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U.S. PROTESTS

George Floyd hailed as 'cornerstone of a movement' at funeral

During a four-hour service broadcast live on every major U.S. television network from a church in Floyd’s boyhood home of Houston, family members, clergy and politicians exhorted Americans to turn grief and outrage at his death into a moment of reckoning for the nation.

Washington, D.C. approves police reforms after days of protests against racism

The emergency legislation, approved by a unanimous vote, comes as a number of cities rethink approaches to policing but falls short of calls by some civil rights activists to defund city police departments.

It bars the use of neck restraints, such as the one used against Floyd, and requires the release of names and images from officers’ body cameras after “an officer-involved death or the serious use of force.”

What you need to know about the coronavirus today

Masks to prevent a second wave

Population-wide face mask use could push COVID-19 transmission down to controllable levels for national epidemics, and could prevent further waves when combined with lockdowns, a British study showed.

If people wear masks whenever they are in public it is twice as effective at reducing the disease’s reproduction rate than if masks are only worn after symptoms appear, the research found.

Hotspot in Arizona

Arizona has again told hospitals to activate the coronavirus emergency plans after cases spiked following reopening, turning it into a U.S. virus hotspot along with neighboring southwest states.

A “cavalier” exit from the state’s successful stay-at-home program caused the sudden case surge, former state health chief Will Humble said.

University of Washington researchers estimated on Monday that 145,728 people could die of COVID-19 in the United States by August, raising their forecast by more than 5,000 in a matter of days.

Virus disappearing Down Under

Australia is on course to have largely eradicated the coronavirus by July, as the country’s most populous state announced the removal of restrictions on community sports. New South Wales has gone for two weeks without any cases of community transmission. New Zealand lifted all restrictions except international border controls after declaring on Monday that it was free of the coronavirus.

Tracing app inspired by U.S. school project

Singapore reached out to a Stanford University student, Rohan Suri, in January to understand his experiences and considerations while developing a prototype for a contact tracing app called kTrace as a high school project in 2014. Suri developed the prototype with a schoolmate as the Ebola epidemic ravaged western Africa.

He spent February and March volunteering on Singapore’s TraceTogether app alongside fellow Stanford students Nikhil Cheerla and Daniel Lee, giving Singapore a roadmap by sharing kTrace’s code and providing advice on stronger privacy protections.

Now, Suri has co-founded another app called Zero, which aims to attract users by bundling contact tracing technology with a safety-rating tool for shops and restaurants based on measures such as occupancy limits and mask rules.


How Germany’s Merkel tamed the virus

A rare inside view of how Angela Merkel handled the pandemic shows how, in Germany as in the United States and elsewhere, COVID-19 is exposing deep tensions between nationalist and collaborative styles of leadership.

A visit to the Chinese city of Wuhan – the ground zero of the pandemic - last September helped shape Merkel’s response to COVID-19. If the disease forced a metropolis of 11 million people to quarantine itself and come to a complete stop, people close to her said, she saw that it must be serious.

Quick lockdown and widespread testing are two elements that have been widely credited by epidemiologists for keeping Germany’s reported fatalities lower than many countries.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: China, UK tech, Warehouses. Read concise views on the pandemic’s financial fallout from Breakingviews columnists across the globe.

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Emerging from lockdown

France will end special government powers brought in to deal with the coronavirus pandemic on July 10 though it will retain the ability to curb gatherings and freedom of movement for four months, the prime minister’s office said.

As coronavirus infections spiralled out of control in March, France passed “state of health emergency” legislation which gave the government the power to restrict civil liberties by decree without parliamentary approval.

Manage a global team of 3,500 people? No problem, says Katrin Lehmann, head of customer innovation and maintenance at German business software company SAP. Do it while looking after four kids, including home schooling 10-year-old Benno? It almost finished her off. “I was going nuts,” she said. “All of them eat different things and they all complain, whatever you do. I said, right: cornflakes for lunch.”

COVID Science

Retracted COVID-19 studies expose holes in vetting of data firms

The scramble to research the novel coronavirus has exposed weaknesses in the vetting of healthcare data being supplied by a growing number of U.S. firms, a flaw that forced two of the most respected medical journals to pull studies last week.

The Lancet and the New England Journal of Medicine retracted COVID-19 studies over questionable patient health data supplied by a small company called Surgisphere. U.S. researchers say they are routinely peppered with pitches from similar firms, with no widespread standard of how to verify their datasets.

Experts question WHO comment on "rare" asymptomatic COVID-19 spread

Disease experts questioned a statement by the World Health Organization that transmission of COVID-19 by people with no symptoms is “very rare”, saying this guidance could pose problems for governments as they seek to lift lockdowns.

Maria van Kerkhove, an epidemiologist and the WHO’s technical lead on the coronavirus pandemic, said on Monday that many countries undertaking contact tracing had identified asymptomatic cases, but were not finding they caused further spread of the virus. “It is very rare,” she said.