A Fort Smith, Arkansas, concert venue grudgingly said it would delay a country music show that it had scheduled for Friday, days before coronavirus restrictions in the state would allow it.

TempleLive will instead seek to have the Travis McCready show moved to Monday, when some indoor events can begin to be held. The move came after the governor said a cease-and-desist letter would be issued and after a venue official said the state alcohol commission "ripped our permits and licenses off the wall."

"It doesn't feel like America to me," Mike Brown of TempleLive said at a news conference. He said the venue will apply to move the show to Monday "against our will."

Gov. Asa Hutchinson noted that the show was scheduled for three days before indoor events would be permitted. "You can’t just arbitrarily determine when the restrictions are lifted," he said. 

The Arkansas Department of Health directive requires a plan to be approved for indoor events with 50 people or more. 

The event had been announced in late April. Brown said that churches had been allowed to open and they wanted to be treated the same as other places now permitted. "At the end of the day we fought the law and the laws won," he said.

BEIJING — China has gone a month without announcing any new deaths from the coronavirus.

The National Health Commission reported four new cases of the virus Friday, all local cross-infections in the northeastern province of Jilin where a cluster of uncertain origin has been detected in recent days. The last time the commission reported a death was on April 14.

Just 91 people remain in treatment for COVID-19 and 623 others are under isolation and monitoring for being suspected cases or for having tested positive without showing symptoms, including 11 newly detected.

In total, China has reported 4,633 deaths among 82,933 cases since the virus was first detected late last year in the central city of Wuhan.

China has maintained social distancing and bans on foreigners entering the country, but has increasingly opened up the world’s second-largest economy to allow both large factories and small businesses to resume production and dealings with customers. The government plans to hold the ceremonial parliament’s annual session later this month, but with highly limited access for journalists and others.

The massive Mall of America in Minnesota announced Thursday that it will begin reopening June 1 after being closed because the coronavirus epidemic.

Not all stores in the mall, which is in Bloomington south of Minneapolis, will reopen on that date, the mall said in a statement. Dining and attractions will remain closed pending further guidance from state officials.

Gov. Tim Walz this week announced that his stay-at-home order expires Monday and that he would replace it with an order allowing retail as long as stores enforce social distancing and stay at 50 percent capacity or less. 

The June 1 date will allow companies to rehire staff and prepare cleaning and other safety measures, the mall said. The mall covers 5.6 million square feet. Under normal circumstances, the mall says that it has around 40 million visitors each year.

Minnesota has seen more than 13,400 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, with at least 663 deaths, according to the state health department.

The most comprehensive national study to date has found that convalescent plasma appears to be safe to use on COVID-19 patients, a promising development in the race to find a treatment for the deadly virus. But the study didn't determine whether the treatment works.

A team of more than 5,000 doctors from over 2,000 hospitals and laboratories have been testing the experimental therapy, which involves transfusing the antibody-rich blood serum of recovered COVID-19 patients into people who are battling the illness.

Of the 5,000 seriously ill patients who received blood plasma transfusions for the study, fewer than 1 percent experienced serious adverse events. The mortality rate seven days after treatment was 14.9 percent, but the researchers noted the infusion patients were already gravely ill and the rate "does not appear excessive."

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