VOA news for Monday, May 18th, 2020
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This is VOA news. Via remote, I'm Marissa Melton.
Brazil's total number of coronavirus cases totaled more than 235,000 on Sunday. It is now the fourth ranked country in the world in terms of the numbers of confirmed cases of coronavirus.
The [uni...] United States is by far the first with 1.4 million cases. It's followed by Russia with 281,000. Britain has 244,000 and then Brazil. Italy and Spain were once harboring more cases than anywhere else in the West. They are now at fifth and sixth places in the world.
India's government has extended a lockdown in place to prevent the spread of COVID-19 for an additional two weeks. That's according to India's ministry of home affairs on Sunday. [considerab...] considerable relaxations and lockdown measures will be allowed in places with relatively low case numbers, according to the home ministry.
Over the weekend, the number of confirmed cases of the coronavirus in India surpassed that of China, making it the most affected country by the virus in Asia. India has recorded over 91,000 confirmed cases and 2,800 deaths. That's according to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus [resource] Resource Center.
Spain's two largest cities remained in coronavirus-related lockdown Sunday. The rest of the country is slowly reopening.
Spain has currently recorded the fifth highest death toll due to the coronavirus in the world. But Sunday reported a death toll of under 100 people. It was the lowest recorded since the Spanish lockdown began in min-March.
Italy will also begin opening up this week. Tourists will be allowed to go into the country beginning on June the third. In Turkey, senior citizens were allowed to leave their home Sunday as part of new guidelines which will allow those over 65, which means they are at higher risk of severe infection from the virus, to go outside for six hours on Sundays.
This is VOA news.
The United States leads the world nearly (with) 90,000 coronavirus deaths, but the U.S. health chief on Sunday rejected the notion that the government had failed its people.
"You can't celebrate a single death," Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar told CNN, but he added, "It could have been vastly, vastly worse.”
Later, as U.S. President Donald Trump returned from a weekend visit to his Camp David presidential retreat outside Washington, he declared, "We did a lot of terrific meetings, tremendous progress is being made on many fronts, including coming up with a cure for this horrible plague that has beset our country.”
Azar said the U.S. over the last two months was "able to flatten the curve" of the number of coronavirus cases in order to give health care workers a chance to deal with the onslaught of patients needing care.
Still, he said, "We do have [higher] greater health risks here in the United States" from people who are obese, have high blood pressure or diabetes.
The University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation is predicting that the U.S. coronavirus death toll will reach 147,000 by August.
And U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Sunday said it has come to his attention the Chinese government has threatened to interfere with the work of U.S. journalists in Hong Kong. He said any decision impinging on Hong Kong's autonomy could affect the U.S. assessment of Hong Kong's status.
Britain returned its former colony of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The territory was then promised a "high degree of autonomy" for 50 years. That promise formed a basis of the territory's special status under U.S. law, which has helped Hong Kong thrive as a world financial center.
Pompeo announced on May the 6 that the State Department was delaying a report to Congress assessing whether Hong Kong enjoyed sufficient autonomy from China to continue receiving special treatment from the United States.
Tensions between Washington and Beijing have spiked in recent weeks as Pompeo and President Trump have complained about China's early handling of the coronavirus outbreak.
And U.S. Democratic lawmakers are launching an investigation into President Trump's firing of the State Department's inspector general in what they say may be an act of illegal retaliation.
The president fired Steve Linick late Friday. Linick has been investigating reports that Secretary of State Pompeo and his wife had asked a State Department aide to run personal errands for them.
And the first named tropical storm of the 2020 season, hurricane season, that is, is moving toward North Carolina after drenching eastern Florida and bringing flooding to the state of Miami.
The hurricane season typically starts June 1.
Via remote, I'm Marissa Melton. This is VOA news.

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