New world news from Time: The U.S. Might Revoke Hong Kong’s ‘Special Status.’ Here’s What That Means For Business in the Global Financial Hub

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Wednesday that Hong Kong was no longer sufficiently autonomous from mainland China — an assessment that could threaten the city’s trading relationship with the U.S. and deal a blow to both American and Chinese companies operating there.

The news comes following Beijing’s decision late last week to draw up a national security law for Hong Kong. The move came after Hong Kong’s Legislative Council failed in its obligations to enact such a law since the former British colony was handed back to China in 1997. Critics say, however, that the Chinese government’s bypassing of the local legislature undermines the “high degree” of autonomy promised to Hong Kong when China resumed sovereignty over the territory of 7.4 million.

“No reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given facts on the ground,” Pompeo said in a statement.

That autonomy matters because Hong Kong’s trading privileges with Washington depend on it. It’s up to the White House to decide what action it will take following Pompeo’s assessment, but options include tariffs, visa restrictions, export controls and freezing the U.S. assets of Hong Kong and Chinese officials deemed to be aiding Beijing in its encroachment on Hong Kong’s freedoms.

Officials made clear that the move is not intended to target Hong Kong citizens. The U.S. will try “to ensure the people of Hong Kong are not adversely affected to the best we can,” David R. Stilwell, assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, said during a media teleconference on May 27.

Businesses, however, are nervous. Almost 300 U.S. companies base their regional headquarters in Hong Kong and more than 1,300 have operations in the city — from 3M to Goldman Sachs to the insurer AIG. There are also an estimated 85,000 U.S. citizens living in Hong Kong.

An American Chamber of Commerce spokesperson spoke last week of a “fear factor developing in the business community.” Business confidence was already shaken by the six months of often violent protests sparked last year by a contentious extradition bill, in the wake of which some companies started making plans to shift their operations. Now experts say that Beijing’s growing control over Hong Kong, and potential trade restrictions by Washington, could further diminish business confidence and compromise Hong Kong’s importance as an international business center.

“Businesses will inevitably change their perceptions of Hong Kong as a gateway to China that is protected by rule of law,” says Benjamin Quinlan, CEO and managing partner of strategy consultancy Quinlan and Associates, who also sits on the board of a fintech association.

“If you remove [Hong Kong’s special status], there will be foreign companies that say ‘we’ll just enter China directly, I’ve got no one-up going via Hong Kong,’ or they’ll just exit China completely,” he tells TIME. “It doesn’t bode well for Hong Kong’s position as a global financial hub.”

What is Hong Kong’s ‘special status’?

Although Hong Kong is a part of China, under the terms of the Hong Kong Policy Act of 1992 the U.S. treats Hong Kong as distinct from the mainland when it comes to economic relations, applying a different set of rules from the rest of China on things like export controls, customs and immigration.

The continuance of this special status is predicated on Hong Kong remaining distinct from mainland China. The “one country, two systems,” framework, a political formula that has been in place since the 1997 handover, affords the city plenty of leeway to run its own affairs, including an independent judiciary and freedoms of assembly, the press and speech. The enclave has its own currency, Olympics team and seat at the World Trade Organization.

Business groups say that these characteristics are an important driver of the city’s commercial success. “It would be a serious mistake on many levels to jeopardize Hong Kong’s special status, which is fundamental to its role as an attractive investment destination and international financial hub,” the U.S. Chamber of Commerce said in a statement on Tuesday.

The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act—passed in November 2019 following months of protests in Hong Kong—requires the State Department to complete an annual assessment to determine if Hong Kong remains sufficiently different from China. That assessment is needed to justify Hong Kong’s unique treatment under U.S. law.

What happens next?

Scott Kennedy, senior adviser and trustee chair in Chinese business and economics at the Washington D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) tells TIME that while President Trump “has a menu of things he could choose to do” it was “an a la carte menu as opposed to on or off.”

According to Kennedy, it’s likely that things like export controls on sensitive technologies would be adopted first, with more punitive measures like tariffs coming later on.

In his May 27 teleconference, Stilwell said actions would be “as targeted as possible to change behavior.”

Sanctions on Chinese officials or entities could damage the ability of Chinese companies to transact in the city, which in turn impacts China’s ability to do international business in U.S. dollars. But the Hong Kong government warned in a May 28 statement that, “any sanctions are a double-edged sword that will not only harm the interests of Hong Kong but also significantly those of the U.S.”

Eswar Prasad, a professor of economics and trade policy at Cornell University and the former head of the IMF’s China Division tells TIME that the revocation of Hong Kong’s special status will have a significant negative impact on trade and financial flows between the U.S. and Hong Kong. In 2018, U.S. foreign direct investment in the territory was $82.5 billion and U.S. goods and services traded with Hong Kong totaled an estimated $66.9 billion. Hong Kong is one of the few jurisdictions to maintain a trade surplus with the U.S., to the tune of $26.4 billion in 2019.

Key to Hong Kong’s success is the rule of law, but its longevity is doubted many businesspeople say. “If the Chinese legislature can start doing things like this and overriding Hong Kong legislature, can they start doing similar things on issues other than national security?” asks Kevin Yam, a financial regulatory lawyer based in Hong Kong.

A lawyer at one global law firm tells TIME that she has received inquiries from nervous clients over the last few days who want to move commercial contracts away from Hong Kong law.

“For U.S. businesses and financial institutions operating in Hong Kong this would herald a period of great uncertainty,” says Prasad, “especially as they can no longer count on Hong Kong’s much-touted rule of law and at least modest independence from China.”

Kennedy believes that companies with operations in Hong Kong will likely leave if the situation continues to deteriorate.

“If Hong Kong loses its independent judiciary, freedom of the press, and all those things it has treasured, then Hong Kong is not going to be seen as a safe harbor within China and the region for American companies to base their regional headquarters, have most of their capital and large staff, and base their contracts there,” he says.

One Hong Kong hedge fund executive tells TIME that he is “definitely concerned” about the news. His firm started considering alternative office locations in Asia because of events in Hong Kong last year, but hadn’t made any meaningful decisions. Depending on how the situation pans out, it may “speed up,” the process of getting a contingency plan in place.

Better for business?

Hong Kong officials have attempted to allay the concerns of international investors, saying that national security legislation is needed to ensure there is no repeat of the mass demonstrations that paralyzed Hong Kong for the second half of 2019. The protests plunged Hong Kong into its first recession in a decade. Protests raged in the financial district for several weeks late last year.

During lunchtime on Wednesday, riot police fired pepper balls to dispel a crowd that had gathered to protest the national security law in the Central area, which is home to the headquarters of several international banks and law firms.

“As the implications of China’s recent direction on Hong Kong start to sink in, there is a growing possibility that investors will lose confidence in Hong Kong’s unique legal construct, of British law operating on Chinese soil,” says Kurt Tong, the former U.S. Consul General in the territory, who is now a partner at consultancy the Asia Group. “As that happens, the movement of people and money out of Hong Kong could start to snowball.”

Others say that it may take a while to see the consequences the national security law has on business in the city. Some are even guardedly optimistic.

“If the process is purely confined to addressing mass protests and what not,” Quinlan says, “then you could argue the opposite point, that businesses will see this as a better place to do business, particularly ones that will be more impacted by protest movements like retail or restaurants.”

New world news from Time: Queen Elizabeth’s Letters, Which Could Address Controversial Dismissal of Australian Government, to Be Made Public

(CANBERRA, Australia) — Australia’s highest court ruled on Friday to make public letters between Queen Elizabeth II and her representative that would reveal what knowledge she had, if any, of the dismissal of an Australian government in 1975.

The High Court’s 6-1 majority decision in historian Jenny Hocking’s appeal overturned lower court rulings that more than 200 letters between the monarch of Britain and Australia and Governor-General Sir John Kerr before he dismissed Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s government were personal and might never be made public.

The only-ever dismissal of an elected Australian government on the authority of a British monarch created a crisis that spurred many to call for Australia to sever its constitutional ties with Britain and create a republic with an Australian president. Suspicions of a U.S. Central Intelligence Agency conspiracy persist.

Hocking, a Monash University academic and Whitlam biographer, said she expected to read the 211 letters at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra next week when a coronavirus lockdown is lifted.

She described as absurd that communications between such key officials in the Australian system of government could be regarded as personal and confidential.

“That they could be seen as personal is quite frankly an insult to all our intelligence collectively —– they’re not talking about the racing and the corgis,” Hocking told The AP, referring to the queen’s interest in horse racing and the dog breed.

“It was not only the fact that they were described quite bizarrely as personal, but also that they were under an embargo set at the whim of the queen,” she added.

The archives said it would release a statement on the court finding later on Friday.

Kerr dismissed Whitlam’s government and replaced him with opposition leader Malcolm Fraser as prime minister to resolve a month-old deadlock in Parliament. Fraser’s coalition won an election weeks later.

The archives had held the correspondence, known as the Palace Letters, since 1978. As state records, they should have been made public 31 years after they were created.

Under an agreement struck between Buckingham Palace and Government House, the governor-general’s official residence, months before Kerr resigned in 1978, the letters covering three tumultuous years of Australian politics were to remain secret until 2027. The private secretaries of both the sovereign and the governor-general in 2027 still could veto their release indefinitely under that agreement.

A Federal Court judge accepted the archives’ argument that the letters were personal and confidential.

An appeals court upheld that ruling in a 2-1 decision.

The archives’ lawyers argued the records were created with the “strong conception” that their character was private, and they were received by the archives under those conditions.

The convention across British Commonwealth nations is that communications between the queen and her representatives are personal, private and not accessible by the executive government, they argued.

Buckingham Palace and Government House have previously declined The AP’s requests for comment on the case and did not immediately respond to renewed requests on Friday.

Hocking has been fighting since 2016 to access the letters written by Kerr to the queen through her then private secretary Martin Charteris.

“I’m absolutely delighted by the decision,” she said. “We can’t possibly know our history and write the complete and accurate history if we don’t have access to the original documents that reveal it to us.”

The British royal family is renowned for being protective of their privacy and keeping conversations confidential.

The family went to considerable lengths to conceal letters written by the queen’s son and heir, Prince Charles, in a comparable case in Britain that was fought through the courts for five years.

Britain’s Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that 27 memos written by Charles to British government ministers could be made public despite objections that their publication might damage public perceptions of the future king’s political neutrality.

Years of dogged research by journalists and historians have pieced together answers to many of the questions surrounding how and why Whitlam’s government was dismissed and who was behind it.

Kerr, who died in 1991, rejected in his memoirs media speculation that the CIA ordered Whitlam’s dismissal over fears that his government would close the top secret U.S. intelligence facility that still exists at Pine Gap in the Australian Outback.

In the 1985 Hollywood spy drama “The Falcon and the Snowman,” a CIA plot to oust Whitlam motivated a disillusioned civilian defense contractor played by Sean Penn to sell U.S. security secrets to the Soviet Union.

New world news from Time: Luxembourg Expands COVID-19 Testing to Its Entire Population

(LUXEMBOURG) — Luxembourg started a coronavirus testing program Wednesday to check each and every one of its roughly 600,000 people, as well as cross-border workers, over the next nine weeks.

Although formally a Grand Duchy, Luxembourg isn’t all that big — the second-smallest country by area and population in the 27-nation European Union. Shoehorned in between France Germany and Belgium, it’s also one of the richest in the world in terms of GDP per capita.

Still, the new coronavirus initiative is also testing its means.

The point of the program is to try and blunt a potential second wave before it develops, as many predict will happen after the European summer. So far, Luxembourg has 110 confirmed deaths and almost 4,000 people have been confirmed as having tested positive.

“The first aim is to break these infection chains throughout the whole population, to basically dampen a second potential wave that might ensue,” said Paul Wilmes, Luxembourg’s COVID 19 task force spokesperson.

The large-scale testing is necessary because it often is unclear to what extent someone is contagious.

Read more: There’s Only One Way to Get the U.S. Back to Work: Testing, Testing and More Testing

Authorities will have 17 drive-through, walk-through and even cycle-through test stations which should have everyone processed by the end of July. People will undergo a throat swab and results will be known within two days.

Positive cases will have to self-isolate while their contacts will be traced.

The testing will be done in several stages, with those most at risk, such as nurses, police and hairdressers, invited for the swab first. They will be invited back every two weeks. Testing is voluntary but authorities are counting on enough civic responsibility to make sure almost all citizens will participate.

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Raf Casert reported from Brussels

New world news from Time: Cyprus Pledges to Cover ‘All Costs’ for Tourists Who Test Positive for COVID-19 While on Vacation

(NICOSIA, Cyprus) — Cyprus is pledging to cover all costs for anyone testing positive for the coronavirus while on vacation on the eastern Mediterranean island nation, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The Cypriot government says it will cover lodging, food, drink and medication for COVID-19 patients and their families. Patients will only have to pay for the taxi ride to the airport and the flight back home.

A 100-bed hospital will cater exclusively to foreign travelers who test positive. About 112 intensive care units equipped with 200 respirators will be reserved for critically-ill patients. A 500-room “quarantine hotel” will be reserved for patients’ family members and other close contacts.

The pledge came in a five-page letter dated Tuesday that was sent out to governments, airlines and tour operators outlining strict health and hygiene protocols that the government is enacting to woo visitors to the tourism-reliant country.

Read more: ‘It Will Be Catastrophic.’ Asia’s Tourism-Dependent Economies Are Being Hit Hard by the Coronavirus

Tourism directly accounts for 13% of Cyprus’ economy. This year, the country expects to lose as much as 70% of the 2.6 billion euros ($2.85 billion) in tourism-generated revenue.

The letter, signed by Cyprus’ foreign affairs, transport and tourism ministers, boasts that the country has one of the lowest coronavirus ratios per capita in Europe after having tested more than 10% of its population.

International air travel to Cyprus begins June 9, initially from 19 countries, with passengers required to undergo a COVID-19 test three days prior to departure. That measure will be lifted June 20 for 13 countries, including Germany, Finland, Israel, Greece and Norway.

Officials say travel will be expanded to more countries depending on a constant evaluation of their infection rates.

Passengers will have to show their test certificate prior to boarding an aircraft and may have to wear masks throughout the flight. Their temperature will be taken on arrival to Cyprus and some random testing may take place at no cost to the traveler.

Tourists will also have to fill out a “COVID-19 Traveler Declaration” stating all their travels 14 days prior to their Cyprus trip and that they have neither shown any coronavirus symptoms for 72 hours before departure nor that they have been in contact with infected people 14 days before.

While in Cyprus, people who aren’t in the same travel group are obliged to keep apart at least two square meters (21 square feet) outdoors and three square meters (32 square feet) indoors.

Regularly disinfected sunbeds will be two meters (6.5 feet) apart for people not belonging to the same travel group.

Hotel staff will be obliged to wear masks with rooms being disinfected after every departure. At restaurants, bars, cafes and pubs, tables will be at least two meters (6.5 feet) apart with a maximum party size of 10. Guests will be encouraged to pay by card instead of cash.

New world news from Time: Yemen Officially Has One of the Middle East’s Lowest COVID-19 Counts. In Reality, the Virus Is Spreading Unseen and Unchecked

When international aid agency Doctors Without Borders took over management of the COVID-19 treatment center at a hospital in the Yemeni city of Aden on May 7, one of the immediate challenges was convincing cleaners, porters, and even some of the hospital’s doctors that the novel coronavirus existed, and could make them sick.

“After years of war, after years of having no proper services, people in general don’t trust what the media says, and they don’t trust the authorities,” the center’s deputy project co-ordinator Mohammed Abdulrahim told TIME by phone from Aden on May 24. “At the beginning, we had medical staff getting sick. They had direct contact with patients without taking precautions like putting on masks—they just treated it like a normal disease.”

Staff misperceptions of COVID-19 were just one of the obstacles Abdulrahim and his team faced. Before Doctors Without Borders (MSF) took over the al-Amal facility’s management there was no dedicated ambulance for coronavirus patients, and a political dispute meant Yemen’s government had stopped paying staff salaries, leading to a wave of resignations. Three weeks into its tenure, dire shortages of PPE and oxygen remain, and dozens of MSF staff are off sick in Aden.

The frontline medics at al-Amal are just a handful of the people struggling to prop up a healthcare system devastated by more than five years of war. After Saudi Arabia, the UAE and other Arab nations intervened to drive Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen’s capital Sana’a in 2015, Yemen’s civil conflict has left more than 100,000 people dead, displaced millions, and led to what the U.N. calls the world’s worst man-made humanitarian crisis.

Now, the coronavirus is here and spreading silently through the country. Although testing is almost non-existent, doctors at the only dedicated COVID-19 treatment center in Yemen’s south say they are struggling to cope with a 40% mortality rate and a growing caseload of patients. “The team is under permanent stress with staff missing or not trained enough,” Marc Schakal, MSF’s deputy operations manager for Yemen tells TIME by phone from Dubai. “There are very difficult clinical decisions to take for the doctors to make: We are obliged to set admission criteria based on age and chances of survival at the end.”

As harrowing as conditions are inside the treatment center, MSF doctors believe they are seeing “just the tip of the iceberg,” Shakal says, “We are really worried about much older people who are not able to reach the center, and who are dying in the community.”

“We don’t have visibility on the epidemiological curve”

Yemen’s official coronavirus caseload, among the lowest in the Middle East, is almost certainly misleading. As of May 28, the World Health Organization had recorded only 253 confirmed cases and 50 deaths among a population of 28 million. In neighboring Oman, authorities have confirmed over 8,000 cases with a population one-sixth the size.

The country has a miniscule casecount only because of the near-total absence of testing. So far, authorities have performed fewer than 1,000 COVID-19 tests, or 31 per 1 million citizens. That’s a lower per capita figure than in northeast Syria, Chad, or Idlib.

The observations of doctors at al-Amal’s COVID treatment center cast further doubt on official figures. Between April 30 and May 24, the center admitted 228 patients suffering from coronavirus-like symptoms. Of those patients, 99 have died, or more than 40%. With the center permanently full, MSF is now expanding capacity to a total of 80 beds, up from 50 when it took over on May 7.

Facilities like this are desperately needed in a country with a barely functioning healthcare system. Half of the country’s hospitals and clinics have been destroyed or shut over the course of the war, and earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that 18% of Yemen’s 333 districts do not have a single doctor. The splintered country, which is controlled by various armed factions, is not anywhere close to being equipped to deal with an epidemic —according to a May 18 UNOCHA situation report, Yemen currently has fewer than 150 ventilators, about 500 ICU beds, and only five labs capable of conducting COVID-19 tests.

In Aden “some hospitals have closed because they’re worried about contamination, or because of lack of essential supplies that could protect the health of workers,” says MSF’s Schakal. Others have reportedly turned away patients who have sought help for breathing difficulties.

Although the MSF center still lacks sufficient staff numbers and PPE, oxygen is its most urgent need. Every day, the agency says, its COVID-19 center gets through 250 40-liter oxygen cylinders. Yemen has a total stockpile of under 12,000 cylinders for the entire country.

Al-Amal’s alarming death rate is in part due to patients arriving at a very late stage in COVID-19’s progression, MSF’s doctors say. But what is especially striking is that most of the dead are between 40 and 60 years old—considerably younger than the majority of those who have succumbed to the disease in European hospitals. While it’s possible that environmental stressors make Yemen’s population more vulnerable to COVID-19, doctors suspect the high death rate means many more people in Aden—particularly the elderly—are dying at home without seeking treatment.

It’s a hypothesis reflected in the city’s burial rates. On May 14, Save the Children reported that 380 people in the city had died of “coronavirus-like symptoms” in a single week. On the same date, the official fatality rate for the whole of Yemen was just 13. By late May, government burial statistics revealed that as many as 80 people were dying every day in Aden, compared to a pre-outbreak normal of 10.

“We don’t have visibility on the epidemiological curve, so we don’t really know when it stops,” Schakal tells TIME. “We don’t know if we are on the way up, at the top, or on the way down.”

Sickness during wartime

All of this is taking place against the backdrop of an ongoing war. Yemen’s conflict pits Houthi rebels, who control Sana’a and the country’s north, against a Saudi Arabia-led coalition that holds sway in the south and is fighting to restore the exiled internationally-recognized government. Saudi airstrikes—using U.S. and U.K. supplied munitions—have been responsible for the majority of the destruction of civilian infrastructure like hospitals.

A respite from the fighting might have come on April 8, when Saudi Arabia announced a two-week ceasefire in Yemen, which it extended for an additional month on April 24. But humanitarian groups say the truce—which was denounced as a media ploy by the Houthis—heralded an initial rise rather than a fall in violence. The Saudi Arabia-led coalition accused the Houthis of breaching its unilateral “ceasefire” 241 times in 48 hours. In the two weeks after it was announced “we definitely saw a spike in violence from both sides, there was an increase in the number of casualties, the number of displacements, and the number of airstrikes,” says International Rescue Committee’s Yemen director Tamuna Sabadze.

As of May 18, Houthi authorities had reported only four cases of COVID-19 and one death—all in Sana’a. But the Aden-based government in Yemen’s south has accused the rebels of covering up a larger outbreak. “It’s difficult to say how many have it,” the International Committee of the Red Cross’s (ICRC) Yemen director Franz Rauchenstein tells TIME from Sana’a. “We presume that there is a rather widespread transmission in the north.”

But it is not only the infected who are impacted. COVID-19 has contributed to increases in the price of basic food items and a drop in remittances from migrant workers—one of the country’s most important sources of income—since the pandemic began. That’s life-threatening in a country where even before the pandemic only 15% of children were eating the minimum acceptable diet for survival, growth, and development; and whose farms face the additional threat of massive locust swarms.

Doctors also fear that COVID-19 could inhibit Yemen’s ability to cope with other health crises. Recent flooding across the country has contributed to outbreaks of mosquito-borne malaria, dengue, and chikungunya. In the first six months of 2019, Save the Children recorded almost half a million suspected cholera cases. While Yemen has not experienced a major cholera outbreak this year, it remains a risk in a country where more than 80% of the population lacks access to clean drinking water.

Rather than a standalone problem, the global pandemic adds another layer to Yemen’s already complex crisis. “The tricky thing is that corona actually reduces the efficiency of humanitarian actors, and it reduces the efficiency of an economy,” says ICRC’s Rauchenstein. “These secondary effects of the coronavirus are weakening Yemen even more, and lowering its resilience.”

On May 24, Mohammed Abdulrahim and his wife, a pharmacist at the nearby MSF managed trauma unit, enjoyed a rare day off work for the Muslim holiday of Eid. Rather than visiting relatives according to tradition, they spent the day together at home.

But outside, Aden’s streets were as busy as usual. Despite authorities encouraging people to observe social distancing measures, men still visited markets to buy khat—a narcotic leaf chewed by many Yemenis—children went from house to house collecting candies, and families gathered in parks.

Yemenis’ resistance to social distancing is not only down to public skepticism over information authorities have put out, says Abdulrahim. Even if people believe official messaging, most of Aden’s population relies on daily work to feed their families. “Either people stay at home, where the electricity cuts out and they die because they’re starving, or they die because of corona,” he tells TIME. “Both ways, they are dead. So, they stop thinking and they just continue their life.”

New world news from Time: African Authorities Conduct Manhunts After Hundreds Flee Quarantine Centers in Zimbabwe and Malawi

(BLANTYRE, Malawi) — Manhunts have begun after hundreds of people, some with the coronavirus, fled quarantine centers in Zimbabwe and Malawi while authorities worry they will spread COVID-19 in countries whose health systems can be rapidly overwhelmed.

In Malawi, more than 400 people recently repatriated from South Africa and elsewhere fled a center at a stadium in Blantyre, jumping over a fence or strolling out the gate while police and health workers watched. Police and health workers told reporters they were unable to stop them as they lacked adequate protective gear.

At least 46 escapees had tested positive for the virus. Some of those who fled told reporters they had bribed police.

And in Zimbabwe, police spokesman Paul Nyathi said officers were “hunting down” more than 100 people who escaped from centers where a 21-day quarantine is mandatory for those returning from abroad.

Read more: Few Doctors, Fewer Ventilators: African Countries Fear They Are Defenseless Against Inevitable Spread of Coronavirus

“They escape and sneak into the villages … We are warning people to stop sheltering them. These escapees are becoming a serious danger to communities,” Nyathi said.

Nearly all of Zimbabwe’s 75 new cases this week came from the centers that hold hundreds of people who have returned, sometimes involuntarily, from neighboring South Africa and Botswana.

The quarantine centers have become “our source of danger,” Health Minister Obadiah Moyo told a special parliamentary committee this week.

Both Zimbabwe and Malawi have fewer than 200 confirmed cases but regional power South Africa, where many in both countries go to seek work, has more than 25,000. South Africa has the most cases in Africa, where the continent-wide total is nearly 125,000.

Zimbabwe’s information minister, Monica Mutsvangwa, on Wednesday told reporters that the government is increasing security at the schools, colleges and hotels used as quarantine centers. Government spokesman Nick Mangwana suggested that security officers guarding centers with high walls and razor wire might be receiving bribes to allow people to leave early.

Zimbabwe’s government is also worried about people crossing porous borders and failing to report at quarantine centers. The information ministry has begun sharing a hotline number and asking people to stop harboring “border jumpers” and those who “abscond” from quarantine.

Malawi saw another mass escape earlier this week when 26 people left the Mwanza border post while waiting for test results. People arriving in the country face a mandatory 14-day quarantine.

The Blantyre district director of health and social services, Gift Kawalazira, said they were overwhelmed when more than 2,000 people turned up at the border post in Mwanza over the weekend. Holding some in the stadium was a last-minute resort after plans to use education facilities failed for lack of funds, he said.

“They will be moving around while trying to elude authorities,” he said of the escapees, including a smaller group that slipped away from a Blantyre center on Monday. Eight had tested positive for the virus.

“People need to understand that it is not punishment but we are only doing this to protect the general public,” Kawalazira said.

Few prevention measures could be seen at the stadium, with people leaving freely to buy food from nearby vendors. They told reporters they had received no food from authorities since Monday.

Relatives of some of the returnees entered the stadium to visit, giving loved ones hugs.

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Mutsaka reported from Harare, Zimbabwe.

New world news from Time: U.K. Police Say Boris Johnson’s Aide Likely Broke Lockdown Rules But Won’t Face Action

(London) — British police said Thursday that Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s adviser Dominic Cummings likely broke the rules by traveling away from home during lockdown, but will not face further action.

Cummings has acknowledged driving 250 miles (400 km) to his parents’ house in Durham, northeast England, during the lockdown, and later taking another drive to a scenic town 30 miles (50 km) away.

Durham Constabulary said that the second drive, to the town of Barnard Castle, might have been “a minor breach” of lockdown rules “that would have warranted police intervention” had he been caught in the act. But the force said “there is no intention to take retrospective action.”

Johnson has resisted calls to fire Cummings for apparently flouting restrictions that the government imposed on the rest of the country.

Cummings has defended his actions, saying he traveled to ensure that his 4-year-old son could be looked after if he and his wife, who both had coronavirus symptoms, became sick. He says he drove to Barnard Castle to test whether his eyesight, which had been affected by illness, was good enough for the long trip back to London.

His explanation failed to assuage the anger among many Britons who have endured two months of isolation from loved ones during the pandemic and see a double standard at work.

Johnson has stood by his aide. His office said “the police have made clear they are taking no action against Mr Cummings over his self-isolation and that going to Durham did not breach the regulations” and the prime minister “regards this issue as closed.”