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Coronavirus

What you need to know about the coronavirus today.

Deaths fall in New York, U.S. epicenter of virus
President Donald Trump cited the fact that, for the first time in a week, deaths from the coronavirus in New York fell slightly from the day before as evidence of a turn for the better. “We see light at the end of the tunnel. Things are happening,” he told reporters. While there were still nearly 600 new fatalities in the state, new hospitalizations over the weekend fell sharply.

No clear ‘Plan B’
Britain’s constitution offers no clear answer to the question now on many Britons’ minds: who takes over if Boris Johnson gets too sick to lead the country? Unlike the role of vice president in the United States, Britain has no formal deputy or caretaker prime minister, although Downing Street has already said that Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab will deputize if necessary.

A tiger at the Bronx Zoo in New York City has tested positive for the respiratory disease caused by the novel coronavirus, in the first known case of a human infecting an animal and making it sick, the zoo’s chief veterinarian said on Sunday. Nadia, the 4-year-old Malayan tiger that tested positive, was screened for the COVID-19 disease after developing a dry cough along with three other tigers and three lions, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the zoo, said in a statement.

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World

Japan is to declare a state of emergency in Tokyo and six other prefectures as early as Tuesday in a bid to stop the coronavirus, the prime minister said, with the government preparing a stimulus package to soften the economic blow.

Death at home: It took Silvia Bertuletti 11 days of frantic phone calls to persuade a doctor to visit her 78-year-old father Alessandro, who was gripped by fever and struggling for breath. When an on-call physician did go to her house near Bergamo, at the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak in northern Italy, on the evening of March 18, it was too late.

Spain said it plans to widen coronavirus testing to include people without symptoms as a first step towards slowly easing a lockdown in the nation with the second highest death toll from the global pandemic. The pace of the country’s coronavirus deaths slowed again on Monday as 637 patients died overnight, taking the total to 13,055, the government said.

Mainland China reported 39 new coronavirus cases as of Sunday, up from 30 a day earlier, and the number of asymptomatic cases also surged, as Beijing continued to struggle to extinguish the outbreak despite drastic containment efforts.