Here’s what you need to know:
- Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain tests positive for coronavirus.
- Largest relief package in U.S. history moves to Congress as global crisis deepens.
- How did the U.S. overtake the world in new infections?
- States plead for more federal help, but White House pushes back ventilator plan.
- In one Italian region, sirens don’t stop wailing for the dead.
- The U.K. salutes its health workers, as New York mourns a casualty.
- In a shift in tone, Trump praises China’s handling of the outbreak.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain tests positive for coronavirus.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has tested positive for the coronavirus and is suffering mild symptoms, he said on Friday. He is the first leader of a major Western country known to have contracted the virus.
“I’ve developed mild symptoms of the coronavirus,” Mr. Johnson said in a video posted on Twitter, noting that he was tested on Thursday after he began running a temperature and suffering a persistent cough.
The prime minister said that he would isolate himself in his official residence, 10 Downing Street, but would not relinquish his duties. On Monday, after resisting harsher measures for more than a week, Mr. Johnson imposed a lockdown on Britain to try to curb the virus’s spread. He has continued to meet with advisers and has appeared most days at a daily televised briefing, though he did not do so on Thursday.
“Be in no doubt that I can continue, thanks to the wizardry of modern technology, to communicate with all my top team to lead the national fight back against coronavirus,” Mr. Johnson said.
The prime minister’s diagnosis rattled a country that was already unnerved by news that Prince Charles, the eldest son of Queen Elizabeth II and the heir to the throne, had tested positive for the virus. Buckingham Palace said the queen remained healthy and was sequestered at Windsor Castle. Mr. Johnson delivered his weekly briefing to the queen by telephone on Wednesday.
Mr. Johnson had staked out a more relaxed position than other European leaders about the timing and strictness of measures Britain should take to slow the spread of the virus. He initially balked at forcing pubs and restaurants to close and shutting down schools.
Last weekend, however, the government shifted its strategy and embraced the more draconian measures. Mr. Johnson has insisted he is guided by scientific advice and has timed the rollout of distancing measures so they are most effective and accepted by the public. Among the questions the government will face is how many people Mr. Johnson came into contact with over the last few days. Many officials had stopped working in Downing Street, participating in meetings via conference call. But a skeleton staff did worked in the residence.
Mr. Johnson did not appear at the daily news conference on Thursday, at which the chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, rolled out the latest plan to protect workers who have lost wages.
Largest relief package in U.S. history moves to Congress as global crisis deepens.
Congress was set to take up a $2 trillion economic stabilization plan designed to save jobs and bail out companies that will also fundamentally transform the relationship between the government and private industry.
In a sign of the times, the House is expected to approve the measure on Friday by voice vote, rather than having hundreds of lawmakers travel from their homes and violate restrictions on mass gatherings.
The relief could not come soon enough for the more than three million Americans who joined the ranks of the unemployed last week — another “largest ever” number in a week filled with superlatives.
The total number of infections in the United States, more than 85,000, for the first time exceeded those in China. More than 1,200 Americans have died as the outbreak spread exponentially into new territory in the Midwest and the South.
New York City, where 385 people have died, remains the hardest hit by the virus. But Michigan, which had only 350 cases a week ago, now has more than 3,000. The mayor of Los Angeles and the governor of Louisiana both warned that their populations were following the same path as New York.
Despite progress on developing a vaccine, sheltering in place remains the best way to slow the spread of the virus, and billions of people around the world have been told to stay in their homes.
The more rapidly the virus spreads, the sooner hospitals are overwhelmed and the more people die. And it can happen with horrifying speed, as evidenced by the dire situations in Italy and Spain, which have suffered a combined total of more than 12,500 deaths.
The spread of the virus in Britain seems to be a bit behind continental Europe, and officials recently expressed cautious optimism that the health system would be able to handle the expected surge in patients. Nevertheless, 578 people have died so far, with the daily total exceeding 100 for the first time, and hospitals in London are now being inundated.
But even as most of the world clamps down further on the movement of people, President Trump remains focused on restarting the economy. He suggested on Thursday that the White House might soon recommend that restrictions be eased in parts of the country where the virus has yet to be widely detected.
But public health experts warned that slicing and dicing the restrictions would lead to disaster, and local officials — who have the final say in such matters — for the most part did not seem inclined to follow the president’s lead.
Residents of Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus originated, took advantage of an easing of harsh restrictions to start the grim process of collecting the ashes of loved ones. But even in China, victory could prove fleeting.
On Saturday, the country will close its borders to foreigners, to prevent the virus from circling back and reinfecting the population.
How did the U.S. overtake the world in new infections?
Scientists warned that the United States someday would become the country hardest hit by the coronavirus pandemic. That moment arrived on Thursday.
With 330 million residents, the United States is the world’s third most populous nation, meaning it provides a vast pool of people who can potentially get Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus.
And it is a sprawling, cacophonous democracy, where states set their own policies and President Trump has sent mixed messages about the scale of the danger and how to fight it, ensuring there was no coherent, unified response to a grave public health threat.
A series of missteps and lost opportunities dogged the nation’s response.
Among them: a failure to take the pandemic seriously even as it engulfed China, a deeply flawed effort to provide broad testing for the virus that left the country blind to the extent of the crisis, and a dire shortage of masks and protective gear to protect doctors and nurses on the front lines, as well as ventilators to keep the critically ill alive.
“This could have been stopped by implementing testing and surveillance much earlier — for example, when the first imported cases were identified,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University.
For now, at least, China has contained the coronavirus with draconian measures. But the pathogen had embarked on a Grand Tour of most countries on Earth, with devastating epidemics in Iran, Italy and Spain. More videos emerged of prostrate victims, exhausted nurses and lines of coffins.
The United States, which should have been ready, was not.
The public health system, limping along on local tax receipts, kills mosquitoes and traces the contacts of people with sexually transmitted diseases. It has been outmatched by the pandemic.
States plead for more federal help, but White House pushes back ventilator plan.
As the United States became the global epicenter of the pandemic, state and local leaders urged President Trump to take more aggressive steps to mobilize the production of critically needed supplies. Instead, the White House suddenly called off an announcement about a venture to produce as many as 80,000 ventilators, out of concern that the estimated $1 billion price tag would be prohibitive.
In a White House briefing, Deborah L. Birx, the administration’s coronavirus response coordinator, insisted that talk of ventilator and hospital bed shortages was overwrought, but she warned of new hot spots developing in and around Chicago and Detroit.
At the same time, many governors said the sweeping stimulus bill fails to provide states with enough money to battle the growing coronavirus crisis.
While several governors said that the bill was a positive — and appreciated — start, they also said that it was not nearly enough to deal with plummeting state revenues and growing pleas for assistance from their residents.
The stimulus includes block grants to states, as well as money that states can draw from to address various needs. It allocates, for instance, $30 billion for states to use on education, $45 billion for disaster relief and $1.4 billion for National Guard deployments. Several medical schools in Massachusetts and New York said this week that they intended to offer early graduation to their fourth-year students, making them available to care for patients eight weeks earlier than expected.
In New York, now the hardest-hit area in the United States, doctors scrambled as the number of hospitalized patients jumped by 40 percent in a day — to 5,327, of whom 1,290 were in intensive care, according to Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
To further support New York, the Navy hospital ship U.S.N.S. Comfort is expected to arrive at Manhattan on Monday, three weeks earlier than previously thought. The ship will take patients from area hospitals who do not have symptoms of the virus.
In one Italian region, sirens don’t stop wailing for the dead.
While the world’s attention now shifts to its own centers of contagion, in Bergamo, Italy, the sirens keep sounding. Like the air raid sirens of the Second World War, they are the ambulance sirens that many survivors of this war will remember. They blare louder as they get closer, coming to collect the parents and grandparents, the keepers of Italy’s memory.
The grandchildren wave from terraces, and spouses sit back on the corners of now empty beds. And then the sirens start again, becoming fainter as the ambulances drive away toward hospitals crammed with coronavirus patients.
There have been 8,165 deaths in Italy, the Bergamo area has suffered more than most. Officially 1,328 people have died there. The actual toll may be four times higher, so many that the local paper is given over to death notices.
Once known as a quiet and wealthy province, Bergamo is now a place where Red Cross workers go door to door, carrying away the afflicted.
“At this point, all you hear in Bergamo is sirens,” said Michela Travelli.
The U.K. salutes its health workers, as New York mourns a casualty.
In an emotional tribute to the workers of the National Health Service, millions across Britain took to their windows, doorsteps and balconies to simultaneously applaud those risking their own health to help others.
From stone cottages in the Lake District to apartment buildings in London, an explosion of sound pierced the darkness as people clapped, played instruments and rang bells in a show of solidarity.
Tower Bridge, Westminster Abbey and the London Eye were among the London landmarks bathed in blue light in tribute.
Even as the country prepared for the worst, with an army of 500,000 volunteering to help ease the burden on government workers, London hospitals were already struggling to meet the demands of the first wave of patients.
And there was a deep awareness that much more will be asked of medical workers in the days ahead.
The dangers facing doctors, nurses and other caregivers has been demonstrated in every country where the virus has insinuated itself.
And the strains on strong health care systems — with protective gear and vital equipment in desperately short supply — underscored the possible tragedy in developing nations.
In Spain, health care workers have been infected at an alarming rate, accounting for more than 10 percent of cases.
The toll on doctors in Italy continues to grow, with at least 37 dying after contracting the virus.
In New York, the story of Kious Kelly, an assistant nurse manager at Mount Sinai West hospital in Manhattan, has gripped the nation.
Mr. Kelly texted his sister, Marya Patrice Sherron, on March 18 to say he had contracted the coronavirus and was on a ventilator in the intensive care unit.
He said he could text, but not talk.
“‘I’m OK,’” he wrote, Ms. Sherron recalled in an interview on Thursday. “‘Don’t tell Mom and Dad. They’ll worry.’”
Mr. Kelly, 48, died late Tuesday.
In a shift in tone, Trump praises China’s handling of the outbreak.
After weeks of rising tensions, President Trump called China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and offered words of sympathy and praise for the Chinese government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
“China has been through much & has developed a strong understanding of the Virus,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter. “We are working closely together. Much respect!”
Even for Mr. Trump, the shift in tone was striking, coming only days after he made a point of referring to the coronavirus as a “Chinese virus.”
A day before the call, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told reporters in Washington that “the Chinese Communist Party poses a threat to our health and way of life, as the Wuhan virus outbreak clearly has demonstrated.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi last spoke directly in February, and both took part in a video conference call of leaders of the Group of 20 nations on Thursday.
China’s readout of the two leaders’ conversation was more restrained. Perhaps mindful of criticism of the country’s early handing of the epidemic, Mr. Xi stressed in the call that China had been sharing information in “an open, transparent and responsible manner” with the World Health Organization and the United States.
“I am paying very close attention and worried about the development of the epidemic in the United States,” Mr. Xi said.
“China understands the difficult situation the U.S. is currently in and is willing to provide as much support as it can within its power,” China’s foreign ministry said, referring to Mr. Xi’s comment.
As schools shut down, parents and students struggle to keep up.
Children the world over — and their parents — are having to grapple with the new reality that in many places, schools are unlikely to reopen before the start of the new academic year in autumn, with closures likely to last for months rather than weeks.
For some students, the challenge runs even deeper.
In China, the outbreak and subsequent shutdown exposed a digital divide that saw some children left without access to online learning. Now the United States, which surpassed China in its number of cases on Thursday, is navigating the same territory.
Allia Phillips, a fourth grader on the honor roll, was excited about picking up an iPad from her school in Harlem last week after her school was forced to close. But the shelter she lives in with her mother and grandmother does not have internet. And her mother worries that she will be left behind.
An estimated 114,000 children in New York City live in shelters and unstable housing, and many worry that school closures will hit them the hardest.
In much of Europe, schools are preparing to be closed through the spring. In Spain, where the outbreak has exploded and schools remain closed indefinitely, parents are struggling to keep their children focused. An extension of an initial two week countrywide lockdown has made that task more challenging.
“During the first week, we were all about drawing and writing and practicing with numbers,” Clara Gonzalez, a 28-year-old mother of two, said. The second week was less about activities. “They sleep less, they have a holiday-like schedule.”
The Spanish government is trying to salvage the school year and the main exams, including ones for entering university, amid growing concerns that a prolonged lockdown could make that impossible. On Thursday, Isabel Celaá, Spain’s education minister, said she expected schools to reopen in May or June, so that the year would not be lost, but critics say that may be wishful thinking.
A new problem in Wuhan: Cremating thousands.
The peak of the outbreak appears to have passed in Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the coronavirus crisis started three months ago, but for some residents, the mourning process is only beginning.
Images circulating online and in Chinese state media showed people standing in a long line outside a funeral home in Wuhan on Thursday, waiting to collect the ashes of loved ones who died during the epidemic. For many residents, it was a long-awaited moment.
As the virus ravaged Wuhan — killing more than 2,500 people, according to official figures — the city was kept under a strict lockdown for more than two months, and residents were barred from holding funerals. In China, where rituals of death are highly prescribed, many have had no choice but to grieve at home in private.
According to a report in Caixin, a respected Chinese newsmagazine, residents began receiving calls from funeral homes this week notifying them to come pick up the ashes. Some who showed up at funeral homes without appointments waited for up to six hours, Caixin reported.
But residents hoping to hold proper funerals for their loved ones will have to wait until May or later. Local officials issued new guidelines on Thursday prohibiting Wuhan residents from holding public commemoration services until at least April 30. With the annual Tomb Sweeping Festival — when Chinese honor their ancestors by tending to their family graves — coming next week, officials are urging the public to hold online memorials instead.
Though Wuhan has accounted for nearly two-thirds of China’s total infections and more than three-quarters of its deaths, many residents and experts believe that the real death toll in the city during the epidemic was likely higher. Medical workers have said that a lack of test kits, particularly in the early weeks of the outbreak in Wuhan, meant that many deaths from the coronavirus went unaccounted for.
A truck driver cited in the Caixin report said that in one day, he had dropped off 2,500 boxes for storing ashes at Hankou Funeral Home, one of eight funeral homes in the city.
By Thursday evening, censors had begun to delete images from the Wuhan funeral home on Chinese social media, prompting anger among some users who saw the erasures as part of a larger government effort to keep the public focused on China’s success in stamping out the virus.
What you can do to protect yourself and everyone else.
You can take several steps to slow the spread of the coronavirus, and keep yourself safe. Be consistent about social distancing. Wash your hands often. And when you do leave your home for groceries or other essentials, wipe down your shopping cart and be smart about what you are purchasing.
Can Trump legally order the country back to work by Easter?
While the president of the United States is often referred to as the most powerful leader on earth, there are limits to those powers, and one of them is that he cannot order Americans to leave their homes and go to work.
Such a declaration, in the midst of a health crisis, would have to come from local authorities — in state capitals or even from city or county governments.
This longstanding legal principle predates the Constitution, experts say, so Mr. Trump can suggest what counties may go back to work as he did in his announcement on Thursday, but he does not have the authority to overturn state and local decrees.
“States are understood to have a general power to legislate for the health, welfare, safety and morals for the people of their state,” said Andrew Kent, who teaches constitutional law at Fordham University’s School of Law.
There might be some exceptions, Mr. Kent and others noted, as in the case of a military invasion or other national emergency, but a pandemic is not one of them. On health matters, the federal government’s powers are limited to trying to prevent the spread of contagious diseases into the United States or between states.
Mr. Trump could try to use his considerable levers of power like withholding federal aid, as he did with the sanctuary cities that opposed his immigration policies, legal experts said, but states could reject any direct attempt to interfere in their shelter-at-home orders.
On economic aid, E.U. is split between wealthy north and virus-ravaged south.
European Union leaders spent six hours on Thursday struggling through a summit meeting by teleconference on how best to support their economies that have been devastated by the coronavirus.
With leaders roughly split between a more fiscally cautious north and a battered south, they gave themselves two more weeks to work out a plan. A call by Italy, Spain, France and six other nations to jointly issue debt, referred to as “coronabonds,” was blocked, despite broad support from the markets, which want to see the euro area do more to bolster its weakest members.
Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, which oppose the proposal, say there is no need to create new tools when old ones will do, and they are loathe to put their stronger economies and healthier budgets to the service of weaker ones, fearing it will encourage irresponsible behavior down the line.
According to a French official who briefed reporters, President Emmanuel Macron said it was important to help those most hurt by the virus, including Italy and Spain.
Mr. Macron said that the bloc owed those countries solidarity, and that if wealthier members failed to show it, it would be tantamount to accepting that Europe does not have a shared destiny, according to the official.
But Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, a consistent critic of joint euro bonds, said she was opposed to the proposal. “We said that this is not the point of view of all member states,’’ she told journalists from her home, where she is in quarantine.
Reporting was contributed by Donald G. McNeil Jr., Maya Salam, John Eligon, Amy Qin, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Elian Peltier, Raphael Minder, Jason Horowitz, Fabio Bucciarelli, Nikita Stewart, Michael Crowley, Lara Jakes, Jesse Drucker, Carl Hulse, Emily Cochrane, Steven Lee Myers, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Steven Erlanger, Caitlin Dickerson, Annie Correal and Neil MacFarquhar.
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