Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Recommends Wearing Masks

The Chinese government held a nationwide day of mourning on Saturday, the day of the annual Tomb Sweeping Festival, a traditional time for honoring ancestors. Flags flew at half-staff, and alarms and horns sounded for three minutes starting at 10 a.m. Xi Jinping and other leaders of the ruling Communist Party attended a ceremony in Beijing.

It will probably not be enough to soothe many families in the city of Wuhan, who have chafed against the state’s efforts to assert control over the grieving process.

The police in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, have been dispatched to break up groups on WeChat, a popular messaging app, set up by relatives of coronavirus victims. Government censors have scrubbed social media of images that showed relatives lining up at Wuhan funeral homes to collect ashes. Officials have assigned minders to relatives to follow them as they pick burial plots, claim their loved ones’ remains and bury them, grieving family members say.

Liu Pei’en, whose father died after contracting the coronavirus in a Wuhan hospital, said officials had insisted on accompanying him to a funeral home to pick up his father’s remains. Later, they followed him to the cemetery where they watched him bury his father, he said. Mr. Liu saw one of his minders take photos of the funeral, which was over in 20 minutes.

The Treasury Department, led by Steven Mnuchin, a former investment banker, might try to avoid imposing conditions that companies find burdensome. But if the aid appears too lenient, popular support for the rescue could evaporate as it did with the bailout of banks and other businesses after the 2008 financial crisis.

In the 24 hours through 12 a.m. on Friday, 562 people — or one almost every two-and-a-half minutes — died from the virus in New York State, bringing the total death toll to nearly 3,000, double what it was only three days before. In the same period, 1,427 newly sickened patients poured into hospitals — another one-day high — although the rate of increase in hospitalizations seemed to stabilize, suggesting that the extreme social-distancing measures put in place last month may have started working.

“It is hard to put fully into words what we are all grappling with as we navigate our way through this pandemic,” Vicki L. LoPachin, the chief medical officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, wrote in an email to the staff on Friday. “We are healing so many and comforting those we can’t save — one precious life at a time.”

Around the country, the total number of coronavirus cases spiked sharply as of Friday afternoon, exceeding 275,000, with more than 7,000 total deaths. After New York, New Jersey was the state with the highest rate of infection. Globally, more than a million people had been infected, and nearly 60,000 had died, according to official numbers.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, said Friday that the government would “move supplies creatively around the country to meet the needs of both the front line health care providers but also every American who needs our support right now.”

The Pentagon is considering letting two Navy hospital ships dispatched to New York and California take patients who test positive for the novel coronavirus, Defense Department officials said Friday. A decision could come in the next few days.

The vast majority of U.S. governors have ordered their residents to stay home, but a small number are resisting increasingly urgent calls to shut down their states.

Health experts warn that the coronavirus can easily exploit any gaps in a state-by-state patchwork of social distancing across the country.

By Friday, nine states had yet to issue formal statewide stay-at-home orders — the most direct and stringent measure available, instructing all residents to stay at home, except for necessities. In some of those states, cities and counties had stepped in to issue their own orders, leaving a patchwork of restrictions.

The contrast is starkest in five states — Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota — where there are no such orders in place, either in major cities or statewide. Another four had partial restrictions issued locally in certain cities or counties.

In interviews and at news conferences this week, the governors in the holdout states defended their decisions, saying that they had already taken strong steps like closing schools and shutting down or limiting many aspects of public life.

For many conservative governors who believe strongly in small government and personal responsibility — the holdout states are all Republican-led — the prospect of mandatory stay-at-home orders is anathema, and they rejected what they called a catchall approach that could wreck their states’ economies.

A leading researcher who fought a different virus; a prodigious songwriter still in his prime; the first black president of the Marseille soccer club; a jazz patriarch.

• Gita Ramjee: In South Africa, Dr. Gita Ramjee led AIDS studies and drug trials, hoping to overcome not only H.I.V. but also cultural barriers to stopping its spread. On Tuesday, another epidemic claimed her: She died of Covid-19 at a Durban hospital. She had fallen ill shortly after returning from a visit to her sons in London, local news accounts said. She was 63.

• Adam Schlesinger: He made suburban characters shine for the band Fountains of Wayne and brought pop-rock perfection to the film “That Thing You Do!” Adam Schlesinger, an acclaimed performer who had an award-winning second career writing songs for film, theater and television, died on Wednesday at 52.

• Pape Diouf: Mababa “Pape” Diouf, who became the only black president of a top-tier European soccer club when he was appointed to lead France’s Olympique de Marseille, died at 68 on Tuesday. He was a gifted orator and a defender of the club’s passionate fan base.

• Ellis Marsalis: His sons Wynton and Branford gained national fame embodying a fresh-faced revival of traditional jazz. But Ellis Marsalis had been an influential musician and teacher in New Orleans long before that. He died on Wednesday at 85.