Category: Corona Virus

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Uber Cuts Thousands of Jobs, Citing Coronavirus Pandemic – NPR

May 7, 2020

Demand for rides has dropped sharply during the pandemic, exacerbating Uber's financial woes. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

Demand for rides has dropped sharply during the pandemic, exacerbating Uber's financial woes.

Uber is cutting 3,700 jobs about 14% of its corporate workforce as demand for ride-hailing has dried up during the coronavirus pandemic.

The layoffs affect people who do customer support and recruiting, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi told employees in an email seen by NPR. He said work for those departments had dried up as trip volumes dropped "significantly" and the company instituted a hiring freeze.

"Days like this are brutal," he wrote.

Uber is also closing around 180 help centers for drivers, and Khosrowshahi is forgoing the rest of his $1 million salary through the end of this year.

In his email, Khosrowshahi hinted at more cuts to come.

"This is one part of a broader exercise to make the difficult adjustments to our cost structure (team size and office footprint) so that it matches the reality of our business (our bookings, revenue and margins)," he wrote. "We are looking at many scenarios and at each and every cost, both variable and fixed, across the company."

Uber already was losing money before the pandemic. The crisis has only exacerbated that situation as millions of people stay home. In March, Khosrowshahi said demand was down at least 60% in Seattle, and he was expecting a similar trend in other big cities such as New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Other U.S. tech companies have also been hit hard by the pandemic. Both Uber's rival Lyft and travel booking site Airbnb laid off thousands of employees in recent days.

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Uber Cuts Thousands of Jobs, Citing Coronavirus Pandemic - NPR

Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is Silencing Them – The New York Times

May 7, 2020

The text messages to the Chinese activist streamed in from ordinary Wuhan residents, making the same extraordinary request: Help me sue the Chinese government. One said his mother had died from the coronavirus after being turned away from multiple hospitals. Another said her father-in-law had died in quarantine.

But after weeks of back-and-forth planning, the seven residents who had reached out to Yang Zhanqing, the activist, suddenly changed their minds in late April, or stopped responding. At least two of them had been threatened by the police, Mr. Yang said.

The Chinese authorities are clamping down as grieving relatives, along with activists, press the ruling Communist Party for an accounting of what went wrong in Wuhan, the city where the coronavirus killed thousands before spreading to the rest of China and the world.

Lawyers have been warned not to file suit against the government. The police have interrogated bereaved family members who connected with others like them online. Volunteers who tried to thwart the states censorship apparatus by preserving reports about the outbreak have disappeared.

They are worried that if people defend their rights, the international community will know what the real situation is like in Wuhan and the true experiences of the families there, said Mr. Yang, who is living in New York, where he fled after he was briefly detained for his work in China.

The crackdown underscores the partys fear that any attempt to dwell on what happened in Wuhan, or to hold officials responsible, will undermine the states narrative that only Chinas authoritarian system saved the country from a devastating health crisis.

To inspire patriotic fervor, state propaganda has portrayed the dead not as victims, but as martyrs. Censors have deleted Chinese news reports that exposed officials early efforts to hide the severity of the outbreak.

The party has long been wary of public grief and the dangers it could pose to its rule.

In 2008, after an earthquake in Sichuan Province killed at least 69,000 people, Chinese officials offered hush money to parents whose children died. Following a deadly train crash in the city of Wenzhou in 2011, officials prevented relatives from visiting the site. Each June, the authorities in Beijing silence family members of protesters who were killed in the 1989 crackdown on the Tiananmen Square pro-democracy movement.

Now, some say the government is imposing the same kind of collective amnesia around the outbreak.

Three volunteers involved in Terminus2049, an online project that archived censored news articles about the outbreak, went missing in Beijing last month and are presumed to have been detained.

I had previously told him: You guys probably face some risk doing this project. But I didnt know how much, said Chen Kun, whose brother, Chen Mei, is one of the volunteers who disappeared.

I had said that maybe he would be summoned by the police for a talk, and they would ask him to take down the site, he said. I didnt think it would be this serious.

Mr. Chen said he had no information about his brothers disappearance. But he had spoken to the relatives of one of the other missing volunteers, Cai Wei, who said that Mr. Cai and his girlfriend had been detained and accused of picking quarrels and provoking trouble, a vague charge that the government often uses against dissidents.

Reached by telephone on Tuesday, an employee at a police station in the Beijing district where Chen Mei lives said he was unclear about the case. The groups site on GitHub, a platform popular with coders, is now blocked in China.

Volunteers for similar online projects have also been questioned by the authorities in recent days. In blog posts and private messages, members of such communities have warned each other to scrub their computers. The organizers of another GitHub project, 2019ncovmemory, which also republished censored material about the outbreak, have set their archive to private.

To the authorities, it seems no public criticism can be left unchecked. The police in Hubei, the province that includes Wuhan and was hardest hit by the outbreak, arrested a woman last month for organizing a protest against high vegetable prices. An official at a Wuhan hospital was removed from his post after he criticized the use of traditional Chinese medicine to treat coronavirus patients, which the authorities had promoted.

The crackdown has been most galling to people mourning family members. They say they are being harassed and subjected to close monitoring as they try to reckon with their losses.

The coronavirus killed nearly 4,000 people in Wuhan, according to Chinas official figures. Some residents believe the true toll is much higher. The government fired two high-ranking local officials, but that is not enough for many grieving relatives, who say they want fair compensation for their losses and harsher punishment for officials.

Zhang Hai is certain that his father, who died in February, was infected with the coronavirus at a Wuhan hospital. He says he still supports the party but thinks local officials should be held responsible for initially hiding the fact that the virus could spread among humans. Had he known the risk, he said, he would not have sent his father to the hospital for treatment.

Mr. Zhang said several Chinese reporters who had interviewed him about his demands later told him that their editors had pulled the articles before publication. He posted calls online to set up a monument in honor of the victims of the epidemic in Wuhan, but censors quickly scrubbed the messages. Officials have pressed him to bury his fathers ashes, but he has so far refused; he says they have insisted on assigning him minders, who he believes would be there to ensure that he caused no trouble.

They spend so much time trying to control us, Mr. Zhang said. Why cant they use this energy to address our concerns instead?

In March, the police visited a Wuhan resident who had started a chat group of more than 100 people who lost relatives to the virus, according to two members of the group, one of whom shared a video of the encounter. The group was ordered to disband.

Mr. Yang, the activist in New York, said at least two of the seven Wuhan residents who had contacted him about taking legal measures against the government dropped the idea after being threatened by the police.

Even if the other plaintiffs were willing to move forward, they might have trouble finding lawyers. After Mr. Yang and a group of human rights lawyers in China issued an open call in March for people who wanted to sue the government, several lawyers around the country received verbal warnings from judicial officials, Mr. Yang said.

The officials told them not to write open letters or create disturbances by filing claims for compensation, according to Chen Jiangang, a member of the group. Mr. Chen, who fled to the United States last year, said he had heard from several lawyers who were warned.

If anyone dares to make a request and the government fails to meet it, they immediately are seen as a threat to national security, Mr. Chen said. It doesnt matter whether youre a lawyer or a victim, its like youre imprisoned.

Some aggrieved residents have pressed ahead despite the government clampdown. Last month, Tan Jun, a civil servant in Yichang, a city in Hubei Province, became the first person to publicly attempt to sue the authorities over their response to the outbreak.

Mr. Tan, who works in the citys parks department, accused the provincial government of concealing and covering up the true nature of the virus, leading people to ignore the viruss danger, relax their vigilance and neglect their self-protection, according to a copy of the complaint shared online. He pointed to officials decision to host a banquet for 40,000 families in Wuhan in early January, even as the virus was spreading.

He urged the government to issue an apology on the front page of the Hubei Daily, a local newspaper.

In a brief phone call, Mr. Tan confirmed that he had submitted a complaint to the Intermediate Peoples Court in Wuhan, but he declined to be interviewed because he is a civil servant.

With Chinas judiciary tightly controlled by the central government, it was unclear whether Mr. Tan would get his day in court. Articles about Mr. Tan have been censored on Chinese social media. Calls to the court in Wuhan on Thursday rang unanswered.

Liu Yi contributed research.

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Coronavirus Survivors Want Answers, and China Is Silencing Them - The New York Times

Who is Rick Bright? The Coronavirus Whistle-Blower Who Said The Trump Administration Steered Contracts to Cronies – The New York Times

May 7, 2020

WASHINGTON A federal scientist who says he was ousted from his job amid a dispute over an unproven coronavirus treatment pushed by President Trump said Tuesday that top administration officials repeatedly pressured him to steer millions of dollars in contracts to the clients of a well-connected consultant.

Rick Bright, who was director of the Department of Health and Human Services Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority until his removal in April, said in a formal whistle-blower complaint that he had been protesting cronyism and contract abuse since 2017.

Questionable contracts have gone to companies with political connections to the administration, the complaint said, including a drug company tied to a friend of Jared Kushners, President Trumps son-in-law and senior adviser. It said Dr. Bright was retaliated against by his superiors, who pushed him out because of his efforts to prioritize science and safety over political expediency.

The 89-page complaint, filed with the Office of Special Counsel, which protects federal whistle-blowers, also said Dr. Bright encountered opposition from department superiors including Health and Human Services Secretary Alex M. Azar II when he pushed as early as January for the necessary resources to develop drugs and vaccines to counter the emerging coronavirus pandemic.

The report provides a window into the inner workings of BARDA, a tiny agency created in 2006 as a response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It partners with industry in developing medical countermeasures that can be stockpiled by the federal government to combat biological or chemical attacks and pandemic threats.

BARDA has spent billions of dollars on contracts with dozens of different suppliers, including major pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotechnology firms.

Both allies and Dr. Bright say his nearly four-year tenure as the head of BARDA was marked by clashes with his superiors especially Dr. Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary of health for preparedness and response and tension with some industry executives. Dr. Bright conceded in the complaint that those clashes came to a head after he leaked information on the dispute over the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine to a reporter from Reuters.

A lawyer for Dr. Bright, Debra Katz, said he felt a moral obligation to get the word out that the administration was pressing to stockpile an unproven and potentially dangerous coronavirus treatment, which was supplied by drugmakers in India and Pakistan and had not been certified by the Food and Drug Administration.

The complaint says top Department of Health and Human Services officials, including Dr. Kadlec, who oversees the strategic national stockpile, overruled scientific experts while awarding contracts to firms represented by the consultant, John Clerici. Mr. Clerici, a founder of a Washington-based firm, Tiber Creek Partners, was instrumental, along with Dr. Kadlec, in writing the legislation that created BARDA.

Dr. Bright was vocal about his concerns regarding the inappropriate and possibly illegal communications between Mr. Clerici, Dr. Kadlec, Mr. Shuy and Mr. Meekins, the complaint stated, referring to Bryan Shuy and Chris Meekins, two other department officials.

A spokeswoman for the department, Caitlin Oakley, did not address the complaints about officials there.

Dr. Bright was transferred to N.I.H. to work on diagnostics testing critical to combating Covid-19 where he has been entrusted to spend upward of $1 billion to advance that effort, she said in an emailed statement. We are deeply disappointed that he has not shown up to work on behalf of the American people and lead on this critical endeavor.

Dr. Bright was initially offered a narrower role at the National Institutes of Health to work on a new Shark Tank-style program to develop coronavirus treatments, but Ms. Katz told reporters he has no role and did not receive his last paycheck. A spokeswoman, Kendra Barkoff Lamy, later said that, at his doctors direction, Dr. Bright has been on sick leave due to hypertension caused by this current situation.

In a statement, Mr. Clerici said he unequivocally denied any wrongdoing, adding: Its sad that during a pandemic, Dr. Bright and his team have chosen to distract people like Dr. Kadlec, who are critical to the response, with politically motivated allegations. The record is clear that his allegations are false and will be proven so.

The complaint, written by Ms. Katz and her law partner, Lisa Banks, identifies four specific instances in which Dr. Bright felt Mr. Clerici exerted undue influence. At one point, it said, Dr. Bright called for an investigation by the inspector general to help break up the cottage industry of marketing consultants and political influence into these contracts.

Dr. Bright also said Mr. Clerici pushed, albeit unsuccessfully, for an extension of a contract awarded to a company run by someone who was friends with Jared and has Hollywood connections. In a brief interview, Mr. Clerici said the conversation never happened.

The document paints Dr. Bright as sounding the alarm about the emerging coronavirus threat and pressing his superiors to do more to prepare including purchasing masks that would later turn out to be in short supply at a time when Mr. Azar was downplaying the crisis.

On Jan. 23, he met with Mr. Azar and Dr. Kadlec to press for urgent access to funding, personnel and clinical specimens, including viruses, that would be necessary to develop treatments, the complaint said. But Mr. Azar and Dr. Kadlec asserted that the United States would be able to contain the virus through travel bans, the complaint said, adding that Dr. Bright was cut out of future department meetings related to Covid-19.

But the complaint says Dr. Bright found an ally in Peter Navarro, Mr. Trumps trade adviser, who shared Dr. Brights sense of urgency, recognized his expertise and was prepared to help. In early February, an official from a company that makes masks connected Dr. Bright with Mr. Navarro, and the two met at the White House on Feb. 8, a Saturday, more than a month before Mr. Trump declared a national emergency.

In that meeting, the complaint said, Dr. Bright urged Mr. Navarro to have the government stop exporting high-quality N95 masks, stock up on remdesivir, an antiviral drug approved last week by the F.D.A. to treat Covid-19, and develop a Manhattan Project for a vaccine an idea Mr. Trump recently adopted.

Mr. Navarro invited Dr. Bright back the following day to help him draft recommendations for the presidents coronavirus task force a move that angered top department officials, the complaint said.

Dr. Bright is asking the Office of Special Counsel to take steps to force the department to reinstate him as head of BARDA. In a brief statement during a conference call convened by his lawyers, he said the past few years have been beyond challenging.

Time after time, I was pressured to ignore or dismiss expert scientific recommendations and instead to award lucrative contracts based on political connections, Dr. Bright said.

Dr. Bright was named to lead BARDA a day after Mr. Trumps election in November 2016, inheriting an agency full of fights with companies over contracting approvals. He proved a polarizing figure.

Bruce Gellin, the former director of the departments National Vaccine Program Office, described Dr. Bright as a visionary thinker who pushed BARDA to take risks and innovate. But some lobbyists and pharmaceutical executives say that under Dr. Bright, the disputes over contracting worsened, a situation that led to a review by an outside consulting firm to evaluate the situation.

The consultant, Mitre Corporation, issued two reports; neither is publicly available. The first concluded that some companies were badly treated by BARDA and included criticism that it lacked technical prowess and professionalism, according to two people who were told about its contents. It was later rewritten to include more flattering information about BARDA that was left out of the first report.

But the final straw for Dr. Bright came when Mr. Trump started pushing hydroxychloroquine as a possible game changer in the treatment of the virus. Dr. Bright pushed to limit access to the drug to hospitalized patients, but grew troubled when administration officials, including Dr. Kadlec, continued to press for its widespread usage, the complaint said.

When a Reuters reporter contacted him, he shared emails with the news outlet. Its story was published on April 16, and Dr. Bright was removed less than a week later.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

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Who is Rick Bright? The Coronavirus Whistle-Blower Who Said The Trump Administration Steered Contracts to Cronies - The New York Times

Coronavirus in California: What Is the Effect on Agriculture? – The New York Times

May 7, 2020

Good morning.

(Dont get California Today by email? Heres the sign-up.)

The coronavirus pandemic has left no industry and no global system unchanged.

The way we grow, harvest and distribute food has been thrown into particular disarray, as workers fall ill and big companies struggle to adapt to demand that has almost instantaneously shifted from restaurants and cafeterias to supermarkets.

He said that, although painful adjustments were underway, there were also silver linings in the pandemic, particularly for smaller growers like the Masumoto Family Farm, which has about 80 acres south of Fresno.

Heres our conversation, lightly edited and condensed:

How are things going?

All in all, good, in that were not in the middle of harvest. But its that cloud of uncertainty. Farmers are used to that, because of nature, but this is totally different.

Were reading the tea leaves about how consumer tastes are changing.

For example, we make organic raisins and a lot go into raisin bran. Cereal sales are going fantastic after they were declining for some time.

So after we lift the shelter in place, are people going back to skipping breakfast? How do peaches fit into this? Are peaches a luxury item or part of a new, healthy diet?

[Read more about growing peaches as the climate changes in this Opinion piece.]

Were in a good position because weve always diversified some small farmers are hurting because their main buyers were restaurants. We sell some to restaurants, but some to wholesale and direct sales.

Each of those are starting to shift. Were getting word that people may buy produce like peaches packaged in clamshells because they dont want to touch the fruit so how does packaging affect how we do things? Does that change the kind of fruit we want? Medium or big? I dont know!

This is one time where small is beautiful. When youre small you can make these shifts much more easily.

Do you supply to community-supported agriculture boxes? And is that something youre shifting toward more?

Absolutely. Our friends are small farmers who do C.S.A. boxes.

People are paying attention to food theyre paying attention to what they make, and so small-scale C.S.A.s have been booming.

We sell into some C.S.A.s, but we dont have a system set up to do our own. If we were a little closer to the Bay Area we probably would have set up something much more direct.

How do you see sustainability fitting into all these changes?

The broader question has to do with living with nature. People draw the comparison with World War II and victory gardens this is working with nature, and the key with that is knowing there are unknowns.

[Read more about the re-emergence of victory gardens.]

Do you think this will change how you actually grow the peaches?

When I got here, the huge shift was me keeping heirloom varieties we grow, as opposed to breeding for shelf life. Were very fortunate the market grew with us and we found an audience for that when the whole food revolution took over in the 1980s and 1990s.

I wonder now, is it one of those pivot moments, where were in the middle of another food revolution?

I think this whole crisis has accentuated the middlemen: the distributors, the packers, the shippers theyre the ones at the heart of all this and they have tended to be ignored.

A static example is toilet paper. There are truckers and shippers, then the local store gets their Tuesday shipment of toilet paper. No one used to pay attention to when toilet paper arrived.

The same thing is happening with the food chain. I always had a little struggle when people used the term farm to fork. It leaves out the middle thats so critical.

Another thing that were in the middle of accentuating is labor.

I was just going to ask about that.

What is the safety of farmworkers? We need sick-leave policies. But I think this could be a shift to people paying attention.

For us, we did a lot of the work ourselves and initially just had seasonal employees at pruning, trimming and harvest time. But about 10 years ago, the labor supply was getting very inconsistent and so we got one full-time employee and a few seasonal employees. At the height, were talking about only about a dozen and they tend to be the same.

[Read about how the pandemic has essentially halted migration to the U.S.]

And about five to 10 years ago, we started transitioning so the farm fits the labor. Usually in business, its the opposite. Im not faulting big agriculture for doing that, but we have efficiencies on a small scale that work to our advantage.

Are you worried right now about finding even the labor you do need?

Were definitely concerned. All these hands that feed us what happens with politics and immigration. All those factors come butting into what we do. I always think that were in Fresno, which is hundreds of miles from the border but were actually on the border because it affects us directly.

I think thats true with a lot of people in the industry and the food world.

[See every coronavirus case in California by county.]

We often link to sites that limit access for nonsubscribers. We appreciate your reading Times coverage, but we also encourage you to support local news if you can.

Jill Cowan grew up in Orange County, graduated from U.C. Berkeley and has reported all over the state, including the Bay Area, Bakersfield and Los Angeles but she always wants to see more. Follow along here or on Twitter.

California Today is edited by Julie Bloom, who grew up in Los Angeles and graduated from U.C. Berkeley.

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Coronavirus in California: What Is the Effect on Agriculture? - The New York Times

13 new COVID-19 coronavirus cases confirmed in the city of Cleveland – cleveland.com

May 7, 2020

CLEVELAND, Ohio The Ohio Department of Health notified Cleveland Wednesday that 13 more cases of the COVID-19 coronavirus had been confirmed in the city, Mayor Frank Jacksons administration announced. No new deaths were reported.

The new cases push the total number of Cleveland residents who have been infected to 838. Nearly 30% of those cases required hospitalization, according to the Cleveland Department of Public Health.

The breakdown by gender is 52% men, 48% women. Nearly 60% of those infected are black. Nearly 22% are white. Asian residents comprise less than 3% of the cases.

The new cases involved men and women ranging in age from their 20s to their 70s. Overall, the age range for those infected is from less than 1 year old into the 90s.

The Cleveland Department of Public Health will work to identify any people who were in close contact with the newly confirmed patients to determine who now would require testing or monitoring for symptoms of COVID-19.

Thirty-nine Clevelanders have died from coronavirus. They ranged in age from less than 1 year old to more than 90 years old.

Ohios 1,225 known coronavirus-related deaths are spread across 64 of the states 88 counties, with total cases now reaching 21,576, the Ohio Department of Health reported Wednesday. The death total increased 7.9% from 1,135 the day before, while the case total was up 2.9% from 20,969.

The 90 deaths added Wednesday were the second most reported in a single day, behind 138 on April 29. The 79 deaths reported Tuesday are the third most.

The state reported 2,542 cases in Cuyahoga County as of Tuesday. Those cases involved 659 hospitalizations. There were 132 deaths reported.

The Centers for Disease Control and Preventions updated tally on Wednesday reported there were 1,193,813 cases and 70,802 deaths in the United States. But those numbers tend to lag other reporting sites.

Worldometer, an online tracking site, estimated that as of Wednesday evening more than 1,258,050 people have become infected with the coronavirus in the U.S. It reported 74,200 people had died.

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13 new COVID-19 coronavirus cases confirmed in the city of Cleveland - cleveland.com

Vietnam crushed the coronavirus outbreak, but now faces severe economic test – The Guardian

May 7, 2020

Vietnam didnt just flatten its coronavirus curve, it crushed it. No deaths have been reported, official case numbers have plateaued at just 271, and no community transmissions of the virus have been reported in the last two weeks. On 23 April, the nation eased lockdowns in its major cities and life is gradually returning to normal. It is a stark contrast to many other nations including the US, where more Americans have died from Covid-19 than during the entire Vietnam war.

Kidong Park, the World Health Organisations representative to Vietnam, has praised the countrys response to the crisis.

Quarantining tens of thousands in military-style camps and vigorous contact tracing procedures have helped Vietnam to avoid the disasters unfolding in Europe and the US. After testing over 213,000 people, the nation has the highest test-per-confirmed-case ratio of any country in the world. A creative public information campaign featuring viral handwashing songs and propaganda-style art helped, but it was decisive early action hastened by a government praised for its response to Sars in 2003 that proved most effective.

Vietnams first two confirmed cases of Covid-19 appeared in late January. On 1 February, Vietnam Airlines ceased all flights to China, Taiwan and Hong Kong and the border with China was shut days later. After a fresh wave of new infections in March, all international flights were grounded and a nationwide lockdown commenced on 1 April. While other nations announced lockdowns to deal with existing crises, Vietnam enacted one to prevent one.

Second waves of the virus have, however, already hit Japan and Hong Kong. To mitigate the risk of a fresh outbreak occurring in Vietnam, wearing face masks in public remains mandatory and gatherings of more than 30 individuals are banned, as are festivals, religious ceremonies and sporting events.

Park stresses the importance of education about the virus at community level, along with strengthening preventative measures in health facilities, offices, schools and other places where it is essential for people to go regularly.

But he warned of the economic consequences and this likely influenced the governments decision to end the lockdown on 23 April.

Many non-essential services, such as bars and karaoke parlours, are still closed. Some will never recover. Constraints have been lifted for shops, hotels and restaurants, yet in a nation where tourism accounts for 6% of GDP, the future looks increasingly uncertain especially when nobody has a clear idea of when borders will reopen.

A report released by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) last month said at least 10 million Vietnamese could lose their jobs or face reduced income in the second quarter of 2020. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicts a growth rate of 2.7% for Vietnam in 2020, a drop from around 7% last year.

In early April, the government announced a $2.5bn support package for Vietnams poor, with the most vulnerable receiving $76 per week. Rice ATMs and zero dong stores have been set up in major cities to assist those hardest hit, yet even when combined with additional government funding, such support only goes so far.

A Hanoi-based economist, Nguyen Van Trang, says the path ahead looks ominous. Incredibly difficult decisions lie ahead on how and when to reopen the country, she says, but adds that despite external risks Vietnam has begun to restore manufacturing, services and retail sectors. The internal resilience is huge. A large part of the population survived through hardships during the war, so they will be able to bounce back very quickly.

For some of Vietnams most vulnerable, the situation looks bleak. With attention diverted towards the pandemic, NGOs have been hit hard. Blue Dragon Childrens Foundation, an organisation that works with street children in Hanoi and rescues victims of human trafficking from China, has seen donations plummet. Skye Maconachie, the organizations joint chief executive, says the crisis has already led to an increase in homelessness and hunger.

Many of the children and families we work with were already in poverty or in crisis, so now they are reaching a breaking point, Maconachie says. Traffickers prey on vulnerable people, so we expect to see an increase in human trafficking and labour exploitation over the coming months.

Whatever the future holds, Vietnam, a nation of 96 million, appears to have contained the virus. As of Wednesday, Singapore had 19,410 confirmed cases of Covid-19 the highest in south-east Asia and 18 deaths, while Indonesia has more than 12,000 cases and 872 deaths. As Vietnam emerges from lockdown, the eyes of the world will be watching.

The fight against Covid-19 is ongoing and the next wave is always possible as outbreaks are still reported globally. Vietnam, Park says, should not lose its grip.

Chris Humphrey is the Vietnam bureau chief for Deutsche Presse-Agentur and a freelance journalist.

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Vietnam crushed the coronavirus outbreak, but now faces severe economic test - The Guardian

Coronavirus researchers killing wasnt because of COVID-19 work according to police: Today in Pa – PennLive

May 7, 2020

You can listen to the latest episode of Today in Pa at this link, or on your favorite app including Alexa, Apple, Google, Spotify and Stitcher. Episodes are available every weekday on PennLive. Subscribe/follow and rate the podcast via your favorite app.

A new civilian coronavirus corps could help the states reopening efforts. Meanwhile, healthcare workers are granted civil immunity for their work treating those for COVID-19. The murder of a coronavirus researcher in Pittsburgh had nothing to do with his work, according to police. Pennsylvania has its 4th straight day of less than 1,000 new cases and Gritty is bringing some much needed joy to Delaware County.

Those are the stories we cover in the latest episode of Today in Pa, a daily weekday podcast from PennLive.com and hosted by Julia Hatmaker. Today in Pa is dedicated to sharing the most important and interesting stories in the state.

Todays episode refers to the following articles:

If you enjoy Today in Pa, consider leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or on Amazon. Reviews help others find the show and, besides, we like to know what you think of the program.

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Coronavirus researchers killing wasnt because of COVID-19 work according to police: Today in Pa - PennLive

Both my parents are doctors and got coronavirus. I’ve never been so scared – The Guardian

May 7, 2020

It is the sixth week of lockdown, and for many people things are getting progressively more intense. Most families are physically distancing at home. People are only leaving the house for their weekly shop and spending a lot of that time waiting in the queue or to exercise once a day.

In my family things are a bit different. Our driveway is usually empty during the day as my parents, who are doctors, go in to work. It is difficult to imagine how only some weeks ago my main worries were around my GCSEs. Now every day, I hear about deaths from coronavirus. I cannot help but feel a surge of fear for my parents as I watch these updates with my brother. Im painfully aware of the many healthcare workers who have lost their lives.

The health and social care secretary, Matt Hancock, has announced that the families of NHS and care workers who died from the coronavirus will get 60,000. Im sure they would much rather have their loved ones with them. It is unthinkable to put a price on someones life. Maybe if this money had been spent on personal protective equipment (PPE) there would have been fewer deaths.

My parents are carrying on with their work with as much semblance of normality as possible. They change before they leave work and again straight after coming home. They avoid all contact with us until theyve had a shower and disinfected things thoroughly.

At the start they discussed my dad moving into a hotel; there was more risk of infection as he works in a hospital. In spite of their best efforts to wash their hands repeatedly and set up a hygiene station in the hallway, they both caught coronavirus one after the other.

I wasnt surprised. PPE guidelines and supplies have been inadequate. Many hospitals have been running out of gowns and the guidelines surrounding what level of PPE should be used have been changing constantly. My mums surgery has had to supplement its own PPE. They have bought gowns, visors and safety goggles as well as masks.

My dad caught the virus in the first week of lockdown. It was a Thursday and as everyone clapped for NHS workers outside, he just about climbed the stairs to his bed. He said it felt like he was trying to climb Everest. He remained isolated from the rest of us, suffering from fever, rigors and severe muscle pains. I often heard him scream in pain. My mum did her best to help, giving him regular paracetamol and nourishing soups that he would barely eat. She would don a mask and leave food outside his door.

My parents werent able to get tested despite the governments claim that NHS staff would be tested for Covid-19. We stayed isolated for 14 days, assuming that my dad had the virus. My mum worked from home, struggling with technology, delivering food to my dad and answering up to 50 phone calls a day.

After multiple attempts to be tested my dad finally accessed a drive-through on day 11 of his illness, when he had recovered. The swab was negative, presumably because he was tested too late.

My mum was sick next. In the first week she lost her sense of smell and had a mild fever. But in the second week her health deteriorated. She became very breathless and could not stop coughing. On day 10 of her illness she was admitted to a coronavirus ward. I have never been more scared in my life. She thankfully got better and came home but Im still worried about whether they might be able to catch the virus again.

This experience has taught me the importance of time and how we can never predict what the future may hold. This week I would have been sitting my first GCSE exam, which now seems trivial compared with what people are going through.

Before this pandemic I took for granted time spent with family and loved ones. But now I have learned to cherish all these priceless moments. While my parents were ill I questioned whether life would ever go back to normal, or even if I would be able to speak to them again.

After everything, I am incredibly grateful for the Thursday clap for the amazing dedication of key workers including those in healthcare, delivery drivers, supermarket staff, school and nursery teachers, and care workers.

There has been so much death, heartache and disappointment in recent weeks for people around the world, many of whom are feeling very isolated. We are all thinking about how this virus has affected us in many ways, but there have also been things to celebrate too such as how communities have come together to offer love, sympathy and camaraderie. I hope this can bring some light to those in darkness right now.

If you would like to contribute to our Blood, sweat and tears series about experiences in healthcare during the coronavirus outbreak, get in touch by emailing sarah.johnson@theguardian.com

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Both my parents are doctors and got coronavirus. I've never been so scared - The Guardian

The US just reported its deadliest day for coronavirus patients as states reopen, according to WHO – CNBC

May 7, 2020

A sad and tired healthcare worker is seen by the Brooklyn Hospital Center in New York, United States on April 1, 2020.

Tayfun Coskun | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images

The United States just had its deadliest day on record due to the coronavirus as states across the country begin to ease restrictions meant to curb the spread of the virus, according to data published by the World Health Organization.

The U.S. saw 2,909 people die of Covid-19 in 24 hours, according to the data, which was collected as of 4 a.m. ET on Friday. That's the highest daily Covid-19 death toll in the U.S. yet, based on a CNBC analysis of the WHO's daily Covid-19 situation reports.

Before May 1, the next highest U.S. daily death toll was 2,471 reported on April 23, according to the WHO. State officials have previously warned that data on Covid-19 deaths are difficult to analyze because they often represent patients who became ill and were hospitalized weeks ago.

Representatives of the WHO did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.

The country's deadliest day comes as state officials weigh reopening parts of the economy and easing stay-at-home orders. Public health officials and epidemiologists have warned that as the public grows fatigued by restrictions and businesses reopen, the virus could spread rapidly throughout communities that have yet to experience a major epidemic.

Protesters in at least 10 states on Friday demanded that the government lift stay-at-home orders and other emergency measures put in place to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Among the states that saw protests are California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee and Washington.

Dozens of states have unveiled reopening plans and several, including Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas, have already begun to allow nonessential retailers to reopen.

New York state, which has reported more than 27% of all confirmed cases in the U.S., according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University, has borne the brunt of the U.S. outbreak so far. The state has reported at least24,039 of the country's65,173 Covid-19 deaths, according to Hopkins.

The toll of the deadliest day of Covid-19 in the U.S. rivals that of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, which claimed the lives of 2,973 people in one day, according to a government commission.

The WHO data differs from data collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which does not report historical daily Covid-19 deaths. The CDC's site says that2,349 people died in the U.S. of Covid-19 on May 1.

However, the agency warns that its data might not be complete. CDC spokeswoman Kate Grusich told CNBC that the agency's data is "validated through a confirmation process with jurisdictions."

"CDC does not know the exact number of COVID-19 illnesses, hospitalizations, and deaths for a variety of reasons," the agency says, adding that asymptomatic patients, delays in reporting and limited testing make it difficult to accurately track the data.

Some cities, such as New York City, have struggled to gain a complete understanding of the Covid-19 death toll. Many patients die at home and others are attributed to heart attacks or other conditions that might have been exacerbated by Covid-19, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said last month.

Further complicating the system for reporting Covid-19 deaths is that the mortuary system in hard-hit cities like New York is overwhelmed by the surge of victims. Funeral homes, caught in the middle of the bottleneck, have had to store corpses in refrigerated trucks, or in some cases whatever storage unit they can find.

The CDC warns that all data right now is "provisional" and the agency might not have a more accurate count until December of next year.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted emergency use authorization forGileadSciences' remdesivir drug to treat Covid-19, President Donald Trump announced Friday.

The EUA means that remdesivir has not undergone the same level of review as an FDA-approved treatment, according toa fact sheetfrom the agency on the drug. However,doctors will be allowed to use the drug on patients hospitalized with the disease even though the drug has not been formally approved by the agency.

The intravenous drug has helped shorten the recovery time of some hospitalized Covid-19 patients, new clinical trial data suggests. Without other proven treatments, health-care workers will likely be considering its use.

The FDA previously authorized the emergency use of malaria drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid-19. However, it laterissued a warning against takingthe drugs outside a hospital or formal clinical trial setting after it became aware of reports of "serious heart rhythm problems" in patients.

Under the EUA, the FDA will allow the drug to be administered for either a five-day or a 10-day dose. A 10-day treatment regimen is preferred for intubated patients.

"That's going to allow Gilead to effectively double the supply," former FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said during an interview on CNBC's "Closing Bell."

The company said it will continue to support clinical trials and expand so-called compassionate use programs for remdesivir.

CNBC's Berkeley Lovelace, Yelena Dzhanova and Hannah Miller contributed to this report.

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The US just reported its deadliest day for coronavirus patients as states reopen, according to WHO - CNBC

New Studies Add to Evidence that Children May Transmit the Coronavirus – The New York Times

May 5, 2020

Among the most important unanswered questions about Covid-19 is this: What role do children play in keeping the pandemic going?

Fewer children seem to get infected by the coronavirus than adults, and most of those who do have mild symptoms, if any. But do they pass the virus on to adults and continue the chain of transmission?

The answer is key to deciding whether and when to reopen schools, a step that President Trump urged states to consider before the summer.

Two new studies offer compelling evidence that children can transmit the virus. Neither proved it, but the evidence was strong enough to suggest that schools should be kept closed for now, many epidemiologists who were not involved in the research said.

Many other countries, including Israel, Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom have all either reopened schools or are considering doing so in the next few weeks.

In some of those countries, the rate of community transmission is low enough to take the risk. But in others, including the United States, reopening schools may nudge the epidemics reproduction number the number of new infections estimated to stem from a single case, commonly referred to as R0 to dangerous levels, epidemiologists warned after reviewing the results from the new studies.

In one study, published last week in the journal Science, a team analyzed data from two cities in China Wuhan, where the virus first emerged, and Shanghai and found that children were about a third as susceptible to coronavirus infection as adults were. But when schools were open, they found, children had about three times as many contacts as adults, and three times as many opportunities to become infected, essentially evening out their risk.

Based on their data, the researchers estimated that closing schools is not enough on its own to stop an outbreak, but it can reduce the surge by about 40 to 60 percent and slow the epidemics course.

My simulation shows that yes, if you reopen the schools, youll see a big increase in the reproduction number, which is exactly what you dont want, said Marco Ajelli, a mathematical epidemiologist who did the work while at the Bruno Kessler Foundation in Trento, Italy.

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The second study, by a group of German researchers, was more straightforward. The team tested children and adults and found that children who test positive harbor just as much virus as adults do sometimes more and so, presumably, are just as infectious.

Are any of these studies definitive? The answer is No, of course not, said Jeffrey Shaman, an epidemiologist at Columbia University who was not involved in either study. But, he said, to open schools because of some uninvestigated notion that children arent really involved in this, that would be a very foolish thing.

The German study was led by Christian Drosten, a virologist who has ascended to something like celebrity status in recent months for his candid and clear commentary on the pandemic. Dr. Drosten leads a large virology lab in Berlin that has tested about 60,000 people for the coronavirus. Consistent with other studies, he and his colleagues found many more infected adults than children.

The team also analyzed a group of 47 infected children between ages 1 and 11. Fifteen of them had an underlying condition or were hospitalized, but the remaining were mostly free of symptoms. The children who were asymptomatic had viral loads that were just as high or higher than the symptomatic children or adults.

In this cloud of children, there are these few children that have a virus concentration that is sky-high, Dr. Drosten said.

He noted that there is a significant body of work suggesting that a persons viral load tracks closely with their infectiousness. So Im a bit reluctant to happily recommend to politicians that we can now reopen day cares and schools.

Dr. Drosten said he posted his study on his labs website ahead of its peer review because of the ongoing discussion about schools in Germany.

Many statisticians contacted him via Twitter suggesting one or another more sophisticated analysis. His team applied the suggestions, Dr. Drosten said, and even invited one of the statisticians to collaborate.

But the message of the paper is really unchanged by any type of more sophisticated statistical analysis, he said. For the United States to even consider reopening schools, he said, I think its way too early.

In the China study, the researchers created a contact matrix of 636 people in Wuhan and 557 people in Shanghai. They called each of these people and asked them to recall everyone theyd had contact with the day before the call.

They defined a contact as either an in-person conversation involving three or more words or physical touch such as a handshake, and asked for the age of each contact as well as the relationship to the survey participant.

Comparing the lockdown with a baseline survey from Shanghai in 2018, they found that the number of contacts during the lockdown decreased by about a factor of seven in Wuhan and eight in Shanghai.

There was a huge decrease in the number of contacts, Dr. Ajelli said. In both of those places, that explains why the epidemic came under control.

The researchers also had access to a rich data set from Hunan provinces Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Officials in the province traced 7,000 contacts of 137 confirmed cases, observed them over 14 days and tested them for coronavirus infection. They had information not just for people who became ill, but for those who became infected and remained asymptomatic, and for anyone who remained virus-free.

Data from hospitals or from households tend to focus only on people who are symptomatic or severely ill, Dr. Ajelli noted. This kind of data is better.

The researchers stratified the data from these contacts by age and found that children between the ages of 0 and 14 years are about a third less susceptible to coronavirus infection than those ages 15 to 64, and adults 65 or older are more susceptible by about 50 percent.

They also estimated that closing schools can lower the reproduction number again, the estimate of the number of infections tied to a single case by about 0.3; an epidemic starts to grow exponentially once this metric tops 1.

In many parts of the United States, the number is already hovering around 0.8, Dr. Ajelli said. If youre so close to the threshold, an addition of 0.3 can be devastating.

However, some other experts noted that keeping schools closed indefinitely is not just impractical, but may do lasting harm to children.

Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins Universitys Bloomberg School of Public Health, said the decision to reopen schools cannot be made based solely on trying to prevent transmission.

I think we have to take a holistic view of the impact of school closures on kids and our families, Dr. Nuzzo said. I do worry at some point, the accumulated harms from the measures may exceed the harm to the kids from the virus.

E-learning approaches may temporarily provide children with a routine, but any parent will tell you its not really learning, she said. Children are known to backslide during the summer months, and adding several more months to that might permanently hurt them, and particularly those who are already struggling.

Im not saying we need to absolutely rip off the Band-aid and reopen schools tomorrow, she said, but we have to consider these other endpoints.

Dr. Nuzzo also pointed to a study in the Netherlands, conducted by the Dutch government, which concluded that patients under 20 years play a much smaller role in the spread than adults and the elderly.

But other experts said that study was not well designed because it looked at household transmission. Unless the scientists deliberately tested everyone, they would have noticed and tested only more severe infections which tend to be among adults, said Bill Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

Assumptions that children are not involved in the epidemiology, because they do not have severe illness, are exactly the kind of assumption that you really, really need to question in the face of a pandemic, Dr. Hanage said. Because if its wrong, it has really pretty disastrous consequences.

The experts all agreed on one thing: that governments should hold active discussions on what reopening schools looks like. Students could be scheduled to come to school on different days to reduce the number of people in the building at one time, for example; desks could be placed six feet apart; and schools could avoid having students gather in large groups.

Teachers with underlying health conditions or of advanced age should be allowed to opt out and given alternative jobs outside the classroom, if possible, Dr. Nuzzo said, and children with underlying conditions should continue to learn from home.

The leaders of the two new studies, Dr. Drosten and Dr. Ajelli, were both more circumspect, saying their role is merely to provide the data that governments can use to make policies.

Im somehow the bringer of the bad news but I cant change the news, Dr. Drosten said. Its in the data.

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New Studies Add to Evidence that Children May Transmit the Coronavirus - The New York Times

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