Here’s what you need to know:
- In Europe and beyond, many people regained freedom to shop or go to school, but life is still far from normal.
- Britain’s new guidelines leave more questions than answers.
- In Mexico City, the sound of quarantine has rhythm.
- In seeking an inquiry, Australia leaps onto global stage and draws China’s ire.
- Putin declares an end to Russia’s ‘nonworking period,’ but data raise questions about the outbreak.
- Saudi Arabia is tripling its sales tax as the cost of fighting the virus and lower oil prices strain its budget.
- Coronavirus cases are climbing in Iraq, driven in part by relaxed stay-at-home orders.
In Europe and beyond, many people regained freedom to shop or go to school, but life is still far from normal.
For the first time in eight weeks, the French may leave home without filling out release forms just to go grocery shopping. Half of Spain’s population can meet in groups of up to 10, and sit outdoors at restaurants. Gyms reopened in Germany’s most populous state, North-Rhine Westphalia.
Across Europe and beyond, nations took some of their biggest steps yet toward lifting coronavirus lockdowns on Monday, but life remained far from normal.
Many countries have falling rates of infection, hospitalizations and deaths, but with no vaccine, they are moving cautiously toward reopening, wary of triggering a surge in new cases.
In France, where restrictions vary by region depending on how seriously afflicted they are, some schools and shops reopened and some hair salons were fully booked. But in Paris and elsewhere, restaurants and theaters remained closed, and masks were still mandatory in public.
On the Paris metro, every other seat was blocked off, and large stickers on the floor showed people where to stand to remain a safe distance apart. Commuters risked fines for not wearing masks, which were handed out at station entrances, and transit workers wearing protective gear sprayed sanitizing gel on riders’ hands.
Pedestrians returned to the Champs-Élysées, but in a trickle, far short of the normal torrent.
Spain also lifted restrictions by region on Monday, allowing small groups to gather and dine outdoors, and small shops to reopen. But about half the population, including residents of the two largest cities, Madrid and Barcelona, remained under tighter controls.
Spanish health officials said that two weeks after children were given limited freedom to venture outdoors, the change did not appear to have caused a surge in new infections.
In Germany, the gradual easing of movement restrictions continued on Monday, with more children returning to classrooms.
And in Australia, popular beaches are open again for exercise. Children across Sydney returned to school on Monday, donning uniforms that had been folded in drawers for weeks.
Britain’s new guidelines leave more questions than answers.
Britons were advised on Monday to wear face coverings in enclosed spaces, including public transport and shops, as the government published details of its new strategy to tackle the coronavirus. The details were part of a plan released a day after a national address from Prime Minister Boris Johnson caused widespread confusion.
In a televised speech on Sunday, Mr. Johnson changed the official advice to stay home, urging Britons instead to “stay alert.” He also encouraged anyone unable to work from home to return to their workplace, but to avoid public transport.
Mr. Johnson did not mention face masks, but the government guidance suggested they be used “where social distancing isn’t possible” such as on public transport or in some shops, though did not make it mandatory. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has asked anyone using public transportation in the city to wear a mask.
While the document released on Monday laid down objectives for easing the lockdown, it still left many questions unanswered. Britain could permit some cultural and sporting events to take place in June behind closed doors for broadcast purposes, but the document did not offer details. It also gave no specifics on a plan, likely to be introduced in a few weeks time, to quarantine those arriving in Britain by air.
According to the document, “The government will require all international arrivals not on a short list of exemptions to self-isolate in their accommodation for fourteen days on arrival into the U.K.” It added that, “where international travelers are unable to demonstrate where they would self-isolate, they will be required to do so in accommodation arranged by the government.”
The government said on Sunday that travelers from Ireland and France would be exempt from the quarantine rules. It has not explained, however, how it would stop travelers transiting through those two countries.
In Mexico City, the sound of quarantine has rhythm.
Our newest correspondent in Mexico City, Natalie Kitroeff, arrived just as the coronavirus was sweeping the globe. As the virus dampened so many sounds in her new city, she tells us what remains.
Lone organists walk the streets playing melancholy songs I can’t place. Two musicians bang out “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk on a marimba. Trumpeters serenade the block with “La Llorona,” a song about a woman who can’t stop crying.
In normal times, street musicians are everywhere in Mexico City, serenading lovers on dinner dates and charming money out of tourists. They play ballads and rancheras, the kind of music you would sing along to after a tequila or two. Now, as the pandemic washes over Mexico, there are far fewer of them. The ones who remain are playing because their odds at home, with no income, are even worse.
There are officially more than 35,000 infections in the country. But many Mexicans do not believe the real numbers are that low.
So for those of us who can afford to stay inside, safe but distanced from usual joys, the musicians have become a guilty pleasure. Some people drop pesos from their balconies or run downstairs to put tips in an outstretched bag. The performers move on to the next block to repeat the process.
“This is the city’s quarantine soundtrack,” wrote my colleague, Paulina Villegas, in an Instagram story filmed from her balcony, of a saxophonist playing.
She sent me another video, taken by her brother, of a saxophonist who reproduced The Beatles’ “Hey Jude” outside his apartment. “This is how I will remember this time, a weird but nostalgic, life goes on anyway kind of mood,” Paulina told me.
The other day, I was stressed and crashing on deadline when a mariachi band broke through the silence of my street. They were in the throes of an energetic rendition of “Cielito Lindo,” a Mexican folk classic that instructs us to sing and not cry. All of a sudden, so was I.
“Ay ay ay ay,” I belted at my houseplants. “Canta y no llores!”
In seeking an inquiry, Australia leaps onto global stage and draws China’s ire.
When Australia started pushing for a global inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, no other countries were on board, and officials had no idea how it would work or how China might react.
Europe soon joined the effort, moving to take up the idea with the World Health Organization this month. And Australia, in its newfound role as global catalyst, has become both a major target of Chinese anger and the sudden leader of a push to bolster international institutions that the United States has abandoned under President Trump.
“We just want to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said on Friday, describing his conversations with other nations.
Confronting a once-in-a-generation crisis, the world’s middle powers are urgently trying to revive can-do multilateralism.
Countries in Europe and Asia are forging bonds on issues like public health and trade, planning for a future built on what they see as the pandemic’s biggest lessons: that the risks of China’s authoritarian government can no longer be denied, and that the United States cannot be relied on to lead when its foreign policy is increasingly “America first.”
The middle-power dynamic may last only as long as the virus. But if it continues, it could offer an alternative to the decrees and demands of the world’s two superpowers.
Putin declares an end to Russia’s ‘nonworking period,’ but data raise questions about the outbreak.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday declared an end to the nationwide “nonworking period” instituted seven weeks ago, but told governors to strengthen or relax lockdowns depending on the situation in their individual territories.
Speaking on state television shortly after the health authorities reported the biggest one-day rise in infections, Mr. Putin acknowledged that the pandemic had not yet been defeated but said it was now up regional governors to decide on restrictions.
“Starting tomorrow, May 12, the national nonworking period will end for the entire country and for all sectors of the economy,” Mr. Putin said, “But the fight with the epidemic is not ending.”
Earlier on Monday, authorities in Moscow, by far Russia’s hardest hit region, announced that the city would remain in lockdown until at least the end of May. Starting Tuesday, the wearing of masks and gloves in public will be mandatory in the Russian capital.
The authorities said on Monday that 11,656 cases had been confirmed in the past 24 hours, bringing the official total to 221,344.
But experts believe the crisis is much deeper than official figures imply.
Since the coronavirus first exploded into a major pandemic, researchers have been left puzzled by Russia’s mortality rate just 13 deaths per million, far below the global average of 36.
But data released by Moscow’s city government on Friday showed that the number of total registered deaths in the Russian capital in April exceeded the five-year average for the same period by more than 1,700. That total is far higher than the official Covid-19 death count of 642 — an indication of significant underreporting by the authorities.
“Mortality figures in Moscow seem to be much higher than average for Aprils over the last decade,” said Tatiana N. Mikhailova, a senior researcher at the Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration in Moscow.
“One thing is clear: The number of Covid-19 victims is possibly almost three times higher than the official toll,” she said in an interview, adding that additional calculations were required for a precise number.
A similar situation of underreporting fatalities has been observed in many other countries, where subsequent data reveal large upticks in deaths compared with the same period in previous years.
Moscow’s figures contrast sharply with the line that has been peddled by the Kremlin and state-run television, that Russia’s effort to fight the virus has been superior to Western nations’.
Officially, 2,009 deaths nationwide had been attributed to the virus as of Monday.
Saudi Arabia is tripling its sales tax as the cost of fighting the virus and lower oil prices strain its budget.
Saudi Arabia’s government said Monday that it would triple the rate of its value added tax on sales to 15 percent and take other measures to shore up state finances, as the combination of lower oil prices and the costs of fighting the coronavirus pandemic strains the kingdom’s budget.
The minister of finance, Mohammad Aljadaan, also said that spending on Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s Vision 2030 projects, which aim to diversify the Saudi economy and create new jobs for Saudis, would be cut, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.
The Crown Prince, who is Saudi Arabia’s chief policymaker, wants to build a futuristic new city called Neom, and vast tourist schemes on the Red Sea and in the interior, but the effects of the pandemic have virtually killed off international tourism.
The new measures would boost state coffers by around 100 billion Saudi riyals, or about $26 billion.
Saudi Arabia’s government is heavily reliant on oil revenue, and the price of oil has collapsed more than 50 percent this year, partly because of lost demand as governments shut down their economies to curb the spread of the coronavirus. Saudi Arabia has recorded about 39,000 coronavirus cases and more than 245 deaths.
Coronavirus cases are climbing in Iraq, driven in part by relaxed stay-at-home orders.
Iraq’s coronavirus experience has been an anomaly. Even in a region with far fewer cases than Europe or the United States, Iraq’s scarcity of confirmed cases, about 2,700 by early May, has stood out.
But the numbers are climbing steadily, leaving some experts asking, why now? The answer seems linked to a handful of superspreading events paired with the relaxation of lockdown measures. In the 19 days since Iraq’s curfew was eased, coronavirus cases in the country have risen 73 percent.
At least two isolated instances that led to dozens of infections — a funeral in Basra, and a birthday party in Baghdad — have been deemed superspreading events. Although it is hard to tie all the cases to those events since Iraq does only limited contact tracing, infections in both cities climbed steadily after they took place, even as cases slowed in other areas of the country.
Around 110 people who attended the funeral in Basra or came into contact with someone who attended have tested positive for the coronavirus, said Dr. Mustafa Abdul Rahman, the head of public health for the province. The health authorities did not realize that someone in the area was infected, and once people began to move around because of the relaxed stay-at-home order, it was already too late.
The health ministry moved belatedly to block off the area where most of those who tested positive came from, putting up blast walls to stop people from going in or out, and stationing security forces at the town’s entrance.
“Better late than not doing it at all,” Dr. Rahman said.
But the restrictions may have had the opposite effect, said Talib Sarhan al Maliki, a psychologist who lives in the town.
“The people feel stigmatized,” he said. “People fear being shut in with other sick people.”
And that, in turn, means people are reluctant to come forward and be tested.
India takes another major step, restarting one of the world’s largest train networks.
India’s train network will gradually restart operations on Tuesday as the country eases its coronavirus lockdown, even though infections there are rising.
The train network, one of the world’s largest, closed in late March when a strict lockdown was implemented. But as India begins to slowly open up this month, trains are the first mode of transport being allowed to crisscross the country.
On Sunday, India reported more than 67,000 total coronavirus cases and more than 2,200 deaths.
The closure of the train system was the first since India gained independence in 1947, offering a potent symbol of the global panic sweeping into the country.
The government converted some 20,000 train carriages into isolation wards, bracing for a wave of coronavirus infections that many predicted would overwhelm hospitals. That disaster has largely failed to materialize, although some cities have fared worse than others, with entire hospitals shut in as staff members became infected.
The railways ministry said on Sunday that some trains would run from New Delhi to cities across the country, but that passengers would have to wear masks and undergo health screenings before being allowed to depart. New routes will also be introduced, the ministry said.
The announcement comes after the government arranged for trains to shuttle thousands of migrant workers back to their homes, mostly in the rural hinterlands. As many as 45 million Indians travel each year from those areas to the country’s big cities to look for work. When the lockdown was announced, millions of migrant workers became homeless and jobless overnight. and with interstate travel banned, many set off on foot to travel to their homes, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
Shanghai Disneyland reopens with a long list of new safety rules.
Costumed characters attended a ceremony to reopen Shanghai Disneyland on Monday. The park is the first of the Disney resorts to resume operations.
Credit...Sam Mcneil/Associated Press-
Slide 1 of 6Costumed characters attended a ceremony to reopen Shanghai Disneyland on Monday. The park is the first of the Disney resorts to resume operations.
Credit...Sam Mcneil/Associated Press
Temperature checks are conducted on ticket holders upon arrival. All guests must wear face masks. Parades are suspended. No theater shows or fireworks. Purple social-distancing mats prevent bunching while waiting in line. Rows of seats are left empty on rides.
It’s not quite the escapist fantasy Disney typically hopes its theme parks will be, but the reopening of Shanghai Disneyland on Monday carried immense symbolic importance. It sent a message to Disney’s furloughed park employees — 43,000 in Florida alone — about the future: There will be one.
From a business standpoint, Shanghai Disneyland will be operating far below its potential. The Chinese government has limited capacity at the park to 24,000 people daily, less than one-third of its pre-outbreak capacity. Bob Chapek, Disney’s chief executive, said last week that Disney would reduce ticket sales even further — “far below” the government’s limit, in his words — to make sure that employees can enforce new safety rules. Fewer tickets sold means decreased food and merchandise sales.
Investors have been relieved. Disney shares have climbed 8 percent since May 5, when Mr. Chapek announced that Shanghai Disneyland would reopen, perhaps paving the way for similar actions at Disney resorts in the United States, Japan and France. The limited number of tickets that Shanghai Disneyland put on sale for this week sold out within hours, suggesting that people are willing to resume public activities, even without a vaccine.
When the Shanghai resort reopened on Monday, according to videos of the event, cast members — Disney’s term for employees — lined Mickey Avenue, which leads to the castle and aerial Dumbo ride, and waved madly as they greeted attendees. Belle, Minnie, Woody, Duffy and other costumed characters appeared with welcome banners as a marching band played an upbeat “Mary Poppins” tune.
“It has been an emotional morning,” Joe Schott, president and general manager of the Shanghai Disney Resort, said in a phone interview. “There is light at the end of the tunnel.”
U.S. plans to accuse China of trying to hack vaccine data.
The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are preparing to issue a warning that China’s most skilled hackers and spies are working to steal American research in the crash effort to develop vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus.
A draft of the forthcoming public warning, which officials say is likely to be issued in the coming days, says China is seeking “valuable intellectual property and public health data through illicit means related to vaccines, treatments and testing.”
It focuses on cybertheft and action by “nontraditional actors,” a euphemism for researchers and students the Trump administration says are being activated to steal data from academic and private laboratories.
The efforts are part of a surge in cybertheft and attacks by nations seeking advantage in the pandemic.
More than a dozen countries have redeployed military and intelligence hackers to glean whatever they can about other nations’ virus responses. Even American allies like South Korea and nations that do not typically stand out for their cyberabilities, like Vietnam, have redirected state-run hackers to focus on virus-related information, according to private security firms.
The decision to issue a specific accusation against China, current and former officials said, is part of a broader deterrent strategy that also involves United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. Under legal authorities that President Trump issued nearly two years ago, they have the power to bore deeply into Chinese and other networks to mount proportional counterattacks.
A spokesman for China’s foreign ministry denied the hacking allegations on Monday.
At a routine news briefing in Beijing, the ministry’s spokesman, Zhao Lijian, said China had long “resolutely opposed” all forms of hacking.
“China is at the forefront of the world in research and treatment of novel coronavirus vaccines,” Mr. Zhao said. “It is unethical for anyone to slander and falsely concoct rumors if they can’t provide evidence.”
The forthcoming warning is the latest iteration of a series of efforts by the Trump administration to blame China for being the source of the pandemic and exploiting its aftermath.
New Zealand and Australia begin to ease lockdowns.
New Zealand and Australia have begun to ease social distancing restrictions with small numbers of family and friends allowed to visit each other’s homes or go to restaurants.
The Australian state of Victoria, which has moved cautiously in responding to the pandemic, will now allow visits of as many as five people between homes and gatherings of up to 10 people outdoors, the state’s premier, Daniel Andrews, said on Monday.
New South Wales, the state that includes Sydney, will adopt roughly the same guidelines as of Friday, following a plan released by the federal government that outlined how the country could largely resume normal domestic life by July.
In New Zealand, where Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern favored an especially severe lockdown that has lasted for nearly two months, restrictions are set to ease on Thursday to an even greater degree.
Ms. Ardern said that restaurants could have a maximum of 100 customers, with bookings limited to groups of 10. Retail stores, malls, cinemas and other public spaces can reopen, while enforcing physical distancing requirements. Home visits of as many as 10 people will be allowed, and schools are set to return to normal classes starting May 18. If no outbreaks alter the timetable, Ms. Ardern said, bars will reopen May 21.
“Our team of five million has united to beat the virus and must keep doing so — and now we must unite to keep rebuilding our economy,” Ms. Ardern said on Monday.
The announcements come as pressure to reopen and revive the economies of both countries has intensified. Small protests broke out on Sunday in Melbourne and Sydney, led by those who claimed that the measures to stop the spread of the virus had gone too far.
As schools reopen in Europe, relief combines with risk.
The self-administered coronavirus tests being distributed at the high school in Neustrelitz, a small town in northern Germany, is one of the more intriguing efforts in Europe as countries embark on a giant experiment in how to reopen schools, which are being radically transformed by strict hygiene and distancing rules.
Restarting schools is at the core of any plan to restart economies globally. If schools do not reopen, parents cannot go back to work. So how Germany and other countries that have led the way on many fronts handle this stage in the pandemic will provide an essential lesson for the rest of the world.
For now, Europe is a patchwork of approaches and timetables — a vast laboratory for how to safely operate an institution that is central to any meaningful resumption of public life.
Austria, Belgium and Greece are all resuming lessons for select grades in coming weeks. Sweden never closed its schools but has put in place distancing and hygiene rules. Some hard-hit countries like Italy and Spain are not confident enough to open schools until the fall.
In Germany, which announced last week that it would reopen most aspects of its economy and allow all students back in coming weeks, class sizes have been cut in half. Hallways have become one-way systems. Breaks are staggered. Teachers wear masks, and students are told to dress warmly because windows and doors are kept open for air circulation. Germany allowed older children back to school first because they are better able to comply with rules on masks and distancing.
Evidence suggests that children are less likely to become seriously ill from Covid-19 than adults. But small numbers of children have become very sick and some have died, either from the respiratory failure that causes most adult deaths or from a newly recognized syndrome that causes acute inflammation in the heart.
An even greater blind spot is transmission. Children often do not have symptoms, making it less likely that they are tested and harder to see whether or how they spread the virus.
Countries where hardship is familiar sometimes fare better against the virus.
As the coronavirus has hopscotched the world, a paradox has emerged: Rich nations are not necessarily better at fighting the crisis than poorer ones.
In Europe, the disease has been burning through Britain, France and Italy, three of the continent’s four biggest economies. But smaller, poorer nations quickly imposed and enforced tough restrictions, stuck to them, and have so far fared better at keeping the virus contained.
The nations include many in the former Communist East, as well as Greece and Croatia, where the authorities are cautiously optimistic about their people’s endurance in the face of adversity.
Those countries could draw on deep reservoirs of resilience born of relatively recent hardship. Compared with what their people went through not long ago, the stringent lockdowns seemed less arduous, apparently prompting a larger social buy-in.
In Greece, where the strictures of the country’s debt crisis are fresh in most minds, the specter of one in three people being out of work is nothing new. In Croatia, many remember being barricaded indoors and hearing air raid sirens blaring for weeks on end during the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Ive Morovic, a 45-year-old barber in Zadar, Croatia, believes the focused way in which people in Croatia have responded to the pandemic harks back to wartime and the legacy of communism.
“People today are afraid,” he said. “The discipline we all learned helps us get in line and creates some sort of forced unity.”
A mosque in Britain built a makeshift mortuary in its parking lot.
Normally, the mosque, one of England’s largest, would be filled with thousands of worshipers during the holy month of Ramadan. Now it is mostly empty, except for stacks of coffins.
Every few hours, a van pulls up in front of the Central Jamia Mosque Ghamkol Sharif. Volunteers dressed in protective coveralls and masks come out and carefully unload velvet-covered coffins and carry them inside a makeshift mortuary in the mosque’s parking lot. There the bodies are washed, shrouded and refrigerated.
Before the coronavirus outbreak, the funeral service at the mosque in the hard-hit city of Birmingham, Britain’s second largest, would receive one or two bodies a week. But last month — as Britain hit its peak infection numbers — five to six bodies were brought in each day, forcing the mosque to build a makeshift mortuary in its parking lot, which it has opened to all faiths.
“I’ve lost count of the bodies that have come in and out of here,” said Javid Akhtar, the mosque’s funeral director. “I’ve never seen anything like this.”
While London has been the epicenter of the country’s outbreak, Birmingham and surrounding areas in the West Midlands have recently emerged as a virus hot spot. Communities from black and religious minority backgrounds, which make up around 26 percent of Birmingham’s 842,000 residents, have been disproportionally affected by the virus, prompting a government investigation into the cause.
“Everyone in the community knows someone who has died or is sick,” said Tariq Mahmood, a 24-year-old volunteer.
Reporting was contributed by Stephen Castle, Ivan Nechepurenko, Allison McCann, Alissa J. Rubin, Aurelien Breeden, Constant Méheut, Raphael Minder, Melissa Eddy, Isabella Kwai, Megan Specia, Livia Albeck-Ripka, Damien Cave, Chris Buckley, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Iliana Magra, Ceylan Yeginsu, Katrin Bennhold, Abdi Latif Dahir, Austin Ramzy, David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Maria Abi-Habib, Neil Vigdor, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, John Eligon, Audra D.S. Burch, Tracey Tully and Jim Tankersley.
"many" - Google News
May 12, 2020 at 01:03AM
https://ift.tt/3fyEJtg
Coronavirus World Updates: Empty Icons Return to Life With Lockdowns Easing - The New York Times
"many" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2OYUfnl
https://ift.tt/3f9EULr
No comments:
Post a Comment