Shanghai
Coronavirus epicentre Wuhan has said it will reopen all its schools and kindergartens from next week, local authorities said.
As many as 2,842 educational institutions across the city are set to open their doors to almost 1.4 million students when the autumn semester gets underway, the local government announced on Saturday. Wuhan University reopened on Monday.
The city said it has drawn up emergency plans to switch back to online teaching should risk levels change. It advised students to wear masks to and from school and avoid public transportation if possible.
Schools have been ordered to stock up on disease control equipment and to carry out drills and training sessions to help prepare for new outbreaks. They must also restrict unnecessary mass gatherings, and submit daily reports to health authorities.
Foreign students and teachers who have not received notice from their school will not be allowed to return, it said.
The central Chinese city, where the COVID-19 epidemic is believed to have originated, was locked down for more than two months from late January. The city’s death toll of 3,869 accounts for more than 80% of China’s total. Wuhan has been steadily returning to normal since April, when the lockdown was lifted, and it has not reported any new local transmissions of the coronavirus since May 18.
India reported 76,472 new coronavirus cases on Saturday, slightly lower than the record breaking numbers of the past couple of days, but extending a run that has made the country’s outbreak currently the world’s worst.
India has reported a total of 3.46 million cases during the pandemic, a tally that places them behind the United States and Brazil in terms of total caseload. However, the south Asian country has reported higher single-day case rises than both those countries for almost two weeks.
India’s death toll rose by 1,021 to 62,550, data from the federal health ministry showed, even as local media reported that some nationwide restrictions on travel could be eased from next week.
The goverment might allow underground train networks to partially reopen, local media reported, an easing that Delhi’s chief minister has said is necessary to get the city back to full speed.
The western Indian state of Maharashtra, home to India’s financial capital Mumbai, recorded 331 fatalities, the steepest single-day increase among all states over the past two days.
On Friday, lawmaker H. Vasanthakumar from the country’s main opposition party Congress became the latest high profile figure to die from COVID-19, the infection caused by the novel coronavirus. “The news of Kanyakumari MP, Shri H Vasanthakumar’s untimely demise due to Covid-19 has come as a shock,” Rahul Gandhi, a leading member of the Congress party said in a tweet late on Friday.—Reuters
