Health

China said on Thursday it supports the World Health Organization (WHO) in trying to pinpoint the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and accused U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo of telling one lie after another in his attacks on Beijing.

Russia's coronavirus cases overtook France and Germany on Thursday to become the fifth highest number in the world after a record daily rise, and Moscow's mayor said the real figure, not captured by official statistics, was much higher.

Deaths in Sweden from COVID-19 passed 3,000 on Thursday, the Public Health Agency said, far more than in neighbouring Nordic countries.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the Netherlands have risen by 455 to 41,774, with 84 new deaths, health authorities said on Thursday.

Vietnam reported 17 new coronavirus cases on Thursday, all of whom were imported infections involving Vietnamese citizens repatriated from virus-hit areas, health ministry said.

Pharmaceuticals maker Recipharm said on Thursday it had secured supplies of chloroquine phosphate and begun production of a product using the active ingredient that has been identified by some as a potential treatment for COVID-19.

German officials warned on Thursday that the coronavirus crisis is far from over despite the country slowly reopening its economy and trying to get life back to normal.

The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased by 1,284 to 166,091, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious diseases showed on Thursday.

Several U.S. senators have urged congressional leaders to accept the White House's offer of rapid coronavirus testing for lawmakers, saying they could otherwise unwittingly spread the disease when they returned to their home districts.

The Canadian province of British Columbia will begin reopening its economy as early as mid-May, the premier said on Wednesday, as new coronavirus cases dwindle and other parts of the country, including Quebec and Manitoba, begin to loosen their restrictions.

Seven days before Japan quarantined a cruise ship near Tokyo early this year, in what became one of the first coronavirus hot spots outside China, another cruise ship docked in southern Japan.

China reported two new coronavirus cases for May 6, unchanged from the same number of increases the day before, data from the national health authority showed on Thursday.

Mexico's health ministry on Wednesday reported 1,609 new confirmed cases of coronavirus infections and 197 additional fatalities, bringing the total in the country to 27,634 cases and 2,704 deaths.

Brazil, one of the world's emerging coronavirus hot spots, registered a record number of cases and deaths on Wednesday, prompting the health minister to flag the possibility of strict lockdowns in particularly hard-hit areas.

A coronavirus war of words broke out between Costa Rica and El Salvador after Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele accused the fellow Central American country of massaging its statistics by deliberately carrying out fewer tests for the virus.

Coronavirus-related border controls, lockdowns and flight shortages are making illegal drugs more expensive and difficult to obtain around the world, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime said in a report published on Thursday.

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Wednesday that countries emerging from restrictions to halt the new coronavirus must proceed "extremely carefully" or risk a rapid rise in new cases.

Gilead Sciences Inc faces a new dilemma in deciding how much it should profit from the only treatment so far proven to help patients infected with the novel coronavirus.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) on Wednesday reported 1,193,813 cases of the new coronavirus, an increase of 22,303 cases from its previous count, and said that the number of deaths had risen by 2,523 to 70,802.

More than 3.7 million people have been reported to be infected by the novel coronavirus globally and 256,897 have died, according to a Reuters tally as of 1322 GMT on Wednesday.