The UN has said that the world was facing “a humanitarian catastrophe” as US President Donald Trump partially blocked immigration to the US “to protect American workers” from the economic shock of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The UN alarm bell came as nations scrambled to fight the virus — which has killed more than 178,000 people and infected more than 2.5 million — as well as desperately seek ways to limit the vast damage inflicted on the global economy.
With more than half of humanity under some form of lockdown, businesses shuttered and millions of jobs lost, the world is facing its worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said that it would hit the least privileged the hardest.
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“I want to stress that we are not only facing a global health pandemic, but also a global humanitarian catastrophe,” WFP executive director David Beasley told the UN Security Council on Tuesday.
“Millions of civilians living in conflict-scarred nations ... face being pushed to the brink of starvation,” Beasley said.
The WFP said that the number of people suffering from acute hunger was projected to nearly double to 265 million this year.
In the US, where about 22 million people have lost their jobs, Trump said that he would stop the issuing of green cards for 60 days, but exempt temporary workers such as seasonal farm workers.
“In order to protect American workers, I will be issuing a temporary suspension of immigration into the United States,” he said. “It will help put unemployed Americans first in line for jobs as America reopens.”
“It would be wrong and unjust for Americans to be replaced with immigrant labor flown in from abroad,” he said.
The US — with more than 45,000 deaths and more than 825,000 coronavirus infections — is the hardest-hit country.
US Centers for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield called on Americans to prepare for a second wave of infections.
“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told the Washington Post.
Meanwhile, small shops yesterday reopened in Berlin as a few nations began easing coronavirus restrictions to restart their economies, but trepidation expressed by some workers and customers indicated a return to normality is still a long way off.
Restrictions were also being eased in Denmark and Austria.
Spain, one of the worst-hit countries, was grappling with how to allow children out of their homes for the first time in nearly six weeks.
The country’s death toll reached 21,717, behind only the US and Italy, after 435 more deaths were reported yesterday.
Singapore, which has been praised for its swift response and meticulous tracing of contacts in the early stage of the outbreak, was grappling with an explosion of cases in foreign worker dorms that were largely overlooked earlier.
The city-state’s infections surged to 10,141 after it reported 1,016 new cases.
In Pakistan, doctors issued a letter calling on the country’s clerics and prime minister to reverse a decision to leave mosques open during Ramadan, warning it could result in an explosion of COVID-19 cases.
Large gatherings would only increase infections and overwhelm the healthcare system, which has less than 3,000 acute care beds for a population of 220 million, Pakistan Medical Association chief Qaiser Sajjad said.
Pakistan on Tuesday recorded its largest 24-hour increase of more than 700 new cases and saw another 533 cases yesterday, bringing the total to 9,749 infections and 209 deaths.
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