The Latest on the coronavirus pandemic. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people. For some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death.
TOP OF THE HOUR:
— Fauci warns economic recovery will not happen if reopening is too fast.
— Putin: Russia has slowed outbreak but nation has yet to see peak of infections.
— Germany to pay hospital bills of the more than 200 patients treated from other EU countries.
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WASHINGTON — The top infectious-disease expert in the United States has a message for protesters who are ignoring their governors’ stay-at-home orders and calling for him to be fired over his guidelines.
Dr. Anthony Fauci says the message is “this is something that is hurting from the standpoint of economics, from the standpoint of things that have nothing to do with the virus.”
He added on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that “unless we get the virus under control, the real recovery economically is not gonna happen. So what you do if you jump the gun and go into a situation where you have a big spike, you’re gonna set yourself back."
Fauci says as painful as it is to follow guidelines of gradually phasing into a reopening “it’s gonna backfire. That’s the problem.”
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MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin says Russia has slowed the outbreak of the coronavirus but warns the nation has yet to see the peak of infections.
Putin conferred with top medical officials in a Monday call and said the government would only move to ease a partial economic shutdown if medical experts rule it safe.
The Russian leader has ordered most businesses except essential industries shut through April 30, and most Russian regions have ordered rigid quarantine measures.
Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin says the tight lockdown and broader screening in the capital have helped prevent an explosive influx of patients in grave condition and reduced the load on the healthcare system.
Moscow has accounted for nearly two thirds of the nation’s total of 47,121 cases, including 405 deaths.
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BERLIN — Germany says it has now treated more than 200 COVID-19 patients from other European Union countries at its hospitals and will pay for their treatment.
Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokesman Steffen Seibert didn’t specify the costs after a meeting Monday of top German officials. He says paying for the care was a matter of “European solidarity.”
Unlike those of some other European countries, Germany’s health system hasn’t been overwhelmed by the coronavirus pandemic. It has been taking in patients from elsewhere for weeks.
Foreign Ministry spokesman Christofer Burger says that Germany has taken in 229 patients from elsewhere in the EU so far. Of those, 130 are from France, 44 from Italy and 55 from the Netherlands.
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BERLIN — Germany’s health minister says authorities will monitor changes in the course of the new coronavirus as it begins to slowly relax some restrictions across the country.
Germany began allowing smaller shops to reopen Monday after a weeks-long shutdown. Strict social distancing rules remain in place.
Health Minister Jens Spahn says officials will evaluate the consequences of the looser restrictions. The current phase runs through May 3 and officials will review the situation again on April 30.
Germany is also recommending people wear face masks on public transport and when shopping, and social distancing measures remain in place.
Spahn commended the country’s health care workers for their work and the public for following restrictions. The relaxation of the measures now is only possible because Germany had been able to successfully slow the spread of the virus and had the capacity to treat people who were infected.
German schools have been closed since mid-March and the government hopes to be able to reopen them in steps next month with the oldest students returning first.
Germany has confirmed more than 145,000 coronavirus infections. It has recorded more than 4,600 deaths.
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DHAKA, Bangladesh — The total death toll from coronavirus in Bangladesh has passed 100 people and the total infections are at 2,948 .
Nasima Sultana is an additional director general of the Directorate General of Health Services. She says 492 people have tested positive over last 24 hours. That is the highest in a single day after the first case of infection was confirmed on March 8.
She says 10 people died in the last 24 hours to raise the total death toll to 101.
Since the first case, only 85 people recovered and returned home. A total of 26,604 samples have been tested for COVID-19 infections until Monday in the densely populated South Asian country of 160 million people.
Experts say community transmission has taken place because of lax enforcement of social distancing guidelines. A nationwide lockdown has been in place in the country until Apr. 25.
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SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Several dozen people in Bosnia are on a hunger strike to protest being quarantined in a hotel on suspicion they might be carrying the new coronavirus.
The group of some 80 Bosnians work abroad and when they returned to the country they were placed under a 28-day quarantine in a hotel in the central town of Zenica. They began refusing food Monday to pressure authorities into allowing them to self-isolate in their homes.
The hunger strikers also say they will no longer allow health care professionals who visit the hotel daily to take their temperature.
“Here, we all mix in hallways and if one of us is infected, we will all get infected,”
Mirsad Susic told The Associated Press by phone that the group congregates in hallways and is a greater risk for catching or passing on the new coronavirus than they would be if they were allowed to self-isolate at home.
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LONDON — Queen Elizabeth II’s husband has made a rare public statement praising those tackling the new coronavirus pandemic and keeping essential services running.
Prince Philip, who turns 99 in June, said he wanted to recognize the “vital and urgent” work of medical and science professionals.
He also gave thanks to key workers including people working in food production, garbage collection, and postal and delivery services.
The royal, who retired from public duties in 2017, signed off simply with “Philip.”
Philip has been staying with the queen at Windsor Castle with reduced staff for their safety.
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ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey’s president has inaugurated parts of a 2,600-bed public hospital in Istanbul that is under expedited construction to aid in treatment of patients the new coronavirus outbreak.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan took part in Monday’s inauguration of the Basaksehir City Hospital by teleconference. He also witnessed the hospital taking delivery of 100 Turkish-made ventilators, whose production was also expedited to help health officials manage the outbreak.
Erdogan says the rest of the hospital will be inaugurated on May 20. The government is separately constructing two additional hospitals in Istanbul, including one on the site of the now-closed Ataturk Airport.
Turkey has reported 86,306 cases of coronavirus and 2,017 deaths.
Authorities say 60% of the confirmed cases are located in Istanbul. The number of cases in Turkey has surpassed those in China and in neighboring Iran.
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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A Dutch privacy watchdog says it can’t evaluate if seven smartphone coronavirus apps the government tested over the weekend sufficiently protect users’ personal data.
The Dutch Data Protection Agency said Monday that terms given to developers were so unclear that it is not possible to work out if apps under consideration will work while safeguarding users’ data.
The announcement is a setback for the government, which wants to use a contact-tracking app to safeguard the public when coronavirus restrictions are gradually eased.
Prime Minister Mark Rutte is set to announce Tuesday evening whether restrictions he calls an “intelligent lockdown” will be partially lifted.
Chairman of the authority, Aleid Wolfsen, says that while he understands the wish to return to normality “we must avoid using a solution if it’s unclear whether it really works, with the risk that it will cause other problems.”
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MADRID — Spanish authorities have gone into damage control mode after a high ranking police official said in an apparent gaffe that one of the goals of fighting misinformation was to rein in on negative coverage of the government’s handling of the coronavirus crisis.
During a daily press conference on Sunday, the chief of the Civil Guard police force Gen. José Manuel Santiago said that in addition to avoid the “social stress” created by false information related to the COVID-19 pandemic, law enforcement was also fighting to “minimize that climate contrarian to the government’s management of the crisis.”
The Civil Guard later issued a statement saying that battling disinformation was being conducted respecting the freedom to criticism. Late on Sunday, Interior Minister Fernando Grande-Marlaska also told La Sexta television that the general’s remarks were “erroneous.”
Grande-Marlaska also accused the conservative leading opposition PP party and the far-right Vox of being “disloyal” to the government. The two parties, together with the center-right Citizens party, want the interior minister to answer questions in parliament regarding the government’s handling of the state of emergency, now on its sixth week.
On Monday, without referring to his previous statement, Gen. Santiago said that during four decades of career he had prioritized the well being of people and had not been at any time moved by ideology.
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BANGKOK — City authorities in the Thai capital Bangkok have extended a ban on the sale of alcoholic beverages to the end of April as efforts continue to contain the spread of COVID-19.
A ban was originally imposed for April 10-20, during which Thais would normally celebrate the annual Songkran Lunar New Year festival with drinking-fueled merrymaking at large public gatherings. Official celebrations of the holiday were postponed until a date to be decided.
Sales bans were separately ordered in all 76 of Thailand’s provinces with different ending dates, according to the Interior Ministry.
Pongsakorn Kwanmuang, a spokesman for the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration, announced the extension, and said other provinces were expected to follow suit.
He also said people with alcohol dependency problems could be treated for free at the city’s medical facilities.
Health officials on Monday confirmed 27 new cases of the disease, bringing the nation’s total to 2,792, including 1,999 recoveries and 47 deaths. New cases have dropped from a March 22 high of 188 to 45 or less for the past 10 days.
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LONDON — Hospital organizations are slamming Britain’s government for its failure to give medical staff appropriate clothing and equipment to deal with the COVID-19 outbreak.
With so many promises dashed, Chris Hopson of the NHS Providers told the BBC there is “relatively low confidence” that a shipment of 400,000 surgical gowns due to arrive last weekend from Turkey will arrive Monday.
The NHS Confederation, which represents organizations across healthcare, described the failed delivery at a time of critically low stocks as making "a difficult situation worse."
The confederation’s CEO Niall Dickson, says it “would have been better had the government not made the announcement in the first place.”
Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden says he’s hopeful “that later today that flight will take off and we will get those gowns.’’
British medical personnel have been arguing for weeks that the ongoing debacle in getting the right equipment to the right people is forcing doctors to put their own lives in danger to treat the sick and hurting medical care across the board.
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MADRID — Spain has surpassed the 200,000 mark of coronavirus infections while recording the lowest number of new deaths in four weeks.
Health ministry data shows Monday that 399 more people have succumbed to the COVID-19 disease created by the virus in the past 24 hours, bringing the country’s total death toll to 20,852. Spain had counted more than 400 daily deaths since March 22.
The outbreak’s spread has continued at a slower pace than in previous weeks, with 4,266 new infections that is bringing the pandemic’s total tally to 200,210.
The Spanish government is starting to relax its confinement measures, trying to re-activate the economy after a two-week freeze and allowing children under 12-years-old to venture out to the streets for brief periods from next week.
The government had been under pressure from regional governments, parents and some educators to ease the lockdown for children. The government says they will be allowed to get out for brief periods on a daily basis starting on April 27 but that all the details need to be ironed out with experts this week.
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Follow AP news coverage of the coronavirus pandemic at https://apnews.com/VirusOutbreak and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak
