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Ireland plans to expand its coronavirus testing capacity to 100,000 tests per week over the next 10 days as it considers easing stay-at-home restrictions on May 5, Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan said on Friday.

Britain launched a new coronavirus taskforce on Friday to support efforts to make a vaccine available to the public as quickly as possible.

Hacking activity against corporations in the United States and other countries more than doubled by some measures last month as digital thieves took advantage of security weakened by pandemic work-from-home policies, researchers said.

Mexico's president on Friday urged medical workers aged 60 to 65 to return to their jobs and treat non-coronavirus patients, in a bid to help the health system handle an expected surge of demand from the virus.

The Chinese-backed owners of Imagination Technologies told the British government on Friday the chip designer would remain headquartered in the United Kingdom and they would consult over any board changes.

The COVID-19 pandemic will likely kill at least 300,000 Africans and risks pushing 29 million into extreme poverty, the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) said on Friday, calling for a $100 billion safety net for the continent.

A sharp upward revision in China's coronavirus death toll on Friday was "an attempt to leave no case undocumented", World Health Organization (WHO) epidemiologist Maria van Kerkhove told a briefing.

Africa can still contain the outbreak of the COVID-19 respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, a senior World Health Organization official said on Friday.

Deaths from the COVID-19 epidemic in Italy rose by 575 on Friday, up from 525 the day before, while the number of new cases declined slightly and scientists warned that infections were now mainly happening among family members.

The British government was too slow to react on several fronts to the novel coronavirus outbreak that could cause the deaths of 40,000 people in the United Kingdom, a leading public health professor told lawmakers on Friday.

U.S. health agencies, the European drug regulator and 16 top drugmakers will collaborate on vaccine and drug development efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. National Institutes of Health said on Friday.

Dutch scientists have pulled a British-made East Radcliff ventilator built in the 1960s from the shelves of a science museum to use as a template for cheap and easy-to-build ventilators in the fight against coronavirus.

Any "wet markets" that are allowed to reopen after coronavirus lockdowns must conform to stringent food and hygiene standards, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a briefing on Friday.

British healthcare staff have been advised to treat COVID-19 patients without full-length protective gowns due to shortages of equipment, the Guardian newspaper reported on Friday.

Private equity firm Canyon Bridge, the Chinese-backed owner of Imagination Technologies, told the British government it was committed to keeping the chip designer headquartered in the UK, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

Activist investors say telecommunications pioneer AT&T Inc will not take their calls for its upcoming annual meeting, reinforcing their concerns that the shift of the gathering to cyberspace due to the COVID-19 pandemic would restrict shareholder input.

Goldman Sachs said on Friday it expects iPhone shipment to drop 36% during the current quarter due to coronavirus-related lockdowns around the world and downgraded Apple Inc stock to "sell".

The coronavirus outbreak in Germany has become manageable again as the number of patients who have recovered has been higher than the number of new infections every day this week, the health minister said on Friday.

France's state-supported "StopCovid" contact-tracing app project is creating friction between government and parliament amid preparations to debate the issue before the app is ready.

The United Kingdom's hospital death toll from COVID-19 rose 847 to 14,576, as of 1600 GMT on April 16, the health ministry said.