BRITAIN’S JOHNSON OUT OF ICU

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson was moved out of intensive care at the London hospital where he is being treated for the virus.

The 55-year-old leader had taken a turn for the worse early in the week as his country descended into its biggest crisis since

World War II.

Almost 8,000 people with the coronavirus have died in British hospitals, according to government figures.

On Thursday, the U.K. reported 881 new deaths, down from the 938 recorded the day before.

Not all the U.K. deaths reported each day occurred in the preceding 24 hours, and the total includes only deaths in hospitals.

Record numbers from New York. New York state reported a recordbreaking number of dead for a third straight day, 799. More than 7,000 people have died in the state, accounting for almost half the U.S. death toll of more than 16,000.

“That is so shocking and painful and breathtaking, I don’t even have the words for it,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said.

But he added that there are hopeful signs, including slowdowns in the number of people being hospitalized, admitted to intensive care and placed on ventilators.

He said the onslaught of patients has not been as big as feared and hospitals are standing up to the strain so far. About 18,000 people were hospitalized, well short of the 90,000 hospital beds statewide, many of which were hurriedly lined up at a convention center and a Navy ship docked in the city.

Worldwide totals climb. Worldwide, the number of dead neared 95,000 and confirmed infections reached about 1.5 million, according to Johns Hopkins University, although the true numbers are believed much higher, in part because of different rules for counting the dead and coverups by some governments.

There were encouraging signs in France, where the national health agency saw indications the crisis is stabilizing, though more than 12,000 lives have been lost.

New infections, hospitalizations and deaths have been leveling off in hard-hit Italy and Spain, which together have around 33,000 deaths, but the daily tolls are still shocking. Spain reported 683 more dead, bringing its total to more than 15,200.

Easter preparations get creative. FE»

SANTA Amid widespread restrictions on public gatherings, major religious denominations are holding virtual services where members can watch on TV, online or on their phones. Others are arranging prayer at drive-in theaters, where people can stay in their cars.

The virus “doesn’t take a day off for Good Friday or Easter Sunday,” said Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe.

Still, other churches plan to move ahead with Easter, especially in states such as Texas, where the governor declared religious gatherings “essential services.” A Houston church has installed hand-washing stations and rearranged the 1,000-person sanctuary to hold about 100 people with 6 or more feet between them.

Pope Francis will celebrate Easter Mass in a nearly empty St. Peter’s Basilica instead of the huge square outside. In England, the Archbishop of Canterbury will deliver his Easter sermon by video.

Animal viruses are jumping to humans; forest loss makes it easier. The destruction of forests into fragmented patches is increasing the likelihood that viruses and other pathogens will jump from wild animals to humans, according to a study from Stanford University published this month.

The research, which focused on contact between humans and primates in western Uganda, holds lessons for a world reeling from the coronavirus outbreak and searching for strategies to prevent the next global pandemic.

“COVID has taught us that once a pandemic starts, it’s very hard to control,” said Laura Bloomfield, a doctoral candidate at Stanford and the study’s lead author.

“If we can decrease the potential for people to come into contact with wild animals, that is one way to decrease the likelihood of having recurrent pandemics.”

In Uganda, a rapidly growing population means more people are carving out patches of forest land to feed their families.

Humans have claimed more than a third of the Earth’s land for agricultural use. Tropical forests are being destroyed at record or near-record rates every year. In places such as the Amazon and Indonesia, for instance, virgin rain forest is being burned to farm commodities like soy, palm oil and cattle. Recently, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has risen sharply under the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.

Eric Lambin, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford and one of the study’s co-authors, said that the United States has its own example of an animal-borne disease linked to patchwork woodlands close to suburban and rural communities: Lyme disease, which spreads from wildlife to humans by ticks.

“We see the animals as infecting us, but the picture that’s coming from the study and other studies is we really go to the animals,” Lambin said. “We intrude on their habitats.”

Germany flies in seasonal farm workers amid virus measures. BERLIN» Two planes carrying Eastern European farmhands arrived Thursday in Germany as an ambitious government program to import thousands of seasonal agricultural workers got underway amid strict precautions to protect the laborers and the country from the coronavirus.

The flights to Berlin and Duesseldorf were arranged to address a massive labor shortage created when Germany banned most foreign travelers from entering the country last month.

Seasonal workers caught up in the ban were not available to pick asparagus, which has sprouted in Germany, and to plant other crops in the fields where some 300,000 such workers were employed last year.

Most came from Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine, and Hungary, where wages are much lower than in Germany.