Memorial Day weekend is typically the start of the busy summer travel season, but this year it represents something more: the end of one of the roughest chapters in U.S. airline history.
Passenger traffic has been climbing for much of this year and hit a pandemic peak on Friday, when more than 1.95 million passengers passed through security checkpoints in the nation’s airports, according to the Transportation Security Administration. That level was last reached in early March 2020, as the coronavirus was just beginning its devastating spread across the United States.
However, with the return of passengers and the prospect of an end to billion-dollar losses, airlines have also seen a surge in disruptive and sometimes violent behavior — and a frequent flash point is the T.S.A.’s mandate that passengers remain fully masked throughout their flights.
Since Jan. 1, the Federal Aviation Administration has received about 2,500 reports of unruly behavior by passengers, of which about 1,900 involved refusals to comply with the mask mandate. The agency said that in the past it did not track reports of unruly passengers because the numbers had been fairly consistent, but that it began receiving reports of a “significant increase” in disruptive behavior starting in late 2020.
“We have just never seen anything like this,” Sara Nelson, the international president of the Association of Flight Attendants, said during an online meeting with federal aviation officials on Wednesday. “We’ve never seen it so bad.”
Two major airlines, American and Southwest, have postponed plans to resume serving alcohol on flights because of such incidents. American Airlines specified that alcohol sales — except in first and business class — would remain suspended through Sept. 13, when the T.S.A. mask mandate is set to expire.
Both airlines announced the shift after a woman punched a flight attendant in the face on a Southwest Airlines flight from Sacramento to San Diego a week ago, an assault that was captured on a widely watched video.
The flight attendant lost two teeth, according to her union, and the passenger has been charged with battery causing serious bodily injury and barred for life from flying Southwest.
More than a month ago, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed its guidelines, saying that fully vaccinated people did not need to wear masks in most situations — except in airplanes, on mass transit, in health care centers and in congregate settings, like prisons.
On Sunday, on the CNN program “State of the Union,” the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, was asked what scientific evidence justified keeping the airplane mask mandate. “Part of it has to do with unique conditions of the physical space,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Part of it has to do with the workplace and folks who don’t have a choice about being there.”
“The bottom line is, we have a set of rules in place to keep people safe,” he added, “and I really hope that travelers will respect flight attendants, bus operators, workers, anybody who is simply doing their job to keep people safe.”
The Copa América, South America’s largest soccer tournament, will be played in Brazil instead of Argentina, which is suffering its worst outbreak of the pandemic, organizers said on Monday.
The start and end dates of the tournament have been confirmed, Conmebol, the South American soccer federation, said on its Twitter account. The dates for the individual games and the specific stadiums to be used will be announced later on Monday, the statement said
The Argentine government and public have been torn over the wisdom of hosting the monthlong tournament, in a discussion that mirrors the one taking place in Japan over holding the Tokyo Olympics this summer. On Friday, officials in Japan, which is recording more than 4,000 cases a day amid a fourth wave of infections, extended a state of emergency in Tokyo and eight other prefectures until at least June 20, just over a month before the opening ceremony.
Last week, President Alberto Fernández of Argentina announced stringent lockdown measures until the end of the month, calling this his country’s “worst moment in the pandemic.” Argentina now ranks third in the world, after neighboring Paraguay and Uruguay, in the number of deaths per capita over the past week, according to a New York Times database. The country of 45 million is reporting an average of more than 30,000 new cases a day, compared with 20,000 in the United States.
Mr. Fernández also met last week with Alejandro Domínguez, the head of Conmebol, and presented a “strict protocol” for holding the tournament if the soccer federation wanted it to go ahead in Argentina as planned.
The 2020 edition of the Copa América was postponed by a year last spring after the start of the pandemic. In soccer-crazed Argentina, which last hosted the event in 2011, it was seen as a joyous occasion to host some of the sport’s biggest stars, including the country’s own Lionel Messi. But calls to move the tournament, which ordinarily takes place every four years, to somewhere other than Argentina have mounted in recent weeks, with opponents on Twitter using the hashtag #NoALaCopaAmericaEnArgentina, and #NoToTheCopaAmericaInArgentina.
Earlier this month, Conmebol removed Colombia as a co-host of the tournament after rejecting the country’s request to postpone it amid continuing civil unrest and antigovernment protests in which dozens of people have died.
That left Conmebol to consider holding the entire championship in Argentina, amid rumors that there could be a last-minute agreement to include another host, like Chile, a vaccination success story in South America that has fully inoculated more than 40 percent of its population. Vaccinations in many other parts of the region have been lagging, prompting some wealthy and middle-class Latin Americans to seek them in the United States instead.
Daniel Politi contributed reporting.
Jennifer Jett and
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The United States looks to continue what has been a steady decline in cases, deaths and hospitalizations since mid-April. As of Sunday, its seven-day averages of cases and deaths are the lowest since June 2020, and hospitalizations are at the lowest level since early in the pandemic.
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India, after a terrifying surge in April and early May, has seen cases plummeting for three weeks. But the death toll, which often lags a few weeks behind changes in case numbers, is still high and began dropping modestly only last week.
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Vietnam said last week it had discovered a new, more contagious variant that was a mix of those first detected in India and Britain. It remains unclear how well the variant is fully understood.
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Taiwan, which had been nearly Covid-free throughout the pandemic, is now recording several hundred cases a day.
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Britain is closely watching an increase in cases because though numbers remain relatively low, the variant first found in India accounts for most of the spread. A surge now could threaten plans to ease the last of its lockdown restrictions on June 21.
India’s coronavirus crisis is likely to hobble the country’s economy for months to come, forecasters said, with most states still locked down to contain a wave of new infections and vaccine supply struggling to meet the needs of a vast inoculation campaign.
On Monday, as India prepared to release a new set of official numbers, economists forecast that the country’s gross domestic product would shrink by at least 7.4 percent over the financial year that began in April. They expected India’s growth numbers for the three months ending in March to come in at 0.6 percent, aided in part by welfare programs and the fact that infections were still far lower at the time than the highs of April and May, at the height of its devastating second wave.
The experts point to two main reasons for their estimates: India’s prolonged lockdowns and its vaccination rate, which has fallen from about 4 million doses a day last month to just over a million now as its large vaccine industry, which had been expected to supply much of the world, has struggled to keep up supply.
India recorded 152,734 new infections and 3,128 deaths on Monday, the country’s health ministry reported.
Though the lockdowns have helped India slow the surge of infections, economists say international experience suggests restrictions might need to remain in place at least until about 30 percent of the country’s 1.4 billion people have received one vaccine shot.
“We estimate that India will reach the vaccine threshold by mid to late August, and accordingly expect restrictions will be extended into the third quarter,” Priyanka Kishore, the head of India and Southeast Asia at Oxford Economics, said last week. “Consequently, we have lowered our 2021 growth forecast.”
India Ratings & Research, a credit ratings agency, forecast that the country’s G.D.P. growth rate would come down to minus 7.5 percent in the current financial year.
Millions of people in India are already in danger of sliding out of the middle class and into poverty. The country’s economy was fraying well before the pandemic because of deep structural problems and the sometimes impetuous policy decisions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Malaysia will begin a two-week national lockdown on Tuesday that will shut most of the economy and limit the movement of people, in an effort to contain the country’s worst coronavirus outbreak since the start of the pandemic.
Essential services like supermarkets and hospitals will be allowed to continue operating, but offices, most retailer stores and malls, and most factories will be closed, Defense Minister Ismail Sabri Yaakob said in a televised address. The number of people at work in the country will fall to 1.5 million from 15 million, the minister said.
The country’s schools were closed earlier in May.
Malaysia is now reporting about 24 new coronavirus cases a day for every 100,000 people, a higher rate than any other country in Asia outside the Middle East, according to a New York Times database.
New case reports have surged in recent weeks and reached more than 9,000 on Saturday; Monday’s count was about 6,800. Over the course of the pandemic, Malaysia has reported more than 570,000 cases and nearly 2,800 deaths — more than three-quarters of them have come this year.
Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin announced the “total lockdown” on Friday evening, saying he was worried that the rapid increase in infections would overwhelm health care facilities in the nation of nearly 33 million.
“With the latest rise in daily cases showing a drastically upward trend, hospital capacity for Covid-19 patients across the country is getting more limited,” he wrote on Facebook.
Less than a week earlier, he had rejected the idea of a lockdown on economic grounds. “We have learned over the last year, we cannot close the economy,” he said on May 23. “We have to balance life and livelihoods.”
As he reversed course, Mr. Muhyiddin said he was motivated in part by the presence of “more aggressive variants with higher and faster infectivity.”
Health Minister Adham Baa told reporters on Monday that three dangerous variants that were first identified in India, Britain and South Africa were present in Malaysia. B. 1.351, the variant seen first in South Africa, appeared to be spreading the most rapidly of the three, he said.
Under the lockdown, which is scheduled to end June 14, no more than two people will be allowed to leave a household, and only for specified activities like buying food and medicine, or going to work for those with jobs deemed essential. No one will be allowed to travel farther than six miles from home except to receive medical services.
Public transportation will operate at half capacity. Stores that are allowed to operate will be open for limited hours.
Individual exercise and jogging will be allowed outdoors, but social distancing of at least six feet will be required.
In an attempt to limit economic harm from the lockdown, some factories will be allowed to operate at 60 percent of capacity, including those producing food, medical components, electronics and textiles for use in protective equipment.
At Chulalongkorn University in Thailand, Labradors are being trained to sniff out Covid-19 in humans, as part of a global corps of dogs to be used to detect the virus. Preliminary studies, conducted in several countries, suggest that their detection rate may surpass that of the rapid antigen testing often used in airports and other public places.
The hope is that dogs can be deployed in crowded public spaces, like stadiums or transportation hubs, to identify people carrying the virus. Their skills are being developed in Thailand, France, Britain, Chile, Australia, Belgium and Germany, among other countries. They have patrolled airports in Finland, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.
Sniffer dogs work faster and far more cheaply than polymerase chain reaction, or P.C.R., testing, their proponents say. An intake of air through their sensitive snouts is enough to identify within a second the volatile organic compounds that are produced when a person with Covid-19 sheds damaged cells.
Some methods of detection, like temperature screening, can’t identify infected people who have no symptoms. But dogs can, because the infected lungs and trachea produce a trademark scent. And dogs need fewer molecules to nose out Covid than are required for P.C.R. testing.
The Thai Labradors are part of a research project run jointly by Chulalongkorn University and Chevron. The oil company had previously used dogs to test its offshore employees for illegal drug use. A dog’s ability to sniff out Covid-19 is, in theory, no different from its prowess in detecting narcotics, explosives or a Scooby snack hidden in a pocket.
Last March, the Las Vegas Strip went dark in its first total shutdown since the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968. In the ensuing weeks, Las Vegas became the layoff epicenter of the United States.
With casinos closed, visitor volume dropped to a little over 100,000 in April 2020 from 3.5 million in January 2020. The decrease sent the state’s small businesses — including the cannabis sector — into a tailspin.
With none of the usual customers in town, some owners of cannabis businesses saw marijuana through a new lens: How could it help with pandemic-related stress and anxiety?
Apparently, quite a bit. Despite inconsistent public health orders from state and local governments about whether cannabis companies would be considered “essential,” the industry had a breakout moment during the pandemic. Legal cannabis sales in the United States passed $17.5 billion in 2020, a 46 percent increase over 2019. For many Americans, stocking up on marijuana was as essential as stocking up on toilet paper. And the industry found a way to get it to them.
In Las Vegas, that meant engaging residents. Five days after Gov. Steve Sisolak issued his first emergency declaration, the Nevada Health Response Covid-19 Risk Mitigation Initiative announced that licensed cannabis stores and medical dispensaries could remain open, but encouraged delivery business and social distancing.
New Delhi, India’s capital, began easing pandemic lockdown restrictions on Monday, allowing construction and manufacturing activities to resume as the city continued to record a steep decline in new Covid-19 cases and deaths.
Life on the streets of Delhi wasn’t expected to return immediately, with schools and most businesses still closed, but the limited reopening signaled officials’ optimism that the city of 20 million was past the worst of a second wave marked by desperation and death.
From April 20, when the number of new reported cases peaked at 28,395, the official figure plummeted to 946 on Sunday. In late April, nearly one in three tests came back positive. Now, the positivity rate is 1.5 percent.
Still, factory owners and construction foremen said it might take some time for activity to return to normal levels because of a shortage of workers. More than 800,000 migrant workers left the city in the first month of its six-week lockdown, according to a Delhi transportation department report.
Ram Niwas Gupta, 72, the founder of Ramacivil India Construction and the president of the Delhi-based Builders Association of India, said that 75 percent of his work force for 10 projects across northern India had disappeared to their rural family homes.
“Immediately we will not be able to start work, but slowly in six to 10 days we will be able to mobilize labor and material and start the work,” Mr. Gupta said.
In a meeting with the city’s disaster management authority on Friday, Delhi’s chief minister, Arvind Kejriwal, said the lockdown would be eased according to economic need.
“Our priority will be the weakest economic sections, so we will start with laborers, particularly migrant laborers,” many of whom work in construction and manufacturing, Mr. Kejriwal said.
“But we have to remember that the fight against Covid-19 is still not over. We have to make sure that things do not go bad again,” he added.
The pandemic is far from over in India, where cases are rising in remote rural areas that have limited to no health infrastructure.
The state of Haryana, which borders Delhi and is home to the industrial hub of Gurugram, extended its tight lockdown by at least another week. And in southern Indian states where the daily case numbers remain high, official orders allowing manufacturing to resume have been met by resistance from workers.
Gun sales have been climbing for decades, but Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.
In March last year, federal background checks, a rough proxy for purchases, topped one million in a week for the first time since the government began tracking them in 1998. And the buying continued, through the protests in the summer and the election in the fall, until a week this spring broke the record with 1.2 million background checks.
“There was a surge in purchasing unlike anything we’ve ever seen,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, a gun researcher at the University of California, Davis. “Usually it slows down. But this just kept going.”
Not only were people who already had guns buying more, but people who had never owned one were buying them too. New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic.
“Americans are in an arms race with themselves,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles, where the surge in gun violence has been particularly sharp, on the City Council. “There was just as much a run on guns as on toilet paper in the beginning of the pandemic.”
There is no single reason for the surge, but social scientists point to many potential drivers.
“There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence. “There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”
Thomas Harris, a former law enforcement officer who works at the gun counter at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Roanoke, Va., said that around March last year, the customers he would speak with began to include more white-collar workers, such as people from insurance firms and software companies. He said many of the buyers were not conservative and most had never handled a gun.
“They were saying: ‘We’re going to be locking down. We’re constrained to our homes. We want to keep safe.’”
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