Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

April 7, 2020

Your Tuesday Evening Briefing

By Remy Tumin and Hiroko Masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

1. Chinese officials ended the lockdown on Wuhan, where the coronavirus first emerged.

But the city is profoundly damaged, a place whose recovery will be watched for lessons on how populations move past pain and calamity of such staggering magnitude.

After several long months, residents can now leave the city if they display a phone app that measures their contagion risk — based on their home addresses, recent travels and medical histories. The move comes as China reported its first day since January with no deaths.

In other international developments:

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain remains in the intensive care unit of a London hospital battling the coronavirus. Britain has no codified order of succession for prime minister, so for now, the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, will take the reins.
France’s health minister said the country had not reached the peak of its epidemic and was “still in a worsening phase.” The country has recorded more than 78,100 cases and 10,300 deaths, with the toll still rising.
Turkey ordered all citizens to wear masks when shopping or visiting crowded public places. It promised that it will deliver masks to every family, free of charge.

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David Mora/U.S. Navy, via Associated Press

2. The acting Navy secretary quit after an uproar over his response to a shipboard outbreak.

The departure of Thomas Modly, pictured in March, capped a weeklong public relations disaster for the Navy after his bungled response — first the firing of the aircraft’s commander and subsequent criticism — set off an outcry. He was the fourth Navy secretary in six months.

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And President Trump effectively ousted the leader of a new watchdog panel charged with overseeing how his administration spends trillions of taxpayer dollars in pandemic relief funds. It was the latest step in an unfolding White House power play over semi-independent inspectors general across the government.

Scott Olson/Getty Images

3. Black Americans are facing alarming rates of coronavirus infection.

In Louisiana, about 70 percent of the people who have died are African-American; in Chicago, above, more than half of those with confirmed cases are black despite making up less than a third of the population. Similar instances were found in and around Milwaukee, Las Vegas, Connecticut, Minnesota and more.

Public health researchers say the racial disparities in coronavirus cases and outcomes reflect what happens when a pandemic is layered on top of entrenched inequalities.

Separately, a nationwide study found that counties with even slightly higher levels of long-term air pollution are seeing larger numbers of Covid-19 deaths.

Morry Gash/Associated Press

4. Today’s Wisconsin election is unprecedented.

The state is the first to hold a major election with in-person voting despite stay-at-home orders for the coronavirus. That led to long lines, disruption, confusion and some frayed tempers. Wait times stretched to two hours in Milwaukee, where just five of 180 planned polling places are open.

Polls close at 9 p.m. Eastern time. We’ll have live updates with on-the-ground reporting. But it will take a while for results: The state’s elections commission has ordered municipal clerks not to release any until April 13.

The mess of an election is the culmination of a decade of effort by state Republicans to make voting harder. Here’s how we got to this point.

Karsten Moran for The New York Times

5. All shucked and nowhere to go.

Warm-weather food businesses like oyster bars (above in New York in 2014), seafood shacks and other seasonal food businesses around the country are putting their plans, and many of their workers, on ice.

The federal stimulus bills enacted last month offer help for the millions of American small businesses and freelancers affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but red tape abounds. Our finance reporter answered common questions about these programs.

And while the cruise industry is struggling to survive, one industry is having a boom: pro video game streamers. Used to spending their days in isolation, gamers may have the most virus-proof job in the world.

Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times

6. Guyana, once one of South America’s poorest countries, is speeding toward a future as an oil-producing giant.

Many are welcoming that change. Others, though, wonder whether the new wealth will improve life for the majority or just a select few.

Ethnic tensions are already intensifying, and environmentalists worry about the toll of fossil fuel production on a nation where nine out of 10 people live below sea level.

7. We’re officially in the era of “fauxcations.”

Avid travelers are devising creative ways to celebrate the vacations they had to cancel. Marty Pollak and Monica Palenzuela, for example, “visited” Patagonia, above, despite travel restrictions.

And sports enthusiasts are not far behind: The “2020 Platform Tennis World Championships” has emerged as an unlikely exception to the disappearance of televised live sports. (Spoiler alert: Don’t get your hopes up.)

Here are some other ways to deal:

Some men are dressing up to work from home. And a lot of people are shopping for tiny desks.
Consider introducing some new characters — even emojis — to your socially distanced Seder this week.
Kids won’t stop fighting? We talked to a bouncer, a therapist and a referee for some advice.

Justin T. Gellerson for The New York Times

8. The Library of Congress owns a rare print copy of the Gutenberg Bible. But Know Your Meme, Urban Dictionary and Cute Overload have also been preserved.

For the past 20 years, a small team of archivists has been cataloging internet culture, totaling more than 2.129 petabytes of data (about 18 billion digital documents). And that’s just a sliver of the internet.

“We do an all-hands-on-deck,” said Abbie Grotke (in black), who leads the team. “And we don’t delete anything. We’re digital hoarders.”

Video by J.Y. Kim et al., Astronomy & Astrophysics (2020)/Event Horizon Telescope

9. News from the cosmos.

For the first time, astronomers have seen a black hole spitting fire from the heart of a distant quasar. The image resolves in stunning detail one of the most mysterious fountains of energy that dot deep space. Our space reporter describes it as a “blowtorch of the gods.”

Scientists also got a unique glimpse at the exposed guts of Comet Borisov, only the second known interstellar object, as it shed a big chunk while heading back out of the solar system.

Ever wonder what the sky would look like from the surface of a fast-spinning star? A blur, mostly. Randall Munroe explains your latest science mystery.

Ocean Park

10. And finally, maybe a bit of privacy was all they needed.

Ying Ying and Le Le, two giant pandas at a Hong Kong zoo, could never quite get in the mood. But after 13 years of living together — most recently, in a visitor-free amusement park thanks to the pandemic — the two successfully mated on Monday.

Pandas only have a mating “season” of just a few days per year and a famously low libido, so the prospect of expanding the vulnerable population was cause for celebration in the world of animal conservation. It’ll be a while before we know whether the patter of tiny panda paws is on the way.

Have a romantic night.

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