Covid Information: India’s Capital Will Ease Restrictions

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India’s capital, New Delhi, will ease some coronavirus restrictions on Monday, allowing markets to reopen with limited hours and the metro transit system to operate at 50 percent capacity, the region’s top official said on Saturday, even as he announced preparations for a potential third wave of infections.

After enduring one of the world’s most ferocious outbreaks in April and May, the broader territory of Delhi has recorded a drop in daily new cases of 85 percent over the past two weeks, and reports of new deaths have plummeted. On Sunday, India as a whole reported more than 114,000 new cases, the lowest number in two months. But across the country, gaps in testing and medical treatment leave many cases and deaths unrecorded.

“The corona situation is under control for now,” Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, told a news conference.

Mr. Kejriwal warned that any new wave could be even more severe than the spring surge, when patients suffered from acute shortages of hospital beds and medical oxygen.

He said the region would build new oxygen-production and storage facilities, and expand the capacity of intensive-care units. He also said that two genome-tracking facilities would be set up to examine samples of the virus and identify variants, and that a pediatric task force was advising the government on how to protect children in the event of a third wave.

At the start of this week, Delhi allowed some manufacturing and construction activity to resume for the first time since a lockdown was imposed six weeks earlier. Yet even a gradual reopening carries risks, given that less than 4 percent of India’s 1.3 billion people are fully vaccinated.

Other parts of India are also easing restrictions. In northern Uttar Pradesh, the country’s most populous state, Reuters reported that only night curfew restrictions remain for 55 of 75 districts.

In the industrialized western state of Maharashtra, malls, movie theaters, restaurants and offices will be allowed to open regularly as of Monday in districts where the positivity rate has fallen below 5 percent, Reuters also reported, and in Gujarat, government and private offices will be allowed to operate fully staffed, while shops in 36 cities will be able to remain open longer.

United States ›	United StatesOn Jun. 5	14-day change
New cases	10,436	–45%
New deaths	370	–28%

World ›	WorldOn Jun. 5	14-day change
New cases	198,170	–27%
New deaths	4,516	–22%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

Long before the pandemic arrived on American shores, there were debates over the politics of mask wearing. More than a dozen states have laws barring people from covering their faces in public, most of them ordinances passed to deter the Ku Klux Klan hate group.

Those laws were suspended, revoked or not enforced as mask wearing in many states became a public health exigency.

But as the pandemic recedes in the United States and emergency orders related to the pandemic expire, the question of what to do with the old mask laws is resurfacing.

When Virginia’s coronavirus state of emergency expires on June 30, a mask ban from 1950 will come back into force.

The anti-Klan law, which presciently included an exemption for the declaration of a public health emergency, bars “any person over 16 years of age to, with the intent to conceal his identity, wear any mask, hood or other device whereby a substantial portion of the face is hidden or covered so as to conceal the identity of the wearer.”

Alena Yarmosky, the press secretary for Gov. Ralph Northam, said in an email that the governor was exploring ways to make sure that the law does not affect people who want to continue wearing masks for health reasons.

“Governor Northam is committed to ensuring that individuals who are not vaccinated and/or not comfortable going without a mask still have the option to wear one,” Ms. Yarmosky said. She did not respond to questions on whether Mr. Northam would pursue a legislative change or executive action.

Anti-mask laws have been invoked over the years in a variety of ways. A federal appeals court ruled in 2004 that the New York Police Department was justified in denying an outdoor rally permit to an organization that called itself the Church of the American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The permit was denied on the grounds that participants would be violating the state’s anti-mask law. In 2011, N.Y.P.D. officers also arrested some Occupy Wall Street protesters and charged them with wearing masks.

The West Virginia Supreme Court in 1996 upheld the use of that state’s mask ban in a case involving an angry parent who attended a school board meeting in a devil’s mask to protest the school’s devil mascot.

And in 2018 police officers in Alabama invoked an anti-mask law to arrest a man after he led a demonstration against an officer-involved shooting of an African American man.

An article in the California Law Review published in November listed 18 states that had anti-mask laws predating the pandemic.

New York’s 1845 law, the oldest anti-mask law in the country, was repealed in May 2020. The law, which made an exception for “a masquerade party or like entertainment,” was passed during an armed uprising by cash-strapped wheat farmers who disguised themselves as Native Americans during protests over feudal rent arrangements.

The anti-mask law in Alabama, which dates to 1949 and was spurred by outrage over a dawn raid by three dozen Klansmen on an interracial Girl Scout camp, bars a masked person from loitering in a public place. It makes exceptions for masquerade parties, parades or a religious, educational or historical “presentation.”

Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, issued an opinion in April 2020 that said the law’s description of “being masked” would not include wearing a medical mask that covers only the nose and mouth.

Rob Kahn, a law professor at St. Thomas University in Minneapolis and an expert on anti-mask laws, believes many of the laws are obsolete. But repealing them might have been easier before the pandemic, he said, before masks became such a political lightning rod.

Mr. Kahn said he did not know of any cases of coronavirus anti-maskers advocating to keep the old anti-mask laws. But he hypothesized that maintaining them might be popular with the sizable number of voters who now think of masks as symbols of government overreach.

“I definitely think there will continue to be a difference of opinion, a divergence over masks,” Mr. Kahn said. “But hopefully the conflicts that come up will be resolved peacefully.”

Credit…Alfonso Duran for The New York Times

At least 12,000 people flocked to Miami for the largest Bitcoin conference in the world and the first major in-person business conference since the pandemic began.

The exuberance of being in person, indoors, in a crowd for the first time in more than a year was electric. Everyone hugged, no one masked. The money zipped between digital wallets. Conference swag included neon fanny packs, festival bracelets and a Lamborghini. The jargon — stablecoin, peer-to-peer, private key — flowed. So did the liquor.

Some attendees wore business casual. Others looked ready for a music festival. One donned a furry rave bikini.

Even a dramatic plunge in value from a high of $64,000 in April to $36,000 now did not dampen spirits. They’re BTD — buying the dip. Wall Street bankers, institutional investors and Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Republican from Wyoming, all came to Miami.

Miami has fully embraced cyptocurrency, as Bitcoin A.T.M.s sprinkle the city’s Wynwood neighborhood. A cryptocurrency exchange called FTX recently bought the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena and Miami’s mayor, Francis Suarez, announced this year that the city would accept tax payments in cryptocurrency, let its employees collect salaries with it and explore holding some on its balance sheet. (The logistics of these announcements were still being studied.)

Speakers at the conference included Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter and the payments company Square, as well as Cameron Winklevoss, a crypto entrepreneur. Panels included one called “Wine, Women and Crypto.”

Only 14 percent of American adults have purchased cryptocurrency, according to a survey by The Ascent, a financial services ratings site. Of those who haven’t, 20 percent said they planned to this year.

Credit…China Daily, via Reuters

More Covid-19 restrictions have been placed on Guangzhou, an industrial hub in southern China. The districts of Nansha, Huadu and Conghua are ordering residents and those who have traveled through the area to be tested for the virus. Video of a large testing site being set up at a stadium in the city was posted by the epidemiologist Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding on Twitter.

This is an expansion of recent lockdown orders, which were put into place in the Liwan District after a 75-year-old woman tested positive for the virus after dining at a dim sum restaurant in the neighborhood.

Restrictions have been placed on restaurants, gyms, pools and other public venues. Restaurants can no longer offer dine-in services, while the other businesses were forced to close. About a dozen subway stops throughout the city were also closed and schools have transitioned to remote learning.

Mainland China has been reporting an average of 38 new cases daily, with more than half of those cases detected in and around Guangzhou. The new cases are all thought to be the variant first found in India, now called the Delta variant.

The city has more than 15 million residents and is a major business and manufacturing center close to Hong Kong.

Credit…Juan Arredondo for The New York Times

Bre Starr, a 34-year-old pizza delivery driver who has been out of work for more than a year, will be among the first to lose her jobless benefits in the next few weeks. That’s because Ms. Starr lives in Iowa, where the governor has decided to withdraw from all federal pandemic-related jobless assistance on June 12.

Iowa is one of 25 states, all led by Republicans, that have recently decided to halt some or all emergency benefits months ahead of schedule. With a U.S. Labor Department report on Friday showing that job growth fell below expectations for the second month in a row, Republicans stepped up their argument that pandemic jobless relief is hindering the recovery.

The assistance, renewed in March and funded through Sept. 6, doesn’t cost the states anything. But business owners and managers have argued that the income, which enabled people to pay rent and stock refrigerators when much of the economy shut down, is now dissuading them from applying for jobs.

“I’m a Type 1 diabetic, so it’s really important for me to stay safe from getting Covid,” Ms. Starr said, explaining that she was more prone to infection. “I know that for myself and other people who are high risk, we cannot risk going back into the work force until everything is good again.”

Most economists say there is no clear, single explanation yet for the difficulty that some employers are having in hiring. Government relief may play a role in some cases, but so could a lack of child care, continuing fears about infection, paltry wages, difficult working conditions and normal delays associated with reopening a mammoth economy.

The particular complaints that government benefits are sapping the desire to work have, nonetheless, struck a chord among Republican political leaders.

Credit…Dawn Bangi for The New York Times

The relationship between American businesses and their employees is undergoing a profound shift: For the first time in a generation, workers are gaining the upper hand.

Up and down the wage scale, companies are becoming more willing to pay a little more, to train workers, to take chances on people without traditional qualifications, and to show greater flexibility in where and how people work.

The erosion of employer power began during the low-unemployment years leading up to the pandemic and, given demographic trends, could persist for years.

March had a record number of open positions, according to federal data that goes back to 2000, and workers were voluntarily leaving their jobs at a rate that matches its historical high. Burning Glass Technologies, a firm that analyzes millions of job listings a day, found that the share of postings that say “no experience necessary” is up two-thirds over 2019 levels, while the share of those promising a starting bonus has doubled.

“Companies are going to have to work harder to attract and retain talent,” said Karen Fichuk, who as chief executive of the giant staffing company Randstad North America closely tracks supply and demand for labor. “We think it’s a bit of a historic moment for the American labor force.”

Credit…Ben Jared/PGA TOUR, via Getty Images

Jon Rahm, a popular player on the PGA Tour and the world’s third-ranked male golfer, had just charged to a six-stroke lead on Saturday in the third round of the Memorial Tournament, an event he won a year ago. Walking from the 18th hole, where a crowd surrounding the green showered him with warm applause, Rahm, 26, shook hands with his playing partners and smiled.

Seconds later, he was doubled over and in tears, his left hand clasping his face. A doctor for the tour had met Rahm at the edge of the green and informed him that he had tested positive for the coronavirus, a result reported to the tour as Rahm was shooting a sparkling eight-under-par 64 on the difficult course at the Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio. Rahm would be forced to withdraw from the tournament and miss the final round on Sunday.

Rahm hid his face in his hands for a few moments, then stood upright before staggering as he began to ascend a steep hill, wiping his eyes as he made his way to the adjacent clubhouse.

“Not again,” he said, although it was unclear what his response meant. It was also unknown whether Rahm has been fully vaccinated, although for the past year he had frequently talked at length about his worries for the health of his family back in his native Spain and about the devastation the virus had brought to communities near his hometown. Rahm currently lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., with his wife, Kelley, whom he met while they were students at Arizona State, and their 2-month-old son, Kepa Cahill.

Late on Saturday night, Rahm posted a statement on Twitter, saying that he was “very disappointed” about withdrawing. “This is one of those things that happens in life, one of those moments where how we respond to a setback defines us as people,” he wrote. “I’m very thankful that my family and I are all OK. I will take all of the necessary precautions to be safe and healthy, and I look forward to returning to the golf course as soon as possible.”

According to the PGA Tour, Rahm was notified on Monday that he would be subject to contact tracing because he had come in close contact with an unidentified person who had tested positive for the virus. Tour protocols permitted Rahm to remain in the tournament if he agreed to be tested every day and avoided using indoor facilities at the event.

Credit…Maggie Shannon for The New York Times

Strict pandemic rules meant that most of California’s Class of 2021 spent roughly a year learning from home. As the spread of the virus has waned in California and around the country, proms — even those retooled with mask-wearing and other precautions — have served the twin function for many of celebrating both the end of high school and the end of the worst of the pandemic.

“For so long, I didn’t take advantage of all the moments I had in high school,” said Michelle Ibarra Simon, a senior at Dos Pueblos High School in the Southern California city of Goleta. “Covid helped me see that I was letting time fly and letting every moment slip through my fingers.” Prom, she added, “was probably one of the best moments of my life.”

Sienna Barry, a senior at Petaluma High School, said that because the students had either been vaccinated or tested, they finally felt comfortable sending Snapchat videos, making TikToks and posting to their Instagram stories with abandon.

“It was like a normal gathering, being able to post with all your friends dancing,” she said. “For the last year and a half, if you go out with your friends you may be low-key embarrassed.”

All the typical drama of a big dance — the beefs, the wounded feelings, the tears — faded away.

“Why have drama on the one night you get of senior year?” she said.

Credit…Saul Martinez for The New York Times

The Florida Department of Health will no longer update its Covid-19 dashboard and will suspend daily case and vaccine reports, the governor’s office confirmed on Friday. Officials will instead post weekly updates, becoming the first U.S. state to move to such an infrequent publishing schedule.

Officials first announced last week that the state would end daily reports in a news release outlining Florida’s plans to transition into the next phase of its Covid-19 response now that cases in the state are decreasing. Last month, Florida closed its state-run testing sites but gave counties the option of taking them over.

Christina Pushaw, press secretary for Gov. Ron DeSantis, told The News Service of Florida on Friday that there was no need to continue issuing the daily reports.

“Covid-19 cases have significantly decreased over the past year as we have a less than 5 percent positivity rate, and our state is returning to normal, with vaccines widely available throughout Florida,” Ms. Pushaw said in an email to reporters.

In the past two weeks, Florida has seen a 43 percent drop in coronavirus cases and deaths. Fifty percent of the population has received at least one vaccine dose, just below the national average of 51 percent, according to a New York Times database.

Florida’s dashboard was created in part by Rebekah D. Jones, a state data scientist who was fired for insubordination in May 2020, a conflict that she said came to a head when she refused to manipulate data to show that rural counties were ready to reopen from coronavirus lockdowns. The data in fact showed that the virus was rapidly spreading in a state that was hesitant to mandate broad restrictions.

Ms. Jones’s firing became a flash point as Mr. DeSantis, a close ally of then-President Donald J. Trump, touted Florida’s early success in battling the virus — a victory lap that turned out to be premature at the time and led to a disastrous summer. State officials insisted that Ms. Jones’s claims about hiding virus data were false. She was dismissed, they said, because she made unilateral decisions to modify the virus dashboard without approval.

After Ms. Jones was fired, she made her own database using public virus case records from the Florida Department of Health that had been buried deep in PDF files on the state website.

In December, state police agents with guns drawn raided Ms. Jones’s home in Tallahassee to execute a search warrant in a criminal investigation, after the police said a breach at the Florida Department of Health was traced to her computer. She denied having anything to do with the breach.

Ms. Jones’s dashboard generally shows a higher number of cases than the number reported by the state. It also includes information from other agencies, such as hospitalization rates from the Agency for Health Care Administration, that are not on the state dashboard.

But after the state announced that it would no longer update its public records, Ms. Jones said that she wouldn’t be able to update her dashboard either.

“No more data,” she wrote in a notice posted on her site. “Only summary reports in PDF format. Please be patient as I work to reformat the website to adjust for these changes.”

Credit…Scott McIntyre for The New York Times

In early May, after travel restrictions in the United States had eased and he had been fully vaccinated, the writer and psychologist Andrew Solomon took a commercial flight to visit his daughter in Texas. He writes of the experience:

I ate and drank nothing onboard, and my mask was tightly fixed on my face. Still, there was also a feeling of festive nostalgia attached to reclaiming the skies, a feeling I usually associate with returning to a university where I once studied, or revisiting the scene of childhood summers.

As we broke through the clouds into that stratosphere of private sunshine that is so familiar to jet travelers, I felt the uneasy joy I discovered when I first hugged friends after being vaccinated. The quarantine had given me extra time with my husband and son, days to write, and the comforting patterns of repetition. But breaking out of it was a relief, nonetheless.

At the end of “Paradise Lost,” Adam and Eve are banished from the Garden of Eden, and John Milton makes no bones about their anguish at being cast out. But he does not end on that sour note, because banishment from one place meant an opportunity to find another, however tentatively that process was undertaken:

Some natural tears they dropd, but wip’d them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That will be how we return to the pre-Covid realms of possibility.

Read the full article here.

Credit…Suzie Howell for The New York Times

Nearly a decade ago, a government-ordered review found that Britain’s so-called high streets — the retail bedrock of the country’s town and city centers, comparable to America’s main streets — had reached a “crisis point.”

Since then things have only gotten worse, as coronavirus lockdowns and a surge in online shopping over the past year have accelerated the downward spiral of brick-and-mortar retailing. A record number of shops closed in 2020.

But now, an unlikely combination of vested interests are coming together to help. Giant asset managers and landlords are taking risks to revive their downtrodden investments. Shoppers and businesses are emerging from the pandemic with renewed interest in their neighborhoods. And town officials are ready to spend heavily to spread confidence.

Enough confidence for people like Hope Dean to bet their livelihoods on the high streets’ revival — with some help.

Her snug plant store, Wild Roots, is operating rent-free for two years, along with several other recently opened businesses in the southwestern town of Poole. They are part of a redevelopment project undertaken by their properties’ owner, the giant London-based asset manager Legal & General Investment Management, a unit of the country’s largest corporate pension manager with more than 1 trillion pounds in assets.

Credit…Adam Dean for The New York Times

For all of the mask-wearing rigor and lockdown obedience displayed by many in Thailand, the catalyst for Bangkok’s latest outbreak was the abandon of a privileged few.

Thailand went for months without a single confirmed case of local transmission. But this spring, according to health officials, two luxury nightclubs that cater to powerful and wealthy men in the capital, Bangkok, became the epicenter of what is now the country’s biggest and deadliest coronavirus surge. Scores of people linked to the clubs have tested positive, including an ambassador and a government minister. Police officers and women who worked at the clubs have been infected, too.

The epidemic has radiated from the nightclubs to the slums that hug Bangkok’s highways and railroad tracks, cramped quarters where social distancing is impossible. Infections have also spread to prisons, construction camps and factories.

“The rich people party and the poor people suffer the consequences,” said Sittichat Angkhasittisiri, a neighborhood chairman in Bangkok’s largest slum, Khlong Toey, where the coronavirus has infected hundreds of people.

Credit…Andrea Mantovani for The New York Times

LONDON — While the United States appears to be trying to close the curtain on the pandemic — with restaurants filled, mask mandates discarded and more than 135,000 people jamming the oval at the Indianapolis 500 — it is a different story across the Atlantic.

Some European countries are maintaining limits on gatherings, reimposing curbs on travel and weighing local lockdowns. And parts of Britain have extended lockdown restrictions, while scientists are heatedly debating whether to proceed with a nationwide reopening planned for June 21.

Although vaccinations have helped drive down coronavirus cases on both sides of the pond, on the fundamental question of how to approach an end to pandemic restrictions, America and Europe have diverged.

“The British are worrying more than any other country,” said Tim Spector, a professor of genetic epidemiology at King’s College London. “We seem to be much more receptive to the doomsday scenarios than they are in the U.S.”

In Britain, the spread of a new, highly contagious variant first detected in India has scrambled calculations. Though scientists are at odds about the severity of the threat from the variant, known as Delta, some argue that the costs of delaying the reopening by a few weeks pale in comparison with the damage that might be wrought by giving the variant extra opportunities to spread while people are still acquiring immunity.

“We’re now looking at a variant where we have less knowledge about its properties,” said Theo Sanderson, a researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. “It just means we have less certainty about what things will look like going forward.”

Covid Information: India’s Capital Will Ease Restrictions

Here’s what you need to know:

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