The coronavirus reached France in December, doctors say, rewriting the epidemic’s timeline.
French doctors say they have discovered that a patient treated in late December had the coronavirus — a finding that, if verified, suggests that the virus appeared in Europe nearly a month earlier than previously understood.
The finding came this week after doctors tested samples taken from patients in late December and early January. One of those, taken on Dec. 27 from a patient who had pneumonia, tested positive.
That was days before Chinese authorities first reported the new illness to the World Health Organization, weeks before the Chinese acknowledged that human-to-human transmission of the virus was possible, and nearly a month before the first report of an infection in Europe, on Jan. 24 in France.
The man who was apparently infected in December had not been outside France since August, indicating that the virus was circulating within the country last fall. It is not clear if he passed it to anyone.
The discovery suggests that the virus had made its way out of China long before measures to cut it off and contain its spread, underscoring how late the European authorities were in seeing the threat and responding. Previously, the first case outside of China was reported in Thailand on Jan. 13.
The news adds to growing evidence that outbreaks were silently underway long before they were noticed. Researchers in the United States have also documented deaths from the virus weeks before anyone recognized that it was in the country.
The French doctors who made the finding, at a hospital near Paris, said they had tested the samples twice to avoid false positives. But they acknowledged that they could not completely rule out that possibility.
The French government did not comment on the case on Tuesday.
More than 170 years ago, the Choctaw Nation sent $170 from Oklahoma to starving Irish families during the potato famine. A sculpture in County Cork commemorates the generosity of the tribe, itself poor.
Now hundreds of Irish people are repaying that old kindness, giving to a charity drive for two tribes suffering in the Covid-19 pandemic. As of Tuesday, the fund-raiser has raised nearly $1.8 million to help supply clean water, food and health supplies to people in the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Reservation in the Southwest, according to the organizers.
Many donors cited the generosity of the Choctaws, noting that the gift came not long after the United States government forcibly relocated the tribe and several other American Indian groups from the Southeastern United States, a march known as the Trail of Tears that left many dead along the way.
“I’d already known what the Choctaw did in the famine, so short a time after they’d been through the Trail of Tears,” Sean Callahan, 43, an Apple administrator in Cork City who made a donation, said on Tuesday. “It always struck me for its kindness and generosity and I see that too in the Irish people. It seemed the right time to try and pay it back in kind.”
On Sunday the organizers wrote on the page on Sunday that, “acts of kindness from indigenous ancestors passed being reciprocated nearly 200 years later through blood memory and interconnectedness. Thank you, IRELAND, for showing solidarity and being here for us.”
Gary Batton, chief of the Choctaw Nation Oklahoma, said in a statement that the tribe was “gratified — and perhaps not at all surprised — to learn of the assistance our special friends, the Irish, are giving to the Navajo and Hopi nations.”
As Covid-19 cuts a wide swath through the Russian Orthodox Church’s monasteries and parishes, many clerics are thundering against both the coronavirus and the government’s efforts to contain it, carving a deep rift between the usually allied powers of church and state.
As the government tries to block public gatherings like church services, some priests have complied readily, keeping parish doors locked and urging worshipers to take part by video link.
But others preach that it is impossible to become infected in a church, or threaten damnation for those who enforce or obey the restrictions. They have resisted shutting even monasteries devastated by the virus.
A bishop in the northern Komi region declared that ringing church bells was the best way to combat the pandemic. He claimed that the word coronavirus, from the Latin for crown, is “not coincidental but is linked to the coronation and enthronement of the Antichrist.”
The outburst of discord is rare within the rigidly hierarchical church. Patriarch Kirill, the head of the church and an ally of President Vladimir V. Putin, has wavered between enforcing the government’s social distancing orders and placating the most fervent clerics. He urged worshipers to skip Holy Week services last month — but left it up to each diocese whether to hold them.
The patriarch issued an order last week that monastery abbots and parish rectors in Moscow must comply with lockdown measures, but so far he has taken formal disciplinary action against only one cleric: the relatively liberal Andrei Kuraev, who mocked the head of a Moscow cathedral who had died from the virus.
Around the world, zealous believers of many faiths have been among the most resistant to stay-at-home orders. The clash has been particularly divisive in Russia, where memories of religious persecution in the Soviet Union make people highly sensitive to government restrictions.
Russia has been recording more than 10,000 new confirmed infections per day.
Two new studies offer compelling evidence that children can transmit the virus, providing what epidemiologists say are strong arguments in favor of keeping schools closed around the world.
A Chinese study published last week in the journal Science analyzed data from Wuhan and Shanghai, and found that children were about a third as susceptible to infection as adults were. But when schools were open, they found, children had about three times as many contacts with other people as adults did — three times as many opportunities to become infected — essentially evening out their risk.
Based on their data, the researchers estimated that closing schools could reduce cases by about 40 to 60 percent.
The second study, in Germany, was led by Christian Drosten, a prominent virologist whose lab has tested about 60,000 people for the coronavirus. Consistent with other studies, he and his colleagues found many more infected adults than children. But children who do test positive harbor just as much virus as adults — sometimes more, even if they are asymptomatic — and so, presumably, are just as infectious, his team found.
Dr. Drosten said he posted his study on his lab’s website ahead of its peer review because of the ongoing discussion about schools in Germany.
The new studies were released amid alarm about a possible link between Covid-19 and toxic shock or Kawasaki disease, a rare illness in children that is associated with inflammation of the blood vessels. At least 15 children in New York City, many of whom tested positive for Covid-19, have been hospitalized with symptoms of the illness, and several European countries have also reported cases.
The Indian government is set to begin an enormous repatriation mission using jumbo jets and naval warships to rescue thousands of Indian citizens stranded in other countries, especially in the Persian Gulf.
Flights are scheduled to start Thursday. Only passengers without coronavirus symptoms will be allowed to travel, the Indian government said.
The country has so far been spared a high death toll, and remains cautious about letting in foreigners or Indians from abroad. India was one of the first major countries to shut down all international flights.
Millions of Indians work in the Arab world — particularly in the oil-rich countries of the gulf, also known as Arabian Gulf — and many have lost their jobs in recent weeks as Arab economies have contracted under lockdown.
“We have been getting distress calls from the Gulf,” said Mahesh Kumar, a spokesman for India’s foreign ministry.
Upon arrival, the returnees would be quarantined for 14 days.
There are also thousands of Indians studying abroad, including many in Europe and the United States, who want to come home.
“With universities and colleges closed, they have few options left,” Mr. Kumar said.
As countries decide how strict or loose to be about social distancing, they are finding that, as in the United States, they have no guarantee of cooperation from local and regional officials.
Mayors running for re-election in Ukraine have defied a national lockdown and invited restaurants and hair salons to resume business, despite threats of criminal prosecution for doing so. The mayor of Cherkasy allowed outdoor seating at restaurants, cheering local business owners.
President Volodymyr Zelensky called the defiance “an attempt to earn political points at the cost of lives and health.”
Early on, Italian mayors scolded and pleaded with citizens to keep them indoors. But as lockdown fatigue sets in, regional leaders have bridled at Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte’s cautious approach to reopening.
Sardinia’s governor, Christian Solinas, announced Saturday that barbershops, hair salons, tattoo parlors and clothing stores could open on May 11, three weeks ahead of the schedule set by Rome. He said Masses, prohibited nationally, could be celebrated next week.
One Sardinian mayor, Settimo Nizzi of Olbia, said that restaurants and bars could start seating customers on May 18.
In Germany, mayors have protested the lockdown rules but so far have followed them. Boris Palmer, the mayor of Tübingen, in the country’s southwest, suggested that reviving the economy mattered more than the lives of potential coronavirus victims, whom he characterized as old and unwell.
“Let me be blunt: In Germany, we might be saving people who would be dead in half a year anyway,” he said in a TV interview last Tuesday.
French mayors have resisted national policies — but in favor of more restriction, not less. Defying the central government, several cities tried to require mask-wearing in public.
Over 300 mayors from the Paris region have asked the government to push back the timetable for reopening schools. Many fear being held legally responsible if teachers or students are infected.
By mid-March, China was already pursuing “mask diplomacy” after an ambitious, nationwide mobilization of medical supply production through February. The study, however, cast doubt on whether the humanitarian aid blitz really took place, since China’s exports were down in March from a year earlier.
The tonnage of China’s net exports of respirators and surgical masks was down 5 percent in March from the same month a year earlier, according to an analysis by Chad Bown, a trade specialist at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington.
The analysis, based on Beijing’s own customs data, also found that China cut way back on exports of medical supplies in January and February and stepped up imports in those months.
But Mr. Bown’s study did not include China’s exports of medical supplies in April, for which official data is not yet available. China continued to promote these exports last month, although complaints from foreign governments about defective products prompted Beijing to institute time-consuming quality checks on April 10 that delayed many shipments.
Norwegian Cruise Line, one of the world’s largest cruise companies, said on Tuesday that there was “substantial doubt” about its ability to survive the pandemic.
Norwegian acknowledged the dire situation in a securities filing announcing that it was seeking $650 million in new financing. The global shutdown of the cruise industry has strained the finances of all three major cruise companies — Norwegian and its two main rivals, Carnival Corporation and Royal Caribbean — forcing them to borrow money at high interest rates.
Carnival, another giant in the cruise industry, was widely criticized for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, but announced on Monday that some of its ships may begin sailing again as soon as August.
Since the coronavirus started spreading in Asia, the Carnival Corporation has been at the center of the pandemic, with outbreaks on at least seven of its ships, including the Diamond Princess, where eight people died and more than 700 were infected.
Lawmakers and epidemiologists have blamed Carnival for failing to contain outbreaks and spreading the virus across the world. Its response to the pandemic is the subject of a criminal investigation by the Australian police and a congressional investigation in the United States.
Despite that growing scrutiny, the cruise line said that eight of its ships could begin sailing on Aug. 1, about a week after a government order banning cruises in the United States is set to expire.
The prime minister, however, has glossed over one crucial fact: There is no solid evidence that Avigan works against Covid-19. While it has shown potential for treating some deadly diseases like Ebola in animal studies, there are limited findings that it works for any illness in humans.
What Avigan, whose generic name is favipiravir, does have is a peculiar regulatory history and one dangerous potential side effect — birth defects. Mr. Abe himself noted in a news conference on Monday that the side effect was “the same as thalidomide,” which caused deformities in thousands of babies in the 1950s and ’60s.
His pitches for the medication, like Mr. Trump’s testimonials for the antimalarial medicine hydroxychloroquine, are adding to concerns that national leaders could warp drug approval processes.
A fund-raising conference on Monday organized by the European Union brought pledges from countries around the world — including Japan, Canada, Australia and Norway — to fund laboratories that have promising leads in developing and producing a vaccine.
For more than three hours, one by one, global leaders said a few words over video link and offered their nations’ contribution, small or large, whatever they could muster. For Romania, it was $200,000. For Canada, $850 million. The biggest contributors were the European Union and Norway, with each pledging one billion euros, or $1.1 billion.
The details of how the money raised will be distributed remain to be sorted out. The European Commission, the executive branch of the European Union that spearheaded the initiative, said the money would be spent over the next two years to support promising initiatives around the globe. The ultimate goal is to deliver universal and affordable access to medication to fight Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.
The multilateral effort stood in sharp contrast to the solo road the United States is on as scientists everywhere scramble to develop a vaccine to stop the virus that has ravaged most parts of the globe, leaving 250,000 dead so far.
In Washington on Monday, senior Trump administration officials sought to talk up American contributions to coronavirus vaccine efforts worldwide, but did not explain the United States’ absence at the European-organized conference.
The U.S. government has spent money on vaccine research and development, including $2.6 billion through the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, an arm of the Health and Human Services Department. Jim Richardson, the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, said American companies had also provided $7 billion so far toward a coronavirus vaccine and treatment.
And the United States was not the world’s only major power to be absent from the teleconference. Russia, too, did not participate.
China, where the virus originated, was represented by its ambassador to the European Union and made no financial pledge.
The country has slashed red tape and offered resources to drug companies in a bid to empower the country’s vaccine industry. Four Chinese companies have begun testing their vaccine candidates on humans, more than the United States and Britain combined.
Lines nearly a mile long. Police officers thumping shoppers with sticks. Gates suddenly slamming shut.
These were the scenes playing out as chaos erupted at liquor stores in India, allowed to open for the first time in six weeks since the government imposed one of the strictest coronavirus lockdowns anywhere in the world.
Firoz Alam, an out-of-work factory worker, had been waiting for five hours on Tuesday to buy a bottle of whiskey from a Delhi shop. He said he hadn’t had a drink for weeks.
“I haven’t been able to sleep well lately,” he explained. “So I just wanted to buy some liquor and sleep for a couple hours.”
But his dry spell was destined to continue. Police officers summarily closed the liquor shop, as they have done at many locations, because the crowd was too big and getting out of control.
“That’s not good,” Mr. Alam said. “We’re not like the rich people who can get this through the black market.”
Starting Monday, India’s central government permitted liquor shops to reopen outside virus hot spots as long there were no crowds and people maintained social distance. But in some places, lines snaked for more than a kilometer. Picture thousands of men, pressed together, cheek by jowl, eager for a drink.
“Why are you out of line? Maintain your distance! Go away!” a clearly frustrated police officer at another shop in Delhi yelled as he lashed out with a long wooden stick.
Officials in the southern state of Kerala opted to keep liquor shops shut entirely, fearing that the risk was still too high. India’s states have some autonomy to set their own standards as long as they do not undermine the national lockdown rules. A couple of states in the northeast had allowed alcohol sales for a few days in April before the central government cracked down.
With sports events canceled across much of the world because of the coronavirus pandemic, Taiwan and South Korea, which have both been world leaders in controlling the outbreak, are pushing forward with the rarest of spectacles: a professional baseball season.
South Korea’s season starts Tuesday, while Taiwan got underway last month. To adapt the game to the coronavirus age, live spectators are banned. The relative quiet makes the games now feel more like practice rather than the typically raucous regular season competitions.
Chewing sunflower seeds is frowned upon — what would one do with the shells? Players are encouraged to bump elbows rather than give each other high-fives.
Players and coaches say they feel fortunate to be able to host games at all when many cities in the world remain under lockdown.
“We know many people are still keeping their eyes on us, even though there are no fans,” said Chiu Chang-Jung, the manager of the CTBC Brothers team, which on Saturday took on the Rakuten Monkeys at the stadium in Taoyuan, about 30 miles west of Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. “Playing these games is a very lucky and blessed thing.”
“This pandemic is the greatest threat to this generation since the Second World War,” said Stephen D. Smith, executive director of the USC Shoah Foundation, which interviews survivors of genocide.
One got out of Nazi Germany on a Kindertransport train to Sweden, never again seeing his parents, who were exterminated in the death camps. One survived two notorious concentration camps, Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and was discovered by British troops on a pile of bodies, half-dead with typhus. One endured freezing temperatures and near starvation in a slave-labor camp in Siberia.
Last month, all three died by the same tiny microorganism, isolated once more from their family members.
And for survivors who have eluded the virus, memories of that dark time, never far out of mind, find new salience in the present plague.
For Diana Kurz, 83, who escaped Vienna with her mother when she was 4 years old, said the coronavirus reminded her of those years in Vienna, when any random encounter might be deadly.
“I guess I picked that up as a child,” she said, “that feeling of dread all the time. That’s what it is like now. You never know if other people on the street are going to give you the virus, or were going to turn you in to the Gestapo because you were a Jew.”
For months, Japanese clinics have been reporting data about the coronavirus to the authorities using fax machines.
That will change on May 17, when medical facilities across the country will be able to report through online portals, streamlining a process that doctors have complained is stuck in the last millennium.
In a country where warehouse workers use mechanized exoskeletons to lift heavy packages and a chart-topping pop singer is a hologram, many in Japan are frustrated and perplexed by the government’s insistence on using old technologies for a wide range of bureaucratic tasks.
The move from paper to pixels seems to have been driven by one doctor’s angst-ridden tweet, lamenting the difficulty of sharing information with the government.
On April 23, pulmonologist Kyuto Tanaka posted on Twitter, “Let’s stop already… handwriting outbreak reports… someone needs to draw attention to this loudly,” along with a copy of the form.
The message received more than 25,000 likes. The most important one came from Defense Minister Taro Kono, who directed it to the attention of Masaaki Taira, a deputy cabinet minister for information technology policy, among other roles.
Within a week, Mr. Taira announced that the process would be moved online.
New Zealand and Australia work toward creating a ‘travel bubble.’
Australia and New Zealand are moving closer toward creating a “travel bubble” that would allow people to fly between the two countries without quarantines — a resumption of traffic that would be a boost for both countries’ economies.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand, who joined Australia’s cabinet meeting on Tuesday to discuss the steps required, said on Monday that the move would depend on continued progress in testing and tracing of coronavirus infections in both countries. That could take weeks or months.
“Both our countries’ strong record of fighting the virus has placed us in the enviable position of being able to plan the next stage in our economic rebuild,” she said.
Ms. Ardern and Prime Minister Scott Morrison of Australia told reporters on Tuesday that the ‘bubble’ is an important part of the road back to normalcy for both nations.
Such a travel arrangement could potentially be extended into the Pacific — Fiji has only a handful of reported cases and zero deaths. And plans are also being laid for limited travel between other countries that have controlled the spread of infection.
China and South Korea began easing quarantine requirements for some business travelers on Friday. A day later, trade ministers from Australia, Canada, South Korea, New Zealand and Singapore agreed to a collective effort to resume the flow of not just goods and services, but also people traveling “for purposes such as maintaining global supply chains, including essential business travel,” according to a joint statement.
Public health experts say that any resumption of travel comes with risks, but they also note that conditions vary by country. Travelers from the United States, the main source of coronavirus infections in Australia, may have to wait far longer to book flights around the world without being subject to 14-day quarantines.
Reporting was contributed by Ed O’Loughlin, Mihir Zaveri, Elisabetta Povoledo, Christopher F. Schuetze, Maria Varenikova, Karen Zraick, Richard Pérez-Peña, Jeffrey Gettleman, Sameer Yasir, Raphael Minder, David Yaffe-Bellany, Kai Schultz, Keith Bradsher, Aurelien Breeden, Ben Dooley, Choe Sang-Hun, Elian Peltier, Megan Specia, Iliana Magra, Mark Landler, Stephen Castle, Andrew Keh, Javier C. Hernández, Damien Cave, Andrew E. Kramer, Denise Grady, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Lara Jakes and John Leland.