Your Monday Evening Briefing

May 4, 2020

Your Monday Evening Briefing

By Victoria Shannon and Hiroko Masuike

Good evening. Here’s the latest.

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

1. The White House forecast that daily deaths will nearly double in May.

The Trump administration is privately projecting that the nation’s daily death toll will reach about 3,000 on June 1, compared with the current daily number of about 1,750, according to an internal document obtained by The Times.

The projections, based on government modeling, forecast about 200,000 new cases each day by the end of the month, up from about 25,000 cases a day currently.

The numbers underscore a sobering reality: While the United States has been hunkered down for the past seven weeks, significant risks remain. And reopening the economy will make matters worse, public health experts fear. Above, a casket company in New York City.

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Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times

2. At least 12 countries began easing restrictions on public life.

Spain kicked off its plan for a “new normalcy” by late June, with small stores and businesses reopening. Germany, Austria, Lebanon, Israel, Poland and India also eased restrictions.

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In Italy, the prime minister said that Italians could visit their congiunti, a word that could be translated as relatives but is also broader. After a national semantics debate, the government tried to clarify: Just friends just didn’t cut it. Above, a train station in Milan.

In Britain, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s press relations have turned testy as virus deaths jump.

Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters

3. Migration has come to a grinding halt in many places, and even gone into reverse.

Border closures, suspended asylum programs, interruptions in transportation and stay-at-home orders are some of the causes. Above, migrants from Mexico at the U.S. border.

The change is global: The number of East Africans seeking work in the Gulf States has plunged. Travel bans have blocked seasonal migrant laborers from Eastern Europe. Venezuelans in Colombia have returned home, as have Afghans in Iran and Pakistan, and Haitians in the Dominican Republic.

“We’ve never seen this before,” a former director of a migrant shelter in southern Mexico said. “I’ve never seen anything slow migration like the coronavirus.”

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

4. New York’s governor laid out the rules for ending restrictions.

New York City is meeting only three of seven reopening criteria announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo: Hospital deaths and new hospitalizations are declining steadily, and the city is conducting the appropriate number of tests each month. Above, a patient entering a Brooklyn hospital.

For the state as a whole, the one-day death toll was the lowest since March 28 and down more than 70 percent from early April.

In New Jersey, schools will remain closed for the rest of the academic year, Gov. Philip Murphy announced a week after saying there was “a chance” they would reopen.

Across the country, Americans who are frustrated by fellow citizens violating government orders are turning into social-distancing vigilantes.

J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

5. “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!”

The Supreme Court’s first argument held by telephone began with the usual chant, but that was almost the only traditional thing about it.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor disappeared for a few moments, apparently having failed to unmute her phone. Justice Clarence Thomas asked his first questions in more than a year.

On the whole, the hearing on whether “booking.com” can be trademarked went smoothly as the world listened in, also for the first time.

(In case you’re wondering: “Oyez” can be traced back to the 13th-century Old French oiez, essentially “hear ye!” It was uttered by the town crier, and is today used only in U.S. and British courts.)

Beth Coller for The New York Times

6. Disney’s happily ever after is nowhere in sight.

The entertainment conglomerate’s 14 theme parks (annual attendance: 157 million) are padlocked. Its eight movie studios, which controlled 40 percent of the domestic box office last year, are at a near standstill.

“From great to good to bad to ugly,” a leading media analyst wrote in a report ahead of Disney’s quarterly results on Tuesday that will be the company’s first assessment of the pandemic’s financial damage. Here is a look at the state of its operations.

Associated Press

7. In memoriam: Don Shula.

The N.F.L.’s winningest head coach died at age 90 at his home near Miami. He was also the football league’s only coach to lead a team to a perfect season.

In 33 years as a head coach at the Baltimore Colts and the Miami Dolphins, he and his teams won 328 regular-season games — still an N.F.L. record.

James Estrin/The New York Times

8. The Times won three Pulitzer Prizes.

This year’s Pulitzer award for public service, considered the most prestigious of the Pulitzers, went to The Anchorage Daily News and the nonprofit outlet organization ProPublica for their yearlong joint investigation of sexual violence in Alaska.

The commentary award went to Nikole Hannah-Jones, above, of The Times for her essay that served as the lead piece in The Times’s 1619 Project, a series that centered on reframing U.S. history by focusing on the consequences of slavery.

The investigative prize went to a Times investigation of the New York City taxi industry. And the international reporting prize was awarded to our series detailing Russia’s influence operations abroad, from assassinations to election meddling.

Here is the complete list of winners.

Alex Welsh for The New York Times

9. What comes after open-plan seating?

Companies long reliant on a layout of cubicles and collaborative spaces are now figuring out how to reconfigure the workplace in an era of infectious diseases.

Under consideration are plexiglass barriers that can be mounted on a desk; hand sanitizers built into desks that are positioned at 90-degree angles; air filters that push air down and not up; and windows that actually open.

The question is whether any of the changes will actually result in safer workplaces.

The New York Times

10. And finally, getting to know Stephen King.

His just-published collection of short fiction, “If It Bleeds,” already leads our best-seller list for hardcover fiction. If you’re a King newbie, we have a starter guide to his more than 70 works, including a classic, a book for scaredy-cats, a multibook epic and a crime novel.

And coming this summer is a new novel in the popular “Twilight” vampire series, more than a decade after the original storyline concluded. The author Stephenie Meyer said “Midnight Sun,” told from the vampire Edward Cullen’s perspective, will go on sale Aug. 4.

Try not to have a scary night.

Your Evening Briefing is posted at 6 p.m. Eastern.

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