Coronavirus, Recession, ‘Tiger King’: Your Wednesday Evening Briefing

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Good evening. Here’s the latest.

1. Florida ordered its 21 million residents to stay home.

After weeks of resistance, Gov. Ron DeSantis relented after a morning phone call with President Trump. Above, a drive-through testing site in West Palm Beach.

The outbreak poses a unique risk for Florida, the third-largest state in the country, which has 7,000 confirmed cases of the virus and 87 deaths. A quarter of the population is older than 60, and the economy largely relies on tourism.

At least 294 million people in at least 37 states, 79 counties, 28 cities, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico are being urged to stay home. That’s nearly 90 percent of the population.

2. We may be in for a long recession.

The global economic downturn that’s almost certainly already underway may be even worse than initially feared, potentially lasting into 2022. Every region of the world faces severe fallout from the abrupt, and indefinite, halt of normal business because of the coronavirus pandemic. Above, a quiet office complex in Beijing.

In the U.S., start-ups have been hit hard. In just a few weeks, more than 50 have laid off or furloughed some 6,000 employees. Young tech companies of all sizes have had to slash prices and watch funding plummet.

The Department of Labor will report last week’s jobless claims on Thursday. That number could surge to more than 5 million, according to an analysis of Google search data. If that forecast is accurate, it will crush the most recent report of 3.3 million claims for March 15-21, which was already the largest single-week increase in U.S. history.

3. The question of which coronavirus patients should get prioritized for treatment has become urgent in New York City, where critical supplies like ventilators are running short.

Worried about facing tough choices soon, doctors have asked state health officials for the rare right to withhold care from patients who are unlikely to recover. Gov. Andrew Cuomo opposes any rationing.

With no state protocol, doctors and other hospital staff have started talking among themselves to formalize common guidelines for triage. Many feared the anguish that such decisions might bring, not to mention possible lawsuits or even criminal charges.

4. Many of the world’s researchers have banded together on the coronavirus in a collaboration unlike any in history.

In the race to understand the virus and to find a cure, normal academic customs have been nixed. Scientists are sharing findings immediately instead of in journals, launching clinical trials together and setting aside the quest for credit. Above, scientists at the Pasteur Institute in Paris in February.

Some early research may offer hope. Doctors in China reported this week that the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine helped to speed the recovery of a small number of mildly ill patients.

Several drugs have also shown promise in treating “cytokine storms,” dangerous overreactions of the immune system. The potentially deadly response is all too common among coronavirus patients, particularly young people.

There have been grim observations, too. In a very small subset of patients, the virus may invade the brain.

5. President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is the last notable holdout among major world leaders in denying the severity of the coronavirus.

Brazilians, he declared last week, are uniquely suited to weather the pandemic because they can be dunked in raw sewage and “don’t catch a thing.” Congressional leaders, editorial boards and the head of the Supreme Court have essentially beseeched Brazilians to ignore their president, and a movement for impeachment is gaining steam.

It’s a very different situation in Spain. After an outbreak, the small town of Igualada, outside Barcelona, has been cut off from the rest of the country — a lockdown within the national lockdown — and thrown into weeks of uncertainty.

6. Residents of this French town accepted a trade-off for decades: good jobs for bad air. But when the health costs became impossible to ignore, enough was enough.

In a groundbreaking move, many of the citizens of Fos-sur-Mer (where the cancer rate is double the national average) banded together to file a criminal complaint accusing the steel, oil and petrochemical companies in the region of putting their lives at risk.

They didn’t stop there: In another first, they’re taking on an entire industrial basin — all of the Marseille area’s heavy industry, which together pumps out one-fifth of France’s fine particles and a quarter of its heavy metals emissions.

7. Just sit down. Stop trying to being productive.

The internet wants you to believe you aren’t doing enough with all of that “extra time” you have now. Why haven’t you organized every corner of your home, become a master baker, gotten in shape? The pressure is real, writes our internet culture reporter, but staying inside and attending to basic needs is plenty.

8. Live, from Samantha Bee’s backyard.

Late-night TV is back — without studios or audiences. Forced to improvise, hosts have returned with radically stripped-down productions made from home. Can they keep it feeling fresh — and their kids out of the frame?

Or in the case of Bee on a recent shoot, top left, “there was literally a screeching hawk, circling up in the sky,” she says.

She’s not the only one being interrupted by wildlife. With much of the world staying home these days, animals have ventured out far beyond their normal environs. That means goats on the streets of Wales, coyotes in San Francisco and yes, unfortunately, plenty of rats.

10. And finally, before “The Daily Show” and The Onion, there was Not The New York Times.

The spoof paper ran for about a month in 1978, during a strike that shut down New York’s major newspapers. It was created by some of the city’s most celebrated writers, including Nora Ephron and George Plimpton.

But it was also an inside job. Editors, designers and a copy boy from The Times made sure the fake articles and advertisements closely mimicked the actual paper. Once the strike ended, their moonlighting became a tightly held secret.

For the first time, three of its contributors recently spoke on the record.

Have a revelatory April Fool’s evening.

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