WASHINGTON: Is “April 2020 the cruellest month,” asks a University of Louisiana guideline for Easter, which was celebrated across America on Sunday. The notice shows how the coronavirus pandemic had subdued Easter celebrations.

At the White House, First Lady Melania postponed the annual Easter Egg Roll and an April state dinner for Spain’s king and queen. Instead, she spent her Sunday sending messages to healthcare workers who were battling the pandemic across the nation.

The University of Louisiana also shared a calendar of online events organised by churches like the National Cathedral, Washington, and its own Holy Cross Catholic Church. Various US media outlets noted that poet T. S. Eliot’s line “April is the cruellest month” had become a national cliché as the coronavirus killed more than 20,000 people and infected almost 550,000 across the United States.

The National Review, a US magazine that covers both culture and politics, noted in its latest issue that the line “April is the cruellest month” was from Eliot’s 1921 poem The Waste Land, which was written when “Europe was in a crumbling, dying mess in the wake of World War I” and the poet also was recovering from a nervous breakdown. The reference led readers to draw a comparison between the early 20th century Europe and the agonies of a world suffering from a deadly pandemic.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, noted that The Waste Land’s famous opening line “seems particularly apt now, as if Eliot were looking 100 years to the future, pointing at this one, saying, ‘Yes, April 2020 — that’s the one I mean.’”

And Bloomberg, a business news wire, predicted: “Virus peril may make April cruelest month for emerging markets.” The International Monetary Fund warned last week that the pandemic had already pushed the world economy into a depression and that emerging markets might collapse if not helped. Meanwhile, various agencies monitoring the Covid-19 outbreak, reported that by Sunday afternoon the virus had infected 545,300 and killed 21,437 in the United States alone. On Saturday, the virus added 30,003 to the patients’ list and 1,830 to the death toll. But Friday was the worst, with 33,752 new cases and 2,035 new deaths.

Statistics provided by the Johns Hopkins University and other agencies showed that during this weekend the United States surpassed the rest of the world in both deaths and infections.

US federal projections have warned of a spike in coronavirus infections if social-distancing and lockdown orders were lifted now. At a news briefing at the White House on Friday, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that any lifting of restrictions would cause an increase in cases.

In an interview on CNN, Christopher Murray, the director of the Institute of Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, also warned that a premature lifting of social distancing restrictions could see a renewed surge in infections, and deaths.

“It’s enough to say that if we were to stop at the national level May 1, we’re seeing a return to almost where we are now, sometime in July,” Dr. Murray said.

The statements caused President Trump to acknowledge that the decision to reactivate social life will be “the biggest decision I will ever make.”

Published in Dawn, April 13th, 2020