1. India’s coronavirus tally on Friday rose to 63,94,069 with 81,484 new cases in the last 24 hours. The country’s toll went up by 1,095 to 99,773. As many as 53,52,078 people have recovered from the infection, pushing the recovery rate to 83.7%. The case fatality rate stood at 1.56%.
  2. Kerala reported its biggest one-day rise of 9,258 new cases, taking its tally to 2,12,626. Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which prohibits the assembly of more than four people, has been imposed in Thiruvananthapuram, Ernakulam and Kottayam districts amid rising coronavirus cases. The orders will be in effect from October 3 to October 31.
  3. The clinical trials of AstraZeneca and Oxford University’s coronavirus vaccine resumed in Japan, almost a month after they were halted as a volunteer fell ill. The vaccine trials have already begun in India, the United Kingdom Brazil and South Africa but remain paused in the United States.
  4. Global markets fell after United States President Donald Trump announced that he and First Lady Melania Trump have tested positive for the coronavirus, weeks ahead of election. European markets opened more than 1% lower in early trading. The future contracts for the S&P 500 slumped 1.21% by early afternoon in Asia. US stocks dropped more than 2%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 index erased gains and fell 0.69% as the Tokyo Stock Exchange resumed normal trading after its worst-ever outage brought the world’s third-largest equity market to a standstill.
  5. The Indian Medical Association said at least 500 doctors have died of the coronavirus in the country so far. The figure is half the number of claims settled or under the process of settlement by the Centre to compensate doctors who died due to the infection. The association, which represents 3.5 lakh doctors across the country, had last month accused the government of “indifference” and “abdication” after it said there was no complete data on the number of frontline healthcare workers who have contracted the coronavirus and died.
  6. Karnataka minister K Sudhakar said that the state government is taking steps to triple coronavirus testing capacity. He added that the government will set up RT-PCR (Reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction) labs in the Public-Private Partnership model.
  7. United States multinational technology company Amazon said that more than 19,800 of its employees have tested positive for the coronavirus. It said that the infection rate was lower than expected.
  8. West Bengal Bharatiya Janata Party leader Anupam Hazra, who had threatened to hug Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee if he contracted Covid-19, tested positive for the infection.
  9. A group of scientists in the United Kingdom warned that even an effective coronavirus vaccine will not return life to normal. The report by researches of the Royal Society said the world needed to be “realistic” about what a vaccine could achieve and by when. Experts at the McGill University in Canada, meanwhile said that an effective vaccine against the coronavirus is not likely to be available for the general public before the fall of 2021. The researchers carried out a survey of 28 experts working in the field of vaccinology.
  10. Globally, the coronavirus has infected more than 3.42 crore people and killed 10,21,709, according to Johns Hopkins University. More than 2.35 crore people have recovered worldwide so far.