Image source, EPA

More than 21 million Americans have lost their jobs in the past four weeks, new figures show. It is by far the worst run of job losses on record.

According to the latest figures from the Department of Labour, new unemployment claims reached 5.25 million in the week ending 11 April.

The previous week saw 6.6 million applications.

Much of the US population is under some form of lockdown because of the coronavirus pandemic, bringing the US economy to a virtual halt and forcing businesses big and small to lay off employees.

There are projections that the unemployment rate could reach 20% this month.

The US has almost 640,000 confirmed cases of the virus, and 30,985 people have died, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Gavin Lee
BBC Europe reporter

EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has offered a "heartfelt apology" to Italy for not helping enough at the start of the outbreak.

This is a significant acknowledgement from the most powerful person in Brussels. A formal recognition that in the panic of the moment when Italy most needed help, the famed EU "spirit of solidarity" didn’t show itself.

It was a difficult thing for Ursula von der Leyen to raise.

But it seems an underlying rancour is still felt by Italians and others who feel there were too few good Samaritans when it counted - in early March, when Italy was the only country that had enforced a lockdown.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte urgently requested medical equipment for hospital staff as well as ventilators and testing kits, but it was several days before any European government responded.

Today, the EU Commission president was quick to say things had changed, and that "the true Europe is standing up". But she added that it was important to "have the courage to stand up and tell the truth”, and not to behave like populists and hide facts.

Italy's Foreign Minister Luigi Di Maio responded on Facebook that the statement was an "important act of truth" that was “good for Europe”.

A ranger at South Africa's Kruger National Park has shared pictures of an unlikely sight - a pride of lions sprawled out across a road usually packed with tourist vans.

The famous park, like many other places in the country, has been closed to the public. South Africa is currently under a nationwide lockdown to curb the spread of Covid-19.

More than 2,500 coronavirus cases have been confirmed in the country and only essential services are allowed to operate during the lockdown period, which was recently extended until the end of April.

Image source, Getty Images

Scotland's First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has just confirmed 80 more people have died from coronavirus in the country.

The latest 24-hour figure brings the total number of deaths in Scotland to 779.

At a "virtual" First Minister's Questions held online, Ms Sturgeon said the lockdown was still "having a positive effect”, as Scottish health authorities were not seeing “sustained increases in the number of people in hospital”.

If you're just joining our live coverage, here are the major UK developments:

• Ministers are expected to announce a three-week extension to the coronavirus lockdown. Health Secretary Matt Hancock has said he believes the government has been clear "we think it too early to make a change"
• The UK must keep a "significant level" of social distancing until a vaccine for coronavirus is found, Prof Neil Ferguson, a scientist advising the government, has said
• Hancock said more than 10,000 tests of care home residents had been undertaken. His comments came after social care directors wrote to the Department of Health and Social Care on Saturday with a list of concerns about how the sector was coping during the pandemic
• In case you missed it this morning, watch 99-year-old Captain Tom Moore complete 100 laps of his garden, a challenge which has so far raised more than £13m for the NHS.

Dearbail Jordan
Business reporter

Image source, Getty Images

British low-cost airline EasyJet plans to keep the middle seat on its planes empty to allow for social distancing once the Covid-19 lockdown has been lifted.

The airline grounded its entire fleet at the end of March.

Chief executive Johan Lundgren said he hoped the seating measure would encourage more people to fly.

He said bookings for winter flights were ahead of last year, helped by customers who had rebooked tickets after Covid-19 disrupted their travel plans.

The company has faced criticism from customers who have had trouble getting refunds.

• More on this story here.

As the coronavirus spread through the UK the government realised it needed many more ventilators, and called on British engineers to create new machines for the front line.

The first design has now been approved. Oxford-based firm Penlon worked with other companies - including Formula One racing teams, Ford and Siemens - to get the design finished, and the government has put in 15,000 orders.

Penlon’s Prima ES02 model will begin shipping today, with the first 40 devices heading to a Ministry of Defence base before being delivered to hospitals. Hundreds of units are expected to be built over the next week.

The government has promised it will shield manufacturers of new ventilators from the cost of potential legal claims over intellectual property infringements, or personal injury caused by defective machines, according to a report in the Financial Times on Thursday, external.

Image source, Reuters

• Factory workers in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico have held a protest demanding that the Regal plant, which assembles electric motors for household appliances, be shut down. The employees said their work was not essential and that not enough was being done to protect them from coronavirus. Mexico has said that it could force the closure of non-essential companies if they refuse to suspend operations
• The Galapagos Islands, a volcanic archipelago almost 1,000km off the coast of Ecuador, have 78 confirmed cases of coronavirus. Forty-eight of those who have tested positive are crew on board a tourist ship. About 30,000 people live on the islands, which have a limited medical facilities.
• A two-month-old baby from the Warao indigenous group has tested positive for coronavirus, officials in Brazil say. The baby's parents fled the economic crisis in Venezuela. Health experts have warned that the coronavirus pandemic could "wipe out" indigenous communities in Brazil.

More than half of adults in the UK say they feel an increased sense of belonging with their neighbours, according to new data from the Office for National Statistics, external, and a similar number say they've checked on vulnerable neighbours in the last week.

In good news for the government, nearly all adults (96.8%) said they had avoided physical contact following social-distancing guidelines.

According to the ONS data, 45.6% of adults were worried about holidays and gap years being impacted, while 48.1% said they were concerned about not being able to make future plans.

More than four in five adults were worried about the effect Covid-19 was having on their mental wellbeing - with 46.9% reporting high levels of anxiety.

Unsurprisingly staying in touch with family and friends remotely was the most common way for people to try to cope (76.9%).

Image source, Office for National Statistics

Image source, AFP

The number of infections in Iran rose by 1,606 in the past day to reach 77,995, Kianush Jahanpur, a spokesman for the country's health ministry said.

The country's official death toll from the outbreak rose by 92 to 4,869. Iran has suffered more deaths than any other Middle Eastern country.

But footage of large numbers of bodies at a morgue in Qom, the city at the centre of Iran's outbreak, suggest the country is struggling to deal with the numbers of dead.

There are fears the true death toll could be far higher than official figures.

Read the full report by BBC Persian's Behrang Tajdin and Louise Adamou.

Sarah Corker
BBC Consumer Affairs Correspondent

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The first of six specially chartered flights from Romania to London will land on Thursday afternoon carrying 150 people to assist British farmers pick fruit and vegetables.

Despite a high profile "Pick for Britain" campaign appealing to students and laid-off hospitality workers to help with the harvest, not enough British workers have come forward.

The six flights were privately chartered by large UK food producers and will land between now and June.

The National Farmers Union estimates a shortage of 70,000 seasonal farm workers that has been exacerbated by the Covid 19 lockdown.

Before boarding, the prospective workers will have their temperatures checked, fill out a health questionnaire and be given masks and hand sanitiser. On arrival in the UK, they will be taken by bus to farms in East Anglia to pick lettuce.

Mark Bridgeman, the president of the Country Land and Business Association, said bringing in workers from overseas to help meet the shortfall was "the right thing to do if we want to keep the supermarkets stocked".

Image source, Getty Images

The Oktoberfest is one of Germany's most famous annual traditions - a beer festival that attracts tourists from around the country and well beyond its borders. (We're looking at you, Australians.)

October might seem a long way away, but Bavaria's state premier has just said that the festival may be cancelled this year.

"I am very, very sceptical and can hardly imagine that an event of that size is at all possible," Markus Söder told reporters.

His warning came as Germany on Thursday recorded another 2,900 new infections and 315 more deaths over the past 24 hours. In total Germany has had more than 130,000 cases, though more than half of those people have already recovered.

Image source, Getty Images

Spain has been under lockdown since 14 March. But unlike other European nations, in Spain children are not allowed outside for any reason.

Ada Colau, the mayor of Barcelona, has called for an end to the confinement, calling on the government to "Free our children!"

In a Facebook post, Ms Colau wrote that like many parents she worried about her children's "psychological and emotional health".

"We are tired of being told that we are soldiers and this is a war, instead of talking about how to take care of our lives and each other," she wrote.

You can read more about that here.

The state of emergency in Spain has been extended until at least 26 April. Latest figures from the country show that total deaths have risen to 19,130, with 551 recorded in the last 24 hours compared to 557 on Wednesday. The country has reported 182,816 confirmed cases of coronavirus.

Image source, AFP

With temples, churches, mosques and other places of worship shutting their doors to help curb the spread of coronavirus, many people have taken up spirituality services online.

From a remote hillside retreat in northern India, Tibetan Buddhist nun Tenzin Drolma's online classes on meditation drew more than 1,000 people from across 57 countries recently. It was a happy surprise, since she was expecting only about 100 to tune in, she told the AFP news agency.

The US-born teacher said she sets up her classes in the prayer hall where she used to hold in-person sessions before the lockdown.

"I think that makes it as real as when I have actual people there," she said from the retreat in Dharamsala.

And in Rishikesh, a city in the Himalayan foothills often called the yoga capital of the world, instructors from the Parmarth Niketan ashram have moved their classes from the banks of the Ganges to the web.

Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswati, originally from California, lives at the ashram. She said she hoped the yoga classes would help people feel "healthy, stress-free and anxiety-free".

Organisers of the UK's major mass-participation events - including the London Marathon - have launched a campaign to help charities plug an expected £4bn income shortfall.

The 2.6 Challenge aims to get the public to come up with activities to compensate for the cancellation of events because of coronavirus.

It will launch on Sunday 26 April, the original date for the 26-mile London Marathon, which has been postponed until 4 October to limit the spread of coronavirus.

The challenge hopes to inspire people to create their own athletic activities based around the numbers 2.6 or 26.

More on this story here.

Image source, Getty Images

Image source, Getty Images

More than nine in 10 people dying with coronavirus have an underlying health condition, according to new figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The ONS looked at nearly 4,000 deaths during March in England and Wales where coronavirus was mentioned on the death certificate.

In 91% of cases the individuals had other health problems.

The most common was heart disease, followed by dementia and respiratory illness.

The average number of pre-existing conditions in those who died was 2.7.

Around the world, self-isolation and social distancing have become essential measures to stem the spread of the virus.

Here are our guides on how to do both properly, including a run-through of the rules in the UK.

Image source, Getty Images

When California became the first US state outside of Washington to record a coronavirus-linked death on 4 March, there were fears the virus would spread quickly through the populous state.

Even Governor Gavin Newsom predicted that over half the state's 40 million residents could be infected.

While California isn't out of the woods yet, some experts are saying it could reach its peak as soon as this week, and a study by the University of Washington has revised the projection for deaths in the state from 6,000 to well under 2,000.

So how did the state keep ahead of the curve?

Read this from the BBC's Regan Morris in Los Angeles.

There are fears that coronavirus could spread further in Guatemala after a number of its nationals who had recently been deported from the US tested positive for the virus.

Three quarters of passengers on one flight alone were found to have the virus, the health minister said.

Guatemala has joined El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico in calling for a halt to deportations from the US because of the threat of the pandemic spreading further.

Nearly a third of the world's two million confirmed cases have been reported in the US, according to Johns Hopkins University, while Guatemala has recorded fewer than 200 infections.

Image source, Getty Images

Lora Jones
Business reporter, BBC News

Image source, Kate O'Loughlin

Kate is a 24-year-old final-year student from Dublin. She’s been trying to break into the music industry and had internships and job interviews lined up at music labels and events companies after graduation.

But they’ve all been cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.

“My heart was set on starting out, so having that taken away from me was absolutely gutting," she said.

Kate is far from the only one in this situation. One survey of 5,000 students found that two-thirds had graduate job applications cancelled or put on hold.

You can read more here.