RUSSIA Moscow woke up to a lockdown obliging most of its 13 million residents to stay home, and many other regions of the vast country quickly followed suit to stem the spread of the new coronavirus. Putin warned his envoys in Russia’s far-flung regions that they will be personally responsible for the availability of beds, ventilators and other key equipment. “We have managed to win time and slow down an explosive spread of the disease in the previous weeks, and we need to use that time reserve to the full,” Putin said.
US Gasoline prices have dropped to their lowest levels in four years, and they are almost sure to go lower as oil prices plunge. Price-tracking services put the national average yesterday around $2 a gallon. Some stations were spotted charging under a dollar. However, demand is weak because so many Americans are under shelter-in-place rules and businesses have been shuttered because of the coronavirus outbreak.
US Two ships carrying passengers and crew from an ill-fated South American cruise are pleading with Florida officials to let them carry off the sick and dead, but Gov. Ron DeSantis says Florida’s health care resources are already stretched too thin. As the Zandaam and its sister ship the Rotterdam make for Florida, passengers confined to their rooms are anxious for relief, hoping DeSantis will change his mind and allow them to disembark despite confirmed coronavirus cases aboard.
LATIN AMERICA From Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Santiago, Chile to Mexico City, the coronavirus is taking root in the world’s most unequal region, where many of Latin America’s first cases arrived with members of the elite returning from vacations or work trips to Europe and the United States. Many of the wealthy are already recovering, but experts warn that the virus could kill scores of the poorest people, who must work every day to feed their families, live in unsanitary conditions and lack proper medical care.
BRAZIL Like every Sunday, Brazilian Pastor Silas Malafaia (pictured) took the stage of his Pentecostal temple in a middle-class Rio de Janeiro neighborhood. But this week, he wore a T-shirt instead of a blazer and, behind the three cameras broadcasting to his legion of YouTube followers, were thousands of empty seats. Brazil’s churches have landed on the front lines of a battle between state governors, who have introduced quarantine measures, and President Jair Bolsonaro, who is actively undermining them.
ZIMBABWE We are already ruined. What more harm can coronavirus do?” Irene Kampira asked as she sorted secondhand clothes at a bustling market in a poor suburb of Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. People in one of the world’s most devastated nations are choosing daily survival over measures to protect themselves from a virus that “might not even kill us,” Kampira said. WHO’s recommended virus precautions seem far-fetched for many of Zimbabwe’s 15 million people.
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