WASHINGTON: The World Health Organization declared Latin America “a new epicenter” of the coronavirus pandemic as US President Donald Trump ramped up pressure on state and local governments to speed up the reopening of the reeling American economy. Surges in infections across much of Central and South America have driven the global case count to nearly 5.2 million, with more than 337,000 deaths, even as hard-hit Europe and the United States cautiously move into a recovery phase.

The death toll in Brazil has soared past 20,000, and with 310,000 reported cases, it has the third-biggest caseload in the world behind the United States and Russia. “In a sense, South America has become a new epicenter for the disease,” WHO emergencies director Mike Ryan said on Friday. “We’ve seen many South American countries with increasing numbers of cases… but certainly the most affected is Brazil at this point.”

Unlike in Europe and the United States, where the elderly were hardest-hit, a significant number of deaths in Brazil have been younger people, who are often driven by poverty to work despite the threat of infection. “Since Brazil has a younger population, it’s normal for the number of cases to be higher among under-60s,” said Mauro Sanchez, an epidemiologist at the University of Brasilia. “What’s perverse is that a lot of the people who are exposing themselves to the virus are doing it because they don’t have a choice.”

As the toll mounted, gravediggers at a cemetery outside Sao Paulo scrambled to keep up. “We’ve been working 12-hour days, burying them one after the other,” said one worker at Vila Formosa, wearing a white protective suit, mask and face shield. “It doesn’t stop.”

In Washington, Trump, keen to find a way out of the crisis and facing an uphill re-election battle, ramped up pressure on state and local governments to ease lockdown measures. The pandemic has hammered the American economy and led to calls for an end to virus restrictions, despite the COVID-19 numbers still rising in the United States – the worst-hit country in the world with 1.6 million infections and 96,000 deaths.

Trump demanded state governors classify churches, synagogues and mosques as “essential services” on the same level as food and drug stores, and immediately allow them to hold services despite curbs on public gatherings. “The governors need to do the right thing and allow these very important essential places of faith to open right now, for this weekend,” said the president, who counts religious conservatives as a core of his electoral base.

“If they don’t do it, I will override the governors. In America, we need more prayer, not less,” added Trump, who has previously expressed support for street protests against lockdowns. It was not clear whether he had any authority to override the governors. There was pushback from the mayor of Los Angeles after the Trump administration warned that the continued lockdown in the city could be illegal. “We are not guided by politics in this – we are guided by science, we are guided by collaboration,” said Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In the latest step to restart the economy, the Trump administration said Friday it would exempt from entry bans foreign professional athletes competing in the top leagues for several sports, including basketball, tennis and golf. “In today’s environment, Americans need their sports,” Chad Wolf, acting secretary of the Homeland Security department, said in a statement announcing the order. “It’s time to reopen the economy and it’s time we get our professional athletes back to work.”
Experts have warned that until a vaccine or treatment is developed for the virus, lockdown measures will persist in some form to prevent new waves of infections, a factor that has put immense pressure on economies. The airline, travel and hospitality sectors have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, and car rental giant Hertz became the latest high-profile victim, announcing Friday that it was filing for bankruptcy in the United States and Canada.
It added that the bankruptcy filing excludes its main international operations, including Europe, where many nations are opening up their economies cautiously after slowing the spread of the virus. France decided that it was safe to hold a delayed second round of municipal elections on June 28, and the Czech Republic said the epidemic remains contained there, two weeks after shopping malls, cinemas and restaurant terraces reopened.

Serbia said, meanwhile, that the Exit Festival in Novi Sad – one of Europe’s biggest music events – could go ahead in August as planned, and in Italy Florence’s famous Duomo cathedral reopened to the public. But authorities are still keen to avoid opening up too fast, with a surge in Russia illustrating how quickly the deadly disease can spread.

Russia has so far recorded 3,249 deaths – with a caseload of more 325,000 infections, second only to the United States. “The seriously ill are building up. Doctors try to save each one who lies there for two, three or more weeks,” said Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin. “Unfortunately, it’s not possible to save them all.”

Meanwhile, patients with severe COVID-19 given plasma from someone who recovered from the disease were more likely to stabilize or need less oxygen support than other similar hospital patients, according to results of a small US study released on Friday. The study showed a trend toward better survival rates, but the number of patients was small and the results cannot be interpreted as applying to patients on mechanical ventilators, researchers at New York’s Mt Sinai Medical Center said.

Mt Sinai analyzed outcomes for 39 hospitalized patients with severe COVID-19 who received convalescent plasma transfusions compared to outcomes for patients with carefully matched medical status. “This is a retrospective case-controlled study. It does not have the rigor of a randomized, controlled trial so that still needs to be done,” Dr Nicole Bouvier, an infectious disease specialist at Mt. Sinai and the study’s lead author, told Reuters. “This does show promise that convalescent plasma is effective.”

Nearly 70 percent of the 39 patients were on high-flow oxygen and 10 percent were on mechanical ventilation. After two weeks, the disease worsened in 18 percent of the plasma patients and 24 percent of the control patients. As of May 1, nearly 13 percent of plasma recipients had died, compared with more than 24 percent of the control patients, with 72 percent and 67 percent, respectively, being discharged alive.
People who survive an infectious disease like COVID-19 are left with blood containing antibodies, or proteins made by the body’s immune system to fight off a virus. The blood component that carries the antibodies can be collected and given to newly infected patients - it is known as “convalescent plasma”. Hospitals around the world have been using plasma donated by recovered COVID-19 patients, but there has been little information on how effective the treatment is.

The US Food and Drug Administration on May 1 gave emergency approval to Gilead Sciences Inc’s antiviral drug remdesivir for COVID-19 based on data showing that it reduced hospitalization time by 31 percent compared to a placebo, but did not have a significant effect on survival.
Remdesivir cuts recovery times in coronavirus patients, according to the full results of a trial published Friday night, three weeks after America’s top infectious diseases expert said the study showed the medication has “clear-cut” benefits. Complete results from the research, which was carried out by US government agency the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), were published by leading medical periodical the New England Journal of Medicine.

The United States authorized the emergency use of remdesivir in hospitals on May 1, followed by Japan, while Europe is considering following suit. The study found that remdesivir, injected intravenously daily for 10 days, accelerated the recovery of hospitalized COVID-19 patients compared to a placebo in clinical tests on just over a thousand patients across 10 countries.
On April 29, NIAID director Anthony Fauci, who has become the US government’s trusted face on the coronavirus pandemic, said preliminary evidence indicated remdesivir had a “clear-cut, significant and positive effect in diminishing the time to recovery”. The National Institutes of Health, of which the NIAID is a part, said Friday in a statement online that investigators found “remdesivir was most beneficial for hospitalized patients with severe disease who required supplemental oxygen.”

But the authors of the trial wrote that the drug did not prevent all deaths. “Given high mortality despite the use of remdesivir, it is clear that treatment with an anti-viral drug alone is not likely to be sufficient,” they said. About 7.1 percent of patients given remdesivir in the trial group died within 14 days – compared with 11.9 percent in the placebo group. However, the result is just below the statistical reliability threshold, meaning it could be down to chance rather than the capability of the drug. – Agencies