Coronavirus live news: WHO chief calls on China ‘to be transparent, open and cooperate’; record cases in Thailand

Los Angeles will return to mandatory mask-wearing indoors, even for people who have been vaccinated, amid a rapid and sustained increase in Covid-19 cases in the nation’s largest county.

Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, LA county’s public health officer, Dr Muntu Davis, said that a public health order requiring masks indoors would go into effect on Saturday.

Davis said the county had been recording more than 1,000 new cases each day for a week and that there is now “substantial community transmission”. Nearly 400 people hospitalized with Covid-19 as of Wednesday, up 275 from the week before. Nine new Covid-19 deaths were reported on Wednesday.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck moment,” he said:

The Philippines has detected its first locally acquired cases of the more infectious Delta coronavirus variant, the health ministry said on Friday.

Of the 16 new Covid cases with the Delta variant, 11 were tagged as locally acquired cases, health undersecretary Maria Rosario Vergeire told a news conference.

The variant, first detected in India, has been blamed as the key factor for a surge in cases in neigbouring countries including Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia.

Thailand reported a daily record of 9,692 coronavirus infections on Friday, taking total cases to 381,907 since the start of the pandemic, as authorities struggle to tackle the country’s biggest wave of infections so far.

The Covid task force also reported 67 new coronavirus deaths, bringing the total number of fatalities to 3,099.

The head of the World Health Organization has acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and said he was asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origins of the coronavirus.

In a rare departure from his usual deference to powerful member countries, WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said getting access to raw data had been a challenge for the international team that travelled to China earlier this year to investigate the source of Covid-19. The first human cases were identified in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Tedros told reporters that the UN health agency based in Geneva is “asking actually China to be transparent, open and cooperate, especially on the information, raw data that we asked for at the early days of the pandemic”:

Hello and welcome to today’s live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic with me, Helen Sullivan.

The head of the World Health Organization has acknowledged it was premature to rule out a potential link between the Covid-19 pandemic and a laboratory leak, and said he was asking China to be more transparent as scientists search for the origins of the coronavirus.

Meanwhile Thailand reported a daily record of 9,692 coronavirus infections on Friday, taking total cases to 381,907 since the start of the pandemic, as authorities struggle to tackle the country’s biggest wave of infections so far.

More on those stories shortly. In the meantime here are the other key recent developments:

• The World Health Organization’s emergency committee has maintained its stance that proof of Covid-19 vaccination should not be required for international travel, amid controversy over countries blocking the entry of travellers if they are unvaccinated.
• The head of the WHO has called on China to cooperate better in the next phase of an investigation into the origins of the pandemic, demanding more access to raw data.
• Abu Dhabi has announced a partial lockdown and new entry requirements in the emirate starting 19 July from midnight until 5 am.
• European Union member states have agreed to add Ukraine to a list of countries from which travel is permitted, while Rwanda and Thailand were removed.
• Spain’s 14-day infection rate surpassed 500 per 100,000 people for the first time since mid-February, health ministry data showed.
• Within 72 hours of the French learning they would soon need to be vaccinated or tested to go to the cafe, more than 3 million had booked appointments and France had broken its vaccination record, administering 800,000 shots in a single day.
• Millions of Chinese people face bans from public spaces including schools, hospitals and shopping malls unless they get a Covid-19 vaccine, under new edicts covering nearly two dozen cities and counties.
• Coronavirus-linked deaths in Africa surged by 43% in a week, driven by a lack of intensive-care beds and oxygen, according to the World Health Organization.
• Barcelona and the surrounding north-east corner of Spain is to impose a curfew from 1am to 6am again amid rising Covid cases.
• Saudi Arabia has arrested more than 120 people allegedly suspected of supplying or procuring fraudulent coronavirus vaccine and test certificates, official media said, two days before a tightly controlled hajj amid some of the strictest and most controversial rules in the world
• More than twice as many children and adolescents were referred to mental health services year on year in England as cases hit a record high, amid warnings that waiting lists are so long that significant numbers of young people would not get treatment in time to prevent them growing into adults with “entrenched mental health issues that could have been avoided had we been able to intervene earlier”.
• Hundreds of thousands of people left the Bangladesh capital on Thursday after authorities lifted a coronavirus lockdown despite rising infections and deaths.
• The Canadian government has rejected proposals to have Ontario residents line up inside a US border tunnel to tap into a surplus of Covid-19 vaccine held by Michigan, a mayor said.