Your daily COVID-19 update

QUOTE OF THE DAY:“It will no longer be a story.” — Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, as his country passed Italy in terms of the total number of COVID-19 cases and his government decided to stop publishing cumulative data. 

The number of Canadians infected with COVID-19 has passed 96,000, while 7,800 people have died. Worldwide, seven million people have been infected and 404,000 have died.

The lack of high-quality race-based COVID-19 data in Canada has meant that the federal government didn’t count roughly 80 per cent of Indigenous cases in Saskatchewan as Indigenous cases, as they weren’t on reserves, writes Denise Balkissoon in Maclean’s. Which goes to show that it’s not enough to collect information about racialized groups, she argues. “Data needs to be decolonized, which means it needs to be developed, collected and owned by the people it’s supposedly for. They might actually use it.”

A preview peer-reviewed article in Nature estimates that public health interventions in just six nations—China, United States, Italy, France, Iran and South Korea—“prevented or delayed on the order of 62 million confirmed cases.” Had there been no restrictions or lockdowns, the researchers estimate that the number of cases in the United States would have increased by 4.8 million in excess of its current tally, which is about to reach the two million mark. One expert estimates that such increases in cases would have raised the nation’s death toll, currently at 110,000, by another 270,000.

The coronavirus is spreading more widely where households are crowded, not where populations are densely packed, a Wall Street Journal analysis found. In some cases, tiny rural settlements, where extended families live in the same home, had deadlier outbreaks than the worst hit areas of New York City. 

With no active cases in the country, the New Zealand government’s COVID-19 Twitter account gave the official all-clear: “At midnight tonight, Monday 8th June, New Zealand will shift to Alert Level 1. At Alert Level 1, everyone can return without restriction to work, school, sports and domestic travel, and you can get together with as many people as you want.” By imposing a ferociously strict lockdown, the nation limited its outbreak to 1,154 cases and 22 deaths. 

To help reunite families separated by COVID-19, a seniors’ home in England set up a drive-through visiting area, where residents can sit while their relations drive up, stop and chat, all while staying a safe distance away in their vehicles. 

—Patricia Treble

As of the latest update, this is the number of confirmed cases in Canada. We're updating this chart every day.