Qantas Airways has said it had cancelled  most international flights until late October after the Australian government indicated its border closure because of the coronavirus was likely to extend to 2021.

Qantas Airways has said it had cancelled  most international flights until late October after the Australian government indicated its border closure because of the coronavirus was likely to extend to 2021.
“We will still have some flights scheduled across the Tasman in the coming months with the expected travel bubble between Australia and New Zealand,” the airline said in a statement, referring to the Tasman Sea between the countries.
“Should travel between Australia and other countries open up and demand return, we can add more flights back into our schedule,” it added.
Australia is unlikely to reopen its border to international travellers until next year but will look to relax entry rules for students and other long-term visitors, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham yesterday.
It is in talks with New Zealand about forming a quarantine-free “travel bubble” given the low number of cases inboth countries.
New Zealand has indicated September could be a realistic date for the resumption of regular flights between the nations.
Qantas this month announced plans to triple domestic capacity to 15% of normal levels by the end of the month as state border restrictions ease.
‘Catastrophic’: South Asia reels from virus surge
Early optimism that South Asia might have dodged the worst ravages of the coronavirus pandemic has disappeared as soaring infection rates turn the densely populated region into a global hot spot.
After several months trailing the US and western Europe, cases of Covid-19 are surging across South Asia – home to almost a quarter of the world’s population – where the virus is wreaking havoc on fragile medical systems and underfunded health agencies are pushed to breaking point.
Overflowing hospitals from Kabul to Dhaka are turning away suspected virus patients, mortuaries are being overwhelmed as cemeteries and crematoria struggle to cope, and desperate families are searching for help for critically ill loved ones.
“The situation is catastrophic,” Abdur Rob, a senior doctor at Bangladesh’s Chittagong General Hospital, told AFP.
“Patients are dying in the ambulances on the roads as they shunt between hospitals looking for (intensive care) beds or hospital admission.”
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Worldwide more than eight million people have been infected by Covid-19 and over 446,000 have died, with the virus accelerating across South Asia and Latin America.
Devastating scenarios are playing out as cash-strapped governments choose between enforcing lockdowns or watching low-income families slide deeper into poverty, often with no safety nets to catch them.
India is the fourth worst-hit country in the world with more than 354,000 confirmed cases – though limited testing means the true number is likely much higher.
The number of fatalities leapt by more than 2,000 to top 11,900 yesterday after Mumbai and New Delhi updated their figures.
The government won plaudits in late March for imposing one of the world’s strictest lockdowns.
But millions of migrant workers were left jobless and, unable to get home, sometimes held in crowded facilities that increased the risk of transmission.
As the government steadily lifts restrictions, cases have surged. 
In neighbouring Pakistan, which has recorded more than 160,000 cases and over 3,000 deaths, Prime Minister Imran Khan resisted a nationwide lockdown, saying the country could ill afford it.
Security personnel seal a residential sector in Islamabad as cases of Covid-19 continue to rise
Many there chose to ignore social distancing guidelines and provincial lockdowns were relaxed during last month’s Eid al-Fitr holiday, helping fuel the current increase in cases. 
“When Eid celebrations came, the public took the ease of the lockdown as a sign that the disease was all over.
“They swamped the markets, they went to funerals, there was no enforcement of the (social distancing measures),” said Samra Fakhar, a surgeon in the northwestern city of Peshawar. 
Authorities have warned that Pakistan would likely see more than one million cases by July, and the World Health Organization has called for new lockdowns, a measure Khan rejected.
In Pakistan’s overwhelmed hospitals, doctors say national leaders wasted precious early months to brace for a potential onslaught.
Further complicating the crisis is limited testing which is skewing data lower.
Last week, burial figures released by nine state-run graveyards in the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka, as well as dozens of small graveyards in a neighbouring city, showed at least 1,600 additional deaths in April and May, a top Bengali news site reported.
Yet health ministry data show only 450 people died from Covid-19 in the two cities during the period.
Similar anecdotes are emerging in conflict-battered Afghanistan, which has only acknowledged more than 26,000 cases and 500 deaths – seemingly impossibly low numbers for a country that failed to enforce lockdowns amid ongoing fighting and where impoverished day labourers are unable to stay home.
“We have reports of increasing suspected deaths, people burying dead bodies at night,” said Kabul governor Mohammad Yakub Haidary last week, adding that the Afghan capital was suspected of having more than a million infected people.
“There is a disaster coming.”
Meanwhile, low standards of hygiene in China’s wholesale food markets and vulnerabilities in its food supply chain need to be urgently addressed after a new coronavirus outbreak in Beijing, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), a leading body of the ruling Communist Party, said in a report published on its website yesterday.
The resurgence of Covid-19 in the country’s capital over the past week, infecting more than 100 people and raising fears of wider contagion, has been linked to the city’s massive Xinfadifood centre.
China’s sprawling food markets have emerged as an ideal breeding ground for the coronavirus. The first major cluster of infections was traced to the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan,where bats and other wild animals were believed to be on sale.
Many Jordanians struggling as country emerges from lockdown
Many people in Jordan are struggling to meet basic needs after a more than two-month lockdown to fight the coronavirus pandemic, a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) study said.
Although Jordan has contained the first wave of Covid-19 and is now reopening most businesses, the full impact of the pandemic is still unfolding in the aid dependent country of 10million people, the UNDP study said.
Jordan had already been hit by years of sluggish growth andhigh unemployment, Sara Ferrer Olivella, resident representative of UNDP Jordan, told Reuters.
“Many businesses were not doing well even prior to thecrisis, similarly many families have little savings left to copewith income losses due to lockdown measures”, Ms Olivella said.
Officials have adopted recent estimates by the World Bank that the economy was set to shrink by 3.5% this year comparedwith an IMF estimate of 2% growth before the health crisis.
It is the first such contraction since 1990.
Unemployment is expected to rise beyond 19% in the fourth quarter last year, with many businesses either failing or cutting jobs amid a highly uncertain outlook for recovery.
Two-thirds of families in a recent UNDP nationwide survey said they had less than one week of financial resources to draw on at the peak of the lockdown, according to Ms Olivella, who added that more than three-quarters of respondents predicted a “long-lasting” impact.
“This is worrying considering that the crisis is far from over. Many informal workers lost their livelihoods so it is very likely that we will see poverty rise,” Ms Olivella said.
Job losses and business closures were also affecting largeparts of the country’s middle class, she added.
An expected sharp drop in annual remittances by expatriateJordanians in Gulf countries hit by the pandemic, inflows that support tens of thousands of families and boost GDP, will add to Jordan’s economic woes, the UNDP said.