Global infections topped 600,000 Saturday morning, with 27,862 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
The U.S. is the first country with 100,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases and has had more than 1,400 deaths.
Spain reported 832 COVID-19 deaths since Friday, bringing the total for the country to 5,690.
The Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus originated, partly reopened on Saturday.
President Trump signed the largest stimulus package in U.S. history.
Trump used his daily briefing to demand appreciation from U.S. governors for his response to the outbreak.
In a world desperate for good news about the coronavirus, a dip in global carbon emissions caused by the outbreak’s economic downturn might be seen as a silver lining. But climate scientists and policy experts aren’t encouraged.
Global oil demand has plummeted by an estimated 20 percent as economies around the world have ground to a halt, cars and trucks have been idled and dramatically fewer jets leave contrails across the sky. As expected, March data compiled by San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography appears to show the rate of rise of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere has slowed. For those who have spent decades warning that the world needs to transition to a sustainable model of energy, however, there’s little to cheer about.
“This isn’t the way we want to reduce emissions,” Rob Jackson, professor of Earth system science at Stanford University and one of the world’s leading experts on climate change, told Yahoo News. “We don’t want millions or hundreds of millions of people being out of work as a tool for curtailing economic activity and cutting emissions.”
Jackson, one of the authors of a September report by the World Meteorological Organization, and his colleagues warned of the urgent need for “concrete actions” to reduce carbon emissions, meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and keep the average global temperature from rising 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. While the relative dip in carbon emissions from the economic disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic is unprecedented, Jackson said, it’s unlikely to be enough to have real impact.
