US President Donald Trump threatened to cut ties with China over its role in the spread of the coronavirus , as the global death toll from the disease topped 300 ,000 .
Despite fears of a second wave of infections , national and local governments around the world are easing lockdown orders as they try to get stalled economies moving again .
But there were warnings Friday that some of the world ’s poorest people remain the most vulnerable , with predictions that a quarter of a billion Africans could be infected without urgent action.
The nexus of poverty and risk was highlighted by the discovery of cases in the world’ s biggest refugee camp , where upwards of a million Rohingya live in squalor .
“We are looking at the very real prospect that thousands of people may die from COVID -19 ” in these camps , Save The Children ’s Bangladesh health director Shamim Jahan said .
“There are no intensive care beds at this moment” in the camps at Cox ’s Bazaar, Jahan said .
Track and trace teams were fanning out Friday to follow up on two positive tests .
– ‘ Disappointed in China’ –
The United States has registered almost 86 ,000 deaths linked to COVID – 19 — the highest toll of any nation , with a third of all known global infections.
In an interview aired Thursday , Trump again accused Beijing of concealing the true scale of the problem after the virus emerged in Wuhan late last year .
“I ’m very disappointed in China . I will tell you that right now ,” he said .
Asked how the United States might choose to retaliate against what he has dubbed the “ Plague from China ”, Trump said : “We could cut off the whole relationship”.
The US and China are the world ’s two largest economies , doing hundreds of billions of dollars of mutually beneficial trade every year .
Nevertheless, the US president is keen to make Beijing the bogeyman in an election year when gloomy news has become par for the course .
New figures showed a further three million job losses , taking the newly unemployed to 36 .5 million — more than 10 per cent of the US population .
Over a third of them will have trouble paying their bills , a survey has revealed .
States are slashing their budgets because of tax shortfalls caused by the job losses , with California announcing it would have a $ 54 billion deficit this year .
Germany’ s treasury is also expecting a big hole in its budget , with around 100 billion euros wiped off the tax take in 2020 .
Europe ’s biggest economy has already slipped into a recession , with GDP expected to shrink by 6 .3 per cent this year — the biggest contraction since 1949 .
