By The Washington Post · Antonio Olivo, Patricia Sullivan, Rebecca Tan · NATIONAL, HEALTH
Bar areas inside Virginia restaurants and taverns will not join the state’s next phase of reopening Wednesday, Gov. Ralph Northam said, a reversal in policy that followed a Delaware decision to shut down recently reopened bars in beach communities.
After federal officials said Tuesday that bars were the source of coronavirus outbreaks in other states across the country, Northam said people in Virginia will continue to be prohibited from congregating inside bar areas unless they are eating at high-top tables that are at set at least six feet apart.
“I am watching what is happening in other states-we are taking a cautious approach as we enter Phase Three, and maintaining the current restrictions on bar areas,” the Democratic governor said in a news release Tuesday evening.
“In Virginia, our hospitalization rates have fallen, our percentage of positive tests continues to trend downward, and we are conducting more than 10,000 tests each day,” the release said. “We want these trends to continue, but if our public health metrics begin moving in the wrong direction, I will not hesitate to take action to protect the health and safety of our communities.”
The decision to keep shutdown restrictions in place for drinking areas came as Virginia headed warily into a more expansive phase of reopening from the coronavirus shutdowns – and amid a small resurgence of infections that includes an outbreak among Loudoun County residents recently back from a South Carolina “beach week.”
With the Fourth of July holiday also a big beachgoing weekend, Democratic Delaware Gov. John Carney on Tuesday ordered bars in Rehoboth, Dewey and other beach areas to close indefinitely starting Friday, citing a recent spike in infections there.
“We have a little bit of a fire that’s been starting in our beach communities, and we need to put it out,” said Carney, expressing frustration that bar patrons have not worn masks since those establishments were allowed to reopen June 1.
Among other things, the new phase in Virginia means groups of as many as 250 people may gather, swimming pools and gyms can operate at 75% capacity, and other nonessential businesses can run at full capacity with physical distancing measures in place. The neighboring District of Columbia and Maryland, which remain in the second phase of their reopening plans, are watching warily.
Average rates of infections, hospitalizations and deaths in Virginia plateaued at their lowest levels since mid-April. But the seven-day averages for newly reported infections and fatalities have since crept back up – a trend that continued Tuesday, when health officials reported 598 new cases and 23 deaths.
The seven-day average for new daily infections was 541, compared with 498 on June 21. The seven-day average for daily reported fatalities was 17, up from nine on June 21.
Overall, the Washington region’s tally of known cases reached 140,673 Tuesday, with 5,504 fatalities, after Maryland recorded 15 deaths and D.C. reported none.
News that at least 100 teenagers and young adults tested positive in Loudoun County, Va., after traveling to hard-hit Myrtle Beach, S.C., in recent weeks sent fresh ripples of worry through communities in northern Virginia.
But local officials said the longer-term signs suggest that the virus’s spread has slowed, while area hospitals appear to be well-equipped. Those factors, most said, merit continuing to reopen, so long as people continue to wear masks and stay on guard against infection.
“Anybody who is not concerned has not been paying attention,” said Libby Garvey, the Democratic chair of the Arlington County Board. “But we have to live with this virus, and all trends are good, with the numbers going down.”
David Goodfriend, director of Loudoun’s health department, called his county’s new outbreak “a warning for all of us.”
“As we’re moving forward to reopening our communities, there are more opportunities for folks to get together, whether it’s in bars or restaurants, Fourth of July celebrations or parties in people’s homes.” he said.
Goodfriend said it’s too soon to know whether those who caught the virus in Myrtle Beach have infected any of their relatives or friends, and whether there are more people who contracted the virus at the beach and have not yet been tested. So far, 174 county residents between the ages of 16 and 20 have tested positive since June 15, with about 100 of them saying they were recently at Myrtle Beach, he said.
In Alexandria, Va., Democratic Mayor Justin Wilson said he is “definitely hearing angst” from residents who have been monitoring news of spikes in Arizona, Florida and other states – leading the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, Anthony Fauci, to warn Tuesday that the country may soon see 100,000 new cases per day.
Fauci also warned against allowing bars to reopen. “Bars: really not good, really not good,” he told a Senate committee. “Congregation at a bar, inside, is bad news. We really have got to stop that. We really gotta stop that right now when you have areas that are surging like we see right now.”
Wilson said many Alexandria restaurants will see little change in Phase 3, because the state’s physical distancing restrictions – which require tables to be kept six feet apart – remain in place. “I talked to the owner of a 24-seat restaurant today who opened with 12 seats a week ago,” Wilson said. “Phase 3 allows him to add four more seats.”
In Fairfax County, Supervisor James Walksinshaw said the limited airflow inside restaurants and taverns is part of a “trifecta of unsafe circumstances” that also includes a tendency to flout mask wearing and, in some cases, cramped quarters that keeps patrons close together.
“While waitstaff must wear masks to protect patrons, they are unprotected from their patrons who are not wearing masks while eating or drinking,” Walkinshaw, a Democrat, said in a Facebook post Tuesday.
Jeff McKay, chair of Fairfax’s county board, said it’s important for Virginians to remember that “Phase 3 is not a return to normal.”
“We must wear masks, socially distance, and wash our hands,” the Democrat said in a statement. “That said, if we notice any changes to our numbers, we will certainly weigh in with that data.”
D.C. Health Director LaQuandra Nesbitt said she had asked Northam administration officials to reconsider allowing bars to operate and to keep large entertainment venues closed. Phase 3 restrictions allow concert halls and other large venues to reopen if they limit crowds to half capacity or 1,000 attendees, whichever is lowest.
“We’ve had several conversations in terms of our porous borders,” she said. “Our hope is to delay high-risk activities like bars, night clubs, large venues across the national capital region until we have no to low evidence of [widespread community transmission].”
Nesbitt said D.C. will remain in its second phase of reopening – with museums and other tourist-related venues closed, as well as bars – until there are no signs of community transmission of the virus.
“If you are observing the type of activities we have permitted in Phase 2, they’re not the type of activities that attract tourists,” Nesbitt said. “Most are geared toward our own residents. This is an approach that we were very strategic about.”
Jul 01. 2020White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany takes questions from journalists who are wearing masks and practicing social distancing at the White House on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
By The Washington Post · Philip Rucker, Seung Min Kim · NATIONAL, HEALTH, POLITICS
WASHINGTON – The most recent former Republican vice president, Dick Cheney, and his Wyoming congresswoman daughter, Liz, say wearing masks is manly.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., says there should be no stigma associated with covering one’s face as public health experts advise, and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., says doing so is essential to fully reopening the economy.
The GOP-led city of Jacksonville, Fla. – which President Donald Trump recently selected to host many of the Republican National Convention festivities in part because of its relatively lax public health restrictions – is now mandating that people wear masks at indoor public spaces. And even Sean Hannity and Steve Doocy, two of Trump’s most fervent and loyal boosters on Fox News Channel, have joined the chorus of mask advocates.
“I think that if the president wore one, it would just set a good example,” Doocy said Tuesday on “Fox & Friends” as he interviewed Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel. “MAGA should now stand for ‘masks are great again.’ Let me give you some marketing advice right there.”
McDaniel chuckled and said she would “take that under consideration” – but her laugh underscored the reality that Trump is unlikely to change his campaign slogan.
The president has refused to trumpet his own administration’s recommendation that people cover their faces. He he has set an example by not wearing a mask at public events, and he has used his bully pulpit to mock others who do and to cast doubt on the efficacy of masks.
But with coronavirus cases soaring across the nation – and most precipitously across Florida, Texas and other parts of so-called Trump Country – many prominent Republicans are now echoing the pleas National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director Anthony Fauci and other health experts that people wear masks to slow the spread of the virus and to help the economy reopen safely.
The recent shift on the political right has left Trump isolated, with the president and his White House staff openly resisting the calls for mask-wearing.
“The president has said he has no problem with masks, that he encourages people to make whatever decision is best for their safety and to follow what their local jurisdictions say,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany said Tuesday. “CDC guidelines are still recommended but not required, and the president is the most tested man in America.”
That is a marked contrast in tone from other elected Republicans, who have been talking about the issue in recent days with fresh urgency. Particularly among GOP senators, there has been a noticeable uptick in public comments and social media posts proactively encouraging the public to adorn masks as the number of infection rises nationwide.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C. – who usually wears a flag-emblazoned mask on Capitol Hill – tweeted Monday that wearing a mask is “one of the simplest and easiest ways to help stop the spread of #COVID19.” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the second-oldest member of the Senate, on Monday posted a photo on Instagram of himself wearing a mask with the logo of the University of Northern Iowa with the caption, “everybody’s got to do their share.”
McConnell told reporters on Tuesday, as he waved his Washington Nationals logo mask, “What we’re all trying to demonstrate for everybody in the country is, the single most important thing you can do – not only to protect yourself but to protect others – until we get a vaccine, is put on a mask. It’s not complicated.”
At a coronavirus hearing Tuesday, Senate Health Committee Chairman Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., said, “Unfortunately this simple lifesaving practice has become part of a political debate that says: If you’re for Trump, you don’t wear a mask. If you’re against Trump, you do. That is why I have suggested the president should occasionally wear a mask even though there are not many occasions when it is necessary for him to do so. The president has millions of admirers. They would follow his lead.”
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters last week, “Everyone should just wear a damn mask.”
Michael Steele, a former RNC chairman, said Republican leaders have hardened their position on masks simply because the virus is infecting “the heart of their base, which we all knew it would.”
Residents in so-called red states, Steele said, “don’t have superpowers and aren’t somehow immune from the ravages of covid-19. That’s why it was paramount for the president to be the voice of leadership here, not to undermine the scientists, not to berate the Dr. Faucis of the world. And now Fox says the president should set a good example and put on a mask. Really, now? After 120,000 deaths? After a million-plus people get infected?”
The rise in cases has not changed the thinking inside the White House. Officials there have long defended the rejection of masks by Trump and many on his staff members by arguing that he and anyone who comes into close contact with the president is regularly tested for the coronavirus.
Vice President Mike Pence has worn a mask on several recent occasions, including a trip over the weekend to Texas, one of the nation’s virus hot spots. He decides when to cover his face based on state and local guidelines as well as a predetermination of whether social distancing can or cannot be maintained, according to a White House official.
When Trump travels Friday to South Dakota to participate in an Independence Day fireworks celebration at Mount Rushmore, masks will be available but not required, and there will be no social distancing mandates.
“We told those folks that have concerns that they can stay home, but those who want to come and join us, we’ll be giving out free face masks, if they choose to wear one. But we won’t be social distancing,” South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, said Monday on Fox News.
At Saturday’s “Salute to America” fireworks extravaganza, which Trump is hosting at the White House, social distancing will be observed and facial coverings and personal hand sanitizer will be provided to guests, according to White House spokesman Judd Deere.
The enthusiasm for mask-wearing among congressional Republicans is not universal. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is one of a very small minority who regularly does not cover his face on Capitol Hill. Paul, who was diagnosed with the coronavirus this year, insists that he is now immune and therefore cannot spread the virus to others, though the medical data on immunity is inconclusive.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., one of the youngest members of the Senate, usually does not wear a mask on Capitol Hill, though he wears one in situations where he is unable to maintain much distance from others. Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., was spotted carrying – not wearing – his mask into a senators-only lunch on Tuesday and said, “I haven’t seen how particularly effective these are.”
Health experts worldwide have strongly pushed for the use of masks to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, and the strategy has been deployed aggressively in many countries that have been more successful in combating the virus than the United States. In the U.S., one June 16 study by researchers at the University of Iowa found that states with mask mandates had an associated decline in the growth rate of coronavirus cases.
Mask-wearing is popular with the public. An ABC News-Ipsos poll released last week found that 89% of adults who left home in the previous week said they wore a face mask, which was up from 55% in early April.
A Pew Research survey in mid-June found that 71% of Americans overall say people in their community should wear masks at least most of the time when they go out to public places where they may be near others; 52% of Republicans said masks should be worn at least most of the time compared with 86% of Democrats.
And an Axios-Ipsos poll released Tuesday found that 53% of Americans said they are wearing a mask “at all times” when leaving their home while 83% report wearing a mask at least “sometimes.” Democrats are about twice as likely to say they wear a mask “at all times,” 71% compared with 35% of Republicans.
Margie Omero, a Democratic pollster whose firm, GBAO, has been regularly surveying the public on masks and other coronavirus topics, said, “Mask-wearing didn’t have to be partisan. The data about mask-wearing hasn’t changed. But Trump has been critical of masks, and many have been taking their cues from him. So when you see Republican leaders now suggesting people wear masks, you have to wonder whether they are just getting caught up on the science, or whether they’re making a different political calculation.”
Alex Castellanos, a veteran Republican strategist, said the divide over whether to cover one’s face is, like many things in the Trump era, political.
“Mask wearing has become a totem, a secular religious symbol,” Castellanos said. “Christians wear crosses, Muslims wear a hijab, and members of the Church of Secular Science bow to the gods of data by wearing a mask as their symbol, demonstrating that they are the elite; smarter, more rational, and morally superior to everyone else.”
Jun 30. 2020Axel Getz, 24, is part of a growing number of men interested in makeup. A recent poll showed about one third of men under 45 are willing to try cosmetics. MUST CREDIT: Bloomberg photo by Adam Glanzman
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Gerald Porter Jr. · BUSINESS, FEATURES
Men’s makeup is going mainstream in America.
CVS, the country’s largest drugstore chain, is making the biggest bet on the category in the U.S. yet, by adding a cosmetics line from Stryx, a brand launched last year, to 2,000 stores (about a quarter of its total). The retailer is giving more legitimacy to a small, but growing, group of products that had mainly been sold through high-end stores.
With this move, CVS likely has potential customers such as Max Belovol in mind. The 23-year-old grew up wearing dazzling eyeshadows and foundation for figure-skating competitions, but didn’t become truly comfortable with wearing makeup during work until the coronavirus lockdown.
“It’s a Zoom effect,” said Belovol, a law student based in Atlanta, who prefers concealer and its subtle look. “People don’t have to worry about how they look at work. You can paint your nails, and nobody on the Zoom call is going to know.”
Belovol is part of a growing shift-about one third of U.S. men under 45 said they would consider trying makeup, according to a survey by Morning Consult in September. Chalk it up to quarantine boldness, like Belovol, and the continued evolution of traditional masculinity that has already created a $9.3 billion U.S. men’s grooming and skincare market.
“It’s simple for cosmetics-men are a growth industry,” said Ben Parr, co-founder of marketing firm Octane AI, who points to the millennial generation’s embrace of men wearing makeup as a major catalyst. “You’re seeing that impact starting now.”
Getting into a nationwide chain marks a quick ascent for Stryx. Just three years ago, 25-year-old Devir Kahan woke up on his wedding day with a pimple and couldn’t find a quick fix. The episode convinced him that he’d discovered an underserved market-guys looking for a product to make their skin look better, especially during a breakout.
Kahan co-founded Stryx in 2017 and has raised about $1 million from investors, including venture firm XRC Labs. Now its concealer tool ($19.99) and tinted moisturizer ($24.99) will be in CVS locations alongside shaving cream and razors. It’s the “ultimate validation,” said Kahan, also chief executive officer of Stryx, and will help normalize a stigmatized practice that’s flown under the radar for years.
“It’s not about a full face of makeup or color,” Kahan said. “We’re talking about improving blemishes, fixing up under-eye bags, a zit-all these sorts of things.”
For decades, men’s grooming in the U.S. equated to having a tight shave free of cuts and razor bumps, a practice that revolved around just two products: shaving cream and after-shave from giant brands, like Gillette and Old Spice. That Mad Men-era mentality began fading at the turn of the century when more men embraced fashion and skincare. The term metrosexual went mainstream.
“We didn’t just take a women’s product and slap a ‘For Men’ label on it.”
In response, brands introduced a broader array of products, spanning wrinkle creams, moisturizers and hair serum. The market has grown about 13% over the past five years. However, revenue is projected to decline by 1% in 2020 due to softer razor sales as beards remain popular, according to Euromonitor International.
In the U.S., where male ruggedness is part of the country’s DNA, online search data shows a surging interest around men’s cosmetics. Queries for “male makeup looks” jumping almost 80% in April compared to about about a year ago, according to data from market analytics firm Moz. Other top requests include “covering redness,” “hiding acne” and “hiding bags under eyes.” America appears to be catching up to other countries, like Japan, where there are fewer taboos around men wearing makeup.
Makeup is a “natural extension” of men enhancing their beauty regimens over the past two decades, according to Parr, the marketing executive. It’s also bound to gain popularity, as society continues moving away from gender norms, he said.
“Men’s grooming has seen incredible growth during this stay-at-home period,” CVS said in a statement. Adding Stryx is part of a strategy to go after that market by bringing in more emerging brands that focus on guys. “Men are a top customer focus at CVS Beauty.”
Even though Stryx is pitching a product traditionally made for women, its presentation is stereotypical male. The packaging is black, grey and dark blue. The concealer tool is pitched as sleek and discreet and could be easily be mistaken for a black pen, clip included. A photo on Stryx’s website rests the makeup on a wooden desk, next to a leather-bound notebook and rocks glass half-filled with booze. A slogan reads: “Handsome made easy.”
“We didn’t just take a women’s product and slap a ‘For Men’ label on it,” Stryx says on its website. “Our products are meticulously formulated for male skin.”
Formen, a men’s cosmetics company founded in 2010, uses an antlered deer head-like you’d find stuffed on a wall-as its logo. A fluid foundation comes in a black vile shaped like a skull. The brand, found mostly in Canada, also promises discreteness, and touts the sturdiness of its concealer’s heavy weight aluminum container.
Axel Getz, a 24-year-old environmental consultant, became a makeup convert last year after a beauty-store clerk convinced him to try a tinted moisturizer from a women’s line. His skin turned “angelic,” the New York resident said, and a day later friends complimented his appearance without a single mention of the makeup.
“A lot of guys just never give themselves the chance, and that goes for men of all sexualities,” said Getz, who had that same hesitancy until he tried that tinted moisturizer.
“From that point on, I was like: ‘Oh damn, I’m sold on this.'”
Jun 28. 2020Forecasted change in GDP between 2019 and 2020 Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Anthony Faiola · NATIONAL, WORLD, HEALTH, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT Not long ago, to step through the lushly planted Green Wall at Singapore’s Changi Airport was to walk into an ever-more-globally connected future.
Millions of passengers each month rushed to and from destinations throughout the world via the most advanced travel experience on Earth – traversing Changi’s new $1 billion terminal meant checking in, dropping bags and boarding flights with just the touch of a few buttons.
Travel restrictions
Long layover? Good problem. You could linger at the airport’s Changi Jewel, with its jungle canopy and 131-foot Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Wander up to a rooftop swimming pool and plane spot. Or leave the airport for a free tour of the ethereal towers of the city-state at the center of the world’s financial and trade systems.
But like fire through Notre Dame, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has now silenced this cathedral of interconnectedness – turning Changi into an emblem of what analysts say could now be a lost decade of travel, trade, investment and migration as decades of globalization give way to a new era of global distancing.
“In the absence of warfare between major powers, we have never seen anything like this,” said Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute for Economics in Washington.
At Changi, one of the world’s great travel hubs, traffic plunged from 5.9 million passengers in January to a mere 25,200 in April – a 99.5 percent drop. The number of airlines serving the airport collapsed from 91 to 35. Two of the four main terminals have been temporarily mothballed; plans for a fifth have been set back at least two years.
“Industries that depend on travel, like aviation, hotels and tourism, will take a long time to get back on their feet, and may never recover fully,” warned Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.
Travel is one of the clearest ways to show how the coronavirus has disrupted the world. This globe shows the disappearance of flights over a five-month period, as covid-19 emerged in China and restrictions on global travel began to take hold.
But travel is only one way that the coronavirus is disrupting global interconnectedness. The pandemic is interrupting the flow of workers, money and goods that increasingly bound the postwar world, helped to lift more than a billion people out of poverty since the fall of the Berlin Wall and delivered unprecedented stability and prosperity to much of the planet. To encapsulate: U.S. investment in China raised demand for soybeans that enabled Brazilian farmers to buy German cars.
Rising economic nationalism was already chipping away at globalization before the first patients in Wuhan, China, began to fall ill in December. But the coronavirus, which has sickened at least 9.6 million people and killed more than 487,000, is now reshaping long-standing cultural, economic and political relations in an increasingly polarized world.
“The pandemic has made it so that you now have an additional excuse to block human-to-human contact and intellectual and economic exchange,” Posen said. “It’s a corrosion of globalization, but it’s also an acceleration of a realignment that was already happening.”
The golden era of globalization brought prosperity, but it also brought hubris. The Great Recession of the late 2000s, when frantic over-borrowing by people and governments, combined with cheap, easy and toxic financial instruments and weak regulation, led to a collapse that hollowed out personal savings and national reserves. The decade that followed saw a resurgence of protectionism; global trade patterns and foreign direct investment never really got their groove back.
But that might be nothing compared to what comes next.
Few are suggesting a complete unwinding of globalization. The pandemic’s substantial but relatively shallow hit to shipping, as compared to travel, show a world of people, companies and countries still prepared to do business with one another. Yet even as rebounding stocks and reopening businesses suggest a desire for a rapid return to normality, the way we travel, work, consume, invest, interact, migrate, cooperate on global problems and pursue prosperity has likely been changed for years to come.
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Passenger numbers suggest what happens when the world freezes in place.
The pandemic has impacted global travel like no other event in history: By spring, every country in the world had thrown up some sort of entry restriction, according to the United Nations World Tourism Organization. In April, international air passenger travel fell to levels not seen since the 1970s.
Analysts now project a record year-over-year drop in international tourist arrivals of as much as 80 percent. Compare that to the Great Recession of 2009, when arrivals dropped only 4 percent, or the SARS pandemic of 2002, when they fell 0.4 percent.
Chile’s LATAM, Colombia’s Avianca, Virgin Australia and Britain’s Flybe airlines have all declared bankruptcy. But the collapse of travel endangers not only airlines and hotels – it also threatens conservation efforts in places such as Namibia, for example, where tourist dollars allowed a poor nation to maintain vast natural preserves for the world’s largest population of black rhinos. It threatens cultural exchanges, such as the semester- and year-abroad programs that send hundreds of thousands of American students overseas each year, now suspended, postponed or canceled.
And it threatens business and other communications. Daniel Runde, director of the Project on Prosperity and Development at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, recalled a recent Zoom call that brought together 20 people from the United States, Brazil and Colombia for a conference on the future of the Amazon rainforest.
“There is no pulling people aside before the meeting to work things out,” he said. “You can’t pick up on body language from a grainy video image. Nonverbal communication is lost, and there were tensions on the call, maybe because of it.
“Afterwards, you can’t just go upstairs and finish the conversation. It feels like you’re missing 50 percent of the information you need to do your job.”
Across the globe, third- and fourth-tier cities – Cordoba, Argentina; Krakow, Poland; Austin, Texas – face a long, slow climb back to full connection with the wider world.
But this is about more than just air travel. Vehicular and pedestrian traffic at U.S. land borders with Mexico and Canada fell in April to their lowest levels on record. New barriers that have shot up on the once-open borders of the European Union might prove far more difficult to take down.
“What it does is increasingly isolate, and leads us to insular protectionist attitudes across the globe in everything that we do,” said John Grant, senior analyst for the British travel data provider OAG. “All of the wonderful learning and sharing, of history, of knowledge, of multiracial sharing of cultural experiences, is heading for a setback.”
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National lockdowns have also slowed the irregular flow of people across borders – undocumented immigration. On the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of people apprehended or expelled by the U.S. Border Patrol fell to 15,862 in April, down 47 percent from March – the largest one-month drop in at least 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center. In one striking move, Saudi Arabia announced this week it would slash the number of people allowed to make the Hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca, to no more than 10,000. The pilgrimage, which able-bodied, practicing Muslims are expected to make at least once in their lives, drew 2.5 million people last year.
Data collected by the International Organization for Migration at 35 key transit points across West and Central Africa showed a decrease in migration of 48 percent from January to April. The number of irregular border crossings along Europe’s main migratory routes fell by 75 percent in April to about 1,470 people – the lowest number since Frontex, the European border agency, began collecting data in 2009.
Some of those drops are proving to be temporary. Irregular arrivals into Europe, for instance, bounced back up to 4,260 in May – still unseasonably low, but a number that suggests that in some developing countries, rising food insecurity is beginning to weigh more heavily on people than the risks of crossing borders in the midst of a pandemic.
The irregular flow could grow as legal routes become more complicated. Wealthier nations have closed migration and asylum offices and consular services, worsening backlogs that in some cases already ran into years. At least two countries – Japan and South Korea – have suspended the validity of previously issued visas.
Some Chinese students are suddenly facing new obstacles to American educations, and President Donald Trump’s move to halt many new green cards and visas for foreign workers, although said to be temporary, has clouded the immediate futures for Swedish advertising executives and Brazilian jujitsu masters seeking to build new lives in the United States.
As poor migrants languish in unemployment or return home, the World Bank expects remittances to low- and- middle-income countries to decline by almost 20 percent this year – the largest decline on record. That virtually assures more of the world’s poorest families will have less access to food and medicines. As a share of GDP in those nations, remittances this year are set to fall to their lowest level since 1999.
Behind those numbers lies unspeakable hardship. Venezuelan migrants, refugees from a humanitarian crisis that has placed them at the bottom of Latin America’s socioeconomic ladder, are also heading home, after finding themselves jobless in neighboring countries suddenly mired in recession. Luis Medina, a 21-year-old Venezuelan laborer, fled the collapsing socialist state last year for Guayaquil, Ecuador. He managed to secure a job as a house painter; the majority of his earnings – $160 a month – went home to his mother, for food, and to aid her battle against cancer.
When the coronavirus ravaged Ecuador, the country locked down, and Medina’s work dried up.
“I could no longer afford the rent or the food,” he said.
He called an end to his immigrant’s dream. Lacking even the money for a bus ticket, he set out in mid-March on the 1,700-mile walk home on foot.
Two months later, he’s still walking.
“I’m returning with empty pockets,” he said from Colombia, with 900 miles left to go. “The future is uncertain, and I’m afraid. For myself, but especially for my family.”
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Perhaps more painful for the global economy is the slowdown in the flow of capital, goods and services. World trade is projected to fall 13.4 percent this year, its steepest drop in at least 60 years, kicking volumes back to 2014 levels. Foreign direct investment in emerging markets – the new bridges, roads, factories and ports that bring the developing world a chance for prosperity – is expected to plunge by about 20 percent, to levels not seen since 2006. Foreign direct investment as a share of GDP is expected to fall to the lowest level since the early 1990s.
The massive Vaca Muerta project, projected to create 22,000 jobs and double Argentina’s oil and gas output in six years by tapping into the world’s second-largest shale deposits, was clouded by the country’s economic woes before the pandemic hit. But after lockdowns sent global oil prices plummeting, foreign firms are rolling back planned investment.
Developing countries are particularly worried about a possible pullback in Chinese investment, one of the main drivers of infrastructure projects in emerging markets. Analysts cite a massive port planned for Lima, Peru, and a railroad project intended to link inland farmers and miners in Brazil’s impoverished Bahia state to an Atlantic port and global markets.
The Brazil project “requires a lot of financing and it’s not begun to be constructed, and there are plenty of reasons to not begin it,” said Margaret Myers, director of the Asia and Latin America Program at the Inter-American Dialogue in Washington. “When you look at the various risk factors, those are the kinds of projects most likely to fail now.”
Announcements of new investment projects and cross-border mergers and acquisitions both dropped by more than half year-over-year in the first months of 2020, according to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.
The pandemic is threatening international cooperation on global concerns. Argentina, plunged into a brutal recession and self-isolating, has halted the rollout of alternative energies to fight climate change indefinitely. The International Energy Agency forecasts that the amount of new renewable electricity added to global capacity will decline by 13 percent in 2020, the first deceleration since 2000.
Global distancing – of people, of goods, of capital – is deepening the brutal economic impact of lockdowns, fueling soaring joblessness and weakening demand. The global economy is suffering its deepest recession since World War II, according to the World Bank, with most countries experiencing downturns at one time since 1870. It’s the fourth deepest recession in the last 150 years, twice as deep as the Great Recession of the late 2000s.
Up to 100 million people globally are poised to fall into extreme poverty, the first increase since the Asian and Latin America financial crises of the 1990s, and the biggest increase since the World Bank began tracking the number in 1990.
“Whatever progress we have made over the past decades, we might end up losing that progress,” said Ayhan Kose, director of the Prospects Group at the World Bank. “There is no way some of the gains won’t disappear. The threats to globalization are quite important.”
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Even before the pandemic, growing economic protectionism after the Great Recession and the return of trade wars – chiefly, between the United States and China – had begun to clog the pipes through which goods, services and capital flowed. Now, in the shadow of covid-19, some wounded nations are moving as never before to protect their own industries.
Italy has long scrutinized foreign investments in its security, defense, transportation and telecommunication sectors. But as the country languishes in a brutal recession and mourns its dead, an emergency decree has vastly expanded the government’s authority to veto meaningful foreign investment in any firm working in electricity, water, health, media, data collection, aerospace, elections systems, banks, insurance, robotics or biotechnology.
“There’s a need to raise a shield against predatory colonization, both from countries of the East and European neighbors,” said Adolfo Urso, a senator of the right-wing Brothers of Italy party.
The coronavirus, he said, has changed the very definition of what constitutes a critical national asset.
“Say the vaccine industry is threatened by hostile takeovers,” Urso said. “Well, today, that’s as strategic as any defense company.”
The new restrictions have raised an alarm among Italian industrialists, who say their country’s long-stagnant economy will need more foreign capital, not less, to emerge from this crisis.
“That’s the whole of our economy right there, in that list, with the exception of Giorgio Armani’s jackets, and some Brianza-made chairs and sofas,” said Antonio Calabrò, deputy head of Assolombarda, a Milan-based group of industrialists. “It’s the opposite of open markets.”
– – –
At the onset of the pandemic, the sudden worldwide need for ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment, coupled with the inability of companies that make everything from tractors to computers to secure parts from shuttered factories in China, caused a global mad dash to scoop up whatever substitutes could be found – often at whatever price. As factories reopen and supply chains stabilize, the experience has left countries and companies traumatized, empowering calls to bring manufacturing jobs home – or at least to spread them among more and mostly closer countries.
That could mean a new set of winners and losers. Pressure will increase on some companies to shift away from China, where growing wages and land costs have already moved jobs to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. For companies targeting U.S. markets, Mexico – which sends goods across the border by land, sea and air – could see more jobs.
Yet actually repatriating globalized jobs can be far more difficult than politicians tend to portray. Carlton Solle found out the hard way.
G95, the company Solle runs just outside of Atlanta, should have had a corona moment: It makes apparel – hoodies, scarfs – fitted with a special filtration technology ideal for pandemic times. When his Chinese suppliers were locked down, Solle attempted to move production to Michigan. The effort quickly bogged down in production delays, poor quality and soaring costs.
The cost of making the company logo alone jumped from 20 cents in China to $3.40 in the United States. Solle says he was forced to raise prices, and his profit margin still took a hit.
He restarted production in China in May.
“At the end of the day, the thing the Chinese do really well is know how to mass-produce items,” he said. “Trying to shift to the U.S. was a monumental task for us as a company. I don’t know. We’re going to keep looking for options in the U.S. and other countries nearby.
“We’d like to do more here, but I just don’t know.”
Lois Travillion, 82, a retired Chicago math teacher and school administrator, has had two friends die of covid-19. “A lot of people have lost folks, and who knows who will be next?” she said. MUST CREDIT: Photo by Youngrae Kim for The Washington Post
By The Washington Post · Amy Goldstein, Emily Guskin · NATIONAL, HEALTH
Nearly 1 in 3 black Americans know someone personally who has died of covid-19, far exceeding their white counterparts, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll that underscores the coronavirus pandemic’s profoundly disparate impact.
The nationwide survey finds that 31 percent of black adults say they know someone firsthand who has been killed by the virus, compared with 17 percent of adults who are Hispanic and 9 percent who are white.
Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
Adding in those who know someone with symptoms consistent with covid-19, slightly more than half of black Americans say they know at least one person who has gotten sick or died of the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Fewer than 4 in 10 white or Hispanic Americans say they do.
Taken together, the poll’s findings attest to sharp racial differences in the sense that the virus is close at hand, after nearly a half-year in which it has sparked the nation’s worst public health calamity in more than a century.
According to authorities on health disparities, those differences arise from the nation’s deep-seated socioeconomic inequality and help explain the recent spasm of unrest across much of the country in a drive for racial justice.
“This pandemic has really unearthed – shone a real bright light on – the ways these disparities should not be accepted and are not tolerable,” said Joseph Betancourt, vice president and chief equity and inclusion officer at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
The differing close-up exposure to the virus’s ravaging effects is accompanied by divergent attitudes about the best way for the country to recover. Asked whether it is more important to try to control the spread of the coronavirus or to try to restart the economy, even if one hurts the other, 83 percent of black Americans say trying to control the virus is a higher priority.
By contrast, when the same question was asked in a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, just about half of white Americans said trying to control the virus is more important.
The differences in proximity to coronavirus sickness and death align, too, with political attitudes, the survey shows. More than 8 in 10 black Americans say that, in deciding which presidential candidate to vote for in the November election, the coronavirus outbreak will be one of the most important factors or very important. Nearly as many Americans who are Hispanic say they hold that view – but fewer than 6 in 10 who are white say the same.
The survey “tells us a lot about how the life experiences of individuals in the United States are different by race,” said Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association. “Life experiences drive a lot about how you view the world, how you make decisions and what you do.”
The poll’s central findings – the frequency of knowing someone killed by the virus – hold a mirror to the well-established pattern that the coronavirus has made its deepest inroads in the United States among black Americans. The virus has been more likely to infect black Americans and more likely to have a devastating effect on their bodies if they contract it.
“A lot of people have lost folks, and who knows who will be next?” said Lois R. Travillion, 82, a retired Chicago math teacher and school administrator who has had two friends die of covid-19.
In early April, Travillion got a call that a former co-worker in the Chicago school system – a man whom she still saw now and then and still played in his own band – had died of the virus.
Travillion said the other was a man, sharp and mobile in his mid-80s, who always sat two seats away from her at the monthly seniors breakfast, followed by Bible study that she attends at St. Stephen AME Church. Next thing she knew, he was infected, in the hospital, on a ventilator. On one of the last days of April, he died.
She found out just last Sunday that a member of her own church, Kelly Woodlawn United Methodist, had tested positive and is quarantining at home. And another man she knows, Travillion said, “was on a ventilator for a long time – and we thought he wasn’t going to make it, but by the grace of God, he pulled through.”
When she was a young woman still living in Mississippi, she took part in a 1963 Woolworth lunch counter sit-in to protest segregated seating. When she was new to Chicago in the late 1960s, she took part in the Black Manifesto, a set of demands to improve education at a high school where she taught.
The past months, she has shut herself in against the virus, relying on a former student to bring her groceries, wearing a mask when she walks down the hall to empty trash in the incinerator in the complex where she lives near Lake Michigan.
“People’s lives are more important” than focusing on restoring the economy, Travillion said. “There are so many people who have died. You won’t even need the economy because there won’t be anybody around.”
Lester Danner, 28, who lives in northwest Mississippi, has the same view. “It’s important to control the virus because we have a walking-dead society with the virus in the air,” he said. “A lot of people have died.”
Early on, a cousin got infected working in a nursing home laundry, Danner said. But she did not develop symptoms.
Then, an aunt called to tell him a family friend’s brother had died. He got sick in March, held on for a month in a hospital, then succumbed. The man and Danner’s father were born on the same day 66 years ago.
And now, just across the Tennessee line in Shelby County, cases are spiking – 400 new cases one day this week, more than twice as many as any day in March, April or May. Last week, the city council in Memphis, the county seat, voted to require residents to wear masks in public.
“People, they were so excited to be out of quarantine, they probably thought it would be okay, but now we are getting another wake-up call,” said Danner, who does branding and marketing work. “You can’t take anything for granted.”
According to the poll, there is not much difference among racial and ethnic groups in the proportion of people saying they know someone who has had possible symptoms of covid-19 but do not know anyone who died. Among white Americans, 28 percent say they know someone with symptoms. That is slightly higher than among black and Hispanic Americans, both at 21 percent.
It is the proximity to death that is stark. Among black Americans, the percentage knowing someone who died increases steadily with age. Nearly 1 in 4 adults younger than 35 say they know someone, compared with more than 4 in 10 people 65 and older.
The findings are “a true indication of reality,” said Betancourt, of Massachusetts General Hospital.
He said people of color in the United States tend to live with “a series of preconditions” that put them at greater risk of becoming infected with the virus and of then faring poorly. They include higher rates of poverty and the varied effects of structural racism, Betancourt said. The downstream effects, he said, include crowded housing, more frequent asthma, diabetes and other chronic diseases, and a greater likelihood of being in jobs that do not allow them to work from the greater safety of home.
The Post-Ipsos poll was conducted June 9-14 through Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a large online survey panel recruited through random sampling of U.S. households. Results among the sample of 1,153 non-Hispanic black adults have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus four percentage points; the error margin is 3.5 points among the parallel sample of 1,051 U.S. adults overall, four points among the sample of 742 white adults and 10 points among the sample of 115 Hispanic adults.
By The Washington Post · Lena H. Sun, Joel Achenbach · NATIONAL, HEALTH, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT WASHINGTON – The number of people in the United States who have been infected with the coronavirus is likely to be 10 times as high as the 2.4 million confirmed cases, based on antibody tests, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Thursday.
CDC Director Robert Redfield’s estimate, shared with reporters in a conference call, indicates that at least 24 million Americans have been infected so far.
The antibody tests examine a person’s blood for indicators that the immune system has mounted a response to an infection. The serological surveys are being done around the country as epidemiologists try to measure the reach of the virus to date. Redfield said he believes 5 to 8 percent of the population has been infected so far.
Significantly, that would mean 92 to 95 percent remain susceptible to a coronavirus infection. Experts say this is the critical data point showing that the pandemic remains in its early stages and people need to continue to try to limit the viral spread.
The CDC director’s comments came as case counts continued to surge to record levels in many states, particularly in the South and West, during warm-weather months that many had hoped would provide a lull in the pandemic.
Alabama, Nevada and Missouri reported single-day records for new coronavirus cases, a day after the national total hit a single-day high of 38,173 cases.
Amid signs that Texas has lost control of the epidemic, Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, announced the state would pause its reopening to try to halt the flow of infections. He said he is focused on strategies to slow the viral spread “while also allowing Texans to continue earning a paycheck to support their families. The last thing we want to do as a state is go backwards and close down businesses.”
As part of that pause, he suspended elective surgeries at hospitals in hard-hit Bexar, Dallas, Harris and Travis counties – home to the cities of San Antonio, Dallas, Houston and Austin, respectively. The rolling average of daily new cases in Texas has increased 62 percent from the past week, jumping from 2,610 on June 18 to 4,227 on Thursday, according to data tracked by The Washington Post. The daily count has set a record each day for 13 consecutive days.
The economic crisis triggered by the pandemic continues to roil the corporate sector. Macy’s said it is laying off 3,900 corporate employees and managers. Chuck E. Cheese’s parent company filed for bankruptcy protection. Both actions were due to the virus’s impact on sales, the companies said.
Apple said Thursday it is re-closing 14 stores in Florida. The state reported a second consecutive day of more than 5,000 new confirmed coronavirus cases.
Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic official, said during an appearance on Fox Business Network that the administration does not anticipate a second wave of infections, which has been projected by health experts, and that new hot spots popping up across the country are scenarios Americans will “just have to live with.”
Some officials in the Trump administration, including the president, argue the surging cases simply reflect expanded testing. But infectious-disease experts, including Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, dispute that, saying they also reflect increased community transmission.
Redfield said that younger people are the leading edge of that transmission. “Young people, many newly mobile after months of lockdowns, have been getting tested more often in recent weeks and driving the surge in cases in the South and West,” he said.
“In the past, I just don’t think we diagnosed these infections,” he said.
Redfield’s comments oscillated between downplaying the latest news bulletins and declaring that the rising numbers are indeed worrisome.
He said that a color-coded map of infections can make the country look as though the surge is widespread – “substantial portions of the United States are in red” – but said that only 3 percent of counties nationwide have actually become “hot spots.”
He also repeatedly pointed out that young people, who are less likely to have a severe outcome from the virus, are getting tested more often. But under questioning, he said he was not downplaying the significance of the surge in cases in places such as Texas, Florida and Arizona.
“This is a significant event,” he said. “We had a significant increase in cases. . . . We need to interrupt that.”
Redfield said Americans need to weigh their individual risks as they go about their lives. “When you must go out into the community, being in contact with few people is better than many, [and] shorter periods are better than longer,” he said.
Above all, he said, people should maintain social distancing, wash hands frequently and properly wear a face covering when they are unable to socially distance.
The death toll nationally from covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, has dropped since it peaked in April, during the catastrophic outbreak in New York City and nearby areas. Many experts have warned that the effects of the reopening of the economy in May and the increased mobility and decline in social distancing could reverse that recent trend. Covid-19 can lead to a protracted illness, and in those cases there is typically a lag of several weeks between an infection and death.
On Thursday, the CDC also made significant changes in how it categorizes people at elevated risk of a severe outcome from covid-19. The agency had previously said that people over 65 face higher risk. But it removed that age marker, saying that risk increases steadily with age.
Conditions that pose a higher risk for serious illness include chronic kidney disease, serious heart disease, COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), a weakened immune system from a solid organ transplant, Type 2 diabetes, obesity and newly added: sickle cell disease, an inherited blood disorder that affects 90,000 to 100,000 people in the United States, mainly African Americans.
Officials clarified that obesity means a body mass index of 30 or higher. Roughly 40 percent of the adult population is obese under that definition. A person who is 5-foot-5 and weighs 180 pounds has a BMI of 30. That same person who weighs 240 pounds would have a BMI of 40.
For the first time, agency officials said pregnant women with covid-19 may face a higher risk of hospitalization and treatment in intensive care units and respiratory help with a mechanical ventilator. The same data, however, shows that pregnant women are not at higher risk of dying. Officials said they are still researching the effects on newborns.
Although pregnant women are at risk for severe disease associated with other respiratory illnesses, such as influenza, there has been limited data related to covid-19 on pregnancy until now, health experts said.
In the CDC report on pregnancy and covid-19 released Thursday, researchers compared the impact of the disease on more than 8,000 pregnant women and 83,000 nonpregnant women from Jan. 22 to June 7.
Pregnant women were over five times as likely to be hospitalized as nonpregnant women, 1.5 times as likely to be admitted to intensive care units, and 1.7 times as likely to require mechanical ventilation, the report said. There was no higher risk for death among the pregnant women.
The CDC report also found that black and Hispanic pregnant women appear to be disproportionately hit by covid-19.
“This is the most convincing evidence that pregnant women with covid-19 are more likely to have severe disease, although the absolute risk is still low,” said Denise Jamieson, chair of the gynecology and obstetrics department at Emory University School of Medicine and chief of gynecology and obstetrics for Emory Healthcare, who was not involved in the report.
Among pregnant women with confirmed infections who reported race or ethnicity, 46 percent were Hispanic, 22 percent were black and 23 percent were white. That suggests the disproportionate impact of the disease on blacks and Latinos: In 2019, white women accounted for 51 percent of those who gave birth, compared with 24 percent who were Hispanic, and 15 percent who were black.
Jun 25. 2020President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla./File photo
By The Washington Post · Carol D. Leonnig, Joshua Partlow · NATIONAL, HEALTH, POLITICS, SCIENCE-ENVIRONMENT, NATIONAL-SECURITY
WASHINGTON – Dozens of Secret Service officers and agents who were on site for President Donald Trump’s rally in Tulsa, Okla., last week were ordered to self-quarantine after two of their colleagues tested positive for the novel coronavirus, part of the fallout from Trump’s insistence on holding the mass gathering over the objections of public health officials.
The Secret Service instructed employees who worked the Tulsa event to stay at home for 14 days when they returned from the weekend trip, according to two people familiar with the agency’s decision.
The order came in the wake of the discovery – hours before the president’s Saturday evening rally – that at least six advance staffers who helped organize the trip had tested positive for the virus, including two Secret Service employees. Another two advance staffers tested positive after Trump returned to Washington on Sunday.
On Tuesday, the Secret Service field office in Tulsa arranged for a special testing session at a hospital to determine if local agents had contracted the virus while assisting with the rally, according to two other people with knowledge of the testing. As part of the arrangement, doctors administered the test to both agents and some local officials in parked cars outside the hospital.
Among those who got tested was U.S. Attorney Trent Shores of the Northern District of Oklahoma, who had attended both pre-planning meetings with advance staff and the rally in case any legal issues arose, according to spokeswoman Lennea Montandon. Shores tested negative, she said.
It is still unknown how the rally may have impacted Tulsa’s count of coronavirus cases, which are rising swiftly. Tulsa County hit a record Wednesday, with 259 new confirmed cases, part of “steep upward trends” seen across Oklahoma, said Bruce Dart, the director of Tulsa’s health department, at a news conference Wednesday.
The move by the Secret Service to try to limit the spread of the infection shows how Trump’s decision to go forward with the rally increased the health risks and burden on the people who protect the president, former agents said.
A Secret Service spokeswoman declined to comment on how many of its employees have tested positive or were quarantined, but said that the Tulsa event has not affected the agency’s ability to do its job.
“The U.S. Secret Service remains prepared and staffed to fulfill all of the various duties as required,” agency spokeswoman Catherine Milhoan said in a statement.
“To protect the privacy of our employees’ health information and for operational security, the Secret Service is not releasing how many of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19, nor how many of its employees were, or currently are, quarantined,” she added.
White House spokesman Judd Deere did not directly answer questions about whether the president regretted the trip or if it increased the exposure risks for the agency, White House staff or himself.
“The President takes the health and safety of everyone traveling in support of himself and all White House operations very seriously,” Deere said in a statement. “When preparing for and carrying out any travel, White House Operations collaborates with the Physician to the President and the White House Military Office, to ensure plans incorporate current CDC guidance and best practices for limiting COVID-19 exposure to the greatest extent possible.”
The Trump campaign hoped the Tulsa trip would rally supporters in the heavily red state of Oklahoma amid polls showing an increasing number of voters concerned about the president’s handling of the pandemic, a stall in the economy and racial unrest over police violence against black Americans.
Before Trump and his son Eric Trump were scheduled to take to the stage in the BOK Center in Tulsa, the campaign learned that six staffers helping organize the event had tested positive for the coronavirus, including an advance agent and a Secret Service officer assigned to help screen attendees.
The two Secret Service employees had both attended a Friday afternoon planning meeting, where dozens of Secret Service staff gathered to review the logistics and their duties for the Saturday rally, according to people familiar with the situation.
Though the Secret Service employees who tested positive did not attend the rally, other Secret Service staff who were at the Friday meeting with them continued to perform their duties, including agents who work closely with the president, according to two people briefed on the arrangements.
“The entire team should have been switched out,” said one person familiar with the Friday meeting. “They were all exposed.”
The Secret Service declined to comment.
At the time the positive cases were announced on Saturday, campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh said, “No COVID-positive staffers or anyone in immediate contact will be at today’s rally or near attendees and elected officials.”
Murtaugh declined this week to discuss the safety repercussions of the trip or steps the campaign took to protect the president and staff, referring questions to the Secret Service.
A former Secret Service supervisor said the president’s choice to hold a closed-stadium rally in Tulsa – where many members of the public were following the president’s lead and not wearing masks – displayed a lack of concern about the safety of his own staff.
“Here the law-and-order president is putting his law enforcement team at risk – and it’s something they can’t see,” said the former supervisor, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the risk of criticizing the president.
Quarantining so many Secret Service agents in the wake of the trip also puts a strain on the agency, requiring other agents and officers to fill their shoes while they are off duty, several former agents said.
Trump’s rally in Tulsa came as Oklahoma had seen in a spike in coronavirus cases.
Dart, the city’s top health official, had said before Saturday’s gathering that he was worried it could become a “super spreader” event and recommended it be postponed.
On Wednesday, Dart said the number of confirmed cases rose 92 percent in the week leading up to the event. Hospitalizations rose 133 percent among people ages 18 to 35.
Dart did not say if any new confirmed cases were directly linked to Trump’s rally or the street protests the event drew. But the Tulsa Health Department is recommending anyone who attended Trump’s rally or the protests that day to get tested and monitor themselves for symptoms of the virus.
“It’s still too soon to know the outcome from these events,” Dart said.
Dart said that over the past month, the spread of coronavirus in Tulsa is exceeding the Health Department’s modeling.
“We’re finding that the reality’s actually worse than what the models were showing us could possibly happen,” he said.
Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, a Republican, said city officials are discussing imposing new restrictions on gatherings and rules about wearing masks.
“What we’ve been doing to date, the numbers are showing, just isn’t working,” Bynum told reporters Wednesday.
But he downplayed the risk of Trump’s rally, even though health officials said it is too early to know how many people may have contracted the virus from exposure there.
“It’s not from people going to protests or to rallies, it’s from people going to weddings and funerals and family gatherings and bars and other things like that, that are causing this uptick,” Bynum said.
By Syndication Washington Post, Bloomberg · Joe Mayes · WORLD, HEALTH, EUROPE
Boris Johnson announced the biggest relaxation of the U.K.’s coronavirus lockdown since it was imposed three months ago, and appealed to people to use their “common sense” to stop the spread of the disease.
Hotels, pubs, restaurants and cinemas will be able to open their doors from July 4, the prime minister said as he gave the green light for England’s beleaguered tourism and hospitality industry to restart.
The minimum “social distance” between individuals will be halved to one meter — provided they also take mitigating actions like wearing a face covering, Johnson said. Restrictions on social activity will no longer be enforceable by the law.
“Our long national hibernation is beginning to come to an end,” Johnson told the House of Commons. “A new but cautious optimism is palpable.”
Johnson said his government “will ask people to follow guidance on social contact instead of legislation” as he signaled the courts would no longer be used to enforce the rules. From July 4, two households will be able to meet indoors or outside and will be advised to follow the new social distancing guidelines.
Johnson’s announcement came after pressure from politicians in his own Conservative Party to speed up the relaxing of restrictions to help rebuild the British economy as it faces its worst recession in 300 years. Business groups cautiously welcomed the move and want more government assistance to help companies safely reopen, British Chambers of Commerce Director General Adam Marshall said in a statement.
“We are still a long way from business as usual,” Marshall said. “Broader efforts to boost business and consumer confidence will still be needed to help firms trade their way out of this crisis.”
Other places that will be allowed to open from July 4 include outdoor gyms and playgrounds, libraries, social clubs, community centers and hairdressers, Johnson said.
Ministers have been able to ease the restrictions because they are satisfied the virus is under control, he said.
“We do not believe there is currently a risk of a second peak of infections that might overwhelm the NHS,” Johnson said. “Our principle is to trust the British public to use their common sense in the full knowledge of the risks.”
Close-proximity venues such as nightclubs, soft-play areas, indoor gyms and swimming pools will remain closed. Traditional summer sports such as cricket also will not be permitted because the ball poses a risk of transmitting the disease, the premier said.
Johnson warned the virus is still in circulation and there may need to be regional restrictions imposed if it surges again in some parts of the country.
“As we have seen in other countries, there will be flare-ups for which local measures will be needed,” he said. “We will not hesitate to apply the brakes and reintroduce restrictions, even at national level, if required.”
He also sounded a note of caution on the likelihood of discovering a vaccine to the disease, seen by many as the only sure way out of the crisis, saying getting one will be “very difficult.”
Graham Brady, an influential Conservative lawmaker, pressed the prime minister on the government’s decision to quarantine travelers from outside the U.K., criticizing the blanket policy on arrivals as “not common sense.”
Johnson said he understands the “balance” required, but the country needs to be protected from reinfection from abroad.
Keir Starmer, leader of the opposition Labour Party, said he welcomed Johnson’s announcement on easing the lockdown, but called on the prime minister to give more support to businesses and local authorities to help them to implement the changes while avoiding a second spike in infections.
“I believe the government is trying to do the right thing and in that we will support them,” Starmer told the House of Commons. But ministers will need to communicate effectively, operate an effective track-and-trace system and follow scientific advice, he added, highlighting areas for which Johnson’s administration has been criticized.
Johnson’s office later said it will stop its daily televised coronavirus briefings, and will only use the format to make significant announcements.
Research shows teens have eaten fast food at least once a week during the Covid-19 crisis while overall online food deliveries have increased by 38 per cent compared to last year.
The Thai Health Promotion Foundation said the 2020 Thai Health Report by Mahidol University’s Institute of Population and Social Research and the academic’s network partners found that up to 69 per cent of Bangkok teens and youth aged 10-24 consume western fast food at least once a week, followed by the central region (54.6 per cent), southern region (48.7 per cent), northeastern region (41.9 per cent) and northern region (38.7 per cent).
Thais consumed fast food by ordering these through food delivery applications during the Covid-19 crisis.
A Kantar World panel undertook the survey between April 10 and 16, questioning 1,638 Thais aged up to 49 living in urban areas.
Thai Health recommends that people consume food in the 2:1:1 ratio – two parts vegetables, 1 part rice or 1 part flour, and 1 part meat – plus reduce sugary and salty foods and exercise regularly.
Asst Professor Dr Manasigan Kanchanachitra at the Institute of Population and Social Research said that today’s technology is affecting the food consumption behaviour of teenagers and youth as they can easily access food ordering applications that play an important role in determining trends and access restaurants easily as never before.
The survey also found that 61 per cent of the popular food ordered by different generations comprises fried chicken, burgers and pizza, while youth consume hardly any fresh vegetables or fruits on a regular basis.
Thai Health is urging food application developers to focus on supporting healthy food promotion.
By The Washington Post · Simon Denyer · WORLD, HEALTH, ASIA-PACIFIC
TOKYO – Sports leagues around the world have acknowledged that the only way to restart competition is to test all their players for the novel coronavirus. For businesses, the same idea is gaining ground: stepping in with testing where government-run efforts are lagging.
In Japan, a telecom magnate, Masayoshi Son, has taken the lead with a combination of antibody and diagnostic tests that offer a model for others as parts of the world look to reopen their economies.
Diagnostic polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, tests still are not widely available in Japan to determine who is infected and potentially contagious. So Son took another route: First, he tested 38,216 employees, family members and clients at his Tokyo-based SoftBank conglomerate for virus antibodies, to see who had been exposed to the virus. Anyone who tested positive was then sent for a PCR test.
“I am worried that if just one or two of our employees are infected, that could possibly lead to a cluster of infections,” he said.
“On the other hand, we can’t afford to continue to stay away as companies, fearing a risk of infection,” he continued. “For an early return to work, I believe it is very important for us to test widely, and to establish a process where patients, if found, will be taken care of by doctors and segregated swiftly.”
The results of his study – the largest antibody test in Japan and one of the largest in the world – offer a mixture of good and bad news.
Just 0.23 percent of the sample tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, suggesting Japan, with its widespread adoption of face masks and relatively early efforts to reduce transmission, has been relatively successful in containing the virus.
Son also offered free tests to medical workers. Of 5,850 who took up his offer, 1.79 percent had antibodies for the virus. Overall, that meant 0.43 percent of 44,066 people tested positive.
The results effectively bury the notion that Japan might be on a path to “herd immunity” – the idea that if roughly 60 percent of the population have already contracted the virus, its spread will slow.
The data is also a potential tripwire as businesses and communities reopen and reconnect. Places that were effective in keeping the infection rate relatively low also have greater numbers of people at risk of first-time exposure as lockdowns ease.
A smaller sample size in three cities – about 8,000 people in total – found infection rates of 0.1 percent in Tokyo, 0.17 in Osaka and 0.03 in Miyagi in northeastern Japan, Japan’s health minister, Katsunobu Kato, said Tuesday.
Kenji Shibuya, director of the Institute for Population Health at King’s College London, said the SoftBank data shows that Japan remains susceptible to another surge in infections if precautions are ignored as it reopens.
At the same time, society cannot manage under strict controls indefinitely, and “protective screening” such as SoftBank’s initiative may become more common, he added.
“The private sector is more rational compared to the old-fashioned medical community … We should move ahead. So I am very glad the private sector did very well,” Shibuya said.
Although SoftBank said the survey was not a representative sample of the country’s population, a rough extrapolation over Japan’s 126 million people would suggest around 300,000 people have contracted the virus since the pandemic began.
That is around 17 times the official numbers found by the diagnostic PCR tests – which under Japan’s policies were used test only the seriously ill.
Son said the tests were “driven by our desire to protect our employees and their families, and our customers and their families, and to protect as many people as possible.”
But the need to protect his business interests also played a role.
“As a private company, SoftBank is engaged in businesses every day, and to us, the exit strategy is very important. But as society becomes more active, we can’t avoid the risk of the second wave of infection,” said Son, Japan’s second-richest person after Tadashi Yanai, chief executive of Fast Retailing, which owns the Uniqlo chain.
Son said the idea of mass testing can be applied to many businesses, including factories, restaurants and night spots, all of which have to reopen.
What he called “a nice surprise” was that only eight out of 19,075 staff working in SoftBank’s mobile phone stores tested positive for antibodies, or just 0.04 percent, lower than the rate among other staff mostly working from home.
“Generally speaking, meeting people is a high risk,” said Norio Ohmagari, director of the National Center for Global Health and Medicine. “But I don’t think that is always the case. The result suggests we could reduce risks by taking various measures and doing them well.”
Other Japanese companies appear to be following Son’s move to step in where the government is slow to act.
Already, Rizap Group, a gym operator, is giving antibody tests to 30,000 employees and customers. Toda Corp., a construction company, plans to offer antibody tests to its staff in Tokyo. Nagasaki International University is testing all 69 faculty members as it seeks to reopen safely, media reports say.
While various antibody tests are being used or developed in the United States, they have sparked medical debates. They cannot replace diagnostic tests: Antibodies typically don’t show up for a week or two after a person contracts the virus, and an antibody test can’t tell if someone is still infected. There are also concerns about accuracy.
Son said he had considered giving everyone PCR tests, but decided on antibody tests as a first step because they can be done “relatively safely, widely and quickly.”
He consulted infectious-disease experts and settled on kits from two Chinese manufacturers, Innovita and Orient Gene. But he is also talking to Japanese company Takara Bio and hoping they can further develop a saliva-based PCR test for mass use.
“I am hoping from the bottom of my heart to get to see a society soon when everyone feels safe and enjoys their life,” Son said.
Japan has been criticized for failing to test people widely, but the government insists it took the correct approach, rationing tests to prevent crowds collecting at medical centers and to allow the health-care system to focus on the most severe cases.
With fewer than 1,000 deaths – by the official count – and only a few dozen new infections a day, the government believes Japan’s approach deserves global recognition.
But many experts say a change of approach is needed now, because only by testing people will the country be able to get back to work after an economically catastrophic shutdown.
“I think the idea of trying to test very comprehensively is very good,” said Wataru Sugiura, director of the Center for Clinical Sciences at the National Center for Global Health and Medicine.
“No test is perfect,” he added, but the massive volume of data created by SoftBank’s study could provide “a foothold toward building a better system.”
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White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany takes questions from journalists who are wearing masks and practicing social distancing at the White House on Tuesday, June 30, 2020. MUST CREDIT: Washington Post photo by Jabin Botsford
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Forecasted change in GDP between 2019 and 2020 Photo by: The Washington Post — The Washington Post
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