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What you need to know about the coronavirus today

Trump faces backlash for removing mask
U.S. President Donald Trump faced a backlash on Tuesday for removing his mask when he returned to the White House and urging Americans not to fear COVID-19.

In a made-for-television spectacle, Trump descended from his Marine One helicopter wearing a white surgical mask only to remove it as he posed, saluting and waving, on the mansion’s South Portico.

“Don’t let it dominate you. Don’t be afraid of it,” Trump said in a video after his return from the Walter Reed Medical Center military hospital.

Vice President Mike Pence and challenger Kamala Harris will be separated by a plexiglass barrier during their debate on Wednesday in an effort to lower the risk of coronavirus transmission, the commission overseeing the event said.

CDC revises guidance
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) said COVID-19 can spread through virus lingering in the air, sometimes for hours, acknowledging concerns widely voiced by public health experts about airborne transmission.

The CDC guidance comes weeks after the agency published – and then took down – a similar warning, sparking debate over how the virus spreads.

In Monday’s guidance, CDC said there was evidence that people with COVID-19 possibly infected others who were more than 6 feet away, within enclosed spaces with poor ventilation.

Under such circumstances, CDC said scientists believe the amount of infectious smaller droplet and particles, or aerosols, produced by people with COVID-19 become concentrated enough to spread the virus.

World’s highest rate of positive cases
Argentina has the world’s highest rate of positive COVID-19 tests, according to Oxford-linked tracker Our World In Data, with nearly six out of 10 yielding an infection, a reflection of low testing levels and loose enforcement of lockdown rules.

Argentina hit 809,728 confirmed cases on Monday, with a 7-day rolling average of around 12,500 new daily infections. The country passed 20,000 fatalities last week.

Medical professionals said low-levels of testing and lax restrictions had propelled the high positive rate.

China in talks with WHO on vaccines for global use
China is in talks to have its locally-produced COVID-19 vaccines assessed by the World Health Organization, as a step toward making them available for international use, a WHO official said on Tuesday.

Hundreds of thousands of essential workers and other groups considered at high risk in China have been given locally-developed vaccines even as clinical trials had not been fully completed, raising safety concerns among experts.

Socorro Escalate, WHO’s coordinator for essential medicines and health technologies in the Western Pacific region, said China had held preliminary discussions with WHO to have its vaccines included in a list for emergency use.

Self-isolating Commission head snubs EU advice
The head of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said she would leave quarantine on Tuesday after having been in contact with someone positive for COVID-19 a week earlier, despite EU recommendations of 14 days of self-isolation.

Von der Leyen, 61, is following Belgium’s rules, which have just been softened, but her decision to ignore the stricter advice from the bloc’s public health body could further weaken calls for an EU common approach to battle the epidemic.

Track the spread our global interactive graphic.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Barca, Kering, Oz boots, Dining.
Read concise views on the pandemic’s financial fallout from Breakingviews columnists across the globe.

Reuters reporters and editors around the world are investigating the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Top Stories

Britain’s Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel of Germany and U.S. scientist Andrea Ghez won the 2020 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discoveries about one of the most exotic phenomena in the universe, the black hole, the award-giving body said. Penrose, professor at the University of Oxford, won half the prize for his work using mathematics to prove that black holes are a direct consequence of the general theory of relativity.

Americans are rushing to cast ballots ahead of the November election at an unprecedented pace, early voting numbers show, indicating a possible record turnout for the showdown between President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden. With four weeks to go before Election Day Nov. 3, more than 3.8 million Americans already have voted, far surpassing about 75,000 at this time in 2016, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which compiles early voting data.

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny said he believed Russia’s intelligence services had poisoned him with a Novichok nerve agent because authorities saw him as a threat ahead of next year’s parliamentary elections.“ They understood that there were big, big problems threatening them ahead of elections for the State Duma,” Navalny said in a YouTube interview with a Russian blogger, his first video appearance since being discharged from a Berlin hospital.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad accused Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan of being the main instigator in the deadliest fighting between Armenian and Azeri forces for more than 25 years. In an interview published on Tuesday that is likely to exacerbate international frictions over the clashes in the South Caucasus region, Assad also said militants from Syria were being deployed to the conflict area.

COVID Science

Breathing with face masks does not affect the lungs
The average face mask may be uncomfortable but does not limit the flow of oxygen to the lungs, even in people with severe lung diseases, researchers say. They tested the effect of wearing surgical masks on gas exchange - the process by which the body adds oxygen to the blood while removing carbon dioxide - in 15 healthy physicians and 15 military veterans with severely impaired lungs via a quick paced six-minute walk on a flat, hard surface.

New coronavirus survives nine hours on human skin
Left undisturbed, the new coronavirus can survive many hours on human skin, a new study has found. To avoid possibly infecting healthy volunteers, researchers conducted lab experiments using cadaver skin that would otherwise have been used for skin grafts. While influenza A virus survived less than two hours on human skin, the novel coronavirus survived for more than nine hours.