ISRAEL: Jerusalem’s Via Dolorosa will be empty on Good Friday, as Christians around the world mark Holy Week events leading to Easter under the restrictions of COVID-19.

Once on a visit to my Iraqi friend Insaf, who lives outside Toronto, I got lost. I went walking to take an editorial team phone call—back before Zoom took over our lives—and lost my way as the meeting went long, the houses and streets looked the same, and it began to snow. Then my cell phone died.

BRITAIN: In 1940, during the Blitz, 14-year-old Princess Elizabeth spoke to the nation by radio, giving a “message of sympathy” to British children evacuated from London to escape nightly bombings. On Sunday, the 93-year-old Queen Elizabeth again spoke to the nation at “an increasingly challenging time,” bolstering her subjects as the U.K. suffered its deadliest day with COVID-19.

CHINA: In a classified report delivered to the White House last week, U.S. analysts said Chinese officials underreported its total number of COVID-19 cases and deaths.

Within hours late Wednesday, Israel recorded five new deaths from the coronavirus, then by midday Thursday seven more, bringing to 33 the number who have died since the virus reached the country with its first recorded case on Feb. 21. 

ISRAEL: Not since the Black Plague has Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the site where Jesus is believed to have been buried and resurrected, been closed indefinitely. The coronavirus has shuttered Jewish, Christian, and Muslim holy sites throughout the Old City.

SOUTH AFRICA: President Cyril Ramaphosa has tested negative for the coronavirus, just hours before the country began a 21-day nationwide lockdown enforced by the military. It and other African nations—vivid with memories of the 1980s AIDS epidemic and recent Ebola outbreaks—are deploying drastic measures.