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What you need to know about the coronavirus today

One death every 15 seconds
Latin America surpassed Europe on Tuesday to become the region with the highest novel coronavirus death toll, according to a Reuters tally. The region has now recorded more than 206,000 deaths, approximately 30% of the global total.

Brazil, the Latin American country most affected by the coronavirus, had recorded a total of 95,819 deaths as of Tuesday. Mexico, the second-most affected country in the region, has 48,869 deaths. Outbreaks have also accelerated in Colombia, Peru, Argentina and Bolivia.

The global death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 700,000, according to a Reuters tally. Nearly 5,900 people are dying every 24 hours from COVID-19 on average, according to calculations based on data from the past two weeks. That equates to 247 people an hour, or one person every 15 seconds.

Closing down Victoria
Australia’s Victoria state reported a record rise in new coronavirus cases and deaths on Wednesday, as it prepared to close much of its economy to control a second wave of infection that threatens to spread across the country.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews said further restrictions would include shutting most child-care centers and expanding a ban on elective surgery to the whole state to free up medical resources for coronavirus cases.

In Queensland state, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said travelers from New South Wales state and the capital, Canberra, would be barred from Saturday. The state is already closed to people from Victoria.

Vaccine developments
Novavax said its experimental COVID-19 vaccine produced high levels of antibodies against the novel coronavirus, according to initial data from a small, early-stage clinical trial.

The U.S. company said it could start a large pivotal Phase III trial as soon as late September, and added that it could produce 1 billion to 2 billion doses of the vaccine in 2021.

Novavax research chief Gregory Glenn told Reuters the late-stage clinical trial could potentially glean enough data to obtain regulatory approvals as early as December.

Meanwhile, India’s Zydus Cadila said its vaccine candidate was found to be safe and well-tolerated in an early-stage human trial.

The company will now start a mid-stage trial of the vaccine candidate, ZyCoV-D, in over 1,000 healthy adult volunteers from Thursday to test its effectiveness.

Young people not invincible
Young people hitting nightclubs and beaches are leading a rise in new coronavirus cases across the world, with the proportion of those aged 15 to 24 who are infected rising three-fold from 4.5% to 15% in about five months, the World Health Organization said.

Apart from the United States, which leads a global tally with 4.8 million total cases, European countries including Spain, Germany and France, and Asian countries such as Japan, have said that many of the newly infected are young people.

“We’ve said this before and we’ll say it again: young people are not invincible,” WHO Director General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a recent news briefing in Geneva. “Young people can be infected; young people can die; and young people can transmit the virus to others.”

Beirut reels from huge blast, as death toll climbs to at least 100 Lebanese rescue workers dug through the mangled wreckage of buildings on Wednesday looking for survivors after a massive warehouse explosion sent a devastating blast wave across Beirut, killing at least 100 people and injuring nearly 4,000.

Officials said the toll was expected to rise after Tuesday’s blast at port warehouses that stored highly explosive material.

The blast was the most powerful ever to rip through Beirut, a city still scarred by civil war three decades ago and reeling from an economic meltdown and a surge in coronavirus infections.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Sweden, L&G, Australia, Metro Bank. 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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Emerging from lockdown

The bloom is back at Lee’s Flower and Card Shop in Washington’s historic U Street neighborhood, with an added touch: Blue, green, yellow and white origami cranes spelling out the words “Black Lives Matter” on the storefront window. The signs reflect a slow return to normalcy as life and business adapt to the coronavirus pandemic and racial justice movement that both erupted in the first half of 2020.

The business, run by sisters Stacie Lee Banks and Kristie Lee, stayed open during the months of mandated shutdown in Washington, doing deliveries as its doors stayed shut.

A migrant in Singapore who self-harmed and was pictured bloodied in a stairwell has heightened concerns over the mental health of thousands of low-paid workers confined to dormitories in the city-state due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In April, Singapore sealed off sprawling housing blocks where its vast population of mainly South Asian laborer's live in crowded bunk rooms, in an effort to ring-fence a surge in virus cases among the workers.

Rights groups say this has taken a heavy mental toll on workers, pointing to recent reports that migrants have been detained under the mental health act after videos showed them perched precariously on rooftops and high window ledges.

Special report

COVID opens new doors for China's gene giant
As countries scramble to test for the novel coronavirus, a Chinese company has become a go-to name around the world. BGI Group, described in one 2015 study as “Goliath” in the fast-growing field of genomics research, is using an opening created by the pandemic to expand its footprint globally.

In the past six months, it says it has sold 35 million rapid COVID-19 testing kits to 180 countries and built 58 labs in 18 countries. Some of the equipment has been donated by BGI’s philanthropic arm, promoted by China’s embassies in an extension of China’s virus diplomacy.