BitGou: Wednesday Morning Briefing: Trump calls off coronavirus aid talks

What you need to know about the coronavirus today

Trump calls off aid talks
U.S. President Donald Trump, still being treated for COVID-19, abruptly ended talks with Democrats on an economic aid package on Tuesday, drawing criticism from presidential rival Joe Biden that he was abandoning Americans in the midst of a pandemic.

Along with Biden, congressional Democrats and some Republicans blasted Trump, saying more was needed to help the millions who have lost their jobs.

“The president turned his back on you,” Biden said in a Twitter post.

India’s daily infections slow down
India reported 72,049 new cases of coronavirus on Wednesday, dropping from the daily highs of last month in a sign infections were peaking for now, officials and experts said.

India leads the world in the average number of new infections and is expected to overtake the United States over the next several weeks as the country with the world’s largest number of cases.

But since it hit a single-day high of 97,894 new cases on Sept. 17, the country has reported a downward trend with 75,909 daily cases on an average, according to a Reuters tally.

China’s experimental vaccine appears safe
A Chinese experimental coronavirus vaccine being developed by the Institute of Medical Biology under the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences was shown to be safe in an early stage clinical trial, researchers said.

In a Phase 1 trial of 191 healthy participants aged between 18 and 59, vaccination with the group’s experimental shot showed no severe adverse reactions.

The most common adverse reactions reported by the trial participants were mild pain, slight fatigue and redness, itching and swelling at the injection site. The candidate also induced immune response.

Czech rise in cases fastest in Europe
The Czech Republic reported a record 4,457 new coronavirus cases in a single day, as a spike in infections over the past month is now rising at Europe’s fastest pace.

The daily rise in new COVID-19 cases, recorded on Tuesday, surpassed a previous record of 3,794 to bring the total number of cases recorded since March to 90,022 - a fourfold increase since Aug. 25.

Hospitalizations have soared tenfold in that period to add strain on the healthcare system.

More problems for UK’s testing system
Britain’s COVID-19 testing system, already struggling with a surge in new cases, was facing fresh disruption on Wednesday after Swiss pharmaceutical giant Roche said problems at a new warehouse had delayed the dispatch of some products.

Roche is one of the main suppliers of diagnostic tests to Britain’s National Health Service Test and Trace program, which only days ago was hit by a technical glitch that delayed the reporting of 15,000 positive results.

Track the spread of COVID-19 with our global interactive graphic.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Billionaires, BMW, UK testing.
Read concise views on the pandemic’s financial fallout from Breakingviews columnists across the globe.

Reuters reporters and editors around the world are investigating the response to the coronavirus pandemic.

We need your help to tell these stories. Our news organization wants to capture the full scope of what’s happening and how we got here by drawing on a wide variety of sources.

Are you a government employee or contractor involved in coronavirus testing or the wider public health response? Are you a doctor, nurse or health worker caring for patients? Have you worked on similar outbreaks in the past? Has the disease known as COVID-19 personally affected you or your family? Are you aware of new problems that are about to emerge, such as critical supply shortages?

We need your tips, firsthand accounts, relevant documents or expert knowledge. Please contact us at coronavirus@reuters.com.

We prefer tips from named sources, but if you’d rather remain anonymous, you can submit a confidential news tip. Here’s how.

Top Stories

Republicans are mobilizing thousands of volunteers to watch early voting sites and ballot drop boxes leading up to November’s election, part of an effort to find evidence to back up President Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated complaints about widespread voter fraud.

U.S. President Donald Trump, under coronavirus quarantine in the White House and restricted from traveling, is grasping for ways to put a spark back in his struggling re-election bid and mount a big comeback with four weeks left until Election Day. Trump, who is still contagious, has been looking for options on how to get his message out and cut into Democrat Joe Biden’s lead in battleground states where the Nov. 3 election will be decided, advisers said.

Oil and gas workers withdrew en masse from offshore production facilities as Hurricane Delta grew into a powerful storm over the Caribbean on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. Delta’s winds reached 145 miles per hour (235 kph) as the storm sped toward Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula and eventual entry into the Gulf of Mexico, whose warm waters will restore it to a Category 4 storm, the National Hurricane Center said.

Scientists Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the development of a method for genome editing, the award-giving body said on Wednesday. “Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna have discovered one of gene technology’s sharpest tools: the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors,” the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement on awarding the $1.1 million prize.

Business

Trump urges Congress to provide $25 billion bailout for U.S. airlines

President Donald Trump said late on Tuesday Congress should quickly extend $25 billion in new payroll assistance to U.S. passenger airlines furloughing thousands of workers as air travel remains down sharply amid the coronavirus pandemic.

4 min read

Supreme Court to mull Google bid to end Oracle copyright suit

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider whether to protect Alphabet Inc’s Google from a long-running lawsuit by Oracle Corp accusing it of infringing Oracle copyrights to build the Android operating system that runs most of the world’s smartphones.

3 min read

Who pays for the toilet paper? The big questions of the work-from-home era

The answer, according to the Dutch, is your bosses.
And how much? $2.40 per working day, on average. That’s meant to cover not only coffee, tea and toilet paper used in work hours, but also the extra gas, electricity and water, plus the depreciation costs of a desk and a chair - all essentials that you’d never dream of paying for in the office.

5 min read