No treatments for the coronavirus have yet been approved, meaning companies cannot make medical claims about their products

Some hospital trusts have seen a dramatic drop in cancer referrals from GPs in recent weeks

Tinned food is an invaluable back-up, and can be transformed into a nutritious meal at the drop of a hat

Tinned food has a best-before date of about three years, but is still likely to be good to eat decades later, making it an invaluable back-up. It also helps you prevent food waste by letting you be more sparing with perishable purchases – though, as with fresh food, it’s a good idea to rotate the cans in your cupboard, bringing short-date items to the fore, so you can build them into the week’s meals.

As well as helping to reduce food waste, tinned food is a good choice compared with other packaged food, because cans are made from a relatively low-impact material that actually gets recycled, unlike most plastics and Tetrapak. It’s also worth noting that, no matter how new it is, if a tin has a dent or is rusty, it is safest to compost the contents to avoid the deadly bacteria Clostridium botulinum.

With so much time on our hands, it’s easy to dwell on loss, says Mariella Frostrup. Try distracting yourself with online dates, box sets and classic novels

The dilemma Several months ago my partner of five years left me very suddenly. He’d gone abroad to work, but as far as I knew everything was fine. I even had flights booked to go and visit. The break-up was a huge shock that left me in a low place. After a few weeks I felt I was beginning to come out of the fog and start moving on with my life, going out and seeing friends, going to classes, etc, but then the lockdown was imposed. Being shut away in my flat all day, alone with my thoughts, I seem to be going backwards.

I’m very aware that we are in the middle of a global crisis and it’s awful for everyone. Luckily, I’m in a good position regarding pay and I’m not paying rent, so I really don’t have any reason to complain. However, all I can think about is my ex. It’s driving me a little bit mad. Do you have any advice on dealing with non-Covid-related troubles during this crisis? Talking to others about it is hard, and I don’t want to make it all about myself.

We can expect psychological difficulties to follow as we come out of lockdown. But we have an opportunity to remake our relationship with our bodies, and the social body we belong to. By Susie Orbach

When lockdown started, I was confused by bodies on television. Why weren’t they socially distancing? Didn’t they know not to be so close? The injunction to be separate was unfamiliar and irregular, and for me, self-isolating alone, following this government directive was peculiar. It made watching dramas and programmes produced under normal filming conditions feel jarring.

Seven weeks in, the disjuncture has passed. I, like all of us, am accommodating to multiple corporeal realities: bodies alone, bodies distant, bodies in the park to be avoided, bodies of disobedient youths hanging out in groups, bodies in lines outside shops, bodies and voices flattened on screens and above all, bodies of dead health workers and carers. Black bodies, brown bodies. Working-class bodies. Bodies not normally praised, now being celebrated.

Gov. Tim Walz is hesitant to reopen businesses until his state's daily testing rate dramatically increases. "You can't flip it like a switch and say you're open if you don't have testing," he says.

A trio of Senate Democrats wants to give $2,000 per month to individuals through the end of the health emergency. One Senate Republican suggests covering payroll for companies that rehire workers.

Canada has backed an American-led effort to allow Taiwan to be granted observer status at the World Health Organization because of its early success in containing COVID-19.

The efforts to undermine Democratic governors who invoked stay-at-home orders are most pronounced in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, all three of which have divided government and are key to President Donald Trump's path to reelection.

Roughly 19 Canadian crew members aboard Holland America’s MS Koningsdam disembarked at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Calif. on Friday while another group of 53 aboard the Emerald Princess is hoping to do the same on Saturday at Port Everglades in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.

The Canadian military is still determining how to raise the wreckage of a military helicopter that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea last week, Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan said Thursday.

As talk of reopening aspects of society continue across the country, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada Richard Wagner and federal Justice Minister David Lametti have begun a study into how courts could safely begin to resume regular operations in light of COVID-19.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says it's a fundamental principle of life in Canada that no one should have to go to work if they don't feel safe doing so.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described Canada’s current economic situation as a recession on Friday, and that should come as no surprise, says Finance Minister Bill Morneau, as the latest economic figures show two consecutive months of major job losses.

The PM's spokesman confirmed Boris Johnson has tested negative for Covid-19 Coronavirus: the symptoms Follow our live coronavirus updates here

It is "too early" to begin easing any lockdown measures "in any meaningful way", Nicola Sturgeon has said.

Canadian actors, musicians and public figures came together on Saturday night for a televised special to support frontline and essential workers, and to raise funds for Food Banks Canada.

Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breaths before rolling under the waves.

Evidently it’s not uncommon for seals to swim the couple dozen miles between Bangor, Maine, and the Atlantic Ocean, but I’d never seen them here before. They were a balm to my buzzing thoughts: What happens next? Will I become a vector of death to my elderly mother? Is the economy going to implode? For a precious few minutes there were only the seals and mergansers and the fish who drew them there, arriving as the Penobscot’s winter icepack broke and flowed to sea, a ritual enacted ever since glaciers retreated from this continental shelf.

In the months ahead we can look to nature for these respites. The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, physical distance easily maintained, and no pandemic can suspend it. Nature offers not just escape but reassurance.

The nonhuman world is free of charge; sunlight is a disinfectant, and physical distance is easily maintained.

In 1946, in the aftermath of World War II, with the Nazi threat vanquished but the Cold War looming, George Orwell welcomed spring’s arrival in London’s bombed-out heart. “After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen,” he wrote in “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad.” “Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time Winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment.”

So she does. And so the slumbering earth warms to life. Two nights before the seals, two nights before World Health Organization declared a pandemic, before the NBA shut down with teams on the floor and fans in the seats, before the fright went beyond viral into logarithmic, was the Worm Moon: the full moon named for the imminent stir of earthworms in thawing soil.

In burrows beneath leaf litter, hibernating toads prepare to open what Orwell called “the most beautiful eye of any living creature,” resembling “the golden-colored semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet rings, and which I think is called a chrysoberyl.” Nearly as beautiful are the eyes of painted turtles waiting on pond bottoms here in eastern Maine, the ice above now retreating from shore, mallard couples dabbling in newly open water.

The birds are the surest sign of spring’s imminence. Downtown the house finches are holding daily concerts. Starlings are starting to replace their gold-streaked winter plumes with more iridescent garb. In the street today I saw two male mockingbirds joust above the pavement, their white wing-bars fluttering territorial semaphores, abandoning the contest only when a car nearly ran them down. 

There are many quieter signs, too: pale tips of shrubs poised to grow, a spider rappelling off a low branch, fresh fox scat in the driveway. It’s red from apples preserved under snow and lined with the fur of field mice and meadow voles whose secret winter tunnels are now revealed in the grass. Somewhere soon mother fox will give birth, nursing her blind hairless charges in underground peace.

Eastern comma butterflies will gather on the trunks of those apple trees and sip their rising sap. Not long after the first orange-belted bumblebee queens will appear, inspecting potential nest sites under fallen leaves and decomposing logs. Warm rainy nights will bring salamanders and newts, just a few spotted glistening inches long, some of them decades old, out from woodland hidey-holes and down ancient paths to vernal pool bacchanals held amidst a chorus of spring peepers. Woodland ephemerals will bloom in sunshine unfiltered by still-bare treetops. My favorite are trout lilies, colonies of which illuminate forest floors with a sea of bright yellow blossoms, petals falling once the canopy unfurls.

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers,” Orwell wrote, “but the earth is still going round the sun.”

At this point there’s no end of studies showing how nature is good for our health, how patients recover faster in hospital rooms with windows overlooking trees, how a mindful walk in the woods will lower stress and raise moods. All true, but at this moment something deeper and more urgent is offered. An affirmation of life.

Will the nightmare scenes out of Italy and Spain and now New York City spread across the land? How long will the pandemic last? Will it completely rend our already tattered social fabric? When can I again play hockey or go to a coffee shop or use a credit card machine without feeling like I’m risking my own and other lives? Who will die? Nobody knows for sure, but in a few weeks the swallows will arrive, and tonight above the fields at dusk I heard the cries of woodcock.

Secretive, ground-dwelling birds with limpid black eyes and long, slender beaks attuned to the frequencies of earthworm-rustles, their feathers blend perfectly with leaf litter and old grass. They rely on this camouflage, going still rather than fleeing a walker’s approach, taking wing only as a last resort.

When they do, their flight is notable for its slowness and the quavering whistle of their wings. At no other time than in spring do they dare draw attention, much less put on a show: calling out, with an urgent nasal buzz best described as a peent, and flying straight upward before spiraling against a darkening sky.

Brandon Keim is a freelance nature and science journalist. The author of The Eye of the Sandpiper: Stories from the Living World, he’s now writing Meet the Neighbors, forthcoming from W.W. Norton & Company, about what it means to think of wild animals as fellow persons—and what that means for the future of nature.

Lead image: Tim Zurowski / Shutterstock

Russian President Vladimir Putin had celebrations to mark victory in WWII and a constitutional vote to keep him in power till 2036 planned for this spring. But the pandemic has canceled both events.

The latest news and information on the pandemic from Yahoo News reporters in the United States and around the world.

The unfavorable comparison between the current president and his predecessor is one of the clearest signs to date of an emerging dynamic that will define the remainder of Trump’s term and the presidential election.

Breaking with the leader of his own party, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., called for “tens of millions” of diagnostic coronavirus tests to be administered to Americans before the country can begin to return to normal.

After years of financial struggles, the United States Postal Service has been brought to the brink of collapse by the coronavirus outbreak. Can it be saved?

As the NHL looks for ways to salvage its regular season that was suspended by the COVID-19 pandemic, one option on the table is for a select group of so-called hub cities to host all the games. Three Canadian cities have expressed interest in the role.

While many parts of our economy remain shuttered and other sports continue to wait for the go ahead to resume play, courses in all 10 provinces will soon be open for business.

The Canadian Olympic Committee CEO talks about state of Canadian sport during COVID-19 and how funding will help keep sport organizations afloat.

The federal government will provide relief funding to the country's sport sector that has seen myriad events cancelled because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

"Our best-case scenario for this year is a drastically truncated season," Randy Ambrosie said. "And our most likely scenario is no season at all.''

Tracing out the shape of a galaxy may offer clues to the size of its supermassive black hole. And a new study shows citizen scientists are actually better at it than computer algorithms.

An experiment on peer reviewers at a psychology conference suggests a positive result premium, which could drive publication bias.

Modern dating techniques are providing new time frames for indigenous settlements in Northeast North America, free from the Eurocentric bias that previously led to incorrect assumptions.

Visual challenges remain before autonomous cars are ready for the masses.

Starting Monday, “park ambassadors” will be stationed at Ottawa’s busiest parks to provide information about what's permitted under pandemic rules.

A new meme imagines a walking down all sorts of aisles after coronavirus-related lockdowns end

A silver chain has taken center stage in Hulu's adaptation of Sally Rooney's "Normal People"

The Overwatch League canceled its esports matches scheduled for February and March in China because of the coronavirus outbreak.

The Electronic Entertainment Expo, the signature video game industry event held each June, has been cancelled because of fears of the coronavirus.

At the behest of the World Health Organization, video game companies are promoting hand washing, physical distancing during the coronavirus crisis.

The Guardian’s data journalists in the UK, US and Australia explain how they have shone a light on the statistical narrative behind the pandemic, and what they have helped to reveal

Sidewalk Labs, a Google-affiliated company, is abandoning its plan to build a high-tech neighbourhood on Toronto’s waterfront, citing what it calls unprecedented economic uncertainty.

As New Brunswick and other provincial governments contemplate launching COVID-19 contact-tracing apps, privacy watchdogs from across the country have issued joint guidelines on what they are describing as an "extraordinary" measure, urging transparency and accountability.

The smash serial killer comedy returns to the BBC with an 'exasperatingly average' third series, leaving our arts columnist Fiona Sturges wishing it would bite the dust

'If I'm not acting, I'm not sure who I am,' the True Blood star said

As a new drama about the 'most British crime of all time' arrives on ITV, here's a reminder of Charles and Diana Ingram's notorious quiz show appearance and their trial for conspiring to cheat

This dramatisation of the 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?' coughing scandal is superbly entertaining and well constructed, and will likely make viewers rethink a story they thought they knew well

Whether or not the Ingrams were cheating on 'Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?', the resulting outrage was rooted in the same dynamics that have come to dominate social discourse in the years since, says Adam White

Live shows will begin this month

After the brilliance of 'Succession' and 'Chernobyl', new comedy 'Run' – from the makers of 'Fleabag' – proves that while HBO may have lost the fight with Netflix for sheer numbers of viewers, it won the argument over quality. So what can it do now? Louis Chilton reports

Men locked away for decades over crimes they didn't commit share their stories in this startling new series

TV host dedicated an episode of her show to virus's deadly toll on black America