N.Y.’s top officials urge caution and warn that protests could set off a second wave of infections.
After a fourth night of crowded and chaotic protests in New York City against racism and deadly police brutality, the mayor, the governor and public health officials voiced strong concerns Monday that the local demonstrations and others nationwide could set off a second wave of coronavirus infections.
“You turn on the TV, and you see mass gatherings that could potentially be infecting hundreds and hundreds of people after everything we have done,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.
He noted that the state had just hit a big milestone: On Sunday, under 1,000 people tested positive for the virus, for the first time since March 16. The percentage of daily positive tests has fallen from over 50 percent to under 2 percent, and the latest daily death toll was 54, down from nearly 800 in April.
“How many super-spreaders were in that crowd?” Mr. Cuomo asked. “How many young people went home and kissed their mother hello, or shook hands with their father, or hugged their father or their grandfather or their grandmother or their brother or their sister, and spread a virus?”
The convergence of the pandemic and the national demonstrations has forced many political leaders to try to strike a difficult balance between expressing support for the right to protest and safeguarding the public health.
“If you say ‘Don’t come out because of the pandemic,’” Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “We don’t want people to hear about this as, ‘We are not hearing your concerns, or your concerns are not valid, or we don’t have to change things.’”
Still, he said, “for those who have made their presence felt, made their voices heard, the safest thing from this point is to stay home.” He said he was considering imposing a curfew to maintain order.
More than 100,000 Americans have already died of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. People of color have been particularly hard hit, with rates of hospitalizations and deaths among black Americans far exceeding those of whites.
Public health officials urged anyone who does protest to wear face coverings, use hand sanitizer, and maintain social distance. Though some experts said that the fact that the protests are held outdoors could reduce the risk of transmission, the leader of New York City’s contact-tracing effort said that everyone who attended a protest should get tested for the virus.
Mr. Cuomo noted that New York City is set to reopen on June 8 and that he did not want to endanger that effort. “Protest, just be smart about it,” he said. “With this virus you can do many things now as long as you’re smart about it.”
Officials elsewhere have slowed reopening because of the protests. Beaches had been scheduled to open on Monday in Miami-Dade County, Fla., but the mayor said they would stay closed until a curfew prompted by the protests is lifted.
Many of the nation’s governors have spoken in support of the protests, but President Trump, who has been besieged by protests and fires outside the White House, lashed out at them on Monday, warning them that they would look like “jerks” if they didn’t order demonstrators arrested and imprisoned.
“You have to dominate,” he told them on a conference call. “If you don’t dominate, you’re wasting your time.”
In the weeks since America began reopening on a large scale, the virus has persisted on a stubborn but uneven path, with meaningful progress in some cities and alarming new outbreaks in others.
New cases are on a small but steady decline over all, to about 21,000 a day from more than 30,000 at the peak in April, a somewhat encouraging sign that the pandemic is waning in the United States.
The Midwest is still troubled by persistent outbreaks. Virus hospitalizations are on the rise in Wisconsin. New cases are consistently high in Minnesota, particularly around the Twin Cities, where health officials have warned that the escalating protests could increase the infection risk.
But in the Northeast, the outlook has seesawed in the other direction. In New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, case numbers have plunged considerably in recent days. Churches in Massachusetts have been given permission to reopen.
In the South, where some states have been open for weeks, there are now small but fierce flare-ups. Rural pockets of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are struggling to control growing outbreaks. Arkansas seemed to be on the rebound when May began but by last week, daily reports of new cases had spiked to near the highest levels since the epidemic began.
Despite the continuing outbreaks in parts of Mississippi, the governor announced on Monday that all businesses may reopen and travel restrictions had been lifted. Social distancing rules remained in effect, however.
In New Jersey, there were an additional 27 deaths, the governor said.
The Hong Kong police halted plans for a vigil on Thursday in memory of the people who died during the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests, citing the need to enforce social-distancing rules.
It is the first time the June 4 vigil, which has been held annually since 1990, has been blocked. Fears about limits on free speech and political expression have grown in Hong Kong after Beijing announced last month that it would impose new national security laws on the semiautonomous city, and some democracy advocates in the city had wondered whether this year’s event might be the last.
The vigil organizers said they still planned to go to Victoria Park, where the event is regularly held, even though they expected the police to break up any gathering. They have asked supporters in Hong Kong and around the world to light candles in their homes or other private places and post the images online.
The organizing body, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, also plans to set up booths around the city to observe the event, said Lee Cheuk-yan, the group’s chairman. A handful of churches are to hold special services, he said.
“This is one of the characteristics of Hong Kong. We all came out to support democracy in China in 1989,” Mr. Lee said. “We have continued for 30 years, and people are really shocked that we can be persistent.”
Protesters in Hong Kong have regularly been fined in recent weeks for violating social-distancing rules that prevent gatherings of more than eight people. They have accused the police of enforcing the rules against government critics while ignoring gatherings by establishment supporters or large crowds in bar districts.
Mr. Trump said last week he would begin the process of ending the U.S. relationship with Hong Kong in response to Beijing’s move to impose broad new national security legislation. The Trump administration has provided little details on the timing and scope of the plans, and the Chinese government has cast the plans as the latest attempt by a foreign government to interfere in Hong Kong. Investors have kept a sharp eye on the tensions between the two countries.
A U.S. State Department official on Saturday attacked the ruling Communist Party on Twitter for moving to impose national security legislation to quash dissent in Hong Kong, prompting a spokeswoman for the Chinese government to fire back on Twitter saying “I can’t breathe,” a popular refrain among the U.S. protesters.
Hong Kong has been widely praised for its success in controlling the spread of the virus. The city, with 7.5 million people, has recorded 1,085 cases and four deaths.
Several countries where the pandemic appears to be ebbing marked the beginning of June by easing restrictions. They included South Africa, which lifted its ban on alcohol sales. A drop in murders and traffic accidents had been attributed to the measure, but bootleggers quickly stepped in to meet demand.
Other measures that went into effect on Monday:
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Students were allowed to return to some elementary schools in England, but many parents decided to keep their children home, concerned that the risks remain too high. Schools also resumed in Greece.
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A pigeon race involving 4,000 birds marked the reopening of some sports events in Britain, and it was soon followed by a horse race held without spectators.
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Beaches in Spain reopened, except those near Barcelona, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao became the country’s first major cultural institution to again allow visitors. Ireland also allowed bathers to return to some beaches.
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Cinemas began screening films again in Thailand, although their audiences were limited to 200 people and customers must be separated by at least one empty seat. Portugal also reopened movie theaters along with some other businesses. Bars reopened in the Netherlands, Finland and Norway.
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The Adriatic state of Montenegro, which has declared itself free of the virus, reopened its border to foreigners. The prime minister of Pakistan also lifted restrictions on foreign visitors. Lithuania ended a 14-day quarantine requirement for visitors from dozens of countries.
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Visitors were allowed into two of Italy’s biggest tourist attractions: the Vatican Museums, including the Sistine Chapel, and the Colosseum.
A major debt crisis looms for poor countries.
From Angola to Jamaica to Ecuador to Zambia, the world’s poor countries have had their finances shredded by the pandemic.
The president of Tanzania has called on “our rich brothers” to cancel his country’s debt. Belarus veered toward a default when a promised $600 million loan from Russia fell through. Russia couldn’t spare the money because the ruble had taken a nose-dive, along with oil and gas prices. Lebanon, troubled even before the pandemic, has embarked on its first debt restructuring. And Argentina has defaulted for the ninth time in its history.
The low interest rates of the last decade allowed poor countries to raise money relatively cheaply to finance their growth. As a result, developing countries now owe record amounts of money to investors, governments and others outside their borders: $2.1 trillion for countries ranked as “low income” and “lower-middle income” by the World Bank.
As economic activity has ground to a halt, governments are on the hook for billions of dollars in interest and principal repayments. Volatility in the currency markets has now made those payments suddenly more expensive. And lenders are not in a forgiving mood.
“The last time we had this many countries likely to go under at the same time was in the 1980s,” said Mitu Gulati, a law professor at Duke University who studies the debts of countries.
Resolving those debts took years of negotiations, austerity measures and stalled economic development. But the brewing debt crisis could be even harder to sort out.
As New York City prepares to reopen after enduring one of the worst outbreaks in the world, officials are scrambling to avoid a new disaster: the gridlock that could result if many people continue to avoid public transportation and turn to cars instead.
Before the crisis, eight million people in the region each weekday — including over 50 percent of the city’s population — used a complex network of subways, buses and railways that has long been a vibrant symbol of the largest U.S. metropolis. But ridership plummeted as workers stayed home to slow the spread of the virus.
Now the city faces a dilemma: Encouraging people to return to mass transit could increase the risk of new infections. But the region’s roads, tunnels and bridges cannot handle a surge in car traffic, and there are few alternatives.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees most of the system, said on Friday that it would roll out a plan to lure riders back, including ramping up service to reduce congestion, deploying the police to enforce mask usage and stationing workers across the subway to report overcrowding.
Transit officials are also urging the city to mandate that major companies create flexible start times and extend work-from-home plans to help ease crowding as businesses reopen.
Still, the efforts to restore confidence in public transportation were dealt a blow when the C.D.C. unexpectedly released guidelines on Thursday that urged people to drive to work alone, rather than take public transportation.
The police in India’s capital, New Delhi, were roundly criticized for their role in anti-Muslim violence earlier this year. Now they’re on the front line of the city’s fight against the virus.
They are manning hundreds of checkpoints and running patrols across the city. They are often the first to respond to calls for potential cases and coordinate the medical response. They are preparing and serving meals to desperately poor people in many locked down communities.
The force has used these efforts to rehabilitate its image, which had been tarnished by evidence of police brutality during nationwide protests over a divisive citizenship law.
The criticism that followed was demoralizing to rank-and-file officers. M.S. Randhawa, a commissioner of the New Delhi police force, said the virus campaign was “a morale booster for the staff.”
A billion-dollar program to protect cities from climate change is at risk of failing, the latest example of how the pandemic has disrupted American climate policy.
Projects in 13 cities and states, which were part of the Obama administration’s push to protect Americans from climate change after the devastation from Hurricane Sandy, are now in jeopardy because of the pandemic, state and local officials warn. And they need Congress to save those projects.
On Monday, officials are expected to tell lawmakers that the virus will prevent them from meeting the conditions of a $1 billion Obama-era program for large-scale construction projects that defend cities and states against climate-related disasters. That money must be spent by the fall of 2022.
Missing that deadline, which officials say is likely because of virus-related delays, would mean forfeiting the remaining money, scuttling the projects. States and cities have been moving swiftly in the design phases and to secure permits since the Obama administration awarded the funds in 2016. Officials will ask Congress to extend the deadline for construction by three years, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The New York Times.
“Without an extension, any funds not spent by the deadline will be canceled and projects will remain unfinished,” the letter reads.
With the United States looking inward, preoccupied by the soaring number of virus deaths, unemployment at more than 20 percent and nationwide protests, its competitors are moving to fill the vacuum, and quickly. China has pushed in recent weeks to move troops into disputed territory with India, continue aggressive actions in the South China Sea and rewrite the rules of how it will control Hong Kong.
Russian fighter jets have roared dangerously close to U.S. Navy planes over the Mediterranean Sea, while the country’s space forces conducted an antisatellite missile test clearly aimed at sending the message that Moscow could blind U.S. spy satellites and take down GPS and other communications systems. Russia’s military cyberunits were busy, too, the National Security Agency reported, with an attack that may portend accelerated planning for a strike on email systems this election year.
The North Koreans said they were accelerating their “nuclear deterrent,” moving beyond two years of vague promises of disarmament and Kim Jong-un’s warm exchanges of letters with Mr. Trump. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said that Iran was re-establishing the infrastructure needed to make a bomb — all a reaction, the Iranians insist, to Mr. Trump’s decision to reimpose sanctions and dismantle the Obama-era nuclear deal.
The virus may have changed almost everything, but it did not change this: Global challenges to the United States spin ahead, with American adversaries testing the limits and seeing what gains they can make with minimal pushback.
U.S. stocks wavered while global markets rose on Monday, with investors watching for signs of increasing tensions between the United States and China.
The S&P 500 drifted between losses and gains in early trading after a weekend of violence and unrest in the United States after the death of George Floyd. Shares of retailers who said they were temporarily closing some stores in response to the turmoil took a hit. Target was down about 2 percent, while Walmart dipped nearly 1 percent.
Stocks in London and Paris were more than 1 percent higher in early Monday trading, though markets in Germany and several other countries were closed for a holiday. Asian markets rose strongly, paced by an increase of more than 3 percent in Hong Kong and more than 2 percent in mainland China shares.
An experimental drug treatment may be effective with a shorter course.
The experimental antiviral drug remdesivir may be as effective in treating coronavirus patients when given for five days instead of the usual 10, its maker, Gilead Sciences, announced on Monday.
Because supplies of the drug are limited, infectious disease experts have been hoping that a shorter course would be just as effective.
The Food and Drug Administration has granted an emergency authorization to remdesivir, allowing doctors to prescribe it even though the drug is not yet formally approved. The authorization came after a large federal trial showed the medication sped recovery in seriously ill patients who received it intravenously for 10 days.
The data indicate that remdesivir is not a miracle drug. But it is the only treatment that a large, controlled trial has shown helps hospitalized Covid-19 patients.
The small study by Gilead has not yet been published nor peer-reviewed. It also did not involve the use of a placebo, as is normally the case.
The study involved 584 moderately ill Covid-19 patients who were hospitalized but who did not have pneumonia. All the patients were given standard-of-care treatment. But 191 were randomly assigned to receive remdesivir for five days, while 194 were given the drug for 10 days.
The researchers measured clinical improvement and found that the five-day course of treatment was modestly better than the usual patient care alone. The 10-day course was not measurably better than normal care, perhaps because of side effects.
The United States has delivered two million doses of a malaria drug to Brazil for use in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, and the two countries are embarking on a joint research effort to study whether the drug is safe and effective for the prevention and early treatment of Covid-19, the White House announced on Sunday.
The announcement comes after months of controversy over the drug, hydroxychloroquine, which President Trump has aggressively promoted, despite a lack of scientific evidence of its effectiveness as a treatment for Covid-19. Mr. Trump stunned public health experts by saying he was taking a two-week course of the medicine.
The donated doses will be used as a prophylactic “to help defend” Brazil’s nurses, doctors and health care professionals against infection, and will also be used to treat Brazilians who become infected, the White House said.
Hydroxychloroquine is widely used for the prevention of malaria and for treatment of certain autoimmune diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, and many doctors consider it safe. But the Food and Drug Administration has warned that it can cause heart arrhythmia in some patients.
Early research in Brazil and New York suggested that it could be linked to a higher number of deaths among hospitalized patients. More recently, a review of a hospital database published by an influential medical journal, The Lancet, concluded that treating people who have Covid-19 with chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine did not help and might have increased the risk of abnormal heart rhythms and death.
But last week, more than 100 scientists and clinicians questioned the authenticity of that database. Some researchers say hydroxychloroquine does show promise as a possible prophylactic or treatment in the early stages of Covid-19, and a number of clinical trials — including one conducted by the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases — are trying to answer those questions. Amid the uproar, experts say, legitimate research has suffered.
Patrick Kingsley, an international correspondent, and Laetitia Vancon, a photojournalist, are driving more than 3,700 miles to explore the reopening of the European continent after coronavirus lockdowns.
You can smell the gin distillery before you see it — the whiff of alcohol floats down the street outside. And if you head inside on the right morning, you’ll find a mustachioed chemist infusing that alcohol with juniper berries, coriander seeds and aniseed.
But the chemist, Michael Levantaci, was mixing something very different last Thursday. He had put the herbs and fruit to one side, and was instead pouring glycerin and ether into a silver vat. The first makes the alcohol kinder to the touch, the other makes it undrinkable.
The Rubbens Distillery has made gin since 1817, when Belgium was still part of the Netherlands. Since the coronavirus crisis started, prompting a Europe-wide shortage of disinfectant, it has also bottled approximately 37,000 gallons of hand sanitizer.
“I prefer the gin part,” said Mr. Levantaci, who invented most of the distillery’s 19 gin and liqueur recipes.
Hendrik Beck, whose family of farmers owns and runs the firm, said that at the moment, “It’s not about making a fancy product.”
“We just wanted to help,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Ian Austen, Julie Bosman, Stacy Cowley, Antonio de Luca, Jeffrey Gettleman, Christina Goldbaum, Luis Ferré-Sadurní, Christopher Flavelle, Jack Healy, Caroline Kim, Patrick Kingsley, Gina Kolata, Hari Kumar, Denise Lu, Apoorva Mandavilli, Raphael Minder, Andy Newman, Matt Phillips, Roni Caryn Rabin, Rick Rojas, David E. Sanger, Eric Schmitt, Dionne Searcey, Karan Deep Singh, Mitch Smith, Eileen Sullivan, Umi Syam, Dave Taft, Carlos Tejada, Mary Williams Walsh, Edward Wong, Ceylan Yeginsu and Karen Zraick.