Spring is in the air. For Chapter 17 of What Do Socially Isolated People Do All Day? we’re featuring stories of people getting outside for some fresh air. Have you been able to do the same? Write us: editor@wng.org.

The U.S. central bank hopes trillions of dollars in new loans will keep American businesses afloat until the COVID-19 pandemic ends. The Federal Reserve took steps Thursday to pump $2.3 trillion into the economy by buying municipal bonds, making loans to medium-sized businesses, and other similar actions.

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.

Earlier this week in an interview with Fox News about the coronavirus, Franklin Graham said, “I don’t think God planned for this to happen. It’s because of the sin that’s in the world, Judge. Man has turned his back on God. We have sinned against Him, and we need to ask for God’s forgiveness. And that’s what Easter is all about.”

It started with fatigue on March 9—a heavy feeling, like his joints were tied with weights, or like he had just run a marathon. Ryan Anderson, assistant pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Nashville, Tenn., didn’t think too much of it. He had a busy Sunday the day before, and he had lost an hour of sleep due to daylight saving. And fatigue was not an unusual symptom for a pastor of 750 worshippers and a father of three young daughters. 

In late December, a Chinese doctor warned former classmates about a new severe respiratory disease he had treated. Later, he realized it was a new coronavirus, the same kind of pathogen that caused the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in the early 2000s.

With that, Dr. Li Wenliang, a 33-year-old ophthalmologist in Wuhan, China, became the first to sound the alarm on what would become the COVID-19 pandemic.

In The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien portrays his hobbit heroes toiling up a long, winding stairway that perhaps looks like early April’s rising curve of coronavirus cases and deaths. Sam Gamgee says he once thought adventures “were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for.” Sam realizes “that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind.” Frodo agrees: Those in a hard adventure never know “what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending.”