Arizona governor to let mayors require masks as Covid-19 cases surge As coronavirus cases surge across the state, Arizona’s Republican governor said he would no longer block mayors from being able to require local residents to wear masks. But governor Doug Ducey held off from issuing a statewide mask-wearing requirement, even after hundreds of Arizona medical professionals sent him an open letter this week, outlining the evidence that masks save lives and asking him to require citizens to wear them. Mask-wearing has become a charged partisan issue in Arizona, one of the key swing states in the 2020 election. Donald Trump is expected to visit the state for a rally next week, even as coronavirus cases and deaths are rising rapidly. For days, the Democratic mayors of Phoenix and Tucson, the state’s two largest cities, have been speaking out, asking Ducey to change the executive order that has blocked them from mandating any public health guidelines in addition to the ones that the governor himself had approved. WHO hails steroid treatment "hope" The cheap steroid British researchers believe can help save lives should be used only for the most serious cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) has said. The WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said research was at last providing “green shoots of hope”. Trial results announced on Tuesday showed dexamethasone, a generic drug used since the 1960s to reduce inflammation in diseases such as arthritis, cut death rates by around a third among the most severely ill patients admitted to hospital. The head of the WHO’s emergencies programme, Dr Mike Ryan, said the drug should only be used in the cases where it has been shown to help. It is exceptionally important in this case, that the drug is reserved for use in severely ill and critical patients who can benefit from this drug clearly. Brazil cases near 1 million Brazil recorded 1,269 additional Covid-19 deaths on Wednesday, bringing its official death toll from the novel coronavirus to 46,510, the most in the world outside the United States. The Health Ministry also registered 32,188 new cases of the virus since its Tuesday update, for a total of 955,377 confirmed cases, also second to the United States globally. Summary Hello and welcome to today’s global live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic. I’m Helen Sullivan and I’ll be with you for the next few hours. It would be great to hear from you on Twitter @helenrsullivan or via email: helen.sullivan@theguardian.com – questions, comments, tips and news from your part of the world are most welcome. The cheap steroid British researchers believe can help save lives should be used only for the most serious cases, the World Health Organization has said. WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said research was at last providing “green shoots of hope”. Meanwhile, Brazil’s Covid-19 cases, the second highest in the world after the US, are nearing 1 million, with 923,189 currently confirmed. Far-right president Jair Bolsonaro has resisted strong measures to stop spread of what he calls a “little flu”, with devastating consequences. The global death toll from coronavirus is nearing 500,000, with more than 8.2 million confirmed cases of the disease worldwide. The Johns Hopkins University tracker is recording more than 445,000 deaths from Covid-19 across the world, as of Wednesday evening UK time. One in four fatalities are in the US, making it by far the worst-hit country. The cheap steroid British researchers believe can help save lives should be used only for the most serious cases, the World Health Organization (WHO) said. The WHO chief Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said research was at last providing “green shoots of hope”. America’s top public health expert has warned the nation it is “still in the first wave” of coronavirus infections and deaths, as six states report record numbers of new cases amid continued rapid easing of lockdown restrictions. However, the state of New York recorded 17 coronavirus deaths on 16 June, its lowest daily death toll since the start of the outbreak. Just 10 weeks ago 800 New Yorkers died in a single day, so the decline is extraordinary. Germany has agreed to ban large events for another four months to guard against a second spike in cases. Chancellor Angela Merkel held a meeting of all 16 state premiers where they agreed to extend the ban on big events until at least the end of October. Millions of people in Beijing are living under renewed restrictions as a spike in virus cases continues. The city reported another 31 cases on Wednesday, bringing the total to 137 in the past week. Before the recent spike, the Chinese capital had gone 57 days without a locally-transmitted case. The World Health Organization (WHO) has halted trials of hydroxychloroquine, the malaria drug championed by Donald Trump for treating coronavirus. WHO said it had stopped testing hydroxychloroquine as part of its multi-country trial because it had showed no benefit. It comes two days after US regulators revoked the emergency authorisation for its use, amid growing evidence it doesn’t workand could cause serious side-effects. WHO welcomed the UK’s successful trial of dexamethasone, the low-cost anti-inflammatory drug found to save lives when used on coronavirus patients. The global body said it marked a “lifesaving breakthrough” in the fight against the virus and ordered its own analysis on the drug. However, some scientists - including South Korea’s top public health official - expressed caution on the drug.