Tag Archives: COVID-19

Take Five: Coronavirus vaccine race is on

(Reuters) – U.S. President Donald Trump has put his faith in anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine to ward off COVID-19, but governments and investors are focusing on a vaccine. Without one, it’s unlikely economic activity can resume fully.

So the race is on, and the rewards are rich: AstraZeneca has vaulted into the position of the most valuable British company after receiving a U.S. pledge for up to $1.2 billion for its experimental vaccine.

Pharma/biotech shares have outperformed broader equities since Feb 19. Investors twitchy for vaccine news sent the share price of biotech company Moderna 20% higher when it said its vaccine trials showed promise. Rivals Novavax and Inovio also rose when they secured vaccine development funding.

The United States has vaccine development deals with Johnson & Johnson and Sanofi, too. But many others, big and small, are in the race: Imperial College, Gilead Sciences, Roche, China’s CanSino Biologics and India’s Glenmark to name just a few.

THE RUBICON

European clashes over how to handle the economic impact of the COVID-19 crisis raised fears for the bloc’s future, but a Franco-German proposal aimed at helping the worst-hit states represents a pivotal moment. The markets want to see the details, however. All eyes will be on the European Commission, which on Wednesday presents its pandemic recovery plan.

The task is to ensure weaker states such as Italy can access funding without adding to their debt burden. But EU states remain divided over whether recovery funds should be funneled through loans or transfers. If those opposed to big-spending manage to water down the plan, the euro and southern European bonds will take a knock.

The change in Germany’s previously hardline stance was momentous. Now it’s the turn of others such as Austria and the Netherlands to decide whether they are ready to cross the Rubicon.

TRYING TIMES

Beijing’s control has long been a sore point for some Hong Kongers. Its latest proposal for a tougher national security regime for the city will almost certainly lead to further violent confrontations on the streets and open a new venue for Sino-U.S. tension.

Only this time it may be worse, which is why the Hang Seng index was hit harder on Friday than even the worst days in the March selldown. China has replaced the leadership in its Hong Kong Liaison office and, foreign envoys reckon, quietly doubled the number of staff there.

The United States has already warned of a tough response. Investors will look there, and to the situation on the ground for cues. As for markets, Hong Kong’s property index posted its worst drop in 11.5 years on Friday. European luxury shares and banks such as HSBC also took a hammering on Friday, meaning ripples could spread.

CLOUD STOCKS FLOAT HIGHER

Coronavirus is a double-edged sword for cloud-computing firms. It has supercharged demand for data center services to support video-streaming and other remote services but is also forcing corporates to slash budgets amid a deep recession.

Cloud computing players take the spotlight on Wall Street in the coming days as they report quarterly results and guide investors on the outlook. Autodesk and Workday report on Wednesday. Salesforce.com  – viewed as the gold standard – follows on Thursday, along with systems software seller VMWare.

The First Trust Cloud Computing index ETF  has gained over 10% in 2020, although some big-name cloud-computing stocks have yet to fully recover from their March lows.

DOOM AND GLOOM

Armed with less fiscal firepower and weaker healthcare systems than richer peers, emerging economies have been less able to counter coronavirus-induced drops in consumption, foreign investment and exports, or alleviate the effects of job losses.

That strain shows up in economic data, not least the 6.8% Q1 contraction in China’s economy, the biggest in decades. Soon four other emerging market heavyweights – Turkey, Mexico, Brazil and India – will tell us how their growth fared in the January-April quarter.

Expect gloomy readings. India, not long ago, the fastest-growing big economy, is expected to have expanded 2% in Q1; Turkey’s economy is seen contracting this year for the first time in over a decade. For Brazil and Mexico Goldman Sachs predicts full-year contractions of 7.4% and 8.5% respectively.

(Reporting by Sujata Rao, Dhara Ranasinghe and Tom Arnold in London, Tom Westbrook in Singapore and Lewis Krauskopf in New York; Editing by Hugh Lawson)

U.S. forecasters expect above-normal 2020 Atlantic hurricane season: NOAA

By Erwin Seba

HOUSTON (Reuters) – U.S. forecasters expect an above-normal 13-19 named storms during the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Climate Prediction Center said on Thursday.

NOAA forecasters estimate three to six major hurricanes packing winds of at least 111 miles per hour (179 km/h) may form. The last two years have seen an above-average number of named storms with 18 last year and 15 in 2018.

Gerry Bell, lead forecaster with the Climate Prediction Center, said the Atlantic is in a warm cycle of a multi-decadal pattern that has dominated the ocean’s weather since 1995.

“We’re predicting this to be an above-normal season, possibly very active,” Bell said.

NOAA’s seasonal outlook is consistent with recent academic and private forecasts. Above-average ocean surface temperatures in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico and an absence of high-level El Nino winds that break up storms portend a more active season, researchers have said

About half of this year’s named storms may reach hurricane strength, with winds of at least 74 mph. The season formally begins June 1 and ends Nov. 30.

The 2020 season started early with Tropical Storm Arthur, bringing heavy rains to the southeastern U.S. coast this week before dissipating on Tuesday. No storms are currently brewing.

Carlos Castillo, acting deputy administrator at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the COVID-19 pandemic would affect disaster plans.

“Social distancing and other CDC guidance to keep you safe from COVID-19 may impact the disaster preparedness plan you had in place, including what is in your go-kit, evacuation routes, shelters and more,” Castillo said.

Eighteen tropical storms developed in 2019 including six hurricanes, three of which were major. The average hurricane season produces 12 named storms and six hurricanes, three of which are major.

(Reporting by Erwin Seba, Editing by Tom Brown and Richard Pullin)

Drive-in cinemas, raves and dining behind plastic: the new going out

LONDON (Reuters) – With lockdown measures more relaxed, social lives are slowly becoming possible. Restaurants, bars, gigs and museums beckon. But as we take our first cautious steps back into the wider world, we are finding it transformed.

Gone are restaurants so busy that you have to wait for service or the check. Now, in the coronavirus-era, social distancing has made eating out a very different experience.

At Da Enzo’s in Rome, waiters no longer hand out menus but hold up a scan code. Customers point their smartphones at it and a menu pops up on the screen with the day’s specialties.

Dining companions – from the same household, please – might eat around a candle-lit table inside a glass booth on the banks of an Amsterdam canal, a concept being tried out by the ETEN restaurant.

If that doesn’t appeal, diners can try eating with a see-through lampshade on their heads, created by French designer Christophe Gernigon for restaurant owners who want to protect customers from COVID-19.

Other designs on the market resemble visitor booths in prisons, Gernigon said, prompting him to create a cylinder of transparent plastic that hangs from the ceiling, much like a lampshade.

“I wanted to make it more glamorous, more pretty,” he said.

Want to catch a movie after dinner but your local cinema is closed under lockdown rules? Drive-in cinemas are seeing a revival, popping up in Lithuania, Dubai and the United States.

On the Cote d’Azur, in Cannes, you can drive to Palm Beach and watch films from the comfort of your own car.

If clubbing is your thing, Germans got the party started with a drive-in rave. In the car park of Club Index in the town of Schüttorf near the Dutch border, clubbers – limited to two per car – parked in rows in front of a DJ and hopped around to the beats while respecting government-imposed social distancing measures.

Lasers, glowsticks, confetti and a whole lot of horn honking set the mood as people celebrated their new-found freedom.

“The night had quite a party vibe here. It was perhaps even better than a normal club night would be,” said organizer Holger Boesch, who runs Club Index.

And forget lockdown beards and daytime pajamas – soon there will be no more excuses for the Robinson Crusoe quarantine look.

Designers from Lebanon to China to Nigeria are creating extraordinary face masks and protective clothing, and in South Korea, YouTubers are giving tutorials to maximize the make-up and mask look.

In Lagos, designer Sefiya Diejomaoh believes a global pandemic should not get in the way of style. Gold-colored and studded with sparkling diamante jewels, her face mask matches her floor-length dress.

(Writing by Raissa Kasolowsky; Editing by Janet Lawrence)

What you need to know about the coronavirus right now 5-21-20

(Reuters) – Here’s what you need to know about the coronavirus right now:

“A long way to go”

The World Health Organization is starting to raise the alarm bell about the rising number of new coronavirus cases in poor countries, even as many rich nations emerge from lockdowns.

The global health body said on Wednesday 106,000 new cases had been recorded in the previous 24 hours, the most in a single day since the outbreak began.

“We still have a long way to go in this pandemic,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said.

Global coronavirus cases have surpassed 5 million, with Latin America overtaking the United States and Europe in the past week to report the largest portion of new daily cases.

Vaccine: high hopes and a reality-check

The United States said it will pump up to $1.2 billion into developing AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine and confirmed that it would order 300 million doses.

U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said he hoped the first doses of the vaccine, which is being developed with the University of Oxford, would be available by October.

AstraZeneca meanwhile stressed it was still awaiting results from an early-stage trial to know if the vaccine worked at all.

China fur and traditional medicine trade to continue?

China’s parliament is preparing new laws to ban the trade and consumption of wildlife, following on from a temporary move in January after exotic animals traded in a Wuhan market were identified as the most likely source of COVID-19.

However, local action plans published this week suggest the country’s fur trade and lucrative traditional medicine sectors will continue as usual.

That means practices that lead to cross-species virus transmission could continue, said Peter Li, China policy specialist with Humane Society International, an animal rights group. China’s annual national session of parliament, delayed from March, starts on Friday.

Sports and sleepwear over suits and ties

The new bestsellers at Marks & Spencer are sportswear, sleepwear and bras, while sales of suits and ties are down to “a dribble”, as the lockdown transforms shoppers’ priorities, Britain’s biggest clothing retailer said on Wednesday.

What customers are buying is “completely different from what it would have been a year ago,” M&S chairman Archie Norman told reporters, after the 136-year-old group published annual results and its response to the pandemic.

Along with surging sales of jogging pants, hoodies and leggings, an emphasis on home comforts and family needs has boosted bedding sales by 150%.

(Compiled by Karishma Singh and Mark John; editing by Nick Macfie)

Global coronavirus cases surpass 5 million, infections rising in South America

By Lisa Shumaker and Cate Cadell

(Reuters) – Global coronavirus cases surpassed 5 million on Wednesday, with Latin America overtaking the United States and Europe in the past week to report the largest portion of new daily cases globally.

It represents a new phase in the virus’ spread, which initially peaked in China in February before large-scale outbreaks followed in Europe and the United States.

Latin America accounted for around a third of the 91,000 cases reported earlier this week. Europe and the United States each accounted for just over 20%.

A large number of those new cases came from Brazil, which recently surpassed Germany, France and the United Kingdom to become the third-largest outbreak in the world, behind the United States and Russia.

Cases in Brazil are now rising at a daily pace second only to the United States.

The first 41 cases of coronavirus were confirmed in Wuhan, China, on Jan. 10 and it took the world until April 1 to reach its first million cases. Since then, about 1 million new cases are reported every two weeks, according to a Reuters tally.

At more than 5 million cases, the virus has infected more people in under six months than the annual total of severe flu cases, which the World Health Organization estimates is around 3 million to 5 million globally.

The pandemic has claimed over 326,000 lives, though the true number is thought to be higher as testing is still limited and many countries do not include fatalities outside of hospitals. Over half of the total fatalities have been recorded in Europe.

Despite the continued increase in cases, many countries are opening schools and workplaces following weeks of lockdown that have stemmed the spread.

Financial markets have also been boosted slightly by promising early results from the first U.S. vaccine trial in humans.

(Reporting by Lisa Shumaker and Cate Cadell; editing by Jane Wardell)

Global COVID-19 trial of hydroxychloroquine, which Trump takes, begins

By Kylie MacLellan and Kay Johnson

LONDON/BANGKOK (Reuters) – Healthcare workers in Britain and Thailand have started taking part in a trial to determine whether two anti-malarial drugs can prevent COVID-19, including one that U.S. President Donald Trump says he has been taking.

The study, involving more than 40,000 healthcare workers across Europe, Africa, Asia and South America, seeks to determine whether chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine could play a role in the fight against the novel coronavirus.

Demand for hydroxychloroquine surged after Trump touted it in early April. He said this week he was now taking it as a preventive medicine against the virus despite medical warnings about its use.

The lead investigators in Thailand and Britain said their ‘COPCOV’ trial, in the works for several months, would cut through the heated and unhelpful debate.

“We still do not know whether anything is beneficial in COVID-19,” the University of Oxford’s Professor Nicholas White, the study’s co-principal investigator, told Reuters.

“The only way we can find out if things are beneficial overall is to do large, well-conducted clinical trials,” said White, who is based at the Mahidol Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit (MORU) in Bangkok. “These are extremely well-established drugs.”

The COPCOV team said laboratory evidence showed the anti-malarial drugs might be effective in preventing or treating COVID-19 but there was no conclusive proof. Accord Healthcare has donated the hydroxychloroquine and matched placebo.

Medics who have tested positive will not be able to take part. More details can be found here.

Trump said on May 18 that he had been taking hydroxychloroquine and many frontline medical workers were too, although the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has issued a warning about its use.

“I’m taking it — hydroxychloroquine,” Trump said. “I’ve been taking it for the last week and a half. A pill every day.”

Professor Martin Llewelyn, the lead UK investigator, said many health workers were relying on social distancing and personal protective equipment but the measures were not perfect.

“Anything that can be done to reduce that risk further would be an enormous breakthrough,” he told Reuters.

(Writing by Kate Holton; Editing by Guy Faulconbridge and Catherine Evans)

NY Fed’s Williams says it’s hard to know what shape U.S. economic recovery will take

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. unemployment rate is likely to get worse before it gets better, and it is difficult to know what the economic recovery will look like, New York Federal Reserve Bank President John Williams said Thursday.

The most recent economic figures do not fully capture the pain American families are going through, since some people who stopped working for health reasons or to care for a family member may not be counted, Williams said in remarks prepared for a webinar organized by business groups based in upstate New York.

The unemployment rate, which surged to 14.7% in April, “is sure to get worse before it gets better,” Williams said.

As businesses begin to reopen, there will be more information on the economic toll of the virus on various industries and how long it could take the economy to rebound, he said.

“What we don’t know is what the shape or timescale of the recovery will be,” he said. “It’s going to be some time before we have a clearer view of the effects on other industries, including autos, higher education, manufacturing, and professional services.”

The Fed acted quickly to shore up the U.S. economy in March as the coronavirus spread. Policymakers cut rates to near zero and rolled out a slew of emergency lending facilities intended to keep credit flowing to businesses and households. The Fed also launched into open-ended asset purchases, including Treasury securities and mortgage-backed securities, to improve market functioning.

Williams said rates will stay low until policymakers are “confident” that the economy is stable and on track to reach the Fed’s maximum employment and price stability goals.

“Amid all the change we’re experiencing, you can be assured of one thing: our unwavering commitment to limit the economic damage from the pandemic and foster conditions for a strong and sustained recovery,” he said.

(Reporting by Jonnelle Marte; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)

Divided by COVID-19: Democratic U.S. areas hit three times as hard as Republican ones

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As America’s response to the coronavirus pandemic splits along partisan lines, a Reuters analysis may help explain why: Death rates in Democratic areas are triple those in Republican ones.

By Wednesday, U.S. counties that voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election reported 39 coronavirus deaths per 100,000 residents, according to an analysis of demographic and public health data.

In counties that voted for Republican Donald Trump, 13 of every 100,000 people had died from the virus.

The uneven impact reflects the disproportionate toll the infectious disease has taken in densely packed Democratic-voting cities like New York. Rural areas and far-flung suburbs that typically back Republicans have not seen as direct an impact.

The pattern holds beyond New York, the epicenter of the U.S. outbreak. Democratic counties in 36 of the 50 U.S. states collectively reported higher death rates than Republican counties.

In Maryland, where the disease has killed more than 2,000 people, the death rate in the Democratic suburbs of Washington is four times higher than in the conservative counties in the Appalachian panhandle.

In Kansas, which has reported 152 fatalities, the death rate is seven times higher in the two counties that backed Clinton than in the rest of the state.

There are exceptions. Republican counties report a higher death rate in Delaware, Nebraska and South Dakota, where the disease has raced through meatpacking plants. Republican counties have been harder hit in Montana, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota and Texas, where rates are well below the national average.

Partisan attitudes reflect the geographic divide.

A Reuters/Ipsos survey of 1,115 U.S. adults conducted Monday and Tuesday found nearly half of Democrats were “very concerned” about the virus, compared with one-third of Republicans.

Others have found Republicans more eager to lift restrictions aimed at slowing the coronavirus in the United States, which leads the world with more than 92,000 deaths and 1.54 million infections.

ARMED PROTESTS AND REFRIGERATOR TRUCKS

The contrast is especially sharp in Michigan, where refrigerator trucks store corpses in Detroit hospital parking lots, while armed men protest business restrictions at the state capitol. Sheriffs in several Republican-leaning counties have said they will not punish businesses that defy rules put in place by Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer.

Trump, who narrowly won Michigan in 2016, is due to visit the state on Thursday. He has pressed Whitmer to lift restrictions in hopes of reviving the economy before the November election.

Michigan counties that backed Clinton in 2016 collectively have reported 79 deaths for every 100,000 people. Counties that backed Trump have reported 25 deaths per 100,000.

Republican pollster Steve Mitchell said voters in the state were sharply split along partisan lines. Democrats are afraid they will catch the disease, while Republicans worry more about the economic damage from nationwide shutdowns that sent unemployment soaring.

“They are not seeing a high caseload in their area and they’re wondering why they’re being treated the same as the city of Detroit,” he said.

Conservative activist Michelle Gregoire said people should not change their behavior to avoid the coronavirus.

“You can’t put yourself in a bubble,” she said.

Democratic state Representative Leslie Love, whose district includes part of Detroit, said the partisan divide reminded her of the statewide response to previous problems like crack cocaine and high auto insurance rates that hit hardest in black neighborhoods.

“It is that same type of disconnect: ‘If it’s not happening to me, if it’s not in my backyard, then that’s their problem over there, and not ours,'” she said.

“It’s going to be your problem, though.”

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Additional reporting by Grant Smith; Editing by Peter Cooney)

U.S. weekly jobless claims remain high as backlogs, layoffs linger

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Millions more Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week as backlogs continue to be cleared and disruptions from the novel coronavirus unleash a second wave of layoffs, pointing to another month of staggering job losses in May.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits totaled a seasonally adjusted 2.438 million for the week ended May 16, the Labor Department said on Thursday. Data for the prior week was revised down to show 2.687 million claims filed instead of the previously reported 2.981 million. Connecticut said last week it had misreported its numbers.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast claims would total 2.4 million in the latest week. The jobless claims report, the most timely data on the economy’s health, could offer early clues on how quickly businesses rehire workers as they reopen and on the success of the government’s Paycheck Protection Program (PPP).

A broad shutdown of the country in mid-March to contain the spread of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the novel coronavirus, has resulted in the worst unemployment since the Great Depression.

“None of these states had systems set up to process the unprecedented amount of claims in one fell swoop, so there are backlogs,” said Steve Blitz, chief U.S. economist at TS Lombard in New York. “We continue to read of firms cutting their workforce and these are firms that were not immediately impacted by the mandated contraction from COVID-19.”

Claims have been gradually declining since hitting a record 6.867 million in the week ended March 28.

Economists said claims numbers were staying high also as states were now processing applications for gig workers and many others trying to access federal government benefits.

These workers generally do not qualify for regular unemployment insurance, but to get federal aid for coronavirus-related job and income losses they must first file for state benefits and be denied.

Last week’s claims data covered the week during which the government surveyed establishments for the non farm payrolls portion of May’s employment report. The economy lost a record 20.5 million jobs in April, on top of the 881,000 shed in March.

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Paul Simao)

Monkeys infected with COVID-19 develop immunity in studies, a positive sign for vaccines

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Two studies in monkeys published on Wednesday offer some of the first scientific evidence that surviving COVID-19 may result in immunity from reinfection, a positive sign that vaccines under development may succeed, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.

Although scientists have assumed that antibodies produced in response to the new coronavirus virus are protective, there has been scant scientifically rigorous evidence to back that up.

In one of the new studies, researchers infected nine monkeys with COVID-19, the illness caused by the novel coronavirus. After they recovered, the team exposed them to the virus again and the animals did not get sick.

The findings suggest that they “do develop natural immunity that protects against re-exposure,” said Dr. Dan Barouch, a researcher at the Center for Virology and Vaccine Research at Harvard’s Beth Israel Deaconness Medical Center in Boston, whose studies were published in the journal Science.

“It’s very good news,” Barouch said.

Several research teams have released papers – many of them not reviewed by other scientists – suggesting that a vaccine against the virus would be effective in animals.

In the second study, Barouch and colleagues tested 25 monkeys with six prototype vaccines to see if antibodies produced in response were protective.

They then exposed these monkeys and 10 control animals to SARS-CoV-2, the official name of the novel coronavirus.

All of the control animals showed high degrees of virus in their noses and lungs, but in the vaccinated animals, “we saw a substantial degree of protection,” Barouch said. Eight of the vaccinated animals were completely protected.

These studies, which have been peer reviewed, do not prove that humans develop immunity or how long it might last, but they are reassuring.

“These data will be seen as a welcome scientific advance,” Barouch said.

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen; Editing by Bill Berkrot)