Today's WorldView: Here’s what’s happening in the world besides the coronavirus pandemic

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Presented by DXC

By Ishaan Tharoor
with Ruby Mellen

Here's what's happening in the world besides the coronavirus pandemic

A Syrian refugee puts a face mask on a boy as a precaution against the novel coronavirus in al-Wazzani, Lebanon, on Saturday. (Ali Hashisho/Reuters)

The center of gravity of the coronavirus epidemic has shifted west. Numbers of infected people are skyrocketing on both sides of the Atlantic, with public health officials widely predicting the worst is yet to come in Europe and North America. On Sunday, Italy saw its single biggest 24-hour spike in coronavirus-related deaths. Germany closed its borders with a number of European neighbors; France and Spain imposed major lockdowns on their cities and towns.

Amid the uncertainty and dread of what is for many an unprecedented moment, you can be forgiven for not paying attention to other developments in the world. Here's a primer to get you up to speed.

The United States and Iran are clashing again in Iraq. Hostilities continue to flare up months after the escalation that led to the U.S. assassination of Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian commander. On Wednesday, a barrage of rocket fire carried out by a pro-Iran Shiite militia hit a military base in Iraq, killing two Americans and a British soldier stationed there. On Friday, the United States responded with airstrikes targeting positions linked to the militia, Kataib Hezbollah. At least five members of Iraqi security forces were killed in the strikes, prompting outrage from authorities in Baghdad angered once more by the brazen "violation of national sovereignty."

On Saturday, the Iraqi government issued a statement warning against such unilateral American action against Iranian-linked militias. "In doing so, it does not limit these actions, but rather nurtures them, weakens the Iraqi state's ability to provide its own security, and expects more losses for Iraqis," the statement read. It reiterated an Iraqi parliamentary demand for the departure of U.S. troops in the country. "This necessitates the speedy implementation of the parliament's decision on the issue of the coalition's withdrawal."

The U.S. airstrikes were hardly a deterrent; U.S. and coalition forces stationed in Camp Taji, a base north of Baghdad, faced renewed rocket attacks over the weekend, with at least five injuries reported.

France held the first round of voting in local elections Sunday. Turnout was somewhat suppressed by fears over the coronavirus, and less than 50 percent of the electorate went to the polls to vote for the country's mayors. Initial results showed a strong performance for the center-left and Green parties. There's the prospect, though, that the second round of voting may be canceled as the country's lockdown intensifies. That could invalidate this weekend's results.

In Israel, Benny Gantz was given a mandate to form a government. It's the latest twist in the country's long-running political drama, which has seen three elections in less than a year fail to yield a stable coalition government. When the vote took place two weeks ago, it appeared Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would stake a claim to the next government. But even with the support of a bloc of right-wing and religious parties, Netanyahu was short of the 61-seat majority needed to return to power.

"Gantz, whose party won 33 seats, appeared to have forged alliances in recent days with two unlikely partners: The Joint List of Arab-majority parties, which gained 15 seats, and the right-wing nationalistic secular party headed by Avigdor Liberman, which won seven," reported The Post's Ruth Eglash. "The factions have wildly incompatible ideologies, but they share the goal of ousting Netanyahu and ushering in new leadership in Israel."

That may not be enough, and Gantz still has a "mammoth" task ahead of him, Eglash noted.

A fragile cease-fire forged between Russia and Turkey has mostly held over Syria's war-torn Idlib province. But it's uncertain how long the detente may last, with the forces of President Bashar al-Assad keen to press their advantage in one of the last remaining rebel enclaves in the country.

"The situation in Idlib is dire," Syrian political activist Oula Alrifai wrote over the weekend. "A million civilians were forced to flee their homes in the last three months. Overcrowded camps have forced many to live in the open, exposed to winter weather so harsh that some children have frozen to death. Others are starving."

In a meeting with reporters in Washington last week, Serdar Kilic, the Turkish ambassador to the United States, warned that his government had few means to check for the spread of the coronavirus among Syrian refugees should a new exodus flood across Turkey's borders.

In Bolivia, plans are still in place to stage a new election in May following the dramatic departure of leftist President Evo Morales last year. But as my colleagues recently reported, the interim regime led by the right-wing Jeanine Áñez has hardly ushered in a unifying democratic restoration.

"Since being sworn in, the fiercely anti-socialist Áñez has presided over the detention of hundreds of opponents, the muzzling of journalists and a 'national pacification' campaign that has left at least 31 people dead, according to the national ombudsman and human rights groups. Washington has yet to comment," my colleagues wrote.

And there's another plague in our midst. Last week, the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization warned that swarms of hundreds of billions of locusts were starting to form in the Horn of Africa. It deepens the menace that my colleagues reported about last month. The governments in Ethiopia and Kenya are struggling to assemble enough aircraft that can target the swarms with pesticides, while aid agencies warn of countless acres of crops ravaged as the locusts move through the region.

Talking Points

• It was the worst massacre in the modern history of Latin America: As many as a thousand Salvadoran civilians, many of them younger than 6, killed by a right-wing military dictatorship backed by the United States. Thirty-nine years later, the suspected killers are on trial, and the judge is seeking a crucial piece of evidence: U.S. government records related to the 1981 El Mozote massacre. The prosecution has been lauded by both the U.S. government and the relatives of victims. Now the Trump administration will have to decide what to hand over. So far, it has offered nothing.

• As the Amazon rainforest burned last autumn, and deforestation rates surged to peaks unseen in a decade, a Brazilian volunteer fire brigade was a rare shard of hope, battling the blazes into submission beside the authorities. The city council applauded them. The state governor thanked them. They became heroes. But now, The Post reports, authorities have arrested the brigade's leader on a stunning charge: arson.

• My colleague Emily Rauhala explains that though temperature checks are an important tool that can be effective in many contexts, experts say that when it comes to curbing the global spread of the novel coronavirus, it has serious limitations — and comes with costs.

Viewpoints

Landing at Dulles Airport, I encountered a case study in how to spread a pandemic

By Cheryl Benard | The Washington Post ● Read more »

The companies putting profits ahead of public health

By The New York Times ● Read more »

The coronavirus called America's bluff

By Anne Applebaum | The Atlantic ● Read more »

Care for all

Medical staff prepare to receive patients for coronavirus screening at a temporary assessment center at a hockey arena in Ottawa. (Patrick Doyle/Reuters)

Nations are running a high-stakes experiment that may show how single-payer, state-run health-care systems fare under the strain of a pandemic. Can systems comparable to Medicare-for-all in Britain, Canada, Denmark, South Korea and other countries do any better than the United States in slowing the coronavirus and treating those who become seriously ill from the novel pathogen?

The pandemic is only in its initial stages. Peak infections are weeks away in most countries, including the United States, according to the most recent forecasts. Vaccines and targeted antiviral medicines are not yet available. It is too soon to see definite outcomes among competing health-care systems. But even in this early phase, public health experts say the single-payer, state-run systems are proving themselves relatively robust. Unlike the United States, where a top health official told Congress the rollout of testing was "failing" and where Congress is only now moving through a bill that includes free testing, the single-payer countries have been especially nimble at making free, or low-cost, virus screening widely available for patients with coughs and fevers.

Denmark is offering some patients "drive-through" testing. South Korea is, too, and almost a quarter of a million people have been tested there. In Australia's single-payer system, Hollywood couple Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson quickly learned they tested positive for the coronavirus.

Yet there are concerns about how well these health-care systems will cope if and when their caseloads surge and their hospitals, especially their intensive care units, become overwhelmed. Already in South Korea, doctors have had to ration care, based on the availability of beds. And even more challenging: Countries such as Britain and Canada have far fewer ventilators, per capita, than the United States. — William Booth, Min Hoo Kim, Amanda Coletta and Michael Birnbaum

Read on: Here's a snapshot of four countries with universal care.

1,000 Words

It was a surreal sight in the City of Lights: A Paris of dark cafes. It's neither an overstatement nor a cliche to say that the cafes of the French capital are its beating heart: A place to read the papers in morning, to sit with a friend in the afternoon or to sip a Bordeaux in the evening. A place to work, talk, think. It doesn't matter what you drink, or whether you drink at all. The cafe is chatter, chaos, community. And they never close — at least not until now. (Rafael Yaghobzadeh/AP)