Coronavirus Live Updates: Crisis Builds From Coast to Coast in U.S. as Death Toll Nears China’s

Models predicting expected spread of the virus in the U.S. paint a grim picture.

The American public on Tuesday is expected to get its first look at the statistical models guiding the policy decisions that have led governors and mayors across the country to order more than 250 million people to stay at home.

It is expected to be unsettling.

Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House coordinator for the virus response team, tried to brace both President Trump and the country for some tough weeks ahead.

Even if all of the social distancing guidelines are followed “perfectly,” Dr. Birx said, the death toll in the nation could reach 100,000 to 200,000.

The United States already has the highest number of reported infections in the world, with 160,000, and has yet to fully ramp up testing, meaning that many cases are going undetected.

As the death toll ticked past 3,000 on Tuesday, the nation was set to overtake that of China, where 3,305 people have reportedly succumbed to the virus, although the Chinese figures are coming under increasing scrutiny.

Nations across Europe also continue to see a steady rise in new infections and deaths. France has surged past 3,000 fatalities. And the virus has ravaged Italy and Spain — where the countries’ combined death toll approached 20,000, roughly half the global total — demonstrating the high price nations can pay if the virus outstrips the capacity of a nation’s health care system.

In the United States, the outbreak in New York remains the largest in the nation, with more than 1,200 deaths, and is weeks away from its apex, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo warned. More than 250 coronavirus patients died between Sunday and Monday, and the governor said that number could ultimately reach 800 a day.

“I want to prepare for that apex, because this virus has been ahead of us every step of the way,” he told reporters.

In Michigan, state officials reported 50 additional deaths on Monday, even as they cautioned that the outbreak was still in the early stages.

Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana said his state was a few weeks behind New York, as he reported a surge in deaths to 185 from 34 in just 24 hours.

Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia became the latest places to order residents to stay at home.

The models used by the White House team are standard epidemiological tools but are not precise, as the results can vary widely depending on how closely people follow the guidelines. In other words, the assumptions built into the models can shape the results.

Across Asia, countries that thought they had the coronavirus pandemic under control are now worried that people from outside their borders will import cases and cause a new wave of outbreaks.

In a flurry of recent moves, China, Hong Kong and Singapore barred foreigners from entering. Japan has barred visitors from most of Europe and is considering further bans of travelers from countries including the United States. South Korea is requiring travelers from all other countries to quarantine for 14 days upon arrival. Taiwan has also barred foreigners.

In China, international flights to the country have been cut back so severely that students abroad wonder when they will be able to get home. In Singapore, people who have returned from overseas receive daily text messages from public health authorities, signaling them to check in and prove that they are sticking to quarantines.

“It seems like leaders will sometimes lurch from complacency to an almost panicked lockdown approach,” said Karen Eggleston, the director of the Asia health policy program at the Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center at Stanford University.

“It’s not entirely clear which one in the end is going to lead to the greater costs, but at this point in the pandemic, when we have exponential growth,” closing borders, she said, “can be the prudent approach.”

President Trump on Monday expressed optimism about the federal government’s ability to provide adequate testing for the coronavirus and suggested that it would soon be producing so many ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment that it would be able to send stocks of supplies to other countries.

America’s governors painted a different picture on the ground.

In a conference call with governors on Monday, Mr. Trump said that he “hasn’t heard about testing in weeks,” suggesting that a chronic lack of kits to test people for the coronavirus is no longer a problem. Yet one governor said his state was “one day away” from not being able to test anyone at all.

Hours later, Mr. Trump’s comments at a news conference suggested that he thought the scarcity of ventilators and other supplies, which has become an emergency in some states, will soon end.

But in New York, where deaths from the coronavirus jumped above 1,200 and a hospital ship arrived to ease the pressure on overwhelmed hospitals, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the worst of the outbreak was yet to come.

“You have to prepare before the storm hits, and in this case the storm is when you hit that high point, when you hit that apex,” the governor said. “How do you know when you’re going to get there? You don’t.”

In Virginia, Maryland and Arizona, governors from both parties issued new stay-home orders.

In Washington, the Food and Drug Administration granted emergency approval permitting the use of two malaria drugs to treat coronavirus patients, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, said it was only a matter of time before Congress would act on a fourth relief measure to try to contain the economic fallout of the pandemic.

“This isn’t about how fast we can do it,” she said. “It’s how fast we must do it.”

In the nation’s jails, prisoners are worried about their health as they wipe down communal phones with prized alcohol wipes and washed down cell bars and table tops with diluted shampoo.

Health care workers have been hailed as heroes, the front-line soldiers taking grave risks to save lives in the fight against the coronavirus. But Eugenia Cuesta, an emergency room nurse at a Madrid hospital, thought there was a more apt metaphor.

“They’re turning us into health care kamikazes,” Ms. Cuesta, said in a video interview.

Like the pilots sent to their deaths during World War II, she said, health care workers were being asked to sacrifice their health without proper protection.

Hospital beds do not offer sufficient space for workers to safely care for patients. Weeks into the crisis, there is still a shortage of protective equipment for doctors and nurses. And health professionals in Madrid have denounced the “chaos” and “disaster” inside an exhibition center converted into a field hospital.

Over 13,000 health care workers have been infected in Spain, the highest reported rate in the world. On Monday, officials said that Fernando Simon, a calming figure who has led the country’s response to the epidemic, had also tested positive for the virus.

Spain reported over 9,000 new cases on Tuesday and set a new daily record overnight of 849 deaths, totaling over 8,000 casualties.

In Madrid, the authorities have presented the field hospital at the exhibition center as the “largest hospital in Spain.” But health care associations are suing the authorities over the level of basic protection gear provided to workers.

“We cannot expose our professionals and let them enter without protection” into the exhibition center, said Alicia Martín, a union representative for primary care professionals.

The central government is considering moving patients out of Madrid and other saturated areas to other regions that have been less affected by the coronavirus.

Exactly 32 years after a group of young activists gathered to form Fidesz — which is now Hungary’s governing party — its leader, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, has been granted the authority to rule the country unchallenged indefinitely.

The party, which controls Parliament, on Monday adopted a sweeping act extending a state of emergency in response to the coronavirus. The measure allows Mr. Orban to suspend elections and existing legislation and to rule by decree until he declares the emergency over.

The situation is an example of how the crisis has accelerated democratic backsliding in the West, as countries across the world face increasing political and economic uncertainty.

Since Mr. Orban was propelled back into power in 2010, his party has adopted a new Constitution, altered election laws and stacked the justice system with loyalists. His allies also control the state news media and most of the country’s private media outlets.

“The new state we are building,” Mr. Orban said in 2014, “is an illiberal state.”

Some monitoring groups say that Hungary has an authoritarian regime, and others rank the country as one of the most corrupt in Europe. Now, the reshaping of its democratic framework has cemented Mr. Orban’s control over the small Eastern European nation.

How could North Korea claim to not have a single coronavirus case while countries ​around the world stagger under the exploding epidemic?

​North Korea has taken some of the most drastic actions against the virus and did so sooner than most other nations. It sealed its borders in late January, shutting off business with neighboring China, which accounts for nine-tenths of its external trade. It clamped down on the smugglers who keep its thriving unofficial markets functioning, and quarantined all diplomats in Pyongyang for a month.

But decades of isolation and international sanctions have ravaged​ North Korea’s public health system, raising fears that ​it lacks the medical supplies to fight an outbreak, which many fear has already occurred.

The discrepancy between North Korea’s official tally and the reality on the ground echoes trends in other countries that either lack the capacity to properly test or have been accused of covering up outbreaks.

For weeks, Indonesia reported zero cases, even as its neighbors were experiencing widespread epidemics. Yet in a sign that the coronavirus is spreading in Indonesia faster than the government acknowledges, Jakarta’s governor says deaths in the capital may be nearly four times the official count.

The governor, Anies Baswedan, said that many of the dead were never tested for the virus and that others had died before their results came in.

According to city data, 283 suspected victims were buried in March using the Covid-19 protocol for disposing of bodies, he said. The official death toll for Jakarta in the same period was 76.

Tips for getting through the coronavirus marathon

Experts keep saying to plan for this to last for a long time. And with many communities a week or more into being homebound, the novelty is wearing off. Here are some tips to help fight burnout, manage antsy teenagers, and even freshen up a home to make it better suit current needs.

As the videoconferencing platform’s popularity has surged, Zoom has scrambled to address a series of data privacy and security problems.

The app is under scrutiny by the office of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.

On Monday, the office sent Zoom a letter asking what, if any, new security measures the company had put in place to handle increased traffic on its network and to detect hackers, according to a copy reviewed by The New York Times.

While the letter referred to Zoom as “an essential and valuable communications platform,” it outlined several concerns, noting that the company had been slow to address security flaws such as vulnerabilities “that could enable malicious third parties to, among other things, gain surreptitious access to consumer webcams.”

Over the last few weeks, internet trolls have exploited a Zoom screen-sharing feature to hijack meetings and do things like interrupt educational sessions or post white supremacist messages to a webinar on anti-Semitism — a phenomenon called “Zoombombing.”

Austria will require all residents to wear face masks when shopping for groceries starting this week, as a growing number of experts have questioned the prevailing guidance that healthy people don’t need to wear masks.

The World Health Organization says that masks should be worn only by people who are sick and those who are caring for them, and that there is little data showing that they protect the general public. But some experts and government officials say masks could offer some protection.

The debate over protective masks for healthy people has created tensions as protective gear, including N-95 masks, has been in woefully short supply for front-line medical workers, leading officials around the world to try to discourage hoarding and panic-buying.

At the same time, some places that adopted nearly universal mask-wearing and intensive social distancing early on were able to contain their outbreaks. George Gao, the director-general of the Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has called not wearing face masks “the big mistake in the U.S. and Europe.”

That hangar had become an events space called the Duggal Greenhouse, part of Duggal Visual Solutions, a graphic display and printing company that typically makes printed glossy graphics for such brands as Estée Lauder and Coach.

But with the greenhouse’s scheduled events canceled because of the coronavirus outbreak, the space has been repurposed as a factory for making disposable face shields. The operation includes more than 300 workers, many recently laid off from restaurant jobs or nonessential businesses that the state ordered to temporarily close.

Kings County Distillery, a small-batch whiskey and bourbon company, has begun distilling alcohol for hand sanitizer in partnership with EcoLogic Solutions, which makes green cleaning products.

Reporting and research were contributed by Selam Gebrekidan, Marc Santora, Megan Specia, Benjamin Novak, Elian Peltier, Donald G. McNeil Jr., Anna Schaverien, Maria Abi-Habib, Sameer Yasir, Raymond Zhong, Knvul Sheikh, Melissa Eddy, Choe Sang-Hun and Richard C. Paddock.