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What you need to know about the coronavirus today

France bans hydroxychloroquine

The French government on Wednesday canceled a decree allowing hospital doctors to administer hydroxychloroquine as a treatment to patients suffering severe forms of COVID-19. The move, which takes immediate effect, is the first by a country since the World Health Organization said on Monday it was pausing a large trial of the malaria drug on COVID-19 patients due to safety concerns.

U.S. President Donald Trump and others have pushed hydroxychloroquine in recent months as a possible coronavirus treatment.

Fears for pregnant U.S. inmates

Guadalupe Velazquez has a college degree, owns a flooring company and is pregnant with a baby girl due next month. Velazquez, 30, is also terrified of contracting COVID-19 in the Phoenix halfway house where she is serving her sentence on a decade-old marijuana conviction in federal court in Arizona, according to her sister and her fiancé.

While some well-known federal inmates have been released into home confinement due to COVID-19 fears, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons said it still has 28 women who are pregnant or recently gave birth in custody, including Velazquez.

President fact-checked

Twitter on Tuesday for the first time prompted readers to check the facts in U.S. President Donald Trump's tweets, putting into application an extension of its new "misleading information" policy, introduced this month to combat misinformation about the novel coronavirus.

Hours after Trump said on Twitter that mail-in ballots would be "substantially fraudulent" and result in a "rigged election", Twitter posted a blue exclamation mark alert underneath those tweets, prompting readers to "get the facts about mail-in ballots" and directing them to a page with information aggregated by Twitter staff about the assertions.

Trump, who has more than 80 million followers on Twitter, lashed out at the company in response, accusing it - in a tweet - of interfering in the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

Phased back to normal

Here are some signposts of companies and country leaders planning the resumption of normal activity: A draft blueprint on safely starting travel between New Zealand and Australia will be presented to both governments in early June, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said, in what would be the creation of a travel bubble between the neighbours.

Walt Disney Co presents its proposal for a phased reopening of its Orlando, Florida, theme parks to a task force on Wednesday.


Trump believes there would be "no greater example of reopening" than a summit of Group of Seven leaders in the United States near the end of June, the White House said. The goal was for the summit to be held at the White House and world leaders who attended would be protected, said White House spokeswoman Kayleigh McEnany.

Google said on Tuesday it would start to reopen buildings in more cities beginning July 6 and scale up to 30% in September.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Safe offices, MAC hack, HK biotech. Read concise views on the pandemic’s financial fallout from Breakingviews columnists across the globe.

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Life under lockdown

Syria said it would lift an overnight curfew starting and allow movement between governorates, easing coronavirus lockdown measures even as the health ministry reported the largest single-day increase in cases. The ministry reported 20 new infections of the novel coronavirus on Monday, bringing the country’s tally to 106 cases and four deaths. Syria has seen an uptick in infections in recent days, which it has attributed to the return of Syrians from abroad.

Damascus said that while it was easing lockdown measures as part of steps to reopen the economy, it would halt flights repatriating Syrians for the time being as it treats those that have recently returned.

Dolores Centeno has scoured the morgues and cemeteries of Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city, for two months searching for her father’s body. Now, in a desperate last attempt to find him, she hopes to catch a glimpse of a scar on his chest that would set him apart from the dozens of other decomposing corpses in a newly-filled shipping container. Like other families looking for their loved ones in the coastal city ravaged by the coronavirus, Centeno is praying the body of her 63-year-old father is among the more than 130 bodies that authorities say they are holding in such containers, awaiting identification.

Officials have discovered dozens of unlicensed retirement homes in northern Mexico, raising fears that so far undetected coronavirus clusters may emerge in the thinly regulated sector. After outbreaks in three registered private facilities in the state of Nuevo Leon sent the health department scrambling to investigate the industry, it shuttered 40 unregistered homes in and around the city of Monterrey. As of May 25, there had been 88 confirmed cases of the coronavirus in the three homes in Nuevo Leon, the department said.

COVID Science

Children have milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults and the balance of evidence suggests they may also have lower susceptibility and infectivity than adults, scientists advising the British government have said.

As Europe and the United States start to return to work after lockdowns imposed to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, world leaders are trying to work out when it is safe for children and students to get back to their studies. Cautioning that there is a significant lack of high-quality evidence on children, the scientists concluded in a paper submitted to the British government that: “There was some evidence that children had milder symptoms than adults but that evidence on susceptibility and transmission was as yet unclear.”

The World Health Organization promised a swift review of data on hydroxychloroquine, probably by mid-June, after safety concerns prompted the group to suspend the malaria drug’s use in a large trial on COVID-19 patients. U.S. President Donald Trump and others have pushed hydroxychloroquine as a coronavirus treatment, but the WHO called time after the British journal The Lancet reported patients getting hydroxychloroquine had increased death rates and irregular heartbeats.

“A final decision on the harm, benefit or lack of benefit of hydroxychloroquine will be made once the evidence has been reviewed,” the body said. “It is expected by mid-June.”

Canadian drug discovery technology company AbCellera, which analyzes and identifies antibodies for pharmaceutical companies working on a coronavirus treatment and other medicines, said it had raised $105 million in funds.

AbCellera has been working with pharmaceutical firm Eli Lilly and Co which is developing a coronavirus drug based on antibodies from patients that have recovered from the disease.

AbCellera uses computer vision and machine learning to quickly analyze data from human samples, and pharmaceutical clients then use that to develop drugs, AbCellera Chief Executive Carl Hansen said.