Where are you at on the Covid 19 "fear scale" of 1-10?

[Daisys and Diamonds]

i think a group hug is in order

 

[missy]

i think a group hug is in order

 

[Dancing Fire]

I'm down to a 3 now.

 

[MRBXXXFVVS1]

I'm still at 10. I think a 2nd wave is coming, especially after the protests over the last couple of weeks. States are opening up due to pressure to balance economic impact and mental health, but the virus is still out there and there are so many unknowns. It's really challenging for me because my life has done a 180 and I haven't been outside in 3 months, but I think the prevention is worth it.

 

[ItsMainelyYou]

I am at a good 7. Enough so that I'll probably have to stop working because the people I work for do not believe in social distancing or vaccines and want 7/8 people in an enclosed space with no precautions in place to ramp their production. They want to move forward without waiting for my return. I was just told this today. I can't fault them as they have their business to run. It is my choice to isolate for a little while longer. I will find out the verdict sometime this week.
It's sad, I enjoyed being out of the house, but it only effects my bottom 'bling' line.
So, no new pretties for the foreseeable futureunfortunately.

 

[mellowyellowgirl]

I'm at the point where I feel like of people are swarming the streets in protest then they should just open businesses and let everyone go about their lives.

Sydney CBD was packed, absolutely packed. It feels stupid to carry on and freak out about the virus now if people are perfectly happy to stand around with thousands of other people. Just let everyone make a choice to open up just like the protesters have their right to protest.

If you can protest in a pandemic you should also be allowed to conduct business.

I'm at about a 2 now. Especially if we're not dying in hoards after the protests then it can't really be that bad!

 

[missy]

Global Coronavirus Caseload Passes 7 Million (Published 2020)

The W.H.O. warned that the pandemic appeared to be worsening, and said that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in how the virus spreads. China is using Twitter to drown out criticism during the pandemic.

www.nytimes.com

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Global Coronavirus Caseload Passes 7 Million
The W.H.O. warned that the pandemic appeared to be worsening, and said that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in how the virus spreads. China is using Twitter to drown out criticism during the pandemic.

• Published June 8, 2020Updated June 9, 2020, 5:27 a.m. ET

0:00/0:45
‘The Pandemic Remains a Public Health Emergency,’ W.H.O. Says
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow.
The Covid-19 crisis has illustrated that even the most sophisticated health systems have struggled to cope with a pandemic. W.H.O. has grave concerns about the potential impact the virus could have as it starts to accelerate in countries with weaker health systems. Of course, the pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern. We will continue working with countries and partners to enable essential travel needed for pandemic response, humanitarian relief and cargo operations, and for countries to gradually resume normal passenger travel.





0:44‘The Pandemic Remains a Public Health Emergency,’ W.H.O. Says
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow.CreditCredit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times
As the global caseload surges past 7 million, the W.H.O. issues a warning.
The World Health Organization reported on Monday that the number of new daily cases worldwide had hit a new high on Sunday, a sign that the pandemic appeared to be worsening.
Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the organization’s director general, told reporters that more than 100,000 new cases had been reported on nine of the previous 10 days, and that Sunday’s tally — 136,000 cases — was the highest single-day tally so far.
The pandemic has sickened more than 7 million people worldwide, according to a New York Times database. As of Tuesday morning, at least 405,400 people had died, and the virus had been detected in nearly every country.



Dr. Tedros said that three-quarters of the new cases reported on Sunday came from just 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia. He urged people who are demonstrating against racism round the world to practice social distancing and other measures to prevent new infections.
Also on Monday, a W.H.O. scientist stirred confusion by saying that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in the spread of the virus, as many public health experts had assumed for months.
SUCCESS STORY


On Twitter, Beijing tries to shape the global narrative about the virus and more.



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China was criticized for its early cover-up of the coronavirus outbreak, but it has regained confidence as other countries have made their own stumbles.Credit...Getty Images
As the Trump administration lashes out at China over a range of grievances, Beijing’s top diplomats and representatives are using the president’s favorite online megaphone — Twitter — to slap back with a pugnaciousness that is best described as Trumpian.



Behind China’s combative new messengers, a murky hallelujah chorus of sympathetic accounts has emerged to repost them and cheer them on. Many are new to the platform. Some do little else but amplify the Beijing line.
No doubt some of these accounts are run by patriotic, tech-savvy Chinese people who get around their government’s ban on Twitter and other Western platforms. But an analysis by The Times found that many of the accounts behaved with a single-mindedness that could suggest a coordinated campaign of the type that countries have carried out on Twitter in the past.
China’s Twitter campaign comes as it battles the United States for control of the global narrative on the pandemic. China was criticized for its early mishandling of the outbreak. But with the United States in turmoil — upended first by the epidemic and now by protests — Beijing sees a chance to define itself as a global leader and press its interests in Hong Kong and beyond.
Here’s what was happening in Hong Kong on Tuesday:

• Cathay Pacific Airways, Hong Kong’s beleaguered flag carrier, said that the territory’s government would plow nearly $4 billion into it and assume a direct say in its operations.
• Hundreds of protesters gathered in several Hong Kong shopping malls to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a march that became the start of the city’s biggest political crisis in decades. The protest movement eased this winter as the virus spread, but has lately re-emerged, albeit on a smaller scale.

The W.H.O. says asymptomatic transmission is rare, confounding experts.




Employees of Atlantic Blueberry got tested for Covid-19 on May 27, before the season.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times
For months, scientists have warned that asymptomatic people infected with the virus are still capable of spreading Covid-19. It has been seen as one of the insidious characteristics of the contagion and a factor in its ability to have infected now more than 7 million people globally.
But on Monday, a scientist for the World Health Organization said that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in the spread of the virus, a statement with far-reaching implications. It has created some confusion among experts seeking more information from the W.H.O.



“That fundamentally changes our understanding of how this virus is spread and what we should do as a response,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of Harvard’s Global Health Institute. “This is not a minor, technical clarification. The implications of what is being said are very, very substantial, and it requires a lot more context and explanation than W.H.O. is providing right now.”
On Monday, Dr. Maria Van Kerkhove, the W.H.O.’s technical lead for Covid-19, said, “It still appears to be rare that an asymptomatic individual actually transmits onward.”
Instead, Dr. Van Kerkhove said governments should focus more attention on controlling the spread among people with symptoms.
“We have a number of reports from countries who are doing very detailed contact tracing,” she said. “They are following asymptomatic cases, they are following contacts, and they are not finding secondary transmission onward. It’s very rare. Much of that is not published in the literature.”
Later on Monday she cited a W.H.O. report published June 5, which said that based on evidence from contact tracing, “asymptomatically infected individuals are much less likely to transmit the virus than those who develop symptoms.”
Dr. Jha said that a finding of that magnitude, if true, should not have been casually revealed in the middle of an hourlong news conference. It deserves an entire briefing on its own.
“Asymptomatic spread is what makes controlling this disease so incredibly hard,” Dr. Jha said. If that’s not the case, he added, “then that changes the ballgame. It’s too big a finding to be shared in passing.”



According to Dr. Avantika Singh, a researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital and co-author of a study on asymptomatic transmission, an infected person is most likely to spread the virus in the few days before the onset of symptoms. She said she was “highly curious” to hear more from the W.H.O., and to see the evidence behind Dr. Kerkhove’s statements, which seem to contradict the commonly held belief.
“We are not commenting specifically on the W.H.O.’s findings because we haven’t seen them,” said Dr. Hanalise V. Huff, the other author of the study. “But given the evidence, it’s pretty convincing that asymptomatic and pre-symptomatic spread exists.

In other news from around the world:

• Tijjani Muhammad-Bande, the president of the United Nations General Assembly, said that world leaders would not come to New York for their annual gathering in September, a first in the U.N.’s 75-year history.
• A 14-day quarantine period for all travelers arriving in Britain took effect on Monday, to the anger of the country’s travel industry and doubts over the practicality of the new rules.
• With cases rising sharply in Israel, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Monday that the country would “put the brakes” on plans to relax more restrictions in the days to come. .
• Canada reopened its border on Monday to immediate family members of Canadian citizens and permanent residents. Anyone showing symptoms will remain barred, and everyone will be required to quarantine for 14 days.

Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
The virus has infected more than 6,600,000 people and has been detected in nearly every country.
New York City began a tentative reopening.
Video

TRANSCRIPT

0:00/1:05
‘Based on the Numbers, We Can Reopen,’ Cuomo Says of New York
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that New York City will begin its first phase of reopening since the coronavirus outbreak forced a severe lockdown.
We didn’t, we didn’t just stop the increase. We bent the curve, and we brought the spread down dramatically. And you look at where we are today — 100 days later later — we are continuing our decline. The rest of the country is still spiking. How remarkable is that? Why are we reopening? Because these numbers say we can. It’s no guess, there’s no ideology, based on the numbers, we can reopen. We are doing more tests than any state in the United States. We’re doing more tests than any country on the globe per capita. That’s why I have confidence saying to 19 million people, “We can do this.” What does Phase 1 reopening mean? It means companies, businesses can reopen pursuant to specific guidelines. This is not reckless reopening.




‘Based on the Numbers, We Can Reopen,’ Cuomo Says of New York

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced that New York City will begin its first phase of reopening since the coronavirus outbreak forced a severe lockdown.CreditCredit...Demetrius Freeman for The New York Times
Commuters wearing face masks waited for freshly scrubbed trains on a subway platform in Manhattan. Construction workers lined up to get their temperatures checked so they could get back on the job. The lights were back on in some neighborhood stores, and their doors were unlocked for curbside and in-store pickup — though many others remained shuttered and boarded up.
For the first time in months, New York City was officially back in business on Monday, with as many as 400,000 people returning to work in construction, manufacturing and limited retail operations.
“We’re not out of the woods, but we are on the other side, certainly,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said.
The first coronavirus case was confirmed 100 days ago in the city that became a center of the pandemic, where more than 205,000 people have been infected and 22,000 people have died. On Sunday, there were an additional 35 deaths statewide, and the city’s health commissioner said on Monday that the city was still in “a moderate transmission phase.”



Major challenges remain. More than 885,000 jobs have vanished, and the city budget hemorrhaged tax revenue and now faces a $9 billion shortfall over the next year.
To allay concerns about a typically crowded subway system, Mr. Cuomo rode the No. 7 line on Monday morning. “If the subway isn’t safe for me, then I wouldn’t ask anyone else go on the subway,” he said afterward.
Mayor Bill de Blasio also announced that the city would add more bus lanes and close some streets to cars to allow buses to move more quickly, though it was not as many miles as the transit agency had requested.
NEW YORK RESTARTS
The city started its reopening on Monday. If you’re planning to take the subway, here’s what you need to know.

June 8, 2020

Cathay Pacific, battered by the virus, receives a nearly $4 billion government bailout.


Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon, a sister airline formerly known as Dragonair, are based in Hong Kong.Credit...Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times

The Hong Kong government is bailing out Cathay Pacific Airways, its beleaguered flag carrier, by injecting nearly $4 billion and taking a direct stake in its operations.



Like airlines around the world, Cathay Pacific was shaken to its core as its passenger traffic shrank to near zero amid the coronavirus pandemic. The airline said last month that its year-to-date losses totaled $580 million. So far this year, it has asked its employees to take unpaid leave, announced cuts to executive pay and grounded half of its fleet.
Cathay has also been hit by a year of anti-China protests, in which citizens have expressed fear over China’s encroaching grip over the semiautonomous territory, and the airline’s shares lost 20 percent of their value.
In a filing to Hong Kong’s stock exchange on Tuesday, Cathay said the Hong Kong government would inject nearly $4 billion into it through loans and other means. As part of the terms of the bailout, the government will take an undisclosed stake in the carrier, a move that gives it a direct say in its operations through two “observer” boardroom seats.
Cathay’s announcement came on the same day that hundreds of protesters gathered in Hong Kong shopping malls to commemorate the one-year anniversary of a protest march that became the start of the city’s biggest political crisis in decades.
Ahead of the announcement, rumors had swirled around a possible takeover by Air China, a Chinese state-owned enterprise. That stoked fears about China’s encroachment not only in the city’s politics but its finance sector.
Even before the contagion spread, Cathay Pacific’s fate looked increasingly uncertain.
Last year, it fell under withering criticism from China’s state-run propaganda machine after several of its employees participated in protests or spoke out in support of them on social media. The airline shuffled its leadership in an effort to deflect the fray, but Chinese customers avoided Cathay anyway, sending its traffic plummeting.



More broadly, the protests drove Chinese tourists to avoid Hong Kong, hitting travel-related businesses hard. Police officers and protesters even clashed last summer in Hong Kong’s slick airport, where Cathay is headquartered.
LOOKING BACK
Our reporters looked back at key moments from the pro-democracy campaign in Hong Kong.

The S&P 500 erased its losses for the year.
On Monday the S&P 500 climbed back above where it began the year — before the pandemic brought the United States economy to a grinding halt, before more than 110,000 Americans died from the coronavirus.
A late-day rally pushed the index into positive territory for 2020, effectively erasing one of the most tumultuous periods in recent American history from the financial record. Stocks rose 1.2 percent, on the same day that economists said the United States fell into a recession in February.
Even though the economy has begun to reopen, it is hard to overstate how disastrous the past three months have been. Tens of millions of people are unemployed, corporate earnings have plummeted, and industries like tourism, retail and entertainment may never fully recover.
But in the stock market, it’s like the pandemic never happened.
“Investors seem to have decided that the past three months were just a bad dream that we’re waking up from,” said Scott Clemons, the chief investment strategist for private banking at Brown Brothers Harriman, an investment bank.
The actions of the federal government have helped. Early on, the Federal Reserve announced it would provide a backstop by using its emergency lending powers to buy assets — from municipal to corporate debt — with newly printed money. Also, it began snapping up government-backed bonds.
That had the effect of keeping bond prices up and yields low. Investors, looking for better returns, began putting their money into the stock market.



“It’s the only way that you can kind of explain what’s going on, is that people really do believe that there is no downside in equity ownership,” said James Montier, a member of the asset management team at Grantham, Mayo, Van Otterloo & Company, a Boston-based asset management company.
CLOSER LOOK
The pandemic has complicated the usual methods and models for compiling employment data.

California allows movie theaters to reopen on Friday, under certain conditions.



California theaters are especially important to the film business. Los Angeles and its suburbs make up the nation’s No. 1 moviegoing market by ticket sales.Credit...Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Movie theaters in California could reopen as soon as Friday if they limit auditorium capacity to 25 percent, according to guidelines released on Monday by the California Department of Public Health. County public health officials must still give their approval.
Many states have allowed theaters to reopen. But California theaters are especially important to the film business. Los Angeles and its suburbs make up the nation’s No. 1 moviegoing market by ticket sales. (The New York area, where no reopening date has been announced, is second.) The Bay Area is also a major market. To justify a national release — Christopher Nolan’s “Tenet,” for instance, is scheduled for July 17 — studios need theaters in most top markets to be operating.
In clearing the way for theaters to relight their marquees, California health officials asked for face masks to be worn for all patrons, except when eating or drinking, and for groups to be seated at least six feet apart in a “checkerboard” style. They also suggested that theaters provide ticket holders with designated arrival times so that they could enter “in staggered groups.”
Air travel in the U.S. is picking up, fueled by vacationers.







The largest U.S. airlines are preparing for a limited rebound next month as more Americans book vacations in places like Florida and national parks in the West.
After cratering in April as a result of the pandemic, the number of travelers and airline and airport employees filtering through the Transportation Security Administration’s airport checkpoints has steadily climbed in recent weeks. The low point arrived on April 14, when the agency screened fewer than 90,000 people, just 4 percent of those screened on the same date last year. On Sunday, the agency screened more than 440,000 people, about 17 percent of last year’s number and the best day since March.
Investors appear to have noticed those numbers, and airline stock prices have surged. American Airlines is up nearly 90 percent since Monday morning last week, United Airlines is more than 70 percent higher, and Delta Air Lines is up more than 45 percent.
Still, the airline industry’s reckoning is far from over.
Industry executives and analysts generally agree that it is likely to be several years before airlines fly as many people as they did before the pandemic. Airlines are still losing tens of millions of dollars every day. That number is shrinking, but the losses are expected to continue through the end of the year.
Generally, a flight needs to be about three-fourths full for an airline to turn a profit; most are far from it because airlines can’t or won’t fill up planes.
Despite the relatively small numbers of travelers, some are concerned the people moving around the country more, whether, via airplane or other modes of transportation, will help drive infection rates higher.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington released new, higher figures on Monday, estimating that 145,728 people in the country could die from coronavirus by August. That number is an increase of about 5,000 from its projection earlier in June and of about 10,000 from a projection made at the end of May.



Ali Mokdad, a professor of global health at the institute, said the reason for the higher numbers is because of increased mobility.
“We have been showing from our data that Americans are more likely to be mobile right now,” he said.
The increased mobility comes as a result of restrictions being loosened, Dr. Mokdad said, noting that it’s still a “little bit early to tell what will happen due to the protests.”
Instead, he pointed to states reopening and the anticipation around that, as well as Memorial Day.
“We have seen a spike in mobility around Memorial Day,” he said.
TRAVEL DURING THE PANDEMIC
After months of staying at home, Americans are heading to vacation destinations like Florida and national parks.

As its death toll soars, Brazil scrubs statistics from a government website.

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As the virus tore through Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro came under blistering criticism for sabotaging the isolation measures imposed by states, encouraging mass rallies by his supporters and lashing out about the soaring death toll, saying, “What do you want me to do?”
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Now that the outbreak in the country has gotten even worse — it has more confirmed infections than any country but the United States, and the highest daily death tolls in the world — Mr. Bolsonaro’s government has decided to stop reporting the cumulative toll of the virus altogether.
Brazil’s health ministry on Friday took down the website where it had been reporting virus statistics. And then, when it came back online on Saturday, the site omitted the historical data, leaving out how many people had already been infected or killed.
The Coronavirus Outbreak

Lawmakers and health experts quickly attacked Mr. Bolsonaro, condemning the government’s decision to withhold statistics and criticizing his administration’s practice of downplaying the danger of the virus.
Mr. Bolsonaro, who initially described the virus as a “measly flu,” says the challenge of the outbreak is dwarfed by the economic fallout of stay-at-home measures, and that the real danger is rising unemployment.
He has come under withering criticism for joining crowded protests; ordering the armed forces to produce hydroxychloroquine, an unproven medication for the virus; and fighting with his own health officials as the crisis intensified.

Read the full article on the furious backlash in Brazil.

Trump wants to restart large campaign rallies within weeks.
President Trump has instructed campaign aides to arrange for him to resume his political rallies in the coming weeks, people familiar with his plans said on Monday, asking them to figure out how to deliver the crowds he wants even though cases are rising throughout the country.
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Mr. Trump’s obsession with restarting packed events has put him at odds with health experts, including those in his own administration, who have urged caution. It has also created a conflict between him and Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina, a Democrat, who has so far resisted the president’s demands to relax social-distancing measures before the Republican National Convention, which was initially set to be held in Charlotte in August.
Campaign rallies became a topic of discussion last week, when Mr. Trump assembled key members of his re-election effort to discuss recent polling that showed him losing ground to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., his Democratic challenger.
A senior White House official said the president had been frustrated by his internal polling, and resuming campaign events were one way his team hoped that Mr. Trump could recapture momentum. The official said Mr. Trump’s campaign team was closely monitoring state reopenings to determine which potential venues were increasing seating capacity. The typical Trump rally venue holds at least 8,000 people.
“Americans are ready to get back to action, and so is President Trump,” Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, said in a statement on the development, which was first reported by Politico. “The great American comeback is real, and the rallies will be tremendous.”
Before the convention, Mr. Cooper wanted to require social distancing and face masks, both of which are recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mr. Trump, bristling that the terms of his own event were being dictated to him, wanted a full stadium with a previrus look and feel, or nothing at all.
Republican officials are now on the hunt for a new venue. Mr. Trump is scheduled to travel to Dallas on Thursday for a fund-raiser.
U.S. ROUNDUP
Meatpacking plants and prisons continue to drive outbreaks in U.S. hot spots.







Thirty-nine of the 40 largest known virus clusters in the United States are in food processing or correctional facilities, according to a New York Times database. As the number of new cases in the country has plateaued at about 20,000 each day, major clusters have continued to emerge in prisons, jails and meatpacking plants.
Around Austin, Minn., where cases have grown to 504 from 36 a month ago, at least 186 cases have been tied to a local pork processing facility. In Kings County, Calif., at least 918 people have been infected at three state prisons, accounting for more than half the county’s total cases. And in northern Utah, the site of an outbreak at a meat processing plant, case numbers have exploded over the last week.
In Dodge County, Wis., where there are 400 total cases, at least 245 people have tested positive at Waupun Correctional Institution. And in the county that includes Storm Lake, Iowa, case numbers have grown to 1,142 from 18 over the course of a month. At least 591 employees of a Tyson plant in that city have tested positive.
Here are other developments from around the United States:

• There are some hopeful signs in the data. In most of the Northeast, infection numbers continue to fall. Parts of theMidwest, including Illinois and Ohio, have seen new case reports trend steadily downward. And some of the counties with the most cases per capita — including Cass County, Ind., the site of a large meatpacking outbreak, and Trousdale County, Tenn., where more than 1,300 people at a prison became ill — have reported fewer than 10 new cases in June.
• A man who attended “multiple house gatherings” on the New Jersey shore infected at least a dozen people in Pennsylvania with the virus, health officials said. Officials in Bucks County, Pa., said in a statement on Saturday that of the 33 new cases in the county, 11 were tied to an individual who visited a New Jersey beach “during the past two weeks.” On Monday, an official said that a 12th infection had been linked to the man. “This is exactly why we can’t let our guard down now, even if it feels ‘safe’ to be at the beach,” said Dr. David Damsker, the director of the Bucks County Health Department. New Jersey’s governor said the state would allow public and private swimming pools to reopen on June 22.
• Florida’s last remaining closed beaches, in Miami-Dade County, will reopen on Wednesday, the mayor’s office announced. The beaches, which closed 81 days ago, were supposed to reopen on June 1 but did not because of a nightly curfew imposed after protests over the killing of George Floyd.
• Casinos along the Las Vegas Strip reopened their doors last week to a flood of visitors after a 78-day hiatus. But figuring out when and where people contract the virus and then quickly tracing their contacts poses a particular challenge in Las Vegas, where guests outnumbered residents by 20 to 1 last year.

Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count
A detailed county map shows the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, with tables of the number of cases by county.
In Poland, coal mines close after an outbreak.

At a coal mine in Katowice, Poland, in 2018.Credit...Kacper Pempel/Reuters

The Polish Health Ministry reported 1,151 new coronavirus cases over the weekend, a record for the country. More than half of those came from the Silesia region in southwest Poland, an area famous for its coal mines. The Zofiowka mine accounted for the largest source of outbreak over the past two days. Nearly 1,150 workers at the Zofiowka mine have been infected, out of a crew of 3,470, the mine said. The minister of state assets, Jacek Sasin, said at a news conference on Monday that 12 of 20 Silesian coal mines will close for three weeks.
The health minister, Lukasz Szumowski, a cardiologist and medical university professor, attributed the sudden rise of infections to the increased number of tests performed. He added that most people are displaying mild symptoms and that the majority of hospital beds and ventilators made ready for the epidemic remain unused.



Zbigniew Gaciong, a professor at the Medical University of Warsaw, said in a television interview that the rise in cases was not a concern because the number of deaths has remained stable. There have been about 26,000 cases of the virus in Poland, and at least 1,161 deaths.
On June 28, Poles will choose a new president, after the election was postponed from the beginning of May in the midst of the pandemic.
Travelers to Britain must now quarantine for two weeks upon arrival.





A 14-day quarantine period for all travelers arriving in Britaincame into force on Monday, to the anger of the country’s travel industry and amid doubts over the practicality of the new rules.
Under the system, those entering Britain by air, ferry or train will have to provide an address at which they will isolate for 14 days, with a fine of up to 1,000 pounds, or about $1,200, for violations.
During the early stages of the pandemic the British government rejected the idea of quarantine, but the home secretary, Priti Patel, argued that the rules are now needed to stop the risk of importing a second wave of infections.
However, the restrictions begin at a time when some other European nations are starting to relax theirs. And quarantine will apply to those arriving from countries with much lower infection rates — including people from New Zealand, which has declared itself virus-free.



Several groups of travelers are exempt, including truck drivers, medical workers, fruit pickers and anyone arriving from Ireland. But some critics doubt that the government has the resources to enforce the restrictions.
“I think people in the U.K. know that the quarantine is useless, it is a political stunt,” Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair told Sky News. Ryanair is one of three airlines that have sent a letter to the government disputing the legality of the plans.
“These measures are disproportionate and unfair on British citizens as well as international visitors arriving in the U.K.,” British Airways, easyJet, and Ryanair said in a statement.
Ministers are also under political pressure and the government says it is holding negotiations over the creation of “travel corridors” that might allow Britons to travel to and from continental Europe without the need for quarantine.

A new option for college essays: ‘How I Spent My Quarantine.’
The Common Application, the system used by more than 900 colleges in the United States, is giving high school students who are applying to college in the fall a chance to talk about how the virus has changed the course of their lives and education.
The application is known for its personal essay question, in which students are invited to write about their backgrounds, interests, successes and obstacles they have surmounted. Admissions officers say a strong essay can help tip the scales for admission.



The additional virus essay, which is optional, is for hardships caused by the pandemic, like a family member becoming sick or dying, schoolwork disrupted by poor internet service or a parent’s job loss because of the economic crisis.
The pandemic has shuttered schools, moved classes online and canceled extracurricular activities and graduation ceremonies for millions of high school students. Many standardized test dates were canceled, leaving students scrambling to sign up for scarce makeup exams.
Officials at the Common App, as it is known, said the question was adopted in response to demand from college admissions officers. They have also added a space for high school counselors to describe the effects of the pandemic on their schools.
Jenny Rickard, the chief executive of the Common App, said the new essay also allowed students to write about communal calamities like forest fires or hurricanes, and that the topic might be expanded to include the recent protests against police brutality.
“It’s already such an anxious time applying to college, and then you add a pandemic into the mix,” Ms. Rickard said. “We wanted to provide that space.”
A technological lifeline during a pandemic.
The pandemic has caused the way we communicate to evolve, and our relationship with technology is being pushed into new territory. Although states are slowly reopening, much of our professional and personal lives will continue to be lived almost entirely online for the foreseeable future."

 

[missy]

Surging Coronavirus Cases Push Latin America ‘to the Limit’ (Published 2020)

The U.S. caseload, already the world’s highest, is approaching two million. A book about the fall of France in 1940 has become a hit during the pandemic.

www.nytimes.com

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Seven million people have been infected worldwide, and new cases hit a high globally on Sunday, according to the W.H.O. Central banks are seeking new tools to offset the downturn.


A new report is expected to show how dire the situation has been for food banks in New York.
Here’s what you need to know:

• As the W.H.O. warns of new cases, developing nations brace for surges.
• Central bankers may experiment more as efforts to rescue the economy continue.
• On Twitter, Beijing tries to shape the global narrative about the virus and more.
• Food pantries in New York had to turn people away, a report says.
• The N.F.L. outlines a plan for training camp, but the timeline is unclear.
• Those We’ve Lost: Bradley Fields, a magician who favored warmth over flash.

‘The Pandemic Remains a Public Health Emergency,’ W.H.O. Says
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow.
The Covid-19 crisis has illustrated that even the most sophisticated health systems have struggled to cope with a pandemic. W.H.O. has grave concerns about the potential impact the virus could have as it starts to accelerate in countries with weaker health systems. Of course, the pandemic remains a public health emergency of international concern. We will continue working with countries and partners to enable essential travel needed for pandemic response, humanitarian relief and cargo operations, and for countries to gradually resume normal passenger travel.






0:44‘The Pandemic Remains a Public Health Emergency,’ W.H.O. Says
The World Health Organization extended its declaration of a global health emergency as the coronavirus pandemic continues to grow.CreditCredit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times


As the W.H.O. warns of new cases, developing nations brace for surges.
Officials in Europe, the United States and other wealthy areas are reopening their economies amid slowing infection rates. Yet the pandemic is worsening in many parts of the developing world, and the global infection peak may still be months away.
The coronavirus has already sickened more than seven million people worldwide and killed at least 405,400, according to a New York Times database. The World Health Organization has said that Sunday’s 136,000 new cases were a new single-day high, and that three-quarters of them came from just 10 countries, mostly in the Americas and South Asia.
Yet as some developing countries return to daily life in an effort to ease the virus’s brutal impact on the poor, they are creating infection risks.
South Africa, for example, whose caseload of nearly 51,000 is Africa’s highest, has started to reopen this week. But it has recorded more than half of its current cases in the past two weeks alone.



In East Africa, truck drivers have been designated essential workers but are testing positive at an alarming rate, prompting officials to start conducting mass testing at borders.
In Pakistan, where confirmed infections have surpassed 100,000, Prime Minister Imran Khan has said that he expects domestic cases to peak by the end of July or August.

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A further complication is that some nations are obscuring or withholding crucial health data from the public. President John Magufuli of Tanzania, whose government has not published data on coronavirus cases for weeks, declared his country “coronavirus free” over the weekend. And in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro’s government decided to stop reporting the cumulative toll of the virus altogether.
Here’s what else is happening around the world:

• The president of the United Nations General Assembly said on Monday that world leaders would not come to New York for their annual gathering in September, a first in the U.N.’s 75-year history.
• A W.H.O. scientist stirred confusion on Monday by saying that asymptomatic transmission was not a significant factor in the spread of the virus — as many public health experts had assumed — and that governments should focus more attention on controlling the spread among people with symptoms.
• The Hong Kong government is bailing out Cathay Pacific Airways by injecting nearly $4 billion and taking a direct stake in its operations.
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Coronavirus Map: Tracking the Global Outbreak
The virus has infected more than 6,600,000 people and has been detected in nearly every country.


Central bankers may experiment more as efforts to rescue the economy continue.



The Federal Reserve “crossed a lot of red lines that had not been crossed before,” its chair, Jerome H. Powell, said recently.Credit...Patrick Semansky/Associated Press
Faced with a crisis unlike any other in memory, central bankers have gone beyond what the monetary authorities did even in the darkest days of the 2008 global financial crisis.



Central bankers entered the current crisis with low interest rates, leaving them less room to goose growth using their tried-and-true tools. With limited ammunition to stoke growth, experimentation may prove even more crucial in the months and years ahead as the world embarks on what could be a long slog back to prosperity.

France, Germany the United States and many other countries have poured trillions of dollars into their economies through tax cuts, cheap credit and cash handouts. Monetary policy and fiscal policy can act as complements during a crisis to get economies back on track.

But appetite for further fiscal action is eroding in some places, including the United States. And the next stage — the recovery — could pose a fresh test for the world’s central banks, forcing them to get more creative as they try to keep pandemic aftershocks from permanently scarring growth potential.
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