Shutdown hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes in Germany placed empty chairs in streets and squares Friday to highlight their economic suffering. The prospect of sipping wine on a Paris sidewalk also is still far off: French authorities announced that restaurants, bars and cafes won’t reopen before June.
The coronavirus has killed more than 190,000 people worldwide, including more than 100,000 in Europe, according to the John Hopkins University tally. New cases are surging in Africa and Latin America as outbreaks subside in some places that were hit earlier.
In Muslim communities, the pandemic is casting a shadow over the holy month of Ramadan — marked by daytime fasting, overnight festivities and communal prayer. Ramadan begins for the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims with this week’s new moon. Many Muslim leaders have closed mosques or banned collective evening prayer to ward off infections.
