What you need to know about the coronavirus right now

Melbourne enters six-week lockdown Australia's second-biggest city of Melbourne began the first day of a six-week total lockdown on Thursday with the closure of most shops and businesses raising new fears of food shortages, as authorities battle a second wave of coronavirus infections.

Here's what you need to know about the coronavirus right now: Trump social media posts pulled

Facebook took down a post by U.S. President Donald Trump, which the company said violated its rules against sharing misinformation about the coronavirus. The post contained a video clip from an interview with Fox & Friends in which Trump said children are "almost immune" to COVID-19.

A tweet containing the video that was posted by the Trump campaign's @TeamTrump account and shared by the president was also later hidden by Twitter for breaking its COVID-19 misinformation rules. YouTube said it had also pulled down the video for violating its COVID-19 misinformation policies. However, the original interview remained available on the Fox News page on the platform.

Fauci says politics and vaccine won't mix U.S. regulators have assured scientists that political pressure will not determine when a coronavirus vaccine is approved, the country's leading infectious diseases expert Anthony Fauci said on Wednesday, even as the White House hopes to have one ready ahead of the November presidential election.

“We have assurances, and I’ve discussed this with the regulatory authorities, that they promise that they are not going to let political considerations interfere with a regulatory decision,” Dr. Fauci told Reuters in an interview. Fresh lockdown fears in Germany

The number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in Germany has breached the 1,000 threshold for the first time since early May, in the latest sign that slackening social distancing is raising the risk of a second wave of the disease. According to data published by the Robert Koch Institute early on Thursday morning, the number of new infections rose by 1,045 to 213,067, breaching a key psychological barrier after creeping up for weeks.

The lockdown and social distancing pushed the number of new cases down to as low as 159 in mid-July but numbers have been rising since, fuelled by local outbreaks, including one centred on a slaughterhouse that required restrictions to be placed on the entire town of Guetersloh. New surge in Philippines

The Philippines recorded another jump in coronavirus infections to overtake neighbouring Indonesia as the country with the highest number of recorded COVID-19 cases in East Asia. A recent surge in cases in and around the capital Manila has pushed authorities to reimpose a lockdown affecting around a quarter of the country's 107 million people. The Philippines recorded 3,561 new infections on Thursday, taking its total confirmed cases to 119,460.

The Philippines imposed one the world's strictest and longest lockdowns in and around the capital, running from mid-March to the end of May, which brought the economy to its knees in the first half. Melbourne enters six-week lockdown

Australia's second-biggest city of Melbourne began the first day of a six-week total lockdown on Thursday with the closure of most shops and businesses raising new fears of food shortages, as authorities battle a second wave of coronavirus infections. Abattoirs are one of the few businesses allowed to stay open in the city of about 5 million people, though with a reduced workforce, under the "stage four" lockdown which took effect at midnight on Wednesday.

(Compiled by Karishma Singh and Linda Noakes; edited by Philippa Fletcher)

(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)