Coronavirus Live Updates: Half of Humanity Under Lockdown Orders

The lockdowns have led to a collapse of the global economy, vaporizing 10 million jobs in the United States in just two weeks. Global stocks, which had surged on Thursday after a wishful tweet from President Trump about the oil markets, dipped again on Friday amid growing fears that the pain will be profound and prolonged.

Governments have promised trillions of dollars in a desperate effort to limit the damage.

Model makers are now being guided by other grim data, most of it coming from Europe.

The staggering death tolls in Italy and Spain, accounting for nearly half of the 53,000 deaths worldwide, rose yet again. But the crisis is deepening across the continent, with more than 5,000 deaths in France, nearly 3,000 in Britain, and more than 1,000 in both Germany and Belgium.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned on Thursday that time was running out to find critical supplies, including the ventilators needed to sustain the most critically ill patients.

“If a person comes in and needs a ventilator and you don’t have a ventilator, the person dies,” Mr. Cuomo said at his daily briefing in Albany. “That’s the blunt equation here. And right now we have a burn rate that would suggest we have about six days in the stockpile.”

That has come to an end.

That number, while staggering, is expected to worsen in coming months. The data released on Friday was mostly collected in the first half of the month, before stay-at-home orders began to cover much of the nation. Nearly 10 million people applied for unemployment benefits in the past two weeks.

“This is nothing compared to what we’re going to see,” said Stephanie Pomboy, president of MacroMavens, an independent research firm. Indeed, the March unemployment rate of 4.4 percent could rise to double digits as soon as next month.

The S&P 500 was down about 1 percent at late morning. Investors were digesting more painful economic data — this time, the monthly employment report from the Labor Department that showed a long run of job growth had ground a halt in March.

Warning again that New York City is days away from a “D-Day” when the outbreak will overwhelm the healthcare system, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City called Friday for the nation’s healthcare workers to be sent to the hardest-hit places.

“Unless there is a national effort to enlist doctors, nurses, hospital workers of all kinds and get them where they are needed most in the country in time,” Mr. de Blasio said on MSNBC Friday morning. “I don’t see, honestly, how we’re going to have the professionals we need to get through this crisis.”

The crisis is hitting New York City particularly hard. Nearly 50,000 people have tested positive, and 1,500 have died in the city, more than 1,000 of them in the past week alone. The city’s emergency medical system is overwhelmed.

At his Friday briefing, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said 2,935 people had died in the state, up from 2,373 on Thursday morning.

Britain has its deadliest day as the government races for an “immunity passport.”

Britain is drawing up plans to issue an “immunity passport” for key workers that would certify those who have recovered from coronavirus — and carry antibodies identifiable by a blood test — that would allow them to resume a normal working life.

“We have a stream of work underway on immunity,” the health secretary, Matthew Hancock, told the BBC on Friday. “We are potentially having immunity certificates so that if people have been through it and when the science is clear about the point at which they are then immune, people can then start getting back to normal.”

The scale of any initiative is likely to depend on the government’s success in rolling out antibody tests that show whether people who experienced light symptoms — or none at all — are likely to be immune from the illness.

The government says that it is working to ensure that such tests are sufficiently accurate, but that not all are performing to required standards of reliability.

Officials announced on Friday that 3,605 people in Britain had died, up 684 from the previous day.

Hours earlier, Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne, opened the country’s newest and largest hospital, with a capacity for 4,000 beds. The temporary facility, the N.H.S. Nightingale, is in an exhibition center in East London that was converted in just nine days.

Prince Charles, who earlier this week ended self-isolation following his own coronavirus diagnosis, opened the hospital via a video link from Scotland.

Data shows an income gap in limiting movement.

Although people in all income groups are moving less than they did before the crisis, wealthier people are staying home the most, especially during the workweek. Not only that, but in nearly every state, they began doing so days before the poor, giving them a head start on social distancing as the virus spread, according to aggregated data from the location analysis company Cuebiq, which tracks about 15 million cellphone users nationwide daily.

The data offers real-time evidence of a divide laid bare by the coronavirus pandemic — one in which wealthier people not only have more job security and benefits but also may be better able to avoid becoming sick.

Government officials and health care professionals toss off mentions of mortality rates, flattening the curve and lockdowns, assuming that we know what they mean. But the terms mean different things from country to country, state to state, even city to city and person to person.

Officials use the same phrases about mass testing, caseloads and deaths to describe very different situations. That makes it hard to give clear answers to vital questions: How bad are things? Where are they headed?

People search for insight by comparing their countries to those that are farther along in the epidemic. But if the terms are misleading or used in differing ways, the comparisons are flawed. Also, the statistics and vocabulary offer a false sense of precision while in reality, the information we have shows only a fraction of what’s going on.

“The new cases or deaths each day are given as exact numbers and we’re trained to take that at face value,” said Mark N. Lurie, an epidemiologist at Brown University’s School of Public Health. “But those are far from exact, they’re deeply flawed, and their meaning varies from place to place and from time period to time period.”

The New York Times infections database is open to the public.

“We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks,” Mr. Trump said in a Twitter post. “Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing — will have a big price to pay!”

At a White House briefing earlier in the day, Mr. Trump announced he was invoking the Defense Production Act, a 1950s law, to help shore up dwindling supplies of medical supplies. The move came after desperate pleas from governors and health care officials who are trying to handle the spike in coronavirus patients.

As the virus swept across the United States, 3M said that it was speeding up production of N95 masks and that it planned to increase output in the United States by 30 percent over the next year.

Germany has been held up as a model across Europe as its laboratories work around the clock to process coronavirus tests, a key measure that has resulted in its relatively low number of casualties.

The widespread testing and other measures intended to slow the spread of the virus have not stopped it outright, however. The country’s death count passed 1,000 on Friday. But with 80,000 detected cases, the death rate remains only slightly higher than that of the flu — 1.2 percent, compared to more than 8 percent in Italy.

As Ms. Merkel heads into what is supposed to be her final year in office, a survey commissioned by public broadcaster ARD showed 72 percent of Germans believed that her government was handling the crisis well and that the measures taken to stem the spread of the illness have been appropriate.

To ensure the food supply and fill the labor gap, the government said it would recruit as many as 80,000 workers in East European countries by the end of May. All applicants will have to pass a medical test, then be flown directly from their home countries. Once in Germany, their movements will be restricted to their places of work.

Correction: An earlier version of this item misstated the death rate in Germany. It is 1.2 percent, not 0.23 percent.

A text had arrived from his older brother, who was letting him use an apartment on the Upper West Side. It read: “Hey Richard — We are so proud of you and your heroism. I hate to be the bearer of bad news but looks like our apartment building doesn’t want you staying in our apt.”

The building’s board of directors wanted him out.

That took a minute to sink in.

On the one hand, Dr. Levitan was answering the state’s urgent plea for help in the worst public health crisis in decades.

On the other, his brother was dealing with the idiosyncratic creature known as a New York City co-op, run by a board of apartment owners. Within their four walls, co-ops are tiny nation-states.

So, while Dr. Levitan was working to save the lives of strangers, his brother was pleading with his neighbors to let his sibling rest in the apartment. He got nowhere. The board had heard what he was doing and did not want him around.

As the Estonian public watched the authorities’ desperate attempts to contain a coronavirus outbreak on the island of Saaremaa, the government quietly enacted legislation that would send home all unemployed workers from outside the European Union.

The legislation was drafted by the Interior Ministry, which is led by Mart Helme, the head of the far-right Estonian Conservative People’s Party. Mr. Helme is a vocal critic of the large Russian minority in Estonia and is known for his rants against migrants and promoting the slogan: “If you’re black, go back.”

It also gives the government the power to decide which sectors are allowed to recruit workers from abroad.

Mr. Helme said that employers should always strive to use local workers.

“Our people are worth being offered jobs during a difficult time of increasing unemployment,” he said in a statement.

Eoin McNamara, a doctoral researcher in political science at the University of Tartu, said Mr. Helme and his party, which joined the coalition government last year, have long seen the Ukrainians as likely to integrate with and galvanize the Russian-speaking minority.

“They have been threatening this for a long time,” he said. “It looks like he took advantage of a politically opportune time to deal with this.”

But as the outbreak spreads in Sweden — with more than 500 new cases a day, some 430 people in intensive care units, and confirmed infections in several nursing homes — the public health agency has ramped up its recommendations to limit gatherings. The measures come as the country has “unfortunately reached a new level of new cases,” Anders Tegnell, a government epidemiologist, said on Thursday.

Public health officials have asked residents to postpone large private gatherings like weddings, baptisms and funerals. Ski lift operators were urged to close the slopes, something the country had initially resisted. Officials have urged people to stay home if they’re sick, work from home if they can and refrain from using public transportation during rush hours.

“It’s time for self-discipline,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said on Thursday, urging people to stay home over the Easter break.

The government last week banned public gatherings of more than 50 people, down from the earlier limit of 500. But Dr. Bjorn Olsen, an infectious disease specialist who is critical of Sweden’s soft approach, said the numbers on what constituted an appropriate sized group had been “pulled out of the air.”

Leo Segermark, a medical student at Lund University, said the public health agency should go further and demand that more people stay home.

“The focus is still on if you have symptoms,” Mr. Segermark said. “But that isn’t enough, and the rest of the world has understood this.”

The hashtag #Sisispalacesforquarantine was trending on Twitter after the government directed all Egyptians returning from abroad to undergo a 14-day quarantine at their own expense at a luxury hotel near Cairo’s main airport.

A series of ambitious construction projects — among them a new capital in the desert outside Cairo, a new summer capital on the Mediterranean coast, and several new palaces — have become a hallmark of Mr. el-Sisi’s rule, but drawn protests of overspending and corruption.

Mr. el-Sisi responded to the outcry over the quarantine instructions by announcing that a government fund would cover the cost of the 14-day hotel stays. But the coronavirus threatens to upend his plans in other ways.

On March 22 and 23, the army announced that two senior generals with its Engineering Authority, which oversees major construction projects, had died from the virus.

This week, Arab Contractors, one of Egypt’s largest construction companies, dismissed opposition claims that work on the new capital had stopped because of infections among workers. Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly on Wednesday urged the construction projects to continue “at full capacity,” while taking precautions to protect the health of workers.

The World Health Organization has sounded the alarm about a spike in coronavirus cases across the Middle East and called on governments and citizens to do more to stop its spread.

He urged countries in the region to “be more aggressive” in testing suspected cases, tracing how the infection may have spread, isolating confirmed cases and protecting health workers, while insisting that citizens stay home and practice rigorous hygiene.

But he acknowledged the difficulty of taking such measures in a region that encompasses 22 countries, including much of the Arab world, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan. Many of these countries have suffered through years of conflicts that have damaged their health systems, ravaged their economies and displaced millions of people.

Public health experts are particularly worried about the threat the coronavirus poses to the refugees, many of whom live in crowded and unsanitary conditions where infection could spread easily.