| Wednesday, April 8, 2020 | | | | We’re covering the end of Wuhan’s lockdown, a leadership challenge in British government and what Guyana’s oil boom means for its residents. | |  By Melina Delkic | | | Travelers returned to the Wuhan railway station on Wednesday after Chinese authorities lifted a ban on outbound travel from the city. Noel Celis/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | After several long months of lockdown, residents of Wuhan, China, can now leave the city if they display a phone app that measures their contagion risk. Shops are reopening, people are going to parks and the city is cautiously coming back to life. | | | The lifting of the 10-week lockdown on Wednesday came after only three new coronavirus cases were reported in the city in the previous three weeks, and a day after China reported no new deaths for the first time since January. | | | Within the city of 11 million, tough rules are still in place to prevent the virus from regaining a foothold. Officials continue to urge everyone to stay at home as much as possible. Schools are still closed. | | | Wuhan is still a “profoundly damaged” city, our correspondents write. “Sickness and death have touched hundreds of thousands of lives, imprinting them with trauma that could linger for decades.” | | | ■ After 13 years together in a Hong Kong zoo, two giant pandas successfully mated on Monday, a rare feat that was celebrated by animal conservationists. The zoo has been closed since January, prompting speculation that Ying Ying and Le Le just needed a little privacy. | | | Prime Minister Shinzo Abe declared a state of emergency during a meeting of Japan’s new coronavirus task force on Tuesday. Pool photo by Franck Robichon | | | The state of emergency announced by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is not a lockdown — it relies on voluntary compliance. Japan’s Constitution would have to be amended to give Mr. Abe the power to impose stay-at-home orders or force businesses to close. And testing so far has been limited. | | | Tokyo’s governor, Yuriko Koike, has asked residents to stay inside for the last two weekends and has encouraged people to telecommute, but a government survey found just one in 8 respondents have ever worked from home. And day cares are still open. | | | By the numbers: Japan reached 3,906 confirmed cases on Tuesday, exactly double the number a week earlier. In Tokyo, by most measures the world’s largest city, cases have doubled in the last five days to more than 1,000. | | | Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times | | | Many are welcoming that change. Others, though, wonder whether the new wealth will change 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. | | | PAID POST: A MESSAGE FROM CAMPAIGN MONITOR | | TEST: Email Marketing 101: Never Sacrifice Beauty for Simplicity | | A drag-and-drop email builder, a gallery of templates and turnkey designs, personalized customer journeys, and engagement segments. It's everything you need to create stunning, results-driven email campaigns in minutes. And with Campaign Monitor, you have access to it all, along with award-winning support around the clock. It's beautiful email marketing done simply. | | | Learn More | | | | Afghanistan: Talks on a prisoner swap between the Afghan government and the Taliban appeared to be collapsing on Tuesday, as Taliban leaders ordered their negotiators to pull out of the discussions. The exchange is seen as crucial to preserving a fragile peace deal between the Taliban and the U.S. | | | Vanuatu cyclone: A category 5 storm ripped through the Pacific island nation for the second day, cutting off communications in some areas and complicating rescue efforts. No deaths have been reported, but there are scenes of sweeping destruction. | | | Snapshot: Above, a caribou in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. A writer for our Travel section reflected on a six-month, 4,000-mile journey there and its lessons about moving forward in a time of uncertainty. | | | What we’re watching: The movie “Survival Family” on Netflix, about a Japanese technology-addled family forced to come together to survive a breakdown of the electrical grid. It is “mostly comic before it turns dark, and then back again,” says Motoko Rich, our Tokyo bureau chief. | | | Cook: A big bowl of garlicky, soupy greens might just be a welcome break from all the poundcake and cookies you’ve been baking. | | | Stephen Castle, The Times’s London correspondent, has been covering Britain’s coronavirus outbreak and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s personal experience with Covid-19. I spoke to him about what he’s seeing on the ground. | | | Walk us through Boris Johnson’s condition and how his case has progressed. | | | We heard on Tuesday that he was stable overnight and was still in intensive care. Critically, they said he had gotten some oxygen but had not been on a ventilator or required invasive treatment. | | | His girlfriend Carrie Symonds, who is pregnant, tweeted about feeling symptoms, but we have no suggestion that she has suffered anything as serious as Boris Johnson. | | | Prime Minister Boris Johnson is being treated for Covid-19 at the intensive care unit of St. Thomas Hospital in London. Andrew Testa for The New York Times | | | What’s the mood right now in Britain? | | | There was quite a lot of surprise and a certain amount of shock of the announcement this week. | | | Really until Thursday and even into Friday, the plan was for him to come out of self-isolation on Friday, which would have been seven days from when he was diagnosed. Then he himself did a sort of rather shaky at-home video explaining his situation, in which he didn’t look terrible, but he didn’t look great either. That was as far as we knew. | | | What are the big questions about leadership in this time of crisis? | | | It has caused something of a power vacuum. We’re in a rather unpredictable position where we’re slightly unclear how the government is being run. As you know, there is no written constitution. | | | The foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, is deputizing for the prime minister, but there does seem to be this feeling at the moment that everything is kind of going wrong for the government at an incredibly critical time for the country. | | | That’s it for this briefing. See you next time. | | Thank you
To Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | P.S.
• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about the presidential primary election in Wisconsin.
• Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Cup of joe (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here.
• Join The Times’s science team for a live discussion of the latest findings on the coronavirus. R.S.V.P. here for the call, at 4 a.m. Thursday Hong Kong time. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
