Here’s what you need to know:
- W.H.O. meeting is overshadowed by Trump accusations against China.
- Pressed for an inquiry into the virus’s origin, China floats its own theories.
- One way to to thin out public transit: pop-up parking lots.
- Japan’s economy is the largest to officially enter a recession.
- U.S. roundup: Governors wrestle with reopening.
- The coronavirus tests Mark Zuckerberg’s approach.
- The frightening new affliction in children linked to the coronavirus.
W.H.O. meeting is overshadowed by Trump accusations against China.
The World Health Organization’s decision-making body will hold a virtual meeting starting Monday with all 194 member states, and a key question will be whether the United States and others will call for the W.H.O. to investigate China’s response to the coronavirus.
President Trump and other world leaders have accused China of allowing the global spread of the virus by suppressing or withholding information about it after it emerged in Wuhan in December. In recent weeks, European and Australian officials have joined Mr. Trump in calling for an investigation.
The United States has by far the world’s worst known outbreak, accounting for more than 1.4 million cases of 4.6 million globally, and nearly 90,000 deaths. And Mr. Trump’s response to the pandemic has been criticized as slow and ineffective.
But he has sought to deflect some of that criticism by stirring anger at China and the W.H.O. Last month, he ordered his administration to halt funding for the organization — a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars, although his administration has raised the possibility of partly restoring it.
The W.H.O. meeting on Monday is the annual gathering of the organization’s World Health Assembly. Typically held in May in Geneva, its purpose is to decide major policy priorities, elect the organization’s leaders and adopt its budget.
But this time, member states will largely focus on the pandemic, report their progress in fighting their nations outbreaks and “consider a draft resolution on Covid-19,” according to the W.H.O. China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, is expected to address the assembly by video.
China signaled on Monday that it would not allow an inquiry. Zhao Lijian, a foreign ministry spokesman, said at a news briefing in Beijing that “the time is not ripe to immediately start the investigation and virus tracing.”
The meeting had been slated to include a vote on another contentious topic: whether Taiwan, a self-governing island that China claims as its territory, should be allowed to participate as an observer.
But on Monday, Taiwan’s foreign ministry said it was backing off its bid to participate. Joseph Wu, the foreign minister, said in a statement that officials expected the vote to be pushed to the fall. With only 29 countries supporting its bid, however, it is likely to fail.
Pressed for an inquiry into the virus’s origin, China floats its own theories.
Fighting foreign pressure to account for the initial spread of the coronavirus, the Chinese Communist Party deflected in one of its leading journals, saying in effect that the virus could have come from anywhere.
The article, published in the party’s magazine Qiushi over the weekend, is China’s latest effort to push back against demands on multiple fronts for a fuller accounting of where the virus came from and especially how it spread from Wuhan.
Last week, Xinhua, China’s main state-run news agency, issued a long question-and-answer article disputing that the virus had leaked from a lab in that city and that China had failed to act quickly to stop its spread.
The Trump administration has pressed the lab theory, which is viewed skeptically by many scientists in China and abroad. Before the World Health Assemblys meeting on Monday to discuss the crisis, Australia, the European Union and other governments have called for an international inquiry into the pandemic while keeping distant from the lab theory.
Such calls are discomfiting for the Chinese government, which has been eager to set aside evidence that officials played down the outbreak and restricted reporting, delaying a response from the central government.
The Qiushi article argues that questions of the coronavirus’s origins are best left to scientists free of political interference. But it uses highly tendentious descriptions of the research to suggest that the coronavirus may not have first spread from China.
Listen to ‘The Daily’: The Chinese Lab Theory
Is Beijing keeping a secret? Or are the exact origins of the coronavirus still a mystery?One way to to thin out public transit: pop-up parking lots.
Governments across the globe are in an unusual position of discouraging people from using public transit, an urban staple that has long been considered an essential tool in fighting congestion and climate change but is now a risk in the spread of the coronavirus.
Scenes of commuters packed elbow-to-elbow are now a major public health risk, as one cough or sneeze could expose dozens to infectious respiratory droplets. But governments have also acknowledged that many people, including medical workers, have no viable alternatives.
Officials have asked passengers to stay away if possible, leaving room for those who need it to safely practice social distancing, even if that means drying up some of the revenue that keeps the systems running.
Some, like Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio in New York, have discouraged use of public transportation, while others are taking direct steps to thin out the crowds.
In Australia, Sydney’s central business district will add bike lanes and pop-up parking lots to deal with an increase in automobile traffic. And in, London the subway’s capacity will be capped at around 13 to 15 percent so that passengers can stay six feet apart. Some may be asked to wait to enter a station until it empties out.
“If you can, please walk or cycle for all or part of your journey, including to complete your journey if traveling into central London,” Vernon Everitt, a managing director for the city’s transit network, said in an email to passengers on Sunday.
Japan’s economy is the largest to officially enter a recession.
Japan has fallen into a recession for the first time since 2015, as its already weakened economy was dragged down by the coronavirus’s impact on businesses at home and abroad.
The country — whose economy is the world’s third-largest after that of the United States and China — shrank by an annualized rate of 3.4 percent in the first three months of the year, Japan’s government said on Monday.
That makes it the largest economy to officially enter a recession, often defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Other major economies around the world are set to follow as efforts to contain the outbreak ripple around the globe.
Businesses had already been staggering before the coronavirus hit.
Consumer spending dropped after the Japanese government in October increased a tax on consumption to 10 percent from 8 percent, a move that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s administration said would help pay down the national debt — the highest among developed nations — and fund the growing demand for social services as the country’s workers age.
Days later, a typhoon hit the country’s main island, inflicting enormous damage and further driving down economic activity.
This year, the pandemic crushed Japan’s exports, forced it to postpone the Olympics and then put the country on a soft lockdown.
On the health front, the efforts seem to have paid off. The total number of deaths attributed to the outbreak was 756 as of Monday, far lower than in other major developed nations. But each of those decisions has had a profound economic impact.
U.S. roundup: Governors wrestle with reopening.
Governors across the United States are weighing the risks of reopening, particularly if it produces a surge of new coronavirus cases and deaths.
“This is really the most crucial time, and the most dangerous time,” Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said Sunday on the CNN program “State of the Union.”
Pressure is building for officials to revive commerce and chart a path for states to edge toward a semblance of normalcy, and some are discussing plans for starting school in the fall.
The push to reopen has been fueled by swelling frustration as unemployment soars, businesses declare bankruptcy or announce that they will not survive the shutdowns. Some businesses have reopened in defiance of state orders.
On Friday, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, filed an emergency rule allowing for the owners of restaurants, bars and other establishments that open prematurely to be charged with a Class A misdemeanor, which carries a punishment of up to a year in jail and up to a $2,500 fine. The rule also applies to businesses like barbershops and gyms, according to Mr. Pritzker’s office.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, said on CNN that he understood “the stress and anxiety that people have,” citing upended dreams and depleted savings.
“The question is,” he added, “how do you toggle back and make meaningful modifications to the stay-at-home order?”
The moves come as reported new coronavirus cases in the country have declined in recent weeks, and as more states have allowed a wider array of businesses to resume. More than two-thirds of states have relaxed restrictions significantly.
In New York, state and city officials are calling on many more residents to get tested to help the state reopen. To underscore this point, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York was tested during his live news briefing on Sunday. He also announced a new website that would help New Yorkers identify testing sites near where they live.
And President Trump continued to express eagerness to see a resumption of some activities. In phone comments during a golf broadcast on Sunday, he said he missed sports and wanted “big, big stadiums loaded with people.”
The coronavirus tests Mark Zuckerberg’s approach.
The pandemic is presenting a huge challenge to Facebook’s ability to combat misinformation, scammers and conspiracy theorists. It’s also giving Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s founder and chief executive, an opportunity to demonstrate that he has grown into his responsibilities as a leader.
Mr. Zuckerberg has long been the face of the social network, which claims more than 2.6 billion average monthly users, or a third of the world’s population. But while he has been extraordinarily involved in some aspects of the business, his approach has been hands-off in others.
The beginning of the end of Mr. Zuckerberg’s distanced leadership came in November 2016 with the election of President Trump. From that moment, crises revolving around fake news, data sharing and political manipulation jolted Mr. Zuckerberg to tighten his grip.
The revamp has not gone without incident. Early this month, Facebook struggled in its handling of a conspiracy video called “Plandemic,” waffling as the footage spread to millions of users. Last week, The Detroit Metro Times showed that the company was blind to assassination-stoking activity on pages with 400,000 members.
In theory, the current crisis plays to some of Mr. Zuckerberg’s strengths. Through his personal philanthropy, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, he has long been interested in public health.
Or the pandemic could take all that is dangerous about Facebook and amplify it. And if Mr. Zuckerberg is fully in control of his company, responsibility for its response will reside entirely with him.
The frightening new affliction in children linked to the coronavirus.
When a sprinkling of a reddish rash appeared on Jack McMorrow’s hands in mid-April, his father figured the 14-year-old was overusing hand sanitizer —- not a bad thing during a global pandemic.
But over the next 10 days, Jack, a ninth-grader in New York City, felt increasingly unwell. Then, one morning, he awoke unable to move.
He had a tennis ball-size lymph node, raging fever, racing heartbeat and dangerously low blood pressure. Pain deluged his body in “a throbbing, stinging rush,” he said.
“You could feel it going through your veins and it was almost like someone injected you with straight-up fire,” he said.
Jack, who was previously healthy, was hospitalized with heart failure that day, in a stark example of the newly discovered severe inflammatory syndrome linked to the coronavirus that has already been identified in about 200 children in the United States and Europe and killed several.
He has since recovered. But New York state has reported three deaths and, as of Sunday, 137 cases were being investigated in the city alone.
The condition, which the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is calling Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children, has shaken widespread confidence that children were largely spared from the pandemic.
Appearing mostly in school-age children, the syndrome causes inflammation throughout the body and can cripple the heart. It often appears weeks after infection in children who didn’t experience first-phase coronavirus symptoms.
Sailors aboard a U.S. aircraft carrier docked in Guam test positive for a second time.
Thirteen sailors aboard the virus-stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt have retested positive for Covid-19 after seeming to have recovered from the disease, Navy officials said on Sunday.
The infected sailors, who had all tested negative twice before reboarding the Roosevelt in recent days, have been removed from the warship to self-quarantine. The Roosevelt has been docked in Guam since March 27 as Navy officials wrestle with how to deal with sickened sailors, disinfect the vessel and prepare for it to resume operations in the Western Pacific.
Navy officials have said they are aggressively screening and testing as crew members return to the Roosevelt after quarantining at the U.S. military base in Guam, as well as at hotels and in other lodging there. Officials on the ship are requiring masks and repeatedly cleaning and sanitizing to prevent another outbreak of the virus, which has infected about 1,100 crew members since March. One sailor has died.
About 2,900 of the 4,800 crew members are now back on board. They are under strict orders to report to doctors the slightest cough, headache or other flulike symptom. In the past week or so, the new testing even turned up a sailor who tested positive for tuberculosis. That set off a wild contact-tracing scramble that found no other cases on board, Navy officials said.
The results of the Navy’s latest investigation into events surrounding the Roosevelt are due by the end of this month.
Recent research in South Korea suggested that dozens of patients there who had tested positive a second time after recovering from the illness appeared to be “false positives” caused by lingering — but likely not infectious — bits of the virus.
A Canadian military jet crashes during a flyover for coronavirus workers.
A Canadian Air Force jet crashed, killing one of the military personnel on board, in Kamloops, British Columbia, on Sunday during a flyover that was intended as a tribute to Canadians, especially those on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities said.
The red and white jet took off alongside another and did a wide turn once in flight, according to a video posted on Twitter. Shortly after, the plane could be seen heading downward.
It appeared that two people ejected from the plane in a plume of dark smoke before the aircraft nose-dived into a house in the Brocklehurst neighborhood of Kamloops, which is about 220 miles northeast of Vancouver.
As of Sunday evening, the authorities had not confirmed any deaths or injuries.
One person was taken to a hospital, Adrian Dix, British Columbia’s minister of health, said on Twitter.
Witnesses said they had heard a loud boom and soon realized a plane had crashed in the area.
Photos shared on Twitter showed what appeared to be a parachute on the roof of a house.
The Canadian Forces Snowbirds last month announced Operation Inspiration. The mission consisted of the squadron flying over cities across Canada in a nine-jet formation with trailing white smoke. The Snowbirds were scheduled to start in Nova Scotia and work their way west throughout the week.
Squadron officials could not be immediately reached for comment on Sunday night.
Reporting was contributed by Javier C. Hernandez, Abby Goodnough, Ben Dooley, Makiko Inoue, Mike Isaac, Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang, Pam Belluck, Sandra E. Garcia, Christopher Buckley, Neil Vigdor, Sharon Otterman and Eric Schmitt.
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