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Spain's overnight death toll from the new coronavirus rose by 56 on Friday to a total of 28,628, the health ministry said.

Sinovac Biotech Ltd said on Friday it had started mid-stage human trials of its experimental coronavirus vaccine in China earlier this month.

Some 80 million children worldwide could be at risk of vaccine-preventable diseases like diphtheria, measles and polio due to disruption of routine immunisation during the COVID-19 pandemic, U.N. agencies and the GAVI vaccine alliance said on Friday.

The coronavirus mortality rate among some of the poorest Catalans is five times higher than among the wealthiest residents of the Spanish region, a study showed, in the latest evidence of how COVID-19 hits the needy hardest.

Thailand will maintain its state of emergency over the coronavirus until the end of June, its COVID-19 task force said on Friday, in an effort to keep infections under control as the government prepares to ease restrictions further.

Britain should have learned more from other countries who were tackling coronavirus outbreaks earlier, the head of NHS England Simon Stevens said on Friday, acknowledging that not everything with the response had gone perfectly.

Children have milder COVID-19 symptoms than adults and the balance of evidence suggests they may also have lower susceptibility and infectivity than adults, scientists advising the British government have said.

President Vladimir Putin told officials on Friday to ramp up testing for the new coronavirus, but said Russia's outbreak was stabilising even as the death toll rose by a record one-day amount.

The United Kingdom's death toll from confirmed cases of COVID-19 rose by 351 to 36,393 as of 1600 GMT on May 21, the health ministry said.

Chinese technology company NetEase plans to carry out a secondary listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange on June 11, which will be followed one week later by web retailer JD.com , four sources with direct knowledge of the matter said.

China's Pinduoduo Inc beat first-quarter revenue estimates on Friday as more people shopped on its e-commerce platform during coronavirus lockdowns that have shut most brick-and-mortar outlets.

African nations should use antibody tests to find out whether the slower spread and lower mortality rate of the new coronavirus on the continent is due to patchy data or a more resilient population, former British prime minister Tony Blair said on Friday.

The United States called on the World Health Organization (WHO) on Friday to begin work immediately on investigating the source of the novel coronavirus, as well as its own handling of the response to the pandemic.

The city of Wuhan, the original epicentre of the new coronavirus outbreak in China, conducted 1,000,729 nucleic acid tests on May 21, the local health authority said on Friday, compared with 887,321 tests a day earlier.

The latest U.S. government action against China's Huawei takes direct aim at the company's HiSilicon chip division -- a business that in a few short years has become central to China's ambitions in semiconductor technology but will now lose access to tools that are central to its success.

(This May 21 story clarifies that lockdown is entering ninth week, not eighth week)

The new coronavirus is believed to be spreading throughout Yemen where the health care system "has in effect collapsed", the United Nations said on Friday, appealing for urgent funding.

Britain decided to end mass testing and contact tracing of those with or suspected of having COVID-19 in March because a surge in new cases at that time would have been beyond the system's capacity, government advisers said on Friday.

China's Pinduoduo Inc beat first-quarter revenue estimates on Friday, as more people shopped at its e-commerce platform during coronavirus lockdowns that shut down most brick-and-mortar shops.

The mortality rate in the Netherlands was lower than average last week, the statistics office said, as deaths in the country from the coronavirus decline.