Huawei wants to put Google apps in its own app store after US blacklisting blocks access to Android - CNBC

Huawei wants to put Google apps in its own app store after US blacklisting blocks access to Android - CNBC
Coronavirus Live Updates: Grim Models Project High U.S. Toll - The New York Times
What Google tells us about lockdown impact in India’s biggest cities - Livemint
As Governors Plead for Tests, Trump Promises Ventilators to Europe - The New York Times
Cruising Through South Central Los Angeles With Google Street View : The Picture Show - NPR

Posted: 31 Mar 2020 01:47 AM PDT

A Huawei's logo is seen during the inauguration of the Huawei Flag Ship Barcelona at Plaça Catalunya on February 22, 2020 in Barcelona, Spain.

Miquel Benitez | Getty Images

Huawei hopes Google apps and services will be available through its own app store — a new idea for the company looking to attract users to its latest handsets without the licensed Android operating system.

Last year, Huawei was put on a U.S. blacklist known as the Entity List, which restricted American firms from doing business with the Chinese telecommunications company. Google was forced to stop licensing its Android mobile operating system to Huawei.

Two flagship smartphones — the Mate 30 and P40 — were released without licensed Google apps. That means that services such as Gmail or Google Maps were not pre-installed on the device.

This is not a big deal for Huawei in China where Google services are blocked and consumers don't really use them. But in international markets, Huawei users have been using a fully licensed version on Android. The blacklisting caused a $10 billion shortfall in revenue in Huawei's consumer division in 2019, Eric Xu, Huawei's rotating chairman, told CNBC on Tuesday.

Huawei launched its own operating system called HarmonyOS last year which it said can work across multiple devices such as TVs and smartphones. But it has yet to put that operating system on any of its own handsets.

Instead, the recently launched P40 is using a so-called open source version of Android which is loaded with the Huawei AppGallery, the company's own app store. It does not have the Google Play Store on it.

There are very few major apps in Huawei's store and notable names like Facebook and Instagram are absent.

Since the blacklisting last May, Huawei has maintained that it would still like to use Google and all of its services on its smartphones. But with the future unclear, Xu has suggested a different strategy.

"We hope Google services can be available through our AppGallery, just like how Google services are available through Apple's App Store," he said in Mandarin, according to CNBC's translation of his comments.

Google apps are available through Apple's App Store even though its devices run a different operating system.

Google was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.

The suggestion from Xu is one that would allow Huawei's users outside of China to get access to the apps they have come to rely on without the Chinese firm having to run an entire licensed version of Android. It's a new idea from the company, one which analysts said could be crucial if Huawei is to find further success overseas.

"I've always argued that even if Huawei could get most major developers onto its AppGallery in the upcoming years, there is still one critical developer whose apps would be missing: Google," Bryan Ma, vice president of devices research at IDC, told CNBC. "So if Huawei is really able to get Google on board, then it would be a significant milestone."

Coronavirus Live Updates: Grim Models Project High U.S. Toll - The New York Times

Posted: 31 Mar 2020 04:00 PM PDT

Here's what you need to know:

Video player loading — President Trump and members of the coronavirus task force are expected to announce projections on the future scope and scale of the virus.CreditCredit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Models predicting expected spread of the virus in the U.S. paint a grim picture.

The top government scientists battling the coronavirus estimated Tuesday that the deadly pathogen could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans, in spite of the disruptive social distancing measures that have closed schools, banned large gatherings, limited travel and forced people to stay in their homes.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, and Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the coronavirus response, displayed that grim projection at the White House on Tuesday, calling it "our real number" but pledging to do everything possible to reduce those numbers even further.

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

As dire as those predictions are, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said the number of deaths could be much higher if Americans do not follow the strict guidelines to keep the virus from spreading, and they urged people to take the restrictions seriously.

President Trump, who on Sunday extended for 30 days the government's recommendations for slowing the spread of the virus, made it clear that the data compiled by Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx convinced him that the death toll would be even higher if the restrictions on work, school, travel and social life were not taken seriously by all Americans.

The data released on Tuesday was the first time that Mr. Trump's administration has officially estimated the breadth of the threat to human life from the coronavirus, and the disease it brings, known as Covid-19. In the past several weeks, Dr. Birx and Dr. Fauci have resisted predicting how many people might die in the pandemic, saying that there was not enough reliable data.

That is no longer, the case, they said. As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 173,741 people across every state, plus Washington, D.C., and four U.S. territories, have tested positive for the virus, according to a New York Times database. At least 3,433 patients with the virus have died.

President Trump strikes a somber note as he warns of a "painful two weeks ahead."

President Trump said at his daily White House coronavirus briefing that "this is going to be a very painful, very very painful two weeks," but that Americans will 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.

Striking perhaps his most somber tone on the subject to date, Mr. Trump said the virus is a "great national trial unlike any we have ever faced before," and said it would require the "full absolute measure of our collective strength, love and devotion" in order to minimize the number of people infected.

"It's a matter of life and death, frankly," he said, officially calling for another month of social distancing and offering a sober assessment of the pandemic's impact in the United States. "It's a matter of life and death."

Dr. Deborah L. Birx, the White House's coronavirus response coordinator, urged Americans to follow the guidelines: No groups larger than 10, no unnecessary travel, no going to restaurants or bars.

"There's no magic bullet. There's no magic vaccine," she said. "It's just behaviors."

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that social distancing measures across the nation are slowing the spread of the virus, he but made clear that the national death toll will continue to rise.

"The fifteen days that we've had of mitigation clearly are having an effect," Dr. Fauci said. But, he added: "In the next several days to a week or so we are going to continue to see things go up."

Mr. Trump, who spent weeks downplaying the threat of the virus — and who has retreated from his recent suggestion that social distancing could be scaled back in mid-April — congratulated himself for projections showing that public health measures may dramatically limit the national death toll.

"What would have happened if we did nothing? Because there was a group that said, 'let's just ride it out,'" Mr. Trump said, without saying what "group" he was referring to.

Mr. Trump said that as many as 2.2 million people "would have died if we did nothing, if we just carried on with our life."

"You would have seen people dying on airplanes, you would have seen people dying in hotel lobbies. You would have seen death all over," Mr. Trump said. By comparison, he said, a potential death toll of 100,000 "is a very low number."

The Trump administration had invoked the Defense Production Act hundreds of thousands of times, but hesitated when the virus hit.

A technician testing ventilators at Bloom Energy, a fuel cell company in California that has transitioned to refurbishing ventilators. — Credit...Pool photo by Beth Laberge

Chemicals used to construct military missiles. Materials needed to build drones. Body armor for agents patrolling the southwest border. Equipment for natural disaster response.

A Korean War-era law called the Defense Production Act has been invoked hundreds of thousands of times by Mr. Trump and his administration to ensure the procurement of vital equipment, according to reports submitted to Congress and interviews with former government officials.

Yet as governors and members of Congress plead with the president to use the law to force the production of ventilators and other medical equipment to combat the pandemic, he has for weeks treated it like a last resort, to be invoked only when all else fails.

"You know, we're a country not based on nationalizing our business," Mr. Trump said earlier this month.

The law's frequent use, especially by the military to give its contracts priority ratings to jump ahead of a vendor's other clients, has prompted those most familiar with it to question why the administration has been so hesitant to tap it for a public health emergency.

"What's more important? Building an aircraft carrier or a frigate using priority ratings or saving a hundred thousand lives using priorities for ventilators?" said Larry Hall, who retired in August as the director of the Defense Production Act program division at the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Trump says he "hasn't heard about testing for weeks," but governors say they still lack test kits.

A day after Mr. Trump said he "hasn't heard about testing for weeks," suggesting that a chronic lack of test kits was no longer a problem in the U.S., the Republican governor of Maryland said his state was "flying blind" in its fight against the virus because of a lack of available tests.

Gov. Larry Hogan, speaking on CNN on Tuesday morning, said that the dearth of testing kits had left Maryland "sort of guessing about where the outbreaks are and about what the infection rate in the hospitalization rates are."

But Mr. Hogan was careful not to blame the federal government, and said Washington had taken "great steps" to address the testing issue: "Everyone of us is in this together," he said.

And Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, a Republican, said on CNN on Tuesday that it was difficult to project when cases would peak in his state, and "part of this is driven by the fact that we don't have widespread testing."

"That is not unique to Ohio," he added. "We have seen that throughout the country. That's been a real challenge."

Mr. Trump made his remark that he "hasn't heard about testing in weeks" in a conference call with governors on Monday. America's governors painted a different picture on the ground: one said that his state was "one day away" from not being able to test anyone at all.

Though the United States and South Korea both confirmed their first cases on Jan. 20, America has been much slower to ramp up testing. Last week, the United States surpassed the number of tests performed in South Korea, but the American population is more than six times larger, and Americans are much less likely to have been tested.

Mr. Hogan, who is chairman of the National Governors Association, also raised testing issues in an op-ed in The Washington Post, which he co-authored with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, Democrat of Michigan. "There simply aren't enough test kits," they wrote.

Ms. Whitmer and Mr. Hogan also wrote that the nation's governors need a testing site in the nation's capital to help identify sick federal workers and prevent them from infecting their colleagues. Many of the more than 400,000 federal workers in the region, they said, are still reporting to work every day and cannot risk infection because of their "mission critical" jobs.

In Washington, lawmakers were debating whether to move forward with another round of emergency measure.

The Senate's top Republican suggested on Tuesday that another round of government help might not be needed to confront the public health and economic crisis brought on by the pandemic, even as top Democrats press to move quickly on what they call "Phase 4."

Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, told the radio host Hugh Hewitt that lawmakers should "wait and see" whether such a measure is needed, while Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, has begun an aggressive push for it, saying that Congress must swiftly pass one.

Stocks dipped as Wall Street finished its worst month since 2008.

Even as stocks rebounded well off their lowest point, when the S&P 500 suffered its worst one-day drop since 1987, March was the worst month for the S&P 500 since October 2008, when investors feared a collapse of the economy in the wake of the global financial crisis. The S&P 500 is down about 12.5 percent this month.

On Tuesday, stocks fell nearly 2 percent.

Calmer markets do not mean the worst is over. As consumers stay home and factories shut down, millions of workers have lost their jobs. Economic data showing the scale of the damage has only just begun to roll in, and Wall Street analysts continue to downgrade expectations for the economy.

But the worst of the recent swings in asset prices seem to have ended, and financial markets are trying to find a footing.

"We appear to be seeing improved sentiment," Yousef Abbasi, global market strategist at INTL FCStone, a financial services and brokerage firm, wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday. "When sentiment does start to improve around the virus and its ultimate economic impact — the market will find it difficult to ignore the size and scope of the fiscal and monetary stimulus that has been undertaken."

The C.D.C. is reviewing its guidance on wearing masks.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is reconsidering its guidance that people not wear masks as new data shows that many individuals who show no symptoms are carrying the virus and infecting others.

The C.D.C. and the World Health Organization have repeatedly said that the general public does not need to wear masks. And as health care workers around the world face shortages of N95 masks and protective gear, public health officials have warned people not to hoard masks.

But Dr. Robert Redfield, the C.D.C. director, told NPR on Monday that the agency was re-evaluating its guidelines based on data showing that as many as 25 percent of infected people remain asymptomatic. "That's important, because now you have individuals that may not have any symptoms that can contribute to transmission, and we have learned that in fact they do contribute to transmission," he said.

He suggested that masks might cut down on spread from those people, and said that is "being aggressively reviewed as we speak."

He also said that people who are just becoming ill may already be infectious up to 48 hours before they show symptoms. "This helps explain how rapidly this virus continues to spread across the country, because we have asymptomatic transmitters and we have individuals who are transmitting 48 hours before they become symptomatic," he added.

Places like Hong Kong and Taiwan that jumped into action early with universal mask wearing and social distancing have gotten their coronavirus cases under much greater control.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb, the former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, said on Sunday that the C.D.C. should put out designs for cloth masks for the general public. "The value of the mask isn't necessarily to protect you from getting sick, although it may offer some protection," he told CBS News, adding, "When someone who's infected is wearing a mask, they're much less likely to transmit infection."

In the radio interview, Dr. Redfield also said that social distancing measures — including staying six feet or more away from others in public spaces, and staying home — were important to keep in place for now.

Asian countries see that success containing the virus can be tenuous, a worrisome sign.

Across Asia, countries and cities that seemed to have brought the epidemic under control are suddenly tightening their borders and imposing stricter containment measures, fearful about a wave of new infections imported from elsewhere.

The moves portend a worrisome sign for the United States, Europe and the rest of the world still battling a surging outbreak: Any country's success with containment could be tenuous, and the world could remain on a kind of indefinite lockdown.

Even when the number of new cases starts to fall, travel barriers and bans in many places may persist until a vaccine or treatment is found. The risk otherwise is that the infection could be reintroduced inside their borders, especially given the prevalence of asymptomatic people who might unknowingly carry the virus with them.

Following a recent uptick in cases tied to international travelers, China, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan barred foreigners from entering altogether in recent days. Japan has barred visitors from most of Europe, and is considering denying entry to travelers from countries including the United States. South Korea imposed stricter controls, requiring incoming foreigners to quarantine in government facilities for 14 days upon arrival.

In China, international flights have been cut back so severely that Chinese students abroad wonder when they will be able to get home. In Singapore, recently returned citizens must share their phones' location data with the authorities each day to prove they are sticking to government-ordered quarantines. In Taiwan, a man who had traveled to Southeast Asia was fined $33,000 for sneaking out to a club when he was supposed to be on lockdown at home.

"Even countries that have been relatively successful in managing the pandemic are only as safe as the weakest links in the system," said Kristi Govella, an assistant professor of Asian studies at the University of Hawaii, Manoa, who added that in the absence of cooperation among countries, "closing borders is one of the ways that individual governments can control the situation."

Cuomo says the federal government is bidding against states for ventilators, as the outbreak hits home for him.

In New York State — the center of the nation's outbreak, with 1,550 deaths so far and the peak not expected for another one to three weeks — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Tuesday that the country's patchwork approach to the pandemic had made it harder to get desperately needed ventilators.

Mr. Cuomo said that New York had ordered 17,000 ventilators from China, only to find itself competing with other the other 49 states, other nations, and even the Federal Emergency Management Agency — leaving New York with a firm expectation of getting only 2,500 of its ordered ventilators over the next two weeks.

"We're all trying to buy the same commodity, literally the same exact item," Mr. Cuomo said, complaining that the competition was pitting the agencies against one another and driving up prices.

"What sense does this make?" he said "The federal government, FEMA, should have been the purchasing agent, buy everything, and then allocate it by need to the states. Why would you create a situation where the 50 states are competing with each other and then the federal government, and FEMA, comes in and competes with the rest of it?"

Mr. Cuomo, whose fact-filled, sometimes emotional coronavirus briefings have drawn a national audience in recent days, shared that the pandemic had now hit close as he commented Tuesday on the news that his younger brother, Chris Cuomo, the CNN anchor, had tested positive.

Governor Cuomo, who called Chris his "best friend," said that his younger brother, who is 49, would be fine, saying that he was "young, in good shape, strong" — before teasing that he is "not as strong as he thinks."

And he used his family anecdote to remind people that social distancing was important — saying how relieved he was that their 88-year-old mother, Matilda Cuomo, had stayed away from Chris and his family in recent days since she could have easily been infected.

Here's what else Mr. Cuomo said:

The number of confirmed cases in New York increased by 9,298, bringing the statewide total to 75,795 statewide as of Tuesday. In New York City, 43,139 people have tested positive.
The number of patients hospitalized surpassed 10,900, up 15 percent from yesterday. Of those, 2,710 are currently in intensive care rooms with ventilators.
More than 18,000 people were tested overnight, pushing the total number of people tested to about 205,000, more than 1 percent of the state's population.

Also on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the city's Human Rights Commission would investigate Amazon's firing of a worker at a Staten Island warehouse who had helped lead a walkout over safety conditions.

If the worker, Christian Smalls, were fired for raising health and safety concerns, "That would be a violation of our city human rights law," Mr. de Blasio said. "We would act on it immediately." He said the New York City sheriff's office visited the warehouse on Staten Island to make sure social-distancing rules were being followed and would continue to do so throughout the week.

In a pandemic, those who can't afford to quarantine must brave the subway.

The New York City subway has become a symbol of the city's inequality, amplifying the divide between those with the means to safely shelter at home during the pandemic and those who must continue braving public transit to preserve meager livelihoods.

"I don't want to get sick, I don't want my family to get sick, but I still need to get to my job," Yolanda Encanción, a home health aide, said recently as she waited for her train in the Bronx.

Since the crisis erupted, the subways have emptied: Ridership has plummeted to fewer than 1 million riders a day from more than five million before. But a New York Times analysis of M.T.A. data shows that the declines vary significantly — largely along socioeconomic lines.

The steepest ridership declines have been in Manhattan, where the median household income is the highest in the city. Some stations in Bronx neighborhoods with high poverty rates, though, have largely retained their ridership.

Many residents there say they have no choice but to pile onto trains with strangers, potentially exposing themselves to the virus. Even worse, a reduction in service in response to plunging ridership has led, at times, to crowded conditions, making it impossible to maintain the social distancing that public health experts recommend.

At the 170th Street station in the University Heights neighborhood of the Bronx, riders still come in waves every morning.

Men tend to arrive first, before dawn, wearing paint-splattered jeans and carrying battered hard hats as they head to construction sites. Later, many women trickle onto the platform, mostly nurses and home health aides deemed essential workers. Others are cooks and nannies, hoping to keep their jobs as long as possible in an unraveling economy.

The U.S. death toll passes China's as questions mount about China's statistics.

The United States' coronavirus death toll has moved past China's official count, a bleak milestone hours before the Trump administration planned to release the models that fueled fears that as many as 200,000 Americans could die because of the pandemic.

Although the count from mainland China — 3,305 deaths — has been a subject of intense skepticism, and although Italy and Spain have reported more than 20,000 fatalities between them, the swelling toll in the United States is a grim indication of the outbreak's scale.

The U.S., despite widespread concerns about the availability of testing for the virus, already had the highest known number of infections in the world, and the American toll was at least 3,430 deaths, as of late Tuesday morning.

But there are mounting concerns that some countries, including China, North Korea and Indonesia, are not being forthcoming about the scope of their outbreaks.

China on Tuesday announced more than 1,500 coronavirus cases that had not previously been made public, giving in to pressure for greater transparency nearly two weeks after officials there first announced zero new local infections.

Questions about the accuracy of China's numbers have circulated since the start of the outbreak there, even as the country has touted its apparent success in bringing it under control. The 1,541 newly announced cases were people who had tested positive but were asymptomatic, according to an official at China's National Health Commission.

China had not previously included asymptomatic patients in its public tallies of confirmed cases, even though the World Health Organization recommends doing so, and many within China and abroad had expressed fear about the true scale of the epidemic.

It was not immediately clear whether the 1,541 figure represented the total number of asymptomatic infections detected in China, or merely a fraction. The South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong-based newspaper, recently reported that asymptomatic cases could number as many as 43,000, or one-third of China's total case count, citing classified government data.

In the case of North Korea, many observers doubt its claims to not have a single coronavirus case, though some attribute it to a lack of testing equipment. Others accuse the government of hiding an outbreak to preserve order.

In Indonesia, the government has for weeks reported zero cases. Yet in a sign that the virus is spreading there, Jakarta's governor says deaths in the capital may be around 283, nearly four times the official count.

Afghans meet coronavirus with kindness.

In a moment of need, ordinary Afghans have stepped up to generously share the little that they have, easing the pain of an impending health crisis that is turning into another test of survival for a country where life has been a daily fight for decades.

Across Afghanistan, many landlords have waived rent, in some cases indefinitely until the virus threat recedes. Tailors have handed out thousands of homemade face masks. Youth groups and athletes have delivered food to hospitals and families in destitution. Wedding halls and private schools have volunteered to be turned into hospitals.

The owner of a marketplace of 40 shops forgave rent not just for the month, but for as long as the epidemic continues. The governor of one province set up an emergency Covid-19 fund and in just one day received contributions of more than $100,000.

Mohamed Kareem Tawain, an 80-year-old dentist in Herat, the center of the outbreak in Afghanistan, said that he had experienced multiple wars and droughts in his lifetime, and that Afghanistan was better prepared to deal with the virus than those past scourges.

"I am not too terrified," he said. "Although it is difficult times, if we join hands, God willing, the corona problem will pass."

A week after meeting Putin, a Russian doctor leading the fight tests positive.

A doctor leading Russia's fight against the virus — and who shook hands with President Vladimir V. Putin at a meeting last week — has tested positive.

Denis Protsenko, the head doctor at Hospital No. 40, Moscow's main and most modern infectious diseases treatment facility, said on Facebook on Tuesday that he had gone into self-isolation in his office at the hospital, which Mr. Putin visited last Tuesday. He said he was feeling "quite well" and would continue working remotely.

Dr. Protsenko had greeted the president with a handshake, and neither man wore a face mask. Mr. Putin donned a protective suit and gas mask to visits wards containing virus patients, but also had extensive unprotected contact with the doctors and nurses.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, responding to news of Dr. Protsenko's infection, said that Mr. Putin had been tested regularly for coronavirus and that "everything is OK," the Interfax news agency reported.

The news of Dr. Protsenko's infection was announced just a day after Moscow went into lockdown, with residents barred from leaving their homes except to buy food and medicine and walk their dogs within a hundred yards of their residence.

Dr. Protsenko had predicted that the coronavirus could reach its peak this week in Russia, which has reported fewer cases than western Europe and the United States, despite figures showing an accelerating rate of infection.

Russia on Tuesday reported 500 new confirmed cases, bringing its total to 2,337, a nearly fivefold increase over a week ago, with 17 deaths.

The captain of a Navy aircraft carrier pleads for help as the virus spreads onboard.

The captain of an American aircraft carrier deployed to the Pacific Ocean has pleaded with the Pentagon for more help as a coronavirus outbreak aboard his ship continues to spread, officials said Tuesday. Military officials say dozens of sailors have been infected.

In a four-page letter, first reported by The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, Capt. Brett E. Crozier of the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt laid out the dire situation unfolding aboard the warship, currently docked in Guam with more than 4,000 crew members, and what he said were the Navy's failures to provide him with the proper resources to combat the virus by moving sailors off the vessel.

The crisis aboard the Roosevelt played out like a slow-moving disaster and highlights the dangers to the Pentagon if the coronavirus manages to infiltrate some of its most important assets, such as bomber fleets, elite Special Operations units and the talisman of American military power, aircraft carriers.

Kenyan police are accused of abuses as they enforce a curfew.

The authorities in Kenya are investigating a string of deaths and injuries related to the enforcement of a nationwide dusk-to-dawn curfew, one of several wide-ranging measures aimed at containing the spread of the virus in the country.

The office of the director of public prosecutions announced on Tuesday that it had ordered an investigation into the killing of Yasin Moyo, a 13-year-old boy who was hit by a stray bullet and died of his injuries on Monday night as officers enforced the curfew in a neighborhood on the outskirts of Nairobi, the capital.

The inspector general of Kenya's police force said he had asked investigators to undertake "a forensic analysis of all firearms" held by officers who were on duty in the area at time of the shooting.

The case is the latest to rock the East African nation since an overnight curfew was introduced on Friday. Hours before it began, images and videos shared on social media showed police officers firing tear gas and beating and detaining commuters at a ferry terminal in the coastal city of Mombasa. On Tuesday, the government-mandated Independent Police Oversight Authority said it would investigate the incident, along with other reports of excessive use of force by police.

The 7 p.m. to 5 a.m. curfew is among a raft of new policies aimed at halting the virus. Officials have also closed schools and universities, banned religious gatherings and suspended international flights. Kenya had 59 confirmed cases of the virus on Tuesday, and at least one death.

Police officials in Britain and elsewhere are also enforcing restrictions on movement and have sometimes been accused of overreach. There is "a strong temptation for the police to lose sight of their real functions and turn themselves from citizens in uniform into glorified school prefects," Jonathan Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, told the BBC on Monday.

The police in Britain have been given an extended set of powers, including the authority to instruct people to leave a place or return home, and issue fines to anyone who is out in public for anything other than necessary shopping, exercising once a day, or traveling to and from essential work. Officers have issued summons for people for taking drives "out of boredom" and reprimanded others for sitting in the park.

In France, more than a quarter of a million people have been fined since restrictions on movement were announced, according to Interior Ministry figures. And in Italy, the country hardest hit by the outbreak in Europe, anyone violating quarantine rules can be fined up to 3,000 euros, about $3,300.

A U.S. judge orders the release of some immigration detainees.

A federal judge ruled on Tuesday that more than a dozen people must be released from federal immigration detention facilities in Pennsylvania by the end of the day, because the detainees' age or pre-existing health conditions put them at high risk of contracting the virus in the facilities.

Two of the plaintiffs were already showing symptoms, their lawyers said, but had not been tested for it. According to their legal complaint, the plaintiffs have been sleeping two or three to a small cell, or side-by-side in bigger rooms of more than 50, with bunk beds so close that they could bump into each other during the night.

"They ate shoulder to shoulder and had 60 people sharing four showers and four sinks with little sanitization in between uses," said Vic Walczak, the legal director of the Pennsylvania chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the plaintiffs. "If you have one infected person in that room, those kind of conditions are only going to guarantee that everybody else is going to be infected."

The complainants in the case — who are from countries including Nigeria, Indonesia, Guatemala and India — were at especially high risk because of high blood pressure, diabetes, high cholesterol, heart stents and other chronic conditions.

In ordering their release, Judge John E. Jones III of the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania wrote, "Our world has been altered with lightning speed, and the results are both unprecedented and ghastly." He continued, "The choices we now make must reflect this new reality."

Seeing the pandemic test Trump, Democrats offer up their own policy ideas.

Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont share a number of priorities regarding the outbreak.

Both have been sharply critical of Mr. Trump's stewardship of the crisis. They have called on him to move to accelerate the production of critical medical gear for health care workers. They have urged him to listen to expert advice from scientists. And they have also expressed concerns about the economic impact of the outbreak, with both seeking housing-related protections for the public.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders have both urged a moratorium on evictions and support temporary rent freezes.

There are also key differences between how they have navigated the crisis.

For Mr. Sanders, the outbreak has offered another reason to push for his signature single-payer health care proposal, "Medicare for all," which Mr. Biden opposes. Mr. Sanders argues that the moment has revealed extraordinary weaknesses in the American public health system and underscored the need for universal health care.

Mr. Biden, who supports building on the Affordable Care Act with the addition of a public option, has sought to use the crisis to illustrate how he would govern as president, rolling out a public health advisory committee and spending hours receiving briefings focused on the virus and on the economy.

Yet despite ramping up his news media appearances and virtual events, Mr. Biden — the front-runner for the Democratic nomination — has sometimes found himself struggling to break through.

Tips for getting through the coronavirus marathon.

Experts keep saying to plan for this to last for a long time. And with many communities a week or more into being homebound, the novelty is wearing off. Here are some tips to help fight burnout, manage antsy teenagers, and even freshen up a home to make it better suit current needs.

Reporting and research were contributed by Michael Cooper, Alan Blinder, Karen Zraick, Michael D. Shear, James Glanz, David D. Kirkpatrick, Corina Knoll, Caitlin Dickerson, Elisabetta Povoledo, Mujib Mashal, Asadullah Timory, Najim Rahim, Aurelien Breeden, Constant Méheut, Selam Gebrekidan, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Joanna Berendt, Benjamin Novak, Raphael Minder, Elian Peltier, Steven Erlanger, Iliana Magra, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Anna Schaverien, Maria Abi-Habib, Sameer Yasir, Raymond Zhong, Knvul Sheikh, Melissa Eddy, Choe Sang-Hun, Abdi Latif Dahir, Michael M. Grynbaum, Andy Newman, Katie Glueck, Helene Cooper, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Andrew Higgins, Adeel Hassan and Richard C. Paddock.

What Google tells us about lockdown impact in India’s biggest cities - Livemint

Posted: 30 Mar 2020 11:12 PM PDT

March 22 (Sunday) was the day of the first national level lockdown or a 'janata curfew'. On the same day, the Central government announced a lockdown in 75 districts that had registered a Covid-19 case. State governments followed it with their own advisories, with the indication being this was till March 31. All five major metros—Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai and Kolkata—were in this list, and pulled down their shutters.

Then, beginning March 25 (Wednesday), the Central government extended the lockdown to the entire nation, increased its duration to three weeks, and also made it more stringent. Thus, for all of last week, most commercial and private establishments in these five cities were closed.

The exceptions were services classified as "essential", a list that included banks, hospitals, diagnostic laboratories, food and grocery stores, vegetable vendors and petrol pumps. Did their business drop? If so, by how much? In order to gauge how a near-ban on movement of people affected how much these establishments were accessed, we used the 'popular times' data from Google.

For each of the five metros, we chose four points of interest (PoI). These four PoIs were a food and grocery store, a bank branch, a petrol pump and a diagnostic laboratory (for three cities). For each of these PoIs, we measured footfalls 12 times in a day, once every hour beginning 9-10 am and ending 9-10 pm. We did this last week from Monday (March 23) to Friday (March 27).

Google 'popular times' data gives a measure of footfalls in any establishment at every hour relative to its peak for the "past several weeks". This historical peak is ascribed a value of 100, and every other value, historical or current, is calibrated to that.

For example, one of the places in our sample was an Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) petrol pump on Baba Kharak Singh Marg in Connaught Place, New Delhi. Its historical peak (value of 100) is Monday between 11 am and noon. On the Monday that was March 23, it recorded a value of 11—a drop of 89%.

Such drop in footfalls have been par for course during the past week. Our automated script generated 726 points of complete data (out of a possible 1,080 points) from Google. Each point is effectively the footfall value for an establishment at a certain hour. Of these 726 points, as many as 603 points, or 83% of the entries, showed a negative value, with the decline going all the way to 100%.

Banks and petrol pumps were the worst affected. The accompanying charts show a collation of the hourly data into daily data, and the average change for each day of the week over their historical highs. For banks and petrol pumps in all five cities, every day showed a massive decline.

To be sure, data from a single PoI is not representative for a segment for the city. But it gives us a slice of what happened to business at the PoI after the lockdown.

Interestingly, the data also shows that in 17% of the hourly periods for which we have complete data, footfalls increased. A majority of this increase in footfalls happened in food and grocery stores, especially in the More supermarket in NGO Colony in Chennai.

Google 'popular times' data shows the historical peak of this More supermarket is Sunday evening. Further, on normal days, it does not register much activity during the daytime, and is the busiest between 6 pm and 9 pm. In almost every hour of the first week of lockdown, it saw people movement spike. On Monday morning, it was registering values that it normally registers in its busy evening period.

The chosen stores in the other four cities also saw footfall increase on Monday. But unlike the Chennai More store, it tailed off in subsequent days. The decline in food and grocery stores through the week was significantly less than that of petrol pumps and banks.

Slotting in somewhere between banks/petrol pumps and food stores were the diagnostic centres. They, too, are smarting over a significant loss in business amid this pandemic fear.

The data shows that even services classified as "essential" are experiencing acute pain, and the remaining two weeks of this lockdown will test them further. For the rest of the economy, things are in a far worse shape.

Point of interest locations chosen for the analysis:

Delhi: State Bank of India (SBI), Malviya Nagar; Indian Oil Corporation (IOC) petrol pump, Baba Kharak Singh Marg, Connaught Place; More, Malviya Nagar; Dr Dangs Lab, Hauz Khas

Mumbai: SBI, Borivali East; IOC petrol pump, Ghatkopar-Mahul Road, Ghatkopar East; Reliance Smart, Malad West; SRL Dr. Avinash Phadke Labs, Shivaji Park

Bengaluru: SBI, Malleshwaram; SVM Fuel Station, Prestige Tech Park; More, Koramangala; SRL Diagnostics, Jayanagar

Chennai: SBI, Whannels Road, Egmore; IOC petrol pump, Anna Salai, Teynampet; More, NGO Colony, Adambakkam

Kolkata: SBI, Sector 1, Salt Lake City, Bidhannagar; BPCL petrol pump, Chavlpatti Marg, Bidhannagar; More, 2/2 School Road, Birati

As Governors Plead for Tests, Trump Promises Ventilators to Europe - The New York Times

Posted: 30 Mar 2020 09:42 PM PDT

Here's what you need to know:

Trump suggests coronavirus testing is no longer a problem. Governors disagree.

President Trump told governors on a conference call Monday that he "hasn't heard about testing in weeks," suggesting that a chronic lack of kits to test people for the coronavirus is no longer a problem.

But governors painted a different picture on the ground.

"Literally we are one day away, if we don't get test kits from the C.D.C., that we wouldn't be able to do testing in Montana," Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, a Democrat, said, according to an audio recording of the conversation obtained by The New York Times.

Speaking in a White House Rose Garden news conference after the call, Mr. Trump also said that so many American companies were now producing ventilators, the United States would soon have supplies to send to hard-hit Europe.

Citing reports that Ford and GE Healthcare plan would produce 50,000 ventilators in 100 days, Mr. Trump said 10 American companies were quickly increasing ventilator production.

"As we outpace what we need, we're going to be sending them to Italy, we're going to be sending them to France, we're going to be sending them to Spain, where they have tremendous problems, and other countries as we can," he said.

His promises seem to indicate that he thought the scarcity of ventilators, surgical masks and other personal protective equipment, which has become an emergency in some states, will soon be ending.

"I think we're going to be in very good shape," he said.

Although testing has picked up since a series of setbacks left the United States behind, governors have continued to warn in recent days that their response is still hampered by shortages, including of basic supplies like swabs. Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, a Democrat, told CNN on Sunday that "we have a desperate need for the testing kits." And Gov. Ralph Northam of Virginia, also a Democrat, warned last week that there was a shortage of testing materials in his state.

In Monday's call, Mr. Bullock explained that officials in his state were attempting to do "contact tracing" — tracking down people who have come into contact with those who have tested positive — but they were struggling because "we don't have adequate tests."

Mr. Trump initially said that Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, could respond to Mr. Bullock, but then quickly offered a rejoinder. "I haven't heard about testing in weeks," the president said. "We've tested more now than any nation in the world. We've got these great tests and we're coming out with a faster one this week." Reiterating his point, Mr. Trump added, "I haven't heard about testing being a problem."

Despite scant evidence, the F.D.A. granted approval to use two malaria drugs.

Researchers work with coronavirus samples in a trial to see whether malaria treatment hydroxychloroquine can prevent or reduce the severity of Covid-19, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, earlier this month. — Credit...Craig Lassig/Reuters

The Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval this weekend permitting the use of two long-used malaria drugs to treat patients who are hospitalized with coronavirus, despite scant evidence that the drugs would be effective against the virus.

The decision allows companies to donate supplies of two related drugs — hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine — to the Strategic National Stockpile. The drugs will then be distributed to hospitals for use in patients who have coronavirus. The generic drug maker Sandoz, a division of Novartis, donated 30 million pills of hydroxychloroquine and Bayer donated one million doses of chloroquine. Other companies are ramping up their production of the drugs and may donate more supplies, the federal government said.

Teva has also said it is donating six million pills of hydroxychloroquine to be used in U.S. hospitals.

Mr. Trump has frequently touted the use of the drugs, describing them as a potential "game changer" in the pandemic, although there is only anecdotal evidence that they are effective. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and other experts, have been far more cautious in saying that evidence is still needed to know if they work.

However, since there are no treatments for the virus, many hospitals are already using the drugs on severely ill patients. The drugs have been on the market for decades and one, hydroxychloroquine, is also used for lupus and rheumatoid arthritis.

The decision by the F.D.A., issued on Saturday but announced by the Department of Health and Human Services on Sunday, will allow hospitals to use the drugs on patients when enrolling them in clinical trials is not possible. Doctors must report on how they were used, including documenting any harmful side effects. Patients and doctors will also receive a fact sheet explaining that the drug's efficacy in treating coronavirus is not known.

By restricting hospital use of the drugs to those taken from the national stockpile, the move also eases pressure on the rest of the supply chain. Both drugs have recently gone into shortage, making it difficult for patients who rely on them for other conditions to get access.

Massachusetts veterans' home sees a rash of deaths.

Eleven residents of a veterans' home in Massachusetts have died, including five people who tested positive for the coronavirus, a state agency announced on Monday, in another example of how the virus can spread in a facility for vulnerable residents.

Officials are awaiting test results for five other residents who died, and the cause of death for one resident is considered unknown. An employee who answered the phone at the veterans' home, the Soldiers' Home in Holyoke, declined to comment.

Gov. Charlie Baker said on Twitter that it was "a shuddering loss for us all."

The state agency, the Executive Office of Health and Human Services, said that other residents and staff members had tested positive for the coronavirus, and that visitors have not been allowed at the home since March 14.

"It is imperative that the Holyoke Soldiers' Home provide a safe environment for the veteran residents, and the dedicated staff who serve them," Dan Tsai, the agency's deputy secretary, said in a statement. He said the home's superintendent had been placed on paid administrative leave.

Also on Monday, the Pentagon announced the first service member to die from the coronavirus, Capt. Douglas Linn Hickok of the New Jersey National Guard. "This is a stinging loss for our military community," Defense Secretary Mark Esper said in a statement.

The deaths in the veterans' home are a reminder that the coronavirus can spread easily within confined environments and is particularly deadly for older people. The first outbreak in the United States tore through a nursing home in Kirkland, Wash., killing at least 35 residents and sickening dozens of other residents and workers. At least six people died from the virus at an upscale elder community on Long Island.

Amid debate over face masks, Austria says that it will require them in grocery stores.

Austria will require all residents to wear face masks when they shop for groceries starting this week, as a growing number of experts have questioned the prevailing guidance that healthy people don't need to wear masks.

The World Health Organization asserts that masks should only be worn by people who are sick and those who are caring for them, and that there is little data showing that they protect the general public in everyday life. But some experts and government officials say they could offer some protection.

The debate over protective masks for healthy citizens has created tensions as protective gear, including N-95 masks, has been in woefully short supply for front-line medical workers, leading officials to try to discourage hoarding and panic-buying by people all over the world.

At the same time, some places that adopted nearly universal mask-wearing and intensive social distancing early on, like Hong Kong, were able to contain their outbreaks. George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has called not wearing face masks "the big mistake in the U.S. and Europe."

As the virus's impact expands, Washington mulls more emergency measures.

As the toll of the coronavirus continued to mount — overwhelming hospitals and sickening health care workers, spreading through jails, playing havoc with the economy and making deadly inroads in more cities — federal lawmakers and Trump administration officials turned their attention Monday to new measures to try to contain the fallout.

In a sign of how fast the virus is upending life in the United States, officials in Washington were already beginning to chart the next phase of the government's response on Monday — just days after enacting a $2 trillion stabilization plan, the largest economic stimulus package in modern American history.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in an interview Monday that state and local government urgently need more resources, and that it was only a matter of time before Congress would act on a fourth relief measure. "So this isn't about how fast we can do it, it's how fast we must do it," she said.

Representative Nydia M. Velasquez, Democrat of New York, announced that she had received a diagnosis of "presumed coronavirus infection" after becoming ill early Sunday morning. Ms. Velasquez, 67, was at the Capitol on Friday, when the House cleared the $2 trillion stimulus law, and later attended a ceremony with senior lawmakers to mark its enrollment. She said her symptoms were mild and the attending physician of the Capitol advised her not to be tested or to see a doctor at the moment. At least six members of Congress have tested positive for the disease.

'We don't know who the person was.'

Like the Biogen conference in Boston and a 40th birthday party in Westport, Conn., the funeral of Andrew Jerome Mitchell in Albany, Ga., will be recorded as what epidemiologists call a "super-spreading event," in which a small number of people propagate a huge number of infections.

Ellen Barry of The Times wrote about southwest Georgia, 40 miles from the nearest interstate, to understand how a rural county now has one of the most intense clusters of the coronavirus in the country.

As briefings become showcases, Trump calls on a friend.

President Trump's coronavirus briefings have become showcases, not only for himself but for his political supporters and cooperative corporations. On Monday, he turned the podium over to several corporate leaders, including the chief executives of Proctor & Gamble, Jockey International and United Technologies.

Among those asked to speak was his friend and political supporter Michael Lindell, founder of Minnesota-based MyPillow Inc. and a member of Mr. Trump's Mar a Lago resort club. Mr. Lindell has called Mr. Trump "the greatest president in history."

Mr. Lindell said during his speaking turn in Monday's briefing that, before Mr. Trump's election, the nation "had turned its back on God," urging Americans to read Bibles during their extended time at home.

"I did not know he was going to do that," Mr. Trump said after Mr. Lindell's remarks. "But he is a friend of mine, and I do appreciate it."

Mr. Trump also lashed out at a CNN reporter who asked about his repeated mistaken assurances in recent weeks that the virus would be contained and could "go away" as early as April. "You look at those individual statements, they are all true statements," Mr. Trump told the reporter, Jim Acosta. Mr. Trump suggested that he had been trying to reassure Americans.

"I could cause panic much better than even you," the president said to Mr. Acosta. "I would make you look like a minor-league player. But I don't want to do that.""I'm very proud. It's almost a miracle the way it's all come together," he added. "And instead of asking a nasty, snarky question like that, you should ask a real question."

Leaders worldwide are invoking sweeping executive powers with little resistance.

To fight the pandemic, leaders worldwide are invoking executive powers and seizing virtually dictatorial authority with scant resistance.

Israel's prime minister has shut down courts and begun an intrusive surveillance of citizens. Chile has sent the military to public squares once occupied by protesters. Bolivia has postponed elections. In Hungary, the prime minister can now rule by decree.

In some parts of the world, new emergency laws have revived old fears of martial law. The Philippine Congress passed legislation last week that gave President Rodrigo Duterte emergency powers and $5.4 billion to deal with the pandemic.

Even in robust democracies like Britain, ministers have what a critic called "eye-watering" power to detain people and close borders. Invasive surveillance systems in South Korea and Singapore, which would have invited censure under normal circumstances, have been praised for slowing infections.

Governments and rights groups agree that these extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and many of these actions are protected under international rules, constitutional lawyers say.

But critics say there are few safeguards to ensure that their new authority will not be abused.

"We could have a parallel epidemic of authoritarian and repressive measures following close if not on the heels of a health epidemic," said Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights.

In Israel, the virus is spreading up to eight times faster in ultra-Orthodox communities.

Ultra-Orthodox Jews failing to comply with government instructions to contain the coronavirus are causing it to spread so quickly that Israeli officials are considering blockading entire communities to protect the wider population.

The virus is mushrooming in ultra-Orthodox communities as much as four to eight times faster than elsewhere in Israel.

In the Tel Aviv suburb of Bnei Brak, where 95 percent of the residents are ultra-Orthodox, the number of confirmed cases nearly doubled in the last three days, from 267 on Friday to 508 on Monday. The total was nearly that of Jerusalem, whose population is four times bigger.

Experts attribute the proliferation among the ultra-Orthodox to overcrowding and large families, deep distrust of state authority, ignorance of the health risks among religious leaders, an aversion to electronic and secular media and a zealous devotion to a way of life centered on communal activity.

All of which add up to stiff resistance to heeding social distancing orders that require people to stay home except for vital errands and prohibit meeting in groups, including for prayer. These rules threaten fundamental activities for the ultra-Orthodox including worship, religious study and the observance of life-cycle events like funerals and weddings.

Similar conflicts have arisen in the United States. In Florida, Sheriff Chad Chronister of Hillsborough County said he had obtained an arrest warrant for Rev. Rodney Howard-Browne, the pastor of a Pentecostal megachurch, for "intentionally and repeatedly" defying emergency orders mandating that people maintain social distance and stay at home. Mr. Howard-Browne on Sunday held two church services, each filled with hundreds of parishioners.

Roughly three out of four Americans are under orders to stay home, or will be soon.

While many states have issued stay-at-home directives to try to slow the virus's spread — with Maryland, Virginia and Arizona becoming the latest to do so on Monday — in Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, had resisted the step, favoring local action over statewide mandates.

But on Monday Governor DeSantis said that he would sign an order codifying a patchwork of local rules urging residents in the densely-populated southeast corner of the state — including Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Monroe counties — to stay home.

Local Florida governments have taken wildly different approaches to restricting interactions. While the city of Jacksonville shut down its beaches, St. Johns County to the south did not. A striking photo taken over the weekend showed bare beaches on one side of the county line and crowded sand on the other. (St. Johns County later closed its shoreline.)

Roughly three out of four Americans are or will soon be under instructions to stay indoors, as states and localities try to curb the spread of the coronavirus before their hospitals are overwhelmed.

Virginia and Maryland both issued new statewide orders on Monday, and Arizona's Republican governor, Doug Ducey, directed his state's residents to stay home until the end of April.

"We are no longer asking or suggesting that Marylanders stay home — we are directing them to do so," Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican, said.

And in Virginia, Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, ordered all residents to stay home, closing the state's beaches and campgrounds and insisting that people only go out for food, supplies, work or medical care.

"I want everyone to hear me: Stay home," Mr. Northam, a Democrat, said.

As the virus spreads behind bars, there are rising calls to free inmates.

One inmate used an alcohol pad that a barber had given him after a haircut to sanitize a frequently used Rikers Island jailhouse phone. Another used a sock when he made a call. A third said he and others have used diluted shampoo to disinfect cell bars and table tops.

In the nearly two weeks since the coronavirus seeped into New York City's jail system, fears have grown of the potential of a public health catastrophe in the cellblocks where thousands are being held in close quarters.

Public officials have been working to release hundreds of people in jail, but while that effort is moving forward, defense lawyers, elected officials, health experts and even some prosecutors have warned that efforts to release inmates and stop the spread are moving too slowly.

Inside the jails, meanwhile, inmates — including some of those waiting to be released — have been struggling to protect themselves from the virus.

"You're on top of one another no matter what you do," said one man who was recently released from Rikers Island. "There's no ventilation. If anything is floating, everybody gets it."

As public officials across the country scramble to release their own vulnerable populations in jails and prisons as a result of the coronavirus, New York's complex on Rikers Island has provided a case study in the difficulty of balancing public safety and public health concerns.

On Sunday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said about 650 people had been released. Still, the rate of infection has continued to climb, and by Monday, 167 inmates, 114 correction staff and 20 health workers had tested positive and two correction staff members had died.

China's factories are almost fully back to work.

Two months after China brought its economy to a near-halt to contain the coronavirus, the country's mighty industrial machine is showing signs of renewed life, according to official sources.

A measure of factory activity released on Tuesday showed a rebound in March, China's National Bureau of Statistics said. The organization, which surveys purchasing managers at Chinese factories, said activity rebounded to 52 on its closely watched index, from 35.7 in February.

A number above 50 on the index indicates growing activity, though the figure could overstate the improvement. It does not show to what degree factories have resumed production, meaning those that have opened could still be operating well below capacity.

China's government has taken a series of top-down measures to get the world's No. 2 economy humming again. As the number of new infections reported each day has fallen, local officials have become more confident about allowing people to return to work.

But even if factories and workplaces are back in business, that does not mean the economy is entirely back on its feet. In the epidemic's wake, cash-strapped families may be reluctant to spend. Businesses fear that their partners and suppliers might default on payments for goods and services. Demand for Chinese exports may be weak as the epidemic continues to worsen in many countries around the world.

Nationwide, major industrial enterprises are operating at an average of 98.6 percent of capacity, said Xin Guobin, China's vice minister of industry and information technology, at a news briefing on Monday. And nearly 90 percent of employees at these businesses are back at work.

Agony in Spain and Italy as deaths climb and lockdowns are extended.

Struggling to give its beleaguered medical workers a fighting chance to combat a virus that has torn through their own ranks in recent weeks, Spanish officials said on Monday that they would impose even more rigorous restrictions on residents' movements, calling for a national period of "hibernation."

The officials compared the tighter restrictions to those imposed in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus was first detected last year. The measures there were perhaps the most draconian attempted anywhere in the world so far.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said at the weekend that the tighter lockdown was needed to avoid the collapse of saturated hospitals in Madrid and a few other regions of the country.

The new restrictions — allowing only "essential workers" to leave their homes — will last until at least April 9 and come on top of the lockdown that was imposed on March 14.

Spain reported more than 812 new deaths on Monday, bringing the country's death toll to nearly 7,400.

Italian officials hoped that the burden on medical facilities might be starting to ease.

Luca Richeldi, a clinical pneumologist at the Gemelli hospital in Rome and a member of the government's scientific advisory committee, said that the number of deaths had dropped every day over the weekend and that the number of new patients needing critical care had also gone down to 50, from 124.

"With our behavior, we save lives," he said.

The April 3 deadline of the national lockdown would certainly be extended, Italian government officials said.

In Britain, Dr. Jenny Harries, the deputy chief medical officer, said it could be six months or more before a return to normal, with lockdowns being reassessed every three weeks. She said that if the strategy was successful, the country could effectively limit the peak of cases in the short term, but that measures would have to continue.

"Doctors are getting sick everywhere." Health workers confront fear as colleagues fall ill.

In emergency rooms and intensive care units throughout New York City, typically dispassionate medical professionals are feeling panicked as increasing numbers of their colleagues get sick.

"I feel like we're all just being sent to slaughter," said Thomas Riley, a nurse at Jacobi Medical Center in the Bronx, who has contracted the virus, along with his husband.

Medical workers are still showing up day after day to face overflowing emergency rooms, earning them praise as heroes. But doctors and nurses said they can look overseas for a dark glimpse of the risk they are facing — especially when protective gear has been in short supply.

The federal government announced Monday that it was relaxing many of its usual safety standards for hospitals so they could expand services to fight the pandemic — rules including what counts as a hospital bed; how closely certain medical professionals need to be supervised; and what kinds of health care can be delivered at home. These broad but temporary changes will last the length of the national emergency.

In China, more than 3,000 doctors were infected, nearly half of them in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, according to Chinese government statistics. Li Wenliang, the Chinese doctor who first tried to raise the alarm about Covid-19, eventually died of it.

In Italy, the number of infected heath care workers is now twice the Chinese total, and the National Federation of Orders of Surgeons and Dentists has compiled a list of 50 who have died. Nearly 14 percent of Spain's confirmed coronavirus cases are medical professionals.

Healthcare stocks help lead Wall Street higher.

Stocks on Wall Street rose on Monday as investors bid up shares of health care companies as they reported progress on products that could help with the outbreak.

The S&P 500 climbed more than 3 percent, adding to a strong showing last week. The S&P 500 had risen 10 percent last week after a three day run that was its best since 1933, amid relief over Washington's $2 trillion spending plan.

Though retail workers continued to suffer, with Macy's saying Monday that with stores closed and sales down, it would furlough the majority of its 125,000 employees. And Gap, which also owns Old Navy and Banana Republic, said on Monday it would furlough nearly 80,000 store employees in the United States and Canada. And L Brands, which owns Victoria's Secret and Bath & Body Works, said it would furlough most store staff starting April 5.

Gainers on Monday included Johnson & Johnson, which said it had identified a lead candidate for a vaccine for the virus and planned to ramp up both production and clinical testing. Also, Abbott Laboratories rose on reports that it had said a new test that could detect the virus in five minutes had been cleared for use by the Food and Drug Administration.

But there were lingering signs of caution in the financial markets. In the oil market, brent crude, the international benchmark, fell more than 6 percent to roughly $26 a barrel on Monday. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, was down more than 5 percent with prices hovering around $20.25 in early afternoon trading. Earlier this morning the price had briefly dropped below $20 a barrel, a level not seen in almost 20 years.

Oil has also been hammered by a price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia, two of the largest oil producers, but analysts say that it is far outweighed by the collapse in demand caused by the pandemic.

Senator Burr is said to be under investigation over stock trades.

Federal authorities are investigating stock trades made by Senator Richard M. Burr, Republican of North Carolina, in the weeks before Americans began taking seriously the threat of the coronavirus and before markets plummeted, according to reports.

The Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission are reviewing a rush of stock sales Mr. Burr made in mid-February that potentially saved him thousands of dollars in losses, CNN and other news outlets reported. The New York Times has not independently confirmed the investigation.

Mr. Burr has insisted that he made the sales based purely on public reporting, but as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the Senate's Health, Education, Labor and Pensions panel, Mr. Burr had early, regular access to top government officials monitoring the virus as it spread in China and then around the world. Investigators would likely work to untangle if any of that information shared with him as a senator prompted his decision.

Lawmakers are legally barred from relying on nonpublic information to buy or sell stocks, but such cases can be difficult to prove and no one has ever been charged under the 2012 statute outlawing the practice.

Mr. Burr's lawyer, Alice Fisher, reiterated on Monday that the senator had only traded based on public information, which is legal. She said he would cooperate with any inquiry into his actions.

Indian officials deny rumors of a lengthy lockdown as hundreds of thousands try to head home.

Officials in India denied on Monday that an abrupt nationwide lockdown that has thrown the country of 1.3 billion people into chaos would last more than three weeks.

The lockdown, announced last Tuesday by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, was imposed with just four hours notice and followed reports that India may be in the early stages of community transmission. With the suspension of India's train and bus services, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers found themselves trapped in cities like New Delhi without food or money.

Rajiv Gauba, the cabinet secretary, told reporters that he was "surprised" to read reports suggesting that the severest restrictions would remain in place beyond April 15.

"There is no such plan," he told Asian News International, a local news outlet.

In what has been described as the largest migration in recent history, huge masses of people began long journeys by foot to their home villages, balancing bags on their heads and children on their shoulders. As of Sunday, just one of India's 36 states and territories had made arrangements to bring migrants home.

Since the lockdown was announced, thousands of people have been seen waiting at bus stops on the outskirts of New Delhi, packed together without protective gear, before being turned away for lack of space.

Many are panicking about the spread of the virus. In one northern Indian city, migrants were sprayed down with a chemical solution on the roadside by people in hazmat suits, according to local reporters.

Some world leaders scoff at the virus, even suggesting vodka and saunas as a cure.

As countries around the world enact lockdowns in an attempt to curb the pandemic, some leaders have scoffed at containment efforts.

In Belarus, the authoritarian President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko called the coronavirus "nothing else but a psychosis" and has joked that a shot or two of vodka a day will poison the virus, advice rejected by medical experts.

Mr. Lukashenko has even suggested that farm work in a tractor, eating breakfast at a particular time or sitting in a sauna can help prevent infection.

While all of Europe and many other parts of the world have suspended professional soccer and other sports leagues, Belarus's premier league has continued to play, a reflection of the country's lax coronavirus response.

President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil has also argued that concerns over the pandemic are overblown.

He visited shopkeepers outside of Brasília, the capital, on Sunday and argued that people must continue their jobs to survive, even while older people should stay home.

"I advocate that you work, that everyone works," he said, the newspaper Folha de São Paulo reported.

He repeated his argument that the harm to the economy from efforts to curb its spread can be worse than the pandemic itself.

"Sometimes, too much medicine becomes poison," he added.

Mr. Bolsonaro has called the virus a simple cold and questioned the death toll in São Paulo, the country's largest city. Brazil has recorded 4,256 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and 136 deaths as of Sunday.

Mr. Lukashenko has also questioned the harm of coronavirus response efforts, saying he endorsed President Trump's comments that the cure to the pandemic cannot be worse than the disease itself.

"I really like his recent statements," Mr. Lukashenko said of Mr. Trump on Friday, according to the state media. "He said that unemployment can claim more lives than coronavirus itself unless they reopen businesses and get Americans back to work. Now you have understood why I did not authorize closures of businesses."

Mr. Trump has since pulled back from his suggestion that the United States should ease restrictions by Easter and has extended social distancing guidelines through the end of April.

A coronavirus slowdown in Seattle suggests that restrictions could be working.

The Seattle area, home of the first known coronavirus case in the United States and the place where the virus claimed 37 of its first 50 victims, is now seeing evidence that harsh containment strategies, imposed in the earliest days of the outbreak, are beginning to pay off — at least for now.

Deaths are not rising as fast as they are in other states. Significant declines in street traffic show that people are staying home. Hospitals have so far not been overwhelmed. And preliminary statistical models provided to public officials in Washington State suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed in the Seattle area in recent days.

While each infected person was spreading the virus to an average of 2.7 other people earlier in March, that number appears to have dropped, with one projection suggesting that it was now down to 1.4.

The researchers who are preparing the latest projections, led by the Institute for Disease Modeling, a private research group in Bellevue, Wash., have been watching a variety of data points since the onset of the outbreak. They include tens of thousands of coronavirus test results, deaths and mobility information to estimate the rate at which coronavirus patients are spreading the disease to others.

The progress is precarious, and the data, which was still being analyzed and has yet to be published, is uncertain. But the findings offer a measure of hope that the emergency measures that have disrupted life in much of the nation can be effective in slowing the spread of the disease.

"We made a huge impact — we slowed the transmission," Seattle's mayor, Jenny Durkan, said in an interview. She cautioned that any lifting of restrictions would bring a quick rise in new cases, and that she expected distancing requirements to continue in some form for months.

"There is evidence that doing the aggressive measures can have a benefit," Gov. Jay Inslee said in an interview, discussing the overall numbers he is seeing.

But the governor said that the state was far from turning a corner. While there are indications of improvement, he said, he has also seen numbers in the last few days that still have him worried, including a rise in positive test results statewide and new cases in rural areas.

As the U.S. receives first shipments of Chinese medical equipment, other nations say some is faulty.

As the first of 22 shipments of Chinese-made medical equipment arrived in the United States on Sunday, other countries are complaining that China provided faulty protective equipment and inaccurate coronavirus test kits.

Chinese companies have kicked into overdrive to supply masks, respirators, testing kits and other protective gear to tackle the fast-moving global pandemic. With its own outbreak seemingly under control, it has looked to sell or donate gear to improve its image on the global stage.

But some faulty products are showing up in the supply chain, prompting governments in the Netherlands, Turkey and the Philippines to complain.

Faulty protective equipment could endanger the lives of health care workers and malfunctioning tests could prevent sick people from getting essential treatment.

The Netherlands on Saturday recalled hundreds of thousands of face masks from China, after it was revealed that they did not meet standards set by the Dutch health authorities. Spanish officials said last week that hundreds of thousands of testing kits delivered by a Chinese company had only a 30 percent accuracy rate. The Chinese Embassy later said that the company was not on its official list of certified suppliers.

In the Czech Republic, for example, a local newspaper cited medical workers who had complained that as many as 80 percent of the rapid coronavirus tests that the government ordered from China did not work properly.

In the Philippines, a Department of Health official said an early first batch of tests sent from China were defective but later walked back his comments after the Chinese Embassy denied the test kits were part of a donation to the Philippines and said its donations had been assessed by the Research Institute for Tropical Medicine.

The Turkish health authorities have also spoken publicly about their concern about testing kits from China without offering details.

A commercial aircraft carrying gloves, masks, gowns and other medical supplies from Shanghai touched down at Kennedy International Airport in New York on Sunday, the first of 22 scheduled flights that White House officials say will funnel much-needed goods to the United States by early April.

The plane carried 130,000 N95 masks, nearly 1.8 million surgical masks and gowns, 10 million gloves and more than 70,000 thermometers, said Lizzie Litzow, a spokeswoman for the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

How is China counting its cases? Asymptomatic patients do not get included in the national tally.

Discussion in China is swirling about the true extent of the coronavirus outbreak in the country and the risk of asymptomatic infections.

Caixin, an influential Chinese newsmagazine that has aggressively reported on the coronavirus pandemic, published a commentary that urged the government to disclose the number of asymptomatic infections in the country, a figure that has been kept secret.

In China's official count of confirmed coronavirus cases, people who test positive but show no symptoms are excluded; they are added to the tally only if they start to feel sick.

The magazine's commentary came after confirmation of a case on Sunday in Henan Province, who apparently was infected by a person who did not show symptoms and was not counted in the official tally released to the public.

The Caixin commentary said revealing the scale and spread of asymptomatic cases was important for research and informing the public of continuing possible risks.

China has reported several days with no new cases outside those brought in from overseas. The case reported in Henan on Sunday suggests that the virus continues to spread among people who might not be included in the public tally.

Observers have also scrutinized the country's death toll. Caixin reported last week that thousands of urns were sent to funeral homes in Wuhan, the center of the outbreak, in recent days, raising questions about whether the death toll in the city could be higher than the official figure of 2,547.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel goes into isolation after a close associate tests positive.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel has gone into quarantine after an aide tested positive for the coronavirus, officials said on Monday.

"Pending the epidemiological investigation and to remove any doubt, the prime minister has decided that he and his close aides will remain in isolation until the end of the epidemiological investigation, and in accordance with the findings," the government said in a statement.

Rivka Paluch, an adviser to the 70-year-old Mr. Netanyahu on ultra-Orthodox affairs and on parliamentary issues, tested positive after her husband was hospitalized with the virus.

More than 4,000 Israelis have tested positive for the virus and the country and the government has imposed sweeping restrictions on residents' movement.

Mr. Netanyahu's announcement that he would enter isolation came as he was in the latter stages of negotiating to form a new governing coalition.

Mr. Netanyahu has already been conducting most of his meetings via video conferencing from his residence, and he and his staff have been strictly complying with Health Ministry instructions over the past few weeks, officials said.

Mr. Netanyahu tested negative for the virus a couple of weeks ago and was expected to be tested again soon.

Prince Charles is out of isolation, while a top adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson goes into quarantine.

Prince Charles, the heir to the British throne who was quarantined in Scotland over the last seven days after testing positive for the coronavirus, has taken himself out of isolation, Buckingham Palace announced on Monday.

"The prince is in good health," an official at the palace said. "He is now operating under the current standard medical restrictions that apply nationwide."

The prince, who is 71, began suffering mild symptoms the weekend of March 21 and was tested in Scotland on March 23. The palace said that Charles would be able to hold meetings and to exercise and that his wife, the Duchess of Cornwall, would remain in isolation until the end of the week. She did not test positive for the virus, the palace said last week, but she is being monitored.

Britain's guidance indicates that those who test positive for the virus should stay at home for seven days after symptoms begin, but the World Health Organization recommends that confirmed patients remain isolated for two weeks after symptoms resolve.

The top levels of the British government suffered another shock on Monday when Dominic Cummings, the top adviser to Prime Minister Boris Johnson, reported that he had symptoms of the virus and had isolated himself, according to the government.

Mr. Cummings was seen on Friday running out of 10 Downing Street, the prime minister's official residence, with a backpack, shortly after Mr. Johnson announced that he had the coronavirus.

Mr. Cummings is the latest high-ranking official directly involved in Britain's outbreak response who is suspected to have contracted the virus. A critical member of Mr. Johnson's cabinet, Matt Hancock, the health secretary, announced last week that he had the illness.

Mr. Johnson posted a video on Twitter on Sunday urging Britons to stay at home, appearing in a suit and tie but with a noticeably hoarse voice. He thanked those health care workers who were coming back into the National Health Service, or N.H.S., "in such huge numbers." Some 20,000 former staff members are returning to the health system to help in the coronavirus response.

Dr. Jenny Harries, the British deputy chief medical officer, said it could be six months or more before a return to normal, with lockdowns being reassessed every three weeks. She said that if the strategy was successful, the country could effectively limit the peak of cases in the short term, but that measures would have to continue.

"We must not then revert to our regular way of living, that would be quite dangerous," she said during a Sunday evening news conference.

Thousands of airline staff who were grounded as travel came to a grinding halt amid worldwide restrictions will also be joining the efforts, according to the N.H.S. Cabin crews from Virgin Atlantic and easyJet have been asked to work at coronavirus field hospitals across the country as part of the health service's response, the health service said in a statement.

Many airline staff are trained in first aid and have security clearance, and they will be working alongside health care professionals to change beds, do nonclinical tasks and support doctors and nurses, the N.H.S. said.

De Blasio pleads for help as New York City's 911 system and hospitals are overwhelmed.

Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York called on the federal government to help provide critical equipment to the city's overstretched hospital system, warning that current stocks will be exhausted by Sunday.

"This is battlefield medicine," Mr. de Blasio said. "Get us the support we need right now."

President Trump, during an appearance on "Fox & Friends" on Monday morning, repeated praise for what his administration had done so far.

"We're delivering so much equipment, nobody has ever seen anything like it. It's a war," Mr. Trump said. "We're fighting a war and the federal government is really stepped up and most governors are very happy."

Mr. Trump acknowledged the crisis in New York, but said that the federal government was "loading it up" with lifesaving equipment. "New York is really in trouble," he said. "But I think it's going to end up being fine."

Even as hospitals across New York City become flooded with coronavirus cases, some patients were being left behind in their homes because the health care system cannot handle them all, according to dozens of interviews with paramedics, New York Fire Department officials and union representatives, as well as city data.

In a matter of days, the city's 911 system has been overwhelmed by calls for medical distress apparently related to the virus. Typically, the system sees about 4,000 Emergency Medical Services calls a day.

Last Thursday, dispatchers took more than 7,000 calls — a volume not seen since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The record for the number of calls in a day was broken three times in the last week.

Phil Suarez, a paramedic, was dispatched to two homes in the Washington Heights neighborhood, where entire families in cramped apartments appeared to be stricken with the virus.

"I'm terrified," said Mr. Suarez, who has been a paramedic in New York City for 26 years, assisted in rescue efforts during the Sept. 11 attacks and later served in the Iraq war. "I honestly don't know if I'm going to survive. I'm terrified of what I've already possibly brought home."

The virus threatens to wipe out half of all jobs in Africa.

Nearly half of all jobs in Africa could be lost because of the coronavirus, according to the United Nations.

In a report released on Monday, the world body warned that the crisis would disproportionately affect developing countries in Africa and elsewhere, taking a toll on education, human rights, basic food security and nutrition.

"This pandemic is a health crisis. But not just a health crisis. For vast swathes of the globe, the pandemic will leave deep, deep scars," Achim Steiner, the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, which produced the report, said in a statement. "Without support from the international community, we risk a massive reversal of gains made over the last two decades, and an entire generation lost, if not in lives, then in rights, opportunities and dignity."

Among the developing nations named in the report were Bosnia, China, Djibouti, El Salvador, Eritrea, Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Nigeria, Paraguay, Panama, Serbia, Ukraine and Vietnam. Overpopulation, poor waste management, pollution and traffic were all identified as factors that threatened a developing nation's chances of recovering from a coronavirus outbreak.

Leaders across the world have tried to balance economic concerns with the need to act swiftly to stop the spread of the virus. Iran has reported among the world's highest numbers of Covid-19 cases and deaths, but President Hassan Rouhani has been severely criticized for not acting forcefully enough to fight the epidemic. And while the illness has been slow to take hold across Africa, the number of confirmed cases and deaths there have risen gradually, raising fears about the continent's readiness to respond.

The coronavirus lockdown in India has left vast numbers of migrant laborers stranded and hungry, and more than a dozen migrant laborers have died since the measure was announced by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, according to hospital officials.

After an outbreak, the Marine Corps stops sending new recruits to its boot camp at Parris Island, S.C.

The Marine Corps has stopped sending new recruits to its boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., for the foreseeable future after a coronavirus outbreak there infected more than 20 recruits.

The incident at Parris Island, one of the Corps' two training depots, is serious for the Marine Corps. As the smallest branch in the military, with around 185,000 people, and a high turnover rate (roughly 36,000 Marines leave each year), stopping the supply of new recruits, even temporarily, will have long-lasting effects, Marine officials have said in the past.

The spike in cases, said Capt. Bryan McDonnell, a spokesman for Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, is believed to have started with two recruits who were brought on for training and quickly infected others. Until Monday, new recruits were screened upon their arrival, so, Captain McDonnell said, it is believed the two were asymptomatic. They have since been quarantined.

Basic training has continued in the other military branches, with an increased emphasis on screening and testing before training begins. But shared living spaces, communal showers and close contact in recruit barracks nearly ensures that any outbreak of the virus will mushroom in days.

In a statement Monday, the Marine Corps said that the move to stop sending recruits to Parris Island was "out of an abundance of caution" and that "recruit training for individuals already at the Depot will continue as planned, with continued emphasis on personal and environmental cleanliness and social distancing."

Reporting was contributed by Jason M. Bailey, Raymond Zhong, Michael Cooper, Richard Pérez-Peña, Karen Zraick, Nick Fandos, Mihir Zaveri, Jonathan Martin, Maggie Haberman, Sarah Mervosh, Patricia Mazzei, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Eileen Sullivan, Elisabetta Povoledo, Raphael Minder, Melissa Eddy, Mary M. Chapman, Julie Bosman, John Eligon, Elian Peltier, Isabel Kershner, Ali Watkins, Stephen Castle, Marc Santora, Mark Landler, David M. Halbfinger, Michael D. Shear, Thomas Fuller, Megan Specia, Austin Ramzy, Neil Vigdor, Kate Taylor, Vivian Yee, Mike Baker, Rick Rojas, Sapna Maheshwari, Vanessa Swales, Michael Levenson, Aimee Ortiz, Suhasini Raj, Stanley Reed, Knvul Sheikh and Kai Schultz.

Cruising Through South Central Los Angeles With Google Street View : The Picture Show - NPR

Posted: 31 Mar 2020 05:31 AM PDT

Felix Quintana

The sun shines as Felix Quintana cruises through South Central Los Angeles. He's always been inspired by what he sees out of his car window, from the strip malls to the street vendors. "I love the hustle," he says. "The hand-painted signs, the swap meets, the people making money washing windshields."

But those moments can fly by. And his ongoing series of cyanotypes make us pause on the often overlooked Angelenos who work and live in the less glitzy, more gritty neighborhoods of LA County.

Felix Quintana

A multidisciplinary artist using his photographer's eye, Quintana samples from the Google Maps Street View archive, turns a screenshot into a digital negative and prints it using digital inkjet film. In the darkroom, he coats the paper with a solution and "scratches" it with symbols of the city "to reveal what's beneath the surface," he explained.

His images together re-create the act of cruising through his hometown. "Cruising is all about driving slow, hella slow, like 25 miles per hour, and bumping music and looking fresh," Quintana says. Cruising can be a political act — there are "No Cruising" signs posted in the area. "It's all about taking up space," he adds. "People are scared of all these Chicanos and black folks coming together."

Felix Quintana

The work invites you to slow down, to see black and brown people exist and resist, and to celebrate the vernacular of South Central LA in all its ungentrified glory.

"It's a very objective point of view that Google gives, but the images are still really grimy," Quintana says. "I'm able to appropriate them and reclaim them, without permission, to find the beautiful and the poetic, to frame it in a way that shows resilience."

Felix Quintana

Quintana chose the cyanotype, an alternative photographic printing process, for his love letter to his city. He makes them by exposing the cyanotype-coated paper to ultraviolet light and sunshine — the pride and joy of Los Angeles. That light develops a melancholic but brilliant blue that harkens back to architectural blueprints.

"These are the emotional and cultural blueprints of the city," Quintana says. "It's an archive of the city that's changing. When gentrification comes in, this is what you're pushing out."

Felix Quintana

In the era of pervasive horizontal wooden-slatted "flipper fences" or "gentrifences," we see chain-link fences and iron gates. Plants also persevere in this concrete jungle. Quintana draws them sprouting from the sidewalks and depicts the ubiquitous palm tree — iconic to Los Angeles even though only a single species is native to California. The motifs recall a line from rapper Tupac Shakur's poetry: "The rose that grew from the concrete."

"It's a good symbol for the people," Quintana says. "We're rooted, we're planted, we're growing."

He made these markings instinctively, he says. They feel at home in South Central LA, fluent in the local slang. "It's a very cholo, gang graffiti style — marking territories," he says.

Felix Quintana

One of his most frequently recurring drawings is a sly coyote, which has become Quintana's signature. It's a nod to artist Keith Haring's famous dog figure. "A coyote in Spanish is the person who smuggles people. That's how a lot of my family got here," Quintana says. "It's this idea of someone within the landscape, but you don't see him."

Felix Quintana

Like the coyote, the people at the center of Quintana's photographs often go unnoticed. They're working in the street, commuting without cars and shopping at the dollar store. But these images are also documentation of an inequity that affects working-class people: a lack of green space, inaccessible mass transit, food deserts.

At times, these everyday images, now extra visible, surprise even Quintana. Like the time he found his father — who died three years ago — preserved in a Google Street View image, sitting in the driver seat of his truck.

"Photography is so much about this present moment," Quintana says. "But Google has archives that date back to 2007. Now, I can make images of the past."

Felix Quintana

These images of the past preserve not just the people from Quintana's life, but the places, too. The Compton Fashion Center was an indoor flea market and West Coast hip-hop landmark with connections to Tupac, N.W.A and Kendrick Lamar. The center closed in 2015 — but it's the subject of the next entry in his continuing Los Angeles blueprints series.

"You went for CDs, white tees, vintage Nikes and Icees," Quintana said. "It's a Walmart now, which is just sad."

Felix Quintana

Felix Quintana is an artist, photographer and educator who is now based in San Jose, Calif. His Instagram is @felixfquintana.

Samantha Clark is a writer and photo editor based in Washington. Follow her on Instagram @samanthabrandyclark.