Hello and welcome to Al Jazeera’s continuing coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. I’m Kate Mayberry in Kuala Lumpur.
The Indonesian capital will go back into lockdown in a bid to contain an escalating outbreak that has pushed hospitals to the brink of collapse.
Some 27.7 million people around the world have now been diagnosed with the coronavirus and 900,239 have died, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. Some 18.6 million people have recovered.
Here are the latest updates:
Thursday, September 10
01:10 GMT – COVID-19 widens gap between rich and poor: Save the Children
The COVID-19 pandemic has widened the gap between rich and poor, boys and girls, according to a new global survey by Save the Children.
In the six months since the pandemic was declared, the most vulnerable children have disproportionately missed out on access to education, healthcare, and food, and suffered the greatest protection risks, the UK-based group said.
The survey, based on the experience of 25,000 children and their caregivers across 37 countries, found:
Two thirds of the children had no contact with teachers at all during lockdown, while eight in ten believed they had learned little or nothing since schools closed.
Some 93 percent of households that lost over half of their income due to the pandemic reported difficulties in accessing health services.
Violence at home doubled to 17 percent when schools were closed.
“To protect an entire generation of children from losing out on a healthy and stable future, the world needs to urgently step up with debt relief for low-income countries and fragile states, so they can invest in the lives of their children,” Inger Ashing, Save the Children’s CEO said in a statement.
“The needs of children and their opinions need to be at the centre of any plans to build back what the world has lost over the past months, to ensure that they will not pay the heaviest price.”
00:30 GMT – Jakarta heads back to lockdown amid coronavirus ’emergency’
Jakarta governor Anies Baswedan says the Indonesian capital will head back into lockdown as it steps up efforts to tackle what he said was an “emergency – more pressing than the start of the pandemic.”
From Monday, all offices will be closed except for businesses in 11 ‘essential’ fields. Entertainment venues will be shut down and all gatherings banned. Religious events will only be allowed at the village level for people who live in the area, he added.
Baswedan said the measures were necessary because modelling showed the capital’s hospitals would be overwhelmed by September 17 if no action was taken.
Indonesia has recorded 8,336 deaths from coronavirus, the most in Southeast Asia.
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Read all the updates from yesterday (September 9) here.
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