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China disapproves of ‘recklessly eating wild animals’ as its Finance Ministry offers incentives to ship them abroad

Chinese authorities have shut down domestic wild animal traders on fears their goods sparked the coronavirus pandemic. Now officials are offering tax incentives to the multibillion-dollar animal-products industry to ship some of the creatures overseas, according to Chinese government documents.

China’s National People’s Congress on Feb. 24 imposed a ban on the sale and consumption of wild animals in the country. “The prominent problem of recklessly eating wild animals and its potential risk to public health have aroused wide public concern,” a spokesman said at the time, according to state media.

Less than a month later, China’s Ministry of Finance and tax authority said on March 17 they would raise value-added tax rebates on nearly 1,500 Chinese products, including offering a 9% rebate on the export of animal products such as edible snakes and turtles, primate meat, beaver and civet musk, and rhino horns, a Chinese government document shows.

China’s economy is struggling amid a sharp global downturn and a prolonged trade war with the U.S. The Chinese government’s new tax incentives are tied to a broad array of exports, designed to support Chinese industries from steel and construction to agricultural products, according to a report by the Congressional Research Service, which produces nonpartisan analysis for members of Congress.

But the move to encourage wild animal sales abroad, while banned at home, “could spread the risk to global markets,” the report said.

China is also a major exporter of medicines and medical equipment, but the new tax incentives made no mention of goods in short supply during the global pandemic, including personal protective equipment for medical workers and first responders. “Absent in China’s policy push are incentives to encourage the sale of pharmaceuticals, PPE, and other medical products overseas,” the report said.

China’s Finance Ministry didn’t respond to a request for comment. Neither did the Chinese Embassy in Washington, D.C. Many countries, including China and the U.S., have put export restrictions on medical-equipment exports due to global shortages.

China’s exports of wild animals and animal parts are minuscule compared with the vast volumes of goods China ships abroad. China’s live reptile exports—which are almost entirely edible reptiles—go primarily to Vietnam, with more than $1 million worth of sales in total during January and February of this year, according to China customs statistics tabulated by Trade Data Monitor.

South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Indonesia were the next-largest importers of China’s reptiles, though at much smaller volumes, with South Korea importing more than $122,000 in reptiles and the other countries less than $100,000 during the first two months of 2020, the data shows.

And yet, even small amounts of exports could pose a risk, should wild animals prove to be the source of pandemics, as some Chinese reports suggest. The U.S. was the biggest importer of China’s animal products used in pharmaceuticals, such as civet and beaver, buying around $865,000 over January and February 2020, according to the data.

Taiwan was the second-largest importer of the products, buying around $126,000 worth over the same period; South Korea and Hong Kong followed, each buying around $70,000 worth, the data shows.

Data on rhino horn trade, which varies in legality around the world, is sparse. Vietnam, and China itself, are believed to be the world’s biggest consumer markets for rhino horn, according to a 2013 report by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, an international treaty administered through the United Nations, and a 2017 report by WildAid, an environmental organization based in San Francisco.

The Center for Advanced Defense Studies’ Wildlife Seizure Database shows that after China, Vietnam is the most frequent destination for rhino horn seizures. Vietnam is the destination in 25% of recorded seizures with destination information, said C4ADS, which is based in Washington, D.C.

The exotic animal trade fuels the multibillion-dollar traditional Chinese medicine industry, in which products made from rhino horns and tiger bones are used to treat ailments. Many scientific studies have found no medicinal properties in either.

Beijing has promoted the use of traditional Chinese medicine in treating coronavirus patients, with China’s national health commission last month recommending a remedy containing bear bile, goat horn and other ingredients for critically ill patients.

There is also a long tradition in China of eating wildlife, especially in the southern regions of Guangdong and Guangxi, a practice that has long been the target of criticism by animal-rights activists.

More than 1.7 million people world-wide have so far been infected by the virus, which causes a disease called Covid-19, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. As of Saturday, countries have reported more than 107,000 deaths from the virus, which first emerged in Wuhan, China.

Although health authorities have yet to identify the precise cause of the outbreak, a study by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, based on patient samples, found a 96% genetic match with a bat coronavirus. Another Chinese study suggested snakes sold in a Wuhan market were the source.

Medical researchers have said the 2002 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, originated in bats and spread to humans via palm civets—cat-sized mammals that look like weasels—sold in China’s open-air food markets.

The dos and don’ts of wearing a face mask

People need clear advice on face-coverings during the coronavirus pandemic

Austria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Bosnia-Herzegovina have all made wearing face masks compulsory in some public places; many other EU countries advise against. Citizens of many Asian countries are donning them routinely. In the US, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new advice for people to wear cloth-based mouth coverings, even bandannas or T-shirts, in crowded areas. President Donald Trump has opted out. “I don’t think I’m going to be doing it,” he said.

In few areas of the Covid-19 pandemic has advice appeared so inconsistent as that related to face masks. The World Health Organization has revised its guidance but still insists that the wide use of masks by healthy people in everyday life “is not supported by current evidence and carries uncertainties and critical risks”.

Caution towards mask-wearing has been dictated in part by the need to prevent panic buying and ensure sufficient medical-grade protection for healthcare staff, amid shortages.

The advice has, nonetheless, been largely based on scientific evidence — or the lack of it. Few proper clinical trials have taken place of how mask-wearing affects viral infection rates. A review by the University of East Anglia of all published research on masks’ effectiveness in respiratory viruses concluded that wearing them in crowded places such as shops or buses could help to protect the most vulnerable from Covid-19. Yet while masks had a consistent but small protective effect, this was not strong enough to recommend widespread use.

Experts fear masks can create a false sense of security, tempting wearers to ignore social distancing, or may be seen as a substitute for other measures such as handwashing. Since the outer surface can become contaminated, wearers risk infecting themselves if they remove them clumsily. Homemade covers such as scarves can become damp, turning them into a potential transmission route.

Masks can also cause skin damage through sweating and rubbing, leading to other forms of infection. Some homemade masks carry particular dangers; consumers have tried adapting vacuum cleaner filters that may contain dangerous particles.

In weighing the pros and cons, much emphasis has been placed on the limited ability of anything short of medical-grade respirators to protect wearers from infection through inhalation; viruses are so tiny they can pass between the fibres of many materials. Yet the evolving understanding of Covid-19 suggests there may be strong arguments for donning masks to reduce infection risks to others.

The main virus transmission route is through droplets, which some evidence now suggests can be propelled further than previously thought by sneezing. Infected individuals may be contagious before suffering symptoms. Masks can catch some droplets expelled by sneezes, coughs or exhalation, reducing contamination of surfaces.

Health authorities, even if they stop short of recommending masks, should recognise many consumers are taking matters into their own hands; in parts of New York, the barefaced are already frowned upon. Authorities should continue to stress that surgical masks must be reserved for professionals, and that handwashing and social distancing are most vital. For individuals who may opt for facial protection, however, officials should issue clear dos and don’ts on what to use, and how. In a world where consumers can easily see what other countries are doing, inconsistent advice is not just unhelpful. It risks undermining trust in those giving it.

Tom Egan is the kind of entrepreneur America needs right now. For 30 years, Mr Egan has run a company making lifts to get wheelchair users in and out of vehicles and around the home. But now he has converted his upholstery shop to make surgical masks and gowns, and his 3D printing machines to make face shields, which he is planning to sell to medical centres in New York City, the current world epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic.

The only problem was that until last week Mr Egan, who is based in upstate New York, had no broadband internet, like tens of millions of other rural Americans. For years his patchy and makeshift internet connection was an irritation, cutting him off from customers and suppliers. Then it became a more serious issue.

“We make things with fabrics,” he says. “Not many people do that in the US any more — it is a lost art. Now we are getting a flood of people asking us what we can produce. Nothing has shown up our need for a connection quite like the Covid-19 crisis.”

Mr Egan finally got a connection at the end of last week after years of lobbying and the intervention of his local congressman. Other rural Americans however are not so lucky. 

Even as the US races to be the first country to roll out superfast 5G internet connectivity nationwide, 21m Americans remain without any broadband connection at all, according to the most recent figures published by the Federal Communications Commission last year. BroadbandNow, a consumer website, puts the figure at double that. 

It is especially a problem in rural areas: the Pew Research Center estimates that a third of rural Americans do not have broadband at home.

Even before the pandemic, rural broadband had become a simmering political issue, an acute example of being left behind which some Democrats were using to prise rural voters away from President Donald Trump. It is a subject that resonates from congressional districts in upstate New York to presidential swing states such as Iowa. 

With the virus spreading rapidly beyond cities into rural counties, poor access to broadband has exploded into a major Congressional row, as politicians tussle over billions of dollars’ worth of stimulus money.

“I think rural communities are realising that this is as deep a divide as access to electricity was at the turn of the century,” says Abigail Spanberger, a Democratic member of Congress who recently won her semi-rural Virginia seat from the Republicans. “And if politicians want to be attentive to the communities they represent, broadband matters.”

Before the pandemic, many people in excluded rural areas found workarounds. Small business owners visited friends’ houses to communicate with customers or file online accounts. Schoolchildren would go to their local libraries or even fast food restaurants to do homework. Mr Egan paid over $4,000 to put up a radio antenna on a friend’s house on the adjacent hill and beam a wireless connection to his office.

But now, with public buildings closed and people confined to their homes, children are in danger of falling behind, medical patients are unable to contact their doctors and businesses cannot contact their customers. Many farmers cannot even operate their machinery: modern irrigation systems, for example, use real-time weather data to calculate how much water to pump out.

“I don’t think there has ever been a moment where everybody understands the profound role that broadband plays in our nation’s life, says Jonathan Spalter, chief executive of the industry association US Telecom. “This is no longer a matter of commerce, it is a matter of life and death.”

The US is not the only country to have struggled to provide broadband access to all its citizens. But the problem is much smaller in other industrialised nations. The UK has now rolled out broadband to 99.5 per cent of its population, according to the telecoms regulator Ofcom, while the EU average was 96.7 per cent in 2018.

Broadband rollout has proved a particularly difficult challenge in the US, thanks in part to how large and spread out the country is. Pew research shows it takes on average two years between getting a grant to provide broadband to a particular location and the connection being switched on.

“There is no other OECD country that has the kind of vast rural land mass that the US has, and no country that has the kind of geographic and demographic challenges when it comes to delivering broadband,” says Mr Spalter. “Just think of the challenge of trying to get it from one end of Alaska to the other.”

It is not just Alaska that lacks broadband. Mr Egan is just a 15-minute drive away from the nearest city. Charter Communications had laid cable to within half a mile of his property, but until last week had been dissuaded from taking it the extra few hundred yards by high costs and a lack of potential customers. State and national governments have already spent billions of dollars trying to incentivise telecoms companies to build out to homes, offices and farms such as Mr Egan’s, and explanations vary on why it has not yet worked.

Some believe it simply needs more money. The Federal Communications Commission last year launched one of the biggest national schemes yet, promising to auction off $20bn worth of incentives for rural broadband access. But the FCC itself estimates it will cost as much as $80bn to get fibre optic cable to every household in the US, while the consultancy firm Deloitte puts the figure as high as $150bn.

Others believe the money has simply been misspent, focusing on incentivising private companies, which need to find a profit margin, rather than smaller non-profit groups. 

“For the most part, we are still hoping that the private sector will find a way to make it happen, and it’s just not happening,” says Christopher Mitchell, a researcher at the Institute for Local Self Reliance. “The FCC has long believed that the big telephone companies could solve this problem, but they don’t consider things like rural electrification co-operatives.”

A far more fundamental problem, however, is that no one actually knows who actually lacks broadband access. 

The official maps run by the FCC define an entire census block — which can run to many hundreds of people — as connected if just a single property within it has access. According to those maps, Mr Egan has long had a connection. And when BroadbandNow took a sample of more than 11,000 addresses and checked them against whether any internet service provider would provide a connection, it found the number of unconnected households was probably double that counted by the FCC.

The commission is now working on new maps which it says will provide a more accurate picture of the problem. But Ajit Pai, the Trump-appointed FCC chairman, wants to begin awarding money to areas before the new maps are released. He intends to start auctioning $16bn worth of money this October, just weeks before the presidential election.

Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democratic commissioner at the FCC, says: “The chairman has proposed, 13 days before the election, sending out $16bn. But I feel like we have put the cart before the horse. We are going to spend the money and do the data collection later — we have got it entirely backwards.”

The current crisis is spurring a wave of short-term solutions. Several telecoms companies have opened up their public WiFi hotspots for people to use for free, while some are providing free packages for families for whom affordability is the main problem rather than the lack of a connection.

Schools are also proving resourceful. Teachers in the Morrisville-Eaton school district in New York state are filming lessons and uploading them on to flash USB drives to be distributed to students without broadband at home. The district has also bought 60 Verizon hotspots, which use cellular networks to provide internet at home.

Such solutions however, are often expensive. The Verizon hotspots cost $40 a month each — money the school district can ill-afford. Greg Molloy, the area’s school superintendent, says: “We don’t know where the money is going to come from but we know we have to do this for the kids and we will figure out the money situation later.”

Democrats in Congress pushed for $2bn to be included in last month’s stimulus package specifically to help schoolchildren get online during the coronavirus outbreak. That plan was scotched at the last minute amid rancorous negotiations between the two parties. But some are hoping that it might make it into the next round of crisis spending. 

Teachers worry, however, that short-term fixes such as this will not stop long-term damage being done during the coming months. Grades are likely to suffer — a study by Michigan State University published earlier this month showed pupils with fast home internet access scored half a grade higher than those with none.

And some worry about the possibility of children suffering more serious, but less measurable harm. “I have spent a lot of time on the phone to pupils who don’t have internet access at home.” says Rachel Murat, a teacher at Maine-Endwell High School, also in rural New York. “But I rely on being able to see them to know whether they are getting what they need at home: do they have shelter, food, a stable place to be. Do they feel safe?”

Over the long term, campaigners for digital access hope that the pandemic will push this issue further up the political agenda. Even before the outbreak, there were signs that politicians were taking it more seriously. Mr Egan, Mr Molloy and Ms Murat all live in a district represented by the Democratic congressman Anthony Brindisi. 

Mr Brindisi won his seat from an incumbent Republican last year in part by campaigning on this issue, regularly attacking Charter Communications, which runs the local cable service under its Spectrum brand. Mr Brindisi says: “A big piece of what I ran on was the lack of broadband service, especially in our rural areas, the unwillingness of our large corporations to expand our broadband service in this area.”

Now, the issue is being taken up by presidential candidates. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, has pledged to spend $20bn on expanding rural broadband, while Mr Trump said last month that he is “committed to ensuring that every citizen can have access to high-speed internet, including — and especially in — rural America”.

Those who have campaigned for years for every American to get broadband access hope that the combination of renewed attention, better mapping and the promise of billions of dollars in funding might provide the push needed to make it finally happen, even as the US prepares to enter the 5G age.

But even if it does, for many people who still struggle to do things online which most Americans take for granted, it will have come years too late.

“It is 2020,” says Ms Murat. “Internet really should be a utility at this point.”

MBA students demand tuition fee refunds over campus closures

Candidates at Wharton among those protesting over diminished educational experience

MBA students at some of the world’s leading business schools are demanding a refund on their tuition fees as compensation for campus closures and the switch to what they view as inferior online learning.

A petition circulating among students at The Wharton School, where fees alone for a two-year MBA degree can exceed $160,000, has received close to 900 signatures, equivalent to a single year’s intake.

At Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, where the two-year MBA programme costs $150,000 in fees, an online petition has been signed by the equivalent to 80 per cent of the class. Students have made similar demands at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and at Insead.

“They have clearly shown that they do not care about us,” said Smith Kachhy, an MBA candidate at Insead’s Singapore campus who predicted the fees row would discourage future students. “Everything has been derailed on our end and we’re also not sure if we’ll get absorbed back into the workforce upon graduation.”

The high cost of an MBA, which has been rising by more than inflation for several years, was a cause for concern even before the coronavirus crisis forced schools to close their campuses and switch to online lectures. Alongside a clampdown on international student visas in some countries, high fees are blamed for a fall in applications at most US business schools.

Fee increases have pushed the cost of a full-time MBA degree at some leading business schools, factoring in living costs and other expenses, towards $250,000.

The high cost is borne by many students because it is widely accepted that an MBA qualification leads to a significant salary increase after graduation. But the virus pandemic, and the long-term economic damage it is causing, has undermined that belief.

Business schools have responded to their students’ concerns by offering extended payment periods but none of the institutions petitioned have agreed to cut fees. Schools are loath to reduce MBA fees because fixed costs such as teaching facilities and staff wages have not reduced.

Ilian Mihov, dean of Insead, said: “We cannot comment on individual requests for fee reductions but have been flexible with payment terms and admission deadlines for students so that we can continue to welcome people from all over the world and keep the business school for the world as open and collaborative as always.”

However, MBA students complain that replacing classroom lectures and one-to-one tutor meetings with YouTube videos and group calls on video app Zoom has reduce their learning experience.

Vyasa Shastry, a first-year student on the MBA course at Kellogg, said students felt impotent to challenge the increasing use of online lectures — although he stressed he also understood why schools were doing this. 

“We’re between a rock and a hard place,” he said. “People are disappointed about it but we wish the school would see our point of view and reduce our tuition.”

Kellogg said: “We are confident that the value of the Kellogg degree is undiminished, and that we will deliver an excellent academic experience even in the midst of this unprecedented health and economic crisis. 

Stanford pointed out that, even in normal circumstances, tuition fees do not cover the full cost of a degree.

“Effectively, all students, including those paying full tuition, receive a significant discount relative to the university’s actual cost.

“Our endowment and other sources of revenue, which we use to supplement tuition to cover the cost of education, are now greatly challenged because of the pandemic crisis.

“We believe the value of a Stanford education and degree, whether in-person or remote, continues to greatly exceed tuition.”

Investment banks braced for pandemic earnings wipeout

European lenders seen as more vulnerable, with Wall Street poised to grab market share

Global investment banks risk seeing their annual earnings wiped out by the coronavirus crisis, with European banks more vulnerable than their more profitable US counterparts. 

Even the most optimistic “rapid rebound” scenario, where relative normality is restored in six months or less, could lead to a 100 per cent decline in profits this year, according to a new report co-authored by Oliver Wyman and Morgan Stanley. 

In a more pessimistic model — dubbed “deep global recession” and lasting a year or more — some weaker banks would slump to big losses. In this scenario, credit losses could surge to between $200bn and $300bn, compared with $30bn to $50bn if a rapid rebound unfolds.

While the banking industry has built up robust capital and liquidity buffers since the financial crisis, “returns have never been lower entering a major stress event and banks’ first line of defence is pre-provision profitability,” said Morgan Stanley’s Magdalena Stoklosa, who led the report alongside Oliver Wyman’s James Davis.

“The pressure on earnings could reveal structural weaknesses in some business models [ . . .] the performance gap will be wide,” said Ms Stoklosa. “The biggest single driver of profitability is scale”, which means an increasingly dominant Wall Street — where JPMorgan is the most profitable lender — is likely to use the crisis to take further market share from smaller European lenders.

Germany’s struggling Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank are the worst positioned among big banks, having little or no profits to absorb a wave of loan defaults. Meanwhile, Switzerland’s Credit Suisse and UBS are the European lenders best positioned to cope, largely thanks to their shift away from investment banking towards wealth and asset management.

Amid the turmoil caused by the lockdowns imposed to contain the pandemic, banks’ resilience is being closely watched. A record number of companies have been forced to seek state support. 

Governments and central banks have unveiled measures to support lenders, including freeing up $500bn in capital by temporarily relaxing regulations and pumping trillions of cheap financing into the system. 

Despite all the help, “we are still talking about an ugly earnings scenario rather than banks dipping below their capital requirements,” said Ms Stoklosa.

For the past five years, wholesale banks have generated an average return on equity of 9 to 10 per cent, according to the report. In the best-case scenario, that measure of profitability will halve to 4 to 5 per cent between 2020 to 2022 — well below the 10 per cent targeted by investors — with the weakest lenders falling to zero or below. 

The eurozone banking system entered this crisis in a particularly weak state. A European Central Bank study last week showed average returns had fallen to 5.2 per cent in 2019, less than half that of their US peers.

The performance will “intensify calls for significant strategic change, potentially also acting as a catalyst for consolidation among European and tier-2 players,” the report said.

Unlike in the 2008 financial crisis, banks can no longer compensate for plunging profits by slashing billions in costs because fixed regulatory, compliance and IT costs have built up.

Additionally, “in the midst of a public health emergency, banks are unlikely to pursue cost-cutting through imposing redundancies,” the report said. HSBC has already said it will delay the “vast majority” of redundancies in its restructuring. Some banks may be pushed to sell assets or exit business lines to create breathing room, the report added.

Within investment banking, a slowdown in dealmaking and capital markets is likely to be partially offset by a surge in trading revenue during the initial volatility. Meanwhile, transaction banking and securities services will be hit by record-low global interest rates that will eat into their margins.

Competition for overseas students is going to be fierce

Universities have a chance to lure a new group of middle-income families

You don’t know what you got until it’s gone. With international students bundled back home to continue classes online, the English-speaking countries hitherto dominant in global higher education are realising what they risk losing.

Politicians have persistently failed to speak up for international students during wider debates about immigration. They are now waking up to the critical role overseas students play in underpinning institutions central to the performance of all knowledge economies.

In the decade before coronavirus struck, the number of international students worldwide had more than doubled to 5m with that number expected to rise to more than 8m by 2025.

Now, doubts are growing over how many overseas students will enrol on traditional face-to-face courses this September. Governments and universities in North America, the UK and Australia say they are preparing for a drop in international students of potentially 50 per cent to 75 per cent.

This major reversal for one of the great boom businesses of the globalised economy will have calamitous consequences for university finances. It will force governments to choose between costly bailouts and disorderly failures that could throw tens of thousands of students on to the streets and into jobs markets already in turmoil.

The challenge is acute in the UK, where 460,000 international students represent 20 per cent of library ticket-holders, massively cross-subsidise research in Russell Group institutions and contribute £20bn to service exports. Regulators will need to design a stabilisation fund to prevent the disorderly collapse of scores of vulnerable English universities. Access to it should be subject to strict conditions, including the closure of poor-quality courses.

Yet for all the anxiety over the coming year, pessimism about the future for international education is overblown — even if it may no longer hew to the current westernised, Anglo-Saxon and mainly English-speaking paradigm.

The push factors remain strong. In key developing countries, such as China and India which account for a quarter of overseas students, the shortage of places at prestigious domestic institutions that match social aspirations and academic needs is acute. In Bangladesh, with its largely young population of 170m, and Sri Lanka, there are an estimated five students competing for every available university place.

Driven by growth in middle classes in Asia and Africa, the demand for higher education is set to increase from 160m students in 2015 to more than 414m by 2030, according to Unesco. To meet that, the world would have to build four universities, each serving 80,000 students, every week, every year.

Only last month, a QS survey of 11,000 prospective international students found 85 per cent still open to applying — although a significant proportion intended to defer for a year.

In fact, the disruption from coronavirus could accelerate a new phase of growth. Traditionally, an international education has been a privilege for those who have the money, or know how to obtain financial aid. In future, it will probably reach a wider pool of talent, through two accelerating trends.

First, the disruption to travel and incomes from the pandemic will boost the relative appeal of opportunities for intraregional study. Many Asian students increasingly contemplate safer and more affordable options closer to home, in countries such as Malaysia. Developing countries will increasingly seek overseas students themselves, with the global north losing market share to the global south.

Second, the crisis will accelerate online, distance-learning and blended courses that combine online educational materials and classroom interaction. These will interest middle-income families unconvinced by the return on investment from traditional multiyear programmes of overseas study.

The best institutions will turn the crisis into an opportunity. In time, demand for traditional programmes of overseas study will return for the elites who’ve always accessed it. The academic kudos and status benefits of full-on immersive experiences in other countries will continue to draw many students.

But the most exciting growth in international education will come from institutions that use technology to increase access for talented students from income groups for whom it has previously been out of reach. An international education market that is more accessible, less elitist and less carbon-intensive may be one good thing to come out of the corona crunch.

The writer is chairman of Tes Global and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School

Scientific adviser warns UK could be worst hit country in Europe

Sir Jeremy Farrar, the director of UK-based medical charity Wellcome Trust, said Britain could record the most cororanvirus deaths out of any European country.

Sir Jeremy, who is also a scientific adviser to the British government, told the BBC that the UK is "likely to be, certainly one of the worst, if not the worst affected country in Europe".

The UK has seen a sharp rise in recent days and now has more daily deaths than either Spain or Italy, where lockdowns appear to be having their desired effect.

Figures analysed on Saturday by the FT's data team show the UK accounts for more daily deaths than Spain or Italy.

Kremlin says Moscow hospitals flooded as coronavirus death toll passes 100

Moscow and many other regions have been in lockdown for nearly two weeks to stem the contagion, but hospitals in the capital are still being pushed to their limit, officials said.

On Saturday a Reuters witness saw a tailback of dozens of ambulances queuing outside a hospital handling coronavirus cases in the region immediately outside Moscow, waiting to drop off patients.

One ambulance driver said he had been waiting 15 hours outside the hospital to drop off a patient suspected of having the virus.

“The situation in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mostly in Moscow, is quite tense because the number of sick people is growing,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on state television, Russian news agencies reported.

“There is a huge influx of patients. We are seeing hospitals in Moscow working extremely intensely, in heroic, emergency mode.”

Russia has reported 13,584 cases of the virus, and the authorities said on Saturday that 12 new coronavirus-related deaths in the last day had pushed the casualty toll to 106.

Peskov added that it would become clearer only in the next few weeks whether the country was nearing the worst point in its outbreak.

Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said on Friday that the city was far from reaching the peak of the outbreak, saying it was merely in its “foothills”.

The authorities in Moscow are set to begin introducing a system of permits to control movement around the city starting next week to help enforce the lockdown.

A stronger police presence was visible on the streets of Moscow on Saturday. Traffic police had set up check points on major thoroughfares on the outskirts of the city but were not systematically carrying out checks.

In the early stages epidemic, Russia recorded fewer cases of the new coronavirus than many Western European countries, but its tally began to rise sharply this month.

Until late March officials were saying the situation was under control and that there was no epidemic in the country.

On Saturday a Reuters witness saw a tailback of dozens of ambulances queuing outside a hospital handling coronavirus cases in the region immediately outside Moscow, waiting to drop off patients.

One ambulance driver said he had been waiting 15 hours outside the hospital to drop off a patient suspected of having the virus.

“The situation in both Moscow and St. Petersburg, but mostly in Moscow, is quite tense because the number of sick people is growing,” Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in an interview on state television, Russian news agencies reported.

“There is a huge influx of patients. We are seeing hospitals in Moscow working extremely intensely, in heroic, emergency mode.”

Russia has reported 13,584 cases of the virus, and the authorities said on Saturday that 12 new coronavirus-related deaths in the last day had pushed the casualty toll to 106.

Peskov added that it would become clearer only in the next few weeks whether the country was nearing the worst point in its outbreak.

Sergei Sobyanin, the mayor of Moscow, said on Friday that the city was far from reaching the peak of the outbreak, saying it was merely in its “foothills”.

The authorities in Moscow are set to begin introducing a system of permits to control movement around the city starting next week to help enforce the lockdown.

A stronger police presence was visible on the streets of Moscow on Saturday. Traffic police had set up check points on major thoroughfares on the outskirts of the city but were not systematically carrying out checks.

In the early stages epidemic, Russia recorded fewer cases of the new coronavirus than many Western European countries, but its tally began to rise sharply this month.

Until late March officials were saying the situation was under control and that there was no epidemic in the country.