As the world endured another stretch in the stockades of coronavirus, the start of the week brought mixed messages, with the crisis easing in previous hotspots across Asia and continental Europe while asserting itself over other parts of the globe. China reported no new deaths courtesy of COVID-19 for the first time since January, and cases stayed low in South Korea, while the situation remained bleak in Spain and Italy which nevertheless recorded lower deaths and falling infection rates. As recoveries outstripped infections in Austria, the country became the first outside of Asia to take steps towards phasing out its lockdown measures, and Denmark and then Norway followed suit. On the other hand Shinzo Abe in Japan officially declared a state of emergency covering Tokyo, Osaka, and five other prefectures, the Philippines extended its lockdown until the end of April, Singapore entered ‘circuit breaker’ mode, and France and the United Kingdom reported record deaths. After registering a record 833 fatalities on Monday, by Tuesday the addition of care home figures saw France join Italy, Spain, and the United States as one of only four countries to amass more than 10,000 deaths. The United Kingdom hit its own high in daily fatalities as Prime Minister Boris Johnson, already in hospital suffering the prolonged effects of the virus, was hastily moved into intensive care. Cases and curfews continued to take hold in Turkey and across Africa, while worldwide reports of domestic violence were on the rise.
The death toll in the United States, already in excess of 10,000, suffered its worst increase to date on Tuesday as the country recorded more than 1,800 deaths in one twenty-four hour period, with New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Louisiana, Georgia, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Connecticut all reporting record jumps. New York alone suffered 731 fatalities, and across the country reports indicated that the virus was having an outsized impact on African American communities, but a decision by the state supreme court in Wisconsin still forced people out to the polls. Cities and states adopted a mix-and-match approach to tackling the virus: Paris banned daytime jogging, while when visiting essential businesses, residents of Los Angeles were compelled to wear face masks. Religious festivals were also affected, as Egypt announced a ban on religious gatherings during the month of Ramadan, and Israel inaugurated a Passover curfew, scheduled to peak over the Seder ritual feast.
In the middle of the week, after two months of lockdown, China lifted travel restrictions on the outbreak centre of Wuhan. Cases in Germany topped 100,000, and continued to rise in Sweden, prompting criticism amid perceptions of an unusually lax approach. As more countries in Europe looked towards easing restrictions, France extended its lockdown, and daily fatalities in the United Kingdom reached a record 938. Deaths across New York State hit a new high of 779, and crept up to 275 in New Jersey. Ethiopia and Liberia declared states of emergency. But in one of the rare silver linings amid the murk and cloud of the virus, the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen announced a unilateral ceasefire in the country’s devastating five-year civil war, an attempt to establish talks and ward off COVID-19’s pernicious spread.
As the weekend drew close, Japan reported record infections despite the state of emergency, cases rose in Singapore where lewd incidents curtailed the use of Zoom, and Bangkok banned alcohol sales in a bid to curb social gatherings during the Songkran New Year’s festival, but the South Korean centre of Daegu recorded no new cases for the first time since February as the country prepared to vote. Amid signs of stability, Spain and Italy extended their lockdown measures, deaths in France topped 13,000 but hospitalisations began to fall, and the United Kingdom suffered one of the deadliest days across all of Europe, with 980 additional fatalities as Boris Johnson emerged from the intensive care unit. Deaths remained relatively low in Germany, but cases rose for a fourth straight day, while the grim picture in care homes darkened the outlook in Belgium. Lockdowns were extended in South Africa and Ireland, and Turkey imposed a two-day curfew across thirty-one provinces just in time for the weekend. Countries equally struggled to combat the economic impact. Unemployment claims in the United States jumped by another 6.6 million, sending total claims soaring beyond 17 million over the past four weeks, and the rate of unemployment was now the worst since the Great Depression, although Wall Street still ended the week on the up. The European Union finally sealed a half-trillion euro rescue plan. By close of business on what was a subdued Good Friday for Christians, the worldwide death toll had passed 100,000 with more than 1.6 million cases across the globe.
By Saturday, Brazil had become the first country in Latin America to record more than 1,000 fatalities, as the death of a Yanomami youth sparked concern for the country’s indigenous people and President Jair Bolsonaro continued to court controversy for his contrarian response. In the United States, experts and non-experts alike revised down their predictions, and there was mixed messaging around social distancing measures, but a firm focus on testing as Google and Apple unveiled a contact-tracing app. Still despite declining hospitalisations, New York reported record fatalities with unclaimed victims of the virus being buried on Hart Island in the city’s potter’s field. The state had now recorded 159,937 cases of COVID-19, more than any single country outside the United States. Overnight the tally worsened across America, as the country became the first to report 2,000 deaths in a single day. As Saturday progressed, the United States overtook Italy as the country with the most deaths from coronavirus. Cases were on the rise in Pennsylvania, while Wisconsin became the final state to warrant a disaster declaration.
South Korea proposed the use of electronic wristbands to track potential quarantine violators. Israel halted all incoming flights as the authorities struggled to keep the virus under control. Cases continued to surge across Russia, stretching beyond the 10,000 mark as Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced additional lockdown measures and a digital pass system to govern local movement. Record deaths and a rising number of cases brought the toll in Sweden to 887 dead and over 10,000 infections, as despite passing wider executive powers earlier in the week, Prime Minister Stefan Lƶfven took a historical purview, admitting the country had not done enough. As in the United States, in the United Kingdom the coronavirus was disproportionately affecting minorities. But in one of those scarcely perceptible bright spots amid the ongoing crisis, crime rates had fallen sharply in numerous parts of the world.
Easter Sunday celebrations were for the most part muted, as in the newfangled tradition of virtual Seder celebrations, Pope Francis live-streamed Easter mass, but later in the day from the Duomo in Milan, renowned tenor Andrea Bocelli roused the torpid with hopeful hymnal song. Indonesia, the Philippines, and Russia reported record deaths and cases, and deaths in Spain sprung back to 619 following three days of decline, but there were blue skies over China thanks to lower levels of particle matter pollution, and the 431 new deaths in Italy were the lowest registered in the country for more than three weeks. In the United Kingdom, total fatalities passed 10,000, with health secretary Matt Hancock mourning a sombre day even as Prime Minister Boris Johnson was released from hospital. Mirroring efforts elsewhere across Europe, the United States, and Asia, the country confirmed plans for its own contact-tracing app. There were small signs of a slowdown in France and the state of New York. Finally as the weekend headed out to nowhere special, OPEC, Russia, and other oil-producing nations ended a long-running saga buffeted by the crisis, pledging to bolster plummeting prices by cutting production in the region of ten percent.
* * *
Whether taking a mulligan or calling ‘fore’ as the ball sailed out of bounds, organisers scrambled to reshape the golfing calendar on Monday, as the Open Championship was cancelled and the other three majors shanked back until later in the year. Originally scheduled for 16-19 July at Royal St. George’s in England, the decision to cancel the Open means that the oldest golf tournament in the world will not be played for the first time since 1945 and the end of the Second World War. Instead the 149th Open Championship will take place in 2021, with Royal St. George’s remaining as the venue, while the 150th anniversary of the tournament will take place at St. Andrews the following year.
At the same time golf’s various governing bodies announced that the Masters Tournament, which usually takes place at Augusta in the first week of April, will move to November, becoming the year’s final major, while the U.S. Open switches to September in New York and the PGA Championship slides back to August in San Francisco, recovering its old temporal home. The remainder of the calendar will have to fit in around the three majors, and the new schedule is inevitably provisional, with Masters chairman Fred Ridley stressing ‘our future plans are incumbent upon favourable counsel and direction from health officials’, while PGA of America chief executive Seth Waugh noted that his organisation will ‘continue to follow the guidance of public health officials, but are hopeful that it will be safe and responsible to conduct the PGA Championship in August’.
* * *
Since Charles Oliveira caught Kevin Lee in a guillotine choke inside an empty arena in BrasĆlia last month, UFC events in London and Ohio have been reluctantly and belatedly cancelled. Whether as a point of pride or for the provision of entertainment, UFC President Dana White keeps kicking and screaming and prying at the fingers of coronavirus, refusing to submit. At the start of the week, White sought to restructure UFC 249, originally scheduled to take place at Barclays Center in Brooklyn on 18 April. With lightweight champion Khabib Nurmagomedov stuck in his native Dagestan, travel restrictions necessitated a change to the main event of the card, and Justin Gaethje was drafted in to face Tony Ferguson for the interim title. New York’s ban on mass gatherings made Brooklyn a non-starter, so the card also had to be relocated, but a shtum White would only indicate something behind closed doors, probably on the West Coast. More elaborate still, White boasted of international cards on an undisclosed island, promising to crank out fights for months to come.
Then reality bit down hard after spitting out the mouthpiece: amid suggestions that UFC 249 would take place on tribal land in California, one of the card’s co-headliners, former strawweight champion Rose Namajunas, withdrew from her scheduled bout against JĆ©ssica Andrade citing the death of two family members from COVID-19. White had previously offered a staunch defence of the UFC’s handling of the crisis, noting that the event schedule kept people employed and involved rigorous testing, deriding his critics as ‘the weakest, wimpiest people on earth’. Finally however White and the UFC were forced to succumb to external pressure, as requests from the state of California, ESPN, and the sports channel’s parent company Disney prompted the postponement of UFC 249, with future events placed on an indefinite hiatus.
* * *
The character actor Allen Garfield died on Tuesday from coronavirus, at the Motion Picture & Television Country House and Hospital in Los Angeles at the age of 80 years old. Born Allen Goorwitz in Newark, New Jersey, after graduating from Weequahic High School Garfield worked as a sports reporter and amateur boxer before finding his vocation as an actor, attending The Actors Studio in New York City where he studied with Lee Strasberg and Elia Kazan. Transitioning from the stage, he appeared in more than a hundred films and television shows over the course of his long career, featuring in early efforts by MiloÅ” Forman, Woody Allen, and Brian De Palma, becoming a favourite of the directors Francis Ford Coppola and Wim Wenders, and attaining critical and commercial success through pictures including Nashville and Beverly Hills Cop II. A stroke suffered prior to filming was written into the script of The Ninth Gate by Roman Polanski in 1999, and Garfield played in an episode of The West Wing and in the Jim Carrey drama The Majestic, before a second stroke in 2004 required long-term care. His final role came in 2016 courtesy of the long-delayed political satire Chief Zabu.
* * *
The influential singer-songwriter John Prine, known for his wry wit and trenchant lyrics on the passage of time, faded love, dusty bars, and wounded veterans, died on Tuesday at the age of 73 from complications caused by coronavirus. Born and raised in the Maywood suburb of Chicago, Prine began writing country songs at 14 years old and attended classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music, before gainful employment as a mailman was interrupted by a stint in the United States Army during the Vietnam War, which Prine served in charge of a motor pool in West Germany. Upon discharge, Prine returned to his mail route and began performing at clubs in Chicago. He credited his discovery to the movie critic Roger Ebert, who wrote Prine’s first ever review after stumbling upon the singer at the Fifth Peg folk club on West Armitage, and the country stalwart Kris Kristofferson, who would reminisce on his first time seeing Prine perform, writing ‘By the end of the first line we knew we were hearing something else. It mustāve been like stumbling onto Dylan when he first busted onto the Village scene’.
Through Kristofferson, Prine signed with Jerry Wexler at Atlantic Records, and in 1971 he released his self-titled debut album, featuring the signature songs ‘Sam Stone’ about a drug-addled war veteran, ‘Angel from Montgomery’ sung from the perspective of a disaffected middle-aged housewife, and ‘Paradise’ which centres on his parents’ hometown in Western Kentucky and became a small-scale environmental anthem. John Prine was followed by Diamonds in the Rough, a stripped-back bluegrass record containing ‘The Great Compromise’, a song about wanton romance which served as an oblique commentary on America. Subsequent albums on Atlantic attained a modicum of commercial success, and Prine moved to Asylum before co-founding in 1981 the independent label Oh Boy Records. Critically acclaimed and revered by his fellow artists, Prine’s biggest hits nevertheless came courtesy of songs he co-wrote or saw covered: ‘You Never Even Called Me by My Name’, co-written with Steve Goodman, which reached number eight on the Billboard country chart in a 1975 version by David Allan Coe, Bonnie Raitt’s defining take on ‘Angel from Montgomery’, and subsequent covers by Bette Midler, Johnny Cash, The Everly Brothers, and The Highwaymen.
In 1991, Prine won his first Grammy Award for The Missing Years, whose title song humorously depicts Jesus Christ’s missing adolescence. Albums full of original songs were interspersed with albums of covers, where Prine sang duets or recited the works of iconic female singer-songwriters. In 1998, Prine was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer on the right side of his neck, and after major surgery and a year of speech therapy, his voice became more gravelly. In 2013 he was again forced to undergo cancer surgery, this time to remove a growth in his left lung, but after six months he made a swift return to performing.
In the meantime Fair & Square in 2005 won Prine a second Grammy Award in the category of Best Contemporary Folk Album. That same year, at the request of the United States Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, Prine became the first musician to recite his works at the Library of Congress. In 2016, he received a PEN award alongside Tom Waits for song lyrics of literary excellence, and in 2019 he was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, before earlier this year at the 62nd Annual Grammy Awards, Bonnie Raitt led the tributes as he was honoured for Lifetime Achievement. With a legacy that seemed to grow year-on-year owing to his lasting influence and roving band of admirers, Prine’s last album The Tree of Forgiveness debuted at number five on the Billboard 200 in 2018, his best-ever chart position. His death was met by a flurry of testimonials from across the worlds of music and film, while Prine is survived by his wife Fiona and children Jody, Jack, and Tommy.
* * *
In an otherwise stellar week for the much-vaunted luminaries of old-time music, with ‘Murder Most Foul’ – his first original song in eight years, an extended playlist borne from communal grief in the aftermath of the assassination of President KennedyĀ – Bob Dylan scored his first ever Billboard number one single. Already the subject of critical appraisal, career retrospectives, and admiration from his fellow artists, ‘Murder Most Foul’ reached number one on the Billboard chart for rock digital song sales. A couple of weeks after being selected for long-term preservation by the Library of Congress, The Chronic by Dr. Dre is finally coming to all streaming services. Previously only accessible via Apple Music, Entertainment One said that the availability of The Chronic from 20 April would prove ‘another reason to celebrate what has become a national holiday’ in the name of cannabis culture. Finally Iggy Pop announced remastered versions of the classic albums The Idiot and Lust for Life, as part of a 7-CD box set incorporating live performances and outtakes from his Berlin period. The Idiot and Lust for Life will also be released in standalone two-disc deluxe editions, with both albums and the box set The Bowie Years due out on 29 May.
* * *
A team of archaeologists excavating the Abri du Maras caves in southeast France unveiled this week the oldest piece of string ever discovered. The tiny fragment of string, stretching 6 millimetres long and 0.5 millimetres wide, was found stuck to the underside of a sharp-edged stone flake, in a layer that dates from between 52,000 and 41,000 years ago. Previously the oldest string on record dated 19,000 years old, uncovered in 1994 at the Ohalo II site near the Sea of Galilee in Israel. Impressions of woven fabric and wear patterns in stone and tooth artefacts suggested earlier uses, but as most ancient string was made from perishable materials, the evidence has remained elusive. In 2013, the archaeologist Bruce Hardy of Kenyon College and colleagues uncovered several 0.7 millimetre-long plant fibres, twisted together near stone artefacts at Abri du Maras, in the vicinity of a site that was occupied 90,000 years ago. The latest find however seems more definitive, with individual fibres bundled together and twisted anticlockwise in an S-twist, before three separate bundles were twisted clockwise in a Z-twist to form a three-ply cordage.
Hardy and his team described these twisted fibres, probably drawn from the bark of a conifer tree, as a ‘foundational technology’, noting that the string may have been used to attach the stone flake to a handle, or separately as part of a bag or net. While the Ohalo II site is associated with modern humans, the Abri du Maras site was for a long time home to Neanderthals. The seasonal knowledge and technique required to extract such fibres from conifer trees, and the fibre technology and degree of mathematical organisation implied by the three-ply cordage – allied to other recent discoveries, including the suggestion that Neanderthals buried their dead – altogether indicate a high level of cognitive sophistication. Writing in the journal Scientific Reports, Hardy and his colleagues in France and Spain argue ‘the idea that Neanderthals were cognitively inferior to modern humans is becoming increasingly untenable’.
* * *
The iconic Formula One racing driver Stirling Moss died on Sunday at the age of 90 following a long illness. In a career which spanned fourteen years, Moss won 212 of the 529 races he entered, becoming one of the stars of the 1950s in the United Kingdom and synonymous with the sport of Formula One, even though the world championship tantalisingly evaded him. Achieving early success in the RAC Tourist Trophy, between 1951 and 1961 Moss won 16 of 66 Formula One races, and after buying a Maserati 250F and joining Mercedes the following year, from 1955 to 1958 he finished runner-up in the drivers’ standings on four consecutive occasions. The title was nearly his in 1958, but he missed out by one point after standing up for his rival Mike Hawthorn at the Portuguese Grand Prix, who stalled and faced disqualification before Moss intervened with the stewards.
When Moss won his first Grand Prix at Aintree in 1955, he became the first British driver to win on home soil. A couple of months earlier at the Mille Miglia in Italy, he put on one of the performances of his career, setting a new course record. In 1958 he won Grands Prix in Argentina, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Morocco, but a faulty car and his generosity towards Hawthorn in Boavista allowed him to be pipped at the finishing line. Moss was seriously injured at the Spa-Francorchamps in Belgium in 1960, and made a swift return to the track, however another crash during the Glover Trophy at Goodwood in 1962 left him in a coma for a month and hastened his early retirement. Moss subsequently worked in broadcasting and maintained various business interests. He was inducted into the International Motorsports Hall of Fame in 1990, and received a knighthood in 2000, before ill health prompted his retirement from public life at the beginning of 2018. News of his death brought tributes from across the world of Formula One, with 1996 champion Damon Hill saying that Moss ‘launched all the other careers of British racing drivers who went on to become world champions’.
