People must stick to restrictions, Merkel warns.
Chancellor Angela Merkel expressed “cautious hope” that Germans were preventing the spread of the coronavirus from straining the health system and slowing the infection rate, but warned that the numbers were no cause for abandoning severe restrictions on social contact and personal freedoms.
“The latest developments give us reason for cautious hope,” Ms. Merkel said. “The numbers are an indication that measures are working.”
But with the long Easter weekend approaching, and summerlike temperatures forecast, she cautioned Germans not to give in to the temptation to roam outside and congregate.
“We can’t be reckless, we can’t allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security,” she warned at a news conference. “I know this from personal experience: you have a little bit of hope, then you gain confidence, then you are a little bit more relaxed inside and then you are a little bit reckless.”
The daily tally of new infections in Germany has dropped from as many as 7,000 to an average of about 4,000 in the past week. Other hard-hit countries in Europe have seen comparable declines.
German authorities have credited early planning, widespread testing and a robust health system with resulting in a low death toll compared to neighboring countries. In Germany, more than 2,000 people have died of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, compared to about 7,000 in Britain, 11,000 in France, 15,000 in Spain and almost 18,000 in Italy, according to a New York Times database.
The chancellor said her government was working to procure more masks and protective equipment from abroad, as well as looking into ways to increase domestic production, to meet domestic and European needs.
The world began this week to see small but encouraging signs that concerted efforts to drastically change human behavior — to suspend daily routines by staying at home — are slowing the spread of the novel coronavirus, which has killed tens of thousands and sickened more than a 1.5 million people across the globe.
Some nations are taking a hopeful approach, with countries in Europe gingerly laying out a timeline to ease restrictive measures. Poland became the latest, with its health minister suggesting on Thursday that restrictions would be eased after Easter to support the country’s economy.
But epidemiologists warn that early indications, while promising, should not be interpreted to mean that all will be well in the coming weeks. And across the world, the evidence of the depth of the crisis continues to emerge.
Singapore, seen as a model for its effective response to the crisis with its strict surveillance and quarantine measures, is in the throes of a second upsurge of the disease, with dozens of new cases reported this week.
Iran’s supreme leader suggested that mass gatherings may be barred through the holy Muslim fasting month of Ramadan amid the pandemic.
On Thursday, the World Bank predicted that sub-Saharan Africa would suffer its first recession in 25 years as a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak. The outbreak continues to devastate the American economy, and Thursday brought fresh evidence, with the Labor Department announcing 6.6 million new unemployment claims last week, almost 10 times the record before the coronavirus crisis.
The U.S. death toll, now growing by well over a thousand a day, has continued to mount with no sign of abating soon.
Across much of Europe, countries are bracing for Easter weekend, stepping up enforcement of social distancing measures as much of the continent adjusts planned celebrations for the new, socially isolated reality.
Oil spikes on word of a deal between Saudi Arabia and Russia.
Oil prices spiked on Thursday on news of a possible deal between Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and Russia for a major cut in production.
Demand for oil has dropped sharply as the coronavirus epidemic has shut down broad swaths of the world’s economy, causing a steep fall in prices. In addition, Russia and Saudi Arabia have been engaged in a price war, after Moscow refused to go along with a Saudi proposal in early March to trim output to deal with the pandemic.
The combination of factors threatens to swamp markets with vast oversupplies of oil.
OPEC, Russia and other oil producers gathered on Thursday for a teleconference to try to agree on production. The meeting was called by Saudi Arabia, OPEC’s de facto leader, after President Trump spoke to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s main policymaker, by telephone.
Brent crude, the international benchmark, jumped nearly 12 percent to $36.40 a barrel, as the meeting started, but it gave up most of those gains soon after.
As many as 150,000 West Bank residents who ordinarily work in Israel or Israeli settlements are vital to the West Bank economy, bringing in an estimated $2.5 billion a year.
But after outbreaks at two kosher chicken slaughterhouses on the Israeli side that sickened dozens of Palestinian workers, it has become clear that they are also bringing back something else: The coronavirus.
Returning workers accounted for at least a third of the known cases on the West Bank, including its only death, Palestinian officials say. Only a few hundred infections have been confirmed there, though testing has been very limited, compared to about 10,000 in Israel.
At first, Palestinian officials expected Israel to care for any workers who contracted the virus. But after an ailing worker was unceremoniously dumped at a checkpoint by the Israeli police (he later tested negative), the prime minister of the Palestinian Authority, Muhammad Shtayyeh, reversed himself and urged workers to return to the West Bank for their own safety.
Now, however, the fear is that many will take his advice — and that large numbers of returning workers could prove unwitting carriers of the virus. That would quickly overwhelm the West Bank’s underequipped hospitals.
The stress on the Palestinian side is showing itself in a ratcheting up of rhetoric that belies the close cooperation between Israeli and West Bank officials behind the scenes — cooperation that the United Nations has publicly praised.
Some 13 percent of income earned by West Bank residents comes from jobs in Israel or Israeli settlements.
European finance ministers meet for a second time this week on Thursday afternoon to take another stab at potential joint measures to cushion the blow of the coronavirus outbreak on the region’s economy, after their previous attempt collapsed in acrimony without a result.
At stake is the recovery of the world’s richest bloc of nations, of which 19 members also share one of the most important currencies in the world, the euro. The recession ahead will be brutal: The bloc is likely to shrink by around 10 percent, economists predict. At its worst year, in 2009, the recession that followed the global financial crisis was a 4.5 percent shrinkage.
But the meeting will also determine whether European nations hit by the virus unevenly, with Spain and Italy suffering the most losses, will be able to leave aside their usual battle lines — north versus south, richer versus poorer — and tackle the issue as one.
While some of the proposed measures have been largely uncontroversial, for example a joint scheme to fund unemployment benefits, and investment to support small businesses, bigger and braver suggestions have proven divisive.
Particularly tough has been reaching an agreement on whether or not to attach reform conditions to any loans that a bailout fund might give to Italy and others. Italy, the bloc’s third-largest economy, is keen to ensure no-strings-attached financing, but the Netherlands is pushing for conditions.
The ultimate stumbling block is whether ministers can agree to possibility of issuing joint bonds in future. This is a no-go for a some northern European countries like Germany and the Netherlands: They don’t want to subsidize cheap debt for their southern counterparts, and claim the move would be legally and practically time-consuming and political untenable at home.
As wealthier nations face accusations of “modern piracy” for trying to secure medical supplies for their own people, manufacturers say orders for vital testing kits cannot be filled in Africa and Latin America because almost everything they produce is going to America or Europe. UNICEF says it’s trying to buy 240 million masks to help 100 countries, but has so far only managed to source around 28 million.
“There is a war going on behind the scenes, and we’re most worried about poorer countries losing out,” said Dr. Catharina Boehme, the chief executive of Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics, which collaborates with the World Health Organization in helping poorer countries gain access to medical tests.
The supply divide matters in part because testing is the first defense against the virus, and an important tool to stop so many patients from ending up in hospital.
So far the developing world has reported far fewer cases and deaths from the coronavirus than the rich one, but if the pandemic hits harder it would prove devastating in countries whose health systems are already fragile and underfunded. A recent study found that some poor countries have only one equipped intensive care bed per million residents.
New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case there, and that travelers brought it mainly from Europe, not Asia.
Teams at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine — both in New York but working separately, on different groups of cases — came to strikingly similar conclusions about genomes from coronaviruses taken from residents of the city starting in mid-March.
Among the highlights:
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Some strains of the virus found in New York were practically identical to ones in Europe. They reveal a period of untracked global transmission starting in late January, more than a month before the United States blocked most travel from Europe.
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Other viruses were identical to ones seen in Washington State, hinting that the virus also likely moved across the United States for weeks.
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That early spread might have been detected if aggressive testing programs had been put in place.
The researchers cautioned that while the mutations they studied are useful for telling lineages apart, they don’t have any apparent effect on how the virus works. That’s good news for scientists working on a vaccine. In another promising sign for vaccine makers, the virus also appears to mutate fairly slowly, unlike influenza.
More than two dozen companies have announced promising vaccine programs in recent weeks, speeding through the early stages of testing unlike ever before.
The director-general of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Wednesday that he had been targeted by racist comments and death threats that originated in Taiwan, in the past three months, including being called “a Negro.”
Dr. Tedros singled out the Taiwanese government, which has been frozen out of the W.H.O. after pressure from Beijing.
“They didn’t disassociate themselves,” he said of Taiwanese officials. “They even started criticizing me in the middle of all that insult and slur, but I didn’t care.”
He said at a coronavirus news briefing on Wednesday that while he didn’t care about the personal attacks, he couldn’t accept disparagement against all black people.
“When the whole black community is insulted, when Africa is insulted, then I don’t tolerate it,” he said.
Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, hit back on Thursday, writing on Facebook: “Taiwan has always opposed all forms of discrimination. For years, we have been excluded from international organizations, and we know better than anyone else what it feels like to be discriminated against and isolated.”
Dr. Tedros also made an impassioned plea for solidarity, warning that politicizing the coronavirus pandemic would result in “many more body bags.”
He made his comments after President Trump unleashed a tirade against the organization on Tuesday, accusing it of acting too slowly to sound the alarm, and of treating the Chinese government too favorably. While the president, who threatened to withhold American funding for the organization, spoke in unusually harsh terms, he was not alone in such criticism.
Critics say that the W.H.O. has been too trusting of the Chinese government, which initially tried to conceal the outbreak. Others have faulted the organization for not moving faster in declaring a global health emergency.
Asked about Mr. Trump’s comments on Wednesday, Dr. Tedros said: “Please don’t politicize this virus. If you want to be exploited and you want to have many more body bags, then you do it. If you don’t want many more body bags, then you refrain from politicizing it.”
African leaders came to Dr. Tedros’s defense, with state and government leaders from South Africa, Ethiopia, Nigeria and Rwanda saying they had full confidence in the W.H.O. and its leader.
Moussa Faki Mahamat, the chairman of the African Union, said on Twitter: “The focus should remain on collectively fighting Covid-19 as a united global community. The time for accountability will come.”
More than 50 African states have so far reported a total of 10,252 coronavirus cases and 492 deaths, according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. On Thursday, the World Bank said sub-Saharan Africa would suffer its first recession for 25 years as a consequence of the outbreak.
With Prime Minister Boris Johnson having spent his third night in intensive care and Britain creeping toward the end of an initial three-week lockdown to stem the spread of the coronavirus, the government is preparing to make a decision on whether to extend the measures.
The government’s emergency Cobra committee will convene on Thursday to discuss the effectiveness of lockdown measures introduced on March 23, although a decision over whether the restrictions should be extended, relaxed or tightened is not expected until next week.
With temperatures expected to reach up to 77 degrees Fahrenheit this weekend, the public has been urged to stay at home. The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, asked the public on Wednesday to refrain from sunbathing, having barbecues in parks and playing team sports.
“I think we’re nowhere near lifting the lockdown,” he told the BBC, indicating the country was at least 10 days away from a potential peak in the number of cases.
Mr. Johnson, meanwhile, “had a good night and continues to improve” in intensive care after becoming infected with the virus, officials said on Thursday. He is still receiving standard oxygen treatment, Downing Street said, but was in “good spirits.”
After Britain reported its highest daily death toll from the virus on Wednesday, with 938 deaths recorded in hospitals in 24 hours, the public health services of England, Scotland and Wales reported 887 new fatalities on Thursday. Northern Ireland had not yet reported its daily tally.
The country’s economic crisis is also deepening as a result of the outbreak, with Britain’s government saying on Thursday that had received 1.2 million new claims for welfare payments since mid-March. In a typical two-week period, there are usually around 100,000 claims, according to the BBC.
In the Spanish city of Seville, Holy Week is celebrated by processions of hooded penitents that draw hundreds of thousands of faithful and tourists onto the streets of the city for the Easter spectacle.
But the festivities and the concept of penitence, a major theme of the week, have acquired a special meaning during a nationwide coronavirus lockdown, as the faithful must stay home rather than meander through the city to the sound of drums and trumpets alongside richly decorated floats. The celebrations are led by brotherhoods, associations formed by residents whose main task is to prepare religious events, particularly during Holy Week.
“This is an unprecedented situation in which we need to prepare for a much longer period of penitence, also because of the economic hardship that awaits us even after the virus has gone,” said Alejandro López, spokesman of the Macarena brotherhood, the largest in Seville, with about 15,000 members.
The processions are typically staggered throughout Holy Week, and the Macarena’s was to take place at midnight Thursday. But with its basilica closed, the brotherhood will instead stream video online from the church.
For those who have spent months preparing for the procession, “there is no doubt some inner feelings of nostalgia and sadness,” said Mr. López. “But we are all mature Christians.”
Not everyone has heeded the lockdown measures, and last Sunday, officers broke up a Mass on a Seville rooftop with a dozen people. The police have been intervening to halt any religious event that could breach the rules of the nationwide lockdown.
Spain is still in the grip of a major outbreak: On Thursday, the country passed the grim milestone of 15,000 dead, with 683 more fatalities reported overnight.
As coronavirus cases climb in India, the country’s top political leaders have indicated that a 21-day nationwide lockdown that is set to expire next week would most likely continue in some form.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi told government ministers on Wednesday that a complete lifting of the lockdown “is not possible,” according to Indian news reports and people who participated in the meeting.
“The priority of the government is to save each and every life,” Mr. Modi was quoted as saying. “The situation in the country is akin to a ‘social emergency.’ It has necessitated tough decisions and we must continue to remain vigilant.”
India’s lockdown, which is in effect until April 15 and applies to all 1.3 billion Indians, was the most severe action undertaken anywhere to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Borders between states were closed. Schools, offices, factories, parks, restaurants and airspace have all shut.
On top of that, the cities of Mumbai and New Delhi mandated this week that people wear face masks when they leave their homes. And on Thursday, the government of Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state, said that residents must stay indoors and allow only essential items like food to be delivered.
Though India still has a relatively small number of infections — 178 deaths and fewer than 6,000 confirmed cases as of Thursday — experts warn that widespread transmission of the coronavirus could be disastrous in a country where millions of people live in dense slums, social distancing is often impossible and the health care system is overburdened.
The Australian authorities on Wednesday boarded the cruise ship Ruby Princess, which is docked off the country’s east coast, and seized the vessel’s “black box” as part of a homicide investigation into how infected passengers were allowed to disembark last month.
The ship allowed about 2,700 untested passengers to disembark in Sydney. Hundreds later tested positive for the coronavirus, causing cases in the state of New South Wales to skyrocket. Fifteen of them later died.
It’s the deadliest single source of infection in Australia, which had 50 deaths and more than 6,000 cases as of Thursday.
The authorities are trying to determine whether the number of potential coronavirus cases aboard the Ruby Princess was played down before it docked. They boarded the ship to gather evidence, including a black box similar to those used in aircraft, and to speak with its captain.
The authorities say more than 1,000 crew members, many from other countries, are still on the ship, and that a number of them have contracted the coronavirus.
Dean Summers, the Australia coordinator for the International Transport Workers’ Federation, said a number of them were “completely confused” and desperate to be tested for the virus.
“That ship obviously has huge exposure to coronavirus,” he said. “Why wasn’t anybody tested?”
Matt Hancock, the British health secretary, came under fire last week after he said on national television, “We’ve seen very sadly four doctors die so far and some nurses.”
“They’re not even counting the nurses,” Donna Kinnair, the chief executive and general secretary of the Royal College of Nursing, said during the BBC show “Question Time.”
Among the dead are Alice Kit Tak Ong, 70; Aimee O’Rourke, 39; and Thomas Harvey, 57. Ms. O’Rourke, a nurse in the acute medical unit at Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother Hospital in Margate, a town in southeastern England, died after testing positive for coronavirus, the hospital said in a statement last week. The hospital plans to put up a permanent memorial in her honor.
Ms. Ong, who was originally from Hong Kong and had worked for the National Health Service for 44 years, died on Tuesday in London, her daughter, told The Guardian. She said that her mother had been working without protective equipment.
The family of Mr. Harvey, who fell ill after treating a patient who later tested positive for the virus, said that the health care system had failed them.
Shortages of protective equipment have been a worry around the globe, with some medical workers making their own gowns from trash bags. A spokeswoman for the Royal College of Nursing said in an email on Wednesday that the facility had asked for more and better protective equipment for staff members over and over again.
All nurses who treated patients with coronavirus were in danger of infection, she added.
The police in a southwestern corner of Germany will monitor who follows outdoor social-distancing orders over the Easter weekend by deploying an unusual mode of transportation — a zeppelin.
The city of Friedrichshafen commissioned the airship — emblazoned with the slogan “Alle fur Alle,” or “Everyone Together” — to make a daily loop through the skies over the banks of Lake Constance to motivate Germans to follow regulations to stay indoors.
Officials reached out to the police and offered a ride-along, said Markus Sauter, spokesman for the regional police in Ravensburg. The authorities readily accepted.
“Our focus will be the Lake Constance region, because from the zeppelin it is easier for us to see where large groups of people may be forming than it is on the ground,” Mr. Sauter said in a telephone interview. The lake, which forms Germany’s southern border with Switzerland and a corner of Austria, is a popular destination for cyclists, hikers and other day-trippers.
Six police officers will ride in the zeppelin and be in radio contact with their colleagues on the ground, alerting them if they spot any large groups.
Germans remain under orders to stay at home, only going out for necessities. But with 113,296 people infected and 2,349 fatalities, according to Johns Hopkins, Germany is seeing the rate of new infections slow. Leaders are floating the possibility that some restrictions could be eased after Easter, warning it can only happen if people keep their distance over the weekend.
With warm, sunny weather forecast, the authorities worry that could prove challenging, even in a country with a penchant for following the rules.
Even after Japan declared a state of emergency to fight the coronavirus pandemic in its largest population centers earlier this week, the central government is urging governors to wait two weeks to ask businesses to close for fear of damaging the economy.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe officially announced the emergency declarations earlier this week for seven prefectures that include Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka and Yokohama and represent a population of 56.1 million people. The government does not have the legal power to issue stay-at-home orders or compel businesses to close, but governors can request that businesses suspend operations to help contain the spread of infection.
While some of the governors want to ask businesses to close now, the central government wants them to wait to see if individual citizens will flatten the curve of infections by refraining from going outside and working from home. On Thursday, the health ministry announced 511 newly confirmed cases — a 46 percent jump over a day earlier.
One municipality is taking matters into its own hands. Gotemba, a city of about 88,000 in the foothills of Mount Fuji, is offering owners of businesses such as bars and nightclubs a maximum of 1 million yen (about $9,200) in compensation for closing between April 16 and 30.
Usually it’s the world’s major oil-producing countries that step in when a big drop in prices shakes the oil market. But these are not normal times.
On Friday, a day after the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and other producers led by Russia are set to hold their own meeting, representatives of the Group of 20 wealthy nations are expected to hold a virtual conference to try to stem the recent plunge in energy prices.
The volatile oil markets threaten to bankrupt energy companies across the world, causing enormous job losses and threatening financial institutions that have backed the industry.
The pandemic has played a critical role in this drama, but there is also a lot of jockeying among the three oil superpowers: Saudi Arabia and Russia, two longtime petro-rivals, and the United States, whose rising prominence as an oil exporter has disrupted the industry.
How to celebrate in coronavirus times.
Stay-at-home orders don’t have to put a damper on your special days. Here’s some ways to celebrate birthdays, weddings, and the upcoming spring holidays.
In Dubai, the largest and most cosmopolitan of the United Arab Emirates, the large foreign population can now have alcohol delivered to the home even as the city has frozen in place to halt the spread of a coronavirus outbreak.
Allowing alcohol deliveries in Dubai during the pandemic may be surprising to some, since drinking is illegal in the neighboring emirate of Sharjah and the nations of Iran, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
But in normal times, Dubai residents can sip at cocktail lounges or soak themselves at Champagne brunches, perhaps the most visible compromise the emirate has made between its Muslim identity and its many expatriate workers and tourists. Foreigners drive cabs, pick up the garbage, run restaurants and power the other industries that make Dubai a global business hub and tourist destination, leading to looser restrictions on behavior than in many of its neighbors.
But allowing home deliveries of spirits is new.
Alcohol delivery, now offered via online order by the city’s major alcohol distributors, is a nod to another reality — that of a citywide lockdown, in which only one member of each household is allowed outside at a time for essential trips. Only tourists who can show a foreign passport and residents with an alcohol license, available to non-Muslims over 21, can order the alcohol, which ranges from a $4.36 bottle of Indian blended whiskey to a $780 bottle of California red wine.
The lockdown is being stringently enforced, blending the high-functioning efficiency that has streamlined Dubai’s economy and government authoritarianism that brooks little dissent. People must obtain a police permit online each time they leave home. Everyone must wear masks and gloves outside.
The Dubai police have said they will not hesitate to “name shame,” arrest and even jail people who mock the stay-home measures on social media.
But it was a striking contrast to the policy in Bangkok, where the authorities announced on Thursday that the sale of alcohol would be banned from Friday until April 20 to discourage gatherings next week during Songkran, the Thai New Year. Songkran celebrations, which can attract large crowds, were canceled earlier.
Bangkok, which is under a partial lockdown, is one of more than 10 jurisdictions in Thailand that have enacted some form of alcohol ban in an attempt to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
Reporting was contributed by Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Jane Bradley, Stephen Castle, Abdi Latif Dahir, Vivian Yee, Melissa Eddy, Raphael Minder, Ceylan Yeginsu, Iliana Magra, Richard C. Paddock, Mike Ives, Megan Specia, Yonette Joseph, Kai Schultz, Elaine Yu, Motoko Rich, Hisako Ueno, Makiko Inoue, Rory Smith, Tariq Panja, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Carl Zimmer, James Gorman, Michael Levenson, Dan Barry, Ben Hubbard, Stanley Reed, Clifford Krauss, Andrew E. Kramer, Dionne Searcey, Ruth Maclean, Denise Grady, Katie Thomas, Patrick J. Lyons, Karen Zraick, Richard Pérez-Peña, Mohammed Najib, David M. Halbfinger, Melissa Eddy and Christopher F. Schuetze.
Source : Nytimes
