Baku, Mar 2: At least 30 people died as a fire tore through a drug rehabilitation clinic in the Azerbaijani capital Baku early on Friday, the local APA news agency reported.
Firefighters and rescuers of Azerbaijan's emergencies ministry had extinguished the blaze and were investigating its causes, the news agency added.
The total number of global COVID-19 cases was nearing 9 million, while the deaths have increased to over 467,000, according to the Johns Hopkins University.
By Monday morning, the total number of cases stood at 8,927,195, while the fatalities increased to 467,636, the University's Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) revealed in its latest update.
With 2,279,306 cases and 119,967 deaths, the US continues with the world's highest number of COVID-19 infections and fatalities, according to the CSSE.
Brazil comes in the second place with 1,083,341 infections and 50,591 deaths.
In terms of cases, Russia ranks third (583,879), and was followed by India (410,461), the UK (305,803), Peru (251,338), Spain (246,272), Chile (242,355), Italy (238,499), Iran (204,952), France (197,008), Germany (191,272), Turkey (187,685), Mexico (180,545), Pakistan (176,617), Saudi Arabia (157,612), Bangladesh (112,306) and Canada (103,078), the CSSE figures showed.
The other countries with over 10,000 deaths are the UK (42,717), Italy (34,634), France (29,643), Spain (28,323), Mexico (21,825) and India (13,254).
Balochistan, May 1: Sajid Hussain, Editor-in-Chief of Balochistan Times, has been found dead in a Swedish town, the police have confirmed.
The Swedish police informed his family on Thursday night that they discovered his body from a river in Uppsala, The Times reported.
The Baloch journalist had been missing from the Swedish city since March 2 this year.
Sajid, 39, left Pakistan in 2012 and had been living as a refugee in Sweden since 2017. He wrote extensively on the suffering of the Balochis at the hands of the Pakistani military establishment.
His work often got him into trouble as the authorities did not like his reporting of Balochistan's forbidden stories, the reason he had to leave and live in exile.
The Baloch journalist was found dead two months after he went missing in Sweden.
Sajid left Pakistan because of security threats from Pakistan Army and its intelligence service ISI.
The spokesperson of the Baloch National Movement, Hammal Haider told news agency: "We are deeply saddened by the demise of prominent Baloch intellectual and writer Sajid Hussain."
"His death is indeed a loss of a great mind for the people of Balochistan. Due to his straightforwardness, he was loved among all journalistic, literary and political circles," added Haider.
"After this incident, we have serious concerns about our members and other Baloch refugees living in the West," he said.
May 5: Global coronavirus deaths reached 250,000 on Monday after recorded infections topped 3.5 million, a news agency tally of official government data showed, although the rate of fatalities has slowed.
North America and European countries accounted for most of the new deaths and cases reported in recent days, but numbers were rising from smaller bases in Latin America, Africa and Russia.
Globally, there were 3,062 new deaths and 61,923 new cases over the past 24 hours, taking total cases to 3.58 million.
That easily exceeds the estimated 140,000 deaths worldwide in 2018 caused by measles, and compares with around 3 million to 5 million cases of severe illness caused annually by seasonal influenza, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).
While the current trajectory of COVID-19 falls far short of the 1918 Spanish flu, which infected an estimated 500 million people, killing at least 10% of patients, experts worry the available data is underplaying the true impact of the pandemic.
The concerns come as several countries begin to ease strict lockdowns that have been credited with helping contain the spread of the virus.
"We could easily have a second or a third wave because a lot of places aren't immune," Peter Collignon, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist at Canberra Hospital, told Reuters. He noted the world was well short of herd immunity, which requires around 60% of the population to have recovered from the disease.
The first death linked to COVID-19 was reported on Jan. 10 in Wuhan, China after the coronavirus first emerged there in December. Global fatalities grew at a rate of 1-2% in recent days, down from 14% on March 21, according to the Reuters data.
DEATH RATE ANOMALIES
Mortality rates from recorded infections vary greatly from country to country.
Collignon said any country with a mortality rate of more than 2% almost certainly had underreported case numbers. Health experts fear those ratios could worsen in regions and countries less prepared to deal with the health crisis.
"If your mortality rate is higher than 2%, you've missed a lot of cases," he said, noting that countries overwhelmed by the outbreak were less likely to conduct testing in the community and record deaths outside of hospitals.
In the United States, around half the country's state governors partially reopened their economies over the weekend, while others, including New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, declared the move was premature.
In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who battled COVID-19 last month, has said the country was over the peak but it was still too early to relax lockdown measures.
Even in countries where the suppression of the disease has been considered successful, such as Australia and New Zealand which have recorded low daily rates of new infections for weeks, officials have been cautious.
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison has predicated a full lifting of curbs on widespread public adoption of a mobile phone tracking app and increased testing levels.
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