TT News Agency/Fredrik Sandberg/Reuters

Swedish Culture and Democracy Minister Amanda Lind presents a literary award, the Tucholsky Prize, to Swedish writer Gui Minhai in Stockholm, Nov. 15, 2019. China, which detained the Chinese-born writer, criticized the award.

How in the world are we to deal with China?

It’s not meant as a rhetorical question, nor a provocative tabloid headline. It is a literal description of a reassessment of relations with Beijing among a number of China’s trade and economic partners – a process building for several years, but accelerated and intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Where it will end is impossible to say. Anything like a complete break seems very unlikely. That would suppose a root-and-branch reversal of decades of globalization, and a rupture with the world’s second-largest economy.

Yet with COVID-19 dramatizing political differences and economic interdependencies with China, a far more skeptical redrawing of future rules of engagement seems on the table.

That’s especially true in the United States, China’s main rival and the world’s largest economy.

Even before the Trump administration, there was growing bipartisan resentment over Chinese trade practices: pressure on American firms in China, technology theft or industrial espionage, and the use of state subsidies and currency-rate adjustments to disadvantage overseas competitors. On the geopolitical stage, Washington was increasingly concerned about China’s military buildup in the South China Sea.

President Donald Trump’s tariff war with China, and human rights concerns over its policies in Hong Kong and the forced “reeducation” of hundreds of thousands of Uyghur Muslims, have since brought a new chill.

But COVID-19 – initially hidden, in China – has raised political antagonism to a level not seen in years. A recent Pew Research Center poll found nearly two-thirds of respondents had an unfavorable view toward China, the highest since it began asking the question in 2005. A recent Gallup Poll found only 33% had a positive opinion on China, lower than in the aftermath of its 1989 crackdown on protesters in Tiananmen Square.

With COVID-19 dominating U.S. politics ahead of November’s election, both President Trump and his presumptive Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, are making China an important issue. President Trump, under pressure over his handling of the virus’ spread, has turned his fire on China’s belated response to the initial outbreak. Mr. Biden’s campaign is highlighting President Trump’s effusive personal praise of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, implying that he has, in fact, been soft on China. 

There are also signs of growing discomfort with China outside the U.S. This is not just because of what a number of governments have called Beijing’s lack of transparency over the virus. It has been aggravated by China’s political strategy since COVID-19 was brought under control there.

There is particular resentment over China’s campaign to reframe the narrative, favorably comparing its response to that of democratic governments abroad and making high-profile gestures of assistance to hard-hit countries.

Even Western states with important trade ties to China – like Germany, France, Australia, and New Zealand – have supported calls, rejected by Beijing, for an independent inquiry into how and where the virus began, how it was dealt with, and how it spread.

In Sweden, which has had close ties with China, COVID-19 also seems to have accelerated a downturn in relations. It began several years ago with the detention of writer and publisher Gui Minhai, a Swedish national who had been critical of China’s government. He was sentenced in February to a 10-year prison sentence on an allegation of “illegally providing intelligence overseas.”

Earlier this month, amid criticism in China’s state news media of Sweden’s pandemic response, the Swedes closed the last of their so-called Confucius Institutes, part of a Chinese cultural and language program with facilities around the world.

The European Union, meanwhile, has been bristling over China’s much-trumpeted provision of assistance to several EU member states, especially those like Italy where resentment of the union’s initial delay in providing help has fed anti-EU sentiment.

A longer-term EU concern involves an economic truth COVID has brought into focus: China’s position as the world’s main source of urgently needed items like ventilators and protective equipment. Germany, with the EU’s largest economy, has begun looking at tightening safeguards against China’s taking controlling stakes in German companies during the economic downturn caused by the pandemic – an issue also recently highlighted by the EU’s commissioner for competition.

In Britain, now formally out of the EU, COVID also appears to be prompting a reassessment. This month, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said it could not be “business as usual” with Beijing after the pandemic, adding: “We will have to ask the hard questions about how it came about and how it couldn’t have been stopped earlier.” 

A number of members of Parliament in the ruling Conservative Party are also pressing for a rethink of the government’s decision to allow a role in the country’s 5G telecommunications network for the Chinese company Huawei – a decision made over objections from the Trump administration.

Even in Africa, where China’s mammoth investment, loan, and infrastructure project, Belt and Road, has widened its influence, COVID-19 has caused friction, with a rare public show of anger over reports of discrimination against African nationals in the campaign to control the virus in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou. 

For now, China seems confident that economic self-interest, whether among African states or more advanced Asian and European trade partners, will blunt long-term damage to its commercial or geopolitical position.

China’s ambassador to Australia this week, for instance, warned of possible economic retaliation over that nation’s support for an international review of the COVID-19 spread. That led Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison to emphasize that this “reasonable and sensible” proposal was not aimed at any specific country.

Yet as an increasingly assertive world power, China under Mr. Xi views its true competitor as the U.S. On that score, China seems determined to pair a pursuit of its national interests with a readiness to take advantage of areas where the U.S. seems malleable or vulnerable. Thus, with the pandemic spreading overseas, China shrugged off criticism in mid-April and arrested prominent pro-democracy figures in Hong Kong. Last week, with Washington withdrawing financial support from the World Health Organization, China announced an additional contribution of $30 million to the WHO.

And this week, a statement from Beijing maintained that Chinese aircraft and naval vessels had turned back an American Navy ship in the South China Sea.
The U.S. said no such confrontation occurred. But it has for some time been mounting naval patrols in the area to underscore its opposition, and that of neighboring states, to Chinese claims of sovereignty over the sea's reefs and islands. 

Amid the contradictory accounts, a Chinese military spokesman pointedly declared: "We urge the U.S. side to focus on the epidemic prevention and control on its homeland, contribute more to the international fight against the pandemic and immediately stop military actions that harm regional security, peace and stability."

Karen Norris/Staff

Concerns around the proliferation of disinformation and so-called fake news have gained new urgency with the World Health Organization declaring an “infodemic” around COVID-19. Here are some key questions to consider while reading news or social media posts.

What is misinformation vs. disinformation?

Misinformation is information that is misleading or wrong, but not intentionally. It includes everything from a factoid your friend reposted on Facebook to assertions made by officials or, yes, even journalists.

Disinformation is more deliberate and is distributed with the intent to confuse, disturb, or provoke. It also includes plausible information shared through devious means, such as a fake Twitter account; done en masse, this can create a skewed impression of popular opinion. A particularly deceptive form of disinformation are “deepfake” videos, with imperceptible alterations in the footage making it appear that someone said or did something that he or she never said or did.

Be particularly on guard against misinformation and disinformation during crises, which provide fertile ground for exploiting fear, anger, and other emotions. 

How can I tell which news sources are credible?

Here are a few points to consider:

Standards: What information does this outlet provide about who they are, their mission, and their fact-checking process or standards?

Show me the money: Who is paying for their work, and why? Is this news outlet’s business model dependent to some degree on generating “clicks”? If so, how might that have influenced this story?

Track record: Does this outlet publish corrections to errors in stories, indicating transparency and accountability? Have they been recognized for journalistic excellence?

None of these methods are fool-proof, but together they will provide a more informed understanding of the sources.

How can I fact-check a particular claim?

Fact-checking sites are cropping up all over the internet to help you do just this. Duke University’s Reporters’ Lab, run by the creator of PolitiFact, has compiled a list of such sites. Their database includes more than 237 fact-checkers in nearly 80 countries – a 26% increase in less than a year. Some of these specialize in exposing online hoaxes and disinformation.

You can go directly to one of these sites and search for the claim you’re researching, or type the claim into Google along with the name of a recommended site, to see if any of them have looked into it. If you don’t see the claim you’re researching on your preferred fact-checking site, look for a place to submit a claim for investigation, such as these pages on PolitiFact and Snopes.

If it’s a photo you’re trying to verify, a reverse image search on Google can help to pinpoint its origin. Sometimes photos are reposted out of context, or with false captions about the year, place, and event at which they were taken.

What about bias?

As the media has become more polarized, more bias has seeped into the news – but it has also become easier to spot. Here are some questions to ask yourself as you read an article:

Angle: What discrete aspect of this topic does this article attempt to address, and what does that say about the news organization’s priorities and/or worldview?

Scope: Does this do a reasonable job of addressing all relevant points given the space allotted? What is the timeframe, geographical reach, and diversity of people included in terms of age, gender, race, cultural background, professional expertise, political views, etc.?

Sources: Who are the sources, what is their expertise, and how does their background and work inform their approach to this topic? What is the relative emphasis placed on each source? Who is quoted most, first, and last?

Author: Who is the author? What did they study, and where? What do they normally write about? What do they post on Twitter? Do they have any affiliations (past or present) that might affect how they approach this topic?

Yourself: This might be the hardest of all! If you’re reading a map and want to follow the blue trail, but don’t realize you’re wearing red-tinted glasses, you might end up following the purple trail without realizing it. So it’s worth asking: What is coloring the way I see this news source, issue, and/or article?

Where can I find more resources on media literacy?

Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Project offers a host of resources on disinformation designed for civil society groups, but relevant to individuals as well.

Data & Society, an independent nonprofit, explains the phenomena of misinformation and disinformation in great depth in this report.

The European Journalism Centre just put out a new edition of its Verification Handbook that addresses disinformation and media manipulation.

UNESCO compiled a seven-module course for teaching about journalism, fake news, and disinformation. It’s geared toward educators, but is a good template for self-instruction as well. The Center for Media Literacy and the News Literacy Project are also great resources for teachers.

The Enoch Free Pratt Library in Maryland has put together a concise guide for spotting fake news.

There are also online courses, such as the Great Courses’ “Fighting Misinformation: Digital Media Literary,” offered in partnership with IREX.

Once you feel like you’re getting the hang of media literacy, you can test yourself with this fun online game, “Factitious,” developed by American University Game Lab to see if you can tell the difference between real and fake news.

Editor’s note: The original version of this story misidentified the creators of Verification Handbook and Factitious. They are the European Journalism Centre and American University Game Lab, respectively.

For the first North Americans, memories of pandemics are long.

Lela Oman was an infant in Nome, Alaska, during the 1918 flu epidemic. Nome, on the far northwestern tip of the continent, had just gotten a telephone line, so residents were able to get some advance warning.

Everyone knew what to do after that, Ms. Oman recalled in a 1996 interview for a University of Alaska, Fairbanks, oral history project. Dog teams “went to Deering and to Shishmaref telling everybody up there not to come down,” she said. “At Shishmaref, there were guards, sentries, with guns. If anybody started coming up this way, shoot to kill.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

Those responses from a century ago are playing out again now as Native communities across North America go on the offensive against COVID-19. Infectious diseases have played a tragic role in the history of indigenous people on the continent, from smallpox to the measles wiping out large swaths of the population through the centuries.

Now, with the arrival of the new coronavirus, Native communities face severe challenges. Those on reservations are disproportionately old, have high rates of chronic disease, are often living in remote locations, and rely on dramatically underresourced health systems. What’s more, for some Native tribes, older people are the last repositories of vanishing languages and cultures.

“Every [issue] that is true elsewhere in the United States is being magnified” in Indian Country, says Allison Barlow, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health.

As recently as the 1918 flu epidemic, the death rate for Native communities in the U.S. was four times higher than the nation as a whole. That shared past has pushed some Native communities to act faster than their neighboring state and national governments, reprising the same shutdowns and security patrols from a century ago. But it has also added something more – a remarkable perseverance.

“This has in many ways been a perfect storm” for Native communities, says Dr. Barlow. But in Native populations, “there’s incredible resilience and flexibility.”

The scope of the challenge

A lack of testing is a problem for the entire continent, but it’s an additional problem for Native communities and health systems that were already stressed. That has made it hard to get an accurate gauge of the coronavirus’s impact.

There are 2,711 confirmed cases in the U.S. Indian health system, and 89 deaths, as of Tuesday, according to an Indian Country Today database. And as of Wednesday, Indigenous Services Canada was aware of 129 confirmed positive tests on First Nations reserves. Those numbers may not capture the large indigenous population living off reservations.

David Jackson/Reuters

Residents, including Chief Wilfred King (far right), stand at a checkpoint restricting access to their community to slow the spread of the coronavirus in their remote First Nations community of Gull Bay, Ontario, April 27, 2020.

Yet reservations are the greatest cause for concern. While the majority of indigenous people live outside reservations, reservation demographics skew toward the most vulnerable populations, including older people and those with chronic illnesses. Most positive cases in Indian Country are concentrated in a few reservations.

Moreover, reservations struggle with a host of challenges. Health facilities are understaffed and underresourced. Homes are crowded, with several generations under one roof. Infrastructure is poor, and in some cases nonexistent. One in three people in the Navajo Nation don’t have running water, for example, according to the Navajo Water Project. In Canada, some reserves not only lack water but also have a “do not use” advisory in effect, meaning they can’t even use that water for hand-washing.

Many reservations are also remote, and that isolation can cut both ways. Ninety-six First Nations in Canada can be reached only by plane, while in Alaska, essential air services that carry food, freight, and mail have been reduced dramatically.

The Canadian government has sent hand sanitizer, masks, gloves, and isolation shields to indigenous communities and is deploying the Canadian Rangers to Inuit communities in northern Quebec. The U.S. Congress, meanwhile, has passed four national relief packages that include more than $8 billion for Indian Country.

But that comes after decades of underfunding from national governments that, through treaty agreements, have a trust responsibility to provide health care to tribes.

Take the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and Nebraska. There is one inpatient health care facility on the reservation, which has a population of almost 20,000 and is more than twice the size of Rhode Island. The clinic has 45 beds and 16 staff members, according to the Indian Health Service.

More supplies are being ordered, and the tribe has a contingency plan for two large-scale quarantine sites. The echoes of the past are hard to ignore.

“This situation is retraumatizing to many tribal communities,” says Dr. Barlow at Johns Hopkins.

“After they have rebounded from generations of genocide and ethnocide and really started to develop autonomous structures for governing and so forth,” she adds, they’re “being revisited by an old enemy. Here is this deadly virus, and they don’t have what they need to contain it.”

Defending the reservation

So tribes are taking matters into their own hands as best they can.

Since the evening of April 3, for instance, the Oglala Sioux have been enforcing a curfew on the Pine Ridge Reservation, restricting who can enter. (Neither South Dakota nor Nebraska has issued statewide lockdown orders.) The tribe has been educating members on hand-washing, including drawing up posters in various languages.

“Are we ready as a people?” asked Julian Bear Runner, president of the tribe, in an April 1 Facebook Live video. “We’re getting ready. I think we’re as ready as we can be right now.”

Courtesy of Cherokee Nation Communications Department

Cherokee Nation Chief Chuck Hoskin Jr. and Deputy Chief Bryan Warner hold up masks during the coronavirus pandemic in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. The tribe donated 1,200 masks to 17 fire departments.

The Little Pine Nation is taking similar steps. A Cree First Nation in northwest Saskatchewan, the Little Pine Nation has 2,000 members. The reserve sits in a valley with two main roads in and out. The Nation runs its own security force, and members say they began patrolling – allowing only residents and essential travel in and out – as soon as the province closed major services on March 25.

Little Pine has also closed schools and organized the distribution of food and supplies. Doug Cuthand, a local columnist and filmmaker, says he’s never seen anything like it.

“It seems to be a total community effort to try and stop this thing,” he says. “Because there is a fear that if it does get a foothold ... it could be very dangerous.”

Care for elders

One of the deepest concerns is for tribal elders. Elders are revered in indigenous communities as the carriers of knowledge, tradition, and language. And tribes around the continent have been taking extra care of them.

Since mid-March, the Cherokee Nation has delivered food to elders across the reservation – including perishable items from 10 casinos and hotels the tribe shut down. Tribal members have also been visiting elders in person to instruct them, in Cherokee, how to follow health and safety guidelines.

The Cherokee Nation is the largest tribe in America, but only 2,000 of its 380,000 members are fluent Cherokee speakers, according to Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Nation.

The “lion’s share” of them are age 65 or older, he says. “They’re the keepers of our stories and our history.”

“They’re holders of [our] ingenuity and knowledge,” adds Dalee Sambo Dorough, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. “The lessons that they share, that they’re eager to ensure that others heed – especially when it comes to hunting, fishing, harvesting, and our overall food security” – are crucial.

It was only in 1925, after all, that a serum was rushed by a dog team to Nome to prevent a diphtheria outbreak – a crisis that inspired the Iditarod race.

“For many of our leaders, the epidemics of the past [are] recent history,” Dr. Dorough adds.

In that way, this crisis feels familiar. John Borrows, a member of the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in southern Ontario, wrote last month about how infectious diseases left a mark on his mother’s childhood.

“That kind of telescopes then to what happened in the previous generation with the Spanish flu and what her father experienced, and then that telescopes back to the previous generation with smallpox and what her great-grandfather experienced,” says Mr. Borrows, an expert in indigenous law at the University of Victoria Law School in British Columbia. “So it cascades and it gets wrapped together for folks – that smallpox is Spanish flu is tuberculosis is COVID-19.”

Today, his mother’s reservation is organizing supplies and food distribution for the neediest people. She gets soup delivered to her front door every evening.

“Sometimes people view reserves as just a lost cause of problems,” he says. “But they’re also homelands, and people love them.”

Little Pine’s Mr. Cuthand says his community’s quick response comes from the knowledge of what past pandemics have done to First Nations communities. What inspires hope is “the fact that [First Nations] are so disciplined.”

If anything, Native communities can take pride in how they’ve responded to the COVID-19 pandemic so far, says Jessica Elm, a postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Center for American Indian Health.

“In some ways I feel we’re doing better than a lot of people in this current situation,” says Dr. Elm, a member of the Oneida Nation in northern Wisconsin. “Tribal communities are resilient to this. ... We’ve been through it before. We know our ancestors have got through it, so we know we can get through it.”

Correction: This article has been corrected to accurately state the number of Navajo without running water.

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall. Also, the story has been updated to include the correct number of Cherokee Nation members.

Whitney Curtis/Reuters

Dairy farmer Alfred Brandt milks his Holstein cows in Linn, Missouri, on April 28, 2020. Mr. Brandt, along with other U.S. dairy farmers, has seen a drop in milk prices and has been forced to dump excess milk as a result of the closure of schools, restaurants, and coffee shops.

On Easter Sunday, Brian Brown, a dairy farmer in Belleville, Wisconsin, did what he had not done before: He opened the valve on his big stainless steel bulk tank and watched 5,000 gallons of milk flow down the drain.

“It’s painful,” he says.

Days earlier he had gotten a call from the dairy processing company he sells his milk to, telling him to cut production by 20%. The call was not unexpected. Among farmers, rumors had been circulating. Others who got the same call began dumping some milk every day. The Browns – Brian, his wife, Yvonne, and their son, Cory – decided to do it once a week, on Sundays.

“I don’t know if it’s our faith,” Mr.  Brown says, adding that “we’re trying to stay positive.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

No one likes dumping milk, least of all farmers. It’s an affront to their bottom line, but also to their sense of purpose and vocation. “You’ve got all your expenses and hard work going into a product that you care for, a quality product for the consumer,” Mr. Brown says.

And yet as the coronavirus disrupts supply chains and undermines the demand for dairy products, especially cheese, dairy farmers from New England to California have been forced to make difficult choices. They have tried alternatives. They have sold their worst cows, usually to slaughterhouses. They have cut back on feed, hoping to reduce the amount of milk each cow makes. 

The Browns have done these things – they sold more than two dozen of their 500-cow herd – but it wasn’t nearly enough. So like many farmers, they have resorted to dumping, an experience Mr. Brown finds difficult to contemplate, let alone describe.

“We kind of feel numb and defeated,” he says. “You open the drain to your product and let it go down.”

A search for solutions

Major farm organizations have appealed to both federal and state governments for help rebalancing supply and demand and rescuing hard-hit dairy farmers. 

Here’s the problem: Even as demand from places like restaurants has dried up due to coronavirus restrictions, the lockdowns have left millions of consumers in financial stress or outright unemployed – less able to shop freely at grocery stores. That leaves farmers with few options.

Give milk to food banks? Make cheese for the future? These too are being tried, but warehouses are full and farmers face a financial crisis. Processors are grappling with both a precipitous drop in demand and the need to adapt quickly to new markets.

“That’s a huge shift,” says Bobbi Wilson, a government relations specialist with the Wisconsin Farmers Union. One consequence is that farmers are again seeing milk prices drop below the cost of producing it – when they already were struggling to recover from a five-year price slump.

Whitney Curtis/Reuters

Alfred Brandt speaks with his son, Sam Brandt, and father, Don Brandt, at the dairy farm that's been in their family since 1840 in Linn, Missouri, on April 28, 2020. Their farm and others across the nation have been affected by the industry's supply chain disruptions in response to the coronavirus disease.

“It’s put them in a difficult position,” says Ms. Wilson. “They need to have a long stretch of good prices to get their heads above water. The timing couldn’t have been worse.”

The National Milk Producers Federation and the International Dairy Foods Association have urged, among other things, that the federal government step in as a temporary buyer, to help more dairy products get to food banks or nutrition aid programs “to address the growing and widening food insecurity facing many Americans.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on April 17 announced a Coronavirus Food Assistance Program, which includes $2.9 billion in payments to dairy farmers and $3 billion in purchases for food banks (including of dairy products).

There have been private efforts, too, large and small, to get dairy products, especially milk, to those who need it. The Milwaukee-based Hunger Task Force pledged $1 million to buy milk for distribution at local food pantries. The Publix supermarket chain has launched a similar effort. One company, Sassy Cow Creamery, put a “kindness cooler” outside its store in Columbus, Wisconsin, stocked with free milk. 

But the larger market trends are grim, with industry experts citing declines in exports among the reasons that milk supply now exceeds demand by at least 10%.

Dumping milk is not unheard of in dairy country. In the first eight months of 2016, according to one estimate, a glut of milk in the U.S. prompted farmers and processors to dump 43 million gallons. In the 1960s, members of the National Farmers Union, a cooperative based in the upper Midwest, dumped milk to protest low prices. They failed to get the dairy program they were demanding, but they got a lot of attention.

The dumped milk doesn’t actually run into sewage pipes. Instead, on most farms it’s diverted into big lagoons used to store liquid manure. Eventually it will be pumped out with the manure and spread on the fields as fertilizer – to return again to the cows as corn and alfalfa.

Future of a farm at stake

What makes this moment especially painful for dairy farmers is that COVID-19 arrived just as things were just starting to look up for them. The five-year slump had forced many of them to borrow against their farms just to survive. Some gave up altogether. Prices began to rebound last autumn, and by the turn of the year, farmers were feeling hopeful. They were making money again. “We were kind of set to go,” Mr. Brown says.

Now prices are falling again, plunging farmers and their families into a new period of uncertainty. 

It’s hard to stay positive. For the Browns, the crisis has brought a still deeper sense of precariousness. In the past few years, Mr. Brown and his wife had been contemplating how they might transfer the farm to their son, who attended a dairy program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been working next to his parents on the farm he grew up on. COVID-19 has cast a shadow over these plans, at least for now. How long it lasts could determine whether they can stay in business.

“It’s not going the way we were thinking it was going to go,” Mr. Brown says. “At the same time, we know we’re not alone.”

Indeed, no farmer is an island. Dairy farmers are surrounded by a host of bankers, veterinarians, nutritionists, university extension specialists, trade organization representatives, and other experts eager to give advice. And like others, Brown has been consulting a lot of them recently, trying to figure out what to do. He’s taken to attending meetings by video conference – something else new to him – to learn more.  The other day he heard someone suggest that farmers could reduce production by lengthening the time a cow is left dry before she calves and is ready to be milked again. He thought he would try it.

From the beginning, too, farmers have been reaching out to one another for news, advice, and simple reassurance. Virgil Haag, a friend of Mr. Brown who sells to a different processing company, called when he learned about Mr. Brown’s predicament. “He was pretty down in the dumps,” Mr. Haag says. But then his turn came, too. He learned he would have to cut production by even more: 25%.

“There have been many nights since then I’ve had pretty much no sleep,” Mr. Haag says. “I’ll have some tears when I’m dumping – just to see that milk going down the drain that we worked so hard to produce.”

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

For Jordanian lawyer Abu Jihad, this marks the first Ramadan that he will not share the sunset fast-breaking meal of iftar with his 72-year-old mother, who lives five miles away on the other side of Amman.

As sunset approaches, Abu Jihad and his family video-chat and send his mother photos of their tables set for the nightly meals. And as soon as he breaks his fast, he is on the phone with his mother and brothers.

“If we cannot break bread physically, we can still reach out and connect verbally,” he says, noting that he now makes 10 to 20 phone calls between sunset and midnight each evening.

Shuttered mosques, separated families, and muted festivities – the Muslim world has never seen a Ramadan like this in over 1,300 years as followers mark a holy month defined by community and charity in self-isolation.

Editor’s note: As a public service, all our coronavirus coverage is free. No paywall.

But amid COVID-19 lockdowns from South Africa to Afghanistan, Chicago to Cairo, Muslims are adapting to not only observe but amplify the pillars of a month of fasting, prayer, and giving.

Iftar from afar

One of the largest changes for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims is to iftar.

Extended families, friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers normally gather for iftar for 30 nights, as Muslims revel in each other’s company in a spiritual social season. But not this year.

Post-iftar gatherings, when families and friends sit for tea, coffee, and snacks late into the night, have now evolved to evening phone calls and Facebook live-streams of living-room debates and impromptu dessert-making.

Yet sharing is still possible.         

Shortly before sunset, wearing gloves and a mask, Amira Nedal places a platter of spicy rice and chicken kabseh on the floor of the elevator of her Amman apartment building and sends it up to her fourth-floor neighbor.

Within minutes the elevator returns with a bowl of her neighbor’s famous lentil soup.

“We can still share iftar if we cannot share a room,” Ms. Nedal says.

“Ramadan was usually time for people to be closer to each other. This is a very different Ramadan,” says Mojtaba Mousavi, a Tehran journalist who methodically washes packaged sweets he orders via an app to remove any virus traces.

This year, rather than frequenting shops or souks, Iranians are ordering homemade holiday staples of zoolbiya – saffron-infused curls of sugar-syrup-encrusted dough – and bamiya dough balls via an app and brought by gloved deliverymen.

Quieted Cairo

Arab cities have lost their late-night bustle. There is a Ramadan-shaped hole in Cairo, where the month is normally celebrated with a nighttime festival of lights, lanterns, colorful tents, music, and food amid packed street markets.

This year, mosques and homes remain lit and colorful banners hang between Cairo streets. But without people, residents say it is not the same.

Akbar Tado/Antara Foto/Reuters

A man reads the Quran inside a mosque as the holy month of Ramadan is observed amid the coronavirus outbreak, in Mamuju, West Sulawesi province, Indonesia, April 24, 2020.

“We can see the lights, we can cook the food, but we cannot actually live or taste the Ramadan experience,” says Shareef Fadl, a Cairo business-owner, who watches Ramadan lights from his apartment balcony. “It is as if we are watching a play without any actors.”

Instead, some Cairo residents have decided to hold mini concerts, playing music and even religious songs from their balconies to their neighborhoods.

‘Pray at home’ orders

The images are startling: Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem’s Al Aqsa Mosque, the three holiest sites in Islam, are empty. In Iran, the famous Quranic reading gatherings in the holy cities of Qom and Mashhad, a staple of the holy month, have been canceled.

But one of the biggest losses for Muslim communities is the shuttering of local mosques and the banning of public tarawih prayers, the communal late-night prayers held each night of Ramadan.

Arab states, Israel, and Turkey have issued nighttime curfews starting before or just after sunset to prevent citizens from forming their own public late night tarawih prayers, gatherings that could reach the hundreds to thousands.

Clerics in Egypt and Saudi Arabia have issued fatwas declaring that prayers via Skype or other online platforms are invalid communal prayers. Instead, their solution is simple: pray at home with loved ones.

In Iran, one of the countries hardest hit by COVID-19, religious services, prayers, speeches, and Quranic recitations are placed on live feeds via social media. Even Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, held his annual Quranic recitation via video conference.

“It has become normal today to be invited to a live Instagram religious ceremony,” says Mr. Mousavi, the Iranian journalist.

Across the Muslim and Arab world, soulful Quranic recitations and tarawih prayers from mosques that would ring throughout the night air like a spiritual soundtrack are absent.

Charity amid uncertainty

The coronavirus has disrupted another basic pillar of Ramadan: charity.

With markets and mosques closed and social distancing costing many people their jobs, Afghans who normally scrape by through manual labor are in even more dire straits.

While charitable organizations step up efforts and Afghans abroad send money for relief efforts back home, Kabul residents roam their neighborhoods before sunset and pass out meals of meat and rice to the growing number of Afghans being pushed below the poverty level.

“The Afghan government, social media, religious people, and clerics emphasize charity and encourage people to give,” says Hidayatullah Noorzai, head of a Kabul-based NGO Afghanistan Social Growth, which focuses on literacy and women’s and children’s rights. “Everyone is trying to share their food with the poorest.”

For Nigerian conservationist Tijjani Ahmed, Ramadan was always synonymous with giving. As a broke college student three decades ago, he would rely on his neighbors’ generosity for iftar meals.

Now head of veterinary education at the Maiduguri zoo, he in normal years invites his neighbors and extended family to iftars and delivers boxes of meals to his mosque for the less fortunate in his neighborhood.

“In sharing what I have during Ramadan, I feel more like a human being,” Dr. Ahmed says.

Yet there will be no big gatherings of family and friends or food drops at the mosque this Ramadan as Mr. Ahmed enters his first full week living under a lockdown.

“We share what we have during Ramadan, because that’s what’s in the interest of our collective humanity,” he says. “But this year, what is in the interest of our collective humanity is also staying at home to stop this virus.” 

At the other end of the continent, South African Muslims began Ramadan as the country’s strict lockdown entered its fifth week, forgoing pastimes such as smoking shisha and eating dates in the tiny cafes that dot Johannesburg’s Fordsburg neighborhood or strolling door-to-door in Cape Town with plates of samosas and vetkoek – savory donuts – to share with their neighbors.

Mariam Adams, a Cape Town high school teacher, says Ramadan under lockdown has drawn into focus what is important about the holiday.

“Even under lockdown, charity is still possible,” Ms. Adams says.

Instead of baking treats for her neighbors, this year she says she will use her savings to donate more to local Muslim charities that are assisting South Africans who have lost their income.

“Of course, you miss the warmth of seeing people and spending time together,” she says. “The social part is quieter, but I think there will also be a lot more giving.”

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AP

German Minister for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth, Franziska Giffey attaches a sticker at the register of cashier Kerstin Strasen in a supermarket in Berlin, April 29. Minister Giffey started a nationwide campaign for supermarkets to act as place for people to report domestic violence.

Governments around the world are starting to realize that an order for individuals to “shelter in place” may require shelter other than one’s house. In many countries, domestic abuse has spiked under the stress of COVID-19 lockdowns and rising layoffs. The United Nations calls it a “shadow pandemic,” estimating that every three months of lockdown will add 15 million extra cases of gender-based violence worldwide.

Yet even as the U.N. and others raise an alarm over people trapped at home with abusive partners, they are rushing to provide support for abuse hotlines and temporary shelters. Instead of a call to “stay home, stay safe,” they are pushing an alternative to stay safe by defining home itself.

In France, Spain, Germany, and Colombia, campaigns have started to train managers of supermarkets and pharmacies to respond to women seeking help because of domestic abuse but who are afraid to do so at home during forced isolation.

The U.N. is funding new domestic-abuse shelters in countries seeing a surge in abuse, such as Tunisia, where cases have risen fivefold in recent weeks.

In some wealthier countries, legislation for dealing with the economic fallout from the coronavirus includes money to stem a rise in domestic violence. In the United States, the CARES Act passed by Congress provides close to $100 million in additional money for programs aimed at protecting women and children. Some lawmakers are now seeking additional funds.

Private groups and individuals are also stepping up. The Mary Kay Foundation and the De Beers Group are donating money for shelters as are music icon Rihanna and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey.

In early April, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a “horrifying global surge in domestic violence.” Since then the U.N. reports a “very positive response” from a number of countries that have flagged the issue. Putting a spotlight on this shadow pandemic has brought hope for many now in abusive situations, offering them a new meaning of home and safety.