Leaders from around the globe have joined the World Health Organisation for a virtual meeting in which they pledged their support for a collaboration to speed up the development of treatments for COVID-19, though the US was markedly absent.
The death toll in the US surpassed 50,000 overnight as Donald Trump signed a $750 billion relief package into law, the fourth of that nature so far throughout this pandemic.
A triumphant milestone has been celebrated by Spain as, for the first time, the country records more people having recovered from coronavirus than being diagnosed with it in a single day.
This story is being updated regularly throughout Saturday. You can also stay informed with the latest episode of the Coronacast podcast.
World leaders launch WHO COVID-19 plan, but US won't take part.
French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa are among dozens of leaders from across the globe who have pledged to help a global initiative to accelerate work to fight COVID-19, the World Health Organisation says.
The WHO billed the initiative as a "landmark collaboration" to speed development of safe, effective drugs, tests and vaccines to prevent, diagnose and treat COVID-19.
There was one major global power missing from the virtual meeting, however — the US.
"There will be no US official participation", said a spokesperson for the US mission in Geneva.
"We look forward to learning more about this initiative in support of international cooperation to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 as soon as possible."
Mr Macron urged all, namely the US and China to support the WHO undertaking.
"We will continue now to mobilise all G7 and G20 countries so they get behind this initiative. And I hope we'll manage to reconcile around this joint initiative both China and the US, because this is about saying: the fight against COVID-19 is a common human good and there should be no division in order to win this battle," said Mr Macron.
US President Donald Trump has lambasted the WHO as being slow to react to the outbreak and being "China-centric", and announced a suspension of funding.
Prior to the meeting, when asked to confirm whether the United States was going to be participating, a WHO source said: "No, but almost everyone else is."
Seth Berkley, the chief executive of GAVI, The Vaccine Alliance (a Geneva-based public-private partnership that leads immunisation campaigns in poor countries) said global manufacturing capacity must be ramped up ahead of choosing "a winner" vaccine.
"We can't have a repeat of what happened in 2009, the H1N1 (swine flu) vaccine, when there was not enough supply for developing countries or when supply did come it came much later," he said.
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