Life Tabernacle Church was packed for services on Tuesday night after its pastor, Mark Anthony (Tony) Spell, was charged with six misdemeanor counts of disobeying the powers of the governor for defying the state’s ban on public gatherings amid the coronavirus crisis.

“We have a mandate from the word of God. … We have a mandate from God to praise God in his sanctuary. This is the sanctuary,” said Spell.

The United States now has the most cases of the new coronavirus, COVID-19, in the world, and the majority of the country is under strict stay-at-home orders to slow the rate of infection. As Americans approach one month since the start of intense social distancing measures, everyone is wondering the same thing: When will this end?

To get a better understanding of what people can expect from COVID-19, Dr. Robert Norton, a professor of public health at Auburn University and member of several coronavirus task forces, answers questions about the virus.

Will COVID-19 be gone by the summer?

“Realistically, I think it’s going to be going well into the summer in some areas,” Norton says.

An analysis based on mathematical statistics more precise than those previously carried out uncovered the reason why powdery mildew fungi on Åland are most abundant in roadsides and crossings. Identified as the specific cause was that traffic raises the spores found on roadsides efficiently into the air.

The researchers are interested in disease transmission, as it helps explain the occurrence and biology of diseases. There are plant diseases that spread along riversides, bird migration routes, ocean currents or, for example, air traffic networks, much like human diseases that spread through social networks.

The transmission process determines the abundance and location of occurrence, while the method of transmission determines how the diversity of the disease branches off temporally and spatially, and, in the end, how the disease evolves through natural selection.

Chicago saw an uptick in murders and shootings during the first quarter of 2020, compared to the same period last year, according to data collected by Chicago police.

However, the 24 murders in March 2020 alone was a 36% drop from the 35 murders in March 2019, police said. The number of shootings in March 2020 rose about 7% from March 2019, from 136 to 145.

In total, 93 people were killed in Chicago between Jan. 1 and March 31st, police said. That is a rise of about 13% compared to the 82 murders during the same period last year.

The Chicago Sun-Times also counted 93 murders so far this year.

Through the end of March, the city recorded 419 shootings, or a rise of about 22% from the same period in 2019, when there were 344 shootings, police said.

Deliveries of groceries and packages are soaring as physical retailers close their doors and tens of millions of Americans “shelter in place.” Moreover, the need for social distancing may encourage more delivery workers to leave packages unattended on porches rather than risk an interaction with someone who has the coronavirus.

These conditions may be perfect for thieves, who prior to the pandemic were increasingly pilfering packages from homes across the country.

About 11 million homeowners reported having a package stolen in 2017 – and a separate 2018 survey found that almost a fifth of Americans said they had been a victim. Three-quarters of the 2017 thefts occurred during the day, and the average cost of the stolen items was close to US$200.

I led a recent study of “porch piracy” to better understand how it happens. I enlisted the help of two graduate students, Melody Hicks and Zachary Hutchinson, to help me review the videos, and my wife Amy Stickle, a math lecturer, performed a statistical analysis to ensure accuracy of the data collected.

Dear How to Do It,

I’m having a wonderful affair with a man. We’re both married, but we’re careful and responsible—it’s what we both need to survive in our marriages, and it’s what’s best for both of us. (Without saying too much, in our situation, divorce would destroy our big, happy, extended immigrant families. I’m not looking for judgment on that.)

The problem is social distancing because of the coronavirus. Our spouses and kids are now both home full time, and getting away to see each other has been impossible. I’m miserable without the sex and companionship, and so is the man I’m seeing. At one point, he suggested meeting in our cars by the grocery store. I obviously declined. Then today, he called me and said to go to my window and waved to me from his car (we live about two neighborhoods apart). I was moved by the gesture, but it worried me. I feel like I am on the verge of doing something risky, and all this time with my husband, who is a kind man, is making me want to lash out and tell him I don’t love him.

What can I do to keep my head on straight here? I would be cast out of my family if this came out, but this whole situation is making me feel out of control.

—Swelter in Place

Police in Australia have charged a man accused of intentionally coughing on packets of noodles after being told by staff there was a limit on how many he could buy.

The suspect, a 34-year-old man from the suburb of Kooringal, tried to ignore the restrictions put in place as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak by purchasing four packets of noodles, police said. The incident took place at a Woolworths in Wagga Wagga, New South Wales, last Thursday.

After being approached by staff, the man allegedly coughed on the two packets he was refused and said "well they're now contaminated anyway," 9News reported.

His attempted rule-breaking noodle purchase was initially flagged by a self-serve register, Riverina Police District's Acting Detective Inspector, Steve Probst, told the news outlet.

The Trump administration’s goal of halting HIV transmission by 2030 is being swamped by the coronavirus crisis, with many sexual health clinics closing their doors and local health departments' infectious disease staff being redeployed to emergency response roles.

That's raising concern about the large population of people living with undiagnosed and untreated HIV, whose compromised immune systems could put them at higher risk of succumbing to coronavirus.

“Those individuals are going to be susceptible to opportunistic infections and would be at considerable risk if they are exposed to Covid-19,” said Christopher Hall, an infectious disease physician in San Francisco and the chairman of the clinical advisory council for the National Coalition of STD Directors.

It's an especially vulnerable population, Hall said. Nearly half of people living with HIV in the U.S. are over 50 years old. Up to half smoke cigarettes, potentially worsening their outcomes from respiratory infections like the coronavirus. And many have preexisting health conditions like diabetes and hypertension that dramatically increase the odds of mortality.

Should we all be wearing masks? That simple question is under review by officials in the U.S. government and has sparked a grass-roots pro-mask movement. But there’s still no consensus on whether widespread use of facial coverings would make a significant difference, and some infectious disease experts worry that masks could lull people into a false sense of security and make them less disciplined about social distancing.

In recent days, more people have taken to covering their faces, although it remains a scattershot strategy driven by personal choice. The government does not recommend it.

That may change. Officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are considering altering the official guidance to encourage people to take measures to cover their faces amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to a federal official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it is an ongoing matter of internal discussion and nothing has been finalized.

Malaysian authorities have advised women to wear make-up and avoid nagging their husbands during the coronavirus lockdown, sparking accusations of sexism.

The south-east Asian nation has ordered its 32million people to stay at home to stem the spread of the coronavirus, which has infected more than 2,700 people there.

One showed a picture of a couple hanging up clothes together next to a caption that advised women to 'avoid nagging' their husbands.

Another post said women should imitate the squeaky voice of Doraemon, a cartoon robot cat from Japan that is popular across Asia.

With daily life changing for many around the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, a huge surge in internet traffic has led to worries over the resilience of the infrastructure that keeps things humming.

As the COVID-19 disease spreads, authorities in many countries — from the U.K. to India — have implemented nationwide lockdowns, forcing people to work remotely while children are sent home from schools.

In Britain, internet service providers have seen double-digit increases in broadband usage, with BT claiming traffic on its fixed network climbed as much as 60% compared to normal weekdays, while Vodafone says it’s seen mobile data traffic increase by 50% in some markets.

“This is an increase we would normally expect to see in a year,” Chintan Patel, Cisco’s chief technologist in the U.K., told CNBC. “We’re now obviously seeing that in a matter of days and weeks.”

The big uncertainty going forward, he says, is not knowing how long the pandemic — and the nationwide shutdowns it has caused — will last.

If engineers are required to self-isolate, for instance, this may make it harder for telecommunications companies to maintain the copper and fiber cables and other equipment needed to deliver broadband.

“With physical networks, you still need to do a certain amount of maintenance,” Thillien told CNBC. “Whether or not this continues for longer time is the main uncertainty.”

With more than two-thirds of the U.S. population ordered to stay home amid the coronavirus pandemic, it’s tougher for burglars to find an empty house to target. But the cooped-up residents seem more likely to fight each other.

That’s what crime statistics show in major U.S. cities where residents are spending almost all their time inside.

In Los Angeles, property crime was down 18% in the four weeks that ended March 21 from the previous four weeks. Calls for police services in Chicago have declined 30% for the month and crime in New York City fell almost 25% in the week ended March 22, compared with the week before.

But with people stuck indoors enduring the stress of an unprecedented public-health crisis and worrying about jobs disappearing, domestic squabbles are rising.

In Seattle, police got 614 domestic violence calls in the first two weeks of March, a 22% increase from a year earlier.

It’s hard to sit in a room alone and not really know which way you’re going to go.

And you don’t have any of your social support. My family actually quarantined upstate, because they live there mostly full-time this year. I was able to FaceTime, which is something probably a lot of elderly people can’t do. My kids, who are 2 and 4, don’t know. They think I was at work. I wore a mask, so they couldn’t really see the whole high-flow setup.

For my wife, her mother died of lung cancer when she was 13, so, this was acutely traumatic for her. She’s isolating upstate and she’s taking care of two kids while she’s really pregnant. I still don’t know how she’s dealing with it. Probably not well.

I managed my own high flow. After six days in the hospital, I was able to get down off the high flow for a long time. The hospital was full, and I was like — you know, I’m just feeling OK enough to manage at home. The hospital is such a sick, ill environment right now, I didn’t want to spend any more time there than I absolutely needed to. I definitely think I have a long way to recover, and certainly my lungs have taken a bit of a hit. It’s going to be a bit of time before I feel like I’m not at risk for regular infections, like pneumonia.

The virus is impacting a subset of people who are infected, but the aftershocks of this are going to be felt in a lot of different areas. The sort of emotional, psychological toll on health care workers will probably lead to people leaving medicine. This idea that — I can’t really adequately say it — that people are dispensable. The government thinks that we can go to work without proper PPE and put our lives at risk. That’s something you can’t really get over — this kind of callousness for human life. I think they should have been trying harder months ago. And there are going to be people who miss their mammograms and get breast cancer. Or they have chest pain and they don’t want to go to the hospital, because they don’t want to get COVID.

The woman from Illinois wrote to the Santa Rosa’s Press Gazette’s ‘Dear Abby’ column to explain her dilemma.

She said she had previously been in an abusive relationship, but broke it off 14 years ago and stayed single to raise her “small son to adulthood”.

She finally found someone she had “strong feelings” for, and who felt the same about her, around seven months ago.

The woman wrote: “My feelings for my boyfriend are strong, and it’s mutual. He is giving, kind, caring, hardworking and protective. We are very much in love.

A spate of mysterious second-time infections is calling into question the accuracy of COVID-19 diagnostic tools even as China prepares to lift quarantine measures to allow residents to leave the epicenter of its outbreak next month. It's also raising concerns of a possible second wave of cases.

From March 18-22, the Chinese city of Wuhan reported no new cases of the virus through domestic transmission — that is, infection passed on from one person to another. The achievement was seen as a turning point in efforts to contain the virus, which has infected more than 80,000 people in China. Wuhan was particularly hard-hit, with more than half of all confirmed cases in the country.

But some Wuhan residents who had tested positive earlier and then recovered from the disease are testing positive for the virus a second time. Based on data from several quarantine facilities in the city, which house patients for further observation after their discharge from hospitals, about 5%-10% of patients pronounced "recovered" have tested positive again.

Some of those who retested positive appear to be asymptomatic carriers — those who carry the virus and are possibly infectious but do not exhibit any of the illness's associated symptoms — suggesting that the outbreak in Wuhan is not close to being over.