APRIL 6, 2020 @ 1600 GMT | Las Vegas, USA | This Monday, April 6, 2020, photo shows an arrangement of hydroxychloroquine pills in Las Vegas. US President Donald Trump and his administration kept up their out-sized promotion Monday of an malaria drug not yet officially approved for fighting the new coronavirus, even though scientists say more testing is needed before it’s proven safe and effective against COVID-19. Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro championed hydroxychloroquine in television interviews a day after the president publicly put his faith in the medication to lessen the toll of the coronavirus pandemic. (AP Photo)
LAS VEGAS (AP) — Some politicians and doctors are sparring over whether to use hydroxychloroquine against the new coronavirus, with many scientists saying the evidence is too thin to recommend it now.
HOW IS IT BEING USED?
The drug can help tame an overactive immune system. It’s been used since the 1940s to prevent and treat malaria, and to treat rheumatoid arthritis and lupus. It’s sold in generic form and under the brand name Plaquenil in the United States. Doctors also can prescribe it “off label” for other purposes, as many are doing now for COVID-19.
APRIL 5, 2020 @ 1730 GMT | FILE – In this April 1, 2020 file photo, medical staff transfer a patient infected with the coronavirus to a train at the Gare d’Austerlitz train station in Paris. On high-speed trains fitted out like hospitals and military planes, France has moved hundreds of intensive care patients around the country in an exceptional effort to relieve congested hospitals and stay ahead of the fast-moving virus. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo)
PARIS, France (AP) — The high-speed train whooshing past historic World War I battle zones and through the chateau-speckled Loire Valley carried a delicate cargo: 20 critically ill COVID-19 patients and the machines helping keep them alive.
The TGV-turned-mobile-intensive-care-unit is just one piece of France’s nationwide mobilization of trains, helicopters, jets and even a warship, deployed to relieve congested hospitals and shuffle hundreds of patients and hundreds more medical personnel in and out of coronavirus hotspots.
“We are at war,” President Emmanuel Macron tells his compatriots, again and again, casting himself as a warrior and harnessing the might of the armed forces to fight this invisible foe.
APRIL 4, 2020 @ 1530 GMT |New York, USA | A body wrapped in plastic is prepared to be loaded onto a refrigerated container truck used as a temporary morgue by medical workers due to COVID-19 concerns, Tuesday, March 31, 2020, at Brooklyn Hospital Center in the Brooklyn borough of New York. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo)
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — There are the new dead. And then there are the bodies waiting in overcrowded mortuaries to be buried as cities struggle to meet demand and families wrestle with rules on social distancing that make the usual funeral rituals impossible.
Med Alliance Group, a medical distributor in Illinois, is besieged by calls and emails from cities around the country. Each asks the same thing: Send more refrigerated trailers so that we can handle a situation we never could have imagined.
APRIL 3, 2020 @ 1630 GMT | Barcelona, Spain | Healthcare workers assist a COVID-19 patient at a library that was turned into an intensive care unit (ICU) at Germans Trias i Pujol hospital in Badalona, Barcelona province, Spain, Wednesday, April 1, 2020. The new coronavirus causes mild or moderate symptoms for most people, but for some, especially older adults and people with existing health problems, it can cause more severe illness or death. (AP Photo)
BADALONA, Spain (AP) — The tension is palpable. There is no non-essential talking. An orchestra of medical monitors marks the tempo with an endless series of soft, distinct beeps.
Never have so many people been inside the library of the Germans Trias i Pujol hospital in northeastern Spain. But the health care workers in improvised protective gear aren’t consulting medical books. Instead, they’re treating patients in critical condition suffering from pneumonia caused by the coronavirus.
APRIL 1, 2020 @ 1400 GMT | US President Donald Trump speaks about the coronavirus in the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House, Wednesday, April 1, 2020, in Washington, as from left, Adm. Karl Leo Schultz, commandant of the Coast Guard, national security adviser Robert O’Brien, Attorney General William Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, and Navy Adm. Michael Gilday, Chief of Naval Operations, listen. (AP Photo)
MIAMI (AP) — President Donald Trump announced Wednesday that Navy ships are being moved toward Venezuela as his administration beefs up counter-narcotics operations in the Caribbean following a U.S. drug indictment against Nicolás Maduro.
The announcement came at the start of the daily White House press briefing to discuss the coronavirus pandemic, which has left much of the country in lock-down and which the government warns could cause 100,000 to 240,000 deaths.
APRIL 2, 2020 @ 1800 GMT |LA California, USA | First responders who were scheduled to be tested earlier for COVID-19, get test kits at a drive-up testing site in Elysian Park, Los Angelas Thursday, April 2, 2020. Officials say hand-washing and keeping a safe social distance are priorities in battling the COVID-19 virus. (AP Photo)
LOS ANGELES (AP) — California is ramping up testing for coronavirus even as a backlog of 59,000 pending tests is growing, delaying some people from getting results for up to 12 days and leaving an incomplete picture of how widespread the outbreak is in the state.
Testing rolled out slowly in California but is accelerating now. More than 90,000 tests have been administered statewide, but nearly two-thirds of those results were still pending, according to state figures.
“The backlogs are not necessarily getting better, in real time, but we’re hopeful,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday.
APRIL 1, 2020 @ 1500 GMT | FILE – U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addresses his statement, during the opening of the High-Level Segment of the 43rd session of the Human Rights Council, at the European headquarters of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, Monday, Feb. 24, 2020. (AP Photo)
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned Tuesday that the world faces the most challenging crisis since World War II, confronting a pandemic threatening people in every country, one that will bring a recession “that probably has no parallel in the recent past.”
There is also a risk that the combination of the disease and its economic impact will contribute to “enhanced instability, enhanced unrest, and enhanced conflict,” the U.N. chief said at the launch of a report on the socioeconomic impacts of COVID-19.
MAR 28, 2020 @ 1700GMT | Norfolk, VA United States | US President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Mark Esper arrive to speak in front of the U.S. Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort at Naval Station Norfolk in Norfolk, Va., Saturday, March 28, 2020. The ship is departing for New York to assist hospitals responding to the coronavirus outbreak. (AP Photo)
NORFOLK, United States (AP) — President Donald Trump has backed away from calling for a quarantine for coronavirus hotspots in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, instead directing Saturday night that a “strong Travel Advisory” be issued to stem the spread of the outbreak.
Trump’s talk earlier Saturday of what he called a quarantine for those hard-hit areas raised questions whether the federal government had the power to do so. Vice President Mike Pence has since tweeted federal health officials are urging residents of the three states “to refrain from non-essential travel for the next 14 days.”
MAR 27, 2020 @ 1530 GMT | FILE — In this Wednesday, March 25, 2020 file photo, a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard disinfects a taxi to help prevent the spread of the new coronavirus in downtown Tehran, Iran. Local media reported Thursday that nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened by ingesting toxic methanol across the Islamic Republic out of the false belief it kills the new coronavirus. (AP Photo)
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Standing over the still body of an intubated 5-year-old boy wearing nothing but a plastic diaper, an Iranian health care worker in a hazmat suit and mask begged the public for just one thing: Stop drinking industrial alcohol over fears about the new coronavirus.
The boy, now blind after his parents gave him toxic methanol in the mistaken belief it protects against the virus, is just one of hundreds of victims of an epidemic inside the pandemic now gripping Iran.
Iranian media report nearly 300 people have been killed and more than 1,000 sickened so far by ingesting methanol across the Islamic Republic, where drinking alcohol is banned and where those who do rely on bootleggers. An Iranian doctor helping the country’s Health Ministry told The Associated Press on Friday the problem was even greater, giving a death toll of around 480 with 2,850 people sickened.
MAR 25, 2020 @ 1400 GMT | Kabul, Afghanistan | British soldiers with NATO-led Resolute Support Mission forces arrive at the site of an attack in Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, March 25, 2020. Gunmen stormed a religious gathering of Afghanistan’s minority Sikhs in their place of worship in the heart of the Afghan capital’s old city on Wednesday, a minority Sikh parliamentarian said. (AP Photo)
KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — A lone Islamic State gunman rampaged through a Sikh house of worship in the heart of the Afghan capital, Kabul, on Wednesday, killing 25 worshippers and wounding eight, Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry said.
The gunman held many of the worshippers hostage for several hours as Afghan special forces, helped by international troops, tried to clear the building. At least one of the dead was a child.
Within hours, the Islamic State group claimed responsibility for the attack.
As the siege ended, the Afghan special forces rescued at least 80 worshippers who had been trapped inside the Sikh house of worship, known as a Gurdwara, as the gunman lobbed grenades and fired his automatic rifle into the crowd, the ministry said.
