Spain Declares Virus Emergency As Global Cases Soar

Spain declared a national state of emergency Sunday to tackle a second coronavirus wave as the World Health Organization (WHO) reported a third straight day of record new infections around the world.

France set a daily record of more than 50,000 Covid-19 cases, while Chinese officials began mass testing to cover 4.75 million residents in the far northwest after 137 new infections were discovered there.

In the United States, which has the world's worst toll at around 225,000 deaths, challenger Joe Biden accused President Donald Trump's administration of waving "the white flag of defeat" after his chief of staff Mark Meadows said: "We are not going to control the pandemic."

The WHO has warned that some countries are on a "dangerous track", with too many witnessing an exponential increase in cases, and called on authorities to take decisive action to curb the spread of the disease.

The UN agency's figures showed that 465,319 cases were declared on Saturday alone, half of them in Europe, which it said was at an especially critical juncture with winter looming.

Covid-19 has now claimed the lives of 1.1 million people and infected more than 42 million globally.

WHO head Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus called for global solidarity in a future rollout of any vaccine, warning that "vaccine nationalism will prolong the pandemic, not shorten it."

As the disease continued its relentless march across Europe, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez announced the new state of emergency and overnight curfews across the entire country except for the Canary Islands.

Spain was the first EU member state to pass the bleak milestone of one million cases and has been joined since by northern neighbor France.

"The situation we are going through is extreme," Sanchez said.