teenagers in the north England who claimed to have coronavirus and deliberately coughed at NHS staff will be prosecuted, police have said.

Details of the incident were released on the Facebook page of Warrington Police. Sergeant Hillyard of Cheshire Police wrote:

We have attended reports of a group of youths coughing at NHS staff stating they have coronavirus. The youths will be prosecuted as will their parental guardians.

This is an absolutely abhorrent incident involving abuse of our NHS heroes. I will once again urge all parents and persons with parental responsibility to make sure that their children stay inside. You too can and will be prosecuted if you fail to keep your children inside.

Separately, a man in Manchester has been charged with assault after allegedly coughing at a police officer and claiming to have coronavirus.

Greater Manchester Police said Mateusz Rejewski, 33, of no fixed abode, has been charged with one count of common assault on an emergency service worker and one count of breaching a dispersal notice.

The officer is self-isolating as a precaution, while Rejewski has been remanded in custody and will appear at Manchester Magistrates’ Court on Tuesday.

More than 5,000 medics from countries around Europe have appealed to governments and the EU to urgently ensure the safety of refugees and migrants in overcrowded camps on the Greek islands, warning of an impending medical disaster.

The coronavirus pandemic that threatens to overwhelm the camps will have “catastrophic consequences for the refugees, Greek inhabitants and the rest of European society,” says the petition, launched last week by Dutch medical professors and public health experts.

It is an illusion to think that a COVID-19 outbreak in these camps could be kept under control: 40,000 people are living on a few square kilometres, and there are only a handful of doctors present. Many children and adults are already ravaged by physical and mental traumas.

If Europe looks away now, this situation could escalate to become a medical disaster, which would represent a serious violation of the norms and values of European healthcare. It is our duty to prevent this from happening.

The signatories called on EU member state governments to comply with their 2016 agreement to take in a fixed number of refugees to prevent “a medical disaster on European territory”.

The European parliament’s civil liberties, justice and home affairs committee last week called for the evacuation of the 42,000 people on the Greek islands as “an urgent preventive measure” to avoid “many deaths”.

Holding facilities on all five Aegean isles opposite the Turkish coast, widely considered particularly high-risk environments for the spread of the virus, are currently six times over capacity.

The first case of Covid-19 on the islands was confirmed earlier this month when a Greek woman on Lesbos, the island long on the frontline of the refugee crisis, tested positive.

A doctor in Uzbekistan has died after attempting to treat a coronavirus infection that he kept secret, authorities have said.

The 39-year-old man had been in contact with Uzbek “patient zero”, the central Asian country’s health authorities said.

The doctor was hospitalised on March 26 in a critical condition and died two days later, becoming the second coronavirus patient to die in the former Soviet republic, Reuters reported.

Uzbekistan has confirmed 104 cases of the virus and has locked down all of its provinces and barred citizens from leaving their homes except for work and essential shopping.