Coronavirus Live Updates: U.N. Chief Calls Pandemic World’s Biggest Test Since World War II

“It is essential that developed countries immediately assist those less developed to bolster their health systems and their response capacity to stop transmission,” he said. “Otherwise we face the nightmare of the disease spreading like wildfire in the global South with millions of deaths and the prospect of the disease re-emerging where it was previously suppressed.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the coronavirus response, displayed the grim projection at a White House news conference and then joined President Trump in pledging to do everything possible to reduce the numbers even further.

President Trump officially called for another month of social distancing and warned that “this is going to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks” — even as he added that Americans would soon “start seeing some real light at the end of the tunnel.”

“I want every American to be prepared for the hard days that lie ahead. We’re going through a very tough few weeks,” Mr. Trump said, later raising his two weeks to three.

The scientists’ conclusions generally match those from similar models by public health researchers around the globe.

Mr. Trump, who spent weeks playing down the threat of the virus, congratulated himself for the projections, which he said showed that strict public health measures may have already curtailed the death toll. He suggested that as many as 2.2 million people “would have died if we did nothing, if we just carried on with our life.” By comparison, Mr. Trump said, a potential death toll of 100,000 “is a very low number.”

But on a day when the U.S. death toll from the coronavirus surged above 3,900, surpassing China’s official count, the pandemic’s personal and financial toll continued to play out across the nation.

Indian court sides with the government and forces journalists to toe the prime minister’s line.

Putting even more pressure on a news media sector already under assault by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s Supreme Court released an order Tuesday night requiring news organizations to publish everything that the government says about the coronavirus.

The order read: “We do not intend to interfere with the free discussion about the pandemic but direct the media to refer to and publish the official version about the developments.’’

Anyone who creates a panic can be punished by up to a year in jail, the court said.

Many lawyers and journalists in India denounced the order as an attack on India’s constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech, at a time when many problems have cropped up from the Indian government’s severe response to the coronavirus.

The government has imposed the world’s largest lockdown, putting 1.3 billion people essentially under house arrest, ordering them not to leave their homes unless vitally necessary. Hundreds of thousands of migrant laborers have fled cities, marching hundreds of miles to their villages in long lines.

The market has become a series of hasty deals in bars, sudden calls to corporate jet pilots and fast-moving wire transfers among bank accounts in Hong Kong, the United States, Europe and the Caribbean.

The stakes are high, and so are the prices. Wholesale costs for N95 respirators, a crucial type of mask for protecting medical workers, have quintupled. Trans-Pacific airfreight charges have tripled.

“It’s a global free-for-all, trying to get capacity,” said Eric Jantzen, the vice president for North America at Vertis Aviation, an aircraft and air cargo brokerage based in Zurich. “And the prices reflect that.”

World leaders are moving to get supplies, but they are still grappling with the vast scope of the problem.

China vacuumed up a big share of global supplies after the outbreak emerged in January. It imported two billion masks in a five-week period starting then. Now, China has become a major part of the solution. Already a giant in mask manufacturing, it has ramped up production to nearly 12 times its earlier level of 10 million a day.

Those who support more government help for low-income families say the crisis has revealed holes in the safety net that the needy have long understood. It is a patchwork system, largely built for good times, and offers little cash aid to people not working. It pushes the poor to find jobs, and supports many who do, but offers little protection for those without them.

Most rich countries have universal health insurance and provide a minimum cash income for families with children. The United States has neither as well as higher rates of child poverty.

And to a degree that casual observers may not understand, the Trump administration has tried both to shrink safety net programs and make eligibility for them dependent on having a job or joining a work program.

But while Republicans have agreed to emergency checks, many did so reluctantly, thinking the safety net is already too large. The $2 trillion rescue package ran into last-minute delays last week when four Senate Republicans said the temporary increase in unemployment benefits was too high and would dissuade people from working.

Conservatives say the limits on public aid are a strength of the American system, and they credit work requirements for cutting child poverty in recent years to record lows. If anything, most would go further in extending work requirements to programs where they have been limited or missing, like food stamps and Medicaid.

While political leaders have locked their borders, scientists have been shattering theirs, creating a global collaboration unlike any in history. Never before, researchers say, have so many experts in so many countries focused simultaneously on a single topic and with such urgency. Nearly all research, other than anything related to coronavirus, has ground to a halt.

On a recent morning, for example, scientists at the University of Pittsburgh discovered that a ferret exposed to Covid-19 particles had developed a high fever — a potential advance toward animal vaccine testing. Under ordinary circumstances, they would have started work on an academic journal article.

“But you know what? There is going to be plenty of time to get papers published,” said Paul Duprex, a virologist leading the university’s vaccine research. Within two hours, he said, he had shared the findings with scientists around the world on a World Health Organization conference call. “It is pretty cool, right? You cut the crap, for lack of a better word, and you get to be part of a global enterprise.”

Dr. Duprex’s lab in Pittsburgh is collaborating with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and the Austrian drug company Themis Bioscience. The consortium has received funding from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovation, a Norway-based organization financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and a group of governments, and is in talks with the Serum Institute of India, one of the largest vaccine manufacturers in the world.

Taiwan announced on Wednesday that it would donate 10 million surgical masks to the United States and other countries, a gesture intended to highlight its success in combating the coronavirus and its exclusion from the world’s leading international health body.

Joanne Ou, the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said Taiwan would donate two million masks to American front-line medical workers, in addition to the 100,000 masks per week it had previously pledged.

“It is a small gesture by Taiwan as a responsible country,” Ms. Ou said in an interview. “It is the least we can do, especially during these challenging times.”

Taiwan, which has a population of 23 million, is now manufacturing 13 million masks per day.

The government is hoping that its gesture of good will at a time of international crisis will spotlight the country’s exclusion from the World Health Organization. China insists it controls the island, and refuses to allow any United Nations organizations, including the W.H.O., to recognize its autonomy.

In addition to the United States-bound shipment, Taiwan will seven million masks to European countries and one million to the 15 remaining countries that officially recognize its government.

On Monday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressed support for Taiwan’s observer status in the W.H.O.’s decision-making body, the World Health Assembly. That followed President Trump’s signing of the TAIPEI Act, which calls for the United States to support Taiwan’s push for inclusion in international organizations.

Nellie Bowles, who covers tech and internet culture from San Francisco for The New York Times, wrote about her losing battle with screens.

Before the coronavirus, there was something I used to worry about. It was called screen time. Perhaps you remember it.

Now I have thrown off the shackles of screen-time guilt. My television is on. My computer is open. My phone is unlocked, glittering. I want to be covered in screens. If I had a virtual reality headset nearby, I would strap it on.

The screen is my only contact with my parents, whom I miss but can’t visit because I don’t want to accidentally kill them with the virus. It brings me into happy hours with my high school friends and gives me photos of people cooking on Facebook. Was there a time I thought Facebook was bad? An artery of dangerous propaganda flooding the country’s body politic? Maybe. I can’t remember. That was a different time.

A lot of people are coming around.

Walt Mossberg, my former boss and a longtime influential tech product reviewer, deactivated his Facebook and Instagram accounts in 2018 to protest Facebook’s policies and negligence around fake news. Now, for the duration of the pandemic, he is back.