"The strength of a culture is seen, not when things are going well, but when crisis strikes," Bishop Donal McKeown of Derry said March 17 in his St. Patrick's Day homily in Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

We cannot allow the coronavirus to make us see others as a threat.

In this time in which we are not able to encounter Christ in the assembly or the Eucharist, we always have the opportunity to encounter Christ in the vulnerable.

Medically, the afflictions are quite different, and AIDS in the early days appears to have been much deadlier than Covid-19 today. Socially, the stigma that affected early cases of H.I.V. and AIDS is largely absent today.

Pope Francis prayed for families who are cooped up in their homes and for all those who are ill with COVID-19.

In a sign of how much the pandemic has grown, China now accounts for less than half of the world's 168,000 cases, according to a tally by Johns Hopkins University.