June 22 coronavirus news

Across the American South, officials are raising alarm about an increased number of younger people testing positive for the novel coronavirus.

In Mississippi, officials attributed clusters of new cases to fraternity rush parties.

In North Carolina, a rise in cases is primarily among the younger population aged 25-49, said Gov. Roy Cooper on Friday.

In Texas, the governor said last week people under 30 made up a majority of new coronavirus cases in several counties. He said that increase in young infected people could be related to Memorial Day parties, visits to bars or other gatherings.

And in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis said Saturday cases are "shifting in a radical direction" toward populations in their 20s and 30s.

Those younger groups, he said, are mostly asymptomatic and don't require clinical attention.

The number of coronavirus cases across Latin America has surpassed 2 million, according to Johns Hopkins University.  

These are the 10 Latin American countries with the highest number of cases:

The first wave of coronavirus in the United States isn't over.

Nearly half of states are reporting a rise in new cases and some continue to break records in their daily reported cases. In the South, officials say more young people are testing positive. And across the US, experts continue to repeat warnings highlighting the need for social distancing and face covers.

And while some point to the rise in numbers as a result of more testing, health officials say that's part of -- but not the full picture.

"More testing does in fact turn out more cases. However ... if widespread testing was the entire reason for the rise in cases, you'd expect to see the proportion of positive tests go down or at the very least remain steady. We're not seeing that," says Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider, a specialist in internal medicine at the California Pacific Medical Center.

These are the 23 states reporting a rise in new cases: Washington, California, Nevada, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Delaware and Hawaii.

These 10 states are staying steady in new cases: Oregon, New Mexico, North Dakota, Nebraska, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Indiana, Arkansas, and Virginia.

And these 17 states are reporting declines in new cases: South Dakota, Illinois, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Alaska, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Maryland.

More than 650,000 Egyptian students took their Thanaweya Amma final exams over the weekend -- all while taking precautions against the coronavirus threat.

More than 100 million personal protection products were distributed, and students took the exams wearing face masks and gloves, state media reported.

Students lined up outside their schools, got their temperatures checked, and practiced social distancing inside classrooms. Bottles of hand sanitizer were readily available, and all the spaces had been disinfected in advance.

Despite the measures taken, worry of spreading the coronavirus still loomed. 

Egypt has reported at least 55,233 total cases and 2,193 coronavirus-related deaths, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

As the coronavirus pandemic surges in states that embraced his calls for aggressive early openings, US President Donald Trump is mocking the very measures that might mitigate a crisis about which he is constantly in denial.

Trump said at his weekend rally that he had told his staff to slow down testing for the disease, which has now killed nearly 120,000 Americans, to hide the discovery of more cases.

Claims by his advisers that he was joking hardly lessen the questionable motives behind the remark.

Trump has meanwhile also helped to turn the wearing of masks, which is proven to slow transmission of the disease, into a culture war issue. And his rally in Oklahoma on Saturday night was a rebuke of the notion of social distancing -- even though, ironically, his smaller-than-expected crowd would have made such practices possible.

Cases spike: Health experts warn that spikes in infections in states like Florida and Arizona -- both of which recorded new highs in daily infection rates over the weekend -- are being driven by the public's waning willingness to avoid large gatherings and a reticence to wear masks.

Long-term threat: The President's poor example represents a typical effort to divide Americans and highlight divisions over specific issues for his own political gain. But in the long run, apart from putting thousands of lives at risk, it is counterproductive, since a more stringent effort to avoid rises in infections as states open up would likely promote the fast economic recovery on which Trump is banking a reelection campaign that has slipped into trouble in recent weeks.

Read the full analysis:

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India has recorded more than 12,000 daily new coronavirus cases for the fifth consecutive day, according to the country's health ministry.

The ministry said on Monday it had registered 14,821 new cases, bringing the nationwide total to 425,282. 

India also recorded 445 new deaths -- the second-highest daily jump in coronavirus deaths within a 24-hour period.

In the past 8 days, India has recorded more than 104,000 new cases and 4,500 deaths.

The number of new coronavirus cases dropped into the single digits in Beijing on Sunday, with nine out of China's 18 new confirmed cases coming from the city, according to the National Health Commission (NHC).

The Chinese capital has been trying to contain the spread of a fresh outbreak that emerged from its largest wholesale food market earlier this month.

Mass testing has been rolled out across the city of 20 million, with mask-donning residents forming long lines at makeshift testing centers in sweltering summer heat.

Beijing authorities said they had collected samples from more than 2.29 million people as of Saturday for coronavirus tests.

There are currently 2,083 testing stations operating at 474 testing sites set up across the city, according to municipal authorities.

Since the new outbreak, Beijing's testing capacity has more than doubled, increasing from 100,000 to over 230,000 tests per day at 124 facilities, Gao Xiaojun, spokesman for the Beijing Health Commission, told a press briefing on Sunday.

If the samples taken from five individuals are combined together and tested in a single tube -- a method known as "pool testing," Beijing can get 1 million people tested daily, Gao added.

The method was adopted in Wuhan, the original epicenter of the pandemic, in May, when the central Chinese city conducted 6.5 million coronavirus tests in just nine days to prevent a second wave of infections.

PepsiCo shut down a factory in Beijing on Sunday after reporting eight cases of coronavirus, according to a company spokesperson.

Two of the workers confirmed of coronavirus had recently visited the Xinfadi market, a sprawling wholesale food market at the center of the capital's fresh coronavirus outbreak.

The spokesperson said 480 staff workers in the closed factory, along with 87 people who were in close contact with them, have been put in quarantine and tested for coronavirus. So far, none of them has been tested positive. 

The factory, which produces potato chips, has been sealed for sterilization. 

In its statement, PepsiCo said none of its bottling factories in China, including the ones in Beijing, have reported any coronavirus cases.  

Fiji is planning to create a travel bubble with Australia and New Zealand, the South Pacific island nation's leader said on Sunday.

Prime Minister Josaia "Frank" Voreqe Bainimarama told parliament his plan for a "post-Covid society" included a slow resumption of the tourism industry the country relies heavily on.

"While Australia and New Zealand work out their trans-Tasman bubble, Fiji's equal -- or arguably, greater -- success against the virus puts us in a position to take the lead in the Pacific," Bainimarama said. "We're working on our own bubble -- a Bula Bubble -- between Fiji, New Zealand and Australia."

Bula is a greeting that means hello or welcome in Fijian.

How it would work: