Virus toll nears 200,000 as UN pushes for global vaccine effort

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," Secretary-General Antonio Guterres told a virtual briefing on Friday, asking for international organisations, world leaders and the private sector to join hands. "A world free of Covid-19 requires the most massive public health effort in history." In the US, gyms, hair salons and tattoo parlors had a green light to reopen on Friday in the state of Georgia as the country surpassed the grim milestone of 50,000 deaths from the coronavirus pandemic. As the southern state lifted restrictions on a list of businesses that also included nail salons and bowling alleys, President Donald Trump warned that Governor Brian Kemp may be moving too fast. "Spas, beauty salons, tattoo parlors, & barber shops should take a little slower path," Mr Trump tweeted. At the same time, Trump said he had told Kemp, a Republican ally, "to do what is right for the great people of Georgia (& USA)!" The mixed messaging was the latest from a president whose remarks from the White House podium have frequently raised eyebrows, including most recently a suggestion that disinfectant could be injected to treat patients with Covid-19. Mr Trump sought to walk back his disinfectant comments on Friday, claiming somewhat unconvincingly that he had been speaking "sarcastically." Global Covid-19 deaths have climbed past 195,000, but new reported cases appear to have leveled off at about 80,000 a day. The daily death toll in Western countries seems to be falling, a sign hopeful epidemiologists had been looking for, but the WHO has warned that other nations are still in the early stages of the fight. The unprecedented situation has left the world staring at its worst downturn since the Great Depression, and put immense pressure on world leaders to balance public health concerns and economic needs. Some countries - including parts of Europe - have started loosening restrictions, with Belgium becoming the latest to announce an easing on Friday. Pressure was growing, meanwhile, on the government of coronavirus survivor and Prime Minister Boris Johnson to explain how Britain will get out of the lockdown stage and restart the economy. On the other side of the world in Australia and New Zealand, where sweeping social distancing measures are in force, people held vigils from the isolation of their own driveways to pay tribute to their war veterans on Anzac Day. Official memorials were held behind closed doors. "We (usually) go away to our various watering holes, pubs or clubs, and we enjoy our mates... you talk about the old times, whilst you were serving and you talk about someone who's missing this year that was there last year," said Ray James, an Australian veteran of the Vietnam War. "It's going to be sad this year because we won't be able to do that." Across the Muslim world, hundreds of millions of faithful opened the Ramadan holy month under stay-at-home conditions, facing unprecedented bans on prayers in mosques and on the traditional large gatherings of families and friends to break the daily fast. In the Islamic holy city of Makkah in Saudi Arabia, the Grand Mosque, usually packed with tens of thousands of people during Ramadan, was deserted as religious authorities suspended the year-round Umrah pilgrimage. "We are used to seeing the holy mosque crowded with people during the day, night, all the time... I feel pain deep inside," said Ali Mulla, the muezzin who gives the call to prayer at the Grand Mosque. Despite the coronavirus threat, clerics and conservatives in some countries including Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia - the world's largest Muslim-majority nation - have pushed back and refused to stop gatherings in mosques.