Coronavirus latest: ‘fresh outbreak’ in Iran feared; UK records more than 20,000 deaths

UK has world’s fifth-highest official death toll, after the United States, Italy, Spain and France

France readies multibillion-euro relief package for Air France and Renault; ‘fresh outbreak’ in Iran feared as shops reopen

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A man wearing a mask poses as demonstrators in Madison protest the extension of Wisconsin’s emergency Safer at Home order on Friday. Photo: Reuters

Published: 4:22am, 25 Apr 2020Updated: 11:59pm, 25 Apr 2020

The global coronavirus death toll approached 200,000 on Saturday as the United Nations launched an international push for a vaccine to defeat the pandemic.

Governments around the world are struggling to limit the economic devastation unleashed by the virus, which has infected nearly 2.8 million people and left half of humanity under some form of lockdown.

The scale of the pandemic has forced medical research on the virus to move at unprecedented speed, but effective treatments are still far away and the United Nations chief said the effort will require cooperation on a global scale.

“We face a global public enemy like no other. A world free of Covid-19 requires the most massive public health effort in history,” Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a virtual briefing on Friday, asking for international organisations, world leaders and the private sector to join hands to fund a vaccine that is safe, affordable and available to all nations.

But notably absent from the meeting were the leaders of China, where the virus was first reported last year, and the United States, which has accused the UN’s World Health Organisation of not warning quickly enough about the original outbreak.

The US is the hardest-hit country by far in the pandemic, recording more than 51,000 deaths and over 890,000 infections.