Health

At a Wayne Farms chicken processing plant in Alabama, workers recently had to pay the company 10 cents a day to buy masks to protect themselves from the new coronavirus, according to a meat inspector.

Blackstone Group Inc said on Monday it invested $2 billion in Alnylam Pharmaceuticals Inc through an equity-and-debt deal, giving the drugmaker a financial boost to develop its gene-silencing therapies.

President Joko Widodo said Indonesian will be able to conduct more than 10,000 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests a day for the new coronavirus after criticism of its testing rates.

The number of people who have died from the new coronavirus in the Netherlands has increased by 86 to 2,823, Dutch health authorities said on Monday.

China will step up coronavirus testing and health management for people leaving Wuhan, state television reported Monday, quoting a meeting chaired by Premier Li Keqiang.

Vietnam's health ministry reported five more confirmed coronavirus cases on Monday, taking the country's tally to 265, with no deaths.

Coronavirus testing has resumed in the Gaza Strip after Israel allowed five testing kits purchased by the World Health Organization (WHO) into the enclave, a Gaza health ministry spokesman said on Monday.

Israeli defence firm Elbit Systems said on Monday it had repurposed assembly lines to manufacture thousands of automatic ventilation machines as the country eyes local production to off-set global shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic.

South Korea plans to send kits designed to run up to 600,000 coronavirus tests to the United States on Tuesday after an appeal from U.S. President Donald Trump, a Seoul official said.

Sabir Durrani says he offers prayers almost every day at a mosque in the central Pakistani city of Multan. He says that often a dozen or more men are in attendance - none of them wearing protective face masks.

The number of commuters in Tokyo has fallen since the city announced a state of emergency last week, but the decrease is short of the target needed to control the spread of the coronavirus, the city's governor said on Monday.

Iran's death toll from the coronavirus outbreak has risen to 4,585, with 111 more overnight, a health ministry official said on Monday, adding the total number of infected cases had reached 73,303 in the most-affected Middle Eastern country

U.S. church leaders peppered their Easter homilies with references to the coronavirus on Sunday, in masses held online, on television and even in parking lots to people sheltering in cars to maintain social distancing during the pandemic.

Americans spent Easter Sunday on lockdown as the U.S. toll from the novel coronavirus pandemic surpassed 21,300 deaths and more than half a million confirmed cases.

Britain has cancelled an order for thousands of units of a simple model of ventilator developed by industrial companies to treat COVID-19 because more sophisticated devices are now needed, a source involved in the project said on Sunday.

Russia on Sunday reported 2,186 new coronavirus cases, the largest daily increase since the start of the outbreak, as authorities announced restrictions on Easter services to contain the spread of the disease.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Sunday reported 525,704 cases of the coronavirus, an increase of 33,288 cases from its previous count, and said the number of deaths rose by 1,927 to 20,486.

More than 1.7 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 108,252 have died, according to a Reuters tally, as of 0200 GMT.

The United States needs to ramp up testing for the coronavirus as the White House considers when and how to lift stay-at-home restrictions and lockdowns triggered by the pandemic, U.S. health experts said on Sunday.

South Africa on Sunday reported a further 145 cases of the coronavirus, taking the total number in the country to 2,173, a statement from the Health ministry said.