In other news, U.S. jobless claimed climbed by 6.6 million over the past week, increasing the total number of jobs lost to the virus to nearly 17 million.
Meanwhile, Oxfam International estimates that the pandemic could ultimately push 500 million additional people into poverty globally.
Finally, researchers at South Korea's Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have released an alarming report that the coronavirus may be reactivating in people who are suppose to be immune after recovering.
About 51 patients classed as having been cured in South Korea have tested positive again, the CDC said in a briefing on Monday. Rather than being infected again, the virus may have been reactivated in these people, given they tested positive again shortly after being released from quarantine, said Jeong Eun-kyeong, director-general of the Korean CDC.
“While we are putting more weight on reactivation as the possible cause, we are conducting a comprehensive study on this,” Jeong said. “There have been many cases when a patient during treatment will test negative one day and positive another.” [...]
Fear of re-infection in recovered patients is also growing in China, where the virus first emerged last December, after reports that some tested positive again -- and even died from the disease -- after supposedly recovering and leaving hospital. There’s little understanding of why this happens, although some believe that the problem may lie in inconsistencies in test results.