Coronavirus Live Updates: C.D.C. Recommends Americans Wear Masks in Public, but Trump Stresses It Is Voluntary

新冠病毒疫情最新消息

C.D.C. says all Americans should wear masks. Trump says the rule is voluntary.

President Trump said at his daily White House briefing on Friday that the Centers for Disease Control recommended that Americans use basic “nonmedical, cloth” masks on a voluntary basis.

“You can do it. You don’t have to do it. I’m choosing not to do it,” Mr. Trump said. “It’s only a recommendation.”

He stressed that medical masks should be reserved for health care workers and that masks are not a substitute for social distancing.

The Trump administration had been 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 had stalled a public announcement that using them could prevent the spread of the coronavirus.

The deliberations, playing out as local officials in cities including Los Angeles and New York have counseled residents to begin covering their faces, reflect how health experts and government officials are trying to keep pace with the evolving science and public opinion surrounding a novel virus.

Top officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been 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.

But some White House officials 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 pressed him to limit the mask-wearing guidance only to people in “areas of widespread transmission.”

That had some 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, some C.D.C. officials believe.

The issue took on greater public urgency this week, when officials said that as many as a quarter of those already infected may show no symptoms but still contribute to “significant” transmission.

At a W.H.O. briefing on Friday, Dr. Michael J. Ryan, executive director of the health emergency program, said that while the agency still recommended masks only for front line 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.”

Some officials fear that a broad recommendation that Americans wear masks would raise demand for supplies that are already dwindling, or inadvertently signal that it’s all right to abandon social distancing and return to public life as long as you are wearing a mask. Mr. Trump made the distinction that the C.D.C. was recommending nonmedical, cloth masks for the general public.

“We don’t want people to feel like, ‘Oh, I’m wearing a mask. I’m protected and I’m protecting others,’” Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus response, said on Thursday.

Evidence for the use of face masks in limiting the spread of the virus has been mounting. In a study published Friday in the journal Nature, researchers found that flat surgical face masks significantly reduced the number of virus-carrying droplets that mask wearers released into the surrounding air.

New York State records its biggest daily death toll, and De Blasio 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.”

Mr. Cuomo again mentioned his brother, Chris Cuomo, a CNN anchor who tested has positive. Another CNN anchor, Brooke Baldwin, announced on Friday that she had tested positive, too. Ms. Baldwin said she had been social distancing and taking the proper precautions but said, “Still — it got me.” Here’s more on the other public figures who have tested positive.

The Trump administration plans to pay hospitals for treating uninsured coronavirus patients, rather than expand insurance coverage.

The Trump administration plans to use money from the recent stimulus bill to pay hospitals for the treatment of uninsured coronavirus patients, arguing that it is more efficient than reopening enrollment in the Obamacare markets to help people without coverage get care.

The money would come from a $ 100 billion fund to help hospitals respond to the crisis that hospital groups expected would be spent on their more immediate financial needs, like urgently needed medical supplies.

President Trump announced the policy on Friday at his daily briefing.

Using the hospital funds to pay for uninsured coronavirus patients could be a targeted way to pay for coronavirus care for the growing number of Americans who lack health insurance. Nationwide, millions of Americans have lost their job-based coverage as the virus has caused a sudden downturn in the economy.

However, critics say it may not go to hospitals in the states hit the hardest so far and does little to address concerns over the millions of people now without coverage for medical care unrelated to the virus.

Congress left the legislation establishing the hospital fund deliberately vague, to allow its allocation to shift as the epidemic played out. But hospitals have asked for as much money as possible to be paid to them immediately, to address pressing concerns like paying their staff, buying equipment and retrofitting their facilities to accommodate the flood of patients with the coronavirus.

The administration’s plan, by contrast, would pay hospitals after the fact, and would tend to shift more money toward states with more uninsured patients. New York, California and Washington, which have experienced early surges in infections, entered the crisis with very low levels of uninsured residents. Republican-led states, like Florida and Texas, that have declined to expand Medicaid are likely to benefit more from funding targeted directly at uncompensated care.

Justice delayed: The Supreme Court has postponed the last two weeks of arguments of its term.

The Supreme Court announced on Friday that it would postpone the last two weeks of arguments of the term “in keeping with public health guidance.” The arguments, which had been scheduled to start on April 20, may be rescheduled before the term ends, typically in late June, if circumstances permit, the court said.

The most urgent of the cases that would have been argued in April was one on whether members of the Electoral College must vote as they had promised to do. Lawyers on both sides had urged the court to decide the question before the presidential election.

The court had already postponed the two weeks of arguments that had been scheduled to start on March 23. They included cases on whether Mr. Trump’s accounting firm and bankers must disclose his financial records.

“All of the justices are healthy,” Kathleen Arberg, a Supreme Court spokeswoman, said in a statement on Friday. She added that the justices conducted their usual private conference on Friday by telephone. In keeping with its recent practice, the court will issue decisions on its website on Monday, but the justices will not take the bench to announce them.

“The court will continue to proceed with the resolution of all cases argued this term,” Friday’s announcement said.

“The court will consider a range of scheduling options and other alternatives if arguments cannot be held in the courtroom before the end of the term,” the announcement said. “The court building remains open for official business, but most court personnel are teleworking. The court remains closed to the public until further notice.”

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.

The global economy has been shaken by the coronavirus pandemic, and 10 million jobs in the United States have been vaporized 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.

While Republican leaders have cast doubt on whether another relief bill would be necessary, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, reversed course on Friday. “There will be a next measure,” he told The Associated Press.

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. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas had denied on Tuesday that his newly toughened social-distancing rules amounted to a statewide stay-at-home order, but his spokesman acknowledged Friday that they did.

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.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.

The number of recorded deaths in the United States topped 1,000 in a single day for the first time.

More governors have invoked their “police powers” to order businesses closed to combat the pandemic, and 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 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.

Across the country, police impersonators are exploiting the restrictions imposed during the pandemic to conduct illegal traffic stops, with some harassing women and others trying to steal money or personal information, according to law enforcement officials.

In Lodi, Calif., a man wearing a “tactical-type vest” threatened someone with jail unless he handed over $ 1,000. In Erie, Colo., a man with flashing lights in his car pulled over a woman, told her she was violating a stay-at-home order, and followed her home.

In many cases, the perpetrators are preying on the fear people feel as the virus spreads, said Marcus Felson, a professor of criminal justice at Texas State University. And in some cases, there appears to have been no clear motive other than a desire to wield the power of the badge.

The police recommend that drivers call 911 if they fear they’ve been stopped by a bogus law enforcement officer, because dispatchers can determine if the stop is legitimate. They also recommend stopping in a well-lit, public area and turning on hazard lights to draw the attention of passing motorists. Drivers can also ask to see a badge or an identification card.

Texas reports its largest outbreak at a nursing home. Its staff members worked in at least seven others.

A coronavirus outbreak at a San Antonio nursing home has infected 66 of the facility’s 84 residents and killed an additional resident, the largest spread of the virus at a Texas long-term care facility, city and county officials said Friday.

Eight of the facility’s workers have already tested positive, and a number of the staff members have worked at other nursing homes in the San Antonio region. Local officials were rushing Friday to perform additional tests and to track down all 60 employees at the facility, the Southeast Nursing and Rehabilitation Center.

“This morning we launched an aggressive, multi-layered response to try to get our arms around the extent of this local outbreak,” Charles Hood, the San Antonio fire chief, said at a news conference on Friday.

Two of the eight infected employees worked in other facilities, and those employees who have not been tested worked in at least seven nursing homes in the city. Such crossover of workers at multiple sites was one of the factors that contributed to a deadly coronavirus outbreak in nursing homes near Seattle, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a recent report.

In San Antonio, medical-response teams were visiting the seven facilities where Southeast employees may have worked to test all residents and workers who show symptoms. Officials were also planning to visit and evaluate 34 nursing homes that have received the lowest federal ratings.

City officials on Friday amended previously issued emergency orders, to prohibit nursing-home employees from working in multiple facilities.

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.

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.

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 fell about 1.5 percent on Friday 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.

The dead are being buried, quietly, in China, amid questions over its death toll.

For months, the residents of the central Chinese city of Wuhan were told they could not pick up the ashes of their loved ones who had died during the height of the nation’s outbreak. Now that the authorities say the epidemic is under control, officials are pushing the relatives to bury the dead quickly and quietly, and they are suppressing online discussion of fatalities as doubts emerge about the true size of the toll.

China’s official death toll from the virus stood at 3,322 on Friday, but medical workers and others have suggested the count should be higher. The C.I.A. has warned the White House for weeks that China vastly understated its epidemic, current and former American intelligence officials say.

As China tries to control the narrative, the police in Wuhan, where the pandemic began, have been dispatched to break up groups on WeChat, a popular messaging app, set up by the relatives of virus victims. Government censors have scrubbed images circulating on social media showing relatives in the city lining up at funeral homes to collect ashes.

And when Liu Pei’en mourned the loss of his father in Wuhan, he said, officials insisted on accompanying him to the funeral home and later followed him to the cemetery, where he saw one of his minders taking photos of the brief funeral.

“My father devoted his whole life to serving the country and the party,” Mr. Liu, 44, who works in finance, said by phone. “Only to be surveilled after his death.”

Berlin comes to the aid of the city’s artists and freelancers.

When Germany shut down public life to halt the spread of the virus last month, Laurenz Bostedt, a freelance photographer, watched as one contract after another was canceled, until his entire expected income had disappeared.

On Tuesday, 5,000 euros, or about $ 5,400, landed in his bank account, just three days after he had submitted an application for immediate assistance. The city-state of Berlin had pledged on March 19 that money would be distributed quickly to self-employed people and small- business owners who were unable to cover their basic expenses.

To the shock of many Berliners, hardened by regular stacks of paperwork from the city’s bureaucracy, it was. On Thursday, just five days after the application process opened, Berlin’s government said it had already paid out more than $ 1.4 billion to more than 150,000 self-employed individuals or businesses with fewer than five employees.

“We are all pretty amazed,” Mr. Bostedt said in a telephone interview. “It went surprisingly fast and was all refreshingly well-organized.”

Small employers and freelancers like artists, fashion designers, computer programmers, hair stylists, web designers, coffee shop owners and club operators account for a quarter of all business in Berlin. They were too small to qualify for the initial aid from the federal government that was aimed primarily at keeping big business afloat, leading the city to set up a rescue package meant specifically for them.

Across Europe, countries from Austria to Italy, France and Spain have quickly drawn up relief packages aimed at not only preventing larger business from laying off employees, but also ensuring that small entrepreneurs are able to make basic payments. A worker who loses a job qualifies for unemployment benefits, but government orders to stay at home put self-employed people in an unusual position — not out of a job, strictly speaking, but unable to work.

Nowhere have the benefits been as generous, or as swift, as in Berlin — a city that has become the butt of endless jokes over its perpetual inability to open an international airport, originally slated to begin passenger service in 2011.

Sweden introduces new restrictions as cases balloon.

Sweden drew attention in recent weeks for its unorthodox approach to the coronavirus outbreak, a holdout to the strict isolation measures being implemented across much of Europe.

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.”

Reporting was contributed by Michael Cooper, Michael Crowley, Alan Blinder, Michael D. Shear, Ana Swanson, Amy Qin, Cao Li, Melissa Eddy, Jonah Engel Bromwich, Emily Cochrane, Maggie Haberman, Manny Fernandez, Adam Liptak, 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, Michael Levenson, 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.