The Latest: British PM Johnson to speak with Trump, queen

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:

— The United Nations urges the world to quickly scale up medicines and vaccines.

— British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is scheduled to speak with U.S. President Donald Trump and Queen Elizabeth II this week as he gradually returns to work.

— Copenhagen’s famed Tivoli Gardens is reopening for its summer season on May 11.

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LONDON — British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is gradually re-engaging with work as he recovers from the new coronavirus.

Johnson’s spokesman says the prime minister remains at his country residence and “isn’t formally doing government work.” But he is getting updates from his staff and is scheduled to speak to U.S. President Donald Trump later Tuesday.

Johnson also plans to hold his weekly audience with Queen Elizabeth II by telephone later this week — the first such conversation in three weeks.

Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab continues to stand in for Johnson as head of government.

Johnson spent a week in a London hospital earlier this month, including three nights in intensive care, after being diagnosed with COVID-19. He was released last week and thanked staff at St. Thomas’ Hospital for saving his life.

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COPENHAGEN, Denmark — Copenhagen’s famed Tivoli Gardens, the amusement park that inspired Walt Disney to create his theme parks, says it is reopening for its summer season on May 11 after its April 16 opening was postponed.

Created in 1843 by Georg Carstensen, the park was built on the city ramparts and last year saw 4.58 million visitors, a 6% drop compared with the previous year.

The park said its popular Friday Rock concerts with open-air gigs showcasing local and international performers, drawing thousands every week, cannot be held “in the usual form until September.”

The park that shut down on Feb. 24 after its winter season was often visited by Danish fairy tale writer Hans Christian Andersen. It is known for its scenery with exotic architecture, historic buildings and rides with thousands of colored lights at night that create a magical atmosphere.

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JOHANNESBURG — The U.N. World Food Program says the number of people with acute hunger could almost double this year amid the coronavirus pandemic.

A new report says 265 million people could face food insecurity by the end of this year, a jump of 130 million. WFP senior economist Arif Husain says in a statement that virus-related lockowns and the global economic recession have already “decimated” the savings of millions in low- and middle-income nations.

The WFP says the 10 countries with the worst food crises last year were Yemen, Congo, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Ethiopia, South Sudan, Syria, Sudan, Nigeria and Haiti.

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VIENNA — Chancellor Sebastian Kurz says Austria intends to go ahead with plans to open all shops at the beginning of May and restaurants in mid-May.

Austria allowed small shops to open a week ago. Kurz said Tuesday that coronavirus infections have continued to drop, so the government can move ahead with the reopening plan it already sketched out. He said the government will review the situation at two-week intervals, “so as always to have the opportunity to pull the emergency brake if that is necessary.”

The plan calls for the remaining shops, along with services such as hairdressers and manicurists, to open at the beginning of May. Schools are scheduled to start opening in May and religious services resuming May 15.

The government also plans to allow the catering industry to restart on May 15, with all staff required to wear masks. There will be restrictions on how many customers can be present.

Kurz advised Austrians against “prematurely” expecting unlimited freedom to travel around Europe. He said that he will take his summer vacation in Austria, and “can only recommend to Austrians that they do the same.”

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NEW DELHI, India — A day after India partially relaxed lockdown restrictions to allow India’s poor to go back to work, the government was forced to advise states to not use rapid testing kits for the next two days.

The advice came after several states told the Indian Council of Medical Research, the apex medical research body, that the kits were faulty and inaccurate.

ICMR’s Dr. R. R. Gangakhedkar said: “Too much variations were being reported in results of rapid test kits. In next two days, kits will be tested and validated in the field by our teams,” adding that an advisory would be issued afterward.

India’s health ministry says the country has 18,601 confirmed cases and 590 deaths.

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PRISTINA, Kosovo — The coronavirus pandemic has claimed the first pregnant woman in Kosovo, according to the Health Ministry.

A statement says the 40-year-old woman from the Gjakova city, 100 kilometers (60 miles) west of the capital, Pristina, died Tuesday after being treated for six days at the infectious clinic in Pristina.

The virus has infected 598 people in Kosovo and killed 16 as of Tuesday. Authorities claim the low figures are due to the restriction measures they have imposed to contain the virus's spread.

Kosovo has been in a total lockdown since mid-March, with all its land border crossing and air routes shut. Schools, cafes, restaurants and other small retail shops are closed and only those offering food and other basic items have remained open during the day.

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ATHENS, Greece — The heads of Greece’s pandemic response effort are visiting a refugee shelter in the south of the country after authorities confirmed a high number of COVID-19 infections at the site.

The shelter at Kranidi hosts 470 asylum-seekers and was placed in isolation Monday after a pregnant resident tested positive for the new coronavirus during a hospital visit.

The government did not immediately confirm reports by state-run media that some 150 asylum seekers had since tested positive.

“It is a worrying development,” government spokesman Stelios Petsas said Tuesday. “There has been a high number of cases given the (crowded) conditions that exist at the facility.”

The outbreak at the shelter occurred after the government launched an effort to relocate some 2,380 asylum-seekers considered the most vulnerable to the virus from crowded camps on the Greek islands to smaller facilities on the mainland.

No cases of COVID-19 have so far been confirmed by Greek authorities at the island camps, which currently host some 40,000 migrants and refugees.

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ROME — Italy’s extraordinary commissioner for the COVID-19 emergency says that for the first time during the pandemic the nation has more respirators than patients with coronavirus infections in intensive care beds.

“This gives us the strength to go forward,” Domenico Arcuri told reporters on Tuesday. There are currently some 2,500 patients receiving intensive care for coronavirus infections.

Arcuri spoke of the “anguish, with which, each night, we had to decide where to send these instruments, which, in the end, save lives” when there weren’t enough respirators for those all needing them.

“I’ll keep that with me for all my life, and I wouldn’t wish anyone else to experience” the dilemma of choosing which hospital received them, he said.

For several days running now in Italy, the number of patients in intensive care wards have been diminishing. Italy has Europe’s highest number of deaths — more than 24,000 — in the outbreak, which in the early weeks overwhelmed hospitals, especially in the north where most known cases were registered.

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MADRID — Spain’s famous running of the bulls in Pamplona is the latest major European event to be called off due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Pamplona city hall announced Tuesday that the nine-day San Fermin festival held in July won’t take place this year.

It said in a statement that though the decision was expected, “it still brings sadness.”

Pamplona mayor Enrique Maya is infected with the virus.

The San Fermin fiesta was made famous internationally by Ernest Hemingway in his 1926 novel “The Sun Also Rises.”

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THE HAGUE, Netherlands — A Dutch nursing home where a number of residents are infected with the coronavirus has been evacuated as a precaution due to smoke drifting from a nearby wildfire.

The organization that runs the Wellenshof nursing home in the southeastern town of Liessel says in a statement that the 24 elderly residents were evacuated Monday evening.

Coby Nogarede, chair of the board of directors of the foundation that runs the nursing home, told local broadcaster Omroep Brabant that the local health authority “organized special transport with all preventative measures so that clients and employees can’t infect one another.”

The fire in the Deurnese Peel nature reserve continued to burn Tuesday, fanned by strengthening winds. Two air force Chinook helicopters equipped with water-bombing equipment are helping fire crews tackling the blaze.

The local municipality reports that nobody has been injured by the blaze that had burned some 150 hectares (371 acres) of peat land by Tuesday morning.

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LONDON — Official statistics show that at least 1,500 more people with the new coronavirus have died in Britain than the 16,500 whose deaths have been announced by the government.

The Office for National Statistics says that 1,043 deaths in nursing homes in England and Wales up to April 10 involved COVID-19, with 826 of those deaths recorded in the final week of that period. More than 500 other people died in hospices and private homes.

Those are not included in the U.K. government’s daily total, which only includes deaths in hospitals.

The figures show that the total number of deaths in the week to April 10 — 18,516 — was the highest weekly total in 20 years. About a third of all deaths involved the coronavirus.

The British government is under pressure to include nursing-home deaths in its daily coronavirus figures amid fears the number is being underreported.

Liz Kendall, social care spokeswoman for the opposition Labour Party, said “these awful figures are only scratching the surface of the emerging crisis in social care, because they are already 11 days out of date.”

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PARIS — Paris police are facing a modest uptick of unrest in the oft-troubled suburbs of the now locked-down French capital, making a small number of arrests after fires were set and fireworks lobbed to shatter the calm imposed by stay-home measures to counter the coronavirus.

A scattering of vehicle and trash-can blazes and firework explosions on successive nights on the outskirts of Paris this week have so far been far milder than previous outbreaks of violence. But the renewed tensions are also a reminder of policing difficulties that have long simmered in troubled neighborhoods of the city, before the virus lockdown forced most people indoors.

Paris police said officers arrested nine people in two suburbs overnight Tuesday. They were suspected of either possessing fireworks or gathering together to commit violence.

A possible trigger for the flare-up appears to have been a traffic accident this past weekend involving a police car and a motorcyclist who was injured. Police reported that projectiles were thrown at officers following the crash on Saturday evening.

The lockdown in place since March 17 has been particularly tough for families jammed together in small apartments in the poorer Paris suburbs. The stay-home orders and police patrols to enforce them have also disrupted underground economies centered around drug-dealing and other crime in unruly projects.

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STOCKHOLM — Sweden’s state alcohol monopoly that runs a chain of liquor stores says it has put up signs in its shops to tell patrons that vodka, gin and other spirits meant for consumption doesn’t work as hand sanitizer.

A spokeswoman for Systembolaget, Therese Elmgren, told Sweden TT news agency that they had received questions from customers — both in shops and online — after which they decided to put up the signs stating that strong alcoholic beverages don’t work as sanitizer.

“It needs to have a higher percentage,” Elmgren said.

Systembolaget was created to minimize alcohol-related problems. The stores that are found throughout Sweden, sell alcoholic beverages that contain more than 3.5% alcohol by volume. One must be above the age of 20 to buy there.

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MADRID — New deaths attributed to the new coronavirus in Spain are slightly up again on Tuesday, with 430 fatalities that bring the total death toll to 21,282 from a 4-week low of 399 daily deaths on Monday.

Spain is reporting nearly 4,000 new infections to a total of 204,178, a 2% day-to-day increase in line with the average for the past four days, health ministry data shows.

The government is assessing already how to roll back one of Europe’s strictest lockdowns, starting from next Monday by allowing children to go out onto the streets for brief periods. Spain’s center-left Cabinet is discussing details on how the measure will be implemented during Tuesday’s weekly meeting.

An 8-week survey of 30,000 households that will be tested for the new virus is also expected to roll out on April 27, allowing authorities to gauge what’s the level of immunization beyond hospitals and nursing homes, where testing has focused during the peak of the pandemic.

Authorities are also deciding on Monday on price caps for face masks, gloves, hand sanitizers and other protective equipment that has been in short supply.

According to a government special order issued on Sunday, the aim with controlling prices is for citizens to access in “non-abusive” economic conditions to the material that experts see as key to controlling future contagion.

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