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South Korea voters head to the polls wearing face masks and standing three feet apart.
Millions of voters, all wearing masks, lined up at polling places across South Korea on Wednesday to elect the country’s 300-member National Assembly, even as the country fought to control the coronavirus.
Voters had their temperatures taken before being allowed to enter polling places. That step was part of safety precautions enforced by disease-control officials who are trying to ensure that the election will take place without causing mass infections. Those with high temperatures were led to vote in booths separate from the others.
Voters were asked to stand at three-foot intervals while they waited. They were also required to rub their hands with sanitizer and put on disposable plastic gloves handed out by officials before entering voting booths.
The polling in South Korea is one of the first national elections taking place amid the coronavirus pandemic, while countries like France and the United Kingdom have opted to postpone elections.
South Korea opened its 14,000 polling stations at 6 a.m. after disinfection. The voting will last until 6 p.m. More than 13,000 voters who are in a mandatory two-week quarantine but still want to vote will be escorted by government officials to vote after 6 p.m.
The election pits President Moon Jae-in’s Democratic Party against the main conservative opposition, the United Future Party, in a contest to control the legislature. Currently, neither party holds a majority there. More than 30 much smaller political parties also campaigned to win seats.
The approval ratings of Mr. Moon and his party have risen in recent weeks as South Korea has appeared to bring the coronavirus under control through a fast and effective operation to test and isolate patients. The country has reported fewer than 50 new cases a day in the past week.
Trump halts World Health Organization funding.
As the United States continued to grapple with how to move forward from the coronavirus pandemic, President Trump announced Tuesday that his administration was halting payments to the World Health Organization while it reviewed the organization’s role in handling the virus.
The president, who has been under criticism for his handling of the response to the virus, blamed the W.H.O. for “severely mismanaging and covering up” the spread of the virus. “So much death has been caused by their mistakes,” the president told reporters during a White House briefing.
The move to end funding to the W.H.O. — depriving the organization of about 10 percent of its budget during a global health crisis — came on the same day that the president took a more cooperative tone with the nation’s governors, pledging to work closely with states to loosen stay-at-home orders and open the country. On Monday, President Trump had asserted that he had “total” authority to reopen the American economy — a position that was widely challenged by legal scholars, governors and other elected officials from both parties.
“We don’t have a king; we have a president,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said, brushing aside Mr. Trump’s assertion of authority.
On Tuesday, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California announced the state’s cautious next steps as it looks to slowly reopen. He said the state’s broad-based stay-at-home orders would eventually be replaced with less restrictive measures. But he did not give a time frame, saying he would revisit the question in two weeks.
The country’s fatality rate increased by 17 percent, to more than 26,000, on Tuesday after New York City sharply increased its death toll by more than 3,700. Officials said they were now including people who had never tested positive for the virus but were presumed to have died because of it. More than 10,000 people have died in the city.
China’s attacks on the West’s coronavirus response anger the French government.
As China has emerged from the worst of its outbreak, Chinese diplomats have become increasingly combative in defending their government against international criticism — only to sometimes inflame more tensions.
France is the latest example. On Tuesday the French foreign minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, summoned the Chinese ambassador, Lu Shaye, to criticize an article that appeared on the Chinese Embassy’s website. The article accused unnamed Western politicians of letting old people starve to death en masse in abandoned retirement homes.
Mr. Le Drian said the article, which was published on the website of the Chinese Embassy in Paris as the work of an unnamed “Chinese diplomat in France,” was “not in line with the quality of the bilateral relation” between Paris and Beijing, Reuters reported.
The article said that Western news outlets have ignored failings in their own countries while making unfounded assertions that China bore the blame for letting the virus spread. Such rebuttals have become common in Chinese state-run media. But this one went further.
It said “nursing personnel in old age homes had abandoned their posts without permission, fleeing en masse, leading to old people dying in groups from starvation or illness,” according to the Chinese version of the article, which is still on the embassy website.
The friction echoed a controversy last month when Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry, asserted — despite no credible evidence — that the American military may have started the coronavirus epidemic. Mr. Zhao has muted his claims since China’s ambassador to Washington, Cui Tiankai, dismissed such speculation as “crazy.”
Mr. Lu may have also decided to try to cool the rancor in France. On Tuesday, he published an essay on his embassy’s website warmly praising cooperation between China and France during the pandemic.
Children return to school in Denmark as some European nations ease pandemic rules.
Toddlers and schoolchildren in Denmark on Wednesday marked their first day back to school and day care after five weeks of coronavirus closings. The youngest had the task of taking Danish society’s first careful steps toward some semblance of normalcy, a path that’s likely to take months, as the country begins to ease stringent measures imposed as part of the lockdown.
Denmark was one of a handful of European countries that have slowly, tentatively begun lifting constraints on daily life this week for the first time since the start of the coronavirus crisis. They are providing an early litmus test of whether Western democracies can gingerly restart their economies and restore basic freedoms without reviving the spread of the disease.
On Tuesday, Italy, the epicenter of Europe’s crisis, reopened some bookshops and children’s clothing stores. Spain allowed workers to return to factories and construction sites, despite a daily death toll that remains over 500.
In Denmark, the slow return began as the number of hospital admissions remained far below capacity across the country. By Tuesday, 380 coronavirus patients were being treated in Danish hospitals, down from 535 at the peak of the outbreak in the country on April 1.
“It’s better than we dared hope for,” Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said at a news briefing on Tuesday.
With the outbreak easing, Ms. Frederiksen’s approval rating has doubled to 79 percent since the start of the crisis. But she has faced some criticism both for the drastic initial shutdown on March 11 when she closed borders, shuttered schools, shut down most of the public sector and asked the private sector to work from home.
“We may have saved lives,” she said on Tuesday of the measures, adding that she hoped to return Denmark to the “rich and secure” society it was before the coronavirus.
“But we’re still going to need some patience,” she added.
Ecuador’s financial capital has seen a surge of dead.
When Guayaquil, Ecuador’s business capital, was first hit by the coronavirus, the devastation was so great that bodies were piling up in the streets.
Now, as the authorities begin to grapple with the scale of the crisis, they have reason to believe that the toll for the province that includes Guayaquil is likely many times larger than the official government figure of 173 dead.
The numbers are skewed because only those who test positive — dead or alive — are counted as coronavirus victims.
The usually bustling port city of about three million had 1,500 more deaths in March of this year than in the same month in 2019, Guayaquil’s mayor, Cynthia Viteri, said in an interview.
“They are not only dying from Covid,” she said, referring to the disease caused by coronavirus. “People with diabetes, hypertension, heart disease are dying from lack of medical attention, because the hospitals are saturated with the critically ill, because there aren’t places where women can give birth without getting infected.”
In addition, in the past two weeks, a special emergency team collected or authorized the burial of nearly 1,900 bodies from Guayaquil’s hospitals and homes, according to Ecuador’s government, which said that figure represented a fivefold increase in the city’s usual mortality rate.
To combat the spread of the virus, the city will resort to some of the most draconian quarantine measures in Latin America.
Security forces on Tuesday began cordoning off the contagion hot spots for up to three days at a time while medics looked door to door looking for potential cases and sanitary workers disinfected public spaces.
Ms. Viteri, the mayor, said movement to and from the hard-hit neighborhoods, located mostly in the city’s poor periphery, will be completely cut off. City authorities will provide residents with food while the operation lasts.
“The situation isn’t grave — it’s extremely grave,” said Ms. Viteri. “And we still haven’t reached a high point of infections in Guayaquil.”
Spraying disinfectant in the streets soothes nerves, but may not kill germs.
The images are compelling: Fire trucks in Tehran or Manila spray the streets. Amazon tests a disinfectant fog inside a warehouse, hoping to calm workers’ fears and get them back on the job. Families nervously wipe their mail and newly delivered groceries.
These efforts may help people feel like they and their government are combating the coronavirus. But in these still-early days of learning how to tamp down the spread of the virus experts disagree on how best to banish the infectious germs.
“There is no scientific basis at all for all the spraying and big public works programs,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.
Other experts are not ready to confidently dismiss disinfecting. There are just too many unknowns about this virus, said Marc Lipsitch, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Dr. Lipsitch said it will be difficult to study the effectiveness of disinfecting outdoor spaces because “everyone is throwing a mix of interventions at the problem, as they should.”
Most transmission of the virus comes from breathing in droplets that an infected person has just breathed out — not from touching surfaces where it may be lurking. “Transmission of novel coronavirus to persons from surfaces contaminated with the virus has not been documented,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes on its website.
Stay 6 feet apart, we’re told. But how far can air carry the coronavirus?
The rule of thumb, or rather feet, has been to stand six feet apart in public. That’s supposed to be a safe distance if a person nearby is coughing or sneezing and is infected with the novel coronavirus, spreading droplets that may carry virus particles.
And scientists agree that six feet is a sensible and useful minimum distance, but, some say, farther away would be better.
Six feet has never been a magic number that guarantees complete protection. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, one of the organizations using that measure, bases its recommendation on the idea that most large droplets that people expel when they cough or sneeze will fall to the ground within six feet.
But some scientists, having looked at studies of air flow and being concerned about smaller particles called aerosols, suggest that people consider a number of factors, including their own vulnerability and whether they are outdoors or in an enclosed room, when deciding whether six feet is enough distance.
“Everything is about probability,” said Dr. Harvey Fineberg, who is the head of the Standing Committee on Emerging Infectious Diseases and 21st Century Health Threats at the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. “Three feet is better than nothing. Six feet is better than three feet. At that point, the larger drops have pretty much fallen down.”
Reporting was contributed by Aimee Ortiz, Choe Sang-Hun, Karen Weintraub, Knvul Sheikh, James Gorman and Kenneth Chang
