Indian PM aims to boost morale of his people

NEW DELHI－To bolster morale, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged the country's 1.3 billion people to hold candles and mobile phones aloft for nine minutes at 9 pm on Sunday to dispel the "darkness and uncertainty" of the novel coronavirus outbreak.

"Friends, amid the darkness spread by the Corona pandemic, we must continuously progress toward light and hope," Modi said in a video message broadcast on Friday.

He said social distancing was the only way to break the chain of the coronavirus, which has claimed 72 lives in India with over 2,500 positive cases as of Thursday. Modi ordered a three-week lockdown across the country on March 24 to stop a massive outbreak of coronavirus infections.

In South Korea, more than 27,000 people are under self-quarantine in the country after it strengthened border controls to slow coronavirus infections linked to international arrivals.

Park Jong-hyun, an official from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, said on Friday that 19,567 of those under self-quarantine have recently returned from overseas while another 7,499 were isolated after contacting virus carriers.

South Korea has been enforcing 14-day quarantines on all passengers arriving from overseas since Wednesday. On Friday, Seoul opened a huge coronavirus testing station in a sports complex built for the 1988 Summer Olympics to test hundreds of people returning to the capital each day.

South Korea has reported 86 new cases of coronavirus on Friday, bringing its caseload above 10,000, according to South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Australian officials closed internal borders on Friday and warned people to stay home over the upcoming Easter holiday as the country seeks to capitalize on a further fall in the rate of new coronavirus cases.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said Australia was shifting to a "suppression" phase in its fight against the highly contagious illness, but stressed that people had to continue to follow orders restricting socializing in public.

"We must continue to do this. Doesn't matter what the temperature is," Morrison said in a televised media conference.

Chief Health Officer Brendan Murphy said the daily increase in new infections had fallen to about 5 percent from between 25 percent and 30 percent two weeks ago. Australia has now reported 5,330 cases and 28 deaths.

The Japanese government said on Friday it has told regions that have suffered the most serious outbreaks of coronavirus to save hospitals beds for severely ill patients, while keeping others with milder or no symptoms at home or in hotels.

Until now Japan has been hospitalizing all coronavirus patients, regardless of whether they are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms. But beds are already filling up in Tokyo and threaten to elsewhere, experts said this week.

Japan's health ministry and local governments said that 2,713 people had been infected with the COVID-19 virus in Japan as of 8:30 pm local time on Thursday, with the daily number of cases topping 200 for a third straight day and a total of 82 people losing their lives to the virus.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to rage in the Middle East, Iran's parliament speaker Ali Larijani has contracted the coronavirus, the highest-ranking official among several senior government figures to catch the disease, as several top Israeli officials entered quarantine after Israel's health minister tested positive on Thursday.

Iran, the worst-hit country in the region, has reported a total of 53,183 infected cases and 3,294 deaths as of Friday, according to health authorities.

The spread of COVID-19 also continued unabated in South Africa, with 82 new cases reported on Thursday. The total number of infections in the country reached 1,462 and the death toll remained at five.

Agencies - Xinhua