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Australia and New Zealand relax restrictions
Surfers returned to a few beaches in Sydney on Monday, and children in New Zealand will return to school in a week.
Both countries have managed to keep the coronavirus outbreak mostly contained. For eight straight days, Australia has recorded fewer than 50 new cases. Over the coming weeks, lockdown restrictions will be relaxed, with schools and a number of businesses reopening along with some public gatherings permitted.
In New Zealand, where restrictions were more severe, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern urged caution. “Stay strong, stay home, be kind, and let’s finish what we started,” she said.
Most of the new infections are in the crowded dormitories where migrant laborers live. The spike has exposed the very different experiences of rich and poorer expatriates in a city-state where 40 percent of residents are foreign-born.
Oil prices tumble as U.S. runs out of storage
Oil prices plummeted on Monday — and some contracts actually turned negative — as the pandemic continued to destroy demand for energy. Concerns grew that storage tanks in the U.S. were almost full and unable to hold all the unused crude.
The June contract for the U.S. benchmark oil fell 12 percent by mid-afternoon Monday to about $22 a barrel, while oil to be delivered next month was essentially deemed to be worthless. The benchmark European crude price was off about 9 percent.
Broader worries also mounted that the deal reached between OPEC, Russia and other producers will not be sufficient to prevent the oil markets being overwhelmed with a record surge of surplus oil.
If you have 6 minutes, this is worth itFacing a pandemic, but still meeting up at the bar
Tokyo may have been lulled into complacency about the coronavirus.
Schools have been closed and large events canceled since the beginning of March, but much of life in the city continued as normal until recently. Tokyo residents still met up for drinks, went to restaurants and showed up for work.
Our Tokyo bureau chief, Motoko Rich, writes about the “magical thinking” that seems to have taken hold.
Here’s what else is happening
Nova Scotia shooting: The authorities in Canada are searching for a motive after a gunman who appeared to be dressed as a police officer killed at least 19 people, one of the country’s worst mass killings in recent memory.
Israeli politics: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former challenger, Benny Gantz, agreed to establish a unity government, finally breaking a yearlong political impasse. The deal keeps Mr. Netanyahu in office as he faces trial on corruption charges.
Prince Harry and Meghan: The couple told four British tabloids — The Sun, The Daily Mirror, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express — they would no longer engage with them, but insisted they were not trying to shut down critical coverage.
Snapshot: Denis Hayes, above, who coordinated the first Earth Day 50 years ago, still believes in the power of activism to spark political change. He is now drawing a connection between the coronavirus and climate change.
What we’re reading: This article in The New Yorker. Jennifer Steinhauer, a reporter in our Washington, D.C., bureau, says: “I am often awake these days at 2 a.m., which has become my time for reading The New Yorker. This piece covers a topic I thought I knew well — the origins of the ‘Never Trump’ movement — but unpacks it with immense detail.”
Now, a break from the news
Cook: Tonnato is traditionally served over rosy slices of poached veal, but the simple sauce can also be spooned onto steamed or raw vegetables.
Read: “If It Bleeds,” the new collection of novellas by Stephen King. Normally, a horror story is not what you would turn to during a bout of insomnia, but our critic writes that King’s style was “immediately soothing.”
Listen: Fiona Apple is back with her first album since 2012, and three of our music critics dissect the effort.
And now for the Back Story on …‘Historically, we’ve preferred to study the male body’
The coronavirus is killing men at higher rates than women, even though infection rates are more or less the same. That’s because the male body and the female body respond differently to viruses. But unlike many other countries, the U.S. is not systematically tracking Co-19 gender data.
Francesca Donner, who heads our Gender Initiative, spoke with Caroline Criado Perez, author of “Invisible Women,” and Alisha Haridasani Gupta, gender reporter for The Times. Their conversation is excerpted from the In Her Words newsletter:
Francesca: We know differences between male and female immune systems exist, yet we know very little about them.
Caroline: The reason we don’t know that much is that, historically, we’ve preferred to study the male body.
We do know the female immune system is more active than the male immune system. The hypothesis is that it’s because women give birth and the female immune system has evolved around that. That can be bad for women in that women make up 80 percent of those with autoimmune diseases. Women also tend to have more frequent and more adverse reactions to vaccines.
The result is that we are less good at diagnosing diseases in women. If you look at something like heart disease in the U.K., women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed than men. One outcome is that in the U.S. and the U.K., women are more likely than men to die following a heart attack. And yet you still encounter so much resistance in the research community, who say things like, “The female body is too complicated, the menstrual cycle will interfere with the results.”
Francesca: Alisha, give us a little background on the sex data being collected.
Alisha: The U.S. is one of 11 countries that isn’t systematically tracking infections and deaths by men and women. Since we published the sex-data article, the Centers for Disease Control did release a report that included a race and a sex breakdown. But even that was a snapshot, drawing information from hospital networks in parts of 14 states.
Francesca: What implications does this have in our search for a vaccine?
Alisha: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases is already in phase one human trials for a potential vaccine on 45 healthy adults. It said it would need a larger number of participants to be able to disaggregate data by sex. That’s not to say that it’s impossible to have disaggregated data right from phase one — because Johnson & Johnson said that’s what it’s going to do as it heads into human trials in September.
That’s it for this briefing. See you next time.
— Carole
Thank youTo Melissa Clark for the recipe, and to Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the rest of the break from the news. You can reach the team at [email protected].
P.S. We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is about what the U.S. might look like after states lift coronavirus-related lockdowns. Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: Drink that comes from the Russian for “water” (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here. Times employees are experimenting with new ways of connecting with and motivating their colleagues while they work from home, including poetry readings and virtual lunches.
