Workers put up fencing and police restricted who could leave a locked-down area in Beijing on Tuesday as authorities in the Chinese capital stepped up efforts to prevent a major COVID-19 outbreak like the one that has all but shut down the city of Shanghai. People lined up for throat swabs across much of Beijing as mass testing was expanded to 11 of the city's 16 districts. Another 22 cases were found in the last 24 hours, Beijing health officials said at a late afternoon news conference, bringing the total to 92 since the outbreak was discovered five days ago. That is tiny in comparison to Shanghai, where the number of cases has topped 500,000 and at least 190 people have died. No deaths have been reported from the still-nascent outbreak in Beijing. Also read:Surprisingly low Shanghai COVID death count spurs questions An initial announcement of testing in one Beijing district had sparked panic buying in the city of 21 million on Monday, but the situation appeared to calm on Tuesday even as testing was expanded. Public transport appeared to be running largely normally and roads were filled with commuters. “I’m not worried that Beijing would suffer from a shortage of supplies so I don’t plan to stock up,” said Zhang Yifan, who was on his way to get tested in Dongcheng district. "Because if people stock up blindly, it may cause a waste of resources. If people keep too much supplies at home, it will cause a shortage.” Beijing has locked down some apartment buildings and residential complexes and on Monday added a larger urban area measuring about 2 by 3 kilometers (1 by 2 miles). Workers put up blue metal fencing along part of the area Tuesday, and police restricted who could leave. Residents are being kept inside their compounds. Fears of a total lockdown have been fed by disruptions in the supply of food, medicine and daily necessities in Shanghai, a southeast coast business hub whose 25 million residents have only gradually been allowed to leave their homes after three weeks of confinement. However, 86-year-old Beijing resident Chen Shengzhen said the capital had been given more time to prepare than its southern cousin. Shanghai's lockdown “came all of a sudden, so the policies and other aspects were not able to be in place,” leading to short-term hardships in the city, Chen told The Associated Press. “My daughter works in a government department and they have prepared very well, such as beds, quilts, and articles for women’s use. Even if we need to go into lockdown, we will be fine,” said Chen. Also read: Beijing on alert after COVID-19 cases discovered in school Shanghai residents, confined to their complexes or buildings, had trouble ordering food deliveries and also faced higher prices. The lockdown of China's largest city has had ripple effects elsewhere as goods have backed up at Shanghai's port, affecting factory production, global supply chains and China's own economic growth. Zhong Xiaobing, the general manager of the Lianhua Supermarket chain in Shanghai, said that shipments of goods from elsewhere in China have gotten smoother since the government organized trucks 10 days ago to bring in goods from key transfer stations, but that imports remain slower because of port and other transport restrictions. Other cities have also been locked down in China as the omicron variant proves difficult to control, with Baotou in Inner Mongolia the latest to enforce one. Beijing tested nearly 3.8 million people in an initial round of mass testing in Chaoyang district on Monday. All the results were negative except for one in a group of five that were tested together, a Chaoyang official said. Those five people were being tested to determine who among them is infected. Chaoyang has had the most cases in the Beijing outbreak, but authorities decided to extend the testing to 10 more districts on Tuesday.

Governments must pour more money and resources into preserving the mental well-being of children and adolescents, the U.N.'s child protection agency urged in a report Tuesday that sounded alarms about blows to mental health from the COVID-19 pandemic that hit poor and vulnerable children particularly hard. The United Nations Children’s Fund said its “State of the World’s Children” study is its most comprehensive look so far this century at the mental health of children and adolescents globally. The coronavirus crisis, forcing school closures that upended the lives of children and adolescents, has thrust the issue of their mental well-being to the fore. UNICEF said it may take years to fully measure the extent of the pandemic's impact on young people's mental health. Psychiatrists quickly saw signs of distress, with children and adolescents seeking help for suicidal thoughts, anxiety, eating disorders and other difficulties as lockdowns and switching to remote learning severed them from friends and routines and as COVID-19 killed parents and grandparents. Read: Young children's diets could get worse under Covid: Unicef “With nationwide lockdowns and pandemic-related movement restrictions, children have spent indelible years of their lives away from family, friends, classrooms, play — key elements of childhood itself,” said UNICEF's executive director, Henrietta Fore. “The impact is significant, and it is just the tip of the iceberg,” Fore said. “Even before the pandemic, far too many children were burdened under the weight of unaddressed mental health issues. Too little investment is being made by governments to address these critical needs.” Pediatric psychiatrists say they were already short of resources before the pandemic brought a surge in caseloads. UNICEF said spending on promoting and protecting mental health “is extremely low” yet the needs are pressing. Citing pre-pandemic figures from 2019, UNICEF estimated nearly 46,000 children and adolescents ages 10 to 19 end their own lives every year. The scale of pandemic-related distress among children and adolescents has jolted some governments into action. France, which is hosting a two-day global summit on mental health this week, has offered free therapy sessions for children and young people and pledged to extend that help from next year to everyone with a doctor’s prescription. Elsewhere, counseling hotlines — some newly opened to help people struggling with their mental health during the pandemics — saw surging demand. UNICEF said multiple worries affect the mental health of children and adolescents, including anxieties over possible illness, lockdowns, school closures and other upheavals in their lives. Lockdowns also fueled behavior problems, and were particularly hard-felt by kids with autism and attention and hyperactivity disorders, UNICEF said. Remote learning was beyond the reach of hundreds of millions of young people. One in three schoolchildren couldn’t take part because they had no internet access or television, UNICEF said. Children in the poorest families were most affected. It estimated that two out of five children in eastern and southern Africa were still out of school as recently as July. Read:1 million Afghan children could die from malnutrition: Unicef Even when they haven't been forced to drop out of school and work to help make ends meet, children also are being hit by the pandemic’s destructive repercussions for jobs and economies. UNICEF said the crisis has triggered “a sharp uptick” in numbers of children in poverty, with an additional 142 million children thought to have slipped into poverty last year. Financial hardship and school closures could also put more girls at risk of being forced into early marriage as child brides, UNICEF warned. Although children and adolescents have been less likely to die from COVID-19 than older and more vulnerable people, UNICEF cautioned that the pandemic has clouded their long-term future and “upended their lives, and created real concern for their mental health and well-being." “It will hang over the aspirations and lifetime earnings of a generation whose education has been disrupted,” it said. “The risk is that the aftershocks of this pandemic will chip away at the happiness and well-being of children, adolescents and caregivers for years to come.”

Britain’s chief medical officers said Monday that children aged 12 to 15 should be vaccinated against coronavirus, despite a ruling by the government’s vaccine advisors that the step would have only marginal health benefits. England Chief Medical Officer Chris Whitty and his counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland said Monday that the age group should be given a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. They have yet to decide on whether to give the students a second dose. The government has said it’s highly likely to follow the recommendation. Expanded vaccinations are expected to be part of a “tool kit” to control COVID-19 infections this fall and winter that Prime Minister Boris Johnson plans to announce Tuesday at a news conference. Johnson’s Conservative government is hoping that widespread vaccinations, rather than restrictions, will keep COVID-19 infections in check. Other countries — including the United States, Canada, France and Italy — already offer coronavirus vaccines to children 12 and up, but Britain has held off. It is currently inoculating people 16 and up, and almost 90% of those eligible have had at least one vaccine dose. Earlier this month, Britain’s Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunization said vaccines should be given to 12- to 15-year-olds with underlying health conditions. But it did not back a rollout to healthy children, who are at low risk of serious illness from the virus, saying the direct health benefits were marginal. However, it said there might be wider societal factors to consider, such as on education or children acting as sources of transmission to more vulnerable groups. READ: UK commits £3.1 mn aid to minimise impact of disasters in Bangladesh, other countries The chief medical officers said it was “likely vaccination will help reduce transmission of COVID-19 in schools” and they were recommending the vaccines on public health grounds. In his road map speech, Johnson is likely to announce that the government will relinquish some of the emergency powers Parliament gave it after the pandemic began last year, including the authority to shut down businesses and schools, restrict gatherings and detain infectious people. The announcement of a new virus road map comes a year after Johnson resisted scientific advice to put the country into lockdown — only to perform a U-turn within weeks as coronavirus cases soared. Virus cases now are 10 times the rate of a year ago, but vaccines are protecting many Britons from serious illness. Still, the U.K. is recording more than 100 coronavirus deaths a day, and about 8,000 people are hospitalized with COVID-19. That is less than a quarter of the wintertime peak, but the number is climbing. Johnson is expected to say that mask-wearing, work-from-home advice and social distancing rules that were lifted in July could return if cases climb further. But his Conservative government is resisting tougher measures, unexpectedly shelving a plan to introduce vaccine passports for nightclubs and other crowded venues. Health Secretary Sajid Javid said Sunday that the vaccine passes, which have been introduced in many European countries and were due to start in England at the end of September, were a “huge intrusion into people’s lives.” He said the government would keep the plan “in reserve” but would not proceed with it right now. Johnson’s spokesman, Max Blain, said nightclubs hadn’t been linked to “significant cases or hospitalizations” since they reopened in July after more than a year of closure. “We are not seeing the exponential increases that some had expected,” he said. Some experts have argued for vaccine passports as a way to encourage young people to get vaccinated, though others say compelling vaccination, rather than encouraging it, could increase hesitancy. The measure was opposed as a burdensome imposition by many in the entertainment industry, and met political resistance on civil liberties grounds from some Conservative lawmakers and the opposition Liberal Democrats. READ: Indo-Pacific: UK sees Bangladesh as "critical stability provider" The government’s decision applies in England. Scotland, which sets its own health policy, plans to introduce vaccine passports for crowded venues next month.

He hunches at the dining room table, putting the finishing touches on his miniature World War II tank. Deep in concentration, he keeps his hand steady as he works to make the scaled-down plastic model look as realistic as possible.

Anxious to spur an economic recovery without risking lives, President Donald Trump on Sunday insisted that "you can satisfy both" — see states gradually lift lockdowns while also protecting people from the coronavirus pandemic that has killed more than 60,000 Americans.

Authorities around the world turned to increasingly drastic measures Sunday to try to slow the spread of the new coronavirus, with lockdowns, curfews and travel restrictions spreading.

China is swiftly building a hospital dedicated to treating patients infected with a new virus that has killed 26 people, sickened hundreds and prompted unprecedented lockdowns of cities home to millions of people during the country's most important holiday.