Here’s what you need to know:
- India takes another major step, restarting one of the world’s largest train networks.
- Not even the West Wing is impermeable from the spread of the coronavirus.
- The U.S. plans to accuse China of trying to hack vaccine data.
- Ethiopian troops may have shot down an aid plane in Somalia.
- Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces a quarantine for incoming travelers.
- Countries where hardship is familiar sometimes fare better against the virus.
India takes another major step, restarting one of the world’s largest train networks.
India’s train network will gradually restart operations on Tuesday as the country eases its coronavirus lockdown, even as infections there are on the rise.
The train network, one of the world’s largest, closed in late March when a strict lockdown was implemented. But as the country begins to slowly open back up this month, trains are the first mode of transport being allowed to crisscross the country.
On Sunday, India reported more than 67,000 coronavirus cases with more than 2,200 deaths.
The March closure was the first since the country gained its independence in 1947, offering a potent symbol of the global panic sweeping into the country.
The Indian government converted some 20,000 train carriages into isolation wards, bracing for a devastating wave of coronavirus infections that many predicted would overwhelm hospitals. That disaster has largely failed to materialize, although some cities have fared worse than others, with entire hospitals shut in as staff became infected with coronavirus.
On Sunday, the railways ministry said some trains would restart, running from the capital to cities across the country, but passengers would have to wear masks and undergo health screenings before being allowed to depart. New routes will also be introduced, the railways ministry said in a statement.
The announcement comes after the government arranged for trains to shuttle thousands of migrant workers stranded in cities across India back to their homes, mostly in the rural hinterlands. Up to 45 million Indians travel each year from those areas to the country’s big cities to look for work. When the lockdown was announced, millions of migrant workers became homeless and jobless overnight and with interstate travel banned, many set off on foot to travel to their homes, sometimes hundreds of miles away.
Not even the West Wing is impermeable from the spread of the coronavirus.
Three top officials leading the White House response to the pandemic began to self-quarantine over the weekend after two Trump administration staff members — a valet to President Trump and Katie Miller, the press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence — tested positive for the virus.
Among those who will be sequestered for two weeks is Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the nation’s leading infectious disease expert. So will Dr. Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and Dr. Stephen Hahn, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration.
But Mr. Pence won’t isolate himself, a spokesman for the vice president said on Sunday night, contradicting a Bloomberg News journalist tweeting that Mr. Pence would self-quarantine.
“It is scary to go to work,” Kevin Hassett, a top economic adviser to the president, said on the CBS program “Face the Nation” on Sunday.
The devastation of the virus has been particularly acute for African-Americans. Many families, social scientists and public health experts now fear that racial bias may be contributing to the disproportionately high rate at which Covid-19 is killing African-Americans.
Acknowledging a history of implicit bias in medical care, the C.D.C. recently advised health care professionals to be careful not to let bias influence their treatment during the pandemic.
The National Medical Association, the country’s largest professional organization representing black doctors, is calling on federal health agencies to study the role bias may have played in the testing and treatment of African-Americans for Covid-19.
Its president, Dr. Oliver Brooks, said, “I think what we will find is race is a factor.”
The virus has also been particularly lethal for residents of nursing homes, who in New Jersey accounted for half of the state’s Covid-19 fatalities, including 72 at the New Jersey Veterans Home at Paramus, a state-run home for former members of the U.S. military.
“The whole place is sick now,” said Mitchell Haber, whose 91-year-old father, Arnold Haber, an Army veteran, died last month at the home, which is about 12 miles northwest of New York City.
While the death toll approached 80,000 people in the United States, the Trump administration signaled the increasingly painful toll of the crisis on the economy on Sunday.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said on Sunday that the jobs figures would get worse before they got better. He said the real unemployment rate — including people who are underemployed as well as those entirely without work — could soon approach 25 percent.
“There are very, very large numbers,” Mr. Mnuchin said on “Fox News Sunday.”
The U.S. plans to accuse China of trying to hack vaccine data.
The F.B.I. and the Department of Homeland Security are preparing to issue a warning that China’s most skilled hackers and spies are working to steal American research in the crash effort to develop vaccines and treatments for the coronavirus.
A draft of the forthcoming public warning, which officials say is likely to be issued in the days to come, says China is seeking “valuable intellectual property and public health data through illicit means related to vaccines, treatments and testing.”
It focuses on cybertheft and action by “nontraditional actors,” a euphemism for researchers and students the Trump administration says are being activated to steal data from inside academic and private laboratories.
The efforts are part of a surge in cybertheft and attacks by nations seeking advantage in the pandemic.
More than a dozen countries have redeployed military and intelligence hackers to glean whatever they can about other nations’ virus responses. Even American allies like South Korea and nations that do not typically stand out for their cyberabilities, like Vietnam, have suddenly redirected their state-run hackers to focus on virus-related information, according to private security firms.
The decision to issue a specific accusation against China’s state-run hacking teams, current and former officials said, is part of a broader deterrent strategy that also involves United States Cyber Command and the National Security Agency. Under legal authorities that President Trump issued nearly two years ago, they have the power to bore deeply into Chinese and other networks to mount proportional counterattacks.
The forthcoming warning is the latest iteration of a series of efforts by the Trump administration to blame China for being the source of the pandemic and exploiting its aftermath.
Ethiopian troops may have shot down an aid plane in Somalia.
A plane carrying coronavirus-related supplies that crashed in Somalia on Monday may have been shot down by Ethiopian troops, according to a new report from the office of the African Union Force Commander in Somalia.
The report, which was leaked on Twitter, said Ethiopian troops not affiliated with the African Union peacekeeping mission in Somalia brought down the Kenyan-registered private plane out of fear that it was about to carry out a “suicide” attack.
The Somali authorities and officials within the African Union verified the authenticity of the report, but did not confirm its findings. An investigation of the crash is still underway.
The incident adds to long-running tensions in the region, where a history of distrust and unresolved disputes between Somalia, Kenya and Ethiopia — as well as the stubborn presence of the Shabab terrorist group — threatens security and stability.
The cargo flight plunged to the earth on the afternoon of May 4 in the town of Bardale, in southwestern Somalia, killing all six people aboard. The plane had approached the airfield in Bardale from the west instead of the east, which is more common.
The aircraft, owned by African Express Airways, was carrying supplies to assist in the fight against the coronavirus pandemic. It initially left the capital Mogadishu and stopped in Baidoa before heading to Bardale.
The airstrip and the town surrounding it are secured by Somali and Ethiopian troops. They are part of an African Union peacekeeping mission meant to help Somalia fight the Shabab, a terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announces a quarantine for incoming travelers.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced on Sunday that Britain would soon impose a mandatory quarantine on travelers arriving in the country by air to try to avert a new wave of coronavirus infections, signaling how cautious the country will be in relaxing its seven-week lockdown.
In a much-anticipated national address, Mr. Johnson offered no details about how the quarantine would work. But with the transmission rate of the virus having declined sharply throughout the country, he made clear the government now views people from abroad as the greatest threat to a country that is already one of the contagion’s hardest hit in Europe.
Mr. Johnson urged the British public to “stay alert,” softening his earlier admonition to “stay home,” and said that people could exercise outside as much as they wanted, sunbathe in parks, and return to work, if they could not work from home. Other than that, he said, the current restrictions would stay in place.
“This is not the time simply to end the lockdown,” Mr. Johnson said, as he credited social distancing for slowing the spread of the virus. “Instead we are taking the first careful steps to modify our measures.”
Critics claimed that the new guidance to “stay alert” was so vague that it risked confusion, and it set off fissures with political leaders in other parts of the United Kingdom, which had largely moved in lockstep in combating the virus. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, said that Scotland would be sticking with the guidance for people to stay at home.
Mr. Johnson did not announce another measure that had been rumored for days: asking people to wear face masks in public.
Countries where hardship is familiar sometimes fare better against the virus.
As the coronavirus has hopscotched the world, a paradox has emerged: Rich nations are not necessarily better at fighting the crisis than poorer ones.
In Europe, the disease has been burning through Britain, France and Italy, three of the continent’s four biggest economies. But smaller, poorer nations in the region quickly imposed and enforced tough restrictions, stuck to them, and have so far fared better at keeping the virus contained.
The nations include many in the former Communist East, as well as Greece and Croatia, where the authorities are cautiously optimistic about their people’s endurance in the face of adversity.
Those countries could draw on deep reservoirs of resilience born of relatively recent hardship. Compared to what their people had been through not long ago, the stringent lockdowns seemed less arduous, apparently prompting a larger social buy-in.
In Greece, where the strictures of the country’s debt crisis are fresh in most minds, the specter of one in three people being out of work is nothing new. In Croatia, many remember being barricaded indoors and hearing air raid sirens blaring for weeks on end during the conflict in the Balkans in the 1990s.
Ive Morovic, a 45-year-old barber in Zadar, Croatia, believes the focused way in which Croats have responded to the pandemic harks back to wartime and the legacy of communism.
“People today are afraid, and the discipline we all learned helps us get in line and creates some sort of forced unity,” he said.
Reporting was contributed by Matina Stevis-Gridneff, Iliana Magra, Abdi Latif Dahir, David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Maria Abi-Habib, Neil Vigdor, Maggie Haberman, Michael D. Shear, John Eligon, Audra D. S. Burch, Tracey Tully and Jim Tankersley.
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