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At a time when showrunners have been elevated to TV auteurs, Alan Yang has earned a reputation as a reliably good writer and creator of comedies for NBC and the major streaming networks. Coming up with Michael Schur (The Good Place), his partner on the late, lamented baseball blog 'Fire Joe Morgan," Yang was a writer on Parks & Recreation, an experience he and Aziz Ansari parlayed into two seasons of the Netflix series Master of None.

Get the latest on Alaska's primary races for president, Senate and House.

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The European Union's finance ministers have reached a deal on a 540 billion-euro rescue plan (about $590 billion) to support the continent's coronavirus-stricken economies.

The Eurogroup, which consists of the 19 finance ministers representing the EU's eurozone countries, approved the rescue package on Thursday after the Netherlands backtracked on its demand for economic reform and oversight.

On this broadcast of The National Conversation, we'll answer your questions on the latest unemployment numbers, efforts to flatten the curve and the number of COVID-19 cases.

The Department of Health and Human Services is stepping back from a plan to end support on Friday for community-based coronavirus testing sites around the country.

Instead the agency says local authorities can choose whether they want to transition to running the programs themselves or continue with federal oversight and help.

The number of patients being treated at overflow hospitals in New York City has more than doubled in the last two days, the Department of Defense says.

On Thursday, military doctors and nurses were treating 189 patients at the overflow hospital at the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, including 15 patients who are being treated in an intensive care unit inside the facility. The Navy hospital ship, the U.S.N.S. Comfort, currently has 53 patients, including 10 who are critically ill with COVID-19.

On Tuesday, the two facilities had fewer than 100 patients combined.

Amid growing concerns about military readiness, a sailor from the coronavirus-sidelined aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt became the first crew member to be hospitalized in intensive care in Guam Thursday. He is one of more than 400 of the ship's sailors who have tested positive for COVID-19.

Last week All Things Considered kicked off our new musical chain of gratitude series Play It Forward with Dan Snaith, who records as Caribou. He told us why he's grateful for a musician named Glenn Copeland, who is today's link in the chain.

Updated at 7:30 p.m.

President Trump said more oil producers are "getting close to a deal" to try to put a floor under prices as demand for energy plummets amid the global pandemic.

Trump said at his daily coronavirus briefing on Thursday that he'd just finished a conference call with the leaders of Saudi Arabia and Russia and that he hoped they'd agree on a cut or another solution that would stabilize the cost per barrel.

Thomas E. Lo is an anesthesiologist who works at Montefiore Nyack Hospital in New York. Since the coronavirus outbreak, his job has gotten dangerous.

"The exposure risk as an anesthesiologist is extremely high because when we intubate a patient, we are literally less than a foot away from the patient, who is in distress, and we're right by their airway, which is where the virus is," Lo tells All Things Considered.

And that exposure risk is made worse by widespread shortages of crucial personal protective equipment, or PPE, like masks, gowns and gloves.

The worst outbreaks of COVID-19 so far have been in colder parts of the Northern Hemisphere during winter or early spring. Will warmer weather slow the transmission?

Could the Southern Hemisphere see outbreaks intensify as that part of the globe moves into winter?

And is it possible that transmission might be naturally interrupted as it is each year for the seasonal flu?

These are some of the key questions about COVID-19 that scientists are trying to answer.

On Thursday, New York's Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts announced that it was canceling all of the summer performances and activities it presents, including three signature, extended series: a three-week outdoor dance party with live bands called Midsummer Night Swing, the classical music-focused Mostly Mozart Festival and the artistically wide-ranging, multi-week festival called Lincoln Center Out of Doors.

Richard Teitelbaum, an electronic artist, keyboardist and composer who combined an interest in non-western musical languages with a focus on experimental practice, died on Thursday at HealthAlliance Hospital in Kingston, N.Y. His wife, the classical pianist Hiroko Sakurazawa, said the cause was a major stroke. He was 80.

It's never a good portent when a stranger arrives at your door with a hammer hidden behind his back. That's how Matvei (Aleksandr Kuznetsov) greets his girlfriend's father, Andrei (Vitaliy Khaev), at the opening of Why Don't You Just Die! Matvei's intentions are pretty evident, but would have been even more obvious if this exuberant black comedy's English title were a literal translation of the Russian one: Papa, Die!

California is releasing thousands of inmates early due to the pandemic without adequate transportation, support services or housing once they get out, statewide prison advocates and reentry service providers say.

"Absolutely do not stop folks from coming home, but we need realistic resources," says London Croudy, with Legal Services for Prisoners with Children, a nonprofit that advocates for inmates' rights and the formerly incarcerated. "We want to be there for these folks, but we need help!"

In a remarkably prophetic report last summer, the Federal Emergency Management Agency accurately predicted that a nationwide pandemic would result in a shortage of medical supplies, hospitals would be overwhelmed and the economy would shut down.

The warnings were contained in the 2019 National Threat and Hazard Identification and Risk Assessment, published last July. Its existence was first reported by E&E News.