| We’re covering an effort to repatriate thousands of Indians from abroad, a potential change in the virus’s timeline and how Taiwan is trying to keep baseball fans’ hopes alive. | | | By Melina Delkic and Carole Landry | | | Volunteers distributing meals to migrant workers at a distance in Dubai, where there is a reliance on the labor of millions of foreigners. Karim Sahib/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images | | | Flights are scheduled to start on Thursday, and several large ships have been dispatched to the United Arab Emirates and the Maldives. Only those without any coronavirus symptoms will be permitted to travel back, the government said. | | | Millions of Indians work in the Arab world, particularly in the Persian Gulf, and many have lost their jobs during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic. More than 150,000 Indians in the United Arab Emirates have asked to be evacuated and thousands who are studying abroad want to return home, according to Indian news media reports. | | | ■ Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is pushing a Japanese-made drug, Avigan, as a coronavirus treatment, but there is no solid evidence that the medication is actually effective against Covid-19. | | | ■ Two new studies offer compelling evidence that children can transmit the virus. Researchers analyzed data from both China and Germany and found strong evidence that schools should be kept closed for now. | | | ■ Pfizer and the German pharmaceutical company BioNTech announced that they had begun human trials in the U.S. for a potential coronavirus vaccine, which could be ready for emergency use in America as early as September. | | | A coronavirus case in France in December, in a man who hadn’t traveled for months, implies that person-to-person transmission in Europe had occurred far earlier than previously known. Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times | | | Doctors in France reported that a patient in late December tested positive for the coronavirus, a finding that, if verified, suggested that the virus appeared in Europe nearly a month earlier than previously known. | | | It raises new questions about how long the disease was circulating in Wuhan, China, before the outbreak was acknowledged by the authorities there. | | | The discovery came after doctors retested samples taken on Dec. 27 from a patient initially diagnosed with pneumonia; it is not entirely clear how the patient contracted the infection. It was days before China reported the illness to the World Health Organization. | | | Keep in mind: Doctors caution that the finding still must be verified and that all of the facts about the case had not been established. | | | President Rodrigo Duterte is seen on a monitor in the newsroom of an ABS-CBN News bureau in Manila’s northern suburb of Quezon City. Ezra Acayan/Getty Images | | | The ABS-CBN media network was ordered off the air on Tuesday, making it the first major broadcaster to be shut down under President Rodrigo Duterte. | | | The network has drawn Mr. Duterte’s ire with its coverage of his brutal war against drug dealers and users, which has left thousands of people dead. | | | “Millions of Filipinos will lose their source of news and entertainment when ABS-CBN is ordered to go off the air on TV and radio tonight, when people need crucial and timely information as the nation deals with the Covid-19 pandemic,” the company said. | | | The broadcaster wrapped up its programming on one channel late Tuesday with a message that said: “This is ABS-CBN Corporation Channel 2. In the service of the Filipino. Now signing off.” | | | Context: Mr. Duterte has not tried to hide his scorn for the news media, calling reporters “sons of bitches” and accusing them of being spies. He has leveled death threats against some reporters and said that none should be “exempted from assassination.” | | | Ashley Pon for The New York Times | | | Sports events are canceled across much of the world, but Taiwan, which has so far kept the outbreak under control, is pushing forward with the rarest of spectacles: a professional baseball season. | | | The stands are filled with fake, cardboard spectators, the locker rooms are stocked with sanitizer, and distancing is enforced between coaches and players. Online viewership has surged, and the team has offered spectators around the world a hint of normalcy. Above, cheerleaders for the Rakuten Monkeys. | | | 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 | | | | Snapshot: Above, baobab trees in Madagascar. Our Travel desk takes you on a visual tour of the southern African island, where 90 percent of the flora and fauna are found nowhere else on Earth. | | | What we’re reading: This critique of the Popeyes fried chicken sandwich by Devra First, the Boston Globe’s food writer and restaurant critic. The column, a finalist for a James Beard Award, “deftly details the taste, culture, distraction and criticism of the fast-food episode,” writes Remy Tumin, on the Briefings team. | | | Cook: An easy Dutch baby. All you need are five simple ingredients: eggs, milk, butter, flour and salt. Serve with confectioners’ sugar and lemon juice on top, or maple syrup, or jam. | | | Do: Today may be the cutoff to order flowers for Mother’s Day for delivery in the U.S.: Here are 10 florists with beautiful options. These desk organizers can help if you’ve been working from home (and will be for some time). And if you’ve never read Stephen King, we have your essential guide on where to start. | | | Steven Lee Myers, our Beijing bureau chief, and Edward Wong, our diplomatic correspondent, this week discussed covering the coronavirus outbreak in China. Steven left Beijing on April 1 after Chinese authorities expelled American journalists from The Times and two other U.S. newspapers. He is relocating to Seoul. Here’s a short excerpt. | | | Ed: Can you tell us what the reopening process has been like in China? | | | Steven: It’s been a slow opening and it’s not a turn the lights on one day and suddenly everything is back to normal. Far from it. | | | As they see the cases decline, they begin to loosen restrictions on people staying at home, opening museums, but by no means is everything open yet. | | | The exception is Beijing, the capital. The restrictions have been intensifying in Beijing oddly as the cases have gone down. Partly that’s because they are so worried about the possibility of a second wave coming or people returning from other parts of China to the capital, which is obviously the political center of the country. They are very concerned about the party leadership. | | | The Times’s Steven Lee Myers chatting with journalists after a news conference in Beijing in March. Andy Wong/Associated Press | | | Ed: Were there any measures that China took that you think the U.S. and others can learn from? | | | Steven: I was struck by how few people were wearing masks when I arrived in the U.S. What China has done and what the people have done there, setting aside the government response, is that the people took this very seriously from the beginning and they really limited themselves. | | | People just heeded the advice, sheltered in place, kept their kids home. That is probably the biggest impact they had against the spread of the virus. | | | 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 rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com. | | | Were you sent this briefing by a friend? Sign up here to get the Morning Briefing. | | |
