Here’s what you need to know:
- Australia outlines a three-step plan for reopening the country.
- Britain is developing an app that will track coronavirus cases in a centralized database.
- Tehran earthquake sends thousands of residents into the streets.
- Not waiting for state action, Russia’s oligarchs have become central to the coronavirus fight.
- The abrupt halt in air travel could impair weather forecasting as the Atlantic hurricane season nears.
- With cycling’s crammed new schedule, the Tour de France could get lost in the crowd.
Australia outlines a three-step plan for reopening the country.
The Australian government on Friday outlined a cautious, three-step plan to reopen the country by July, with states and territories in control of the timeline.
“We cannot allow our fear of going backwards from stopping us from going forward,” said Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The plan’s tentative first stage will allow Australians to hold public gatherings of up to 10 people. Schools, playgrounds, some eateries and community centers will be allowed to reopen, with social distancing.
If all goes well, officials said, Australians may be allowed to travel between states and attend public gatherings up to 100 people by July. The plan will be reviewed every three weeks, and further outbreaks would most likely occur. But the country was committed to moving forward with the plan, Mr. Morrison said.
“If not now, then when?” he added. He encouraged Australians to download a government app aimed at contact tracing.
The country has now tested over 730,000 people for the virus, with 6,900 confirmed cases and 97 deaths.
The slow reopening was met with cautious support by many Australians. “I still feel the need to be super vigilant, especially with risk groups like my grandparents, said Desmond Cohn, 26, from Sydney, where some restrictions were relaxed and beaches were recently reopened for exercise.
The country also joined a meeting of countries on Thursday, led by Austria and including Greece, Israel, Denmark, Singapore, Norway, New Zealand and the Czech Republic, to compare strategies on reopening their economies. Australia has called for an independent inquiry into the origin of the pandemic, which has caused frictions with its largest trading partner, China. “We just want to know what happened so it doesn’t happen again,” Mr. Morrison said on Friday.
Britain is developing an app that will track coronavirus cases in a centralized database.
Britain’s National Health Service is moving forward with an app to track the spread of the virus despite questions about the technology’s effectiveness, privacy safeguards and compatibility with key iPhone and Android features.
Officials are counting on the technology, which is designed to alert anyone who may have come into contact with an infected person, to help ease lockdown orders. But a dispute over privacy — and over how much data the authorities can collect — has hampered the rollout and pitted the government against Apple and Google, which are pushing a competing design for exposure tracing.
The British government may be overmatched by the Silicon Valley titans, which control the software that runs on nearly every smartphone on the planet. Unless Britain changes course, the companies are refusing to provide access to a Bluetooth signal on iPhones and Android phones.
The debate is about balancing public health and individual privacy. British officials say that more can be learned about the virus by collecting information in a centralized database. Apple and Google, supported by academics and privacy groups, are promoting a decentralized approach that would protect against invasions of privacy.
In Australia, an app similar to the British one has been criticized for technical problems. Germany, Austria, Italy and Switzerland are developing apps that support the Apple-Google specifications.
Tehran earthquake sends thousands of residents into the streets.
An earthquake with the magnitude of 5.1 shook Tehran around 1 a.m. on Friday, with at least 20 aftershocks sending thousands of panicked residents into the streets.
Tehran residents have been struggling to manage the threat of the coronavirus pandemic for over two months, and Friday’s quake saw people crowding together fearfully in the aftermath.
There were no casualties reported in Tehran but in Damavand, the epicenter of the quake about 6.2 miles northeast of Tehran, a 60-year-old man died and eight others were injured. There were no immediate reports of buildings or hospitals being damaged, said Tehran’s governor, Anoushirvan Mohseni-Bandpey.
The government’s management of the pandemic has drawn criticism from Iranians who are anxious over the lack of a strict lockdown order. Health officials said this week that the pandemic is still spreading, with a steady increase in numbers in at least 15 provinces.
The quake hit when most people were at home sleeping or watching television. Videos shared on social media showed the moment when walls began rattling and people ran for their doors.
Eyewitnesses in Tehran said streets were packed with people standing around on sidewalks, huddled in parks and camping outside for the night. Some people wore masks but many did not observe social distancing in the chaos of trying to take shelter outdoors.
“There are thousands of people outside, it’s even more crowded than daylight here,” Pooriya Asteraky, a resident of Tehran, said in a telephone interview.
Around Tehran, people were sleeping in their parked cars along the sides of roads, fearful of going back inside.
“People should be on high alert and observe health protocols related to the coronavirus when they come out of the house,” Mr. Mohseni-Bandpey said in a TV broadcast.
Not waiting for state action, Russia’s oligarchs have become central to the coronavirus fight.
A Russian steel magnate had his company supply respirator masks for the police, ventilators for hospitals, housing for people in isolation, software for quarantine compliance and workers for lockdown patrols.
The fantastically rich oligarchs who own Russia’s biggest businesses have become central figures in the country’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
With local health systems buckling, some oligarchs are deploying millions of dollars of their own cash, along with their companies’ logistics and procurement capacity, while urging slow-moving regional authorities to act with more resolve.
Under President Vladimir V. Putin, oligarchs have depended on the Kremlin’s benevolence, and the pandemic illustrates how much Mr. Putin’s system of governance relies on informal alliances with business tycoons.
The battle against the coronavirus is also revealing the weaknesses of the Russian state, which has neglected investment in health care and other social services, and at first did not respond aggressively to the pandemic.
So people like the steel magnate, Alexei A. Mordashov, have stepped in. He helped persuade regional governors to shut down the cities where he operates, and provided resources to make it happen.
For a fertilizer tycoon, Andrei A. Guryev, closing off the isolated Siberian region around one of his operations was simpler — his company owns the local airport and the ski resort.
Oleg V. Deripaska, a metals magnate hit by American sanctions in 2018, is paying for construction of three coronavirus treatment centers in Siberia. Vladimir O. Potanin, among Russia’s richest men, and his mining giant Nornickel, have set aside some $150 million for the coronavirus fight.
The depth of their coffers also puts the oligarchs in position to outlast the crisis — unlike Russia’s reeling small and midsize businesses — meaning that the businessmen’s influence is poised to grow in coming years.
The abrupt halt in air travel could impair weather forecasting as the Atlantic hurricane season nears.
The drop in airline travel caused by the pandemic has sharply reduced the amount of atmospheric data routinely gathered by commercial airliners, the World Meteorological Organization has said.
The agency said Thursday that it was “concerned about the increasing impact” on forecasts worldwide.
Data on temperature, wind and humidity, collected by sensors on the planes and transmitted in real time to forecasting organizations around the world, has been cut by nearly 90 percent in some regions, the meteorological organization said.
The organization, an arm of the United Nations that coordinates a global observing system for 193 member nations, said surface-based weather observations had also been affected in some parts of the world, including Africa and Central and South America. Many weather instruments there are not automated and must be visited regularly to obtain readings.
National weather agencies “are facing increasingly severe challenges as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, especially in developing countries,” the agency’s director-general, Petteri Taalas, said, in a statement.
“As we approach the Atlantic hurricane season, the Covid-19 pandemic poses an additional challenge, and may exacerbate multi-hazard risks at a single country level,” he said.
With cycling’s crammed new schedule, the Tour de France could get lost in the crowd.
Like most of the sports world, cycling shut down in mid-March. Now the international federation has announced plans for the resumption of the season in August. And the calendar is packed, to say the least.
A few events were canceled outright, including the Tour of Switzerland. But most of the races originally planned for March through July have been crammed into the new schedule, somehow, someway.
Many multiday races overlap, most notably two of the Grand Tours, in Spain and Italy. The Giro d’Italia will start on Oct. 3 but not end until Oct. 25. The Vuelta d’Espana will start on Oct. 20, before the Giro ends. As recently as 2008, Alberto Contador won both races in the same year. That will be impossible in 2020.
The Tour de France, which is to be held in September instead of June and July, usually has little major competition for attention. But this year it will be held simultaneously with an important weeklong Italian race, the Tirreno-Adriatico, which has been won in recent years by Tour champions Contador, Vincenzo Nibali and Cadel Evans.
Reporting was contributed by Isabella Kwai, Adam Satariano, Farnaz Fassihi, Anton Troianovski, Henry Fountain and Victor Mather.
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