August 24, 2020
A roundup of domestic and international news
Newsroom, 24.08.2020, 13:55
Covid-19 RO. 825 new cases of people infected with SARS-CoV-2 have been registered in Romania since the latest report, the Strategic Communication Group has announced today. The total number of cases thus reaches 79,330. Another 37 people infected with the new coronavirus have died, one registered in the 10-19 age bracket, and the total number of deaths in Romania has reached 3,309. 7,410 people with COVID-19 are hospitalized in specialized health units and 494 patients are in intensive care. On the Romanian territory, 10,742 people confirmed with the new coronavirus are in isolation at home, and 5,433 in institutionalized isolation. Also, 29,404 people are in quarantine at home, and 37 in institutionalized quarantine. As regards the Romanian citizens abroad, 5,920 have been confirmed as carriers of the new coronavirus, mostly in Germany, Italy and Spain, and 124 have died.
Pandemic. The health situation related to the COVID 19 pandemic keeps deteriorating around the world, with signs of recurrence in a growing number of countries. Several countries have reported in recent days the highest daily figures since the spring wave, or even since the onset of the pandemic. The total number of Covid-19 diseases has exceeded 23.5 million worldwide on today, 16 million of whom are cured patients. At the same time, according to centralized data by worldometers.info, more than 805 thousand people have lost their lives. US President Donald Trump has urgently authorized the transfusion of blood plasma from cured people to infected patients, a treatment already widely used in the world. The United States, with 5.8 million cases of infection and more than 176 thousand deaths, remains the most affected country in the world. Second comes Brazil with almost 2.8 million diseases and over 114 deaths. In Europe, the UK is the most affected country, with a total of over 41,000 dead.
Debt. Romania has to recover over 650 million US dollars from goods and services exported before 1990, said the former foreign minister Cristian Diaconescu in an interview for Radio Romania. According to him, with about 400 million dollars, Iraq is at the top of the list of countries that still owe money to Romania, followed by Sudan, Mozambique, Libya, Guinea, the Central African Republic, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and North Korea. In addition to these amounts, Cuba owes Romania over 1.5 billion transferable rubles. Diaconescu stressed that it is a state issue involving very difficult partners, because many of them no longer recognize these debts or even demand political compensation for their payment.
Elections. In Romania, the constituency electoral bureaus will officially report today the final candidacies for the September 27 local elections. The election campaign begins on Friday and ends on September 26. The joint order of the Ministry of Health, the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Permanent Electoral Authority, regarding the health protection rules to be applied during the election campaign and during the elections, is to be approved early this week.
Belarus. In Minsk, for the second Sunday in a row, tens of thousands of people protested against the re-election of President Alexander Lukashenko, who is believed to have rigged the elections. The High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell has warned that the EU does not intend to turn Belarus into a second Ukraine. In an interview published Sunday in the Spanish daily El Pais, Josep Borrell said that in Ukraine tensions between Europe and Russia have been resolved through armed violence and the disintegration of Ukrainian territory, a situation that continues to this day. The head of the European diplomacy believes, however, that the people of Belarus should not have to choose between Europe and Russia, but to gain freedom and democracy.
Tennis. The pair made up of the Romanian tennis player Horia Tecău and the Dutch Jean-Julien Rojer play, today, against the pair Raven Klaasen (South Africa) / Oliver Marach (Austria), in the round of 16 of the doubles event of the ATP Masters 1,000 tournament in Cincinnati. The tournament, with over $ 4.2 million in prize money, is hosted this year by the Flushing Meadows arenas in New York. Tecău and Rojer qualified after defeating 3-6, 6-3, 10-8 the Frenchmen Jeremy Chardy / Fabrice Martin. Tecău and Rojer lost a final in Cincinnati, in 2016. Tecau had won the title in 2012 together with the Swede Robert Lindstedt. (M. Ignatescu)
