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The coronavirus pandemic forces more than 20 million Americans to seek unemployment benefits, while tentative projections indicate millions could become infected in Africa.
This story will be updated regularly throughout Friday. You can also stay informed with the latest episode of the Coronacast podcast.
50 million US jobs vulnerable
The wave of layoffs that has engulfed the US economy since coronavirus struck forced 5.2 million more people to seek unemployment benefits last week, the Government reported on Thursday.
Roughly 22 million have now sought jobless benefits in the past month — easily the worst stretch of US job losses on record. It means that roughly one in seven workers have lost their jobs in that time.
The nation's output could shrink by roughly 10.5 per cent before it starts to rebound, according to Ryan Sweet, an economist at Moody's Analytics.
That would be more than double the contraction that occurred during the 2008–2009 recession, which was the worst downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Layoffs are spreading beyond service industries like hotels, bars and restaurants, which absorbed the brunt of the initial job cuts, into white collar professional occupations, including software programmers, construction workers and sales people.
Up to 50 million jobs are vulnerable to coronavirus-related layoffs, economists say — about one-third of all positions in the United States.
That figure is based on a calculation of jobs that are deemed non-essential by state and federal governments, and cannot be done from home.
"This crisis combines the scale of a national economic downturn with the pace of a natural disaster," said Daniel Zhao, senior economist at Glassdoor.
"And that's really unprecedented in American economic history."
Africa could see 10 million infections
Coronavirus cases in Africa could shoot up from thousands now to 10 million within three to six months according to very provisional modelling, a regional World Health Organisation (WHO) official said.
But Michel Yao, head of emergency operations for WHO Africa, said that was a tentative projection which could change and noted worst-case predictions for the Ebola outbreak had not come true because people changed behaviour in time.
"This is still to be fine-tuned," he told a media teleconference.
"It's difficult to make a long-term estimation because the context changes too much and also public health measures when they are fully implemented, they can actually have an impact."
The world's poorest continent has seen more than 17,000 confirmed cases of the COVID-19 disease and about 900 deaths so far — relatively little compared to some other regions.
More than 1 million coronavirus tests will be rolled out starting next week in Africa to address the "big gap" in assessing the true number of cases on the continent, the head of the African Centres for Disease Control and Prevention said.
Spain's death toll could be thousands higher
Spain has reported another rise in its coronavirus death toll but figures from the region of Catalonia indicated the real total so far could be several thousand more.
The number of people infected also rose, although health emergency chief Fernando Simon said this was due to increased testing and that most concerned people with mild or no symptoms.
The health ministry said on Thursday the total number of fatalities rose to 19,130 over the past 24 hours as 551 people died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, up from 523 the previous day.
The overall number of cases of those infected rose to 182,816.
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However, Catalonia's health department announced late on Wednesday an additional 3,242 coronavirus deaths since the start of the pandemic, nearly doubling its previous tally to 7,097 for the region.
The addition was due to a methodology change, with data from funerary services on suspected and confirmed coronavirus deaths in nursing homes and private homes included for the first time.
Until now, the Catalan health department was only reporting coronavirus deaths in hospitals and confirmed by tests.
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Russia will accept ventilators from the US
Russia would accept a "kind offer" by US President Donald Trump to ship ventilators to the country if it felt it needed them to treat people suffering from COVID-19, the Kremlin said on Thursday.
Russia, which has so far recorded 27,938 cases and 232 coronavirus-related deaths, shipped ventilators and protective gear this month to the United States after a phone call between Mr Trump and President Vladimir Putin.
In March the New York Times reported the US faced a critical shortage of lifesaving ventilators. The country has more than 640,000 infections and more than 31,000 deaths.
Mr Trump told Mr Putin in a recent phone call that the US could reciprocate as it begins to produce more ventilators, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
"If necessary Russia would of course take advantage of this kind offer," he said.
He did not say whether Moscow would pay for the potential ventilator shipments from the US, nor whether Russia needed them.
The Kremlin initially described Russia's shipment of ventilators and medical equipment to the United States as humanitarian aid, while the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow had paid for half of it.
Those assertions were later countered by a Trump administration official who said that Washington had picked up the whole tab.
Ventilators are in high demand globally as governments rush to purchase them in large quantities to tackle the coronavirus crisis, and manufacturers say they cannot immediately supply everyone.
Banksy working from home
Street-artist Banksy has followed official advice to stay at home during the coronavirus crisis by creating a new artwork in his bathroom that shows his trademark stencilled rats running amok around the sink and toilet.
The elusive artist posted photos of the work to Instagram with the comment: "My wife hates it when I work from home."
Banksy, whose identity remains a secret, uses the site to authenticate murals after they are painted in public locations, most recently in the English cities of Bristol and Birmingham.
The new work, like much during lockdown, can only be experienced online.
It shows stir-crazy rats squeezing a tube of toothpaste, hanging off the light switch, unravelling loo rolls and urinating over the toilet seat.
Works by Banksy have rocketed in value. His painting of chimps sitting in Britain's Parliament sold for more than $US12 million ($19 million) in October, a record price at auction for his work.
Prince William opens new emergency COVID-19 hospital
Prince William, the grandson of Queen Elizabeth, has opened an emergency COVID-19 hospital built in just eight days in the exhibition centre of Britain's second city, Birmingham.
William, the Duke of Cambridge, opened the new NHS Nightingale Hospital at the National Exhibition Centre (NEC) via video link.
The hospital is the second of seven being constructed around England in response to the novel coronavirus outbreak which has killed nearly 13,000 people in Britain so far.
It has a 500-bed capacity, which can be increased to 1,500. Over 400 civilian contractors, along with military personnel and about 500 clinical staff, were involved in its building.
William's father, Prince Charles, tested positive for the coronavirus in March but has since recovered.
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Topics: infectious-diseases-other, respiratory-diseases, covid-19, united-states, spain, united-kingdom