Category: News

PARIS — As President Emmanuel Macron wove through crowds during a campaign stop in northern France last week, an elderly voter got in his face to protest one of his most unpopular economic proposals: raising the retirement age to 65 from 62 to fund France’s national pension system.

“Retirement at 65, no, no!” the woman shouted, jabbing a finger at Mr. Macron’s chest as he tried to assuage her. The boisterous exchange was caught on camera. Two hours later, he retreated, saying he would consider tweaking the age to 64. “I don’t want to divide the country,” he said on French television.

Mr. Macron’s reversal on a key element of his economic platform, in an industrial region backing the far-right firebrand Marine Le Pen ahead of France’s presidential election next Sunday, was a reminder of the social distress dominating the minds of voters. He and Ms. Le Pen have starkly divergent visions of how to address these concerns.

As they cross the country in a whirlwind of last-minute campaigning, their runoff will hinge to a large extent on perceptions of the economy. Worries about widening economic insecurity, and the surging cost of living amid the fallout from Russia’s war on Ukraine, have become top issues in the race, ahead of security and immigration.

Ms. Le Pen won by a comfortable margin in the first round of voting last Sunday in places that have lost jobs to deindustrialization, where she has found a ready audience for her pledges to bolster purchasing power, create employment through “intelligent” protectionism and shield France from European policies that expanded globalization.

While Mr. Macron is still expected to win in a tight race, workers in restless blue-collar bastions may yet prove a liability. Despite a robust recovery in France from Covid lockdowns — the economy is now growing at around 7 percent, and unemployment has fallen to a 10-year low of 7.4 percent — many feel inequality has widened, rather than narrowed, as he pledged, in the five years since Mr. Macron took office.

After France’s traditional left-wing and right-wing parties collapsed in the first round of voting, both candidates are scrambling to lure the undecided and voters who gravitated to their opponents — especially the far-left firebrand Jean-Luc Mélenchon — in large part by recasting major planks of their economic programs to appeal to those struggling to get by.

Pensions is a case in point. Mr. Macron has worked to recalibrate his image as a president who favors France’s wealthy classes, the business establishment and white-collar voters as he set about overhauling the economy to bolster competitiveness.

In 2019 he was forced to set aside plans to raise the retirement age to 65 after raucous nationwide strikes shut down much of France. He had sought to streamline France’s complex system of public and private pension schemes into one state-managed plan to close a shortfall of 18 billion euros, or about $19 billion.

Following his confrontation in northern France last week, Mr. Macron insisted that he would continue to push back the retirement age incrementally — by four months per year starting next year — but that he was open to discussing an easing of the plan in its later stages.

“It’s not dogma,” he said of the policy. “I have to listen to what people are saying to me.”

Ms. Le Pen accused Mr. Macron of engaging in a policy of “social wreckage” and of blowing with the wind to capture votes, although she has also shifted gears after the protectionist economic platform she advanced five years ago spooked businesses. She dropped plans to withdraw from the European Union and the eurozone.

Today, Ms. Le Pen favors maintaining the current retirement age of 62, abandoning a previous push to reduce it to 60 — although certain workers engaged in intensive manual labor like construction could retire at the lower age.

As Ms. Le Pen seeks to rebrand her far-right National Rally party as a kinder, gentler party than the one she steered in 2017, albeit with a clear anti-immigrant message, she has focused on economic issues close to blue-collar voters’ hearts.

She got out front on one of the biggest issues of the campaign: a surge in the cost of living.

While Mr. Macron was trying to broker a cease-fire in Ukraine, Ms. Le Pen was visiting towns and rural areas across France, promising increased subsidies for vulnerable households.

She has pledged a 10 percent hike in France’s monthly minimum wage of 1,603 euros. She is also vowing to slash sales taxes to 5.5 percent from 20 percent on fuel, oil, gas and electricity, and to cut them altogether on 100 “essential” goods. Workers under 30 would be exempt from income tax, and young couples would get interest-free housing loans.

Her France-first policy extends even further: To make up for increased spending on social programs, she has said she would slash billions in social spending on “foreigners.”

She has also vowed to create jobs and re-industrialize the country by prioritizing French companies for government contracts over foreign investors and dangling a host of expensive tax incentives to encourage French companies that have branched out overseas to return to France.

While she has abandoned talk of a so-called Frexit — a French exit from the European Union — some of her proposals to protect the economy would amount to essentially that, including a pledge to ignore some European Union laws, including on internal free trade. She has said she would withhold some French payments to the bloc.

Mr. Macron has branded such promises “pure fantasy” and is proposing to retain many of his pro-business policies, with modifications.

Having vowed to lure jobs and investment, under his watch foreign companies have poured billions of euros into industrial projects and research and development, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs, many in tech start-ups, in a country that has not easily embraced change.

At the same time, he has faced a challenge in discarding the image of an aloof president whose policies tended to benefit the most affluent. His abolition of a wealth tax and the introduction of a 30 percent flat tax on capital gains has mainly lifted incomes for the richest 0.1 percent and increased the distribution of dividends, according to the government’s own analysis.

After a growing wealth divide helped set off the Yellow Vest movement in 2019, bringing struggling working-class people into the streets, Mr. Macron increased the minimum wage and made it easier for companies to give workers “purchasing power bonuses” of up to 3,000 euros annually without being taxed, a policy he has pledged to beef up.

As inflation has surged recently, Mr. Macron has also authorized billions of euros in subsidies for energy bills and at the gas pump and has promised to peg pension payments to inflation starting this summer. He has vowed new tax cuts for both households and businesses.

His economic platform also aims for “full employment,” in part by pressing ahead with a series of pro-business reforms that has continued to lure the support of France’s biggest employers’ organization, Medef.

“Emmanuel Macron’s program is the most favorable to ensure the growth of the economy and employment,” the group said last week, adding that Ms. Le Pen’s platform “would lead the country to stall compared to its neighbors and to put it on the sidelines of the European Union.”

For all the differences, the pledges by Mr. Macron and Ms. Le Pen have one thing in common: more public spending, and less savings. According to estimates by the Institut Montaigne, a French economic think tank, Mr. Macron’s economic plan would worsen the public deficit by 44 billion euros, while Ms. Le Pen’s would widen it by 102 billion euros.

“These shifts are significant enough to think that some of their proposals cannot actually be applied — except if they put in place budget austerity measures that they are not talking about,” Victor Poirier, director of publications at the Institut Montaigne, said.

In March of 2020, Krista Fahs began working from home. As she sidled up to her desk, the 53-year-old sales associate for a computer distributor put aside her usual sneakers. She found herself doing laundry, playing with her cat and even visiting neighbors without putting on shoes. “I was barefoot all the time,” she said.

A few months into working from home, she began to feel a twinge of heel pain, but disregarded it until last month, when it got too intense to ignore. Even as she lay in bed, the throbbing wouldn’t stop. “‘This is ridiculous,’” she remembered thinking, “I didn’t even know how I was going to fall asleep.”

The beginning of the pandemic coincided with a steep decline in foot trauma, said Dr. Robert K. Lee, chief of podiatric foot and ankle surgery at UCLA Santa Monica Medical Center, but his practice quickly repopulated with patients like Ms. Fahs who complained about foot pain. “I was like, ‘Aha, so this is the effect of the pandemic on feet across the country,’” he said.

There is no hard data on the increase in foot pain, but Dr. James Christina, the executive director of the American Podiatric Medical Association, said it’s been a clear trend for many of his 12,000 members.

Members like Dr. Rock Positano, the co-director of the Non-surgical Foot and Ankle Service at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York, who has seen foot pain increase so much — 20 to 30 percent — that he called the phenomenon “pandemic foot.”

Now that spring is here, mandates are relaxing and people are eager to get their prepandemic bodies and hobbies back, they are hitting the pavement, said Dr. James Hanna, a podiatrist and president of the New York State Podiatric Medical Association. Many are exacerbating existing foot injuries or creating new ones.

“People thought they could just return to where they left off or try something they hadn’t tried in a couple years,” he said, “but their feet aren’t prepared for what their bodies want to do.”

By instituting a few simple measures, Dr. Hanna assures owners of achy feet everywhere that foot pain can be alleviated as well as prevented.

Overuse Injuries

Some of the most common foot ailments occur simply because the foot is under increased strain during the pandemic. Perhaps you opted to walk long distances instead of use public transportation or went barefoot at home. “People don’t realize how much mileage they put on walking and standing in their houses,” Dr. Positano said.

Ms. Fahs was diagnosed with one such overuse injury, plantar fasciitis, where the ligament under the foot that supports the arch becomes inflamed, often felt as pain in the heel. “I knew what it was because my brother, sister and one of my best friends all got it recently, too,” she said.

Metatarsalgia is another overuse injury, similarly caused by inflammation, but in the toe joints, which causes pain in the ball of the foot.

For those starting ambitious running routines right out of the pandemic gates, Achilles’ tendinitis has been a common diagnosis. The tendon connects the calf muscle to the heel bone and with a sudden increase in use, it can become irritated and swell.

These injuries can impact more than foot health. If they are not addressed, they can “go up the chain,” and cause knee, hip and back pain. “People think they are falling apart, but they are not,” Dr. Positano said. “They are overusing their feet.”

Fragile Feet

Overuse injuries aren’t the only reasons people have been feeling foot pain lately. Dr. Priya Parthasarathy, a Maryland-based podiatric surgeon, has also seen an uptick in toe and foot fractures. Some are caused, she said, by accidentally kicking furniture — a result of being home and barefoot more often — and tripping and falling awkwardly over pets. “You see one, then you see two, then three and then four,” she said of such pet-related fractures, “and you’re like, ‘Wait, there’s definitely a connection here.’”

Spreading Toes

Meanwhile, Dr. Judith F. Baumhauer, an orthopedic surgeon at University of Rochester Medical Center, has been removing more bunions, which are bony protrusions at the base of the big toe. Without supportive shoes, the foot can splay — actually widen — and the anatomical structures can change. Among other issues, this can aggravate bunions.

“They let their feet do whatever they wanted,” Dr. Baumhauer said, “and now that they have to go back to work, their feet are rebelling.”

More Weight on the Foot

Dr. Baumhauer said that pandemic weight gain may also be to blame for the rise in foot discomfort. She explained that even an extra couple of pounds makes an impact. “It’s literally just physics,” she said, explaining that the foot takes on four times the force of our body weight when walking. Losing or gaining five pounds would be a change of “20 pounds to their ankle and foot,” she said.

Too Much Too Fast

Jacqueline M. Dylla, an associate professor of clinical physical therapy at the University of Southern California, said one of the biggest triggers is people doing too much too fast. Many of us have undergone atrophy and bone density loss from inactivity without noticing it, making it harder to stabilize ourselves on uneven surfaces. “Smaller injuries are causing more catastrophic problems,” she said. “I have patients who look like they were in a car accident,” she added, “but they just rolled their ankle during a hike.”

Even young children, after a year or two doing virtual school, are experiencing issues as they jump headlong into sports. “You have a kid sitting at home every day for a year going straight into cross-country practice,” Dr. Parthasarathy said.

How to Help Your Feet

Podiatrists say one of the fixes for foot pain can be quite simple: Wear supportive footwear. That means a semirigid sole, a spacious toe box and a small heel lift. Get properly fitted at a shoe store and, if you don’t want street shoes in your home, get a pair specifically for use indoors. If using older shoes, be sure that the tread is not too worn, as those may have degraded too much to offer substantial support. Insoles can also be added for additional arch support.

Ms. Dylla said it’s also essential to prepare our bodies for renewed activity by strengthening them first. This means exercising the feet with toe curls and foot doming. “There’s a crunch for the stomach,” Ms. Dylla said, “doming is the crunch for the foot.”

Dr. Hanna said the best advice may be to start slow. “If you’re going to start walking, do moderate pace at short distance,” he said. “If you tolerate that well, maybe go at a faster pace for longer distance.”

Podiatrists also say stretching is crucial to prevent and treat unhappy feet. “A proper warmup,” Dr. Hanna said, “I cannot emphasize this enough.”

In the morning, even before going to the bathroom, Dr. Hanna recommends flexing your feet by pulling your toes up toward your body. Then pretend your toes are a pencil and write out the alphabet. “If you do that,” he said, “you’ll activate all the joints and be much less likely to injure yourself.”

Even though the calf seems distant from the bottom of the foot, stretching it plays an essential role in pain-free walking. “When your calf and Achilles are tight,” Dr. Lee said, it “creates a lot more stress to all your foot joints.”

He suggests getting into a lunge position with one foot in front of the other, your hands up against a wall and your feet flat on the ground. You should feel the stretch in the calf of the back leg. He suggests doing this several times throughout the day.

Massaging the arch area can also prevent injury by keeping the bottom of our feet limber. Dr. Lee advises grabbing a tennis ball or golf ball while sitting at a desk or while watching TV. “Roll your foot over the ball and massage into that area to loosen up those fibers,” he said.

However, if you are having heel pain, get your foot checked by a doctor before stretching. In some cases, Dr. Positano said, there can be undiagnosed tears in the plantar fascia that stretching can worsen.

If you are experiencing any persistent foot pain, book an appointment with a podiatrist. There are many simple ways doctors can relieve pain and prevent chronic issues from developing. If you’re in discomfort, “seek care,” Dr. Baumhauer said, “because there are a lot of tricks up our sleeves.”

Mara Altman is a journalist and the author of “Gross Anatomy: Dispatches From the Front (and Back)”

Today’s energy crisis has a familiar ring. In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy supplies have faltered and prices have skyrocketed. Americans are seeing costly gasoline, and in Europe, natural gas prices are around five times typical levels for this time of year, driving up the price of electricity and even threatening bankruptcies across industries that depend on gas.

After previous global energy crises — 1973, 1979, 1990 and 2008 — tensions abated, prices fell, people forgot and governments turned to other priorities. And global dependence on oil and gas kept rising.

This time could be different. Western nations have aggressively employed sanctions against Russia, and those sanctions are expected to tighten and include Russian oil and gas exports, as Europe and other importers gain confidence that they can replace those supplies. But what really matters for the long term is whether the West can lower its dependence not just on Russian exports, but on fossil fuels altogether.

To do that, companies and investors have to take risks on new, clean technologies, but many won’t if governments don’t give them the signal. What’s new in this crisis is how the European Union, in particular, is using the war in Ukraine to give investors a big green light.

The Union already had plans, outlined last summer, to slash emissions 55 percent by 2030, mainly by cutting consumption of fossil fuels that cause global warming. After Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Europe went a step further with a new plan to accelerate the shift away from Russian gas (including by importing, for now, more gas from friendlier places, including from the United States). New details on those plans are expected next month. Over the long term Europe is now speeding the exit from oil and gas altogether.

It is easy for politicians to announce bold plans. What’s different is that Europe’s plans are mostly already written into binding laws backed by big spending on infrastructure and research and development.

This kind of credibility matters because it determines where capital flows, and almost every approach to making big cuts in fossil fuels and emissions is capital intensive. The good news is that there are vast pools of available private capital willing to back risky novel technologies — a sharp contrast with the 1970s, when shifts in technology were slower because access to capital was controlled by a few large financial institutions and multinational energy companies and allocated mainly to established enterprises.

In almost every aspect of the industrial economy — from making steel and cement to new aircraft to better systems for heating homes and making electricity — the emission reduction plans in Europe are opening markets to new technology while also convincing big existing businesses, like oil and gas companies, they must innovate or get out of the way. Where investors put their money today hinges not just on technological promise, but also whether radical new ideas will be allowed to flourish and compete.

Take hydrogen, which is a leading idea for cutting dependence on conventional fossil gas. Modern energy systems depend heavily on natural gas, in part because it is easy to store and use when needed. Greater use of gas has already helped cut emissions because it has displaced coal. Shifting to clean hydrogen could cut those emissions essentially to zero, and would also make it possible to reuse some of today’s extremely valuable gas infrastructure.

One way to make clean hydrogen is with electrolyzers that split hydrogen from water. Right now that’s expensive, but with a spurt of new investment, electrolyzer costs will likely tumble. Other methods will compete as well.

Central to the European plan for cutting dependence on natural gas is investment in hydrogen and other alternatives to conventional gas — something that companies are lining up to do with their own capital. Privately backed projects are exploring how to link hydrogen production to renewable electric power generators — a key innovation because hydrogen is easier to store than electricity and could help make electric grids reliable even when they depend on large amounts of intermittent wind and solar.

Leaders in sectors such as steel, refining and chemicals all see hydrogen investments as part of their plans to remain viable in a world that slashes emissions. Maersk, one of the world’s largest container shipping companies, is backing some of these projects — along with several other clean fuels. Even in aircraft and heavy trucks, hydrogen may prove the best way to cut emissions.

The consulting firm McKinsey estimates that the value of investment in clean hydrogen projects by 2030 will exceed half a trillion dollars, based on the announcements made — with Europe in the lead. For comparison, the total value of all fossil fuels sold globally in 2021 was about $5 trillion.

The United States is finding it harder to be a clean technology leader because the political environment is fractured. But one area of promise is $8 billion for “hydrogen hubs” in the recent bipartisan infrastructure law to build the production facilities, pipelines and terminals to link producers and consumers.

A hydrogen revolution could take a while — perhaps two decades with a highly committed effort, until there are substantial volumes of hydrogen replacing conventional natural gas and also replacing oil. But beyond hydrogen there are many other examples of credible policy, along with new technology attracting a flood of capital. New designs for nuclear plants attracted $3.4 billion in private capital in 2021 alone. (New nuclear plants are likely to focus on America, Britain, China and other markets. Attitudes around nuclear power in most of continental Europe are yet to turn reliably in favor.) Other, more mature clean technologies like solar, wind and batteries are expanding massively as well.

Europe is in the lead because it has found ways to make political pronouncements more credible. This leadership matters because technologies are traded globally, and European investments are redefining the frontier. The effect of all this will be a series of revolutions that cut dependence on Russia and on fossil fuels — and also help heal the planet.

Philip Verleger is a retired professor of economics from the University of Calgary and a nonresident senior fellow at the Niskanen Center. David G. Victor is a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California, San Diego, and nonresident senior fellow at The Brookings Institution.

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NASHVILLE — I was 10 when “Brian’s Song” aired in 1971 as an ABC Movie of the Week. It is the story of the abiding friendship that grew as Brian Piccolo, who was white, and Gale Sayers, who was Black, competed for playing time as N.F.L. rookies with the Chicago Bears. It’s also the story of Piccolo’s death of cancer at 26. I was a girl in Birmingham, Ala., then “the most segregated city in America,” when “Brian’s Song” reminded this country that race was not an insurmountable barrier to love.

Of course I read “I Am Third,” the 1970 memoir by Gale Sayers from which the film was adapted, as soon as I could get my hands on it. When the bookmobile librarian suggested that I might also like “Death Be Not Proud,” John Gunther’s heart-wrenching account of his 17-year-old son’s death from a brain tumor, I devoured it too.

I was not a child obsessed with death; I simply wanted to understand how the world works. My friend Mary Laura Philpott read the same kinds of books as a child, and for the same reason.

“The more I saw and heard of the real world, the more I came to suspect there was sadness everywhere, and if I was going to live in this world, I should understand its scale and reach,” she writes in her acclaimed new book, “Bomb Shelter.”

Reading stories is a gentle way for a child to encounter the hardest truth that shadows mortal life: There are no happy endings.

“The first problem love presents us with is how to find it,” writes Kathryn Schulz in her new memoir, “Lost & Found.” “But the most enduring problem of love, which is also the most enduring problem of life, is how to live with the fact that we will lose it.” Many stories solve the first problem. Far fewer admit that the second even exists.

Books about loss tell us something about our own nature. They remind us that we belong to a species capable of carrying on when we think we can’t carry on any longer. Death is just part of how the world works. It’s part of how we ourselves work.

“No part of an embodied life is guaranteed except for death,” writes Tallu Schuyler Quinn in her new essay collection, “What We Wish Were True.” To face it — however haltingly or furiously or tearfully, or on a carousel of all those swirling feelings — is to be fully alive.

Ms. Quinn was the beloved founder of the Nashville Food Project, which addresses food insecurity. Last summer, when I wrote about her life and mission, she was working on a collection of essays drawn in part from her CaringBridge journal about living with a terminal brain cancer. Ms. Quinn died in February. The book will be published on Tuesday.

I did not know Ms. Quinn personally, but even from a distance I know that her life was a bright testament to the power of serving others. I know, too, that she could write like an angel, with poetry and humor and a bone-deep understanding of the way love and grief walk hand in hand through the world together, twinned: “As these tumors hold court in my mind and mix me up in these sad and terrible ways,” she writes, “I find shelter in new thanks and new praise and in another day — and even in how healing these salty tears taste pouring into my open mouth as I wail my thanks for this unexpected, unbelievable, boundless shelter of love.”

There are reasons to worry that a book which confronts the essential inevitability of death, especially the untimely death of a human being in love with the world, someone who never seemed to waste a minute of her one remarkable life and is heartbroken to leave it behind, will be a book many readers will fear to face.

After all, we are still in the midst of a pandemic that has taken millions of people from their loved ones. We are watching in real time as bombs fall from Ukrainian skies and Vladimir Putin’s ground forces slaughter innocent people. The hunger Ms. Quinn fought so hard to alleviate will inevitably worsen as inflation rages. In such a world, who could bear to read a book which the writer herself did not live long enough to see into print?

But the human world has always been just this tragic, just this unbearable, and the literary world has always given us reasons to understand the gifts such books can offer — not in spite of the tragedies we witness and live through, but because of them — if we don’t turn away.

We’ve all had near misses that shook us to the core: when a hydroplaning car skidded to a stop in the nick of time; when a toddler, unwatched for half a second, teetered at the top of a flight of steps but was caught just before stepping over the edge; when the scan showed a shadow that had to be a tumor but turned out to be nothing at all.

And every near miss is almost always followed by a golden time, too brief, when the futile frustrations and pointless irritations of daily life fall away, when all that’s left behind is gratitude. We are here. Our beloveds are here. How remarkable it is to be together. How full of grace the fallen world can be.

“What We Wish Were True,” like so many end-of-life memoirs that came before it, and so many others still to come, is for readers a kind of literary near-miss experience. Its beauty reminds us to linger in the grace. Its wisdom teaches us to treasure the ordinary pleasures we ought to have been treasuring all along.

“I think about everything I will miss, and what I won’t be alive to witness or experience or endure or bounce back from,” writes Ms. Quinn. “No singing show tunes in the minivan. No burnt toast with butter in the mornings. No snuggling up to watch cooking shows. No walks together circling the neighborhood we love so much.”

Whether it comes before or after we turn the last page of a book, we know the ending of every human story. “If an ending could be changed through strategic planning or force of will or the sheer love of life, things would go differently, but this cannot be changed,” Ann Patchett writes in “These Precious Days.”

It cannot be changed. The finality of that truth is breathtaking.

But “What We Wish Were True” is not a book about dying any more than “Brian’s Song” is a movie about dying. It is a book about the life of an extraordinary person. It is a book about love and gratitude and making every day an opportunity to love, a chance to decide, again and again, to keep on loving for as long as we draw breath. And, through the miracle of books, beyond it, too.

BEIJING — Faced with its worst Covid-19 outbreak yet, China has been enforcing an expanding number of mass quarantines, strict lockdowns and border controls. The measures may yet work, but official data released on Monday show they are exacting a grim toll on the world’s second-largest economy.

China’s economy expanded 4.8 percent in the first three months of this year compared to the same period last year. That pace was barely faster than the final three months of last year, and it also obscured a looming problem.

Much of that growth was recorded in January and February. Last month, economic activity slowed as Shenzhen, the technology hub in the south, and then Shanghai, the country’s biggest city, and other important industrial centers shut down. The lockdowns suspended assembly lines, grounded workers, trapped truck drivers and snarled ports. They confined hundreds of millions of consumers at home.

Retail sales, a crucial sign of whether consumers are spending, fell 3.5 percent in March from a year ago, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Monday. Factory output grew 5 percent, a rate that was slower than the pace recorded in the first two months. Imports, which had been racing ahead in the first two months of the year, fell slightly last month, partly because of transportation snags.

The slowdown that started in March is expected to worsen this month, with even more regions placed under restrictions. This is bad news for China’s leaders, who have set a target of “about 5.5 percent” growth for the year.

Premier Li Keqiang called for “a sense of urgency” a week ago in telling local officials to limit the effects of Covid shutdowns on the economy. China’s central bank acted on Friday to help commercial banks lend more to promote economic growth.

For the world, China’s Covid shutdowns could feed inflation by further disrupting the supply chains that many manufacturers rely on, pushing up the cost of making and transporting goods. A sluggish China would also import less from other nations, whether it is natural resources like oil and iron ore or consumer goods like cherries or designer handbags.

“Talking about the impact of the pandemic outlook on Shanghai and Shenzhen, we cannot forget that they are important parts of the entire supply chain and it will have certainly have an effect on the whole circle of the entire Chinese economy,” Yao Jingyuan, a former chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics who is now a cabinet adviser, said at a news conference last Wednesday.

Executives in the auto industry and tech sector, two of China’s biggest employers, have begun warning in recent days of crippling disruption to their nationwide operations if Shanghai, in particular, cannot reopen soon. The city manufactures many high-tech components that are crucial to many supply chains.

“Shanghai is a hub for international car companies — if the hub fails, the whole system won’t work,” Cui Dongshu, the secretary general of the China Passenger Car Association, said in a telephone interview.

Lockdowns Cripple Local Economies

By April 11, 87 of China’s 100 largest cities had imposed some form of restriction on movement, according to Gavekal Dragonomics, an independent economic research firm that has been tracking lockdowns. These ranged from limiting who can enter or leave a city to full lockdowns as in Shanghai, where most residents have not been allowed to leave their homes even to buy food.

Yang Degang, the manager of a factory that makes plastic molding machines in Zhangjiagang, 70 miles from Shanghai, was forced to halt operations after his town imposed a lockdown on Wednesday.

Even before the lockdown, the authorities had imposed restrictions that were preventing the movement of trucks. This meant Mr. Yang couldn’t get components on time to build his machines and could not deliver finished equipment to many factories and ports in lockdowns.

Mr. Yang said he did not know when he could reopen. “Zhangjiagang is under huge pressure,” he said. “I worry about losses, but there is no other way.”

But while more and more cities are imposing lockdowns — Taiyuan, the hub of China’s coal industry, joined the list last Thursday — the stringency of municipal lockdowns has weakened a little lately. From the end of March through last Wednesday, the number of large cities with severe lockdowns fell to six from 14, according to Gavekal. The share of China’s economic output represented by these cities shrank to 8 percent, from 14 percent.

Beijing has ordered local governments to help trucks reach their destinations and take other measures to shield the economy from harm during lockdowns. Nio, an electric carmaker in Hefei in central China, halted car assembly on April 9. Hefei was not locked down, but crucial components suppliers were in Shanghai, Jilin and elsewhere. By last Thursday, however, the company had obtained enough car parts to resume limited production.

Workers Face Difficulties

Many workers are struggling as well. Truck drivers, for example, face the constant danger of weekslong quarantines, for which they are often not paid even as interest payments on their trucks keep falling due.

Yu Yao, a truck driver who delivers vegetables and fruits from Shandong Province to Shanghai, is one of many Chinese truck drivers stranded because of ever-tightening epidemic control measures. He has been trapped in Shanghai for more than three weeks.

Mr. Yu came to Shanghai on March 16 to deliver vegetables to a market. He was still in the city three days later when the authorities identified him as a close contact of an infected person in the market. The police ordered him to be immediately quarantined. So he stopped his truck near a highway and began to wait.

He has been waiting ever since. No one has fetched him for quarantine. He lacks a travel permit now required to drive a truck in Shanghai during the lockdown. He and four other drivers without travel permits have slept on the ground and shared bread for three weeks.

“We can’t get off the highway, every exit is guarded. We just want to go home,” Mr. Yu said. “I couldn’t get enough food the other day, and my body can’t take it anymore.”

Surviving on Exports

One area of China’s economy continued to barrel along in the first three months of this year: exports. Chinese factories have grabbed a considerably larger share of world markets during the pandemic, including a jump of 14.7 percent in exports in March from a year ago. Many multinational companies continue to depend on large networks of components suppliers in China.

But as China keeps disrupting production by imposing stringent lockdowns with no warning, at least a few importers in the West are starting to look elsewhere for supplies. Jake Phipps, the founder of Phipps & Company, an American importer and distributor of home furnishings that sells to hotel and apartment developers, said that in the past two years he had been shifting many orders away from China.

He has started buying kitchen cabinets from Vietnam and Turkey, vinyl flooring from Vietnam and India and stainless steel sinks from Malaysia. China’s repeated lockdowns have delayed too many shipments, including a lockdown in part of Ningbo, near Shanghai, that delayed his shipment of plumbing supplies last month. Many customers are now wary of relying on China because of tariffs, geopolitical tensions and questions about China’s possible role in the origins of the coronavirus, he added.

“Reliability has made me move, and the comfort of customers not wanting to order from China,” Mr. Phipps said.

Li You contributed research.

It took five weeks and three attempts, but around 7 a.m. on Sunday the Ever Forward, a 1,095-foot container ship operated by the same company whose vessel blocked the Suez Canal last year, was finally freed in the Chesapeake Bay.

Loaded with nearly 5,000 containers, the Ever Forward was on its way to Norfolk, Va., from Baltimore when, according to the United States Coast Guard, it ran aground in the bay near the Craighill Channel on March 13.

“Initial reports indicated no injuries, pollution or damage to the vessel as a result of the grounding,” the agency said in a statement at the time. The ship, which became stuck about 20 miles southeast of Baltimore, was not obstructing the channel, it added.

More than two weeks later, after a week of dredging beneath the ship, the Coast Guard, together with the Maryland Department of the Environment and Evergreen Marine Corp., which owns the vessel, made its first attempt to refloat it. Their efforts were unsuccessful.

They tried again the next day, but the ship would not budge.

“Salvage experts determined they would not be able to overcome the ground force of the Ever Forward in its loaded condition,” the Coast Guard said in a statement on Sunday.

On April 4, the authorities announced a new plan: They would continue dredging the sediment to a depth of 43 feet and at the same time begin to unload the Ever Forward’s containers onto barges that would shuttle them back to Baltimore.

Once the ship’s load was lightened, tugs and pull barges would attempt another refloat as the authorities continued to monitor for pollution. A naval architect and salvage master would remotely track the ship’s stability.

This new strategy would take about two weeks, the Coast Guard said, adding that it offered “the best chance of successfully refloating the Ever Forward.”

Early on Sunday, the effort to refloat the ship at last succeeded, Petty Officer Third Class Breanna Centeno, a spokeswoman for the Coast Guard, said by phone.

In a statement, the agency said it had removed 500 containers from the ship and had dredged more than 200,000 cubic yards of material from the estuary’s bed, which would be used to offset erosion at Poplar Island, a three-mile spit of land in the Chesapeake Bay.

The ship’s grounding was a “rare occurrence,” said Capt. David O’Connell, a commander for the Coast Guard’s Maryland-National Capital region. “The vastness and complexity of this response were historic,” he added.

The Coast Guard would continue to investigate how the ship became stuck, Petty Officer Centeno said, adding that there were many possible reasons a ship could run aground.

The Ever Forward became stuck about a year after the Ever Given, one of the world’s largest container ships, was dislodged from the Suez Canal, six days after it ran aground.

The Ever Given, which is nearly a quarter of a mile long, became stuck on March 23, 2021, blocking a channel that is believed to handle about 10 percent of global commercial maritime traffic.

By the time the ship was dislodged, 367 vessels were backed up waiting to pass through the canal. The mishap was disastrous for the shipping industry, freezing nearly $10 billion in trade a day.

In a statement, William Doyle, the executive director of the Maryland Port Administration, described the task of freeing the Ever Forward as an “outstanding team effort” that was aided, he said, by “the Easter Sunday rising tide in the Chesapeake Bay.”