The U.N. secretary general, Antonio Guterres, and Pope Francis have both called for a cessation of all global conflicts to focus on what Mr. Guterres called the true fight of our lives. Last week Saudi Arabia announced a cease-fire in its war against Houthi rebels in Yemen, and armed groups have indicated a desire to stop fighting in Colombia, Cameroon and the Philippines. The Afghan government and the Taliban have both begun efforts to stem the spread of the virus. And Russia may find the burden of supporting Syrian troops or secessionists in western Ukraine excessive if Covid-19 begins to take a heavy toll on the economy.
But the Islamic State has called on its followers to ramp up their efforts. The Houthis have not reciprocated Saudi Arabias cease-fire, and fighting has escalated in parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
It is understandable that governments of rich nations have focused first and foremost on the crisis within their own borders. Nothing like the coronavirus has ever overwhelmed so much of the world in such short order, or with such cataclysmic force. Yet it is dismaying that a danger that confronts the entire world, that is likely to hurt the entire global economy, has led to so little global cooperation and has been met with so little global leadership.
This is a crisis in which the United States could have emerged as the leader. The country still may do so. But on top of the widely chronicled failures at home, the Trump administration has provided little inspiration for the world. The response in Europe has also been marked by confusion and disunity: The president of the European Unions main science organization resigned last week in protest of the bloc's handling of the crisis. The World Health Organization, meanwhile, is under heavy fire from critics who say its complicated relationship with China may have undermined its mission.
That is not likely to change, especially while the disease continues to ravage the United States, Italy, Spain and many other countries in the Northern Hemisphere, and most especially in an American presidential election year, when the struggle against Covid-19 is likely to become only more politicized.
But the weakness of Washington should not prevent the brain trust of the developed world the think tanks, news media, universities and nongovernmental organizations from focusing on a strategy for the next and possibly most brutal front in the struggle against the scourge of the coronavirus. Many organizations have already begun to do so, recognizing that this may be the defining struggle of our era, and that if ever the world demanded a global response, this is it.
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The Global Coronavirus Crisis Is Poised to Get Much, Much Worse - The New York Times
Dr. Padgetts team at EvergreenHealth decided to transfer him to cardiac specialists at Swedish Health Services in Seattle. Dr. Matt Hartman, a cardiologist there, said it was clear that Dr. Padgetts condition was rapidly worsening and that if they did not do something, he would not survive.
We didnt know if this was someone who was just going to die no matter what we do, he said. We think with his age, and the fact that theres no other major comorbidity or problem, that we should at least give it a try.
The team decided to hook Dr. Padgett up to a machine known as an ECMO that could essentially serve as both an artificial heart and lung, taking his blood out of his body, oxygenating it and returning it to him. While such procedures are most often done in the surgery suites, in this case it was all done in the intensive care unit, to prevent the spread of the coronavirus elsewhere in the hospital.
We brought the operating room to him, said Dr. Samuel Youssef, a cardiac surgeon at Swedish.
The team also began consulting with oncologists. Indicators of inflammation in Dr. Padgetts body were astonishingly high, suggesting that he was potentially dealing with a cytokine storm, a dangerous phenomenon in which the immune systems of otherwise healthy people overreact in fighting the coronavirus.
The doctors administered the drug tocilizumab, often used for cancer patients who can have similar immune system reactions. They added high-dose vitamin C after seeing reports that it might be beneficial. These experimental treatments had also been tried on another patient, a 33-year-old woman, with some success.
Over that week in mid-March, there were signs of improvement. As his inflammation numbers came down and his lungs started to provide more oxygen, the team began scaling back the ECMO machine, until they finally removed it on March 23.
Four days later, on March 27, the breathing tube was removed. Slowly, after two weeks in a sedated coma, Dr. Padgett began to wake up.
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He Was a Doctor Who Never Got Sick. Then the Coronavirus Nearly Killed Him. - The New York Times
(Want to get this briefing by email? Heres the sign-up.)
Good morning.
Were covering the debate over reopening the U.S. economy, a major deal to reduce oil production, and deadly storms in the Southeast.
Gov. Philip Murphy of New Jersey, a Democrat, said of returning to a semblance of life before the coronavirus outbreak: Its not job No. 1, because right now the house is on fire and job No. 1 is to put the fire out.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said that reopening the country would not be an all or none proposition and that restrictions must be lifted gradually to prevent a resurgence of cases. He also said that more lives could have been saved if the country had been shut down earlier.
Here are the latest updates from the U.S. and around the world, as well as maps of the pandemic.
Were also tracking the viruss growth rate in hundreds of U.S. metro areas.
In other developments:
Prodded by President Trump, OPEC, Russia and other oil producers agreed to reduce output by 9.7 million barrels a day in May and June, close to 10 percent of the worlds production. Demand for oil is down about 35 percent since the start of the crisis.
The Daily: In todays episode, Americans discuss how their lives have changed during the pandemic.
Perspective: In an opinion piece for The Times, Joe Biden outlines his strategy for reopening the U.S. economy.
The details: Weve compiled expert guidance on several subjects, including health, money and travel.
The Times is providing free access to much of our coronavirus coverage, and our Coronavirus Briefing newsletter like all of our newsletters is free. Please consider supporting our journalism with a subscription.
The obstetrics unit at the Brooklyn Hospital Center, where nearly 200 babies have been born since the beginning of March, has been transformed during the pandemic, with mothers-to-be confined to their rooms. Multiple doctors and nurses have gotten sick.
Some pregnant women have fallen extremely ill, but doctors are winning battles for their lives and their childrens. So far, not one mother or baby has been lost.
Another angle: Gov. Andrew Cuomo insisted that he had the final say on when New York Citys public schools will reopen. Mayor Bill de Blasio has said they will remain closed through the end of June.
Related: New York State still has hundreds of coronavirus-linked deaths each day, but hospitalization rates and other data suggest that the spread of the virus has slowed, Mr. Cuomo said on Sunday. Heres the latest from our Metro desk.
Epidemiologists have praised the aggressive stay-at-home orders in California, Oregon and Washington for helping to limit the spread of the coronavirus, a contrast to relatively slower moves in New York State and elsewhere.
As of this morning, there have been more than 9,300 virus-related deaths in New York, compared with just over 1,200 total for the three Pacific Coast states.
Some say the effects of the western states moves have been overlooked in a country where news outlets are concentrated in New York City and Washington, D.C.
Quotable: California and the Bay Area response is impressive because it was done before there were obvious and tangible risks, said Dr. Robert Wachter at the University of California, San Francisco. New York acted in a more predictable way.
Another angle: Space and privacy have emerged as a class divide: more valuable than ever to those who have it and potentially fatal to those who dont.
They include a group of veteran black actresses who have overcome the odds to achieve long Hollywood careers. Above, clockwise from left: Taraji P. Henson, Mary J. Blige, Angela Bassett, Lynn Whitfield, Halle Berry and Kimberly Elise.
Deadly storms in the South: At least 11 people were killed as tornadoes hit Mississippi and other states. More severe weather is expected through this morning.
Chernobyl fires: Firefighters have struggled to control wildfires burning through radioactive forest around the abandoned nuclear plant in Ukraine. Radiation levels there are considerably lower than they were immediately after the 1986 accident but still pose risks.
Snapshot: Above, tulips in the Netherlands. Lockdowns have led growers to destroy hundreds of millions of flowers, upending a season that brings in about 7 billion euros ($7.6 billion).
Metropolitan Diary: In this weeks column, a sharp comeback, a turtle in trouble and more reader tales of New York City.
What were reading: This Guernica magazine essay about a writers enduring love for Dolly Parton. This gorgeous reflection on childhood, beauty and origin stories has me blasting my own Dolly Parton albums, says Anna Holland, an editor in London.
Now, a break from the news
Cook: Coconut macaroons, two simple ways. They might just be the easiest and most forgiving of any cookie.
Read: Vanessa Friedman on Bill Cunninghams photographs of Easter parades past in New York City. Dwight Garner reviews a collection of poems by Hannah Sullivan. And speaking of poetry, heres some for children, with pictures.
Cope: Heres how to manage a refund for that vacation that isnt happening. Art can help put the pandemic in perspective. And Tara Parker-Pope has a definitive guide to face masks.
We have more ideas about what to read, cook, watch and do while staying safe at home.
During the pandemic, The Times has enhanced its service journalism: answers to questions people are asking, and solutions to problems theyre experiencing.
Elisabeth Goodridge and Karen Barrow are two Times journalists now assigned to that coverage. Heres a taste of their approach, edited from their discussion with Times Insider.
Where have you found support?
Elisabeth: Service journalism is coming from every single corner of the newsroom. Its coming from Business, from Metro, from Parenting, from Health. Its pretty much the entire newsroom.
How does this differ from what you normally do?
Elisabeth: I am usually the deputy travel editor. What I have been doing is figuring out what service stories are needed now. There are three ways Im approaching it. First, what kind of stories are we hearing from our reporting? Second, what reader questions are coming in? Third, were reviewing what people are searching for on Google. Then, actually, fourth is whatever comes out of Karens mind.
Karen: My logic, having been an editor for Smarter Living for a couple of years, is that if Im wondering about it, a lot of other people probably are.
What does an average day look like for you?
Karen: We both have kids, so were balancing that. Theyre all home. I find myself constantly checking Slack and email and furiously working during windows when theyre busy with other things.
Elisabeth: I have been waking up early to get as much work done as I can before my son is awake. We have a lot of meetings. Theres just so much news. In the afternoon, Im doing a lot of editing. Were taking ideas from our own lives, because we know that other people are having these issues, too.
How do you decompress?
Elisabeth: You have to walk around. Drink water.
I think everyone needs to be really disciplined, and I need to start taking my own advice on making sure that we know this is a marathon, not a sprint. And additionally, being good to my mental health, being good to all my co-workers and everyone I know.
Karen: I have a dog who Ive never loved more because he gets me out of the house twice a day.
Thats it for this briefing. See you next time.
Chris
Thank youMelissa Clark provided the recipe, and Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh the rest of the break from the news. The Back Story is based on reporting by Danya Issawi. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.
P.S. Were listening to The Daily. Todays episode is about life in the U.S. during the pandemic. Heres todays Mini Crossword, and a clue: Prayer ender (four letters). You can find all our puzzles here. Sam Sifton, the founding editor of NYT Cooking, and our restaurant critics will discuss the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on the restaurant industry during a group call with readers at 4 p.m. Eastern today. R.S.V.P. here.
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What You Need to Know Today: Coronavirus, Anthony Fauci, Tornadoes - The New York Times
The coronavirus pandemic has crippled America. So far, the virus has killed more than 20,000 people in the United States and has sickened more than 500,000 people.
Its clear now that the US government was woefully unprepared for the pandemic, and thats been reflected in its messaging to the public since the start.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), for instance, didnt tell the country to stop gathering in groups until March 15 weeks after a top CDC official announced that the virus would begin spreading throughout the US. And after telling Americans for months that they should not wear masks unless they are sick, the government formally flipped that advice on April 3 and said that everyone should wear some kind of covering on their face in certain public settings.
Much of the mainstream media amplified this slow and muddled reaction to the rapidly spreading virus. Since alarming reports about Covid-19 began to emerge from China in January, the media often provided information to Americans that later proved to be wrong, or at least inadequate.
For instance: While President Trump has been correctly pilloried for describing the coronavirus as less dangerous than the flu, that message was commonplace in mainstream media outlets throughout February. And journalists including my colleagues at Vox were dutifully repeating exhortations from public health officials not to wear masks for much of 2020.
As we head into the next phase of the pandemic, and as the stakes mount, its worth looking back to ask how the media could have done better as the virus broke out of China and headed to the US.
Why didnt we see this coming sooner? And once we did, why didnt we sound the alarm with more vigor?
If you read the stories from that period, not just the headlines, youll find that most of the information holding the pieces together comes from authoritative sources youd want reporters to turn to: experts at institutions like the World Health Organization, the CDC, and academics with real domain knowledge.
The problem, in many cases, was that that information was wrong, or at least incomplete. Which raises the hard question for journalists scrutinizing our performance in recent months: How do we cover a story where neither we nor the experts we turn to know what isnt yet known? And how do we warn Americans about the full range of potential risks in the world without ringing alarm bells so constantly that theyll tune us out?
Lets be clear: Journalists have been doing crucial reporting about what the US government got wrong as the pandemic advanced, and what US leaders could have done to prepare America. They provided analysis that put the news in context. And they have also provided important on-the-ground dispatches from places around the world that have been devastated by the disease often at great personal risk starting at its epicenter in Wuhan, China.
But when it came to grappling with a new disease they knew nothing about, journalists most often turned to experts and institutions for information, and relayed what those experts and institutions told them to their audience.
And given that the Covid-19 coronavirus is brand new, even the best-meaning experts and institutions gave conflicting information, some of which now has proven to be inaccurate or up for debate. That includes National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Anthony Fauci, who is now the most trusted official in the federal government when it comes to the Covid-19 response, but as late as February was calling the risk from coronavirus minuscule and warning people to worry instead about influenza outbreak, which is having its second wave.
Theres a line between doing aggressive reporting and kind of acting in the role of a public health agency, Joe Kahn, the New York Timess managing editor, told Recode. And you never have a degree of complete certainty about the medical analysis, and the epidemiology.
That degree of uncertainty is much larger when it comes to a new virus that moves around the world as quickly as a plane. Its a problem that comes built into the reporting. Perhaps the only solution journalists have is to simply say: The experts we talked to arent sure, but theyre trying to find out.
Laura Helmuth, who was the health and science editor at the Washington Post and recently left to become editor-in-chief of Scientific American, says acknowledging gaps in knowledge is crucial but not easy.
One thing that science journalists have been getting better at is not just saying what we do know, but what we dont know, she says. But most journalists arent accustomed to doing that.
And that assumes the journalists themselves have the expertise to ask the right experts. Mainstream journalists who know how to read and understand academic research reports are a select group and have been for decades. Many midsize newspapers once employed dedicated science journalists, but those jobs have been dwindling for years. (One reason that Stat, a publication that launched in 2015, which specializes in medical and science reporting, has been so valuable during this crisis is that it employs dozens of expert journalists who once did this work for other outlets.)
But Zeynep Tufekci, a professor at the University of North Carolinas School of Information and Library Science who specializes in the intersection between technology and society, argues that the mainstream media should have been able to understand the threat facing the country much earlier.
Writing in the Atlantic on March 24, she says the threat should have been obvious as early as January 29, when a New England Journal of Medicine paper described the viruss speed, cunning, and lethality. Tufekci shared the paper on Twitter and said that with an urgent enormous effort, this could be contained. But back then, widespread lockdowns and enforced social distancing for everyone regardless of their symptoms were hard to imagine, even for Tufekci. For all of us, washing hands often and not touching ones face and self-isolating if feverish are the sensible stepsas in any flu season, she tweeted.
Tufekcis critique is that many journalists who covered the outbreak in the first couple of months of the year werent analytical enough: Thus from the end of January through most of February, a soothing message got widespread traction, not just with Donald Trump and his audience, but among traditional media in the United States, which exhorted us to worry about the flu instead, and warned us against overreaction. It seemed sensible, grown-up, and responsible.
Some of that advice shows up in memes that highlight headlines from a range of respected media outlets that now seem terribly misleading after new information came to light. (You wont find any Vox headlines in the collage below on flu comparisons, but as many people have pointed out, my colleagues at Vox published some stories and tweets with similar angles.)
But, again: Those stories didnt just materialize out of reporters heads. They were informed by experts trying to make sense of something they hadnt seen before.
For instance, Maimuna Majumder, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School, told BuzzFeed News in late January in a story originally titled Dont Worry About The Coronavirus. Worry About The Flu that some worst-case projections about the diseases velocity were absolutely premature and hyperbolic.
A January 29 piece from Axios explained, Why we panic about coronavirus, but not the flu. It quoted an infectious diseases physician at the University of Nebraska, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, and a professor of preventive medicine at Vanderbilt University to make the argument that the flu should be Americans real concern.
The same was true for a much-discussed Recode piece from February 13 that looked at the way Silicon Valley was responding to the virus. That story relied on information from the CDC as well as an infectious disease physician at Stanford Health Care, who said that the chances are astonishingly low that you would come into contact with a coronavirus infection at work or in a public setting. Building on those interviews, it repeated the argument that the fact remains that, so far, the flu has impacted far more people. Though true at the time, this clearly missed where the virus was headed.
But even now, months after we first learned about the virus, scientists are still learning the nitty-gritty of how it spreads and the extent to which it lingers in airborne droplets and aerosols that can infect others. That makes it hard to answer a question like, can you contract the virus just by breathing in the same space as someone whos infected? We dont know the full answer and may not for some time, and thats why the institutions that employ these experts have been giving journalists and the public contradictory advice along the way.
That back-and-forth can be jarring, even if weve become accustomed to continual contradictions from our government leaders. The Trump administration has conditioned Americans to a reality where the president routinely announces something in the morning, backtracks it shortly afterward, and later pretends he never said it. So when he does say something, its pored over immediately to check for falsehoods and (usually) treated with appropriate skepticism.
You can argue that American newsrooms should use the same kind of scrutiny when it comes to pronouncements from institutions including ones like the CDC, which generally dont make news. But its not a stance Americans are used to seeing, particularly in the middle of a catastrophe, when people want reassurance and guidance.
An obvious but important point: All of the coverage were discussing here doesnt include Fox News and the rest of the pro-Trump media infrastructure, because it would be unrealistic to expect useful coverage from that infrastructure. With the narrow exception of Tucker Carlson, that apparatus simply provided an echo chamber and feedback loop for Trumps messaging, so that when Trump said he expected the virus to miraculously disappear, they said the same, and when he said it was time to take it seriously, they did the same. This did a deadly disservice to an enormous swath of the country, which takes its cues from those outlets. But its not surprising. Misinformation from the Trump administration is the biggest challenge, Helmuth says. Really good reporters are wasting a ton of time refuting misinformation from the White House.
But even if youre inclined to give the media a pass for its performance before the pandemic hit the US, what about the second phase? When we knew it was coming and that it would be bad?
You cant argue that Americans had mixed messaging by that point: On February 25, CDC official Nancy Messonnier told reporters that she expected to see the coronavirus appear in the US via community spread meaning people would become infected without knowingly coming into contact with other infected people and that disruption to everyday life might be severe.
But even after that, worrisome news about the spread and effects of the virus, which was moving across Asia and showing up in Europe, competed with coverage of the Democratic primary and other stories of the moment, like Harvey Weinsteins sentencing for sexual assault. And stories that did cover the virus often focused on the Trump administrations moves like his decision to put Mike Pence (theoretically) in charge of a virus response team instead of plainly telling Americans that they could be facing huge death tolls and a devastated economy.
I think people were worried about being alarmist, MSNBC host Chris Hayes told Recode. But Hayes also says that figuring out the right degree of alarm to sound is a basic problem for journalists.
In a fundamental, definitional way, news is bad at communicating risk, he said. Telling you about a plane crash is news, but it doesnt convey the risk of flying it overstates it, by giving it prominence. The same with local crime stories. Meanwhile, telling you about a pandemic thats about to overtake the country, kill tens of thousands of people, and crater the economy is very hard to do when it hasnt happened yet, but theres a chance it could.
This core challenge for journalists wont go away after the pandemic: There are always going to be threats that could eventually lead to disaster, but most of them dont. If we holler every time we see one, well be wrong and no one will listen to us. If we dont holler when theres a real one, we will have let down our audience.
I first started poking a few weeks ago at the idea of whether the mainstream media should have been more alarmist about the coronavirus sooner. When I talked to Brian Stelter, CNNs media reporter, on March 10, he told me he didnt want to cause undue fear in his coverage, and that extended to the way he edited the on-air chyrons that ran during his Reliable Sources show.
For instance, Stelter said at the time that he was stripping out the word deadly whenever he saw the phrase deadly virus.
Everyone knows its a deadly virus, he said. You dont have to call it deadly virus every time. Its a virus. We dont call the flu the deadly flu.
As Stelter noted, a lot of this comes down to packaging: How and when do you communicate the most important news to people, and how do you balance the need to not scare them prematurely with the need to scare them into action?
The media should be screaming about it, says Laura Helmuth. They should be saying that the states that dont have stay-at-home orders are killing people, that politicizing this is killing people.
In some cases, the screaming was there, but you had to work to hear it. You wouldnt find it in a headline or the top of a newscast, but if you absorbed the whole thing, youd find news that would scare you into some kind of action.
My sort-of come-to-Jesus moment started on February 27 when I listened to Times reporter Donald McNeil on the papers Daily podcast. He said the worst-case scenario was a repeat of the 1918 flu pandemic, which killed 50 million people worldwide and at least 675,000 in the United States.
In that version, McNeil said calmly: Everybody in the US would know somebody who dies.
Its most gripping in audio form, but I want to pull out a section here:
Donald G. McNeil Jr.Some big chunk of the country 30, 40, 50 percent are likely to get a new virus when it blows through. And if you dont get it in the first wave, you might get it in the second wave.
Michael BarbaroAnd 2 percent lethality rate of 50 percent of the country. I dont want to do that math. Its really, really awful.
McNeilIts a lot of people. It means, you know, you dont die, 80 percent of people have mild cases. But you know somebody who dies.
BarbaroThats pretty horrible Okay. Now, the best-case scenario.
McNeil The best-case scenario is one of these drugs works, and basically everybody gets sick next year, but everybody who is hospitalized gets a drug that keeps them from dying and keeps them from going into deep, deep, deep respiratory distress. And we have the equivalent of a bad flu season. And then everybody says, Oh, the media, they blew it out of proportion again. You know, its all ridiculous. And, you know, I get blamed.
That was enough for me sort of. I didnt change my plans to travel to Los Angeles the following week, but I did start assuming that the rest of my spring plans were going to be up in the air. And I told my family that we should start buying food not in panic, but slowly. And I wondered how The Dailys millions of listeners would respond.
But, again, if you just scanned the title of that days Daily episode, you might not realize that a New York Times reporter was projecting that the best-case scenario for America was that everybody gets sick over the next year but could be saved from serious illness via yet-to-be-developed drugs. And that the worst case was more American deaths than we suffered in World War II. That Title: The Coronavirus Goes Global.
The truth is, theres no good answer to this. You can be as diligent about your sourcing as possible and still get it wrong if the experts you talk to get it wrong. And you can err on the side of not scaring people, when scaring people into action may be the only thing that saves their lives. I dont know that well do better next time, and we may just have to live with it no matter how early the warnings are.
Lets end by traveling back in time to January 27, to watch an exchange you probably didnt see when it aired: CNBCs Brian Sullivan interviewing former Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who was also the head of the Department of Health and Human Services from 2005 to 2009.
Leavitt was arguing that if the coronavirus made it to the US, it would be nearly impossible to confine it. But you can see Sullivan struggling, in real time, with how much fear to strike in his audience.
Mike LeavittThere will be a period of time, if this starts to spread, where people will need to change their behavior. These will be the same kind of provisions that every family, every business, every community, every employer, needs to be thinking about, not just for a pandemic virus but for many kinds of emergencies.
Brian SullivanBut we also have to walk, I would imagine, that very fine and difficult line, Governor, which is: You dont want to scare people unnecessarily. We do have five cases. Nobody is minimizing any of those five cases or what is happening. But you also dont want to create a situation where people may begin to act irrational.
Leavitt[Pause] So heres the problem. Anything you say in advance of a pandemic seems alarmist. Anything that youve done after it starts is inadequate.
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What went wrong with the medias coronavirus coverage? - Vox.com
Meanwhile, New Yorks health-care system was sinking into chaos, as COVID-19 cases swamped hospitals. That day, there were more 911 calls than there had been on September 11, 2001. Some Fokkers, however, felt that it was important not to get swept up in apocalyptic tales or media reports, or to fall for the Chicken Littles. They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program Mad Money, on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.
As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets, and of arguments about them, is numbersdata and their deployments. Reliable data about COVID-19 have been scarce, mainly because, in the shameful absence of widespread testing, no one knows how many people have or have had the virus, which would determine the rate of infection and, most crucially, the fatality rate. The numerator (how many have died) is known, more or less, but its the denominator (how many have caught it) that has been the object of such speculation. If I had a roll of toilet paper for every finance guys analysis of the death rate Ive been asked to read, Id have toilet paper. Most of these calculations, it seems, are arguments for why the rate is likely to be much, much lower than the medical experts have concluded. The less lethal it is, the better the comparison to the flu, and therefore the easier it is to chide everyone for getting so worked up over it. As Lawrence White, a professor of economics at George Mason University, tweeted, Almost everyone talking about the #coronavirus is displaying strong confirmation bias. Which only goes to prove what Ive always said.
Still, its hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings. Whats the trade-off? How many deaths are tolerable? Zero? Tens of thousands, as with the flu? Or whatever number it is that will keep us from slipping into a global depression? The public-health hazards of deepening unemployment and povertymental illness, suicide, addiction, malnutritionare uncounted.
Financial people love to come at you with numbers, to cluck over the innumeracy of the populace and the press, to cite the tyranny of the anecdote and the superior risk-assessment calculus of the guy who has an understanding of stochastic volatility and some skin in the gameeven when that skin is other peoples. But while risk and price are intertwined, value and values are something else entirely. It can be hard to find the right math for those.
In the months following the first tidings of COVID-19 from China, Trump played down its potential impactattempting to jawbone a virus, or at least the perception of it. But a virus, unlike a President, doesnt care how its perceived. It gets penetration, whether you believe in it or not. By the time, later in March, that he acknowledged the scale of the pandemic (and sought to convince those who hadnt been paying attention that hed been paying attention all along, except to the extent that hed been distracted), it had long been abundantly clear that he cared more about the economic damageeven if it was only in relation to his relection prospects, or to the fate of his hotel and golf-resort businessesthan about any particular threshold regarding loss of life or the greater good. Others, perhaps on his behalf, have tried to expand his position. For a few days, the message, reinforced by the likes of Glenn Beck (Id rather die than kill the country) and Dan Patrick, the soon-to-be-seventy lieutenant governor of Texas (If thats the exchange, Im all in), was that we might have to sacrifice our elders for the sake of the economy. The politics of it were perverse. Many of the same people who had cited death panels in the fight against Obamacare were now essentially arguing the opposite. One mans cost controls are another mans eugenics.
For Trump, the economy is basically the stock market. Hes obsessed with it, much the way he fixates on television ratings. The stock market is, among other things, a great mood indicator. But it isnt the economynot even close. As were now discovering, to more horror than surprise, the cessation of commercial activitytravel, tourism, entertainment, restaurants, sports, construction, conferences, or really any transactions, in significant volume, be they in lawyering, accounting, book sales, or sparkplugsmeans no revenue, no ability to make payroll or rent, mass layoffs, steep declines in both supply and demand, and reverberations, up and down the food chain, of defaults on debt. Thats the economy.
This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the viruss victims, the economy had a prexisting conditiondebt, instead of pulmonary disease. Corporate debt, high-yield debt, distressed debt, student debt, consumer debt, mortgage debt, sovereign debt. Its as if the virus is almost beside the point, a trader I know told me. This was all set up to happen.
The trader was one of those guys who had been muttering about a financial collapse for a decade. The 2008 bailout, with the politically motivated and, at best, capricious sorting of winners and losers, rankled, as did the ongoing collusion among the big banks, the Federal Reserve, and politicians of both parties. Hed heard that the smart money, like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by Marchs end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit linesa revolver frenzy, as the financial blog Zero Hedge put it, in publishing a list of the companies that managed to get their money in time. Corporate America had hit up the pawnshop, en masse. In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down just $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.
It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapseshaircuts for baldheadsleading to more defaults. The market in distressed debt has already ballooned to about a trillion dollars.
As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didnt have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions, as landlords sent threatening reminders. Would property owners, without their monthly nut, be able to finance their own debts? And what of the banks, with all the bad paper? In the last week of March, an additional 6.6 million Americans filed jobless claims, doubling the previous weeks record. In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.
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Other evidence supports this model. A recent peer-reviewed study led by a team from Erasmus University, in the Netherlands, published data from 12 patients showing that they had developed antibodies after infection with SARS-CoV-2. Several of my colleagues and students and I have statistically analyzed thousands of seasonal coronavirus cases in the United States and used a mathematical model to infer that immunity over a year or so is likely for the two seasonal coronaviruses most closely related to SARS-CoV-2 an indication perhaps of how immunity to SARS-CoV-2 itself might also behave.
If it is true that infection creates immunity in most or all individuals and that the protection lasts a year or more, then the infection of increasing numbers of people in any given population will lead to the buildup of so-called herd immunity. As more and more people become immune to the virus, an infected individual has less and less chance of coming into contact with a person susceptible to infection. Eventually, herd immunity becomes pervasive enough that an infected person on average infects less than one other person; at that point, the number of cases starts to go down. If herd immunity is widespread enough, then even in the absence of measures designed to slow transmission, the virus will be contained at least until immunity wanes or enough new people susceptible to infection are born.
At the moment, cases of Covid-19 have been undercounted because of limited testing perhaps by a factor of 10 in some places, like Italy as of late last month. If the undercounting is around this level in other countries as well, then a majority of the population in much (if not all) of the world still is susceptible to infection, and herd immunity is a minor phenomenon right now. The long-term control of the virus depends on getting a majority of people to become immune, through infection and recovery or through vaccination how large a majority depends on yet other parameters of the infection that remain unknown.
One concern has to do with the possibility of reinfection. South Koreas Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that 91 patients who had been infected with SARS-CoV-2 and then tested negative for the virus later tested positive again. If some of these cases were indeed reinfections, they would cast doubt on the strength of the immunity the patients had developed.
An alternative possibility, which many scientists think is more likely, is that these patients had a false negative test in the middle of an ongoing infection, or that the infection had temporarily subsided and then re-emerged. South Koreas C.D.C. is now working to assess the merit of all these explanations. As with other diseases for which it can be difficult to distinguish a new infection from a new flare-up of an old infection like tuberculosis the issue might be resolved by comparing the viral genome sequence from the first and the second periods of infection.
For now, it is reasonable to assume that only a minority of the worlds population is immune to SARS-CoV-2, even in hard-hit areas. How could this tentative picture evolve as better data come in? Early hints suggest that it could change in either direction.
It is possible that many more cases of Covid-19 have occurred than have been reported, even after accounting for limited testing. One recent study (not yet peer-reviewed) suggests that rather than, say, 10 times the number of detected cases, the United States may really have more like 100, or even 1,000, times the official number. This estimate is an indirect inference from statistical correlations. In emergencies, such indirect assessments can be early evidence of an important finding or statistical flukes. But if this one is correct, then herd immunity to SARS-CoV-2 could be building faster than the commonly reported figures suggest.
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BEIRUT, Lebanon Qatar has locked down tens of thousands of migrant workers in a crowded neighborhood, raising fears it will become a coronavirus hotbed. Companies in Saudi Arabia have told foreign laborers to stay home then stopped paying them. In Kuwait, an actress said on TV that migrants should be thrown out into the desert.
The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf have long relied on armies of low-paid migrant workers from Asia, Africa and elsewhere to do the heavy lifting in their economies, and have faced longstanding criticism from rights groups for treating those laborers poorly.
Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse, as migrants in Gulf States have found themselves locked down in cramped, unsanitary dorms, deprived of income and unable to return home because of travel restrictions.
Some are running out of food and money and fear they have no place to turn in societies that often treat them like an expendable underclass.
Nobody called us, said Mohamed al-Sayid, an Egyptian restaurant worker stuck with seven friends in a one-room apartment in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, after they lost their jobs. Nobody checked on us at all. Im not afraid of corona. Im afraid well die from hunger.
Lockdowns and the resulting economic downturns have dealt harsh blows to migrant communities across the globe, including in Southeast Asia and inside India. But the sheer numbers and diversity of migrants in Persian Gulf countries mean that damage to their health and finances will echo across continents.
It is hard to overstate the role of migrant labor in the Gulf, where jobs in construction, sanitation, transportation, hospitality and even health care are dominated by millions of workers from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, the Philippines and elsewhere. They often work and live in substandard conditions to earn more than they could at home.
More than one-third of Saudi Arabias 34 million people are foreigners, as are about half the populations of Bahrain and Oman, according to the Central Intelligence Agencys World Factbook. In Kuwait, foreigners outnumber citizens by more than two to one; in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, that ratio is nearly nine to one.
As the virus has spread, Gulf countries have imposed lockdowns and other restrictions aimed at limiting contagion that have dramatically slowed their economies.
Many of these losses have trickled down to the laborers. Some earn as little as $200 per month, and many amassed substantial debts to recruiters and middlemen before they had even begun working.
Lost income will not only affect the workers, but also their home countries, which receive billions of dollars in remittances every year.
Also, there are indications that the virus has hit migrants particularly hard. Saudi Arabias health ministry said on April 5 that more than half of its cases of Covid-19, the disease the virus causes, were foreigners. The kingdom has reported more than 4,000 cases.
Qatar, in the midst of a construction boom to prepare to be host of the World Cup in 2022, found hundreds of cases in an industrial zone where many migrants live. The government said it had isolated the infected for treatment and locked the area down, creating fears the virus would continue to spread inside the isolated area.
There is this innate discrimination in the system itself which is suddenly not going to disappear, said Vani Saraswathi, associate editor of Migrant-Rights.org, an advocacy group. It is going to get more stark as this crisis keeps growing.
Advocates for workers say measures the Gulf governments have announced to shore up their economies and slow the viruss spread do not do enough to protect laborers.
King Salman of Saudi Arabia announced last month that he would cover the treatment of anyone suffering from Covid-19 in the kingdom, including foreigners. But a $2.4 billion aid package that will partially cover the salaries of private sector workers applies only to Saudi citizens.
The United Arab Emirates passed a new regulation empowering companies to grant paid and unpaid leave and cut wages temporarily or permanently for noncitizen employees. While such changes are to be done by mutual agreement, labor advocates say workers have little real leverage against their employers.
There seems to be a disconnect in these countries about how much they need these workers, Ms. Saraswathi said. Their societies would literally fall apart if these workers were not there, but there is very little empathy for their situation.
Although Gulf governments have issued strict stay-at-home orders and closed businesses deemed nonessential, some migrant-heavy sectors, like construction and oil and gas, have kept working, potentially exposing workers to the virus.
Many laborers also live in camps where as many as 10 men share rooms, a fertile environment for contagion.
If it spreads in the camps, it is wildfire, so all of these countries should have an interest in keeping this under control, said Hiba Zayadin, a Gulf researcher for Human Rights Watch.
Qatar has earmarked more than $800 million to help companies pay their employees and issued regulations shortening the workday to try to stem the viruss spread. But workers say the policies are not always applied on the ground.
A Kenyan oil worker in Qatar said he used to ride to work on a crowded bus with 60 other people, but the employees complained and the company reduced capacity to 30 men per bus. He still shares a room in a company compound with three others, in a ward with only six bathrooms for 450 men.
Crowding is the problem, and washing hands is almost unrealistic, he said by phone, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of punishment by his employer.
His company provides food, but in a communal dining hall that is often crowded.
It is not in any way social distancing, he said. It is only God who is protecting people.
Gulf countries have banned unionization and other activism aimed at improving workers conditions, leaving laborers with few places to turn if their employers violate their contracts or fail to pay them.
Last month, Totzky de la Cruz, a Filipino restaurant worker in Saudi Arabia, was told with 16 of his colleagues to stop working and that no work meant no pay. The men were not paid their final salary, and food allowances their employer promised have not arrived.
We are left to help and rely on each other, Mr. de la Cruz said. Whoever has extra money among us would have to support the others.
The most vulnerable workers, advocates say, are those without contracts who freelance on the local market.
Women who work as in-house maids often have nowhere to turn if their employers abuse them, and day laborers have no company responsible for their well-being. Lockdowns mean they cant go out to look for work, or sometimes even to buy food.
We cant go out because the police are very strict, said Islamuddin Iqbal, a Pakistani day laborer in Oman who has been stuck in a room with four other men for more than a month.
The men used to venture out to buy bread, but the bakery closed, so they are left with only the rice in their room.
Our supplies are running out fast, Mr. Iqbal said by phone. We have started to eat less, to save what we are left with.
Hwaida Saad contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon; Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan; and Jason Gutierrez from Manila.
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Coronavirus Fears Terrify and Impoverish Migrants in the Persian Gulf - The New York Times
While the coronavirus pandemic has stalled much of the world's activity, China has kept up its aggression in the disputed South China Sea actions that analysts said could deepen the mistrust between Washington and Beijing.
China's continued hostility toward its Southeast Asian neighbors in the contested waters appear at odds with the soft power that Beijing has sought to portrayas the outbreak in the mainland receded. In the past few weeks, China has sent help to countries hit hard by the pandemic and rallied for global coordination in managing the outbreak.
But the sinking of a Vietnamese fishing boat by a Chinese surveillance vesselearlier this monthonce again brought into the spotlight Beijing's multi-year assertions in the South China Sea, in which it claims nearly the entire waterway.Other main claimants to the resource-rich waterway include the Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan and Brunei.
"Fundamentally, China has not let the Covid-19 outbreak dampen its pursuit of foreign policy issues. In addition to the South China Sea, Beijing has also authorized air force flights around Taiwan in the past month," Kelsey Broderick, China analyst at consultancy Eurasia Group, told CNBC in an email.
"China may be hoping to both send a message to other countries involved in the South China Sea that China will not back down under any circumstances, and send a message to a domestic population about the strong leadership of the party," she added.
The coronavirus, which has infected over two million people globally, first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December last year. There have been accusations both domestically and internationally that Chinese authorities ignored early warnings about the outbreakand attempted to downplay its severity.
Collin Koh, an expert on maritime security at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University (NTU), told CNBC there were "speculations" about whether the pandemic would hamper China's ability to "maintain vigil over issues of national defense and security concerns."
"This would send the wrong signal back home and to the international community that there's a let-up in asserting such interests that concern sovereignty and rights," he said,explaining that could be why China has had to maintain its activity in the South China Sea.
"What I observe is that, since the outbreak till present, there's no rolling back at all," said Koh, a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, a think tank within NTU.
Issues surrounding the South China Sea have for years been a point of contention in the relationship between the U.S. and China the world's top two economies competing for geopolitical influence in Asia Pacific.
The U.S. doesn't claim any parts of the South China Sea as its own but has long promoted the "freedom of navigation" by air and sea across the waterway, which Washington has accused Beijing of militarizing.
The U.S. has conducted activities including surveillance and military exercises in the area that is also a vital commercial shipping route, where an estimated $3.4 trillion of the world's trade passed through in 2016, according to think tank Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Meanwhile, the U.S.Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated thatmore than 30% of the world's maritime crude oil tradeor an estimated 15 million barrels per day passed through those waters in 2016. Data by the EIA also showed that the South China Sea is rich in resources, containing some 11 billion barrels of oil and 190 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in proved and probable reserves can be found there.
Following the sinking of the Vietnamese fishing boat, the U.S. hit out at China, saying it's "seriously concerned" by reports of what Beijing did.
"This incident is the latest in a long string of PRC actions to assert unlawful maritime claims and disadvantage its Southeast Asian neighbors in the South China Sea," the U.S. Department of State said in a statement, referring to China's formal name, People's Republic of China.
"We call on the PRC to remain focused on supporting international efforts to combat the global pandemic, and to stop exploiting the distraction or vulnerability of other states to expand its unlawful claims in the South China Sea," the statement read.
We don't need extraneous crises right now, we've certainly got enough on our plate with this once-in-a-century kind of global crisis that we're all facing right now.
Susan Thornton
senior fellow at Yale University's law school
In response, China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs accused the U.S. of sending "warships and planes to make waves in the South China Sea" and attempting to "negate China's legitimate claims and stir up troubles."
"At present, the world is in a crucial period of jointly combating the pandemic. While fighting the pandemic at home, China is doing its utmost to support and help other countries in need, which has won universal praise from the international community," said a Chinese foreign ministry spokesmanZhao Lijian.
"China urges the US to stop linking the pandemic with maritime issues and focus on domestic and international anti-epidemic response instead of doing otherwise," Zhao added.
Such an exchange could contribute to "a worsening relationship around foreign policy issues" between the U.S. and China, said Broderick of Eurasia Group.
She added that in the coming weeks, the U.S. may be "especially sensitive to China's attempts to leverage its Covid-19 aid for more leadership in international institutions like the (United Nations) or for a stronger leadership role in Asia."
Further mistrust between the U.S. and China is also unnecessary at a time when countries globally should be working together to fend off a fast-spreading coronavirus disease, said Susan Thornton, a lecturer and senior fellow at Yale University's law school.
She told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" that both countries should focus on getting their respective economies back on track, and set aside "other issues that are still pending."
"We don't need extraneous crises right now, we've certainly got enough on our plate with this once-in-a-century kind of global crisis that we're all facing right now," she said.
Nevertheless, China's sinking of the Vietnamese fishing vessel in a part of the South China Sea claimed by both sides reflects the ongoing tensions among countries involved in a complicated and decades-long territorial dispute.
... my concern is that any of the claimants, China in particular, might simply use this window of delay to further consolidate and strengthen its position in the (South China Sea).
Collin Koh
Nanyang Technological University
China claims large swatches of the sea based on what Beijing said are nine dashes delineating Chinese historical territory in olden maps. The so-called "nine-dash line" overlaps with territorial claims by several parties, and forms the basis for China's actions ranging from drilling for oil to creating artificial islandsin the disputed waters.
A number of claimants including China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Malaysia and the Philippines also contest over some islands, reefs and shoals in the South China Sea.
In 2016, an international tribunal dismissed the nine-dash line as legally baseless a ruling that China ignored.
Koh from Singapore's NTU said a resolution to the dispute is "a long way off" even though the claimants have made some progress in negotiating a joint "code of conduct." The framework, initially aimed to finalize next year, will form the basis to manage and resolve the territorial dispute.
"However, the pandemic might have thrown uncertainties into the works. And my concern is that any of the claimants, China in particular, might simply use this window of delay to further consolidate and strengthen its position in the (South China Sea)," he said.
"And we do see now how China is already doing that."
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This is the most important thing recovered patients can do to help.
Once a person recovers from Covid-19, his or her blood contains antibodies in its plasma that can fight the virus. Those antibodies can be extracted from a donors blood and given to a severely ill patient via transfusion, with the hope that the donors antibodies will help the patient recover.
The use of convalescent plasma plasma from people convalescing, or recovering to treat illnesses has been around for a century, as doctors used the process to treat patients as far back as the Spanish flu in 1918. More recently, the treatment has been used on patients with polio, measles, SARS and other illnesses, and there is anecdotal evidence and new data that show it could be effective in treating patients with severe cases of Covid-19, according to Dr. Pampee Young, chief medical officer of the American Red Cross.
We certainly are getting anecdotal reports in, Dr. Young said, that seem to be very positive, adding that some people who have received convalescent plasma are stabilizing and requiring less oxygen.
Still, there is not yet conclusive evidence the procedure will be effective in treating Covid-19, and the process is very early on.
A spokeswoman for the Mount Sinai Health System in New York said that about 30 patients had received the treatment so far, with a few hundred more expected in the coming weeks. Dr. Young said the Red Cross collected only one donation of convalescent plasma the week of March 30 with several more expected last week, and that it could be as long as half a year until it is definitively known whether it works.
Still, with a small, but growing, body of research that is indicating positive results, we can be somewhat optimistic about convalescent plasma as being an effective therapy, Dr. Young said.
To qualify, donors must pass normal blood-donation requirements and be symptom-free of Covid-19 for at least 14 days, and, in most cases, must have positive results from a test. (Other restrictions may apply, depending on the organization.) Recovered patients can donate once every 28 days, and the process to donate can take 90 minutes to two and a half hours.
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Recovered From Coronavirus? Heres How You Can Help - The New York Times
