The new measures are taking effect as China prepares for its biggest event of its political season, the annual session of the National People’s Congress — a tightly choreographed legislative pageant aimed at conveying the strength of the ruling Communist Party.
The latest outbreak is concentrated in Jilin, a northeastern province of 27 million people that sits near China’s borders with Russia and North Korea. Jilin has reported a small outbreak of about 130 cases and two deaths, but experts there have warned of a potential “big explosion.”
The forceful response reflects fears among China’s leaders about the potential for a fresh wave of infections as factories, schools and restaurants reopen across much of the country.
President Xi Jinping of China has seized on the pandemic as an opportunity in disguise — a chance to redeem the party after early mistakes let infections slip out of control, and to rally national pride in the face of international ire over those mistakes. The same theme will likely underpin the National People’s Congress, an annual legislative meeting that opens on Friday after a monthslong delay.
So far, Mr. Xi has largely succeeded in rewriting the narrative in China, in part because the disarray in other countries, especially the United States, has given him a reprieve from domestic political pressure.
But keeping up that narrative may be challenging: Mr. Xi must continue push his agenda while the country faces a diplomatic and economic climate as daunting as any since the Tiananmen Square crackdown in 1989. And China faces growing criticism around the world for its early attempts to conceal the outbreak in Wuhan.
“If you position yourself as a great helmsman uniquely capable of leading your country, that has a lot of domestic political risk if you fail to handle the job appropriately,” said Carl Minzner, a professor of Chinese law and politics at Fordham University.
Here’s what else is happening around the world:
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The average number of daily coronavirus cases worldwide over the last week — more than 91,000 — is higher than it has ever been, according to data compiled by The New York Times. But the average weekly death toll has been decreasing.
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Greece’s prime minister said on Wednesday that foreign tourists from some countries would be allowed to fly to Athens from June 15, and that flights to the rest of the country’s airports would resume on July 1.
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The authorities in Bolivia fired the health minister on Wednesday, the Reuters news agency reported, and opened an investigation into allegations that officials bought ventilators at inflated prices.
Around the world, people already struggling with lockdowns and social distancing are facing additional threats from natural disasters, forcing them to make an impossible choice: shelter in place or evacuate.
More than three million people were whisked from their homes, but many were apprehensive about rushing into packed emergency shelters, where they feared they would catch the virus.
The Indian subcontinent isn’t the only place where the pandemic and natural disasters are dealing a one-two punch to local residents.
And in the Philippines last week, more than 50,000 people took refuge in evacuation centers as a typhoon barreled ashore, destroying fishing boats and hundreds of buildings. The typhoon made landfall on the country’s main island, Luzon, which is home to about 60 million people and has been on an extended lockdown to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Now, as officials respond to the disasters, they must also ensure that shelters don’t become breeding grounds for more infections. And some shelters that would normally be used to house evacuees are not available because they have already been converted into quarantine centers.
“It is a unique situation because it is the first time that we’re going to face a natural hazard like a storm while taking into consideration a pandemic situation,” said Mark Timbal, a spokesman for the Office of Civil Defense in Manila.
On March 14, Spain imposed one of the most stringent lockdowns in Europe, especially for kids. Although dogs were allowed regular walks and adults could still run essential errands, it wasn’t until April 26 that Spanish minors were finally permitted to leave home for one hour, within allotted time slots and a half-mile radius.
On May 4, people in areas with fewer Covid-19 infections started to enjoy additional freedom, including travel within their own province. But not everyone is bolting out the front door. The confinement of millions of kids for six consecutive weeks, many in small apartments, has taken a psychological toll.
A new study from Miguel Hernández University, under review by the journal Frontiers in Psychology, examined the psychological impact of the confinement on children in Spain and Italy. About 90 percent of 431 Spanish parents surveyed described emotional and behavioral changes in their kids, including difficulty concentrating, irritability and anxiety.
The ongoing quarantine in Valencia, Spain’s third largest city, is an example of the stresses children are undergoing, with helicopters tracking movements and shining spotlights into homes, waking them at all hours of the night.
Experts are growing increasingly concerned about the potential long-term effects of this pandemic on children’s health and psychological development not just in extreme cases, like Spain, but across the world, said Richard Meiser-Stedman, a trauma expert and professor of clinical psychology at the University of East Anglia in England.
Health agencies offer tips on sex during the pandemic.
As countries around the world slowly begin to come back to life, governments are experimenting with exactly how prescriptive they should be when giving guidelines on how people should navigate the new normal — including on sex and dating. It has involved some trial and error.
In the Netherlands, Dutch officials relaxed the government’s rules on sex during the coronavirus pandemic, advising last week that locked-down singles find “sex buddies.” Acknowledging that human touch is important, the guidance said the two parties must be in strict agreement about limiting the spread of the virus.
“Discuss together how to best do that,” the guidelines said. “Follow the rules around the new coronavirus.”
Officials at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in the Netherlands later clarified that advice, however, removing the term “seksbuddy” from the website after it drew attention from the international news media.
A spokeswoman for the agency told the Dutch news website NU.nl that the advice did not encourage “random sex contacts,” but that people who already knew each other or were in relationships but did not live in the same household could have sex without violating health guidelines.
Earlier in the pandemic, the Dutch government, like others around the world, had advised people to have sex only with steady partners.
India will resume domestic flights on Monday, two months after all passenger flights in the country were grounded to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus.
Under the new rules, each passenger must wear a surgical mask and a face shield.
Hardeep Singh Puri, the minister for civil aviation, announced the decision in a tweet on Wednesday. It surprised the domestic airline industry, which had been bracing for delays until at least May 31 under lockdown rules.
William Boulter, the chief commercial officer at the airline IndiGo, said that flights would initially resume at about a third of normal summer capacity.
“We’ve been talking with the authorities and the airports on how to maintain social distancing and we look forward to providing an environment which will be safe for all our customers,” he said.
Before the lockdowns started, India had one of the world’s fastest growing aviation markets. In 2018, over 204 million passengers flew in and out of the country’s airports, mostly on domestic flights.
A top Japanese official who ignored the country’s voluntary lockdown to play mahjong with a group of reporters has resigned.
The official, Hiromu Kurokawa, headed Tokyo’s public prosecutor’s office and is believed to be a close ally of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He was already in the nation’s bad graces after Mr. Abe tried to force a change in the retirement age for the prosecutor’s office, a move that was widely seen as an attempt to keep Mr. Kurokawa in power.
Mr. Kurokawa’s lockdown transgression was first reported by the Japanese magazine Shukan Bunshun.
While Japan has no legal mechanism for enforcing its lockdown, Mr. Kurokawa’s decision to ignore an national state of emergency has provoked public outrage. And it doesn’t help that he and the reporters were playing mahjong for money — in a country where gambling is illegal.
Here are a few other recent examples of people around the region who have violated virus-related restrictions on movement:
State-run Chinese newspapers have ramped up their rhetoric against Hong Kong’s antigovernment protesters, calling violent tactics and the notion of independence “tumors” that must be eradicated ahead of an annual gathering of China’s top officials.
People’s Daily, the flagship newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, on Thursday said in a commentary that the “malignant tumor” of violence must be rooted out and that the Hong Kong police must “not give the rioters any breathing room.”
The official state news agency, Xinhua, had on Wednesday called Hong Kong independence a “tumor on the body of the country” that must be “eradicated completely with determination.”
Critics and analysts have accused Beijing of taking advantage of the world’s diverted attention during the pandemic to crack down on the city’s pro-democracy movement in the lead-up to legislative elections in September.
The anti-protester language mirrors that used by Chinese officials in internal documents to justify the mass detention of Muslims in Xinjiang, which included words like “virus,” “infected” and “eradicate.” A top police official in Hong Kong has also compared protest violence to “cancer cells” spreading across the city’s universities.
“Fight against the virus and violence, save Hong Kong from total annihilation,” an influential pro-Beijing political party said in a recent advertisement, referring to the pandemic and the protests.
When the annual parliamentary meetings begin on Friday, Beijing is expected to discuss proposed national security legislation for Hong Kong. If enacted, the law would further accelerate the erosion of the territory’s civil liberties.
While some activists in the former British colony openly support Hong Kong independence, it has not emerged as a demand in protests that began last June calling for greater democracy and police accountability.
Denmark’s top chef, René Redzepi, made new Nordic cooking an international sensation, and for nearly two decades has caused surprise, outrage and, of course, delight with his rules-breaking kitchen at Noma in Copenhagen.
But his latest menu may be the most shocking of them all: a pared down selection of just two burgers.
The coronavirus lockdown caused the closure of Noma two months ago, but on Thursday it will reinvent itself as a burger joint in the first step in a gradual return to business.
Chefs at Noma used to be sent foraging on beaches and roadsides to come back with what in the eyes of a stranger looked like inedible weeds. But in Noma’s kitchen, ingredients from the bottom of the food hierarchy were turned into high end plates including plankton mousse, live ants or cod head.
Noma has been selected as the “best restaurant in the world” four times and diners fly in from all corners of the world to experience its famed 20 course menus. In 2018, The Times’s restaurant critic Pete Wells described the servings as “put on the plate by a team of synchronized hummingbirds.”
The new menu will be less hummingbird, more hands on and the shortest in the restaurant’s history with just the two $18 burger options served in the restaurant’s garden. They come with a promise of lot’s of umami and “a little bit of magic from our fermentation cellar” the restaurant said in a statement.
At the old Noma, tables were sold out months in advance. But from tomorrow at 1 p.m., the hungry and the curious can “come as you are, there are no reservations.” The usual Noma will return to business later this year, with the same ambitions as before.
“I still want to be the best,” Mr. Redzepi, told the Politiken daily. “But dammit, I also want to be with people. I miss that atmosphere of community.”
If the United States had begun imposing social-distancing measures one week earlier in March, about 36,000 fewer people would have died in the pandemic, according to new estimates from Columbia University disease modelers.
And if the country had begun locking down cities and limiting social contact on March 1, two weeks earlier than when most people started staying home, a vast majority of the nation’s deaths — about 83 percent — would have been avoided, the researchers estimated.
“It’s a big, big difference,” said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia and the leader of the research team. “That small moment in time, catching it in that growth phase, is incredibly critical in reducing the number of deaths.”
The enormous cost of waiting to take action reflects the unforgiving dynamics of the outbreak that swept through American cities in early March. Even small differences in timing would have prevented the worst exponential growth, which by April had subsumed New York City, New Orleans and other major cities, the researchers found.
The government of Mexico City has acknowledged that its count of deaths related to the coronavirus is higher than federal data show, and it has named a special commission to review all fatalities in the capital connected to Covid-19.
“This team will evaluate, based on each death certificate and medical report, how many confirmed Covid deaths there are, how many suspicious Covid deaths and how many probable Covid deaths there are,” said Mexico City’s mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
The New York Times first reported a discrepancy between city and federal data on May 8, citing a private database maintained by local officials that showed the death toll in the capital was more than three times higher than what the federal government reported to the public.
That data, which city officials gather by placing calls to every public hospital in the city on a daily basis, includes both confirmed Covid deaths and those where doctors determine the virus was the most likely cause.
The federal data counts only confirmed cases. That number is exceptionally low, however, because Mexico has conducted fewer tests than almost any other developed nation.
The federal government declined to comment on The Times’s story, but after publication released a video claiming the article, along with others by The Wall Street Journal and El País that also questioned official data, was “unethical.”
Federal officials did not, however, deny the existence of the database or the veracity of the numbers published by The Times. Instead, officials claimed that coordination between the city and federal government was excellent.
Several days later, government officials announced the creation of the new commission to review Covid-related deaths in Mexico City. And shortly after, Ms. Sheinbaum, the mayor, acknowledged the death toll tabulated by city officials was higher than that published by the federal government.
After six tries, reams of paperwork and repeated rejections, a New Zealand woman will be reunited with her dying sister in Australia, receiving a rare exemption to strict travel bans.
Gail Baker, who lives north of Sydney, was diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer in late March, when travel bans locked down borders all over the world. She and her sister, Christine Archer, a nurse in New Zealand, have been trying to reconnect ever since.
“I just want to spend every minute I can with her,” Ms Archer told ABC News of Australia.
Both countries have been easing restrictions in recent weeks, but not on international travel.
“It’s just been such a huge job, it really has,” she said. “I am sure there are so many other people in the same position as I have been in and maybe now it will open the door for others to see their loved ones, sooner rather than later.”
Hannah Beech is the Southeast Asia bureau chief for The Times. She lives in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand.
I wandered past the shop selling premium salmon skin with salted egg yolk, past vials of perfumes I could not sniff because of my mask, past the Japanese soufflé pancake place where, I must admit, I bought a box full of pillowy deliciousness.
After 30 minutes of meandering through Siam Paragon, one of Bangkok’s many malls that have reopened since the city’s coronavirus lockdown began to ease, I finally found my quarry.
Just past Cartier and not quite to Bottega Veneta, the robot was wheeling its way past a gaggle of Thais in floral-patterned masks. I stepped in front of it and the robot politely veered to my left.
In front of Louis Vuitton, the robot, about the size of a leprechaun, came upon a foreign woman in short shorts and a mouth painted with lipstick.
The robot’s camera whirred. Something inside clicked. “Please wear masks,” the robot said in both Thai and English.
If robots could look admonishing, this machine was delivering a very stern gaze.
The woman giggled, then looked a bit nervous. Security guards in black suits and face shields showed her the exit.
After weeks of recording few new coronavirus cases, Thailand is opening up again. But the deluge of shoppers — one Ikea was overwhelmed by a line of hundreds of people — has public health experts worried. Incoming commercial flights have been banned until at least the end of June.
To get into Siam Paragon, I snapped a QR code with my phone, stepped through a mist of disinfectant and waited for my temperature to be taken.
The reading appeared to indicate that I was a lizard. The guard waved me through anyway.
Reporting was contributed by Elaine Yu, Shalini Venugopal Bhagat, Jin Wu, Azam Ahmed, Javier C. Hernández, Lorraine Allen, Austin Ramzy, Ben Dooley, Martin Selsoe Sorensen, Damien Cave, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Steven Lee Myers, Chris Buckley, Russell Goldman, Jeffrey Gettleman, Sameer Yasir, Kai Schultz, Hari Kumar, Jin Qu, Mike Ives, Jason Gutierrez, Hannah Beech, Lorraine Allen, Jenny Gross and Claire Moses.