Aug 6 (Reuters) - Here's what you need to know about the
coronavirus right now:
Trump social media posts pulled
Facebook took down a post by U.S. President Donald Trump,
which the company said violated its rules against sharing
misinformation about the coronavirus.
The post contained a video clip from an interview with Fox &
Friends in which Trump said children are "almost immune" to
COVID-19.
A tweet containing the video that was posted by the Trump
campaign's @TeamTrump account and shared by the president was
also later hidden by Twitter for breaking its COVID-19
misinformation rules.
YouTube said it had also pulled down the video for violating
its COVID-19 misinformation policies. However, the original
interview remained available on the Fox News page on the
platform.
Fauci says politics and vaccine won't mix
U.S. regulators have assured scientists that political
pressure will not determine when a coronavirus vaccine is
approved, the country's leading infectious diseases expert
Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday, even as the White House hopes
to have one ready ahead of the November presidential election.
“We have assurances, and I've discussed this with the
regulatory authorities, that they promise that they are not
going to let political considerations interfere with a
regulatory decision,” Dr. Fauci told Reuters in an interview.
Fresh lockdown fears in Germany
The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Germany has
breached the 1,000 threshold for the first time since early May,
in the latest sign that slackening social distancing is raising
the risk of a second wave of the disease.
According to data published by the Robert Koch Institute
early on Thursday morning, the number of new infections rose by
1,045 to 213,067, breaching a key psychological barrier after
creeping up for weeks.
The lockdown and social distancing pushed the number of new
cases down to as low as 159 in mid-July but numbers have been
rising since, fuelled by local outbreaks, including one centred
on a slaughterhouse that required restrictions to be placed on
the entire town of Guetersloh. New surge in Philippines
The Philippines recorded another jump in coronavirus
infections to overtake neighbouring Indonesia as the country
with the highest number of recorded COVID-19 cases in East Asia.
A recent surge in cases in and around the capital Manila has
pushed authorities to reimpose a lockdown affecting around a
quarter of the country's 107 million people. The Philippines
recorded 3,561 new infections on Thursday, taking its total
confirmed cases to 119,460.
The Philippines imposed one the world's strictest and
longest lockdowns in and around the capital, running from
mid-March to the end of May, which brought the economy to its
knees in the first half. Melbourne enters six-week lockdown
Australia's second-biggest city of Melbourne began the first
day of a six-week total lockdown on Thursday with the closure of
most shops and businesses raising new fears of food shortages,
as authorities battle a second wave of coronavirus infections.
Abattoirs are one of the few businesses allowed to stay open
in the city of about 5 million people, though with a reduced
workforce, under the "stage four" lockdown which took effect at
midnight on Wednesday.