Author: BigGuy

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TSA screened 2 million travelers on Friday of Memorial Day Weekend

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screened nearly 2 million travelers Friday heading into the Memorial Day weekend, a sign that more Americans are beginning to travel as coronavirus vaccines become more widespread.

TSA spokesperson Alexa Lopez confirmed that 1.96 million passengers, airport workers and aircrew were screened Friday and that the agency was “creeping up to 2 million.” The figure marks the highest number of passengers screened during the Covid-19 pandemic.

The influx of passengers comes as traveling starts to rebound after over a year of decline during the coronavirus pandemic. More than 1.5 million people traveled through U.S. airports in March — the first time since the beginning of the pandemic that air travel had reached that level. Travel is expected to continue to rise as vaccines become more widespread in the U.S. “We’re very excited about the reemergence of travel, the chance for Americans to reunite with family and friends whom they haven’t seen for some time. … There’s going to be a tremendous amount of people traveling this weekend,” Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said. “Patience is required.”Figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) updated Friday showed that over half of the total U.S. population has received at least one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine. The CDC said earlier this month that people who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19 are not required to wear masks in most settings, both indoors and outdoors. However, the TSA has announced that the federal mask mandate for all transportation networks, including on airplanes, in airports, on buses and on rail systems, would be extended through September.

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Vietnam identifies new, highly transmissible variant of coronavirus

https://youtu.be/OvKxFUDF8DI

Vietnam has detected a new, highly transmissible variant of the coronavirus, the Vietnamese Health Ministry announced Saturday. The variant, which is believed to have spurred a recent wave of COVID-19 infections in the country, has a mix of characteristics from both the strains first found in the United Kingdom and India, according to VnExpress, an international newspaper. Specifically, Health Minister Nguyen Thanh Long said the new variant is a version of the one first found in India with mutations that originally belonged to the U.K. variant, according to the news outlet. The new variant is highly contagious when spread through the air, and Long said viral cultures revealed the virus was able to replicate very quickly. “The Ministry of Health would announce the new coronavirus variant on the global genome map,” Long said, according to VnExpress. The variant has yet to be named. The news from Vietnam comes as India continues to struggle after the coronavirus overwhelmed hospitals and created a dearth of medical supplies in the country. In a potential sign of a coming reprieve, Reuters reported Saturday that the South Asian country has seen a decrease in cases for the first time in 45 days. India reported 173,790 new coronavirus infections in the last 24 hours. However, the wire service noted, the death toll rose to 3,617. The Indian variant, B.1.617, is thought to be the main cause of an explosion of cases in the country. U.S health officials, including the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Anthony Fauci, said coronavirus vaccines are effective against the Indian variant. It remains unclear if a vaccine will stand up to the new variant announced by health officials in Vietnam.

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Wrong to say tens of thousands died unnecessarily from COVID, UK minister says

The number of coronavirus deaths in the UK would have been halved if lockdown had been introduced a week earlier, a former government adviser has said.

Prof Neil Ferguson, whose advice was crucial to the decision to go into lockdown, said the outbreak had been doubling in size every three or four days before measures had been taken. The prime minister said it was still too early to make such a judgement. “We will have to look back on all of it and learn the lessons that we can.”

Boris Johnson added: “A lot of these things are still premature. This epidemic has a long way to go.”

‘Limited information on virus’

Chief scientific officer Sir Patrick Vallance said important questions about the measures taken “still needed to be addressed”.

The UK’s chief medical adviser, Prof Chris Whitty, said looking back at “how we improve on what we do” was routine. “Part of the problem… at that stage is that we had very limited information about this virus,” he added. In the UK, lockdown began on 23 March. The number of people known to have died with coronavirus in the UK stands at 41,128. Prof Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told a committee of MPs: “Had we introduced lockdown measures a week earlier, we would have reduced the final death toll by at least a half.

“So whilst I think the measures, given what we knew about this virus then, in terms of its transmission, were warranted… certainly had we introduced them earlier, we would have seen many fewer deaths.” Prof Ferguson, who resigned as a government adviser last month after allegedly breaching lockdown rules, indicated many lives in care homes could have been saved.

“We made the rather optimistic assumption that somehow the elderly would be shielded,” be said.

But “that simply failed to happen”. Prof Ferguson said the government’s Scientific Advisory Group on Emergencies (Sage) had “anticipated in theory” the risk to people living in care homes. And it had been discussed in meetings as early as February. But the “only way you can really protect care homes is to do extensive testing to make sure it doesn’t get in”. And more was now understood about how the virus was transmitted, Care home workers often worked at more than one facility and might be spreading infection between residences, for example. Coronavirus was growing “exponentially” in February and March.

Scientists have told BBC News an estimated 100,000 people were being infected every day in England by the time it went into lockdown.

Introducing measures a week earlier would have significantly cut that figure and in turn saved lives. Why this did not happen is one of the major questions about the government’s handling of this pandemic. It is far easier to look back than to make the decision in the moment. There was a lack of information and the scale of the outbreak within the UK was not clear. But other scientists were making the case for the UK to go into lockdown weeks before it happened. Discussing the timing of the lockdown on BBC Radio 4’s More or Less programme, mathematician Kit Yates said there had been an “overreliance” on certain models when determining how fast the epidemic had been doubling. “Some members of [pandemic modelling group] SPI-M have communicated their concerns to me that some of the modelling groups had more influence over the consensus decisions than others,” he said. This meant “some opinions or estimates that may have been valid didn’t get passed on up the chain.

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Inflation questions keep stocks in check

LONDON/SYDNEY (Reuters) – World stocks were pinned down on Thursday as investors awaited U.S. data expected to offer clues on inflation, with further pressures widely seen as sparking a scaling back of central banks’ giant stimulus packages. The Euro STOXX 600 lost 0.2%, with German shares down 0.5% and London’s main index making slim losses. France gained 0.1%. Losses of around 0.2% in energy stocks were offset by 1.2% gains in the mining sector, while British bank HSBC gained 0.1% after a move to exit U.S. retail banking to focus on Asia. Wall Street futures gauges pointed to losses of around 0.2%. In focus was U.S. gross domestic product and jobless claims numbers expected later in the day. Investors also held back major bets before the monthly U.S. personal consumption report, due on Friday. “We still believe inflation will not be transient, but will persist – this is where I think we differ with central banks,” said Jeremy Gatto, a portfolio manager at Unigestion.

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Fed will act if upward inflation pressure persists – Clarida Wall Street closes mixed as rebound stalls

Fed will act if upward inflation pressure persists – Clarida

Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida on Wednesday said it may take longer to reopen the economy than it did to shut it down during the coronavirus pandemic and his concerns range from the possibility of both higher inflation and weaker employment than economists expect. The Fed has been hit by two major data surprises. Last Friday’s weaker-than-expected April job report and Wednesday’s hotter-than-expected April consumer prices. In a discussion with the National Association for Business Economics, Clarida said he was surprised by the strength of the government report that showed the consumer price index jumped 0.8% in April. As the economy reopens, “we could have more persistent imbalances between aggregate demand and supply that would put more persistent upward pressure on inflation than we and outside forecasts expect,” Clarida said Wednesday after the inflation data was published. If stronger demand relative to supply persisted and pushed up inflation higher than the Fed’s stable 2% target, the central bank would not hesitate to act, he said.

He said he still expects price gains as the economy reopens to be one-time price increases with temporary effects on inflation.

“I expect inflation to return to – or perhaps run somewhat above – our 2% longer-run goal in 2022 and 2023,” he said. This would fit under the Fed’s new policy framework, he noted. After looking at the details of the April job report published last Friday, Clarida said was concerned about the immediate prospects for job growth.

“The near-term outlook for the labor market appears to be more uncertain than the outlook for activity,” Clarida said.

The labor market added 266,000 jobs in April, well below market expectations of one million new jobs. There is a “necessary rebalancing of labor supply and demand, he said. What this means for wage and price dynamics “will depend importantly on the pace of the recovery in labor force participation as well as the extent to which there are post-pandemic mismatches between labor demand and supply in specific sectors of the economy and how long any such imbalances persist,” he said. Clarida said that employment remains 8.2 million below its pre-pandemic peak. “At the recent pace of payroll gains – roughly 500,000 per month over the past three months – it would take until August 2022 to restore employment to its pre-pandemic level,” Clarida said. The Fed has been buying $120 billion of assets, along with keeping its policy rate close to zero, to support the economy. Fed officials have said they want to see “substantial further progress” in their two goals of full employment and stable 2% average inflation before cutting back on the pace of purchases. Clarida said it would likely take “some time” for this benchmark to be reached, giving no hint that he wants to start a formal discussion of when it would be appropriate to start to taper asset purchases. Is it time to taper, Clarida was asked. “Not yet,” he answered. “It is fair to say, sitting here in the middle of May, we have not made substantial progress towards our labor market objectives,” Clarida said. “We need to recognize that there is a fair amount of noise right now and that it will be prudent and appropriate to gather more evidence before we make that judgement,” he added.

Wall Street closes mixed as rebound stalls

Major stock markets on Wall Street closed mixed on Tuesday following a tumultuous trading session. Earlier, big tech companies erased gains recorded through the day, with Amazon coming under fire following the announcement that Washington DC was suing it over antitrust issues. Meanwhile, Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Richard Clarida stated that the Fed would react if the upward inflation pressure, caused by the country’s reopening, continued. The Dow Jones closed with a decrease of 0.24%, with Merck & Co losing 1.99%. The Nasdaq 100 ended the session 0.12% in the green, as Moderna rose by 3.10%. The S&P 500 was down 0.21%, with Seagate Technology Holdings plc declining 4.74%.

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U.S. consumer confidence holds steady; housing showing strain as prices surge

https://youtu.be/2UOHmq6XBMI

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. consumer confidence hovered at a 14-month high in May as optimism about job prospects tempered concerns about rising inflation and diminishing government financial support. Though the survey from the Conference Board on Tuesday suggested the pace of economic growth remained robust in the second quarter, the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic recession, which started in February 2020, is bumpy. The housing market, one of the star performers, is showing signs of fatigue, with new single-family homes sales dropping in April amid a dearth of properties, which is boosting prices at the fastest pace in more than 15 years. The Conference Board said its consumer confidence index slipped to a reading of 117.2 this month from 117.5 in April, the highest level since February 2020. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index at 119.2. Effective May, the Conference Board switched to an online from a mail survey. Data from January through April was revised to reflect the results of the online survey. The dip mirrored other sentiment surveys, which were pulled down by worries that rising inflation would erode consumers’ purchasing power. Consumers’ expectations for the future may be less bright because the tailwind from Americans spending their $1,400 stimulus checks could be fading. Earlier this month, the Commerce Department reported that retail sales in the U.S. flattened out in April after soaring in March, when many Americans received those government checks and boosted their spending. Economists have said that rising confidence should bolster overall economic growth as consumers, who account for 70% of economic activity, spend more as lockdown restrictions are eased or abandoned altogether in many places. Recent government data shows that the nation’s gross domestic product — its total output of goods and services — is expected to continue to rise. Following a 4.3% gain in the fourth quarter of 2020, the government’s first estimate of the January-March quarter came in at a brisk 6.4% annual rate. Some economists expect even bigger growth in the current April-June quarter — an annual pace of 10% or more — driven by a surge in people traveling, shopping, dining out and resuming their pre-pandemic spending habits.

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First COVID-19 patients in Wuhan were hospitalized

US intelligence report found that several researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology fell ill in November 2019 and had to be hospitalized, a new detail about the severity of their symptoms that could fuel further debate about the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, according to two people briefed on the intelligence. A State Department fact sheet released by the Trump administration in January said that the researchers had gotten sick in autumn 2019 but did not go as far as to say they had been hospitalized. China reported to the World Health Organization that the first patient with Covid-like symptoms was recorded in Wuhan on December 8, 2019. The Wall Street Journal first reported on the intelligence surrounding the earlier hospitalizations. Importantly, the intelligence community still does not know what the researchers were actually sick with, said the people briefed, and continues to have low confidence in its assessments of the virus’ precise origins beyond the fact that it came from China. “At the end of the day, there is still nothing definitive,” said one of the people who has seen the intelligence. #Covid19 #CNN #News
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AstraZeneca’s COVID vaccine slightly less effective against variant found in India, CEO tells FT

(Reuters) – AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine was slightly less effective against the variant first found in India than the strain identified in Kent, the company’s Chief Executive Officer Pascal Soriot said in an interview with Financial Times on Friday. He added the company is in talks with governments, including the United Kingdom, about new contracts for booster doses.

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ECB’s Lagarde: Inflation rise only temporary

European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde stated on Friday that the inflation rises this year are only temporary and that it would go back to pre-pandemic levels in 2022.Speaking at a press conference following the Eurogroup meeting in Lisbon, Lagarde also noted that she believes the European economy was in a recovery process but remained cautious saying that it was still uncertain. Additionally, she noted that given this uncertainty “coordinated policies will continue to be needed for months to come,” adding that the ECB should “see through the period of higher inflation.” Lagarde also commented that the central bank was closely monitoring the rise that has been seen in yields and that they remain committed to preserving favourable conditions, but noted that it was “too early to debate long term issues, too early to ask medium-to-long-term questions.”