Coronavirus Live Updates: New York Suffers Biggest Daily Death Toll. And U.S. Debates Use of Masks.

New York State records its biggest daily death toll, and pleads for the nation’s help.

With New York City officials warning that they are days away from a “D-Day” when the pandemic will overwhelm hospitals, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said Friday he had signed an executive order letting him move ventilators from hospitals with lower needs to those with dire shortages. And he made a plea for a similar redistribution on a national level.

“I’m not going to let people die because we didn’t redistribute ventilators,” Mr. Cuomo said as he announced that the state now had more than 100,000 known cases and its death toll had reached 2,935 after its biggest one-day increase. The state’s death toll has nearly doubled in the last three days.

Mr. Cuomo was blunt about the looming shortage of lifesaving ventilators, saying “we don’t have enough — period.”

The governor made a plea for a national redeployment of medical personnel and equipment from states where the virus has yet to hit in full force to New York, which has by far the most cases and the most deaths. And he said that after New York’s peak in the days to come, those resources could then be sent to the next hot spots.

“Now, it’s not a perfect sequential timing, but if you look at the projected curves — when it’s going to hit Michigan, when it’s going to hit Illinois, when it’s going to hit Florida, you’ll see that there is a timing sequence to it,” Mr. Cuomo said.

“Why not — or what is the alternative — to now saying let’s help each other, let’s focus on each situation as it develops, and let’s move our resources and personnel as it develops,” he said, noting that the federal government could not make up the shortfall. “What is the alternative to the crisis that we see looming nationwide?”

“It’s in the American DNA to say we’re here to help one another,” Mr. Cuomo said.

New York City’s mayor, Bill de Blasio, has been warning that the city is just days away from a “D-Day” when the outbreak will overwhelm the health care system, and made his own plea for bringing in health care workers from elsewhere.

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

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

One out of every six New York City police officers is out sick or in quarantine, placing serious strains on the department at a time when its 36,000 officers have been asked to enforce emergency rules intended to slow its spread. A veteran detective and five civilian workers have died from the disease caused by the virus.

And some of the extra steps taken to ease the city’s burden are slow. The U.S.N.S. Comfort, a 1,000-bed Navy hospital ship that was dispatched to New York to treat people without the virus to free up hospital beds elsewhere, has been slow to accept patients, taking just 20 as of Thursday night.

Mr. Cuomo said that the need for more beds for virus patients had grown so acute that he had sought, and won, permission for the 2,500-bed emergency hospital operated by the military in the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, which was originally intended for people without the virus, to begin accepting patients with it. He thanked Mr. Trump for pushing through the change “despite the fact that federal agencies were not eager to do it.”

Should you wear a mask? The White House and public health officials are debating the advice.

The Trump administration is deeply divided about whether to urge all Americans to wear masks when they leave their homes, with White House advisers and public health officials engaged in a debate that has stalled a public announcement that using them could prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

Top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are pushing for President Trump to advise everyone — even people who appear to be healthy — to wear a mask when shopping at the grocery store or in other public places.

The issue has become more urgent since the C.D.C.’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield, said that as many as a quarter of those already infected may show no symptoms but still contribute to “significant” transmission.

But some White House officials have resisted, according to a top C.D.C. official who has seen emails from people in the West Wing. The official said that people around Mr. Trump are pressing him to limit the mask-wearing guidance only to people in “areas of widespread transmission.”

That has C.D.C. officials worried because the virus has already spread, largely undetected, to most parts of the country. Wearing masks everywhere, including in places where cases of the virus have not already spiked, could help slow the rate of infection significantly, the C.D.C. officials believe.

In some parts of the country, including Los Angeles and New York City, local officials have already been urging residents to cover their faces.

At the World Health Organization briefing on Friday, Dr. Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the health emergency program, said that while the W.H.O. still recommended masks only for frontline health workers and those who are sick or caring for the sick, “we can certainly see circumstances in which the use of masks, both homemade or cloth masks, at community level may help in an overall comprehensive response to this disease.”

Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, on Thursday had expressed serious reservations, saying that asking all Americans to wear masks could inadvertently send the signal that it’s all right to abandon social distancing and return to public life as long as you are wearing a mask.

“We don’t want people to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m wearing a mask. I’m protected and I’m protecting others,’” Dr. Birx said at the daily briefing.

Others at the White House have expressed concern that asking all Americans to wear masks could heighten shortages for hospital workers and first responders.

In a move to increase the availability of masks, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said Friday it would allow use of a Chinese equivalent of the highly protective N95 mask.

Hospitals across the country are running out of N95 masks, which filter at least 95 percent of particles that are 0.3 microns or larger. The F.D.A.’s new clearance is for KN95 masks, which the C.D.C. lists as a suitable alternative when N95s are not available. They meet basically the same standards but are regulated by the Chinese government instead of the American agency.

It remains unclear whether political leaders — including the president — or media personalities would wear masks while appearing in public if the administration suggests wider use of masks. Mr. Trump on Thursday said a recommendation about masks would be coming out soon but added “we’ll see what that recommendation is.” He seemed to be grappling with the issue even as he talked about it publicly.

“If people wanted to wear them they can,” he said. “They can pretty much decide for themselves right now.”

U.S. tries to bar 3M from exporting face masks.

The Trump administration is trying to use its wartime powers to cut off 3M’s ability to export face masks abroad, as well as claim more of the masks the company manufactures in other countries for use in the United States. Such a policy would be a dramatic expansion of the U.S. government’s reach as it seeks to procure much-needed protective gear for American health care workers.

But some trade and legal experts fear new mandates could backfire, causing other governments to clamp down on exports of masks, ventilator parts and pharmaceuticals that the United States desperately needs. They have also questioned whether the Defense Production Act gives the government the authority to commandeer goods made beyond United States borders.

Peter Navarro, the White House trade adviser overseeing Defense Production Act policy, said Thursday evening that an executive order the president signed was aimed at directing 3M’s production to the Americans who need it most.

“To be frank, over the last several days we’ve had issues making sure that all of the production that 3M does around the world, enough of it is coming back here to the right places,” he said. “We’re going to resolve that issue with 3M probably by tomorrow, close of business. Because we can’t afford to lose days or hours or even minutes in this crisis.”

In a statement on Friday, 3M said that the administration had requested that 3M increase the amount of respirators the company imports from its overseas operations into the United States, and that 3M was complying. Earlier this week, it secured approval from China to export to the United States 10 million N95 respirators the company makes in China, it said.

The company added that the administration had also asked 3M to stop exporting respirators that are manufactured in the United States to Canada and Latin America — a request it said carried “significant humanitarian implications” for people in those countries.

A Korean-war era law, the Defense Production Act gives the administration expansive powers to secure supplies, including forcing a company to prioritize the federal government’s contract or even determining the distribution of products for a company like 3M.

Curbs on medicines and medical devices are increasingly popping up around the world as countries aim to preserve scarce supplies for their own citizens.

As of April 1, 68 nations had already put limits on exports of medical supplies, according to tracking by Simon Evernett, a professor of international trade at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.

With joblessness soaring, Pelosi says it’s time to “go bigger” on another economic relief bill and wait on infrastructure.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday called for another sweeping government aid package to build on the more than $2 trillion stimulus enacted last week, indicating that Democrats would wait to pursue an infrastructure plan and instead focus on urgent action to help Americans weather the economic shocks brought on by the pandemic.

“We must extend and expand this bipartisan legislation to meet the needs of the American people,” Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said in a statement Friday after the release of devastating job figures that reflected the beginning of the virus’s impact on the labor market.

“It is imperative that we go bigger and further assisting small business, to go longer in unemployment benefits and provide additional resources,” to process jobless claims, “and more direct payments for families,” she said.

It was only a few days ago that Ms. Pelosi called for the next phase of virus aid legislation to include an expansive infrastructure program to create thousands of jobs, a goal that was quickly endorsed by Mr. Trump but panned by Republican leaders who said it had nothing to do with confronting the crisis.

In her statement of Friday, Ms. Pelosi said that Democrats would continue to work on an infrastructure plan that would ultimately help revive the economy.

“We must work on an infrastructure package for recovery that addresses some of the critical impacts and vulnerabilities in America that have been laid bare by the coronavirus,” she said.

Half the planet is on lockdown, but not every U.S. state.

Nearly four billion people on the planet — half of humanity — found themselves on Friday under some sort of order to stay in their homes.

But some U.S. states are still resisting the most stringent measures, including North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said that he believed that social-distancing measures should be extended in every state.

“You know, the tension between federally mandated versus states’ rights to do what they want is something I don’t want to get into,” he told CNN on Thursday. “But if you look at what’s going on in this country, I just don’t understand why we’re not doing that.”

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

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

But the virus’s ferocious global assault continues. At least one million infections have been detected worldwide, but experts suspect the true number is far larger because of asymptomatic cases and delays in widespread testing. The Australian medical chief estimated that there are between five million and 10 million cases.

As Beijing and Washington declared a détente in their sniping, it emerged that the C.I.A. had been warning the White House since at least February that China was vastly underestimating the scale of the crisis, limiting the usefulness of its data in predictive models.

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

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

The number of recorded deaths in the United States topped 1,000 in a single day for the first time. In New York City, the center of the country’s outbreak, both hospitals and morgues struggled to meet surging demand.

And as more governors have invoked their “police powers” to order businesses closed to combat the pandemic, some Americans are turning to the courts, either suspicious of such sweeping measures or in the hope of protecting their livelihoods.

Specific, local grievances, like a Pennsylvania golf course that wants to be declared “life-sustaining” so it would not be subject to a closure order, are at the root of various lawsuits. Those claims are rooted in the Fifth Amendment, which requires due process and guarantees compensation for property seized by the government.

Other constitutional amendments have been invoked in numerous cases attempting to force open gun stores, or to argue that efforts to curb the virus should not outweigh rights like freedom of assembly and religion.

“Those may be serious, but they may also be part of an attempt to make an argument in the press about overreach,” said Tom Burke, a political-science professor at Wellesley College who studies the politics of litigation.

Because of sparse online records, it’s not clear how many ordinary Americans have turned to state courts for redress, legal experts said, but there has been a wave of lawsuits as state governments extend the timeline for people to stay home and to shutter their businesses.

History dating back to the time of 15th century plagues shows that lawsuits typically plummet during pandemics, Mr. Burke said, for the obvious reason that courts are closed. Legal experts anticipate a tidal wave of court activity afterward — especially in fields like insurance and debt collection — because of the economic dislocation.

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

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

Although in its early stages, the idea could form part of a broader exit strategy from the countrywide lockdown, once the spread of the disease has been brought under control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who said last week that he had contracted the coronavirus, still has symptoms — including a high temperature. He said on Friday that he was extending his self-isolation period. Mr. Johnson delivered the news in a video statement, his voice audibly hoarse.

Small businesses seek a share of $350 billion as some predict a chaotic process.

Small businesses flooded lenders with emergency loan applications on Friday morning as the spigot opened on $350 billion in relief money.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said that community banks had processed 700 loans for $2.5 million before 9 a.m. An hour later, he said the total was up to $4 million, a sign of the surging demand. Larger banks are expected to go live later in the morning, Mr. Mnuchin added.

The program is the centerpiece of the Trump administration’s economic stabilization effort and comes as government figures showed that 701,000 jobs were lost last month.

Lenders and borrowers have been bracing for a chaotic start to the program, which was assembled by the Small Business Administration and the Treasury Department in just a week. There has been mass confusion about the terms of the loans and the application form that borrowers are supposed to use.

The Treasury Department changed the terms of the loans, increasing the interest rates that banks get from 0.5 percent to 1 percent, on Thursday evening. Mr. Mnuchin posted the final version of the form on Twitter at 10:43 p.m. on Thursday.

“I expect it to be a train wreck,” Brock Blake, chief executive of the small business lending marketplace Lendio, said of the first day of the program.

The U.S. job market is crumbling, and stocks decline.

The U.S. economy had added jobs for 113 months in a row, dating from the early period of the recovery from the Great Recession.

That has come to an end.

The Labor Department reported on Friday that employers shed 701,000 jobs in March.

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

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

U.S. stocks opened lower on Friday after a drop in Europe, setting up a downbeat end to another turbulent week in financial markets.

The S&P 500 was down about 2 percent early Friday afternoon as investors digested more painful economic data — this time, the monthly employment report from the Labor Department that showed a long run of job growth had ground a halt in March.

Oil prices rose sharply, extending Thursday’s gains on word that major oil producers would meet to discuss the falling demand for petroleum. Brent crude, the international benchmark, rose as much as 10 percent.

Watch a video that takes a look at Trump’s changing coronavirus message.

When Mr. Trump was asked about a potential pandemic in January, he said confidently: “We have it totally under control.” By March he was saying: “I’ve always known this was a pandemic. I’ve felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”

Data shows an income gap in limiting movement.

In cities across America, many lower-income workers continue to move around, while those who make more money are staying home and limiting their exposure to the coronavirus, according to smartphone location data analyzed by The New York Times.

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

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

The outbreak is so new that the relationship between socioeconomic status and infection rates cannot be determined, but other data, including recent statistics released by public health officials in New York City, suggests that the coronavirus is hitting low-income neighborhoods the hardest.

Jared Kushner said the nation’s medical stockpile is federal, not the states’. Its website now agrees.

A description on the Health and Human Services website for its Strategic National Stockpile was altered in the last several hours to change a reference to its role helping state and local responders during emergencies when their own resources are depleted, a day after Mr. Trump’s senior adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, described the stockpile as existing for the federal government, not the states.

The new version shifts responsibility away from the federal government and to the states.

Appearing at a news conference with the president on Thursday, Mr. Kushner said that the federal stockpile was not there for states to rely on. “The notion of the federal stockpile was it’s supposed to be our stockpile,” Mr. Kushner said. “It’s not supposed to be states’ stockpiles that they then use.”

Previously, the website’s description of the stockpile read, “Strategic National Stockpile is the nation’s largest supply of life-saving pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for use in a public health emergency severe enough to cause local supplies to run out.”

“When state, local, tribal and territorial responders request federal assistance to support their response efforts, the stockpile ensures that the right medicines and supplies get to those who need the most during an emergency.”

It added, “Organized for scalable response to a variety of public health threats, this repository contains enough supplies to respond to multiple large-scale emergencies simultaneously.”

Now, in a change first spotted by the journalist Laura Bassett, the website says that the role is to “supplement state and local supplies during public health emergencies. Many states have products stockpiled as well.”

“The supplies, medicines and devices for lifesaving care contained in the stockpile can be used as a short-term stopgap buffer when the immediate supply of adequate amounts of these materials may not be immediately available.”

An officer removed by the Navy from his ship after sounding an alarm about an outbreak aboard is cheered by his crew as he leaves.

A day after the Navy removed the captain of the stricken aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt for what it said was exercising poor judgment under pressure, the officer’s crew gave him a rousing sendoff as he departed the vessel in Guam.

Capt. Brett E. Crozier had implored his superior officers for more help as an outbreak spread aboard the ship, with almost 5,000 crew members aboard, and described what he said were the Navy’s failures to provide the proper resources to combat the crisis.

Navy officials, angry that the captain’s complaints contained in a letter were leaked to the media earlier this week, accused him of going outside his chain of command and said he was no longer fit to lead the fast-moving effort to treat the crew and clean the ship .

But the resounding show of support for the captain — captured in several videos posted on social media on Friday — provided a gripping scene: the rank-and-file clapping and cheering their support for a boss who they viewed as putting their own safety ahead of his career.

More than 130 sailors have been infected so far, a number that is expected to rise by hundreds as the vessel remains docked at Guam.

Germany’s response keeps death toll low, and Merkel’s approval rating soars.

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

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

Chancellor Angela Merkel returned to her office on Friday, ending 14 days in quarantine after a doctor who administered a vaccine to her tested positive. The chancellor has seen her approval ratings jump over her government’s handling of the crisis.

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

The approach has included issuing billions of euros in financial aid to individuals and businesses. But it also included closing the borders, leaving tens of thousands of seasonal farm workers unable to enter the county as the spring planting season begins.

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

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

The doctor came to save lives. The co-op board told him to get lost.

At the end of seven hours in mask, gown and gloves at Bellevue Hospital Center on Monday, Dr. Richard Levitan finally had a chance to look at his phone.

Dr. Levitan, an emergency physician who lives in northern New Hampshire, had volunteered to work for 10 days at Bellevue, in Manhattan, as coronavirus patients besieged New York City hospitals. Monday was his first shift there.

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

The building’s board of directors wanted him out.

That took a minute to sink in.

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

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

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

That kind of thing is rampant and emerges in many shapes, if rarely so outrageously as the shunning of a medical volunteer. Governors were talking about pulling over cars with New York plates, and people in rural areas were mad about city residents who had fled to their second homes. In the city, people want to know if anyone in their building has tested positive, though with the virus so widespread, the only safe course is to assume that some neighbor has it or had it, and to take precautions.

Sweden introduces new restrictions as cases balloon.

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

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

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

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

He said Sweden should have followed the examples of its Nordic neighbors Denmark, Norway and Finland, which closed their borders and imposed strict quarantine rules early on.

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

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

Calls to turn presidential palaces into quarantine centers lead Egypt to change course.

The outbreak touched a raw political nerve this week for Egypt’s autocratic leader, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, when Egyptians used social media to call for his lavish palaces to be turned into quarantine centers.

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

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

In a statement released on Thursday, Dr. Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the W.H.O.’s regional director for the eastern Mediterranean, said the number of cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, had risen to more than 58,000 from more than 32,000, in the week ending on April 2.

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

In Egypt, the call to use Mr. el-Sisi’s residences instead was initiated by a Turkey-based television station linked to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. But it was quickly taken up by other Egyptians who contrasted the order with conditions at the palaces, echoing a theme that became the focus of rare antigovernment demonstrations in September.

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

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

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

Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper, Alan Blinder, Michael D. Shear, Ana Swanson, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Maggie Haberman, Raphael Minder, Ben Hubbard, Declan Walsh, Christina Anderson, Joanna Berendt, Nada Rashwan, Melissa Eddy, Jim Dwyer, Stephen Castle, Neil MacFarquhar, Eric Shcmitt, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Denise Lu, Gabriel J.X. Dance, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Kenneth Chang, Vindu Goel, Jeffrey Gettleman, Richard Pérez-Peña, Peter Eavis, Niraj Chokshi, David Gelles, Michael Corkery, Julia Jacobs and Maya Salam.