“The market played a role in the event, that’s clear. But what role we don’t know, whether it was the source or amplifying setting or just a coincidence that some cases were detected in and around that market,” said Dr Peter Ben Embarek, a WHO expert on food safety and zoonotic viruses that cross the species barrier from animals to humans.

Companies are still cutting jobs in the midst of a severe downturn, with the economy possibly shrinking at an unheard-of 40% annual rate in the April-June quarter. GE Aviation said it is cutting up to 13,000 jobs. Uber will shed 3,700 positions. Amy Egert, a dental hygienist in Severn, Maryland, was laid off in mid-March. She was told she could return a month later, but she’s still waiting and it’s unclear when she will able to go back. She monitors Maryland statistics on coronavirus cases in hopes that the figures will show enough of a downward trend for her to work again.

Convalescent plasma therapy is at an experimental procedure for COVID-19 patients. As per the guidelines, hospitals and institutions planning to provide this modality of treatment should do so in a clinical trial with protocols that are cleared by the Institutional Ethics Committee, the ICMR had said earlier while seeking participation in the trial.

The BoE said it’s Monetary Policy Committee kept Bank Rate at its all-time low of 0.1 per cent and left its target for bond-buying, most of it British government debt, at 645 billion pounds ($797 billion).

The BoE said it expected a 25 per cent plunge in British gross domestic product in the April-June period with the unemployment rate more than doubling to 9 per cent.