#and yet americans respond to this treatment with spreading lies about other countries

[newstfionline]

Sunday, December 27, 2020

Millions of Americans lose jobless benefits as Trump refuses to sign aid bill (Reuters) Millions of Americans saw their jobless benefits expire on Saturday after U.S. President Donald Trump refused to sign into law a $2.3 trillion pandemic aid and spending package, protesting that it did not do enough to help everyday people. Trump stunned Republicans and Democrats alike when he said this week he was unhappy with the massive bill, which provides $892 billion in badly needed coronavirus relief, including extending special unemployment benefits expiring on Dec. 26, and $1.4 trillion for normal government spending. Without Trump’s signature, about 14 million people could lose those extra benefits, according to Labor Department data. A partial government shutdown will begin on Tuesday unless Congress can agree a stop-gap government funding bill before then.

Downtown Nashville explosion knocks some communications offline (AP) A recreational vehicle parked in the deserted streets of downtown Nashville exploded early Christmas morning, causing widespread communications outages that took down police emergency systems and grounded holiday travel at the city’s airport. Police were responding to a report of shots fired Friday when they encountered the RV blaring a recorded warning that a bomb would detonate in 15 minutes, Metro Nashville Police Chief John Drake said. Police evacuated nearby buildings and called in the bomb squad. The RV exploded shortly afterward, Drake said. The blast sent black smoke and flames billowing from the heart of downtown Nashville’s tourist scene, an area packed with honky-tonks, restaurants and shops. Buildings shook and windows shattered streets away from the explosion near a building owned by AT&T that lies one block from the company’s office tower, a landmark in downtown. AT&T said the affected building is the central office of a telephone exchange, with network equipment in it. The blast interrupted service, but the company declined to say how widespread outages were.

Powerful mobile phone surveillance tool (The Intercept) UNTIL NOW, the Bartonville, Texas, company Hawk Analytics and its product CellHawk have largely escaped public scrutiny. CellHawk has been in wide use by law enforcement; the software is helping police departments, the FBI, and private investigators around the United States convert information collected by cellular providers into maps of people’s locations, movements, and relationships. Police records obtained by The Intercept reveal a troublingly powerful surveillance tool operated in obscurity, with scant oversight. CellHawk’s maker says it can process a year’s worth of cellphone records in 20 minutes, automating a process that used to require painstaking work by investigators, including hand-drawn paper plots. According to the company’s website, CellHawk uses GPS records in its “unique animation analysis tool,” which, according to company promotional materials, plots a target’s calls and locations over time. “Watch data come to life as it moves around town or the entire county,” the site states. The company has touted features that make CellHawk sound more like a tool for automated, continuous surveillance than for just processing the occasional spreadsheet from a cellular company. CellHawk’s website touts the ability to send email and text alerts “to surveillance teams” when a target moves, or enters or exits a particular “location or Geozone (e.g. your entire county border).”

In other white Christmas news, 74 pounds of cocaine found floating off the Florida Keys (Miami Herald) The Keys sheriff’s office came across some white stuff Christmas week. But it wasn’t the usual kind of snow. About 74 pounds of cocaine were spotted floating off the Lower Keys by a fisherman Wednesday afternoon. The packages were put in a Monroe County sheriff’s patrol boat and turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol. Lost shipments are trending in South Florida and the Keys. In August and September, almost 150 pounds of marijuana were found floating off the island chain or washed up on the shore. In July, more than 50 pounds of cocaine washed up near Grassy Key. Earlier that month, 29 bricks of cocaine came ashore in the Middle Keys city of Marathon, according to federal agents.

Brexit Deal Done, Britain Now Scrambles to See How It Will Work (NYT) For weary Brexit negotiators on both sides of the English Channel, a Christmas Eve trade agreement sealed 11 months of painstaking deliberations over Britain’s departure from the European Union, encompassing details as arcane as what species of fish could be caught by each side’s boats in British waters. But for many others—among them bankers, traders, truckers, architects and millions of migrants—Christmas was only the beginning, Day 1 of a high-stakes and unpredictable experiment in how to unstitch a tight web of commercial relations across Europe. The deal, far from closing the book on Britain’s tumultuous partnership with Europe, has opened a new one, beginning on its first pages with what analysts say will be the biggest overnight change in modern commercial relations. Britain’s services sector—encompassing not only London’s powerful financial industry, but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others—was largely left out of the 1,246-page deal, despite the sector accounting for 80 percent of British economic activity. Negotiators have not formally published the voluminous trade deal, though both sides have offered summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens uncertain about some details even as lawmakers in Britain and Europe prepare to vote on it in a matter of days.

Virus besets Belarus prisons filled with president’s critics (AP) A wave of COVID-19 has engulfed prisons in Belarus that are packed with people in custody for demonstrating against the nation’s authoritarian president, and some of the protesters who contracted the coronavirus while incarcerated accuse authorities of neglecting or even encouraging infections. Activists who spoke to The Associated Press after their release described massively overcrowded cells without proper ventilation or basic amenities and a lack of medical treatment. Kastus Lisetsky, 35, a musician who received a 15-day sentence for attending a protest, said that before he entered prison, he and three bandmates were held in a Minsk jail and had to sleep on the floor of a cell intended for only two people. All four have contracted the virus. Lisetsky must return to prison to serve the remaining seven days of his sentence after he’s discharged from the hospital. He accused the government of allowing the virus to run wild among those jailed for political reasons. “The guards say openly that they do it deliberately on orders,” Lisetsky said. More than 30,000 people have been detained for taking part in protests against the August reelection of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko in a vote that opposition activists and some election workers say was rigged to give Lukashenko a sixth term.

Japan bans new entries of foreigners after virus variant arrives (Reuters) Japan on Saturday said it would temporarily ban non-resident foreign nationals from entering the country as it tightens its borders following the detection of a new, highly infectious variant of the coronavirus. The ban will take effect from Dec. 28 and will run through January, the government said in an emailed statement. Japanese citizens and foreign residents will be allowed to enter but must show proof of a negative coronavirus test 72 hours before departing for Japan and must quarantine for two weeks after arrival, the statement said.

As Virus Resurges in Africa, Doctors Fear the Worst Is Yet to Come (NYT) When the pandemic began, global public health officials raised grave concerns about the vulnerabilities of Africa. But its countries overall appeared to fare far better than those in Europe or the Americas, upending scientists’ expectations. Now, the coronavirus is on the rise again in swaths of the continent, posing a new, possibly deadlier threat. In South Africa, a crush of new cases that spread from Port Elizabeth is growing exponentially across the nation, with deaths mounting. Eight countries, including Nigeria, Uganda and Mali, recently recorded their highest daily case counts all year. “The second wave is here,” John N. Nkengasong, the head of the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has declared. In South Africa, the continent’s leader by far in coronavirus cases and deaths, the growing devastation in its medical system has led to the rationing of care for older adults. Last week, officials announced that a new variant of the virus that may be associated with faster transmission has become dominant. With stricter control measures lifted and many people no longer seeing the virus as a threat, public health officials fear that Africa’s second wave could be far worse than its first.

Syria’s bread lines are so long that children have to skip school to wait in them (Washington Post) Every morning, Abu Mohammed and his two eldest sons wake up for dawn prayer in Damascus, then take turns heading to the bakery. They wait for at least three hours, barely making it to work or school on time, he said. Often, the boys miss their first few classes. Sometimes they miss the whole day. Abu Mohammed, who declined to give his full name for fear of harassment by the security services, is among a rapidly growing number of Syrians languishing in seemingly endless lines. The bread crisis is perhaps the most visible and painful manifestation of Syria’s economic meltdown. It has seen the amount of subsidized bread most families can buy reduced by half or even more. Subsidized prices have doubled since October. Outside major cities, the deprivation may be even worse. “The poor man living in the village no longer has gas; he has wood. He’s out of bread; he makes his own,” said a resident of the coastal city Tartous, interviewed over Facebook.

Our Digital Lives Drive a Brick-and-Mortar Boom in Data Centers (NYT) The shift to digital work and play from home, hastened by the pandemic, has wreaked havoc on commercial real estate. But experts say it has also generated one surprising bright spot for the industry: data centers. The growing reliance on cloud-based technology—and the big, blocky buildings that house its hardware—has created greater opportunities for developers and investors as businesses and consumers gobble up more data in a world that has become increasingly connected. “Our houses are connected, our cars are connected, our streetlights and parking meters are connected, and every single one of those connections is passing data back and forth,” said Sean O’Hara, president of the exchange-traded funds division at Pacer Financial, an investment advisory firm in Malvern, Pa. And companies that provide data storage are preparing for even greater demand as new technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence become more widely used.

The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help (NYT) If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow? That possibility is at the heart of an ambitious new study of exercise and mortality. The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people’s lives climbs. In essence, says Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, intense training—which was part of the routines of both the interval and control groups—provided slightly better protection against premature death than moderate workouts alone.

#headlines #news

[techcrunchappcom]

New Post has been published on https://techcrunchapp.com/covid-19-live-updates-latest-news-on-vaccines-variants-and-cases/

Covid-19 Live Updates: Latest News on Vaccines, Variants and Cases

Here’s what you need to know:

An emergency paramedic takes the temperature of Uwe Einecke, 59, before he is vaccinated in Rostock, Germany.Credit…Lena Mucha for The New York Times

ROSTOCK, Germany — It was barely noon, but Steffen Bockhahn’s phone had not stopped ringing with people wanting to know if they qualified for a vaccination, and if not now, when?

Days earlier Germany had changed its guidance on who qualified for vaccines, resulting in a seemingly endless stream of questions from worried local residents for Mr. Bockhahn, the health minister for this port city in Germany’s northeast.

“No, I’m sorry, but we are not allowed to vaccinate anyone in Category 2 yet, only those nurses or other care givers are who are in the first priority group,” he told a caller. “You have to wait.”

More than two months into the country’s second full lockdown, people across Germany are growing tired of waiting, whether for vaccines, getting their government compensation, or a return to normalcy. It’s a disheartening comedown.

At the start of the pandemic, Germany showed itself to be a global leader in dealing with a once-in-a-century public heath crisis. Chancellor Angela Merkel forged a consensus on a lockdown. Her government’s testing and tracing tools were the envy of European neighbors. The country’s death and infection rates were among the lowest in the European Union. And a generally trustful population abided by restrictions with relatively muted grumbling.

No more. In the virus’s second wave, Germany now finds itself swamped like everyone else. A host of tougher new restrictions has stretched on, amid loud complaints, and even occasional protests before everything was shut down again. Still, infection rates hover around 10,000 new cases per day.

And as fears grow over the new variants first identified in England and South Africa, Germany’s vaccination program, lashed to the fortunes of the European Union, has floundered. Only 3.5 percent of Germans have received their first shots, and just 2 percent, roughly, have been fully immunized.

A survey by the Pew Research Center shows that while more Germans feel confident in their country’s handling of the pandemic than Americans or Britons, their approval dropped 11 percentage points between June and December 2020.

The mood has only soured further as Germans watch other countries, especially Britain, step up their vaccination campaigns with the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine — developed with the help of German taxpayers — while they have been left waiting for doses to arrive.

Beyond that, mayors are warning of the death of inner cities if small stores are not allowed to reopen. Some states have reopened schools, while others remain shuttered. Doctors are warning of the lockdown’s lasting psychological damage to children.

Parents are frustrated with the lack of support for online learning. Germany’s stringent data protection laws prevent Germans from using U.S.-based digital learning platforms, but local solutions do not always function smoothly. In many public schools, education now consists of teachers sending lessons as email attachments for students to work through on their own.

Ms. Merkel has done her best to buck up a weary public. Over the past month, the normally reserved chancellor has chatted by video with overwhelmed families, appeared before the Berlin news corps and given two interviews on prime time television.

“I wish that I had something good to announce,” she said, addressing the nation.

United States › United StatesOn Feb. 19 14-day change New cases 78,018 –45% New deaths 2,626 –34%

World › WorldOn Feb. 19 14-day change New cases 408,714 –24% New deaths 11,009 –25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

A drive-through coronavirus testing site in Bozeman, Mont., in December.Credit…Janie Osborne for The New York Times

Not three months ago, the coronavirus had so ravaged South Dakota that its packed hospitals were flying patients to other states for treatment. An analysis of data collected by Johns Hopkins University had shown that the mortality rates from Covid-19 in North and South Dakota were the world’s highest. In one Montana county, the rate of hospitalization for the virus was 20 times the national average.

As in some earlier hot spots like Arizona and Florida, the surge mushroomed as most leaders and residents in these states resisted lockdowns and mask mandates for months. In South Dakota, no statewide mask mandate was ever issued.

The spike in these states was as brief as it was powerful. Today, their rates of new cases are back roughly to where they were last summer or early fall. In North Dakota, which mandated masks at the height of its surge in mid-November, the turnaround has been especially dramatic: the daily average deaths per person is now the country’s second lowest, according to a New York Times database.

By some measures, the three-state hot spot’s trajectory has mirrored the nation’s. After the daily U.S. average for new cases peaked on Jan. 9, it took 37 days — until last Monday — for the rate to drop by two-thirds. It took South Dakota and Montana 35 days to reach the same mark after cases peaked in those two states in November. (North Dakota did it in 24.)

Deaths remain high nationally, because it can take weeks for Covid-19 patients to die. The country continues to average more than 2,000 deaths each day and is on pace to reach 500,000 deaths in the next week.

Experts say the spikes in the Northern Great Plains ebbed largely for the same reason that the U.S. caseload has been falling: People finally took steps to save themselves in the face of an out-of-control deadly disease.

“As things get worse and friends and family members are in the hospital or dying, people start to adjust their behavior and cases go down,” said Meghan O’Connell, an epidemiologist in South Dakota and an adviser on health issues to the Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, which represents Native American populations in the area. Native Americans, who represent about 5 percent to almost 10 percent of the population all three states, have been infected by the virus at far higher rates than the general population.

During the outbreak’s worst weeks, from early November to late December, mask use rose 10 to 20 percentage points in South Dakota and 20 to 30 percentage points in North Dakota, according to survey data from the University of Maryland.

Since then, the U.S. vaccination drive has been gathering speed. North Dakota ranks fifth among states for giving its residents at least one shot; South Dakota is seventh and Montana is 11th.

Some experts see the coronavirus’s race through these states as a rough test of the widely rejected idea that the pandemic should be allowed to run its course until the population gains herd immunity.

While the region did not reach herd immunity, it may have come closer than anywhere else in the United States.

The outbreak in November vaulted North and South Dakota to the top of the list in cumulative cases per person, where they remain, according to a New York Times database, with 13 and 12.5 percent of their residents known to have been infected. Montana, at about 9.2 percent, is close to the middle of the national pack.

Just over 8 percent of Americans — about 27.9 million — are known to have had the coronavirus, but for many reasons, including that asymptomatic infections can go undetected, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggests that the real rate is 4.6 times that.

By those measures, as least six in 10 Dakotans — and most likely more — could have gained some immunity to the virus by the end of 2020, according to Jeffrey Shaman, a Columbia University professor of environmental health sciences who is modeling the future spread of the virus. And in some places, he noted, the share could be even higher.

Motorists lined up for a Covid-19 shot at a mass vaccination site in Los Angeles this month.Credit…Jae C. Hong/Associated Press

With the vaccine rollout gaining steam and coronavirus cases declining after a dark winter surge, it may seem as though the end of the pandemic is in sight for the United States. In reality, how soon could we get there?

One answer lies in herd immunity, the point when enough people are immune to the virus that it can no longer spread through the population. Getting there, however, depends not just on how quickly we can vaccinate but on other factors, too, like how many people have already been infected and how easily the virus spreads.

The exact threshold for herd immunity for the coronavirus is unknown, but recent estimates range from 70 percent to 90 percent.

If the rate of vaccinations continues to grow, one model shows we could reach herd immunity as early as July. But a lot could happen between now and then. The speed and uptake of vaccination, and how long immunity lasts are big factors. The rise of new virus variants and how we respond to them will also affect the path to herd immunity.

In most scenarios, millions more people will become infected and tens or hundreds of thousands more will die before herd immunity is reached.

Ginés González García, Argentina’s health minister, on Wednesday. He was asked to resign amid a vaccine scandal.Credit…Matias Baglietto/Reuters

BUENOS AIRES — Argentina’s health minister, Ginés González García, resigned on Friday at the request of the president over revelations that people with close ties to the government were given early access to Covid-19 vaccines.

The resignation came just hours after a well-known journalist incited nationwide outrage by revealing that he had been vaccinated at the health ministry. The journalist, Horacio Verbitsky, who is seen as pro-government, said he had called Mr. Gónzalez García, an old friend, to find out where he could get vaccinated and was directed to the ministry’s headquarters.

Mr. González García presented his resignation on Friday. Carla Vizzotti, who as the No. 2 official at the health ministry has played a visible role during the pandemic, is expected to be sworn in as the new health minister on Saturday afternoon.

The scandal in Argentina comes amid a similar controversy in Peru, where several high ranking officials, including the foreign and health ministers, were forced to step down after it was revealed that around 500 officials jumped the line to receive the vaccines before health care workers.

Mr. Verbitsky’s revelation led to widespread outrage on social media, which for days had been rife with rumors that well-connected Argentines had been quietly getting vaccinated. Local news media outlets quickly followed up with reports that Mr. Verbitsky was one of several government allies, naming lawmakers and business leaders, who received a shot at the ministry.

In his resignation letter, Mr. González García blamed his private secretary for an “involuntary confusion” that led to people being vaccinated at the ministry and said he would take responsibility “for the mistake.”

A prosecutor has opened a preliminary investigation and leaders of the opposition have called for congressional hearings.

Argentina began its vaccination campaign in late December with Russia’s Sputnik V vaccine, and until recently, most doses had been reserved for health care personnel and certain government officials.

Older Argentines became eligible for the vaccine this past week, but appointments are scarce.

Argentina, a nation of about 45 million, has received some 1.2 million doses of the Sputnik V vaccine, and earlier this week received a shipment of 580,000 doses of the Oxford University-AstraZeneca vaccine from India’s Serum Institute. The country has administered more than 445,000 first doses and more than 261,000 second doses, according to the country’s health ministry.

The coronavirus has sickened more than two million people in the country, and more than 50,000 have died.

Applications have soared at Cornell University, which dropped its requirement for standardized test scores during the pandemic.Credit…Christopher Gregory for The New York Times

Prestigious universities like Cornell never have a hard time attracting students. But this year, its admissions office is swimming in 17,000 more applications than it has ever received before, driven mostly by the school’s decision not to require standardized test scores during the pandemic.

“We saw people that thought ‘I would never get into Cornell’ thinking, ‘Oh, if they’re not looking at a test score, maybe I’ve actually got a chance,’” said Jonathan Burdick, Cornell’s vice provost for enrollment.

But while selective universities like Cornell and its fellow Ivy League schools have seen unprecedented interest after waiving the requirement for SAT or ACT test scores, smaller and less recognizable schools are dealing with the opposite issue: empty mailboxes.

A drop in applications does not always translate into lower enrollment. But at a time when many colleges and universities are being squeezed financially by the pandemic and a loss of public funding, the prospect of landing fewer students — and losing critical tuition dollars — is a dire one at schools that have already cut programs and laid off staff.

The California State system extended the application deadline for all of its schools by two weeks, and Cal Poly Pomona managed to close the gap. But its herculean effort, at a time when Ivy League schools had to add an extra week just to consider their influx of applicants, further underscored inequities in higher education that have been widened by the pandemic.

“It’s impacting both students from an equity perspective,” said Jenny Rickard, the chief executive of the Common Application, which is used by colleges across the country, “and then it’s also showing which colleges and universities are more privileged.”

Many institutions outside the top tier were struggling even before the pandemic, and a smaller freshman class could mean further distress.

“Covid didn’t create this challenge, but it certainly exposes and exacerbates the risk that institutions face financially,” said Susan Campbell Baldridge, a former provost of Middlebury College and an author of “The College Stress Test,” a book that examines the financial threats to some American colleges and universities.

And the experiment with ignoring test scores could extend beyond the coronavirus crisis, some admissions officers said.

“For us,” said Luoluo Hong, who oversees admissions at the Cal States, “what is ultimately going to matter is: You’re admitted to college. But do you go?”

Credit…Matt Chase

There are many ways to assess how the coronavirus has affected the U.S. economy. The pandemic has decimated the labor market, driving the unemployment rate to 6.3 percent in January, nearly twice what it was a year earlier. Restrictions on activities led Americans to spend less money, pushing the savings rate to extraordinary heights. As people have fled to places with more space and fewer people, home prices have surged.

Another way the pandemic has affected the economy is by making people bored.

By limiting social engagements, leisure activities and travel, the pandemic has forced many people to live a more muted life. The result is a collective sense of ennui — one that is shaping what we do and what we buy.

Boredom’s impact on the economy is under-researched, experts say, possibly because there has been no modern situation like this one, but many agree that it’s an important one. How people spend money is a reflection of their emotional state — the answer to “How are you?” in Amazon packages and Target receipts.

Among the most vivid examples of boredom’s economic influence occurred late last month when amateur traders piled into shares of GameStop, a down-for-the-count retailer for gamers. These investors pushed its stock to astronomical highs before it crashed back to earth.

“Im bored i have 8k in free money what can i invest in that will make at least a little profit,” a Reddit user who goes by biged42069 wrote on Wall Street Bets at the height of the stock market frenzy. The response was unanimous: GameStop.

Of course, millions of people have been busier than ever during the pandemic. Essential workers have hardly experienced lockdown tedium. Women who have left the work force to take care of children who cannot go to school are frequently overwhelmed, their days a stream of Zoom classes and dinners and bedtimes. Boredom, in some ways, is a luxury.

And some groups of people are more likely to experience boredom than others. People who live alone, for instance, are more likely to be bored, said Daniel Hamermesh, an economist at Barnard College who has studied loneliness during the pandemic lockdowns.

Early in the pandemic, bread-making fervor prompted stores across the country to sell out of yeast. Puzzle sales have skyrocketed. Gardening has taken off as a hobby.

Home improvement, too, has boomed. According to the NPD Group, 81 percent of consumers in the United States purchased home improvement products in the six months than ended in November. Sherwin-Williams said it had record sales in the fourth quarter and for the year, in part because of strong performances in its do-it-yourself and residential repaint businesses.

Pandemic boredom evidently has nothing on watching paint dry.

A Covid vaccination being administered in Fargo, N.D., in December.Credit…Tim Gruber for The New York Times

New studies show that people who have had Covid-19 should only get one shot of a vaccine, a dose that is enough to turbocharge their antibodies and destroy the coronavirus — and even some more infectious variants.

Some researchers are trying to persuade scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to recommend only one dose for those who have recovered from Covid-19, a move that could free up millions of doses at a time when vaccines are in high demand.

At least 30 million people in the United States — and probably many others whose illnesses were never diagnosed — have been infected with the coronavirus so far.

The results of these new studies are consistent with the findings of two others published over the past few weeks. Taken together, the research suggests that people who have had Covid-19 should be immunized — but a single dose of the vaccine may be enough.

A person’s immune response to a natural infection is highly variable. Most people make copious amounts of antibodies that persist for many months. But some people who had mild symptoms or no symptoms of Covid-19 produce few antibodies, which quickly fall to undetectable levels.

The latest study, which has not yet been published in a scientific journal, analyzed blood samples from people who have had Covid-19. The findings suggested that their immune systems would have trouble fending off B.1.351, the coronavirus variant first identified in South Africa.

But one shot of either the Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna vaccine significantly changed the picture: It amplified the amount of antibodies in their blood by a thousandfold.

In another new study, researchers at New York University found that a second dose of the vaccine did not add much benefit at all for people who have had Covid-19 — a phenomenon that has also been observed with vaccines for other viruses.

In that study, most people had been infected with the coronavirus eight or nine months earlier, but saw their antibodies increase by a hundredfold to a thousandfold when given the first dose of a vaccine. After the second dose, however, the antibody levels did not increase any further.

what we learned

President Joe Biden makes remarks after touring the Pfizer manufacturing site in Kalamazoo, Mich. on Friday.Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

In his first trips as president, President Biden traveled to Wisconsin and Michigan to promote his vaccination rollout plan and the $1.9 trillion relief bill he hopes can restore the American economy.

After an optimistic vow on Tuesday that any American who wanted a vaccine “could have one by the end of July this year,” Mr. Biden was asking for patience on Friday, saying the United States could be“approaching normalcy” by the end of the year. The week ended as winter storms hitting much of the country delayed the delivery of six million vaccines.

Mr. Biden addressed the virtual G7 summit and said that his administration would make good on a U.S. promise to donate $4 billion to the global vaccination campaign over the next two years. Mr. Biden’s engagement in the global fight against the pandemic is in stark contrast to the approach of former President Donald J. Trump, who withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization.

In other news this week:

Israel has raced ahead with the fastest Covid vaccination campaign in the world, inoculating nearly half its population with at least one dose. Now, new government and business initiatives are moving in the direction of a two-tier system for the vaccinated and unvaccinated, raising legal, moral and ethical questions.

Cuba is getting closer to achieving the mass production of a coronavirus vaccine invented on the island. If the vaccine proves safe and effective, it would hand the Cuban government a significant political victory — and a shot at rescuing the nation from economic ruin.

Life expectancy in the United States fell by a full year, the federal government reported Tuesday. The report also showed a deepening of racial and ethnic disparities between Black and white Americans. Life expectancy of Black population declined by 2.7 years in the first half of 2020. Another study, released Tuesday, showed that Latino and Black residents of New York City have fallen behind in vaccination rates.

Two developments this week could potentially expand access to the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine: The vaccine works well after one dose, and doesn’t always need ultracold storage. A study in Israel showed that the vaccine is 85 percent effective 15 to 28 days after receiving the first dose, raising the possibility that regulators in some countries could authorize delaying a second dose instead of giving both on the strict schedule of three weeks apart. And Pfizer and BioNTech also announced on Friday that their vaccine can be stored at standard freezer temperatures for up to two weeks.

House Republican leaders have called Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue plan a “payoff to progressives.”Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Republicans are struggling to persuade voters to oppose President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic rescue plan, which enjoys strong, bipartisan support nationwide even as it is moving through Congress with just Democratic backing.

Democrats who control the House are preparing to approve the package by the end of next week, with the Senate aiming to soon follow with its own party-line vote before unemployment benefits are set to lapse in mid-March. On Friday, the House Budget Committee unveiled the nearly 600-page text for the proposal, which includes billions of dollars for unemployment benefits, small businesses and stimulus checks.

Republican leaders on Friday said the bill spends too much and includes a liberal wish list of programs like aid to state and local governments — which they call a “blue state bailout,” though many states facing shortfalls are controlled by Republicans — and increased benefits for the unemployed, which they argued would discourage people from looking for work.

The arguments have so far failed to connect, in part because many of its core provisions poll strongly — even with Republicans.

More than 7 in 10 Americans now back Mr. Biden’s aid package, according to new polling from the online research firm SurveyMonkey for The New York Times. That includes support from three-quarters of independent voters, 2 in 5 Republicans and nearly all Democrats.

In the poll, 4 in 5 respondents, including nearly 7 in 10 Republicans, said it was important for the relief bill to include $1,400 direct checks. A similarly large group of respondents said it was important to include aid to state and local governments and money for vaccine deployment.

On Friday, House Republican leaders urged their rank-and-file members to vote against the plan, billing it as Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California’s “Payoff to Progressives Act.” They detailed more than a dozen objections to the bill, including “a third round of stimulus checks costing more than $422 billion, which will include households that have experienced little or no financial loss during the pandemic.” Ms. Pelosi’s office issued its own rebuttal soon after, declaring, “Americans need help. House Republicans don’t care.”

Mr. Biden has said he will not wait for Republicans to join his effort, citing the urgency of the economy’s needs.

The Republican pushback is complicated by the pandemic’s ongoing economic pain, with millions of Americans still out of work and the recovery slowing. It is also hampered by the fact that many of the lawmakers objecting to Mr. Biden’s proposals supported similar provisions, including direct checks to individuals, when Mr. Trump was president.

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California Will Reserve Vaccine Doses for Teachers and School Staff

Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Friday that, starting on March 1, California will set aside 10 percent of the state’s first doses of Covid-19 vaccine for educators and school employees.

Thirty-five counties in the state of California currently are prioritizing vaccinations for teachers and educators. We want to operationalize that as the standard for all 58 counties in the state. So effective March 1, not only are we doing that through our third-party administrator, but we are also setting aside 10 percent of all first doses, beginning with a baseline of 75,000 doses every single week that will be made available and set aside for those educators and childcare workers that are supporting our efforts to get our kids back into in-person instruction. That’s effective March 1. And the reason we can do that more formally, even though we have allowed for it over the course of the last number of weeks, is the window of visibility into the future with more vaccinations that we know are now coming from the Biden administration.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Friday that, starting on March 1, California will set aside 10 percent of the state’s first doses of Covid-19 vaccine for educators and school employees.CreditCredit…Dean Musgrove/The Orange County Register, via Associated Press

Under pressure to reopen classrooms in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom said on Friday that, starting March 1, the state will reserve 10 percent of its first doses of Covid-19 vaccines for teachers and school employees.

Noting that the federal government has been steadily increasing the state’s vaccine allotment, the governor said he would set aside 75,000 doses each week for teachers and staff planning to return to public school campuses in person. Although California prioritizes teachers for the vaccine, supply has been an issue. Only about three dozen of the state’s 58 counties have had enough doses on hand to immunize those who work at public schools.

Most of California’s large school districts — including those in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco — have been operating remotely for the majority of students for almost a year. Mr. Newsom said reopening schools would be particularly important for single parents whose children have been learning from home.

As big school districts up and down the West Coast have mostly kept their buildings closed, Boston, New York, Miami, Houston and Chicago have been resuming in-person instruction.

New guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that urge school districts to reopen have not changed the minds of powerful teachers’ unions opposed to returning students to classrooms without more stringent precautions.

In Oregon, the governor prioritized teachers and school staff members for vaccination — ahead of some older people, which went against C.D.C. guidelines.

Mr. Newsom’s announcement was aimed at appeasing California’s teachers’ unions, which have demanded vaccination as a condition of returning to what they regard as a potentially hazardous workplace. The California Teachers Association this week began airing statewide television ads noting that the coronavirus is still a threat and demanding that the state not reopen classrooms without putting safety first.

The governor, who faces a recall effort over the state’s lockdowns, was also responding to fellow Democrats who control the Legislature and who on Thursday introduced a fast-track bill to reopen schools by April 15, using prioritized vaccines for teachers and hefty financial incentives.

The legislative plan calls for spending $12.6 billion in state and federal funding to help districts cover reopening costs, summer school, extended days and other measures to address learning loss. It largely aligns with the priorities of the unions, and state lawmakers said they expect it to pass swiftly.

On Friday, Mr. Newsom said he was very pleased with the plan but felt it didn’t push districts to open fast enough, and threatened to veto the bill if it passes.

“April 15!” he exclaimed. “That’s almost the end of the school year.”

The governor also noted that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently issued new guidelines saying that teacher vaccination need not be a prerequisite to reopening schools, as long as other health measures were enforced.

In New Hampshire, Gov. Chris Sununu, a Republican, issued an emergency order on Friday requiring schools to offer in-person instruction to all students starting March 8.

“The data and science is clear — kids can and should learn in-person, and it is safe to do so,” said Mr. Sununu in a statement. “I would like to thank all school districts, teachers and administrators who have been able to successfully navigate this path.”

Taylor Erexson greeted a student in Chicago this month. Many states have included teachers in the most highly prioritized category for vaccination, allowing them to receive shots immediately. Still, many have not.Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

This week, with vaccine production continuing to ramp up, President Biden declared that vaccines would be available for 300 million Americans “by the end of July” — enough to reach a critical mass. And on Friday, as Mr. Biden was headed to Michigan to tour a Pfizer vaccine plant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released a report stating that the available vaccines were quite safe, with only minor side effects.

Mr. Biden had put coronavirus relief at the center of his campaign, and his promise of additional stimulus checks for Americans was seen as particularly crucial to the Democratic Senate candidates’ wins in Georgia last month.

The president is working to deliver on his promises before voters lose faith — and he’s also facing down a stark deadline: Some key provisions in the latest round of economic relief, passed just before he took office, will run out in less than a month.

House Democrats on Friday released a nearly 600-page proposal for the legislation, and the president virtually dared Republicans in Congress to oppose the bill. “Critics say that my plan is too big, that it costs $1.9 trillion,” Mr. Biden said. “Let me ask them: What would they have me cut? What would they have me leave out? Should we not invest $20 billion to vaccinate the nation? Should we not invest $290 million to extend unemployment insurance for the 11 million Americans who are unemployed, so they can get by?”

But there’s one big campaign promise that continues to be particularly thorny: the dilemma of how quickly to reopen schools. As he was careful to note on Friday, those decisions will ultimately be made at the state and local levels, but Mr. Biden has stood by a promise to safely reopen most schools nationwide within the first 100 days of his presidency — meaning by late April.

But some experts remain skeptical about the feasibility of classrooms fully reopening by April without more concerted federal action to bring vaccines into schools. Some states have included teachers in the most highly prioritized category for vaccination, allowing them to receive shots immediately. Still, many have not.

“I can’t set nationally who gets in line when, and first — that’s a decision the states make,” Mr. Biden said in response to a reporter’s question, adding, “I think it’s critically important to get our kids back to school.”

Dr. Janet Woodcock, the acting F.D.A. commissioner, is considered to be one of the front-runners for the permanent role.Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

One month into his presidency, President Biden still has not named a candidate to head the Food and Drug Administration, a critical position at a time when new vaccines and coronavirus treatments are under the agency’s review.

The vacancy is glaring, given that the president has made selections for most other top government health posts, and the gap has spurred a public lobbying campaign by supporters of the two apparent front-runners, Dr. Joshua Sharfstein, a former high-ranking F.D.A. official and Dr. Janet Woodcock, the agency’s acting commissioner.

The absence of a nominee has also exposed rifts among congressional lawmakers and within public health and medical communities, as well as inside the health and drug industries that depend on the F.D.A. for approval of their products. In particular, some public health officials have used the open position to debate the leadership qualifications needed to restore the agency’s morale and credibility after a year fighting both a pandemic and a president who often belittled the F.D.A.’s process for approving treatments and vaccines.

“Every month is a crucial month in the pandemic,” said Scott Becker of the Association of Public Health Laboratories. “There is so much going on regarding the vaccine, and new drugs and diagnostics. The time to have permanent leadership is now.”

Administration officials attributed the delay to the overwhelming focus on solving Covid-19 vaccine shortages and distribution problems.

The F.D.A. plays a key role in the nation’s pandemic response: vetting vaccines that are in development and under review as well as treatments, protective gear and devices. The agency also monitors the safety of new vaccines and therapies as they are distributed and administered to the public.

Interviews with several officials and other people familiar with the leading candidates indicate that the primary disagreement centers on how each would manage the inherent tensions between the agency’s mission to get drugs onto the market quickly and ensuring they are safe and will work.

Dr. Woodcock commands deep support, especially within the vast network of cancer-related patient advocacy groups, researchers and the drug companies that help finance them. But her decades of service at the F.D.A. have made her more of a target for critics, and she has drawn particular fire over her time as chief of the agency’s drug division during the opioid crisis.

Dr. Sharfstein held the No. 2 slot at the F.D.A. for nearly two years in the Obama administration and has extensive public health interests. He now works at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, where he is vice dean for public health practice and community engagement. He often criticized the Trump administration’s pandemic response, and called for the F.D.A. to “stand up for itself and for science, not politics.”

The last time his name was seriously floated for the top post, back in 2008, Dr. Sharfstein drew opposition from the pharmaceutical industry, which protested his criticism of off-label drug marketing and gifts from pharmaceutical companies to physicians.

Neither Dr. Woodcock nor Dr. Sharfstein would comment publicly because the selection process was under way.

#covid #World

[xtruss]

Global Uncertainty: The Economic Fallout From Coronavirus

A Classic 'Black Swan'?

— Knowledge@Wharton, the online research and business analysis journal of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania | The Economic Forum | February 28, 2020

Coronavirus is already impacting global markets, with economic impacts felt beyond China and other effected countries.

There's a lot still to learn about the virus - and therefore how extensive its impact on the global economy could become.

On Monday, February 24, stock indices tumbled, spooked by reports that the coronavirus outbreak that emerged in China is spreading to countries including Italy, Iran and South Korea. A day later, trading in stocks across world markets remained choppy, reflecting hope that the economic fallout might be manageable — just as damage from the SARS epidemic was some two decades ago — but also fear that the economic impact could be significant and linger longer.

The markets’ movements mirror the uncertainty that prevails and persists not just in the U.S. but all over the world. Several weeks into the coronavirus outbreak that has brought the world’s second-largest economy to its knees, some of the most basic aspects of the virus remain unknown. It’s not yet clear how widely beyond China COVID-19 will spread; this week, numbers of infected individuals have surged outside China. Still, exactly how it is transmitted, how easily, and how lethal it might be are aspects of this coronavirus that remain to be uncovered, according to University of Pennsylvania scientists.

As the human toll mounts, so does the economic damage. The business realm, of course, tends to shudder in the face of uncertainty, and right now, with reports on the seriousness of the coronavirus evolving each day if not each hour, the eyes of commerce are on epidemiology.

“This has many economic implications,” says Wharton management professor Mauro Guillen. “It has implications not just for China but for the entire world. The world depends on Chinese growth,” he says, citing both the country’s supply-chain role and consumer buying power. Still, he notes: “It is unclear how much impact in the end this is going to have.” But what is clear is that if politics and trade wars emerged as uncertainties in recent years, now a third leg in the stool holding up global confidence has suddenly gone wobbly. Some observers describe it as a classic “black swan” — a random event that is completely unpredictable. (An interview with Nassim Taleb, author of the book from which the expression is derived, can be heard here.)

A police officer wearing a protective face mask, following an outbreak of the coronavirus, stands with his bike in front of a screen showing the Nikkei index outside a brokerage in Tokyo, Japan February 26, 2020.

“The long-term repercussion quite apart from whatever happens now is that we’ve got a source of risk we hadn’t thought about,” says Marshall W. Meyer, a Wharton management professor emeritus who consults in China. “My view is there is going to be a big adjustment of global trade patterns unless we are really lucky and [the virus] goes away very quickly. This became apparent after SARS, but SARS went away. And this may or may not go away. The real problem is people’s confidence, and in China how much political damage there will be and whether it will be contained. And there is no way to know.”

An Economic Earthquake

The damage has already been severe and has reached into a surprising array of sectors. As noted above, this week the markets responded negatively to the sharp uptick in cases outside of China, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling more than 1,000 points on Monday — its third-biggest one-day decline. (The selloff continued on Tuesday as the Dow fell another 879 points.) Major American orchestras have canceled tours in China. The cruise industry has seen the public-relations nightmare of more than 1,200 passengers quarantined aboard the Diamond Princess in Yokohama. With moneyed Chinese travelers forced to stay home, European tourism has taken a hit. “It’s seen as on par with an earthquake, a situation of emergency,” Mattia Morandi, spokesman for Italy’s ministry of culture and tourism, told The New York Times.

Supply chains in the retail sector and others have been disrupted, factories in China have gone quiet, and passenger air travel has been curtailed. Apple recently announced that it now expects to miss its next quarterly revenue forecast as a result of shuttered factories and closed retail shops in China.

“This is going to be a slow-rolling, highly consequential event,” says Meyer. “I would say stock up on aspirin and Ibuprofen now, because the base ingredients come from China. Antibiotics come from China. Hong Kong wholly depends on China for its food supply, for its water.”

Economic disruption related to the coronavirus is expected to rob the world economy of growth for the first time since 2009, according to London-based research firm Capital Economics. “We assume the virus will be contained soon, and that lost output is made up in subsequent quarters, so that world GDP reaches the level it would have done had there been no outbreak by the middle of 2021,” the firm said in a statement.

What’s the potential outcome if the virus isn’t contained? According to a report by CNBC, Moody’s chief economist Mark Zandi noted on Tuesday that if the virus becomes a pandemic in Europe and the U.S., “that is the prescription for a global and U.S. recession.” Meanwhile, Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell suggested that there will “very likely be some effects on [the economy of] the United States” from the current outbreak, but, in recent testimony before the House Financial Services Committee, said it’s too early to say how much.

The philanthropic sector is beginning to divert resources to the crisis. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed up to $100 million toward efforts to help strengthen detection, isolation and treatment efforts, to protect at-risk populations, and to develop vaccines, treatments and diagnostics. Hong Kong investor and philanthropist Li Ka Shing has donated $13 million to assist Wuhan, where the outbreak has been concentrated. Alibaba founder Jack Ma has committed $14.4 million, including $5.8 million to fund research into a vaccine.

‘Still Learning’

Of course, how much philanthropy eventually gets moved to combating COVID-19 depends on the eventual scale of the epidemic, and at any given point, no one has been able to say whether it has peaked.

But so far, this new coronavirus appears to be less lethal than SARS, says Susan R. Weiss, a faculty member in the department of microbiology at Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine. Its sudden, dramatic appearance may have been a function of some special circumstances.

“It started in Wuhan, a really dense city at the crossroads of many different means of transportation, and this happened at New Year’s, when a lot of people were traveling, so this was a perfect storm,” says Weiss. “SARS started in the Guangdong Province, which is much less dense and was more easily controlled.”

On the other hand, she says, SARS spiked up over about eight months, and then disappeared, and it’s not yet known whether COVID-19 will behave the same way. “We don’t know whether it will burn out, like SARS, or come back seasonally like the flu,” she said.

This is going to be a slow-rolling, highly consequential event.

— Marshall W. Meyer

What is known at this point is the coronavirus’s nucleic acid sequence, “and that gives scientists a lot of information,” says Penn professor of medicine and infectious disease specialist Harvey Rubin. This helps in developing diagnostic tests and informs the approach to coming up with a vaccine. “What that doesn’t tell you is how transmissible it is. It doesn’t tell you whether the disease can be spread when it’s asymptomatic. We don’t yet know how transmissible it is person to person,” he says. “Right now, 99% of cases are still in China, but a small but important number are out of China, so the trajectory of this problem is still a time-dependent process…. We are still learning, and numbers are still coming in.”

Trade, Disease and the Moral High Ground

Experts have been vocal about what China has done wrong, debating whether the country recognized the epidemic soon enough and if the government’s ideological aversion to transparency delayed action and cost lives.

But what about the U.S. reaction? Is there something the U.S. can and should be doing beyond the $100 million that the U.S. government says it is prepared to spend to help China and other countries where the epidemic has spread?

“It’s already daunting for China to be coping with this, but we have a trade war going on, and it would actually be in the best interest of the U.S. to stop the trade war,” says Guillen. “It would create a lot of goodwill and would give us a good relationship as opposed to a confrontational one.”

In the meantime, he says: negotiate. “The U.S. can seek an agreement, but from a high moral ground — as in, ‘we know you are in trouble, let’s see what we can do about it.’ And if they don’t want to do what the Trump administration wants to do, the U.S. can re-impose tariffs.”

Getting to a trade solution now is also a recognition that our fates are intertwined. After the big 2011 tsunami in Japan, Guillen points out, “within weeks, many factories in the U.S. had to stop producing because they were getting components outsourced from Japan. This is a global economy. We have businesses and operations and connections with China, and if the second largest economy in the world is brought to a halt, it has the potential to disrupt things all over the world.”

Will the coronavirus crisis cause companies to look at China differently in the future?

“They are very likely to do so,” says Howard Kunreuther, co-director of Wharton’s Risk Management and Decision Processes Center and professor emeritus in the operations, information and decisions department. In research with Wharton professor Michael Useem for their recent book Mastering Catastrophic Risk: How Companies Cope with Disruption, the authors contacted chief risk officers and leading executives at more than 100 S&P 500 firms on the most adverse risks they had faced in recent years.

If there is some message here, it’s that this is totally predictable.

—Harvey Rubin

“Every one of them said we are now paying much closer attention to the potential consequences of catastrophic risks than in previous years because they are happening more frequently: the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2008-2009 financial crisis, the 2011 Japan trifecta (earthquake, tsunami and nuclear accident) and more intense natural disasters. Firms are now engaging in enterprise risk management to reduce the likelihood and consequences of future adverse events that will affect their operations and are asking questions, such as how safe is it for us to operate here?”

Part of the rationale for these firms considering taking steps now is the high visibility of the coronavirus. “I don’t think they would be paying attention if it weren’t in the news every day,” says Kunreuther. Still, that doesn’t mean businesses should not consider taking action now given the potential for a pandemic. “The question is, what will they do? Will they undertake an assessment of the risk and ask what kind of risk-management strategies they can follow by examining the potential costs and benefits of undertaking these steps?”

“Many of us have been saying for years that it’s only a matter of time,” says Rubin, referring to the arrival of a serious epidemic or pandemic. “If we are lucky and this starts to abate and the mortality is relatively low, it’s unfortunate for the people who are sick and died, but next year or the year after something else could happen. The world needs to have not only medicine and healthcare infrastructure but also economic and information infrastructure. If there is some message here, it’s that this is totally predictable.”

A lot of attention gets paid to infectious disease outbreaks in the moment, and there is a lot of talk about vulnerabilities, preparedness and response.

“We talked about it after Zika, Ebola, during the measles outbreak, and then nobody talked about it anymore,” says Rubin. “For some reason this captures attention while it’s there, but then it goes away. People forget.”

[newsfundastuff]

President Donald Trump attacked Dr. Deborah Birx for the first time on Monday after the White House coronavirus task force coordinator said she believed the virus had entered a “new phase” and that counties with significant community spread should not reopen schools in the fall.Birx’s comments came on CNN just two days after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) criticized her in a meeting with administration officials, calling her “the worst.” One Democratic aide said Pelosi was referencing Birx’s apparent deference to the president’s inaccurate statements about the virus, including that ingesting bleach should be studied as a possible cure. “She’s not a straight shooter,” the aide said. “She sat there during the bleach [comment]. She just sat there!”Nancy Pelosi Tears Into Dr. Birx: ‘I Don’t Have Confidence’ in HerBy Sunday, Birx had done precisely what Pelosi accused her of sidestepping—something Hill Democrats took as affirmation of the Speaker’s decision to go after her. She challenged several White House talking points, which appeared to infuriate the president.“In order to counter Nancy, Deborah took the bait & hit us,” Trump tweeted. “Pathetic!”The president’s reaction on Monday morning came as an early-in-the-week annoyance to some in the West Wing and others close to Trump, who interpreted his angry tweeting more as an impulsive attempt to keep her in line, and less so due to any personal grudge. Two advisers noted that this was yet another instance of President Trump trampling over his lieutenants’ crafted messaging strategy—which included attacking Pelosi for attacking Birx—and that in such cases, given how frequent they are, staff has limited recourse beyond ignoring their boss.By Monday afternoon, that is precisely what several top Trump aides decided to do, opting to look past the president’s own comment, and simply continue knocking Pelosi.Nevertheless, Trump’s denunciation of Birx didn’t just highlight his willingness to undermine his own coronavirus task force coordinator in an effort to push forward his agenda to reopen the nation’s economy and schools. The exchange also underscored how shaky the administration’s policy rationales have been on critical pandemic-related matters. Spokespersons for the White House and the coronavirus task force did not respond to repeated requests for comment.Trump’s Top COVID Adviser: Deaths Will Soon Start to RiseBirx’s comments marked a significant departure from the White House’s public stance on school reopenings. She pointed to the Center for Disease Control’s school guidelines during her comments, saying she agreed with the agency’s recommendations that schools should conduct virtual learning under certain circumstances. Those guidelines, though, only call for the consideration of virtual learning. Birx said that if there is “high case load and active community spread … we’re asking people to distance learn at this moment.”In her interview Birx said the U.S. was experiencing a “new phase” of the virus—a point Pence and others have resisted communicating or confirming as President Trump has pushed his allies to reopen the American economy. Birx said a slew of states across the country are experiencing new outbreaks and that case counts have steadily increased since Memorial Day weekend. “What we are seeing today is different from March and April. It is extraordinarily widespread" in both urban and rural areas, she told CNN’s Dana Bash.The synopsis was the rare case of an administration official publicly painting a less-than-rosy picture about the virus’ spread. And it raises questions about how Pence specifically will respond. The VP has been loyal to Trump throughout the pandemic. But he has also praised Birx for months as one of the administration’s guiding forces in its coronavirus response.Since last month, Pence has echoed the president in pushing state leaders to reopen their economies as well as their schools, according to recordings of his calls with the nation’s governors previously obtained by The Daily Beast. He’s often been joined on these calls by Birx and CDC Director Robert Redfield, as well as other leading coronavirus task force officials, who have provided governors with readouts of the latest data, trends, testing initiatives, as well as the federal government’s recommendations on reopening. Since May, task force officials have in large part stayed on message with the president, pressing governors to consider implementing phased reopenings and pushing for school reopenings. During one phone call with governors on July 7, Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos told participants that schools should reopen even if there is some risk because “risk is embedded in everything we do” from “learning to ride a bike, to the risk of getting in a space capsule and getting shot off in a rocket into space.”In recent days Birx has taken a more aggressive approach in her debriefings, insisting that states experiencing significant upticks in positivity rates—more than 5 percent—implement strict new measures to contain the virus. On the call with governors last week, she said communities should enforce strict “100 percent mask mandates,” limit indoor gatherings, including dining, and close bars. Even before then, Birx warned state leaders that the upward tick in case counts in the South and Southwest could affect mortality rates. Since then, Birx has worked with a small group of officials to collect and analyze case counts, death rates and hospitalizations, and to coordinate with state officials on their virus responses. Over the last several weeks she has traveled across the country to states with increasing positivity rates and community spread in an effort to encourage local officials to enact stricter containment measures. Behind the scenes, Trump has fumed about the public outcry over the increasing number of positive cases throughout the country. The president has insisted repeatedly (and in contradiction with logic) that the uptick has been tied to an increase in testing. And he has launched public attacks on Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, who has been more openly pessimistic about the state of the pandemic fight. Birx had, for months, avoided such treatment. While Fauci became a lightning rod for censure and scorn from the president and his allies, Birx gained a reputation within Trumpworld not only as a talented doctor, but as a much savvier political player.“She is not some [MAGA] loyalist, but she knows how to play the game,” said one former senior Trump administration official. “And the president instinctively respects that.”For months, the president’s private remarks about Birx have generally been charitable, with Trump often emphasizing how much she will back him up about what great a job he and his team supposedly have done. During an Oval Office news conference in late April, when a Yahoo News reporter asked a question—based on misread data—about coronavirus testing, Trump mocked the journalist in front of the news cameras, saying, “Are you going to apologize, Yahoo?” and, “That’s why you’re Yahoo and nobody knows who the hell you are.” Dr. Birx, who was also seated in the Oval office that day, had corrected the reporter’s numbers, which led to the Yahoo News staffer later issuing a mea culpa on Twitter.In the weeks that followed, Trump continued to savor the moment, bringing it up repeatedly to those close to him, according to a person with direct knowledge of the comments. “The president saw this as something that showed how much of a team player [Dr. Birx] is, and that she wouldn’t put up with lies from the press,” this source said. “He greatly appreciated how she put [that reporter] in his place.”Still, by Monday morning, none of this mattered, at least not enough to spare her getting pilloried by @realDonaldTrump. -with reporting by Sam SteinRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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[mastcomm]

To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China

SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.

The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.

Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.

Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak. But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.

Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.

“Once the epidemic was disclosed, the central government put huge pressure on local officials,” Professor Li said. “That triggered competition between regions, and local governments turned from overly conservative to radical.”

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

“Even when the situation is relieved or if the mortality rate turns out not to be high, the government machine is unable to change direction or tune down,” she added.

China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and the local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.

Zhejiang Province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei Province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000 and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000

The authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.

At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu this past week, workers in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages that show their location data before being allowed to leave.

An app developed by a state-run maker of military electronics lets Chinese citizens enter their name and national ID number and be told whether they may have come in contact, on a plane, train or bus, with a carrier of the virus.

It is too early to say whether China’s strategy has contained the outbreak. With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts say that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.

“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra L. Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”

In Zhejiang, one of China’s most developed provinces and home to Alibaba and other technology companies, people have written on social media about being denied entry to their own apartments in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Coming home from out of town, they say, they were asked to produce documents from landlords and employers or be left on the street.

For Nada Sun, who was visiting family in Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang, a health scare turned into a mandatory quarantine.

When Ms. Sun, 29, complained of tightness in her chest this month, her mother told her to go to the hospital. She did not have a high fever, yet the hospital gave her a battery of checks. All came back negative for the virus.

Even so, when she returned to her apartment, she was told that she would be quarantined for two weeks. She was also added to a group on the WeChat messaging app with a local Communist Party secretary and other volunteers in which she has to submit her temperature and location twice a day.

“I’m worried they have too much information,” Ms. Sun said.

The lockdowns are not necessarily oppressive. Many people in China have been happy to wall themselves off, ordering groceries online and working from home if they can. Some neighborhood officials act with a humane touch.

Bob Huang, a Chinese-born American living in northern Zhejiang, said the volunteers at his complex had helped chase down a man who stayed out overnight to drink, in violation of rules about how often people can step outside. Yet they also delivered food from McDonald’s to a quarantined family.

Mr. Huang, 50, has been able to dodge the restrictions by using a special pass from the property manager, and he has been driving around delivering protective face masks to friends. Some building complexes don’t let him in. Others take down his information.

A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Mr. Huang said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

Some parts of China have imposed other, often severe policies for fending off the epidemic.

Hangzhou has barred pharmacies from selling analgesics to force people with symptoms to seek treatment at hospitals. The eastern city of Nanjing requires anybody who takes a cab to show ID and leave contact information. Yunnan Province wants all public places to display QR codes that people must scan with their phones whenever they enter or exit.

Many places have banned large gatherings. The police in Hunan Province this month destroyed a mahjong parlor where they found more than 20 people playing the tile game.

With local governments deciding such policies largely on their own, China has become a vast patchwork of fiefs.

“It can be quite haphazard,” said Zhou Xun, a historian of modern China at the University of Essex in England. “A perfect plan on paper often turns into makeshift solutions locally.”

Officials seem to recognize that some local authorities have gone too far. This month, Chen Guangsheng, the deputy secretary general of Zhejiang’s provincial government, called it “inappropriate” that some places had employed “simple and crude practices,” like locking people into their homes to enforce quarantines.

National officials on Saturday urged towns and villages to remove unnecessary roadblocks and ensure the smooth transport of food and supplies.

Zhang Yingzi’s apartment complex in Hangzhou initially forbade anybody who had been out of town from entering. Later, the ban was adjusted to cover only people coming from Hubei Province and the Zhejiang cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou, both of which have had many cases of the new virus.

“Banning everyone from out of town wasn’t realistic,” said Ms. Zhang, 29, an accountant. “There are so many of them, after all. Some needed to come back for work.”

Still, many in China are uneasy about loosening up virus controls too quickly.

Zhang Shu, 27, worries that her parents and neighbors are becoming cavalier about the virus, even as workers drive around her village near Wenzhou with loudspeakers telling people to stay home.

“Ordinary people are slowly starting to feel that the situation isn’t so horrible anymore,” Ms. Zhang said. “They are restless.”

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Wang Yiwei and Lin Qiqing contributed research.

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As Protesters Fill Hong Kong’s Streets, Businesses Are Alarmed, Too

HONG KONG — As tens of thousands of protesters returned to Hong Kong’s streets on Wednesday to speak out against a proposed law that would allow extraditions to mainland China, one prominent voice has been largely silent: big business.

But quietly, a wave of concern has spread through the community of foreign consultants, investors and executives who depend on Hong Kong as a safe base from which to do business in China.

No major company dares to speak out publicly for fear of angering the Chinese government. Behind the scenes, they are grappling with difficult questions about whether the legislation would endanger foreign executives or undermine the city’s legal system, a preferred venue for resolving disputes over the mainland’s Communist Party-controlled courts.

“The business and financial community is deeply concerned about what this may augur for Hong Kong,” said Fred Hu, founder of the investment firm Primavera Capital Group and former head of Goldman Sachs’s Greater China business.

“Any perceived erosion of independent judiciary and individual freedom could undermine investor confidence and negatively affect Hong Kong’s future as a leading global business and financial center,” Mr. Hu said.

The law could broadly threaten Hong Kong’s place as a middle ground between China and the business world. As the protests gathered steam in Hong Kong on Wednesday, Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the United States House of Representatives, issued a statement questioning whether Washington should reconsider a law that exempts Hong Kong from some of the trade and technology limits it imposes on the rest of China.

“Congress has no choice but to reassess whether Hong Kong is ‘sufficiently autonomous’ under ‘one country, two systems’ framework” if the government passes the bill, she said, referring to the arrangement that allows the Chinese city to function under its own laws.

Hong Kong’s stock market fell 1.7 percent on Wednesday in an otherwise quiet trading day in Asia, as protesters filled up a main transportation artery where multinational companies and international banks occupy much of the gleaming skyscraper real estate. The police used tear gas on protesters Wednesday afternoon on the same streets and sidewalks that bankers and lawyers for some of the world’s biggest companies travel on their daily commutes. Employees at major banks like HSBC and accounting firms like Deloitte were told to work from home in anticipation of grinding traffic and concerns about safety.

There were signs on Wednesday that tensions in Hong Kong were already undermining business confidence. A Hong Kong property developer called Goldin Financial Holdings cited “recent social contradiction and economic instability” for its decision this week to walk away from its $1.4 billion bid for a plot of land at the city’s former Kai Tak airport. It did not detail its concerns.

For big business, Hong Kong was supposed to be safer than this.

When the British handed over Hong Kong, a former colony, to China in 1997 under the policy of “one country, two systems,” there was a promise that the territory would continue to operate under relative autonomy. Though Beijing effectively controls the system by which Hong Kong picks its top leaders, the city enjoys wide freedoms of speech and of the press. The government takes a light hand compared with the mainland when it comes to business regulation, and its courts are considered independent and well run.

For decades, major companies parked their Chinese or Asian headquarters in Hong Kong, making the city a major nexus of finance and commerce, though some of that power has ebbed as China grew wealthy in its own right and more companies began to deal with that market directly.

Still, unease has grown in recent months.

Last year, the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong said that over half of its respondents were concerned about the rule of law. Business leaders cited a move by the Hong Kong government to reject a standard request by a journalist to renew his work visa last year as a major setback for Hong Kong’s independence. While the city government declined to disclose a reason, it appeared to be in response to the journalist hosting a talk with Andy Chan, the leader of a small political party that calls on Hong Kong to secede from China.

The trade war between the United States and China also threatens to make Hong Kong a bargaining chip. On Monday, a State Department spokeswoman said that “the continued erosion of the ‘one country, two systems’ framework puts at risk Hong Kong’s long-established special status in international affairs.”

“The extradition bill is worrying because for business it starts to call into question whether there is now a blurred line between politics and business in a city that views itself as a commercial capital that puts business first,” said Tara Joseph, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong.

Yet even as American companies, sometimes privately, have expressed increasing concern about the bill, it was too early to say whether they would pull out of Hong Kong and move operations elsewhere. “People are talking about what this bill could mean and what their possible alternatives could be, but there are no immediate answers,” Ms. Joseph said.

One fear among businesses is that the United States could begin treating Hong Kong as if it were just another Chinese city. Under a 1992 law called the United States-Hong Kong Policy Act, the city enjoys special treatment for customs and commercial purposes. Changing or eliminating that law could crimp Hong Kong’s status as a business crossroads.

In recent days, as the front pages of American newspapers displayed images of the protests, lawmakers in Washington have taken greater interest in the territory both publicly and in private meetings, according to two people with direct knowledge of these meetings but not authorized to speak publicly.

Many have cited the most recent Hong Kong Policy Act Report by the State Department in March that reported an increased “tempo of mainland central government intervention in Hong Kong affairs — and actions by the Hong Kong government consistent with mainland direction.” Despite this, the report concluded that Hong Kong continued to have a sufficient degree of autonomy.

Unlike big companies, many small businesses in Hong Kong have been outspoken against the legislation, worrying that it could permanently damage Hong Kong’s economy. More than a thousand of them closed on Wednesday in solidarity with the protesters. The city’s historically weak labor groups asked workers to call in sick.

On Instagram, hundreds of coffee shops, restaurants and other businesses posted pictures with the hashtag “#612strike.” One online floral company called Floraholic wrote, “Hong Kong is sick, let’s take a day off for some rest!”

“Striking is the only action we could take,” said Yanki Lam, co-owner of a company called Changchang Goodstore in the city’s Kowloon district.

The Eaton Hong Kong, a hotel and co-working space, said it would allow its employees to attend the protests on Wednesday, saying that “we respect our team members’ political stances.”

Yet even with this growing sense of concern, foreign businesses that speak out could face retribution from the Chinese government.

“It’s almost impossible for foreign companies to do business in China without the approval of the mainland government. Quite rationally, they don’t want to stick their heads above the parapet,” said David Webb, a former banker and the publisher of the financial and corporate governance website Webb-site.

There is also a sense of resignation from big companies that rejecting the extradition legislation will do little to address a bigger problem of China’s growing reach into the city, Mr. Webb said.

“No amount of padding around the extradition treaty is going to fix that,” he said.

Katherine Li contributed reporting.

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Live Updates: Over 150 Million Chinese Are Under Coronavirus Lockdown

Half of China’s population is facing new travel restrictions.

At least 150 million people in China — over 10 percent of the country’s population — are living under government restrictions on how often they can leave their homes, The New York Times found in examining dozens of local government announcements and reports from state-run news outlets.

More than 760 million Chinese people live in communities that have imposed strictures of some sort on residents’ comings and goings, as officials try to contain the new coronavirus epidemic. That larger figure represents more than half of the country’s population, and roughly one in 10 people on the planet.

China’s restrictions vary widely in their strictness. Neighborhoods in some places require residents only to show ID, sign in and have their temperature checked when they enter. Others prohibit residents from bringing guests.

But in places with more stringent policies, only one person from each household is allowed to leave home at a time, and not necessarily every day. Many neighborhoods have issued paper passes to ensure that residents comply.

In one district in the city of Xi’an, the authorities have stipulated that residents may leave their homes only once every three days to shop for food and other essentials. They also specify that the shopping may not take longer than two hours.

Tens of millions of other people are living in places where local officials have “encouraged” but not ordered neighborhoods to restrict people’s ability to leave their homes.

And with many places deciding their own policies on residents’ movements, it is possible that the total number of affected people is even higher still.

Japan says 500 people will be released from cruise ship after more cases confirmed.

About 500 people will be released on Wednesday from a quarantined cruise ship that has been a hot spot of the outbreak, Japan’s health ministry said on Tuesday, but confusion about the release was widespread.

The ministry said 2,404 people on the ship had tested negative for the virus, but it did not say how it had decided who would be allowed to leave on Wednesday, or when others might be released. The ship, the Diamond Princess, has been moored off Yokohama since Feb. 4.

Earlier in the day, the ministry announced that 88 additional cases of coronavirus were confirmed on the ship, bringing the total to 542.

Australia plans to repatriate about 200 of its citizens aboard the ship on Wednesday, and other countries have similar plans, but Japanese officials did not say whether any of those people were among the 500 who would be allowed to disembark.

The release coincides with the expiration of a two-week quarantine imposed on the ship, but it was not clear if that was the reason for letting people go. More than 300 Americans were released this week before that period was completed.

Some public health experts say that the 14-day isolation period makes sense only if it begins with the most recent infection — in other words, new cases mean a continuing risk of exposure and should restart the quarantine clock.

In addition, many infected people have tested negative initially, only to test positive days later, after becoming sick. The Japanese announcement suggested that Japanese people who are released will not be isolated, a decision officials did not explain.

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

The American passengers who were released were put into 14-day quarantine in the United States. Australia also plans to quarantine people it repatriates.

Britain prepares to evacuate citizens from cruise ship.

The British government is taking steps to evacuate its citizens who have been on the Diamond Princess.

Seventy-four British citizens are on the ship, according to the BBC, which said that they are expected to be flown home in the next two or three days. A statement from the Foreign Office on Tuesday suggested that those who have been infected will remain in Japan for treatment.

“Given the conditions on board, we are working to organize a flight back to the U.K. for British nationals on the Diamond Princess as soon as possible,” the Foreign Office said in a statement. “Our staff are contacting British nationals on board to make the necessary arrangements. We urge all those who have not yet responded to get in touch immediately.”

One Briton in particular has been the subject of more attention than most: David Abel, who has been posting updates on Facebook and YouTube while waiting things out in isolation with his wife, Sally.

They both tested positive for the virus and would be taken to the hospital, he has said. But his most recent Facebook post suggested that all was not as it seemed.

“Frankly I think this is a setup! We are NOT being taken to a hospital but a hostel,” He wrote. “No phone, no Wi-Fi and no medical facilities. I really am smelling a very big rat here!”

The new virus is deadlier than the one that causes the flu.

An analysis of 44,672 coronavirus patients in China whose diagnoses were confirmed by laboratory testing has found that 1,023 had died by Feb. 11 — a fatality rate of 2.3 percent. Figures released on a daily basis suggest the rate has increased in recent days.

That is far higher than the mortality rate of the seasonal flu, with which the new coronavirus has sometimes been compared. In the United States, seasonal flu fatality rates hover around 0.1 percent.

The new analysis was posted online by researchers at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Over all, about 81 percent of patients with confirmed diagnoses experienced mild illness, the researchers found. Nearly 14 percent had severe cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new coronavirus, and about 5 percent had critical illnesses.

Thirty percent of those who died were in their 60s, 30 percent were in their 70s and 20 percent were age 80 or older. Though men and women were roughly equally represented among the confirmed cases, men made up nearly 64 percent of the deaths. Patients with underlying medical conditions, like cardiovascular disease or diabetes, died at higher rates.

The fatality rate among patients in Hubei Province, the center of China’s outbreak, was more than seven times higher than that of other provinces.

China on Tuesday announced new figures for the outbreak. The number of cases was put at 72,436 — up 1,888 from the day before — and the death toll now stands at 1,868, up 98, the authorities said.

Xi Jinping, China’s leader, told Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain in a phone call on Tuesday that China was making “visible progress” in containing the epidemic, according to Chinese state media.

The director of a hospital in Wuhan has died from the virus.

The director of a hospital in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the epidemic, died on Tuesday after contracting the new coronavirus, the latest in a series of medical professionals to be killed in the epidemic.

Liu Zhiming, 51, a neurosurgeon and the director of the Wuchang Hospital in Wuhan, died shortly before 11 a.m. on Tuesday, the Wuhan health commission said.

“From the start of the outbreak, Comrade Liu Zhiming, without regard to his personal safety, led the medical staff of Wuchang Hospital at the front lines of the fight against the epidemic,” the commission said. Dr. Liu “made significant contributions to our city’s fight to prevent and control the novel coronavirus.”

Chinese medical workers at the forefront of the fight against the virus are often becoming its victims, partly because of government missteps and logistical hurdles. After the virus emerged in Wuhan late last year, city leaders played down its risks, and doctors did not take the strongest precautions.

Last week the Chinese government said that more than 1,700 medical workers had contracted the virus, and six had died.

The death nearly two weeks ago of Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist who was initially reprimanded for warning medical school classmates about the virus, stirred an outpouring of grief and anger. Dr. Li, 34, has emerged as a symbol of how the authorities controlled information and have moved to stifle online criticism and aggressive reporting on the outbreak.

Stigma surrounding virus impacts communities in Europe.

With just 42 cases of the coronavirus confirmed in Europe, the continent faces a far less serious outbreak than China, where tens of thousands have contracted the virus. But the people and places associated with the illness have faced a stigma as a result, and fear of the virus is, itself, proving contagious.

A British man who tested positive for coronavirus was branded a “super spreader,” his every movement detailed by the local media.

Business plummeted at a French ski resort identified as the scene of several transmissions of the virus.

And after some employees of a German car company were diagnosed with the virus, the children of other workers were turned away from schools, despite negative test results.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the World Health Organization, warned last weekend of the dangers of letting fear outpace facts.

“We must be guided by solidarity, not stigma,” Dr. Tedros said in a speech at the Munich Security Conference, adding that fear could hamper global efforts to combat the virus. “The greatest enemy we face is not the virus itself; it’s the stigma that turns us against each other.”

HSBC will cut 35,000 jobs amid virus and protests.

HSBC, one of Hong Kong’s most important banks, plans to cut 35,000 jobs over the next three years as it struggles to revive a business that has come to depend increasingly on China for growth.

The London-based bank said on Tuesday that it aimed to cut $4.5 billion in costs as it faces headwinds that include the coronavirus outbreak in China and months of political strife in Hong Kong, one of its most important markets.

The coronavirus is causing economic disruptions in Hong Kong and mainland China that could have a negative impact on performance this year, the bank warned. The bank lowered expectations for growth across Asia for this year but added that it expected to see some improvement once the virus was contained. Nearly half of the bank’s revenue comes from Asia.

HSBC shares trading in Hong Kong slumped by more than 3 percent.

It is the latest company to show the impact of a fast-moving virus that has gripped China over recent weeks and led to a near-nationwide economic standstill. While parts of the country are getting back to work, the reopening of business operations for many companies has been slow.

Domestic workers from the Philippines will be permitted to return to Hong Kong.

The Philippines has lifted its travel ban on citizens employed as domestic workers in Hong Kong and Macau, officials said Tuesday.

The nation had enacted a ban on Feb. 2 on travel to and from mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, preventing workers from traveling to jobs in those places.

Hong Kong alone is home to about 390,000 migrant domestic workers, many of who are from the Philippines. The travel ban had left many anxious about the sudden loss of income, along with the risk of infection.

Also on Tuesday, the authorities in Hong Kong announced that a 32-year-old Filipino woman was the latest person in Hong Kong to have contracted the virus, bringing the number of confirmed cases to 61.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Health said the woman was a domestic worker who was believed to have been infected at home. The government said that she was working in the home of an older person who was among the previously confirmed cases.

Salvador Panelo, a spokesman for President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, said that workers returning to Hong Kong and Macau would have to “make a written declaration that they know the risk.”

South Korea’s leader warns of a dire impact on economy.

President Moon Jae-in of South Korea warned on Tuesday that the outbreak of the coronavirus in China, his country’s biggest trading partner, is creating an “emergency economic situation,” and ordered his government to take actions to limit the fallout.

“The current situation is much worse than we had thought,” Mr. Moon said during a Cabinet meeting on Tuesday. “If the Chinese economic situation aggravates, we will be one of the hardest-hit countries.”

Mr. Moon cited difficulties for South Korean companies in getting components from China, as well as sharp drops in exports to China, the destination for about a quarter of all South Korean exports. He also said travel restrictions hurt the South Korean tourism industry, which relies heavily on Chinese visitors.

“The government needs to take all special measures it can,” Mr. Moon said, ordering the allocation of financial aid and tax breaks to help shore up businesses hurt the most by the virus scare.

Also on Tuesday, a South Korean Air Force plane flew to Japan to evacuate four South Korean citizens stranded on the Diamond Princess, the quarantined cruise ship in Yokohama.

Cruise ship passengers blocked from leaving Cambodia.

Passengers from a cruise ship were turned away at an airport as they tried to leave Cambodia on Tuesday, amid fears that the country had been too lax in containing the new coronavirus.

The ship, the Westerdam, was turned away from five other ports over virus fears, but Cambodia allowed it to dock last Thursday. Prime Minister Hun Sen and other officials greeted and embraced passengers without wearing protective gear.

More than 1,000 people were allowed to disembark without wearing masks or being tested for the virus. Other countries have been far more cautious; it is not clear how long after infection people develop symptoms, and some people at first test negative for the virus, even after becoming sick.

Hundreds of passengers left Cambodia and others traveled to Phnom Penh, the capital, to wait for flights home.

But on Saturday, an American who left the ship tested positive on arrival in Malaysia. Health experts warned that others could have carried the virus from the ship, and passengers were barred from flights out of Cambodia.

On Monday, Cambodian officials said tests had cleared 406 passengers, and they looked forward to heading home to the United States, Europe and elsewhere.

On Tuesday morning, Mr. Hun Sen announced that passengers who were waiting in a hotel would be allowed home on flights through Dubai and Japan.

Orlando Ashford, the president of the cruise operator Holland America, who had traveled to Phnom Penh, told anxious passengers to keep their bags packed.

“Fingers crossed,” said Christina Kerby, an American who had boarded the ship in Hong Kong on Feb. 1 and was awaiting approval to depart. “We’ve been cheering as individuals begin to head to the airport.”

But a cohort of passengers who went to the airport later returned to their hotel. It was not clear if any passengers had been able to fly out.

“New fly in the ointment, the countries that the flights have to go through are not allowing us to fly,” Pad Rao, a retired American surgeon, wrote in a message sent from the Westerdam, where about 1,000 crew and passengers remain.

He said he had been tested for the virus on Monday and was awaiting results.

“We need all the help we can get!” he added.

Reporting and research were contributed by Austin Ramzy, Isabella Kwai, Alexandra Stevenson, Hannah Beech, Choe Sang-Hun, Raymond Zhong, Lin Qiqing, Wang Yiwei, Elaine Yu, Roni Caryn Rabin, Richard C. Paddock, Motoko Rich, Daisuke Wakabayashi, Megan Specia, Michael Wolgelenter, Richard Pérez-Peña and Michael Corkery.

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To Tame Coronavirus, Mao-Style Social Control Blankets China

SHANGHAI — China has flooded cities and villages with battalions of neighborhood busybodies, uniformed volunteers and Communist Party representatives to carry out one of the biggest social control campaigns in history.

The goal: to keep hundreds of millions of people away from everyone but their closest kin.

The nation is battling the coronavirus outbreak with a grass-roots mobilization reminiscent of Mao-style mass crusades not seen in China in decades, essentially entrusting front line epidemic prevention to a supercharged version of a neighborhood watch.

Housing complexes in some cities have issued the equivalents of paper hall passes to regulate how often residents leave their homes. Apartment buildings have turned away their own tenants if they have come from out of town. Train stations block people from entering cities if they cannot prove they live or work there. In the countryside, villages have been gated off with vehicles, tents and other improvised barriers.

Despite China’s arsenal of high-tech surveillance tools, the controls are mainly enforced by hundreds of thousands of workers and volunteers, who check residents’ temperature, log their movements, oversee quarantines and — most important — keep away outsiders who might carry the virus.

Residential lockdowns of varying strictness — from checkpoints at building entrances to hard limits on going outdoors — now cover at least 760 million people in China, or more than half the country’s population, according to a New York Times analysis of government announcements in provinces and major cities. Many of these people live far from the city of Wuhan, where the virus was first reported and which the government sealed off last month.

Throughout China, neighborhoods and localities have issued their own rules about residents’ comings and goings, which means the total number of affected people may be even higher. Policies vary widely, leaving some places in a virtual freeze and others with few strictures.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has called for an all-out “people’s war” to tame the outbreak. But the restrictions have prevented workers from returning to factories and businesses, straining China’s giant economy. And with local officials exercising such direct authority over people’s movements, it is no surprise that some have taken enforcement to extremes.

Li Jing, 40, an associate professor of sociology at Zhejiang University in the eastern city of Hangzhou, was almost barred from taking her husband to a hospital recently after he choked on a fish bone during dinner. The reason? Her neighborhood allows only one person per family to leave the house, every other day.

“Once the epidemic was disclosed, the central government put huge pressure on local officials,” Professor Li said. “That triggered competition between regions, and local governments turned from overly conservative to radical.”

Updated Feb. 10, 2020

What is a Coronavirus? It is a novel virus named for the crown-like spikes that protrude from its surface. The coronavirus can infect both animals and people, and can cause a range of respiratory illnesses from the common cold to more dangerous conditions like Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS.

How contagious is the virus? According to preliminary research, it seems moderately infectious, similar to SARS, and is possibly transmitted through the air. Scientists have estimated that each infected person could spread it to somewhere between 1.5 and 3.5 people without effective containment measures.

How worried should I be? While the virus is a serious public health concern, the risk to most people outside China remains very low, and seasonal flu is a more immediate threat.

Who is working to contain the virus? World Health Organization officials have praised China’s aggressive response to the virus by closing transportation, schools and markets. This week, a team of experts from the W.H.O. arrived in Beijing to offer assistance.

What if I’m traveling? The United States and Australia are temporarily denying entry to noncitizens who recently traveled to China and several airlines have canceled flights.

How do I keep myself and others safe? Washing your hands frequently is the most important thing you can do, along with staying at home when you’re sick.

“Even when the situation is relieved or if the mortality rate turns out not to be high, the government machine is unable to change direction or tune down,” she added.

China’s prevention efforts are being led by its myriad neighborhood committees, which typically serve as a go-between for residents and the local authorities. Supporting them is the government’s “grid management” system, which divides the country into tiny sections and assigns people to watch over each, ensuring a tight grip over a large population.

Zhejiang Province, on China’s southeastern seaboard, has a population of nearly 60 million and has enlisted 330,000 “grid workers.” Hubei Province, whose capital is Wuhan, has deployed 170,000. The southern province of Guangdong has called upon 177,000, landlocked Sichuan has 308,000 and the megacity of Chongqing has 118,000

The authorities are also combining enormous manpower with mobile technology to track people who may have been exposed to the virus. China’s state-run cellular providers allow subscribers to send text messages to a hotline that generates a list of provinces they have recently visited.

At a high-speed rail station in the eastern city of Yiwu this past week, workers in hazmat suits demanded that passengers send the text messages that show their location data before being allowed to leave.

An app developed by a state-run maker of military electronics lets Chinese citizens enter their name and national ID number and be told whether they may have come in contact, on a plane, train or bus, with a carrier of the virus.

It is too early to say whether China’s strategy has contained the outbreak. With large numbers of new infections being reported every day, the government has clear reasons for minimizing human contact and domestic travel. But experts say that in epidemics, overbearing measures can backfire, scaring infected people into hiding and making the outbreak harder to control.

“Public health relies on public trust,” said Alexandra L. Phelan, a specialist in global health law at Georgetown University. “These community-level quarantines and the arbitrary nature in which they’re being imposed and tied up with the police and other officials is essentially making them into punitive actions — a coercive action rather than a public health action.”

In Zhejiang, one of China’s most developed provinces and home to Alibaba and other technology companies, people have written on social media about being denied entry to their own apartments in Hangzhou, the provincial capital. Coming home from out of town, they say, they were asked to produce documents from landlords and employers or be left on the street.

For Nada Sun, who was visiting family in Wenzhou, a coastal city in Zhejiang, a health scare turned into a mandatory quarantine.

When Ms. Sun, 29, complained of tightness in her chest this month, her mother told her to go to the hospital. She did not have a high fever, yet the hospital gave her a battery of checks. All came back negative for the virus.

Even so, when she returned to her apartment, she was told that she would be quarantined for two weeks. She was also added to a group on the WeChat messaging app with a local Communist Party secretary and other volunteers in which she has to submit her temperature and location twice a day.

“I’m worried they have too much information,” Ms. Sun said.

The lockdowns are not necessarily oppressive. Many people in China have been happy to wall themselves off, ordering groceries online and working from home if they can. Some neighborhood officials act with a humane touch.

Bob Huang, a Chinese-born American living in northern Zhejiang, said the volunteers at his complex had helped chase down a man who stayed out overnight to drink, in violation of rules about how often people can step outside. Yet they also delivered food from McDonald’s to a quarantined family.

Mr. Huang, 50, has been able to dodge the restrictions by using a special pass from the property manager, and he has been driving around delivering protective face masks to friends. Some building complexes don’t let him in. Others take down his information.

A nearby village took a less orthodox approach.

“They always start asking questions in the local dialect, and if you can respond in the local dialect, you are allowed to go in,” Mr. Huang said. Unable to speak the dialect, he had to wait, though the villagers were friendly. They gave him a folding chair, offered him a cigarette and didn’t ask for an ID.

Some parts of China have imposed other, often severe policies for fending off the epidemic.

Hangzhou has barred pharmacies from selling analgesics to force people with symptoms to seek treatment at hospitals. The eastern city of Nanjing requires anybody who takes a cab to show ID and leave contact information. Yunnan Province wants all public places to display QR codes that people must scan with their phones whenever they enter or exit.

Many places have banned large gatherings. The police in Hunan Province this month destroyed a mahjong parlor where they found more than 20 people playing the tile game.

With local governments deciding such policies largely on their own, China has become a vast patchwork of fiefs.

“It can be quite haphazard,” said Zhou Xun, a historian of modern China at the University of Essex in England. “A perfect plan on paper often turns into makeshift solutions locally.”

Officials seem to recognize that some local authorities have gone too far. This month, Chen Guangsheng, the deputy secretary general of Zhejiang’s provincial government, called it “inappropriate” that some places had employed “simple and crude practices,” like locking people into their homes to enforce quarantines.

Zhang Yingzi’s apartment complex in Hangzhou initially forbade anybody who had been out of town from entering. Later, the ban was adjusted to cover only people coming from Hubei Province and the Zhejiang cities of Wenzhou and Taizhou, both of which have had many cases of the new virus.

“Banning everyone from out of town wasn’t realistic,” said Ms. Zhang, 29, an accountant. “There are so many of them, after all. Some needed to come back for work.”

Still, many in China are uneasy about loosening up virus controls too quickly.

Zhang Shu, 27, worries that her parents and neighbors are becoming cavalier about the virus, even as workers drive around her village near Wenzhou with loudspeakers telling people to stay home.

“Ordinary people are slowly starting to feel that the situation isn’t so horrible anymore,” Ms. Zhang said. “They are restless.”

Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong. Wang Yiwei and Lin Qiqing contributed research.

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