Chennai: France reported its highest daily number of deaths from COVID-19 since the coronavirus epidemic began, saying 509 more people had died in hospital to bring the toll to 4,032.
There are now 24,639 people hospitalised in France with COVID-19, with 6,017 of them in intensive care, health official Jerome Salomon told reporters in his daily update. The death toll on Tuesday had risen by 499. The French figures include only those who died in hospital and not those who died at home or in old people’s homes.
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte has announced that the nationwide lockdown due to the coronavirus pandemic which was due to end on 3 April, has now been extended until 13 April.
The announcement on Wednesday evening came just two days before the current lockdown, which started on March 10, was due to end, reports Xinhua news agency.
Italy currently accounts for the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world at 13,155, while the overall confirmed cases tally stood at 110,574.”We have surpassed 13,000 deaths, and this is a wound that pains us especially — it is a wound that will never heal,” Conte said in a televised address.
In the next few days, the world will see confirmed COVID-19 cases reach one million and death tally climb to 50,000, the chief of World Health Organization (WHO) noted.
“As we enter the fourth month since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I am deeply concerned about the rapid escalation and global spread of infection,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a daily briefing, Xinhua reported.
Noting a near-exponential growth of new COVID-19 cases over the past five weeks around the world, Tedros said the death toll has more than doubled in the past week.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has recalled Parliament for an expanded emergency aid as the country was facing the greatest economic and health challenge since the Second World War due to the coronavirus pandemic.
At his daily press conference on Wednesday, Trudeau said that recalling Parliament was part of a Team Canada effort to combat the COVID-19 spread that has shut down huge sections of the economy and placed a massive strain on the medical system, reports Xinhua news agency.
Trudeau called the aid package of C$107 billion ($75 billion) to help the unemployed, protect jobs of workers in shuttered businesses and loans and liquidity measures for business as the biggest economic measures in our lifetime to defeat a threat to our health.”This is the largest economic program in Canada’s history,” he said.