Author: BigGuy

PARIS (Reuters) – France registered a record 10,593 new confirmed coronavirus in the past 24 hours, health ministry data showed on Thursday, the country’s highest single-day count since the pandemic began. The rise followed a government decision to make COVID-19 tests free, leading to a surge in testing and an increase in infection rates. The previous high in 24 hours in France was 10,561 new cases, recorded on Sept. 12. The seven-day moving average of new cases – which smoothes out irregularities – rose to a high of nearly 8,800. The ministry reported that the cumulative number of cases had risen to 415,481, and the death toll had risen by 50 to 31,095, the second-highest number of new deaths in a day in two months. The government’s decision to make COVID-19 testing free has resulted in long queues at testing centres in cities and testing has increased six-fold since the peak of the first coronavirus wave. About 1.2 million tests were carried out last week, the health minister said. Data show 5.4% of tests were positive. Doctors say many tests are pointless as some people who have no symptoms, or have had no contact with people with confirmed cases, take multiple tests. “To get tested three times a week is totally delirious. Anyone can show up and say they have symptoms,” Jean-Jacques Zambrowski, a doctor and health policy lecturer at Paris Descartes university, said on BFM TV. French television showed scenes of chaos at testing centres in big cities, with people waiting hours and jostling in queues. Hundreds of workers at laboratories went on strike on Thursday over poor working conditions as the testing system buckles under the demand. The number of people being treated in hospital for COVID-19 rose by 25 to 5,844, the 19th consecutive daily increase after a low of 4,530 at the end of August, down from a mid-April high of over 32,000.

Top executives at major airlines including American Airlines Group Inc., Southwest Airlines Co. and United Airlines Holdings Inc. met Thursday with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows as the companies and their employees make a final push for more job-saving government aid. Airlines agreed not to furlough or lay off employees through the end of September in exchange for $25 billion as part of a broad pandemic relief package last spring. They hoped the funds would see them through the worst of the crisis, but six months later, travel demand is still hovering at around 30% of last year’s levels and airlines expect recovery to be rocky and slow. The restrictions of the first round of aid expire at the end of the month. Unless they receive another infusion of cash, airlines have said they would furlough tens of thousands of workers starting Oct. 1. President Trump and lawmakers in both parties have said they support providing another $25 billion in aid to airlines so they can keep paying all their workers through next March. But Congress has been unable to come to terms on a broader relief package that could include the airline funds, and time is running out. “We remain hopeful for an outcome that spares thousands of our colleagues and their families from what we regard as an avoidable fate,” American Chief Executive Doug Parker and the leaders of the airline’s unions wrote Wednesday in a joint letter to the White House, the Treasury, and Congressional leaders. American has said that some 19,000 of its employees will lose their jobs through furloughs and layoffs Oct. 1 without additional aid. Airline executives and industry lobbyists have grown more pessimistic as Democrats and Republicans in Congress have remained at an impasse over basic questions like the overall size of the next relief package. Mr. Meadows has said previously that the administration was looking into executive orders that could assist the industry, but details have been murky.More recently, there have been signs of movement. Mr. Trump, who has largely remained on the sidelines during the latest discussions, said in a tweet Wednesday that Republicans should seek a more expensive aid package — something that could bring the two sides closer to an agreement. Airlines and labor unions are continuing to plan for the possibility that no further aid is coming. Southwest Airlines has said enough employees agreed to depart on their own that it won’t need to furlough any this year. Delta Air Lines Inc. said this week that it had been able to save enough through voluntary departures, reductions in workers’ hours and other measures that it won’t cut any flight attendants, mechanics, or other front-line workers, with the exception of pilots. Currently the airline is planning to furlough over 1,900 pilots, though the company and the union are still discussing measures that could mitigate that figure. United Airlines pilots are voting on whether to accept reductions in their work schedules, which translates into lower pay, in exchange for a guarantee that all their jobs would be safe until at least June. Union leaders endorsed the proposal Wednesday and members will vote at the end of this month, just days before the first swath of furloughs is due to go into effect. “Hundreds of thousands of airline workers need the CARES Act extension, but with pilot furloughs just weeks away, we can’t wait,” Capt. Todd Insler, chairman of United’s pilots union, said in a statement.

LONDON — The Bank of England indicated Thursday that it could cut interest rates below zero for the first time in its 326-year history as it tries to shore up a U.K. economic recovery that is facing the dual headwinds of the coronavirus and Brexit. After unanimously deciding to maintain the bank’s main interest rate at the record low of 0.1%, the nine-member rate-setting Monetary Policy Committee said it had discussed its “policy toolkit, and the effectiveness of negative policy rates in particular.” In minutes accompanying the decision, the rate-setters said a recent wave of virus infections has “the potential to weigh further on economic activity, albeit probably on a lesser scale than seen earlier in the year.” Though the committee noted that recent economic data have been a “little stronger than expected” at its last meeting in early August, it said it is unclear what that says about the future “given the risks.” One clear concern relates to whether Britain, like others in Europe, will reimpose broad restrictions on businesses and public life after the recent flare-up in virus infections across the region. Already social gatherings are being restricted and certain areas of the U.K. are seeing localized lockdowns. The British economy suffered one of the deepest recessions in the world this year when many sectors were effectively mothballed to help contain the pandemic. Though it recouped some ground in the summer as lockdown restrictions were eased, the economy was still around 12% smaller at the end of July than it was in February, when the pandemic started in Europe. The other major risk facing the U.K. economy relates to the post-Brexit trade discussions between the U.K. and the EU following a worsening in relations. If the talks collapse, tariffs and other impediments to trade will be imposed by both sides at the start of 2021, a development that would hurt the U.K. more. The U.K. left the EU on Jan. 31, but is in a transition period that effectively sees it benefit from the bloc’s tariff-free trade until the end of the year while the future relationship is negotiated. With the outlook so murky, the bank was not expected to provide more stimulus on Thursday. Since the pandemic started, it has cut its main rate to a record low and boosted its bond-buying program to oil the financial market’s wheels and keep borrowing affordable. The policymaking panel said Thursday it could take further action on borrowing costs after revealing it had been briefed on how to effectively implement negative interest rates, which would seek to encourage banks to lend rather than hoard their cash. The central bank will further discussions the potential use of negative rates during the fourth quarter. Though that doesn’t necessarily mean a rate cut is likely this fall, it’s a clear signal that the bank could enact further stimulus measures. “While the Bank is clearly exploring the possibility of using negative rates as a potential tool, we doubt it will go down that path anytime soon — at any rate, not in November,” said Kallum Pickering, senior economist at Berenberg Bank. Still, financial markets interpreted the announcement as increasing the likelihood of negative rates next year, potentially in the event of the U.K. and the EU failing to agree on a trade deal. The pound fell 0.7% to $1.2884. Most economists think the bank will boost its bond-buying stimulus program in November. By then, unemployment across the U.K. is expected to be rising sharply as a government salary support program will have come to an end. The Job Retention Scheme, under which the government pays the bulk of the salaries of workers that firms keep on rather than fire, has kept a lid on unemployment. However, it ends on Oct. 31, a change that most economists think will more or less double the U.K.’s unemployment to around 8% from 4.1% at present.

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PARIS (Reuters) – France registered a record 10,593 new confirmed coronavirus in the past 24 hours, health ministry data showed on Thursday, the country’s highest single-day count since the pandemic began. The rise followed a government decision to make COVID-19 tests free, leading to a surge in testing and an increase in infection rates.The previous high in 24 hours in France was 10,561 new cases, recorded on Sept. 12. The seven-day moving average of new cases – which smoothes out irregularities – rose to a high of nearly 8,800. The ministry reported that the cumulative number of cases had risen to 415,481, and the death toll had risen by 50 to 31,095, the second-highest number of new deaths in a day in two months. The government’s decision to make COVID-19 testing free has resulted in long queues at testing centres in cities and testing has increased six-fold since the peak of the first coronavirus wave. About 1.2 million tests were carried out last week, the health minister said. Data show 5.4% of tests were positive. Doctors say many tests are pointless as some people who have no symptoms, or have had no contact with people with confirmed cases, take multiple tests. “To get tested three times a week is totally delirious. Anyone can show up and say they have symptoms,” Jean-Jacques Zambrowski, a doctor and health policy lecturer at Paris Descartes university, said on BFM TV. French television showed scenes of chaos at testing centres in big cities, with people waiting hours and jostling in queues. Hundreds of workers at laboratories went on strike on Thursday over poor working conditions as the testing system buckles under the demand.The number of people being treated in hospital for COVID-19 rose by 25 to 5,844, the 19th consecutive daily increase after a low of 4,530 at the end of August, down from a mid-April high of over 32,000.

United States COVID-19 Cases and Deaths by State

It seems clear now that Covid-19 will take a place in world history, a seismic event of the twenty-first century whose effects will only be fully understood over many years, even decades. What also seems clear is that the United States-China relationship will change — indeed, must change. The question is how, and along what lines. Among Americans, anger at China runs high. American voters may, in the short term, choose to blame the Trump administration at the polls in November 2020; in the long term, whomever they vote for, most Americans understand that China is responsible for a global catastrophe that could have been greatly minimized or even averted entirely had Beijing simply told the truth about it from the beginning. No number of missteps, from often-bungling Western governments, can disguise Beijing’s fundamental culpability. Recent polls in the United States suggest that Americans understand this — overwhelming majorities blame China for causing this disaster. Moreover, the coronavirus has darkened Americans’ views of China more broadly. A Pew poll showed two-thirds of American respondents now view China negatively. American policymakers — regardless of whether they are part of a Trump or Joe Biden administration in 2021 — will have to respond to the American people’s darkening view of China. Even the most devout China apologists — and their numbers are legion in the federal government, in the private sector, and in the American media — will have to recognize that the coronavirus has ripped the curtain down on Beijing’s masquerade as a responsible member of the global community. China’s refusal to take responsibility for the virus has revealed the true character of the Communist regime even for those who had not been willing to acknowledge the obvious before. If U.S. officials, of either party, hope genuinely to serve the American national interest, then we’re going to see changes in the years ahead. Some of those changes are already afoot. The Trump administration has cut investment ties, for example, between U.S. federal retirement funds and Chinese equities. The move affects about $4 billion in assets. Meantime, U.S. lawmakers, in tandem with Canadian counterparts and Indian attorneys, are pursuing various legal actions, including reparations, against China for inflicting the coronavirus on the world, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions, if not trillions, in economic damage. Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee has sponsored a Senate resolution calling on Beijing to forgive some of its holdings of American debt. Private American citizens have filed lawsuits against China seeking damages, including a $20 trillion class-action suit in Texas. Beijing will pay no heed to Blackburn’s gesture, and the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act will almost surely protect it against citizen claims, but these actions indicate the resentment against China felt by large portions of the American public. Some China observers, such as Gordon Chang, argue that the United States should retaliate by seizing China’s holdings of U.S. Treasury obligations — but only in tandem with our allies and issuers of other major currencies. “If we act alone,” Chang argues, “China is going to say that we repudiated our debt. We’re going to take a reputational hit, which is going to be a big one… they’re going to say that we are an irresponsible member of the global financial system, and that the dollar shouldn’t be the reserve currency of the world.” But if the U.S. acts in concert with allies, then “we can take away that argument from China.” The anger extends far beyond Washington’s shores. India’s bar association, in tandem with the International Council of Jurists (ICJ), is appealing to the United Nations Human Rights Council for compensation from China for “surreptitiously developing a biological weapon capable of mass destruction.” The ICJ’s president called Covid-19 a “crime against humanity,” caused by China, which has “deliberately concealed crucial information about coronavirus.” He asked the UN to “enquire and direct China and to adequately compensate international community and member states, particularly India, for surreptitiously developing a biological weapon capable of mass destruction of mankind.” He further alleged that China had exploited the virus with the intention of controlling the global economy and taking advantage of countries weakened by the virus and facing economic collapse.

United States President Donald Trump stated on Wednesday that the WIDE distribution of the first coronavirus vaccine could start in mid-October or “maybe a little bit later.” He added that the US could supply at least 100,000,000 doses by the end of the year, as well as that all the necessary supplies for vaccination had been manufactured. Trump contradicted the Center for Disease Control Director Robert Redfield, who said in his testimony to Congress that it would take six to nine months before a vaccine could be distributed nationally. Trump repeatedly speculated that Redfield “misunderstood the question” when he was asked about vaccine distribution. The president launched another attack on his opponent, Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, alleging that he “promotes anti-vaccine theories.” He called on states with Democratic governors to “open them up,” claiming that the measures against the coronavirus were “hurting people far more than the disease itself.”

(Bloomberg) — New York City officials know Covid-19 cases will climb this fall. The question they are watching as the city moves to reopen is, just how much? For months, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been working with academic groups at Columbia University and New York University. The academic teams have been asked to model case numbers, help predict needed hospital resources and to advise the city on how to open up workplaces, schools, restaurants and more. The disclosure Tuesday of a Covid-19 case at the New York offices of JPMorgan Chase & Co. is likely just the latest example of what will happen as businesses push to get workers back to the office, and people begin going back to school and returning to restaurants and gyms. In interviews, experts from two academic groups working with New York described what’s likely to be a significant increase in cases this fall, but with the opportunity to stop the worst with careful public-health measures like masks and social distancing. “If you do these types of phased reopenings, there are going to be certain increases in transmission activity,” Columbia University’s Jeff Shaman, who is part of a team working with the city to predict the path of the outbreak. “Every model will tell you you’re going to see increases in cases.” The city is likewise planning for a resurgence, according to a top adviser to the mayor, while trying to restore as much normal business as possible. “Even independent of having any mathematical backing for this, we have been planning around the assumption that there will be resurgences of this infection,” said Jay Varma, senior advisor for public health in the New York City Mayor’s Office. That likely means continued social distancing practices, mask-wearing and limited capacity, said Scott Braithwaite, a professor at NYU’s Grossman School of Medicine who has led the other academic effort advising the city. “Forget about normalcy,” Braithwaite said in a telephone interview. “If things were back to normal, quote unquote, and we weren’t social distancing we weren’t wearing masks, a hundred people coming in one day could restart a disastrous wave.” The infection at JPMorgan’s 383 Madison Ave. building came a week after workers began returning following the Labor Day holiday, and shortly before a deadline for senior traders to come back to their desks. The bank, which has been among the most aggressive in pulling people back to the office, has now sent some Manhattan workers home, Bloomberg reported Tuesday. The decision was an echo of steps taken by workplaces around the city when cases first started expanding in the spring.

While JPMorgan has moved ahead, Americans have expressed caution about reopening too quickly. A September Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that an even number of Americans thought the worst of the outbreak was yet to come, versus already behind them. The poll split along party lines, with Democrats being more pessimistic. The groups at Columbia and NYU began working with the city at the start of the outbreak. In weekly meetings, they’ve helped project how many hospital beds would be needed, how many cases were likely happening despite limited testing, and what the coming weeks would hold. The Columbia team has been led by Wan Yang, an epidemiology professor, and Shaman, the director of the climate and health program at the university’s Mailman School of Public Health. The work was confidential at first, Shaman said, but the researchers pushed the city to allow them to discuss it publicly. “People have a right to see this,” Shaman said. One of the Columbia models, released in June as the city was beginning to reopen, predicted tens of thousands of additional hospitalizations by the end of the year, though the estimates vary widely based on how quickly services were opened and how effective public-health measures are. “It’s inherently crude. We just don’t know the nuance of what’s going to happen,” Shaman said. “You open up more, you’re getting it worse.” Varma said the models have been useful in decision-making, but aren’t to be taken as hard estimates. “Infectious-disease models are not really designed to predict the future,” Varma said. “What they’re designed to do is to give you information to help you change the future.” New York City is currently reporting around two hundred new cases a day, according to the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. That’s likely only a portion of the actual infections, though the number has been coming steadily down since a peak of more than 5,000 cases a day in April. The city is also testing in schools. As of Monday, the city had found 55 positive Covid-19 cases out of 17,000 school teachers and staff who had been tested, for a positivity rate of 0.32%, Mayor Bill de Blasio said during a Monday news briefing. The city has been weighing how to get people back to their regular lives, while also limiting new cases, Varma said. Across the border in New Jersey, the state this month reported a rise in cases as it has reopened indoor dining, theaters and prepared to bring children back to school. Social-distancing measures play a crucial role, said Braithwaite. Early on in the outbreak, his group built models under two scenarios, one in which people followed public health guidelines and social distancing measures, and one in which they didn’t. “Under that scenario, we were having hundreds of thousands of deaths in New York City. And under the scenario where people did pay attention to social distancing, you were having tens of thousands of deaths,” he said. So far, there have been 27,750 confirmed and probable Covid-19 deaths in New York City, according to the health department. “We are presenting data to them that are suggesting this is problematic,” he said, though he noted the city was engaged in a very difficult balancing act between controlling cases, and reopening schools and preventing businesses from going bankrupt. Reopening is good for the city, but it’s also good for the virus, Shaman said: “There’s a huge potential for growth, even in a place like New York City, because 75% to 85% of the population has yet to be infected.”