Big Nations See Rising Virus Toll as US, Europe Reopen More

By Staff, Agencies

American car makers are getting back to work and Europe is continuing to reopen. But while new coronavirus cases have been declining in many countries that were initially hit hard by the pandemic, cases are rapidly rising in other populous nations.

Russia and Brazil now sit behind only the US in the number of reported cases. And cases are spiking from Mexico to India. Some places have seen encouraging signs reverse: Iran reported a steady drop in new cases through April only to see them rise again in May.

But there is new hope after an experimental vaccine against the coronavirus yielded encouraging results in a small and extremely early test. Stocks rallied on the news.

Europe also has pushed ahead with reopening, allowing people into the Acropolis in Athens, high-fashion boutiques in Italy, museums in Belgium, golf courses in Ireland and gardens in Bavaria.

Meanwhile in India, where the population is 1.3 billion, cases have surged past 100,000, and infections are rising in the home states of migrant workers who left cities and towns during a nationwide lockdown when they lost work.

In densely-populated Bangladesh, where authorities Monday reported a record 1,602 positive tests, thousands of cars were on the streets of the capital, Dhaka, despite a lockdown that extends through May 30.

Relatively, more than 130,000 autoworkers returned to factories across the United States for the first time in nearly two months Monday in one of the biggest steps yet to restart American industry.

More than 4.8 million people worldwide have been infected so far and over 318,000 deaths have been recorded, including more than 90,000 in the US and over 160,000 in Europe, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.

Those figures are believed to understate the true dimensions of the outbreak because of limited testing, differences in counting the dead and concealment by some governments.