Israel back into lockdown as it battles coronavirus resurgence

JERUSALEM－Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced that a new countrywide lockdown will be imposed amid a stubborn surge in coronavirus cases, with schools and parts of the economy to shut down in an effort to bring down infection rates.

From Friday, the start of the Jewish High Holiday season, schools, restaurants, malls and hotels, among other businesses, will be shut, and Israelis will face restrictions on movement and on gatherings.

"Our goal is to stop the increase (in cases) and lower morbidity," Netanyahu said in a nationally broadcast statement. "I know that these steps come at a difficult price for all of us. This is not the holiday we are used to."

The tightening of measures marks the second time Israel has been plunged into a lockdown, after a lengthy shutdown in the spring. That lockdown is credited with having brought down what were much lower infection numbers, but it wreaked havoc on the country's economy, sending unemployment skyrocketing.

The lockdown will remain in place for at least three weeks, at which point officials may relax measures if numbers are seen declining. Israelis typically hold large family gatherings and pack synagogues during the important fast of Yom Kippur later this month, settings that officials feared could trigger new outbreaks.

Globally, there were 29,007,970 confirmed coronavirus cases and 924,116 deaths by Monday, according to a tally kept by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.

Singapore is battling new clusters of infections in migrant dormitories that authorities had given the all-clear to, highlighting the difficulty of stamping out the disease, even in a closely monitored population.

As the wealthy city-state tumbled into recession, officials facing intense pressure to revive the economy are opting for limited isolation measures rather than the kinds of wide clampdowns that were imposed earlier, but most low-wage workers are still penned in.

"There is little choice," said Leong Hoe Nam, an infectious diseases expert at the city's Mount Elizabeth Hospital. "We need to be realistic. We need the economy to go on."

The dormitories, home to more than 300,000 workers in industries such as construction and shipbuilding, with several allocated to a room, account for nearly 95 percent of Singapore's more than 57,000 infections.

Vigorous testing

When authorities uncovered the virus raging through the dormitories they sealed off their occupants, began vigorous testing and ordered a national lockdown.

Still, an average of 45 daily new infections has shown up there since authorities declared last month that all residents had recovered or been shown by testing to be virus-free.

India's COVID-19 tally rose to 4,846,427 and the death toll increased to 79,722 as 92,071 new cases and 1,136 deaths were reported in the latest 24-hour period, the health ministry said on Monday.

A total of 57,239,428 tests had been done by Sunday out of which 978,500 tests were conducted on Sunday alone, the Indian Council of Medical Research said.

India has emerged as the worst-hit country globally in terms of new cases discovered every day. Over the past week the average number of daily infections has exceeded 90,000.

The average was about 24,000 two months ago and 58,000 a month ago. The number of new cases detected in India each day is more than double the daily average of the US and Brazil, the next two worst-affected countries.

The Indian Parliament began its monsoon session on Monday, with strict arrangements in place for maintaining social distancing.

On Sunday, Brazil said 415 COVID-19 deaths in 24 hours pushed the country's total death toll to 131,625.

In the same period, tests detected 14,768 new cases of infection, taking the total caseload since the onset of Brazil's outbreak in Sao Paulo on Feb 26 to 4,330,455.

The number of new cases is about half last week's daily average of cases, but officials said figures tend to be lower on weekends for administrative reasons.

In a heat wave affecting southeastern Brazil, the epicenter of the national outbreak, residents in the states of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro thronged beaches for the second weekend in a row.

Sao Paulo is the state with the most COVID-19 deaths, 32,606, and cases, 892,257. Rio de Janeiro has the second-highest death toll, 16,990.

Xinhua - Agencies