LISBON — Portugal will test 500 asylum seekers for the coronavirus and move some into apartments left empty by tourists, after an outbreak at an immigrant hostel last week prompted scrutiny of overcrowded conditions that could lead to contagion.

Portugal is housing 800 asylum seekers in hostels across the country while they wait for their applications to be processed. A single case at one hostel in Lisbon last week prompted all 175 residents to be tested, revealing that 138 had contracted the virus.

The Ministry of Internal Affairs said on Sunday it was planning to “take advantage of the reduced pressure on the housing market in the capital” to move some asylum seekers to hostels and apartments left empty because of the lack of tourists this summer.

Applications for asylum increased in Portugal nearly threefold in the past five years to 1,716 in 2019.

The Council for Refugees (CPR), responsible for housing people while their applications are being processed, has capacity for just 150, and puts up the remaining applicants in hostels or social housing.

CPR head Monica Farinha told Reuters she was concerned that the conditions of the hostels, with several people to a room, meant there was a high risk of contagion.

Health minister Marta Temido said on Sunday that a study of nearly 3,000 of the country’s 23,864 cases indicated that co-habitation and contagion in concentrated spaces such as care homes and the Lisbon hostel were the top causes of transmission of the disease.

The country is preparing to ease a lockdown imposed on March 18 and currently in place until May 2, but the health minister urged people to remember that social distancing measures would need to continue to avoid a resurgence in cases. — Reuters

TOM Barrack said the US property market is in “chaos” and still on the verge of collapse because the federal government and local authorities are allowing renters and homeowners to skip payments because of the coronavirus.

“We haven’t had a crisis like this,” Mr. Barrack, chief executive officer of Colony Capital, Inc., said in an interview Friday on Bloomberg Television. “We’ve never had one where we just have a government taking of revenue.”

The stimulus bill passed by Congress last month included a provision allowing borrowers to defer payments for as long as a year without penalty on federally backed mortgages. At the same time, cities and states throughout the country have suspended evictions and foreclosures to help the tens of millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs.

Normally, lenders and landlords can use the legal system to enforce rent and interest obligations, but “all those options are out the window,” Mr. Barrack said.

A month ago, Mr. Barrack, 72, was among the first big real estate investors to warn publicly about the perilous state of the industry and to call for government intervention. He proposed an orchestrated forbearance, a “time out” in which any payments could be accrued onto leases and loans.

Many of the measures he sought then, including market liquidity from the Federal Reserve and delays in new accounting rules, were adopted. Others, such as a halt on margin calls by banks and a suspension of mark-to-market requirements on financing arrangements, weren’t.

Federal efforts such as the Paycheck Protection Program and Main Street Lending Program are “difficult to utilize” for companies like Colony, which is structured as a real estate investment trust, Mr. Barrack said.

“We’re not using those,” he said. “We’re encouraging many of our borrowers and our users to rely on whatever subsidies they can get to continue to make their payments.”

Colony’s real estate portfolio was valued at almost $50 billion as of Dec. 31. Mr. Barrack said its digital infrastructure investments — cell towers, data-storage facilities and fiber-optic networks — are holding up best. Retail and hospitality assets are the worst performers.

In April, the number of Colony tenants who made rent payments was “amazingly good,” dropping only 3% to 5% from normal levels, Mr. Barrack said. He expects fewer will remain current next month.

Mr. Barrack, who first saw property prices collapse during the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, predicted that big companies like Colony, which he said still has “plenty of liquidity,” will survive the recession and real estate shakeout.

“The people who’ll be crushed are the people who own the equity, the people who own bonds and debt, the pensioners,” he said. “At the end of the day, the government is going to have to step in and subsidize it all if people don’t go back to work.” — Bloomberg