Without an effective therapy or a vaccine for the novel coronavirus, the U.S. economy could face 18 months of rolling shutdowns as the outbreak recedes and flares up again, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari said. “We’re looking around the world. As they relax the economic controls, the virus flares back up again,” Kashkari said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Kashkari is a voter in 2020 on the Fed’s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee.
“We could have these waves of flareups, controls, flareups and controls until we actually get a therapy or a vaccine. I think we should all be focusing on an 18-month strategy for our health care system and our economy.”
Unemployment has skyrocketed in the U.S. over the last few weeks as state and local governments have ordered businesses to close their doors in a bid to contain the spread of the virus.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that a partial reopening of the economy could possibly begin in May, but cautioned that the outbreak could flare up again in the fall. Kashkari warned that “this could be a long hard road that we have ahead of us until we get either to an effective therapy or a vaccine.” “It’s hard for me to see a V-shaped recovery under that scenario,” he said. The U.S. central bank has responded aggressively to blunt the effect of the coronavirus pandemic on the U.S. economy, launching an unprecedented range of emergency programs to support as much as $2.3 trillion in loans and slashing interest rates to nearly zero.
The Fed has more firepower to bring to bear if needed. Cleveland Fed chief Loretta Mester, also a 2020 voter, said Friday that the central bank was “likely not done” in seeking ways to keep credit flowing in the economy. “We’re always looking for things where if we have a tool to be able to do it, and if we think it’s needed, we’re going to do it,” she told an online forum hosted by the City Club of Cleveland. The economic pain is already severe. Almost 17 million people have filed for U.S. unemployment benefits in the last three weeks, implying a jobless rate of around 13% or 14%, with output in the second quarter expected to shrink sharply. Fed Chairman Jerome Powell on Thursday cautioned that the slowdown was striking with “alarming speed” and that unemployment would temporarily hit very high levels.
BRUSSELS – France and Bolivia have postponed elections. Peru handed its president broad new legislative authority. Israel sharply ramped up the reach of its surveillance state. While leaders around the world fight the spread of the coronavirus, they’re amassing sweeping new powers. As legislatures limit or suspend activities in the name of social distancing, many of the norms that define democracy – elections, deliberation and debate, checks and balances – have been put on indefinite hold. The speed and breadth of the transformation is unsettling political scientists, government watchdogs and rights groups. Many concede that emergency declarations and streamlining government decision-making are necessary responses to a global health threat. But they question how readily leaders will give up the powers they’ve accrued when the coronavirus eventually subsides.
“This is a situation where it’s far too easy to make arguments for undue interference with civil rights and liberties,” said Tomas Valasek, a Slovak lawmaker.
The country that has attracted the most notice for a lurch away from democratic reforms is Hungary, which last month handed Prime Minister Viktor Orban near-dictatorial powers. Orban was already facing the prospect of sanctions from the European Union over concerns that he had packed courts with loyalists, closed down opposition media outlets and changed the country’s constitution to ensure that he remains in power. The new measure gives him authority to legislate by decree, free from parliamentary oversight, for as long as he deems necessary to fight the coronavirus, and it imposes steep penalties for spreading “false information” – a step critics fear will be used to further impede the opposition. But even countries with robust traditions of freedom and dissent have imposed measures nearly overnight that under other circumstances would look more familiar in an authoritarian state. In Belgium, authorities have requisitioned cellphone companies’ location tracking data to make sure people are not straying too far from home. Police checkpoints on major streets monitor what the phone companies miss. Continue reading “Leaders seize new powers to fight coronavirus, fears grow for democracy”
This is the Bio research facility at the center of coronavirus leak scrutiny that was performing experiments on bats from the caves where the disease is believed to have originated
https://youtu.be/qv1f0TaGdlI
The US National Institutes of Health, a government agency, awarded a $3.7million research grant to the Wuhan Institute of Virology
The lab is the center of several conspiracy theories that suggest it is the original source of the coronavirus outbreak
The institute experimented on bats from the source of the coronavirus
They were captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan
Sequencing of the Covid-19 genome has traced it to bats to Yunnan’s caves
The U.S. government funded research on coronavirus transmission in the lab over the past decade
The Chinese laboratory at the center of scrutiny over a potential coronavirus leak has been using U.S. government money to carry out research on bats from the caves which scientists believe are the original source of the deadly outbreak. The Wuhan Institute of Virology undertook coronavirus experiments on mammals captured more than 1,000 miles away in Yunnan which were funded by a $3.7 million grant from the US government. Sequencing of the COVID-19 genome has traced it back to bats found in Yunnan caves but it was first thought to have transferred to humans at an animal market in Wuhan. The revelation that the Wuhan Institute was experimenting on bats from the area already known to be the source of COVID-19 – and doing so with American money – has sparked further fears that the lab, and not the market, is the original outbreak source. Lawmakers and pressure groups were quick to hit out at U.S. funding being provided for the ‘dangerous and cruel animal experiments at the Wuhan Institute’.
American farmers are concerned. The coronavirus pandemic is posing a threat to their livelihoods, as it is for many others across the globe. But unlike some shelf-stable goods producers, farmers have very little flexibility. They’re on a strict planting and harvesting schedule and cannot ramp up or decrease production at will. “A peach [that] is good today is not good tomorrow. That’s how quick things ripen,” Chalmers Carr told CNN Business. Carr owns and operates Titan Farms in Ridge Spring, South Carolina, where he grows peaches on around 6,200 acres, in addition to bell peppers and broccoli. For blueberries and strawberries, he said, “if you leave them on the bush or the vine one extra day, they’re virtually worthless.” Even more forgiving crops, like bell peppers, have a short harvesting window of two to five days, Carr said. Peach farmers, among others, are concerned. April and May are critical planting and harvesting times for many US farmers. They need skilled laborers to work their fields, and a reliable supply chain to deliver their goods. And they don’t have any time to waste. If farmers can’t find enough workers or if their farming practices are disrupted because of the pandemic, Americans could have less or pricier food this summer. And because international farmers and their supply chains face similar problems, we could receive fewer food imports, potentially limiting supply and driving up prices. In recent weeks, many Americans got a scare when they walked into grocery stores and found empty shelves. Those shortages are caused by bottlenecks in the supply chain, not a lack of food, so grocery stores have been able to replenish their shelves fairly quickly. What happens over the next several months will determine whether those disruptions become more serious. Farmers are scrambling to solve problems as they arise, and it’s unlikely that we’ll run out of food. But this year and next, we may not see the bounty we’re accustomed to. As efforts to contain the coronavirus pandemic limit consular services, US farmers are worried they won’t be able to hire the international workers they rely on. “We are a sector that is very dependent upon guest workers coming into this country, particularly for the planting and harvesting of specialty crops [like] fresh fruits and vegetables,” said Chuck Conner, president and CEO of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives. H-2A workers have been deemed essential by the government, and should be allowed to work in the United States. These workers don’t seem to be avoiding coming to the United States for fear of catching Covid-19 — the economic incentive is just too large to give up, Carr said. But workers may eventually decide it’s too risky to enter the United States. And if they do have a hard time getting in, it’s not clear that domestic labor will be able to fill in the gap. It might seem like there’s an obvious solution to the problem. US unemployment claims have reached unprecedented levels as businesses close their doors because of the pandemic. In the week ending March 21, initial jobless claims reached a seasonally adjusted 3.28 million — the largest number since the Department of Labor started keeping track of the claims in 1967. People currently seeking work could find it on farms. But most of the newly unemployed are not qualified. “It’s very skilled labor,” said Tom Stenzel, president and CEO of the United Fresh Produce Association. “If you’re a peach picker, you’re very different than a strawberry picker. And the ability to handle the volume and keep up with the pace — it’s a professional job.”
Coronavirus spreads more than twice the 6ft social distancing gap demanded by government – and that isolating infected people at home is not a good strategy
Chinese scientists examined two wards at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan
They found that aerosol transmission were concentrated upstream up to 13 feet
Virus was also concentrated on surfaces like door handles and computer mice
Coronavirus sufferers can spread the infection 13 feet, twice the government’s social distancing rules, a study has found. Chinese scientists examined surface and air samples from both an intensive care unit and general Covid-19 ward at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, the city where the disease spawned before spilling across the map to become a global pandemic. Both wards housed a total of 24 patients between February 19 and March 2, when China was still in the grip of the deadly virus. The team observed so-called aerosol transmission – when the droplets of the virus are so fine they become suspended and remain airborne for several hours. Chinese scientists examined surface and air samples from both an intensive care unit and general Covid-19 ward at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in March This differs from cough or sneeze droplets that fall to the ground within seconds and linger on surfaces.
They found that virus-laden aerosols were mainly concentrated downstream from patients at up to 13 feet, though smaller quantities were found also observed upstream up to eight feet away.
It suggests that the government’s six-feet distancing guidance does not go far enough. However it remains unclear if these ultrafine particles are infectious and the World Health Organization has so far downplayed the risk. The Chinese team, from the Academy of Military Sciences in Beijing, also tested the concentration of the disease on surfaces. Their findings, published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, were that the virus was most heavily concentrated on the floors of the wards, ‘perhaps because of gravity and air flow causing most virus droplets to float to the ground.’ High levels were also found on frequently touched surfaces like computer mice, trashcans, bed rails and door knobs. ‘Furthermore, half of the samples from the soles of the ICU medical staff shoes tested positive,’ the team wrote. ‘Therefore, the soles of medical staff shoes might function as carriers.’ They also offered advice that bucks most lockdown guidelines: ‘Our findings suggest that home isolation of persons with suspected Covid-19 might not be a good control strategy given the levels of environmental contamination.’ Because most citizens do not have access to personal protective equipment, the scientists believe confining the virus to households simply leads to cluster cases.
Election officials from both parties are already sounding the alarm about the need for more resources to ensure health safety and expand alternatives to in-person and day-of voting. They also anticipate protracted partisan fights over what the general election could and should look like in the age of Coronavirus.
“We cannot let our Democracy be causality of the current health pandemic. We cannot wait until October to gear up for alternative methods to vote. We have to get ahead of it, we have to start now,” said Alex Padilla, California’s secretary of state. “There is an urgency here.”
Tammy Jones, president of the Florida Supervisors of Elections, wrote a letter to Governor Ron DeSantis this week raising concern about preparations. “We anticipate a significant statewide shortage of poll workers for the 2020 elections,” she wrote. “Alternatives or additional voting methods must be made available to counties.” And officials in red states like Louisiana are urging Congress to push legislation that would provide additional funding to states to carry out the elections safely in November. Polling shows that voters are also thinking ahead about the impact the virus could have on elections. A new Reuters/Ipsos survey found 72% of all U.S. adults support requirements for mail-in ballots as a way to protect voters should the virus continue to spread, including 79% of Democrats and 65% of Republicans. The concept of mail-in voting is at the forefront of the debate over how to proceed with November’s election. Four states already conduct their general elections by mail, and Hawaii is set to become the fifth state to move entirely to vote-by-mail with elections this year. Another 28 states and Washington D.C. offer “no-excuse” absentee or mail voting, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Now, Democrats are pushing for it to be implemented nationwide. Senators Amy Klobuchar and Ron Wyden have introduced legislation to “ensure that voters in all states have 20 days of early in-person voting and no-excuse absentee vote-by-mail.” The senators have been collaborating with a bipartisan group of secretaries of state across the country and acknowledge that the more likely reality is a hybrid system of expanded mail-in voting and early opportunities in addition to in-person voting on Election Day. “We are not reinventing the wheel here. This is upscaling what is already taking place,” Wyden told reporters on Thursday. “The goal to us from a public health standpoint became clear: minimize exposure at polling places and maximize vote by mail,” said Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon, noting that those goals “come with steep, steep price tags.” The newly passed stimulus package allocated $400 million to help secure elections, but Democratic leaders in Congress are pushing for additional funds. The Brennan Center estimates that ensuring a vote-by-mail option in all states would cost at least $1.4 billion, which would include ballot printing, postage costs, dropbox security, ballot tracking and processing, staffing, and additional technology. The center also estimates another $270 million would be necessary to ensure the safety of in-person voting and expand early voting. Padilla, who also heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said most states have some capacity for vote-by-mail elections. “It is a matter of ramping up that capacity, not experimenting with an untested tool,” he said, adding it will take political will and resources to do so. But if Wisconsin’s election is any indication, the political willpower isn’t easy to come by. The state has no-excuse absentee voting, and a record number of people requested ballots, but some voters still went to the polls on Tuesday in the middle of a global pandemic, despite several legal challenges and some political Hail Marys. The GOP-controlled Wisconsin legislature didn’t consider requests from Democratic Governor Tony Evers to first send every registered voter an absentee ballot and, a week later, to conduct the election primarily by mail voting with a May deadline, the first time Evers suggested moving the date of the election. On Monday, the Wisconsin State Supreme Court shot down a last-ditch attempt by Evers to suspend in-person voting until June, and the United States Supreme Court curtailed a lower court’s decision to extend the deadline for returning absentee ballots, after the Republican National Committee, Wisconsin Republican Party and Wisconsin Legislature challenged that ruling. At the national level, President Trump is leading the charge against expanded vote by mail. “People cheat,” Trump said at his daily briefing on Tuesday, though he, too, voted absentee by mail in Florida’s primary last month. “The mail ballots are corrupt in my opinion. They collect them, go out and get people to sign them, forgeries in many cases.” Mr. Trump argued that his Florida vote last month was different because he was out of the state on Election Day. The Republican National Committee and the Trump re-election campaign have been pushing back against efforts for a widespread vote-by-mail system. “Democrats couldn’t even make a vote counting app work in Iowa and now they suddenly believe they can redesign the entire U.S. election system,” said Justin Clark, the campaign’s senior counsel.
The government and the private sector are going deeper in the hole to survive the economic shutdown, which could be a drag on recovery if it spurs a period of thrift
The full impact of the coronavirus pandemic may take years to play out. But one outcome is already clear: Government, businesses and some households will be loaded with mountains of additional debt. The federal government budget deficit is on track to reach a record $3.6 trillion in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, and $2.4 trillion the year after that, according to Goldman Sachs estimates. Businesses are drawing down bank credit lines and tapping bond markets. Preliminary signs are emerging that some households are turning to credit for funds, too.The debt surge is set to shape how governments and the private sector function long after the virus is tamed. Among other things, it could be a weight on the expansion that follows. Many economists believe low interest rates will help the nation manage the soaring debt load. At the same time, they say high levels of private sector debt could lead to a period of thrift, slowing the recovery if businesses and individuals try to rebuild their savings by holding back on investment and spending. “People and firms and government are facing a negative shock, and the classic textbook prescription for a temporary shock is to do some borrowing to smooth that out,” says Alan Taylor, an economist and historian at the University of California Davis, who has studied the economic effects of pandemics going back to the Black Death of the 14th century. Borrowing now amounts to a transfer of economic activity from the future to the present. The payback comes later. “You do have something to worry about in terms of the recovery path,” Mr. Taylor said. Leveraged Society Overall U.S. debt as a share of GDP has been rising since the 1980s. Since the 2007-09 crisis,stimulus plans pushed federal debt to post-World War II levels, while household debt shrank aspeople paid off commitments.Public and private debt as a share of GDPSources: Federal Reserve; Bureau of Economic Analysis The Federal Reserve, the nation’s central bank, will play the critical role of navigating the nation through the rising tides of debt. It sways the cost of debt service, whether inflation emerges and whether banks and other financial institutions can bear the burden of lending that the nation demands. So far the Fed is getting high marks from President Trump and many economists and investors for moving quickly to make credit widely available, though it faces challenges and uncertainties deciding how far to extend itself and when and how to pull back. On Thursday, it announced more programs to support $2.3 trillion in lending. The U.S. government currently has $17.9 trillion in debt held by private investors and other governments—the amount it has borrowed from others to fund its annual budget deficits. That works out to 89% of U.S. gross domestic product, the highest since 1947. Before the coronavirus crisis, debt and deficits were pushed higher by ramped up government spending on military and other programs and tax cuts enacted in 2017. Government borrowing will soar in the months ahead due to the $2 trillion economic rescue program, higher spending on programs like unemployment insurance and an expected fall in tax revenues amid lower incomes and corporate profits. Mr. Trump is pushing for an additional Washington stimulus program focused on infrastructure spending. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said another round of stimulus could exceed $1 trillion. That could include an expansion of small business loans and grants by another $250 billion. “After the dust settles in the U.S. there will be arguments over who should pay for all of this spending and absorb the burdens of the debts, which will be political arguments,” said Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, the large hedge fund company. Many economists believe that for now the U.S. can manage the surge in government borrowing, in part because the Fed is likely to buy a lot of the debt itself. The U.S. Treasury funds government deficits by issuing Treasury bonds. In normal times the Fed isn’t a player in the Treasury market, but after the 2007-09 financial crisis it started buying government bonds itself. Its “quantitative easing” program was meant to hold down interest rates to help the recovery by reducing the supply of Treasury securities in public hands. In theory, large scale purchases of government bonds by the Fed should cause inflation, because it involves pumping money into the financial system in exchange for the securities. That money eventually finds its way to households whose purchases drive consumer prices higher. Such price spikes did occur after World War I and World War II, and the U.S. could head for such a repeat.
But inflation didn’t budge during or after the Fed’s purchases in the 2007-09 crisis. Despite warnings by critics that the moves would destroy the purchasing power of dollars, inflation has remained below the Fed’s 2% target for most of a decade. Interest rates also stayed low.
Japan, the world’s third-largest economy, offers additional evidence that inflation might not surge. Japanese government debt is even larger than U.S. government debt, at two-times GDP. The Bank of Japan has been buying Japanese government bonds for years, but inflation there has been subdued throughout.
“When the virus does run its course and it’s safe to go back to work and it’s safe for businesses to open, then we would expect there to be a fairly robust.
As far back as late November, U.S. intelligence officials were warning that a contagion was sweeping through China’s Wuhan region, changing the patterns of life and business and posing a threat to the population, according to four sources briefed on the secret reporting. Concerns about what is now known to be the novel coronavirus pandemic were detailed in a November intelligence report by the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence (NCMI), according to two officials familiar with the document’s contents. The report was the result of analysis of wire and computer intercepts, coupled with satellite images. It raised alarms because an out-of-control disease would pose a serious threat to U.S. forces in Asia — forces that depend on the NCMI’s work. And it paints a picture of an American government that could have ramped up mitigation and containment efforts far earlier to prepare for a crisis poised to come home.
“Analysts concluded it could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House. Wednesday night, the Pentagon issued a statement denying the “product/assessment” existed.
From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis, according to people who have worked on presidential briefings in both Republican and Democratic administrations. “The timeline of the intel side of this may be further back than we’re discussing,” the source said of preliminary reports from Wuhan. “But this was definitely being briefed beginning at the end of November as something the military needed to take a posture on.” Those analyses said China’s leadership knew the epidemic was out of control even as it kept such crucial information from foreign governments and public health agencies.”It would be a significant alarm that would have been set off by this,” former Deputy Assistant Defense Secretary Mick Mulroy, now an ABC News contributor, said of the NCMI report. “And it would have been something that would be followed up by literally every intelligence-collection agency.” Mulroy, who previously served as a senior official at the CIA, said NCMI does serious work that senior government leaders do not ignore. “Medical intelligence takes into account all source information — imagery intelligence, human intelligence, signals intelligence,” Mulroy said. “Then there’s analysis by people who know those specific areas. So for something like this to have come out, it has been reviewed by experts in the field. They’re taking together what those pieces of information mean and then looking at the potential for an international health crisis.” NCMI is a component of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. Together, the agencies’ core responsibilities are to ensure U.S. military forces have the information they need to carry out their missions — both offensively and defensively. It is a critical priority for the Pentagon to keep American service members healthy on deployments. Continue reading “Intelligence report warned of coronavirus crisis as early as November: Sources”
FEARS have been raised that the coronavirus may be able to remain in the body and “reactivate” later after 51 recovered patients tested positive again.
The patients, from the city of Daegu, South Korea, had all spent time in quarantine while recovering from the virus, but were diagnosed again within days of being released. South Korea has been among the most successful countries globally in controlling the outbreak, using strict quarantining and widespread testing to slow its spread of the virus. The number of new cases being diagnosed each day in the country is now at levels last seen as the pandemic was getting underway in February. The 51 cases were identified as part of a study conducted in Daegu, the epicentre of the outbreak in South Korea, by a team of epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The center said it did not believe the patients had been reinfected, but that the virus had remained at undetectable levels in their cells and later “reactivated”. South Korea has been among the most successful countries globally in controlling the outbreak, using strict quarantining and widespread testing to slow its spread of the virus. The number of new cases being diagnosed each day in the country is now at levels last seen as the pandemic was getting underway in February. The 51 cases were identified as part of a study conducted in Daegu, the epicentre of the outbreak in South Korea, by a team of epidemiologists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The center said it did not believe the patients had been reinfected, but that the virus had remained at undetectable levels in their cells and later “reactivated”. The claim runs contrary to the bulk of current evidence about how the virus works. Paul Hunter, an infectious diseases professor at the University of East Anglia, said: “I agree that these will not be reinfections but I do not think these will be reactivations.”
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