Here’s what you need to know:
- Italy’s poorer south suffers under lockdown, and fears a second blow from the virus.
- The number facing acute hunger could double this year, the World Food Program says.
- A port city in Ecuador has become an epicenter of the outbreak in Latin America.
- Lebanese protesters head back to the streets — some in cars — as the virus magnifies dysfunction.
- 25,000 missing deaths: Tracking the true toll of the crisis.
- U.S. updates: Trump announced a pause in green cards, and new guidelines say there’s no proven drug for treating Covid-19.
- A team at Oxford will begin trials of a potential vaccine on people this week.
Italy’s poorer south suffers under lockdown, and fears a second blow from the virus.
In Italy, the pandemic hit the wealthy north first and hardest, but the poorer south is also suffering deeply, amid fears that things there could get much worse.
The northern region that includes Milan, the country’s commercial capital, has suffered one of the world’s worst outbreaks. It has caused more than 20,000 known deaths, sickened and killed many health care workers, overwhelmed hospitals, forced doctors to ration lifesaving treatment and left many elderly people to die with no care at all.
The national lockdown the government ordered six weeks ago has kept that level of catastrophe from hitting the south, where there have been about 1,500 deaths, and where health care systems are not as sophisticated or as well staffed, and were already in dire financial straits.
“The health system in the south cannot hold a candle to the northern one,” said Giovanni Rezza, director of the infectious illness department at the National Health Institute. He said the government’s lockdown decision was in part motivated by the belief that “the south cannot bear the shock of an epidemic.”
Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Tuesday that the country was likely to begin easing lockdown measures from May 4, and promised to move cautiously. But southern officials fear that easing travel restrictions will expose their region to the full wrath of Covid-19.
The south was already suffering from poverty and corruption before the epidemic struck, leaving many people with little to fall back on. Unemployment was at 18 percent, and many workers were ineligible for benefits if they lost their jobs because they worked off the books.
In such conditions, the lockdown has left people unable to buy food or pay rent.
Meorina Mazza, who lives in the southern region of Calabria, said she now relies on donations of flour to feed her two daughters, but cannot pay her electricity bills.
“We are really headed toward total desperation,” she said.
The number facing acute hunger could double this year, the World Food Program says.
The coronavirus pandemic is likely to double the number of people facing acute hunger this year, according to a new report from the World Food Program that details how the virus — and the resulting lockdowns — will exacerbate conditions in some of the world’s poorest nations.
About 265 million people in low- and middle-income nations could face starvation by the end of 2020, a doubling of the 135 million who already faced acute food insecurity in 2019, according to the program, which is part of the United Nations. Most of the countries with the worst food crises are in Africa, with conflict, climate change and economic crises listed as the main factors threatening access to food.
The coronavirus pandemic has infected more than 2.4 million people and killed over 165,000 in at least 177 nations since it began, upending almost all aspects of life, and introducing dramatic changes to how we interact, learn, and work. Across the world, lockdowns and social distancing measures aimed at curbing the spread of the virus have also affected agricultural production, food security and levels of nutrition.
Unless much-needed food and humanitarian aid is delivered to those in need, the virus and the response “could prove catastrophic for millions already hanging by a thread,” Arif Husain, the chief economist with the World Food Program, said in a statement.
“It is a hammer blow for millions more who can only eat if they earn a wage,” Mr. Husain said, adding, “It only takes one more shock — like Covid-19 — to push them over the edge.”
The United Nations said on Monday that global donors had only pledged a quarter of the $2 billion it needs to respond to the challenges brought by the pandemic.
A port city in Ecuador has become an epicenter of the outbreak in Latin America.
Ecuador took early, aggressive measures to stop the coronavirus, but could not prevent its largest city, Guayaquil, from becoming the site of Latin America’s worst outbreak. A lack of tracking and testing of people who arrived in Ecuador from Europe contributed to the spread of the virus in February.
It took 13 days to diagnose an Ecuadorean woman the government labeled Patient 0, who was living in Spain and had returned home. In that time, she infected at least 17 other people, including much of her family, according to a medical investigator. As authorities grapple with the scale of the crisis that caused hospitals and morgues to collapse, they believe the toll is likely many times larger than the official figure of 520 deaths.
Lebanese protesters head back to the streets — some in cars — as the virus magnifies dysfunction.
When the pandemic froze Lebanon in place last month, it also dispersed the last crowds of antigovernment protesters who had filled the country’s streets for months, chanting against what they call the country’s corrupt and incompetent political elite.
Over the last week, however, small demonstrations have flared once again in Beirut, the capital, and Tripoli, a northern city where many lived hand-to-mouth even before their daily wages disappeared amid the lockdown to try to slow the virus’s spread. The shutdown has magnified the poverty and joblessness that drove many of the protesters out to the streets in the first place.
Videos posted on social media over the last week showed protesters crowding roads in Tripoli, none wearing masks, shouting, “Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!”
Other protesters respected the rules of social distancing by coming up with a new way to make their voices heard. On Tuesday, convoys of cars in Beirut drove in honking protest past the building where Lebanon’s Parliament was meeting. (The Parliament met under circumstances dictated by the coronavirus, convening in a large auditorium instead of the usual government building so lawmakers could sit far apart.)
With the value of the Lebanese lira plummeting, banks continuing to withhold depositors’ savings and prospects of an international bailout uncertain at best, the government’s economic recovery plan has drawn widespread skepticism. Its distributions of food aid amid the lockdown have also been criticized for falling far short of the need.
Beginning in mid-October, the protest movement had drawn at least a million people — a quarter of the population — to daily demonstrations, which tailed off by early this year. As the virus spread, some of the remaining demonstrators donned surgical masks. But soon after the lockdown began in March, security forces moved to dismantle protesters’ tents in downtown Beirut. But neither that, nor the virus, stopped the protests.
25,000 missing deaths: Tracking the true toll of the crisis.
At least 25,000 more people have died during the coronavirus pandemic over the last month than official Covid-19 death counts report, a review of mortality data in 11 countries shows — providing a clearer, if still incomplete, picture of the toll of the crisis.
In the last month, far more people died in these countries than in previous years, The New York Times found. The totals include deaths from Covid-19 and those from other causes, potentially including those who could not be treated as hospitals became overwhelmed.
These numbers contradict the notion that many people who have died from the virus might soon have died anyway. In Paris, more than twice the usual number of people have died each day, far more than at the peak of a bad flu season. In New York City, the number is four times the normal amount.
Of course, mortality data in the middle of a pandemic is not perfect. The disparities between the official death counts and the total rise in deaths most likely reflect limited testing for the virus, rather than intentional undercounting. Officially, about 160,000 people have died worldwide of the coronavirus as of Tuesday.
But the total death numbers offer a more complete portrait of the pandemic, experts say, especially because most countries report only those Covid-19 deaths that occur in hospitals.
U.S. updates: Trump announced a pause in green cards, and new guidelines say there’s no proven drug for treating Covid-19.
President Trump said on Tuesday that he would order a temporary halt in issuing green cards to prevent people from immigrating to the United States, but he backed away from plans to suspend guest worker programs after business groups exploded in anger at the threat of losing access to foreign labor.
Mr. Trump, whose administration has faced intense criticism in recent months for his handling of the coronavirus crisis, abruptly sought to change the subject Tuesday night by resuming his assault on immigration, which animated his 2016 campaign and became one of the defining issues of his presidency.
He cast his decision to “suspend immigration,” which he first announced in a late-night tweet on Monday, as a move to protect American jobs.
But it comes as the United States economy sheds its work force at a record rate and when few employers are reaching out for workers at home or abroad. More than 22 million Americans have lost their jobs in the economic devastation caused by the virus and efforts to contain it.
Seeking to contain the economic fallout of the virus, Mr. Trump and congressional leaders reached agreement on Tuesday on a $484 billion aid package that will replenish a fund to help small businesses keep paying their employees.
Also on Tuesday, the federal agency led by Dr. Anthony Fauci issued guidelines stated there is no proven drug for treating coronavirus patients, a finding that essentially reinforces Dr. Fauci’s dissent from Mr. Trump’s repeated promotion of certain drugs without evidence to support their use.
The report echoed what frustrated doctors already know: Not enough is known about the highly infectious virus or how to combat it. Dr. Fauci has repeatedly pushed back at the president’s enthusiasm over the malaria drugs hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine.
The expert panel specifically advised against several treatments unless they were given in clinical trials. One was the combination of the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine plus the antibiotic azithromycin, which Mr. Trump has repeatedly promoted despite the lack of evidence that they work.
A team at Oxford will begin trials of a potential vaccine on people this week.
Britain’s health secretary, Matt Hancock, said on Tuesday that trials of a coronavirus vaccine will begin on people this week, with the government making £20m, or $24.5 million, available to an Oxford University team to accelerate its work.
Mr. Hancock said at a news conference that a successful outcome was far from guaranteed, because vaccine development was generally a matter of trial and error, but added that it would normally have taken two years to get to this point in the work cycle.
He also announced funding to support vaccine development at Imperial College, London, and said the government would invest in expanding manufacturing capacity to produce any successful vaccine on a large scale.
Sarah Gilbert, a professor of vaccinology at the Jenner Institute at Oxford University, told Sky News that she hoped that up to 500 people would be part of the trial by the middle of May.
“We will be monitoring them asking them to contact us if they have any symptoms of coronavirus and then we will find out who is getting infected,” she said.
The trials will involve healthy volunteers and take place in Oxford and Southampton, with three other sites to be added later.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Race For A Vaccine
In an era of global connectedness, the quest for a coronavirus shot has revealed the boundaries of international solidarity.The crisis could have deep, lasting effects on the way people’s minds work.
After life returns to something more like it was before the pandemic, will we?
Will we avoid crowds, or even going outside? Will we find it hard to focus our thoughts or make plans? Will newfound virtues, like looking after our neighbors, persist?
The world has changed, and in response, so have people — the way they think, react and relate to each other. The history of places that have been thrust into long periods of isolation and danger shows that the changes within people can be deep and lasting.
“Loss of control of one’s routines, sense of normalcy, freedom, face-to-face connections and so on” defined much of peoples’ experiences during the 2003 SARS epidemic, said Sim Kang, a psychologist at Singapore’s Institute of Mental Health.
Studies from the SARS, Ebola and swine flu outbreaks show that all caused spikes in anxiety, depression and anger. But they also produced behaviors designed to regain a sense of control: people reported working on their diet or hygiene, or reading more news.
Other people cope by accepting that they are powerless and can only react to circumstances. But that outlook can hinder their ability to look ahead and make decisions when the crisis ends.
Many people develop habits of reaching out to help each other. “All the different ways that people create solidarity in a crisis get activated,” said Dipali Mukhopadhyay, a Columbia University political scientist.
Even with a vaccine, it could take two years to tame the pandemic in the United States. That is a long time for people to grow accustomed to life possibly without in-person weddings, sports events, religious gatherings, air travel, concerts, public transit and restaurants.
“People, during times of prolonged, radical change, end up changing,” said Luka Lucic, a Pratt Institute psychologist.
Criminal gangs in Mexico hand out food, posing as protectors of the poor.
As Mexico’s economy staggers under the fallout of the pandemic, organized criminal groups have stepped into the spotlight, trying to cast themselves as Robin Hood-like benefactors, handing out aid to impoverished communities.
In recent weeks, images and videos on social media have shown members of at least five different drug gangs going door to door, distributing aid packages with canned foods, toilet paper, beans and rice to poor neighborhoods in at least half a dozen states.
A video posted on Facebook last week showed Alejandrina Guzmán, along with several other women assembling boxes of food and supplies, labeled with the face of her father, the famed drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. Mr. Guzmán, who led the Sinaloa Cartel, is serving a life sentence in a U.S. federal prison.
“What we are seeing is a kind of P.R. campaign from these criminal groups, seizing a favorable environment to do this, clearly unpreoccupied about the reaction of authorities and trying to rally support during these critical times,” said Eduardo Guerrero, a security analyst based in Mexico City.
In a country with widespread poverty, criminal gangs regularly use handouts to win favor, but their recent actions are more blatant, underlining the government’s shortcomings — and, analysts say, rubbing the government’s nose in it.
“It turns out that those who are doing the grass-roots aid efforts are drug traffickers,” Mr. Guerrero said.
Mexico moved more slowly than others in the region to restrict public life, trying to slow a virus that has been blamed for more than 700 deaths.
On Monday, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador urged gang members to stop distributing food and supplies, and end the country’s crippling violence instead.
“They shouldn’t come out now saying ‘we are handing out aid packages,’ no, it is better if they lay off and think of their families,” he said.
A report says the pandemic threatens press freedom around the world, including in the U.S.
The coronavirus pandemic could threaten press freedom and exacerbate the crises that reporters around the world are facing, according to this year’s World Press Freedom Index, which evaluates the landscape for journalists in 180 countries and territories.
The report, published Tuesday by the media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders, said the United States and Brazil were becoming models of hostility toward the news media. It also singled out China, Iran and Iraq for censoring coverage of the coronavirus outbreak.
The pandemic has already redefined norms. New laws that some governments have passed with the ostensible goal of slowing the spread of the virus — which broaden state surveillance, for instance — have raised concerns about long-term negative effects on the news media and freedom of expression.
The pandemic has allowed governments to “take advantage of the fact that politics are on hold, the public is stunned and protests are out of the question, in order to impose measures that would be impossible in normal times,” Christophe Deloire, the secretary general of Reporters Without Borders, said in a statement.
Press freedom in the United States continued to suffer under President Trump’s administration, according to the report, which ranked the country 45th out of 180, up three spots from last year.
Under cover of coronavirus, Hong Kong cracks down on protest movement.
As the world has been engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities in Hong Kong have arrested prominent pro-democracy figures in politics, civil society and the media, waging a broad crackdown on the demonstrations that convulsed the city last year.
The government’s campaign is in tandem with recent efforts by mainland China’s central government, itself a core target of antigovernment demonstrators, to assert more stridently what it perceives as its right to intervene in the affairs of the semiautonomous Chinese territory.
These moves have raised concerns in Hong Kong that China’s ruling Communist Party is pressing for restrictions that would curb the protests, which were among the biggest challenges for China’s leader, Xi Jinping. Many fear that such restrictions, which could include a widely contested national security law, would accelerate the erosion of civil liberties in Hong Kong, a former British colony that enjoys freedoms unseen on the mainland.
This year, the coronavirus epidemic has helped mute antigovernment demonstrations in Hong Kong. But the government’s crackdown could revive the protests, particularly if the local outbreak remains under control and social distancing rules are eased. (Hong Kong on Tuesday extended a range of social distancing measures to May 7.)
Here is a look at the key recent steps, and what they could mean for the coming months.
New studies using antibody testing find far more infections than expected.
Two new studies using antibody testing to assess how many people have been infected with the coronavirus have turned up numbers higher than some experts had expected.
If the numbers prove accurate, one of the researchers said, the coronavirus may prove to have a lower fatality rate than current data suggests, and one that more closely resembles that of a bad flu strain, which would be less than .2 percent.
Both studies were performed in California: one in Santa Clara County and the other in Los Angeles County. In both cases, the estimates of the number of people infected countywide were far higher than the number of confirmed cases.
In the Santa Clara study, researchers tested 3,330 volunteers for antibodies indicating exposure, and roughly 1.5 percent were positive. After adjustments to account for differences between the sample and the county population as a whole, the researchers estimated the prevalence of antibodies fell between about 2.5 percent and just over 4 percent.
That means that between 48,000 and 81,000 people were infected in Santa Clara by early April, the researchers concluded.
In Los Angeles County, researchers conducted tests in early April and estimated that between 2.8 percent to 5.6 percent of the county’s adult population carried antibodies. If accurate, that would mean that 220,000 to 442,000 residents had been exposed.
By comparison, only 8,000 cases had been confirmed in the county at the time the testing was done.
Antibody studies in other countries have produced similar numbers, said Dr. John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and an author of the paper on Santa Clara County.
Neither report has been peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal, and both pieces of research have met with criticism. Both relied on volunteers, which may have skewed the results, and the investigators say they are now probing their data to see how significant this bias may have been. They maintain, though, that so-called participation bias would not alter the conclusion significantly.
Many antibody tests have also been found to be inaccurate. The investigators say they validated the accuracy of the tests used.
The new data suggest most adults will experience mild or asymptomatic infections, even as the virus presents a grave threat to some. But little is known about the transmissibility of the virus from asymptomatic adults, which may complicate efforts to understand how the virus spreads.
The Dutch have to wait longer for soccer, haircuts and grandparent visits, but schools will reopen soon.
The Netherlands has canceled public gatherings, including the professional soccer league’s games, until Sept. 1, but elementary students will be able to return to school next month, Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced on Tuesday.
Mr. Rutte disappointed many people who had hoped he would take the first steps toward restoring public life by easing restrictions that were set to expire next week. Instead, he extended them into May, if not longer, much as neighboring countries have done.
“Yes this is sour, I understand, but we have to sacrifice for the greater good,” he said at a news conference.
The prime minister said he had “struggled” with the decisions, calling it a “diabolical dilemma” and concluded that opening up the country further is “scary and dangerous.”
The ban on “contact professions” like hairdressers, physical therapists and tattoo artists was extended by at least a week. Mr. Rutte said that before lifting it, he wanted to investigate how effective masks and other protective equipment were in preventing the spread of the virus.
A prohibition on visiting elderly relatives in nursing homes was also extended by at least a week.
“This is extremely difficult but we must to protect them at all costs,” Mr. Rutte said.
The one important relaxation he announced was allowing elementary students to return to school on May 11. They will attend on alternating days, to let them stay farther apart.
The Netherlands, a country of 17 million people, has had more than 3,900 confirmed Covid-19 deaths, giving it one of the highest official death rates.
Final three cruises that departed before pandemic arrive in ports.
The last three cruise ships still sailing with passengers returned to port this week, releasing the thousands onboard into a new reality of a world under lockdown where economies have plunged into recession and social distancing is the norm.
The three ships — MSC Magnifica, Pacific Princess and Costa Deliziosa — all embarked on their journeys before the coronavirus exploded into a pandemic, and they docked on Monday and Tuesday.
Laurie Belrose, 42, and her 72-year-old mother disembarked from the MSC Magnifica in the southern French port city of Marseille on Monday.
“It was a big shock to see all the empty streets, closed shops and restaurants and the people wearing masks,” Ms. Belrose said by phone, describing her drive to her home in southern France. “We were used to the life on the ship and did not think so much about corona, but on the land, you see it everywhere.”
All of the ships, which usually dock at ports every few days, canceled their initial itineraries in March and have since been cruising toward their final destinations in Europe and the United States, only stopping for supplies or technical support.
The Pacific Princess arrived in Los Angeles on Monday and the passengers on the Costa Deliziosa will disembark in Genoa, Italy, on Tuesday. No cases of the coronavirus have been reported on any of the liners and once they are docked, all international cruises will be suspended.
“At the beginning it was very scary to be stuck on the cruise because we saw in other ships how fast the virus spread,” Ms. Belrose said. “But in the end, we were very lucky, because there were no cases on board and no one was allowed on or off the cruise, so we had our own safe and relaxing quarantine.”
The Diamond Princess was the first cruise ship to report confirmed cases of the coronavirus in February, with more than 700 passengers eventually contracting the disease. Since then at least 30 cruise ships have confirmed cases, causing several of them to be quarantined at ports for weeks as public health officials carried out testing on the passengers.
Outbreak at Greek migrant center raises fears for the most vulnerable.
At least 150 people have tested positive for the coronavirus at a hotel being used to temporarily host migrants in Greece, according to local media reports that cite officials, raising fears of a more widespread outbreak among the vulnerable group.
The authorities first visited the hotel in Kranidi, a town in the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece, on Monday, after a pregnant woman from Somalia tested positive for the virus. She is now self-isolating at the hotel. The migrants had been staying at the hotel for months before the pandemic began as part of a government plan to provide accommodation, according to a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration, which runs the facility.
The hotel had been in quarantine since Thursday when a hotel employee and her husband developed symptoms and tested positive for the virus.
While Greece has been praised for taking strict social distancing measures early, and by Monday had registered just 116 deaths in a country of about 10.7 million, the government has received criticism for not evacuating crowded migrant camps, especially on the islands in the Aegean Sea.
So far, the only migrant facilities reported to have suffered outbreaks have been temporary ones on the mainland like the hotel in Kranidi. But worries persist for the tens of thousands housed in makeshift camps on the islands. More than 2,300 vulnerable asylum seekers will be moved from the islands to the mainland in the coming days, the government has said.
Oktoberfest and Pamplona’s bull runs join Europe’s long list of canceled festivals.
Two world-famous European festivals are among the latest cancellations announced in the wake of the pandemic, with Germany’s Oktoberfest and Spain’s running of the bulls both officially canceled on Tuesday.
Oktoberfest, Munich’s annual festival of beer-drinking, mug-swinging people packed together in massive tents, will not take place in 2020 because of concerns over the spread of the coronavirus, the authorities in the southern state of Bavaria said on Tuesday.
Drinkers from around the world convene in Munich every fall for the event, which has become a symbol of southern German culture, as well as a highly lucrative tourist draw that last year generated $1.33 billion for the city.
But the authorities acknowledged that it would not be possible to enforce safe social distancing or the wearing of face masks among the millions of revelers during the festival, which was scheduled to run from Sept. 19 to Oct. 4.
“We are living in changed times,” Markus Söder, the governor of Bavaria, said as he announced the decision alongside the mayor of Munich. “Living with corona means living cautiously.”
This year will not be the first year in its 210-year history that Oktoberfest has had to be called off. It did not take place during the world wars, or during the epidemics of the 19th century.
For the past month, a tent has been set up on the fairgrounds, not to serve beer, but to test people for the coronavirus.
And the city of Pamplona announced the cancellation of one of Spain’s most famous festivals, the running of the bulls, on Tuesday because of the coronavirus threat. The country has been especially hard hit by the outbreak; it is currently the European nation with the largest number of confirmed cases.
Ana Elizalde, the acting mayor of Pamplona, said in a televised news conference that it was impossible to make “an exception” for the weeklong festival, scheduled to start on July 6, amid a long list of other major events that have been called off in Spain.
Ms. Elizalde, who is filling in for the mayor who has been ill with the virus, said she expected the city’s residents to show creativity in order to celebrate as best as possible while “respecting sanitary rules.”
Singapore extends its lockdown until June 1.
Singapore, which was widely praised for initial response to the coronavirus outbreak but is now trying to handle a surge in cases, said on Tuesday that it would its extend its “circuit breaker” lockdown until June 1.
As the first signs of a pandemic emerged, the city state responded with a rigorous and sophisticated program that included contact tracing, ample testing and shutting its borders. But a resurgence in cases then prompted it to impose further restrictions, and its caseload has jumped in recent days to more than 9,100, the highest in Southeast Asia.
Most of the new cases have been recorded in the crowded dormitories where many migrant workers live, largely out of sight of much of the population.
Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong said in a national address that while the restrictions had largely been effective since they were first imposed two weeks ago, more workplaces would be closed to minimize transmission, even though it means “some degradation of services.”
“We must all hunker down and press on with our tight circuit breaker measures,” said Mr. Lee. “We have called on all Singaporeans to stay home. Go out only for essential needs, like buying food or groceries. Otherwise, please stay at home.”
Mr. Lee said the goal was to ensure that the authorities could quickly detect and contain any spread from the worker housing to the wider community, and to prevent new clusters from forming and spreading widely.
The prime minister, who acknowledged that businesses would not welcome the extension, said the restrictions could be lifted only by doing three things: Opening up slowly, scaling up testing, and making full use of technology for contact tracing, though he conceded there would be privacy concerns.
Indonesia bans travel during Muslims’ most important holiday.
President Joko Widodo of Indonesia announced Tuesday that he will ban millions from returning to their home villages next month for the Eid al-Fitr holiday, known in Indonesia as Idul Fitri. The holiday, marking the end of fasting for the month of Ramadan, falls this year on May 23 and 24.
Mr. Joko had been under mounting pressure to ban the traditional holiday migration by millions of people, known as mudik, to slow the spread of the coronavirus. The travel ban will take effect Friday, but there will be no sanctions for violating it until May 7, said a top cabinet minister, Luhut Panjaitan.
Officials said major highways would not be closed but checkpoints would be set up around greater Jakarta to inspect vehicles and turn back those who appear to be violating the ban. Domestic air travel and train, bus and ferry service will be restricted.
Health experts fear that the virus is rapidly spreading in the world’s fourth-largest country and could overwhelm its limited health system. The virus has been found in all 34 provinces even though testing has been minimal.
Indonesia reported 7,135 confirmed cases and 616 deaths as of Tuesday, a fatality rate of nearly 9 percent. At least 42 doctors, nurses and dentists are among those who have died. In addition, many suspected Covid-19 patients have died before tests were conducted or completed.
In previous years, about 20 million people have traveled during mudik to be with their families. Mr. Joko earlier banned government employees and members of the police and military from joining in the migration.
Spain’s military police spur a debate about censorship during the pandemic.
The Spanish authorities have vowed to clamp down on the spread of dangerous and fake news swirling online during the pandemic, but their actions are raising questions about how far policing information should go, part of a worldwide balancing act between halting misinformation and protecting freedoms.
In Spain, the debate took on new vigor after the chief of staff of Spain’s military police, Gen. José Manuel Santiago, said that his force was also working to “minimize this climate that is contrary to the crisis management of the government.”
The outcry on social media that followed forced Spain’s interior minister, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, to address the issue in a Sunday news briefing, denying that the government was attempting to stop online criticism. But opposition politicians have demanded a full investigation.
On Tuesday the debate was revived by the release of an internal email sent by the leadership of the military police to regional commanders, asking them to identify fake news that could lead to “frustration toward the institutions of the government.”
General Santiago Marín confirmed the authenticity of the email, but said that his staff were tracking online disinformation relating to the health crisis and “the institutions of the whole state, rather than the government.”
Overnight, Spain added another 430 deaths to its grim tally, raising the overall number of fatalities nationally to more than 21,000 since the start of the crisis.
With Ramadan nearing, Pakistan urges reluctant mosques to obey distancing rules.
A showdown between Pakistan’s Muslim clerics and the government is brewing ahead of Thursday, the start of the holy month of Ramadan, as officials plead with mosques to follow social distancing rules.
Mosques have consistently violated Pakistan’s lockdown, ushering in the faithful every Friday for the last four weeks, as worshipers wash themselves under communal water taps before kneeling almost shoulder to shoulder in supplication. The police have tried to break up Friday Prayer across the country, but have been violently attacked by worshipers.
Pakistan saw its biggest single-day jump in cases on Monday, with 474 testing positive. So far the country has recorded 9,200 cases with nearly 200 deaths. With limited testing, the numbers are likely much higher.
A collection of clerics and the heads of Muslim political parties signed a letter last week demanding the government lift the lockdown rules for mosques during Ramadan. The world’s second-largest Muslim country, Pakistan has struggled to monitor and regulate mosques for decades, and they have become a driver of radicalization.
Government officials met with clerics over the weekend and agreed that mosques would be allowed to open during Ramadan as long as they followed 20 rules, which include forcing worshipers to stand six feet apart and performing ablutions at home. That the government capitulated underscored the tremendous power mosques yield over the state.
But many are skeptical the rules are enforceable after the clashes with police during Friday Prayer. Pakistan’s mosques have long operated as if they are above the law, often without repercussion.
In much of the Muslim world, clerics have followed the lockdown rules and shut their mosques.
Reporting was contributed by Paulina Villegas, Stephen Castle, Thomas Erdbrink, Abdi Latif Dahir, Vivian Yee, Gina Kolata, Ceylan Yeginsu, Raphael Minder, Iliana Magra, Jason Horowitz, Richard Pérez-Peña, Karen Zraick, Michael Wolgelenter, Elisabetta Povoledo, Maria Abi-Habib, Jin Wu, Allison McCann, Daniel Victor, Megan Specia, Carlotta Gall, Farnaz Fassihi, Melissa Eddy, Jennifer Steinhauer, Jason Schreier, Mike Ives, Richard C. Paddock, Dan Levin, Alissa J. Rubin, Declan Walsh and Kenneth Chang.
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