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With 532 new cases on Wednesday, there are now at least 1,871 cases of coronavirus in New York City and 11 deaths, Mayor Bill de Blasio's office confirmed to CNN.Health officials and government leaders have encouraged Americans to avoid populous places and large group gatherings to mitigate the spread of the virus. In one of the more drastic measures, San Francisco is demanding that residents shelter in place during the pandemic.

Ridership on the city's subway system was down 3.7 million on Tuesday, compared with the same day last year when more than 5.5 million people rode the subway, the MTA New York City Transit said in a tweet.

Times Square, normally teeming with vehicle and foot traffic, was lit up as ever but nearly uninhabited Monday as bars and restaurants became take-out only and public spaces like theaters and gyms shuttered.

There's still time to stop the United States from becoming the next epicenter of the novel coronavirus pandemic, a World Health Organization spokeswoman told CNN on Wednesday.

The formula for success is testing people, finding each case, identifying people who have come into contact with those who have been infected, isolating those who are ill or who have been exposed and quarantining, she said.

President Donald Trump is hopeful Americans will be able to return to work in fewer than three weeks, he said, by Easter, which is April 12 -- an outlook that is not shared by world health officials.

A threat so grave handed Trump a history-making opportunity that eluded many of his predecessors. He’d become a wartime president, with a chance to refashion his legacy. That moment has come and is likely gone

“This is Trump’s Churchill moment,” Steve Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, told me. “This time will define his presidency.”

“There are times when you really need a president—and those are the ones that have forged our great presidents,”

The Tokyo Olympics have been postponed. New York, now the center of the outbreak in America, braces for a flood of patients. The playwright Terrence McNally dies of complications from the coronavirus.

tocks rallied on the hope that Washington was close to producing a stimulus bill. Shares soared for airlines and other companies expected to benefit.

Trump expressed outrage at having to ‘close the country’ to curb the spread of the virus.

In actuality, the decision on when and how to reopen is not entirely Mr. Trump’s to make because he never ordered it closed. The stay-at-home edicts that have kept the vast bulk of Americans indoors were issued by governors state by state.

if he were to issue new guidance saying it was safe to reopen or outlining a path toward reopening, many states would most likely follow or feel pressure from their businesses and constituents to ease up on restrictions.

the central question dominating the conversation in Washington, New York and elsewhere was how long would it be until the country could begin to get back to normal.

“Right now we’re projecting that we are reaching a plateau in the total number of hospitalizations, and you can see the growth and you see it starting to flatten,” Cuomo told reporters Tuesday. “Change in daily ICU admissions is way down, and that’s good news. The daily intubations number is down, and that’s good news. The discharge rate is right about where it was.”

one computer model of the disease’s future spread — relied upon by governors and the White House — shifted its estimate of covid-19’s U.S. death toll downward this week. Instead of roughly 94,000 deaths as estimated a week ago, the University of Washington model now predicts about 82,000 by late summer.

The University of Washington model predicts the worst day for deaths will be around April 16, meaning daily death tolls will grow higher until then.

The disturbing contrast between the values and culture of the Democratic and Republican parties was on horrifying display on Tuesday.

On one hand, you had a lovely, personal endorsement of former vice president Joe Biden from 2016 Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, followed by a substantive discussion of the unequal impact of the coronavirus. After Biden introduced her as “a woman who should be president of the United States right now,” Clinton remarked, “I wish he were president right now, but I can’t wait until he is.

On display was empathetic, data-driven leadership. The friendly reminiscing of their time in the Obama administration reminded us of a time when graceful, decent and cordial people populated government.

The US recovery from the pandemic lags way behind Europe – even as states reopen

The US may be moving to loosen social distancing restrictions around the same time as several European countries but it remains in a far different, and worse, stage of the coronavirus pandemic.

While infections and deaths from Covid-19 quickly raced to terrifying peaks in Italy and Spain, both countries have managed to arrest the increase and are now forcing the key trends downwards.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced recently that New York City would take several more steps toward normalcy: More people would soon be allowed in restaurants; an 11 p.m. curfew at businesses like movie theaters would end; and yoga classes, among other indoor fitness activities, would be allowed to restart.

On Feb. 25, New York City had a seven-day average of 4,043 cases per day, according to data from the city. This week that number has dipped to an average of less than 2,700. There’s been a similar decline in new hospitalizations: to a seven-day average of 178 per day this week, from an average of 326 in late Februar

Deaths and hospitalizations in the city have fallen in recent weeks, but newly reported cases in New York City are hovering at a 14-day average of more than 3,500 a day, which is still very high, according to a New York Times database.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer vetoed a bill that would have given a degree of power over emergency orders to the state legislature, limiting how long her administration could enforce orders without lawmakers' approval.

"Unfortunately, epidemics are not limited to 28 days," Whitmer said in a veto letter, according to MLive.com. "We should not so limit our ability to respond to them."

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Whitmer has faced criticism for her administration's orders. At the height of the pandemic in April, Michigan saw armed protesters storm the state's Capitol in opposition to Whitmer's stay-at-home order.

paving the way for a potential $4.2 billion industry that could create tens of thousands of jobs and become one of the largest markets in the country.

end years of racially disproportionate policing that saw Black and Hispanic people arrested on low-level marijuana charges far more frequently than white people.

The deal was crafted with an intense focus on making amends in communities impacted by the decades-long war on drugs.

A recent solitary dissent by John Roberts points to his isolation from the court’s other conservatives.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s arrival in late October changed all that, and quickly. A few minutes before midnight on the night before Thanksgiving, the court issued an order suspending the indoor attendance limits that Gov. Andrew Cuomo had placed on religious services in areas of New York with high rates of Covid infection.

Warning that the decision would lead to “a major expansion of the judicial role,” the chief justice wrote: “Until now, we have said that federal courts can review the legality of policies and actions only as a necessary incident to resolving real disputes. Going forward, the judiciary will be required to perform this function whenever a plaintiff asks for a dollar.”

Suddenly, it was everywhere.On March 1, 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in his state, after reports of local outbreaks up and down the West Coast in February. The avalanche began, with states across the country shutting down and caseloads surging into the thousands. American life had been upended.

Over the past year, we have been relearning the lessons of the British economist John Maynard Keynes. In 1937, Keynes wrote that serious economics was not a realm for “pretty, polite techniques, made for a well-paneled board room and a nicely regulated market.” The real world is messy, the future uncertain. And the genius of profit-maximizing entrepreneurs does not automatically arise to provide solutions when calamity strikes. For Keynes, the economy was not a self-sustaining engine of prosperity; it was something that societies created to meet social needs and that had to be actively managed to function properly.

Of course, expanded unemployment aid should have kept flowing through the final five months of last year. And aid to state and local governments to fight the pandemic was insufficient. But where the problem was a shortage of money, the government delivered. Cash constraints have not hindered its rescue efforts, at $5 trillion and counting. Even the loudest moderates of Joe Biden’s Democratic Party did not balk at the $1.9 trillion cost of the Covid-19 relief bill he signed into law Wednesday night.

On March 1, 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York announced the first confirmed case of Covid-19 in his state, after reports of local outbreaks up and down the West Coast in February. The avalanche began, with states across the country shutting down and caseloads surging into the thousands. American life had been upended.

On March 9, fearing a wave of corporate losses and bankruptcies, investors piled into government-backed paper, driving down the yield on 10-year Treasury bonds to just 0.54 percent. On March 15, the Federal Reserve announced that it would begin offering ultracheap emergency loans to banks, reviving the rescue mind-set during the 2008 financial crisis. The same day, it cut a key interest rate to near zero, reducing financing costs for businesses and consumers. Two days later, it resurrected another 2008-era program to provide cheap longer-term loans to big banks and securities dealers.

The United States once maintained a robust commitment to public investment in things like spaceflight, medical research, the interstate highway system and the development of the internet, backed by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.

If it’s time for a new outsider, it does sort of seem that Andrew Yang ought to fit the bill. Yet he’s run a rather strange campaign — lots of interesting ideas but often the kind you hear from a guy who’s on a six-month internship at City Hall before being posted someplace else.

Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.

New York’s congressional delegation will shrink by one seat after the 2022 election, the Census Bureau announced on Monday, but the state came excruciatingly close to snapping an eight-decade streak of declining representation in Washington: It was 89 residents short, to be precise.

Ms. Menin said she believed that the personal animus between Mr. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio was a driving factor in the state’s approach to the census, adding that she was “100 percent” sure that an additional 89 people would have been counted had there been greater state involvement. “It’s unconscionable,” she said.

California will remain the state with the largest congressional delegation, with 52 districts, losing one seat. Texas will pick up two seats for a total of 38. Florida and New York had been tied with 27 seats each, but Florida will gain a seat as New York sheds one, part of a broader trend of population shifts to the South and West in recent decades.

After a year of criticism by health experts, mockery from comedians and blistering critiques from political rivals, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is standing unabashedly tall among the nation's governors on the front lines of the coronavirus fight.

As many parts of the country embark on an uneasy march toward normalcy, Florida is not only back in business -- it's been in business for the better part of the past year. DeSantis' gamble to take a laissez faire approach appears to be paying off -- at least politically, at least for now, as other governors capturing attention in the opening phase of the pandemic now face steeper challenges.

"Those lockdowns have not worked. They've done great damage to our country," DeSantis said Tuesday at a news conference in Tallahassee. "We can never let something like this happen again. Florida took a different path. We've had more success as a result."

Equal Pay Day marks the date in the calendar when women are finally able to catch up to what men earned the year before. It's sad, but not surprising, that women in the US still earn far less than men, and the pandemic has only heightened the economic hardships for women.

It's a reminder that future historians will judge us on how women fared coming out of this once-in-a-century phenomenon. Will this be known as the year women fell into an abyss with no hope of climbing out? Or can women experience a "V" shaped recovery, falling fast and hard but rebounding higher than they were before?

My fear is that because of this pandemic, 2021 will go down in history as the time when American women fell further backward, instead of taking leaps forward.Think this is an exaggeration? Just ask any woman how the coronavirus recovery is going for her.

Those concerns have intensified in recent days, as the United Federation of Teachers warned the city that it believed all schools should close if the positivity rate reached a certain threshold.

But in a repeat of a battle that has played out frequently over the few months, the mayor’s office has said it is determined to keep schools open.

And more than 100 schools were closed for a mandatory quarantine because of virus cases as of Tuesday.

Recovery efforts are underway in the Philippines after Super Typhoon Goni brought flooding, mudslides and strong winds to its largest island early Sunday morning. The storm, whose maximum wind speeds earned it the distinction of the year's most powerful cyclone, left at least 10 people dead and three missing.

Ahead of the storm, the international airport in Manila closed for 24 hours starting on Sunday. And nearly one million residents were preemptively evacuated, a process further complicated by the coronavirus pandemic — Johns Hopkins University puts the number of confirmed cases in the hard-hit Philippines at more than 383,000.

The storm intensified rapidly on Friday, adding 80 miles per hour to its maximum sustained winds in just 24 hours. Peak winds were estimated at 195 mph prior to landfall, which is equivalent to a Category 5 hurricane.