Agriculture policy plays out against a complex political backdrop that can transcend party loyalties. Small farmers battle big agriculture for influence. Each region of the country has discrete interests, as do producers of different kinds of crops and other farm products.

Economists say the Agriculture Department, under intense pressure from both the White House and Congress to deliver coronavirus checks to farmers, seems again engaged in major guesswork in trying to calculate losses.

Across the United States, doctors and other health care workers have been stopping work in recent days for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, the length of time George Floyd, a black man, was pinned down by a white police officer’s knee before he died.

Many say they view the deaths of black people at the hands of the police as a public health issue. But they also express worries that large gatherings will cause a second wave of coronavirus cases, and they are balancing their involvement with calls for protesters and police officers to adhere to public health guidelines.

“As a physician, when I hear ‘I can’t breathe’ I’m usually rushing to someone’s bedside,” said Dr. Teresa Smith, an emergency doctor at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, who thought of her patients with respiratory failure when she saw the video of the killing of Mr. Floyd. “To see George Floyd crying — that, that was personal for me as a physician of color.”

As the coronavirus crisis wears on in the United States, the country remains stuck on a stubborn plateau. Each day, about 20,000 new cases are identified, and about 1,000 more people die. And progress in one place is undermined by setbacks elsewhere.

Two weeks ago, case numbers around Chicago were stuck at a high level, and alarming growth in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area had shown few signs of subsiding. Both of those regions have since reported sustained drops in new cases.

Though the exponential case growth that was reported in March has ended, much of the country has not seen a plunge in case numbers. Nearly two million people in the United States are known to have had the virus, and more than 110,000 have died. Already in June, more than 100,000 new cases and about 5,000 more deaths have been announced.

Case clusters continue to emerge across the country, including at a meatpacking plant in Chicago, a summer camp in Tennessee and a tortilla production facility in northwest Arkansas, a region where outbreaks in several food processing plants are contributing to explosive case growth.

In two spending bills in March, lawmakers approved $1.59 billion in pandemic assistance to be sent abroad through the State Department and the United States Agency for International Development.

As of last week, $386 million had been released to nations in need, according to a government official familiar with the spending totals that the State Department has reported to Congress for both agencies. That money was delivered through private relief groups and large multinational organizations, including United Nations agencies, that provide health and economic stability funding and humanitarian assistance around the world.

Of that, only $11.5 million in international disaster aid had been delivered to private relief groups, even though the funds are meant to be rushed to distress zones.

The totals reflected spending on the global coronavirus response as of June 3 by the State Department and the American aid agency and were shared with The New York Times on the condition of anonymity because the figures were intended to be private.

Relief workers said they were alarmed and bewildered as to why most the money was unspent.

“Little to no humanitarian assistance has reached those on the front lines of this crisis in the world’s most fragile context,” executives at 27 relief organizations wrote to the aid agency’s acting administrator, John Barsa, in a letter dated June 4.

“In spite of months of promising conversations with U.S.A.I.D. field staff, few organizations have received an executed award for Covid-19 humanitarian assistance,” the letter stated.

Most of the money is provided through the U.S. aid agency. A spokeswoman, Pooja Jhunjhunwala, said on Friday that the total amount made available so far to relief groups was $595 million, including $175 million in international disaster aid.

Just over three months since its first coronavirus case was confirmed, New York City is set on Monday to take its first steps toward reopening.

As many as 400,000 workers could begin returning to construction jobs, manufacturing sites and retail stores in the city’s first phase of reopening — a surge of normalcy that seemed almost inconceivable several weeks ago, when as many as 800 people a day were dying from Covid-19.

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Sunday that outdoor, socially distanced graduations could be held in New York State beginning June 26, with up to 150 people.

Over the course of the pandemic, more than 211,000 people in New York have been infected, and nearly 22,000 have died.

But the road back will be challenging. More than 885,000 jobs vanished during the outbreak, and strong gains are not expected for the city until 2022. And the reopening has been complicated by the vast protests for racial justice, forcing government officials and business owners to adjust their plans.

With nearly 10,000 new infections, India has surpassed Spain and now has the world’s fifth-highest caseload — about 245,000 infections and 6,929 deaths.

Even as the number of cases continued to skyrocket, Indian officials have moved ahead with easing a nationwide lockdown by reopening shopping malls, places of worship and hotels on Monday. The authorities said the relaxations are needed to get the economy restarted.

After Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced restrictions in late March, states sealed their borders, businesses shut and all 1.3 billion Indians were ordered to stay inside. Since then, more than 120 million people have lost their jobs and some industries have edged toward bankruptcy.

A prominent British laboratory is forming a partnership that would sidestep the drug industry to sell a potential vaccine against the coronavirus without profits or licensing fees in Britain and in low- and middle-income countries.

Scientists, nonprofit groups and public health experts have urged that any successful coronavirus vaccine be distributed at the lowest possible cost and on the basis of need rather than profit. But for-profit drug giants or biotechnology start-ups have dominated the development race, especially in the United States, a vital market because of its high drug prices.

If successful, he said, the vaccine’s lower cost could appeal to the large donor organizations that typically supply low-income countries, which make up much of the world. It could also provide a cheaper alternative in affluent countries.

Inspired by the anti-racism protests that have swept the United States after the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the marches have been unrelenting even as global cases of the virus approach seven million and the death toll nears 400,000.

Chanting “Black lives matter” and “No justice, no peace,” thousands of people gathered in Rome on Sunday to protest racism in the United States and in Italy.

“As many of you know, there is a very serious problem with state-condoned violence” in the United States, said Fatimah Provillon, a New Jersey native who has lived in Rome for 13 years, told the crowd of mostly young Italians in the Piazza del Popolo. “But it’s not just a U.S. problem — it’s happening all over the world.”

The rallies have unfolded for the past week around the world. More than 500 people gathered in Antwerp, Belgium, last Monday despite an official ban on large crowds because of the coronavirus. All protesters respected social distancing and wore masks, according to the police, who did not to intervene with the demonstration. Another approved demonstration was planned for Sunday afternoon in Brussels.

Last week, people threw red paint on a statue of Leopold II in the city of Ghent, and gagged his face with a message that read, “I can’t breathe,” referring to Mr. Floyd’s words in his last moments as a white officer pressed a knee to his neck.

In many cases, the changes will transform workaday offices into fortified sites resembling biohazard labs.

At Cisco, for example, employees will have to log into an app every day and answer several questions about their health. Those cleared by the app can head to the office, where they will face a temperature check. Anyone with a fever will be sent home.

For example, the agency recommends limiting elevator use to maintain social distancing. Some companies lease space in crowded office buildings, sharing elevators with many other tenants.

Even for companies that occupy entire buildings, elevators are a vexing problem.

“It can’t be two people per elevator in a high rise. That’s not just feasible,” said Rob Falzon, a vice chairman at Prudential, which occupies several large buildings in Newark. “It would take us two to three hours just to get everyone in.”

One possible solution? Prudential is considering putting ultraviolet lighting in elevators so surfaces are continuously disinfected.

To ease the pressure, hospitals in nearby San Diego and Riverside counties began accepting transfers in April. But the intensifying crisis has prompted California to enlist hospitals in Santa Barbara, San Francisco and Sacramento to accept patients.

The swelling numbers of Covid-19 patients entering the United States from Mexico comes as infection rates have dropped in many parts of California, enabling businesses to reopen.

“We worked hard to flatten the curve in California,” said Carmela Coyle, president of the California Hospital Association, who asked hospital systems across the state for help. “Now we have a surge in the Imperial Valley because the situation is so severe in Mexicali.”

The number of cases in Imperial County reached 2,540 on Friday, up from 1,076 two weeks earlier. The county has the highest infection rate in California, with one in every 71 residents having contracted the virus. Per capita, the El Centro area has reported the second-most cases of any U.S. metropolitan area over the past two weeks.

I’ve given my phone number to a lot of strangers over the past week.

I scribbled it down for the charming barista who made my latte. I handed it to the waiter who took my first restaurant booking in more than two months. I gave it to a hairdresser, to an ice cream vendor, even to the guy behind plexiglass at the open-air swimming pool.

I swear I wasn’t flirting. I was just trying to have a swim.

Berlin has been emerging from its coronavirus lockdown in full force, and the price of a snippet of our pre-corona lives is handing over personal details so the detectives of the German health authority can trace the contacts of a newly infected person.

It is one way in which Germany’s new normal looks anything but normal. In a country where privacy is something of a national religion, Germans now casually hand over their private address at every turn.

At a trendy coffee shop in central Berlin, Sabine Baum, a graphic designer, added her details to the dog-eared handwritten list on the counter one recent morning.

“Somehow it feels OK, because it’s just on paper and not online,” she said.

The longing for normality is a powerful incentive to put up with things that in early March would have seemed either unacceptable or totally absurd to many Germans. Like wearing something in a sauna (face masks might become mandatory when saunas reopen next month).

A top official said at a news conference in Beijing that the Chinese government and state news media had provided early, timely and extensive information since the first cases appeared in Hubei Province late last year. In an apparent reference to the Trump administration’s numerous assertions that China is to blame for the subsequent global pandemic, he complained bitterly about what he described as foreign lies and slanders.

“Those are completely unwarranted and unreasonable,” said the official, Xu Lin, who oversees the State Council Information Office. The agency published a detailed report on Sunday about China’s epidemic response.

Ma Xiaowei, the minister in charge of the National Health Commission, also said that China had “not delayed in any way” the release of information about the disease.

A report published by Mr. Xu’s agency on Sunday provides a detailed timeline of China’s epidemic response. But while Chinese scientists moved quickly to identify the new disease and share their findings internationally, political leaders were slower to act, ordering police investigations of doctors who tried to sound the alarm in late December.

Since the outbreak began, China has recorded more than 89,000 cases and more than 4,600 deaths.

The U.S. accusations against China continued on Sunday, with Senator Rick Scott, Republican of Florida, saying that the United States had evidence that China was trying to slow down or sabotage the development of a Covid-19 vaccine by Western countries.

“We have evidence that communist China is trying to sabotage us or slow it down,” Mr. Scott said during an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation. “China does not want us and England and Europe to do it first. They have decided to be an adversary to Americans and I think to democracy around the world.”

Mr. Scott declined to give any evidence or details of his claim, but said it had come through the intelligence community.

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