Live updates: Scientists express doubts about coronavirus treatment touted as breakthrough by Trump

Thirteen people died in a stampede after police raided a nightclub in Peru for violating lockdown restrictions on Saturday night, authorities said.

Peru has one of the world’s highest coronavirus death rates per capita, and has enacted a nationwide nighttime curfew and a strict ban on large gatherings in response to the ongoing crisis.

On Saturday, neighbors called to report a noisy gathering in the capital of Lima, according to Reuters. When police officers showed up, roughly 120 partygoers rushed toward the only exit, causing some to be trapped, asphyxiated or trampled in the chaos, according to authorities.

“I feel sorry for the relatives … but also anger and indignation with the businesspeople who organized the event,” Peruvian President Martín Vizcarra said, according to the Associated Press.

Peru ordered bars and nightclubs to close in March, and the country’s Interior Ministry said in a statement Sunday that the club’s owners had been arrested.

An additional 23 partygoers were detained in the raid. Fifteen of them have since tested positive for the coronavirus, according to Reuters.

Some witnesses claimed that police fired shots and hurled tear gas at the confined crowd, the Associated Press reported. The Interior Ministry said no tear gas or weapons were used.

TOKYO — Shinzo Abe became Japan’s longest serving prime minister on Monday, but there was no celebration of his record 2,799-day tenure. Instead, Abe spent the morning at the hospital, as concerns mount that his health may be faltering.

Abe’s motorcade was filmed bringing him to Keio University Hospital in Tokyo, with Japanese media reporting he was receiving the results of a seven-hour checkup last week.

That in itself is hardly a reason to write the long-serving leader’s political obituary. But persistent reports have suggested the 65-year-old Abe is exhausted after a stressful few months coping with the coronavirus pandemic and rising public unhappiness with his leadership. Others have suggested he could be suffering from a return of the ulcerative colitis that cut short his previous term in office in 2007.

BEIRUT — An alarming spike in coronavirus cases since the devastating explosion at Beirut’s port is compounding Lebanon’s misery at a time when the country was already laid low by overlapping financial, economic and political crises.

Since around 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate were ignited Aug. 4 by a still-unexplained blaze in a warehouse at the port, the total number of coronavirus infections has more than doubled — to 12,191 as of Saturday — prompting the government to order a partial lockdown that went into effect Friday.

The jump has been attributed in part to the mass panic that gripped Beirut in the aftermath of the blast, which wrecked three Beirut neighborhoods adjoining the port and inflicted damage and injuries for miles beyond. Tens of thousands of injured and traumatized people surged onto the streets without thought of wearing masks or social distancing.

The University of North Carolina has cleared the football team and several other athletic squads to resume practice after suspending activities because of a number of coronavirus clusters on campus.

In addition to football, men’s and women’s basketball, cross-country, field hockey, men’s and women’s soccer and volleyball were to resume activities Sunday, the school announced Saturday. The football team will return to practice Monday. All other sports teams are on pause for now.

The school suspended athletic activities last week because of an “upward trend in positive covid-19 tests on campus.”

President Trump announced Sunday that he had helped break through a regulatory “logjam” to grant emergency authorization of convalescent plasma to treat covid-19, a “powerful therapy” that he claimed “had an incredible rate of success,” despite the fact that his own scientists are calling for more studies to definitively show it works.

The announcement, at a news conference where Trump was flanked by Food and Drug Administration commissioner Stephen Hahn and Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, drew criticism from physicians and scientists, who said their statements misled the public by overstating the evidence behind a therapy that shows promise but still needs to be rigorously tested.

“I watched this in horror,” said Eric Topol, an influential physician and scientist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute. “These are basically just exploratory analyses that don’t prove anything. It’s just extraordinary to declare this as a breakthrough … All this does is jeopardize ever getting the truth.”

When New York began allowing outdoor activities in June, Emily Ladau, 29, ventured out in her Long Island town of West Babylon after long months of staying inside because of the coronavirus. But her moment in the sun was marred — as a wheelchair user, she found that restaurants spilling over onto the sidewalk blocked her path.

“Throughout the whole main street,” of nearby Bay Shore, she says, “I couldn’t be on the sidewalk at all.”