Your daily COVID-19 update

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “They are dithering.” — Pub owner Michael Belben, about the British government, which has yet to unveil the distancing measures for traditionally crowded gathering spaces that could decide the future of many pubs.

The number of Canadians infected with COVID-19 has passed 102,000, while 8,400 people have died. Worldwide, nine million people have been infected and 470,000 have died.

The patios of Toronto’s vibrant restaurant scene are going to be packed on Wednesday, when the city, as well as neighbouring Peel Region, moves to stage two of the province’s economic reopening plan. In addition, residents can finally get professionals to fix their homemade COVID-19 haircuts.

Worried about going to the store to pick up milk or going for a hike on a popular trail? The Toronto Star has experts rank 29 mundane activities by their COVID-19 risk.

The 100-year-old Maryland Baptist Aged Home in West Baltimore, Md., has had no coronavirus infections. Its director locked down the facility in late February immediately after “President Trump said we had 15 cases and it would soon be down to zero,” Rev. Derrick DeWitt told the Baltimore Sun.

The city of Miami just mandated that its residents wear masks in public as the number of new cases of COVID-19 soars. While mask usage has turned into a political issue in the United States, “a growing number of scientific studies support the idea that masks are a critical tool in curbing the spread of the coronavirus,” Maria Godoy writes in a detailed article for National Public Radio.

Knowing how to successfully manage case clusters of COVID-19 is a growing concern for health experts and the public alike as regions everywhere try to reopen their societies and economies. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has compiled a huge database of some 230-plus clusters, which researchers are using to draw lessons from, Science News reports. The trends, however preliminary, are interesting: indoor settings, in particular households, dominate as the most common places for transmission.

Your moment of Zen: watching an expert shape flowers, animals and all things cute and adorable out of…I’m honestly not sure what the substance is, perhaps a version of Play-Doh or a moldable icing. It’s so mesmerizing, the details don’t seem to matter.

—Patricia Treble

As of the latest update, this is the number of confirmed cases in Canada. We're updating this chart every day.