Science

Hungarian journalists say a new law supposedly aimed at fighting the coronavirus will make objective reporting of the pandemic harder and leave them open to facing court cases or even jail time for their reporting.

The measures, in place since Monday, have been roundly criticised for the sweeping powers they hand to the nationalist prime minister, Viktor Orbán, to rule by decree. Another part of the bill provides penalties of up to five years in prison for those spreading misinformation during the pandemic.

Journalists in the country say the new law is already being used to deny them access to information, and on occasion to threaten them.

One Budapest-based journalist, who requested anonymity given the current situation in the country, said she had called a hospital over the weekend to follow up on a tip-off about a group of doctors who had reportedly contracted the coronavirus there. “A few minutes later, the hospital’s chief communication officer called me back and asked if I think it’s a good idea to keep asking about this, a day before the government’s bill will be passed,” she said.

Csaba Lukács, a journalist from the weekly newspaper Magyar Hang, said that since the law was passed at the beginning of the week, there had been a rise in threatening comments on social media or in emails warning staff that they would end up in jail. “We are also afraid we might face more lawsuits, which could put us in a very difficult financial situation,” said the journalist.

Russia is considering aggressive new surveillance methods as the country seeks to enforce mandatory shelter-in-place orders in cities including Moscow and St Petersburg and other regions across its 11 time zones.

While the details of the new monitoring system have not been confirmed, official statements and leaked plans have indicated they could include mobile apps that track users’ location, CCTV cameras with facial recognition software, QR codes, mobile phone data and credit card records.

The hastily developed patchwork to monitor individuals’ movements could tell authorities whether Russians had broken coronavirus lockdowns for reasons other than those allowed: seeking medical care, visiting the grocery store, the pharmacy, or traveling to an authorised job. Leaked plans indicate that parts of the system may go online this weekend.

While there remain questions about whether the technology is viable, opposition politicians have warned that the government is laying the groundwork for a “cybergulag,” with a new system of enhanced surveillance that could remain active even after the current crisis passes.

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin told Russians that he would extend the country’s “non-working” days, saying they should stay at home until the end of the month.

The approval ratings of democratic leaders around the world have soared during the coronavirus crisis, but political scientists say it will not last – and warn that populist opposition parties, in particular, will bounce back strongly as it subsides.

Will Jennings, a professor of political science at Southampton University, said the increases were due to an effect first identified in 1970 by a US political scientist, John Mueller, in a paper examining the popularity of US presidents in times of crisis.

“In the context of the cold war, Mueller looked at presidential approval data dating back to the 1940s. He observed that it spiked significantly at major moments of tension like, say, the Cuban missile crisis,” Jennings said.

“He defined this ‘rally round the flag’ effect as coming from an international event that directly involved the president, and was ‘dramatic, specific and sharply focused’. That pretty much perfectly describes the coronavirus crisis.”

Some leaders have seen spectacular rises. The popularity of Giuseppe Conte, the law professor who became Italy’s prime minister in 2018, has surged to 71%, even as his country recorded the highest number of coronavirus deaths in the world.

Angela Merkel, who is in her fourth term as Germany’s chancellor and has announced she will not be standing again, has seen her approval rating rise by 11 points since early March to a startling 79%, according to Forschungsgruppe Wahlen’s barometer.

In France, a series of polls has shown the satisfaction rating with Emmanuel Macron surging by up to 14 points since February to between 46% and 51% – the highest score the French president has registered in the better part of 18 months.

Even when leaders are seen as having mishandled the Covid-19 outbreak, their popularity has increased. In the UK, an Ipsos Mori poll found that despite widespread criticism of his government’s approach, Boris Johnson has seen his satisfaction rating put on more than five percentage points since early February.

The same story has unfolded in the US, where Gallup found that while Donald Trump, too, has been castigated for his dismissive early response to the impending crisis, 49% of voters approve of his performance – the most since he entered the White House.

The most comparable recent example of “rally round the flag”, Jennings said, was the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when the approval rating of President George W Bush briefly hit 90%, the highest ever seen for a US president – and was still riding high at nearly 70% a year later.

Researchers originally theorised that the effect was due to leaders appearing as “national unifying figures”. More recently, they have suggested it may be because politics and the media become less partisan, or when people feel threatened, they look to an authority figure to protect them.

“One school believes that when partisan differences are set aside, and the media coverage becomes more unified – when the cues people are getting change – that creates a space for the leader to be viewed more positively,” Jennings said. “The other explanation is more based on social psychology.”

Whatever it is that drives it, “rally round the flag” generally has the effect of pushing opposition parties and their leaders – particularly those, such as western Europe’s far-right populists, who habitually attack governments aggressively – out of the spotlight.

France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and the leaders of Germany’s AfD have lost ground in the polls: Le Pen, leader of the far-right National Rally, is down three points according to the latest Elabe barometer; Salvini’s Lega has shed between two and four. They have also become less vocal as the pandemic has advanced.

But that does not mean they will be gone for long. “We will see a time of reckoning when this is all over,” said Catherine Fieschi, director of the Global Policy Institute at Queen Mary University of London, and a leading expert on far-right populism. “For the moment, they are biding their time. But we risk seeing a big resurgence.”

Europe could well see “an economic crisis after this health crisis – with a social crisis as a consequence”, Fieschi said. “People without jobs, high unemployment. No matter how much governments – and, of course, the EU – have done, it will never be seen to have been enough. No incumbent leader can run on a platform of ‘but it could have been so much worse’. And that’s the populists’ opportunity.”

Italy in particular risks an explosion of populist support, Fieschi said. “If the Germans and the Dutch continue to block some kind of collective support mechanism, the Italians are going to feel this is the third time – after the financial crisis and the refugee crisis – that they’ve been hung out to dry. Salvini will jump on it.”

Jennings agreed. “Now isn’t the time for populist leaders to attack,” he said. “They will be seen as going against the flow, as unpatriotic – undermining the very principles they stand for. But as the crisis subsides, and inquiries are begun into how it was handled, their ‘elites failing the people’ narrative will be back.”

The death from coronavirus of a 99-year-old former soldier who was the last surviving member of a company of predominantly Spanish troops who helped liberate Paris from Nazi occupation has thrown a spotlight on one of the lesser-known events in French history.

Rafael Gómez Nieto, who fought against Franco in the Spanish civil war before joining the allied war effort, died after contracting Covid-19 in a nursing home in Strasbourg.

Gómez Nieto grew up in a town in the Almería region of Andalucía, the son of a career soldier who had been part of the royal guard to the Spanish king Alfonso XIII.

After fighting as part of the republican forces in the civil war – and seeing action in the four-month Battle of the Ebro, considered to be the conflict’s longest and bloodiest battle – he crossed the border into France along with about 500,000 of his compatriots.

Following a brief internment he travelled to north Africa, where he joined the 9th company of the Régiment de Marche du Tchad, part of the 2nd Armoured Division, commanded by Gen Philippe Leclerc. Not for nothing was the company known by its Spanish name – La Nueve or La Española.

One hundred and forty-six of the company’s 160 men were Spanish and, despite serving in the French army and under a French commanding officer, they were permitted to stitch the red, yellow and purple flag of Spain’s second republic on to their uniforms.

They were also allowed to paint the flag on their vehicles, which rolled into Paris emblazoned with names such as Guernica and Don Quichotte (Don Quixote). Spanish was the common language within the company and all had fought during the liberation of French north Africa.

The company, led by the Spanish Lt Amado Granell, was the first to enter Paris on 24 August 1944 through the Porte d’Italie, in the south of the city. As they awaited the official surrender of the German governor of occupied Paris, Dietrich von Choltitz, La Nueve troops were sent to occupy public buildings and those taken over by the German military command, as well as Place de la Concorde.

Royal Dutch Shell has secured a $12bn (£9.7bn) loan facility to protect its shareholder payouts against an oil price crisis and the “significant uncertainty” of the coronavirus pandemic.

Shell set out the plan to bolster its balance sheet after becoming the first major oil company to update investors on the toll of tumbling oil prices on its business. It warned that the sudden oil market collapse could wipe up to $800m from its finances for the first quarter through a post-tax impairment charge.

The global oil price fell to 18-year lows this week as the economic contagion of the Covid-19 virus continues to weaken demand for energy and a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia threatens to flood the market with more oil than the world can use.

Oil prices traded higher from lows of $23 a barrel following a call between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin which raised hopes of a truce between Moscow and Riyadh before they each raise oil production to record highs next month.

The price of Brent crude rose to $23.55 a barrel overnight and had climbed to around $25 by Tuesday afternoon, from $65 a barrel in the first week of this year before the coronavirus began slashing the global energy demand forecasts for 2020.

“We have seen and expect significant uncertainty with macro-economic conditions with regards to prices and demand for oil, gas and related products,” Shell told investors. “Furthermore, recent global developments and uncertainty in oil supply have caused further volatility in commodity markets.”

The company is already planning to slash $9bn from its spending plans to weather the collapse in prices amid the coronavirus pandemic. On average oil companies are cutting their spending plans by around a quarter to help weather the crisis.

Helima Croft, the head of global commodities at RBC Capital, said a US intervention in the Saudi-Russo oil price war “may prove to be an important turning point in the standoff between Moscow and Riyadh”.

“A rollback of some US energy sanctions could be the catalyst for getting Russia back to the OPEC+ bargaining table,” she said.

But analysts at Rystad Energy, a Norwegian consultancy, warned that Russia and Saudi Arabia’s production increase ambitions “are a drop in the ocean compared to the losses of global demand” due to the coronavirus crisis.

“Only a global production curtailment deal could help speed up the recovery in the market, once the calamities of the Covid-19 quarantine measures on oil demand become more clear,” the analysts said. “Unprecedented times call for unprecedented actions.”

Europe’s largest capital and Africa’s most populous city have gone into lockdown as countries across the globe including the US prolonged and tightened already strict confinement orders in an effort to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

Moscow imposed strict isolation measures on Monday after many residents ignored official requests to stay indoors, confining citizens to their homes unless for a medical emergency, to travel to essential jobs, shop for food or medicines or walk their dogs.

At the request of the prime minister, Mikhail Mishustin, regional authorities across Russia started preparing similar orders as the country began a “non-working” week declared by the president, Vladimir Putin.

“I ask you to take these forced but absolutely necessary measures … very seriously and completely responsibly,” Putin said. Facial recognition cameras will police the measures in the capital, which has reported more than 1,000 confirmed cases.

On the other side of the world in Nigeria, the 21 million inhabitants of Lagos, which has recorded one death from Covid-19, prepared to enter a two-week lockdown on Monday night. Experts have warned the measure could prove almost impossible to enforce in a city where millions live in poverty and rely on daily earnings to survive.

In the US, where Donald Trump on Sunday extended emergency physical distancing restrictions until 30 April, Deborah Birx, coordinator of the White House’s coronavirus task force, said on Monday that if the country did things “almost perfectly, we could get in the range of 100,000 to 200,000 fatalities”.

The number of confirmed cases in the US has passed 140,000 with more than 2,500 deaths. A 1,000-berth US navy hospital ship with 12 operating rooms, the USNS Comfort, pulled into a cruise ship terminal in New York on Monday, while a 68-bed field hospital designed as a respiratory care unit has been put up in Central Park.

According to the Johns Hopkins University tracker, the coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 740,000 people and killed more than 35,000. Nearly 3.5 billion people around the world are living in voluntary or mandatory confinement.

Campaigners fear that EU citizens who have made their homes in the UK are at risk of becoming illegal as the government diverts resources to fight coronavirus.

Under current rules, all EU citizens have until June 2021 to apply for settled status. However, there are concerns that the pandemic will mean that the government support available to help EU citizens will reduce, and public awareness campaigns, designed to reach the most vulnerable people and those without an online presence, will be delayed.

Campaigners claim that this could hit the very care workers – NHS staff and delivery workers – who are helping the country deal with the virus.

The Right to Stay campaign, newly launched by Another Europe is Possible and supported by the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, is urging the government to replace the application process for settled status with a guaranteed right to stay for all EU citizens residing in the UK written into law.

Zoe Gardner, of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, said: “The coronavirus crisis means that the entire system of applications is at risk of failing.

“Support services to help people through the process are largely face to face and simply won’t be able to function for a prolonged period, with charities designed to support vulnerable EU citizens severely limited in their ability to support vulnerable people.”

The charity sector, which also helps offer advice to EU citizens, could also be overwhelmed by the crisis as their resources are diverted to help people navigate the welfare system.

Clara Angela di Stefano, an NHS intensive care nurse from Italy, said: “In the next few months, migrants are going to save countless lives in NHS hospitals. Many of us will get sick, and some will die.

“We are proud to do this work. But when this crisis is over, many thousands of EU migrants could lose their status here because the government has insisted on persisting with a broken application system. Boris Johnson can solve this problem easily – by giving us a right to stay written into law.”

The government has already announced that the settled status processing service has been delayed by Covid-19. It normally takes about five days. To be eligible, EU citizens usually need to have lived in the UK, the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man for at least six months in any 12-month period for five years in a row.

The Home Office declined 300 applications in February, which the department said had been because applicants had failed to provide the government with the correct evidence or information.

• This article was amended on 30 March 2020. An earlier version misnamed the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants as the Joint Committee for the Welfare of Immigrants, and said that organisation launched the Right to Stay campaign with Another Europe is Possible. The JCWI supports the Right to Stay campaign, but was not involved with its launch. This has been corrected.

The Spanish government has tightened up its national lockdown, ordering all non-essential workers to stay at home for the next two weeks in an effort to halt the spread of the coronavirus and relieve pressure on the country’s overstretched hospitals.

The measure, which comes two weeks after the prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, declared a state of emergency, was announced hours after Spanish health authorities said the outbreak appeared to be peaking in parts of the country.

In a televised address on Saturday evening, Sánchez ordered all those in non-key jobs to stay at home from Monday, saying the “extraordinarily tough” measures were needed as the county intensified its efforts to contain the pandemic.

“This measure will reduce people’s movement even further [but] it will reduce the risk of contagion and allow us to unblock out intensive care units,” the prime minister said.

Sánchez also warned that the EU needed to react to the global health crisis in a united and decisive fashion to safeguard its own future.

“It’s Europe’s time to act. Europe is at risk,” he said.

Earlier on Saturday, Fernando Simón, the head of Spain’s centre for health emergencies, said that the situation in some regions appeared to be improving even as the country reported another record single-day death toll of 832.

The number of Covid-19 cases in the country rose from 64,059 on Friday to 72,248 on Saturday, and the number of dead now stands at 5,690.

Between Thursday and Friday, 769 people died from the disease.

“We’re getting there,” Simón told a press conference on Saturday afternoon.

“We don’t know exactly when we’ll get confirmation, but we’re getting close to the peak of the curve that we’re studying so anxiously. In some parts of the country, they probably may even have passed it – but we need to be cautious with preliminary information.”

He added: “The increase in cases is coming down in comparison with previous weeks, but it could be that there are cases that aren’t being detected in some regions.”

But Simón also warned that reaching a peak would not ease the pressure on Spain’s overstretched intensive care units (ICUs), adding that they were predicted to pass beyond full capacity in less than a week’s time.

“We still have a big problem when it comes to the overloading of our ICUs,” he said.

“Patients who pick up the disease today may need a bed in an ICU in seven to 10 days. That means that we’re still seeing a lag between the control of transmission and the saturation of ICUs. It also means they’re going to be overloaded by the end of next week or the beginning of the following week.”

If there’s been a fall in custom at the Nyhavn restaurant, it’s hardly noticeable. Groups of drinkers huddle under heat lamps out on Möllevång Square, the centre of nightlife in the Swedish city of Malmö, seemingly oblivious to the virus spreading through Europe.

“It’s the Swedish trust in government,” says Linus Bohman, 28. “No one told me you have to stay home right now,” agrees his friend, Fredrik Glückman, a history student at Lund University. “We’re not in quarantine. And as soon as we hear from our government that we have to stay in, like you do in Britain, then we will do it.”

“But not,” Bohman adds, “if Boris Johnson says it.”

While every other country in Europe has been ordered into ever more stringent coronavirus lockdown, Sweden has remained the exception. Schools, kindergartens, bars, restaurants, ski resorts, sports clubs, hairdressers: all remain open, weeks after everything closed down in next door Denmark and Norway.

Universities have been closed, and on Friday, the government tightened the ban on events to limit them to no more than 50 people. But if you develop symptoms, you can still go back to work or school just two days after you feel better. If a parent starts showing symptoms, they’re allowed to continue to send their children to school.

It has only been in the past couple of days that the death toll has started to increase significantly, rising by a third in a single day on Thursday and Friday, with 92 people now dead and 209 in intensive care. As he announced the tighter restrictions on Friday, the prime minister, Stefan Löfven, warned that the coming weeks and months would be tough.

But he defended the decision not to implement the tighter restrictions seen in Denmark, France and the UK. “We all, as individuals, have to take responsibility. We can’t legislate and ban everything,” he said. “It is also a question of commonsense behaviour.”

Anders Tegnell, Sweden’s state epidemiologist, believes it is counterproductive to bring in the tightest restrictions at too early a stage. “As long as the Swedish epidemic development stays at this level,” he tells the Observer, “I don’t see any big reason to take measures that you can only keep up for a very limited amount of time.”

His team at the Public Health Agency of Sweden is critical of the Imperial College paper that warned this month that 250,000 people in the UK would die if the government failed to introduce more draconian measures. A week later Johnson ordered the police to implement a partial lockdown to combat the virus, telling people they “must stay at home”.

“We have had a fair amount of people looking at it and they are sceptical,” says Tegnell. “They think Imperial chose a number of variables that gave a prognosis that was quite pessimistic, and that you could just as easily have chosen other variables that gave you another outcome. It’s not a peer-reviewed paper. It might be right, but it might also be terribly wrong. In Sweden, we are a bit surprised that it’s had such an impact.”

The Spanish government has withdrawn 58,000 Chinese-made coronavirus testing kits from use after it emerged that they had an accurate detection rate of just 30%.

Like other countries struggling to diagnose and treat the virus, Spain has looked to China for rapid testing kits equipment and much-needed supplies, and announced this week that it would spend €432m (£390m) on tests, masks, gloves and other personal protective equipment.

However, a batch of Chinese-made kits bought by Spanish health authorities a few weeks ago has been pulled after they were discovered to be unreliable and the Chinese government said they had been made by a company that did not appear on its list of authorised manufacturers.

In a statement on Thursday, Spain’s health ministry said it would be returning the kits, but stressed that they had not been bought directly from the Chinese manufacturer but from a supply company in Spain that had purchased them in China and had provided the necessary accompanying paperwork.

“The first tests on the rapid testing kits were carried out simultaneously by a hospital in Madrid and by the Carlos III Health Institute, and as soon as their low sensitivity was discovered, they were withdrawn,” said the ministry. “The supplier has been contacted and replacement tests will be provided.”

Certificates shared by the ministry included an EU declaration of conformity for the products, which, according to the documentation, were made by the Shenzen Bioeasy Biotechnology Company Limited in Guandong province.