Winter is coming to Antarctica. The sun rises for only a few hours each day at McMurdo Station, and the last support aircraft are heading home, leaving the base to a small "winter-over" crew. It's some of the most extreme work a scientist can do.

And this year there's a new concern — keeping the Antarctic free from the coronavirus.

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The total number of active coronavirus cases in China has been reported to be under 1,000, China’s National Health Commission said on Thursday.

While the country has had a total of 82,798 confirmed cases, 77,207 of those patients were discharged after they made recoveries. Also on Thursday, China reported no new deaths from the virus.

China, where the global outbreak originated, has started to tentatively loosen restrictions on residents, as the number of reported infections in the country continue to fall.

With hundreds of locations shuttered due to the coronavirus, Gap is the latest Main Street staple to stop paying rent.

“Under common law we are not obligated to pay rent for stores that have been closed because of government and public health authority orders,” the company said Thursday.

The retailer said it had suspended April rent payments of around $115 million month in North America. Gap warned that it may terminate some leases and close some stores, though it would negotiate its current leases to defer or abate rent during the time that stores are closed, according to an SEC filing.

It joins companies such as The Cheesecake Factory, Staples, Dave & Buster's, and AMC Theatres, in not paying April rent during the shutdown. 

A team at Britain's Oxford University began clinical trials of a potential COVID-19 vaccine on Thursday called "ChAdOx1 nCoV-19." 

As many as 100 potential COVID-19 candidate vaccines are now under development by biotech and research teams around the world, and at least five of these are in preliminary testing in people in what are known as Phase 1 clinical trials.

The Oxford scientists said last week that large-scale production capacity was being put in place to make millions of doses of the ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 shot, even before trials show whether it is effective.

The number of people dying from coronavirus in Europe’s care homes is an “unimaginable human tragedy,” as new estimates from the the World Health Organization suggest they make up nearly half of all deaths from the disease in the region. Earlier this week, the continent surpassed 100,000 coronavirus deaths.

There is a “deeply concerning picture” emerging regarding those in long-term care facilities, the WHO's director for Europe told a press conference on Thursday.

“This pandemic has shone a spotlight on the overlooked and undervalued corners of our society. Across the European Region, long-term care has often been notoriously neglected. But it should not be this way,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, as he urged future investment in setting up person-centered long-term care facilities throughout Europe.

Another 4.4 million Americans filed for initial jobless claims last week, revealing that at least 26 million people have requested unemployment benefits since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic.

In just one month, all job gains since the Great Recession have disappeared, according to new data released Thursday by the Department of Labor. The economy had created around 22 million jobs since 2010, during a historic decade of economic expansion that came to an abrupt end in February.

Over the last three weeks, initial jobless claims have declined, but they are still jaw-dropping totals. Many economists worry that, as the crisis continues, there could be a second wave of layoffs as businesses realize they cannot survive any longer.

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A Chinese citizen journalist who posted videos in February about the coronavirus situation in the city of Wuhan — where the outbreak originated — resurfaced on Wednesday after going missing for almost two months. Li Zehua, 25, was one of three citizen journalists who went missing in Wuhan. In a YouTube video posted Wednesday, he said he had been forcibly quarantined.

A video he published on Feb. 20 showed temporary porters being hired to transport corpses of people who apparently died of the coronavirus. It was viewed 850,000 times on YouTube, which is blocked in China. Days later, he posted live video footage of the police coming to his home. He was then not heard from until his new video was posted on Wednesday.

The other two citizen journalists, Chen Qiushi and Fang Bin, who according to media reports also posted footage of overwhelmed hospitals and corpses piled in a minibus, have not yet resurfaced publicly. U.S. Congressman Jim Banks called in March 31 on the U.S. State Department to urge China to investigate the disappearance of the three. Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying dismissed Banks' call at the time, saying it was "totally based on trumped up messages and information."

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Thursday the coronavirus is “far more” than a public health emergency, explaining it is also an economic and social crisis that is “fast becoming a human rights crisis.”

The U.N. chief said in a video message that there is discrimination in the delivery of public services to tackle COVID-19 and there are “structural inequalities that impede access to them.” However, the chief didn't mention any countries by name. 

Guterres released a U.N. report on Thursday where he warned of “rising ethno-nationalism, populism, authoritarianism and a push back against human rights in some countries,” saying  “the crisis can provide a pretext to adopt repressive measures for purposes unrelated to the pandemic.” The report called for governments to be transparent, responsive and accountable while “protecting human rights and the rule of law” in the time of the outbreak.