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New Delhi: The Covid-19 pandemic continues to devastate several countries across the world the latest count is 45,27,811 cases and over 3,03,438 deaths.

US President Donald Trump has threatened to cut-off his countrys entire relationship with China. The pandemic is now spreading through war-torn Yemen. Doctors are increasingly dying in Russia as the virus spreads further. Meanwhile, the outbreak is also making some Artificial Intelligence (AI) models useless in the e-commerce sector.

ThePrint brings you the most important global stories on the Covid-19 pandemic and why they matter.

As the US-China tensions continue to escalate, President Donald Trump said Thursday that he was no longer on talking terms with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, and Washington could go as far ahead as to end the whole relationship with Beijing, the Straits Times is reporting.

In turn, Chinas state-run Global Times has said, Trump turns up election strategy nonsense with China cut-off threat.

During a morning show on Fox Business, Trump said, I have a very good relationship (with Xi Jinping) but I just right now I dont want to speak to him. He went on to threaten the US relationship with China if the two countries failed to resolve their trade disputes. We could cut off the whole relationship. Now if you did, what would happen? Youd save $500 billion, if you cut off the whole relationship, he said.

Trump did not explain what he meant by the whole relationship, but the $500 billion figure suggests that he might have been referring to trade. He has tweeted in the past that we lose 500 Billion Dollars a year to China on trade, notes the Straits Times report.

There has been a dramatic rise in the number of deaths due to Covid-like symptoms in the southern Yemeni city of Aden, says a BBC report. Citing official figures, Save the Children said there had been at least 380 deaths in the past week, notes the report.

While it seems like the pandemic is finally spreading through war-torn country, Yemen has only reported a few dozen cases until now. Moreover, owing to almost five years of civil war and the war with Gulf Cooperation Council countries, the countrys healthcare system is completely damaged.

Our teams on the ground are seeing how people are being sent away from hospitals, breathing heavily or even collapsing. People are dying because they cant get treatment that would normally save their lives. There are patients who go from hospital to hospital and yet cannot get admitted, Mohammed Alshamaa, Save the Childrens director in Yemen, tells the BBC.

Also read:Drugs, mafia, alcohol Lucknow to London, how underground economy is thriving in pandemic

As the novel coronavirus pandemic spreads through Russia, over 180 doctors have lost their lives to the lethal virus, the New York Times reports.

Russia is hailing its medical workers as heroes, their photographs plastered on billboards and their stories glamorized on state TV. But as the country develops into one of the global epicenters of the disease, those workers are suffering astonishing levels of infection and death in their ranks, notes the report.

A website that memorialises the doctors, nurses, and other health workers who have lost their lives to Covid-19, lists at least 180 doctors. Moreover, according to the countrys health minister at least 400 Russian hospitals have experienced an outbreak.

Over the past few weeks, several drugs such as remdesivir have been undergoing rushed clinical trials to test their potency as anti-Covid drugs.

In an interview to The New Yorker, Peter B. Bach, a physician and epidemiologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where he runs the Center for Health Policy and Outcomes talks about how effective remdesivir might be and how we should be thinking about standards of evidence in the middle of a public-health catastrophe.

Theres this romantic vision of the genius scientist who has the eureka moment and it all plays out well, but cluttered among all those events are many more missteps where we have an idea and we think it will work and, when we rigorously evaluate it, it doesnt. And thats all O.K, says Bach.

Frustrating as it is in the moment, its the only way we have consistently made progress against human disease and we have made considerable progress, he adds.

The novel coronavirus has now been detected in one of the Rohingya refugee camps in southern Bangladesh, Al Jazeera is reporting.

An ethnic Rohingya refugee and a local person tested positive for Covid-19, a senior Bangladeshi official and a United Nations spokeswoman said on Thursday. It was the first confirmed case in the densely populated camps as humanitarian groups warned the infection could devastate the crowded settlement, notes the report.

Bangladesh has so far reported over 18,000 cases and 280 deaths. The rising fear of Covid-19 spreading through the refugee camps has alarmed the countrys health officials, who feel that it could substantially worsen the crisis faced by the Rohingyas.

Also read:US-shaped void forces Australia to stand up to assertive trade-partner China

The popular Indonesian resort island Bali has managed to duck the pandemic with the help of its local traditions, says a Bloomberg report.

The success in curbing the virus has come with the help of about 1,500 traditional village committees with considerable sway over the majority Hindu residents, according to Governor Wayan Koster. The island with a population of 4.2 million has reported just four virus-related deaths and 337 confirmed cases for a fatality rate of 1.2%, far below the national average of 6.4%, notes the report.

Its also in sharp contrast to the widely-criticized efforts at the national level, which have led to deaths swelling to more than 1,000 and officials now warning the disease may infect almost 100,000 before starting to ease, it adds.

In an unexpected development, several AI models that are responsible for helping various e-commerce platforms with inventory management, fraud detection, marketing, and more are no longer working the way they should because of change in customer behaviour amid the Covid-19 pandemic, notes a report in the MIT Technology Review.

Machine-learning models trained on normal human behavior are now finding that normal has changed, and some are no longer working as they should. Machine-learning models are designed to respond to changes. But most are also fragile; they perform badly when input data differs too much from the data they were trained on, adds the report.

A raging pandemic is not just threatening human life but is also emerging as a major risk for the safety of wildlife in Africa, Al Jazeera reports.

Given that most governments are now focused on only dealing with the pandemic, it is giving a free hand to poachers, criminal syndicates, and illegal wildlife traders, it says.

Also read:People living longer and healthier lives but Covid threatens to disrupt that: WHO report

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Donald Trumps threat to China, doctors deaths in Russia & other global Covid news - ThePrint