Wednesday, March 25, 2020 | View in browser

Good morning.

We’re covering a stimulus deal between the Senate and the Trump administration and the growing toll of the coronavirus in New York. We also look at the newest additions to the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry (when the news includes Mister Rogers, it’s not all bad).

By Chris Stanford

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, center, said President Trump was "very pleased with this legislation." Anna Moneymaker/The New York Times

$2 trillion for a nation under siege

The Senate and the Trump administration agreed early this morning on a roughly $2 trillion measure that would send direct payments and jobless benefits to individuals, as well as money to states and businesses hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

The legislation, which was still being finalized, is expected to be enacted within days. It’s the largest fiscal stimulus package in modern U.S. history.

Here are the latest updates and maps of the outbreak. We’ve also compiled a daily tracker that shows the virus’s trajectories by country and state.

In other developments:

■ President Trump said on Tuesday that he wanted to reopen the U.S. for business by Easter, on April 12, saying he believed that a crippled economy and forced social isolation would do more harm than the spread of the virus. Public health experts said that lifting the restrictions now in place would result in unnecessary deaths.

■ Here’s how some economists assess the trade-off between economic well-being and health. Our Opinion section also compiled a range of perspectives.

■ Global markets rose today on the news from Washington, after a major rally on Wall Street. Here’s the latest.

■ The Chinese province of Hubei, where the pandemic began, lifted travel restrictions on most of its 60 million residents today, ending a nearly two-month lockdown.

■ India’s 1.3 billion people must stay in their homes for three weeks starting today. Prime Minister Narendra Modi acknowledged that the lockdown would create “a very difficult time for poor people,” in a country where hundreds of millions are destitute.

■ For Olympic athletes, the decision to postpone the Summer Games in Tokyo until 2021 comes as both a blessing and a curse.

■ Yellowstone, Grand Teton and the Great Smoky Mountains national parks were closed, after concerns about crowding.

■ Hundreds of e-commerce sites are popping up to sell products that they claim help fight the coronavirus, and many are being shut down for making exaggerated claims or selling phantom goods.

“The Daily”: Today’s episode is about the president’s response to the pandemic.

The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage, and our Coronavirus Briefing newsletter — like all of our newsletters — is free. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.

Times Square on Tuesday. The coronavirus infection rate was up to 10 times greater in the New York area than in other parts of the country, officials said. Bryan Derballa for The New York Times

New York is a ‘high-risk area’

Vice President Mike Pence on Tuesday advised people who have passed through or left the city recently to place themselves in a 14-day quarantine. About 60 percent of the country’s new confirmed cases of the coronavirus were in the New York City metropolitan area, officials said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has emerged as the Democratic Party’s most prominent voice during the crisis, offered a grim forecast for the outbreak in the city and criticized the federal government for its slow response in sending crucial equipment.

“You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators?” he said. “What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem.”

Related: The city’s public transportation network is cutting service at least 25 percent, after subway ridership on Tuesday fell 87 percent — by nearly 4.8 million riders — compared with the same day last year.

Photo illustration by Delcan & Co.

‘What I learned when my husband got sick’

“It has been 12 days since T woke up in the middle of the night on March 12 with chills.”

In a first-person essay, an editor for The Times, Jessica Lustig, describes life with her family since her husband was diagnosed with Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus.

She writes: “It’s as if we are in a time warp, in which we have accelerated at 1½ time speed, while everyone around us remains in the present — already the past to us — and they, blissfully, unconsciously, go about their ordinary lives, experiencing the growing news, the more urgent advisories and directives, as a vast communal experience, sharing posts and memes about cabin fever, about home-schooling, about social distancing, about how hard it all is, while we’re living in our makeshift sick ward, living in what will soon be the present for more and more of them.”

If you have 20 minutes, this is worth it

Drawn to Chernobyl

Mark Neville for The New York Times

Driven by his own curiosity, a writer for The Times Magazine traveled to the area around the former nuclear plant, the site of arguably the worst ecological catastrophe in history. “I was on a kind of perverse pilgrimage,” he writes. “I wanted to see what the end of the world looked like.”

Above, two tourists at an abandoned amusement park in Pripyat, a city built for Chernobyl workers.

Here’s what else is happening

Draft could include women: Under a new recommendation to Congress, all Americans ages 18 to 25 — not just young men as currently required — would have to register with the government in case of a military draft.

Meridith Kohut for The New York Times

Snapshot: Above, a boarding school for girls in need in Maracaibo, Venezuela. As the country’s economic crisis deepens, mothers and fathers are going abroad in search of work, leaving hundreds of thousands of children in the hands of relatives, friends and, sometimes, one another.

In memoriam: Terrence McNally, a four-time Tony Award-winning playwright, dramatized and domesticated gay life in a Broadway career that spanned five decades. He died on Tuesday at 81, from complications of the coronavirus.

A playlist for history: The theme song for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” are among 25 recordings that have been added to the national registry at the Library of Congress.

What we’re reading: This article about a socially distanced wedding from The Cut. It’s “a charming story of making do,” says Steven Erlanger, our chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe, “when you just have to get that wedding done for the insurance.”

Now, a break from the news

Melissa Clark

Cook: This “highly adaptable” vegetarian skillet chili from Melissa Clark is part of her series on cooking with pantry staples.

Watch: Netflix’s feel-good documentary “Crip Camp” recalls a Catskills summer camp that fostered American disability rights activism. We made it a Critic’s Pick.

Listen: Patrick Stewart reads Shakespeare on Twitter, Ballet Hispánico is on Instagram, and art museums are expanding their digital offerings. If you’re stuck at home and hankering for the fine arts, there’s plenty online.

Smarter Living: Catastrophizing — imagining the worst-case scenario and planning for it — can be damaging. So take a breath, stick to the facts and follow these other suggestions for staying sane.

And now for the Back Story on …

A lost sense of smell

There is growing evidence that anosmia — loss of the sense of smell — may be a coronavirus symptom. Medical experts said that people who lose their ability to smell or taste should isolate themselves for at least a week, even if they are otherwise asymptomatic.

Sarah Maslin Nir, a Times reporter who covered a suburban outbreak, lost her sense of smell last week and later tested positive for the virus. She spoke to our colleague Jonathan Wolfe about her experience for our Coronavirus Briefing.

When did you notice that you couldn’t smell?

I had a socially distant lunch with a friend on Perry Street, at opposite ends of a stoop, and she passed me some Clorox wipes. And I thought, Unscented Clorox wipes? That’s weird. But then I looked at them, and they said “lemon scent.”

Blossom season in North Macedonia. The loss of smell has been associated with the coronavirus. Ognen Teofilovski/Reuters

What did you do next?

I quickly made my exit, because I remembered reading an article about two Chinese health care workers and one sentence stuck out to me — that one of the women lost her sense of taste and smell. I went home, got my godmother on FaceTime, opened my spice cupboard and tried sniffing all of the spices. I sliced fresh ginger and practically put it up my nose and couldn’t smell it.

Is anosmia your only symptom?

I don’t have a cough or a fever, but I’m exhausted. And because I can’t smell, food is bland. Eggplant Parmesan tastes like a hot wet book.

Has your sense of smell returned?

Since I can’t smell, I don’t really have an appetite, but I’m still trying to eat nutritiously. After several days, my sense of smell briefly came back: I was making myself what I would normally make, a kale salad, and surprisingly, it did not taste like serrated paper. But shortly after that it went away again.

How would you describe anosmia to others?

It’s deeply unsettling. It’s a constant reminder that something is deeply wrong with your body. You can perk up and have a good moment or two, but then you eat your Cheerios and your heart misses a beat.

A correction: Tuesday’s briefing cited an article that misstated the regulatory status of the drug thalidomide. It was approved in the 1990s for leprosy and, later, cancer treatment; it is not the case that it was never approved in the U.S.

That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.

— Chris

Thank you
Mark Josephson and Eleanor Stanford provided the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.

P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Today’s episode is about President Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Here’s today’s Mini Crossword, and a clue: Capital of Vietnam (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• The Times Company has acquired Audm, a subscription-based audio app that transforms long-form journalism into audio.