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Inventory Market Information: Dwell Updates

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Post date March 3, 2021

Rishi Sunak, Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, speaking in the House of Commons Wednesday. Seated behind him is Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…-/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Britain’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced a wide range of measures on Wednesday to support the country’s emergence from the pandemic, including an extension of the government’s wage-support program, billions of pounds in business grants and aid for art institutions and sports clubs.

But Mr. Sunak also said corporate taxes would rise beginning in 2023 and he would freeze personal income tax allowances, a measure that will push more people into higher tax brackets.

A year into the job, Mr. Sunak is trying to use this budget to juggle a number of different goals. In the short term, he is aiming to support jobs as the vaccine rollout continues and the economy cautiously reopens. He announced extensions to emergency support programs that will last through the summer.

But he has been under pressure to signal how he will tackle the budget deficit after spending of more than 400 billion pounds (about $560 billion) over the past year. He has alos faced questions about how he will meet the government’s commitment to “level up” the economy to reduce regional inequality and revitalize the post-Brexit economy.

The pandemic had led to one of the largest and most sustained economic shocks Britain had seen, Mr. Sunak said.

Last year, gross domestic product shrank nearly 10 percent, the worst in three centuries. The independent Office for Budget Responsibility forecasts the British economy will grow 4 percent this year, less than predicted in November, but then increase 7.3 percent in 2022.

The measures announced on Wednesday include:

5 billion pounds ($7 billion) in grants to nearly 700,000 businesses such as shops, restaurants, hairdressers, hotels and gyms;
An extension to September of the furlough program that pays employees 80 percent of their wages for the hours they don’t work (businesses will have to contribute to the program starting in July);
Additional grants for self-employed workers;
£700 million for arts, culture and sports institutions;
An increase starting in 2023 in the corporate tax rate for companies with profits greater than £50,000, from the current rate of 19 percent, and topping out at 25 percent for companies with profits in excess of £250,000;
A “super deduction” on corporate taxes for business investment, which will allow companies to reduce their tax bill by 130 percent of the amount spent on investment.

Credit…Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Apollo Global Management announced Wednesday that it would acquire the crafts retailer Michaels in a deal that valued the company at $5 billion.

The acquisition is a bet that Michaels can continue to ride the wave of enthusiasm for crafting spurred by Americans stuck at home during the pandemic. The company has also invested in its digital business, starting both curbside and same-day delivery.

Shares of the retailer, which has more than 1,200 stores in North America and some 44,000 employees, have risen nearly 300 percent over the past year, giving it a market capitalization of around $2.3 billion.

The deal will bring Michaels back into the hands of private equity after seven years as a public company. The private equity firms Bain Capital and Blackstone acquired Michaels in 2006, taking it private in a deal worth more than $6 billion. The company made its way back into the public markets in 2014, at a market value of about $3.5 billion. Bain is still a large shareholder.

At least one other private equity firm had expressed interest in acquiring Michaels, according to two people familiar with the situation.

Credit…Joe Cavaretta/Associated Press

“Hey, I know this is like a crazy idea. But would you ever buy the Venetian?”

That’s a call that David Sambur, Apollo Global Management’s co-head of private equity, recounted receiving while walking in Central Park this fall.

The answer, ultimately, was yes.

On Wednesday, Las Vegas Sands, the world’s largest casino company, announced that it would sell the Venetian, long seen as one of its prized assets, to Apollo and Vici Properties for $6.25 billion. Apollo will operate the property and Vici will own the real estate.

Executives from Sands, which was founded by the billionaire gambling magnate and Republican megadonor Sheldon Adelson, who died in January, called the deal “bittersweet,” but said they will use the proceeds to invest in the group’s casinos in Macau and Singapore, which form the “backbone” of the company.

“The Venetian changed the face of future casino development and cemented Sheldon Adelson’s legacy as one of the most influential people in the history of the gaming and hospitality industry,” said Robert Goldstein, the chief executive of Sands. “As we announce the sale of The Venetian Resort, we pay tribute to Mr. Adelson’s legacy while starting a new chapter in this company’s history.”

For Apollo, the deal is a bet that leisure and business travel will return to pre-pandemic levels, or close enough to make the purchase pay off. It follows similar investments, like buying a stake in travel booking company Expedia early in the pandemic and extending a loan to Aeromexico in October after the Mexican airline filed for bankruptcy a few months before.

Other casino companies, like Caesars Entertainment, have been saying that leisure travel in Las Vegas is poised to recover quickly. Judging when business conventions will return is harder, Mr. Sambur said. Apollo’s research found that the conference business tends to track the stock market and corporate profits, both of which are strong right now.

“It’s a very audacious bet to make,” he said. “But all of the fundamentals are there if you look hard enough.”

Credit…Samuel Corum for The New York Times

Bridges in disrepair, underfunded drinking water systems, roads riddled with potholes. President Biden’s next ambitious goal is to fix the nation’s infrastructure, and a new report suggests he has his work cut out for him.

The American Society of Civil Engineers on Wednesday gave U.S. airports, roads, waterways and other systems a C–, reflecting its view that the nation’s infrastructure is in poor to mediocre shape and in dire need of an upgrade.

“A C–, as you might imagine, is not something to be particularly proud of,” said Thomas Smith, the executive director of the professional group. “There’s a great need for improvement.”

After pushing a $1.9 trillion pandemic relief measure, the Biden administration is expected to shift its focus to an infrastructure proposal of a similar magnitude. Improving national infrastructure enough to earn a B grade will require an investment of $2.6 trillion over the next decade, the engineering society said.

The group publishes these reports every four years. Despite the dire warnings, the new one bore some good news: The C– is a slight improvement on the D or D+ the group had awarded since 1998. A D reflects a system in poor condition, and a C means mediocre condition. A B is awarded to a system that is “adequate for now,” and an A to infrastructure in exceptional shape and ready for the future.

Since the last report card in 2017, grades improved incrementally in a handful of categories. Increased federal funding helped lift aviation, inland waterways and ports, for example. Drinking water and energy infrastructure also improved as utilities used resources better and became more resilient, though that might seem hard to believe after the dayslong blackouts in Texas recently.

Still, only two of 17 categories were graded better than a C: America’s ports earned a B– and rail a B. Transit scored worst, earning a D–. The nation’s dams, roads, levees and storm water systems got a D.

Mr. Smith said he was optimistic that lawmakers and the public would back major investments in infrastructure, especially as a barrage of costly disasters exacerbated by climate change have laid bare the general state of disrepair.

“There’s just every reason to be doing this, and I feel like we’re learning so many lessons,” he said.

Credit…How Hwee Young/EPA, via Shutterstock

Shady retirement home and investment schemes have cheated China’s rapidly aging population out of hundreds of millions of dollars, spurring more than a thousand criminal cases in recent years.

In a society that traditionally relied on family members to take care of elderly parents, fraudsters have been able to prey on fears that changing social norms and scarce resources will leave older people bereft, report Alexandra Stevenson and Cao Li for The New York Times.

By 2025, more than 300 million people in China will be 60 or older, according to the Chinese government. By 2050, that number is estimated to rise to half a billion.

China’s now-defunct one child policy and mass migration to big cities, though, mean that there are fewer people to care for this large and vulnerable group. The government provides care only to those with no family, no financial support and no ability to work.

In Yiyang, a retired handyman was so distraught after being swindled that he threw himself into a river last month and drowned, according to state media.

“We have a continuously aging population, and government-funded public services are not enough to look after this population,” said Dong Keyong, a professor at the School of Public Administration and Policy at Renmin University of China in Beijing.

The government has been relying on private sector companies to step in, offering subsidies and tax benefits as encouragement. But the cost of building a nursing home is high, and the rewards are often too low because most people cannot afford high-quality care.

The result has been that some builders have skirted laws that forbid them to accept money from residents before the retirement homes are built by creating side investment products that promise high interest rates and future membership benefits.

One company, Shanghai Da Ai Cheng, raised more than $150 million promising returns of up to 25 percent and a retirement home. Three years after the program started, the project collapsed and more than $81 million had disappeared.

Corporate executives around the country are wrestling with how to reopen offices as the pandemic starts to loosen its grip. Businesses — and many employees — are eager to return to some kind of normal work life, going back to the office, grabbing lunch at their favorite restaurant or stopping for drinks after work. But the world has changed, and many managers and workers alike acknowledge that there are advantages to remote work.

More than 55 percent of people surveyed by the consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers late last year said they would prefer to work remotely at least three days a week after the pandemic recedes, Julie Creswell, Gillian Friedman and Peter Eavis report for The New York Times. But their bosses appear to have somewhat different preferences — 68 percent of employers said they believed employees needed to be in the office at least three days a week to maintain corporate culture.

Salesforce, the software company based in San Francisco, recently earned praise from some people when it said that most of its employees would be able to come into the office one to three days a week — an approach the company described as “flex” — once the pandemic is no longer a public health threat. The company would not say whether it now needed less office space.

But other companies ultimately want all or nearly all employees back for most of the week — and are telling workers that their careers could suffer if they don’t return.

Rapid7, a cybersecurity company based in Boston, will expect workers to come back to the office at least three days a week when it determines that it is safe to do so.

“We really believe that our in-person workplaces foster our culture and our core values,” said Christina Luconi, the company’s chief people officer.

Employees who choose not to return to the office could face professional repercussions, she said.

U.S. Markets

The S&P 500 drifted lower on Wednesday as government bond yields climbed.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.48 percent. Bond yields have jumped sharply this year, reflecting optimism about economic growth but also raising concerns about inflation and that the Federal Reserve might pull back on its efforts to bolster the economy.
Shares of Michaels jumped more than 20 percent after Apollo Global said it would acquire the craft retailer in a $5 billion deal.

Europe and Asia

Trading in Europe was mixed, with the Stoxx Europe 600 down slightly and the FTSE 100 up 0.5 percent.
Automakers were among the big gainers in Europe, with Volkswagen rising 5.2 percent and Renault up 5.9 percent, after analysts gave both companies positive outlooks. Stellantis, the name for the merger of Fiat Chrysler and PSA, said it would aim for a profit margin of 5.5 percent to 7.5 percent, assuming no further significant lockdowns; shares rose 2.3 percent.
Asian markets ended the day higher, with the Shanghai composite in China up 2 percent higher and the Nikkei in Japan gaining 0.5 percent. In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200 gained 0.8 percent after the government announced the economy grew 3.1 percent in the final quarter of 2020 over the previous quarter; for all 2020, the economy shrank 1.1 percent.

Commodities

Oil prices were higher, with futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, up 1.9 percent, to $60.88 barrel, and the global benchmark, Brent crude, also up 1.9 percent to $63.88 a barrel.
The chairman of Rio Tinto, the giant Anglo-Australian mining company, said he would step down after the destruction of two ancient rock shelters in Australia that were sacred to Aboriginal groups. The company blew up the caves in May to get at iron ore underneath them, raising an outcry that caused the chief executive to step down in September.

Tags Live, market, News, Stock, Updates

Business

Reside Updates: Inventory Market, Goal Earnings Report and Volvo

Post author By
Post date March 2, 2021

Target reported that its fourth-quarter sales increased nearly 21 percent.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

Target’s sales continued to climb in the fourth quarter, surpassing analysts estimates, as the retailer capitalized on the shift in consumer shopping habits to buying online and picking up their purchases in stores.

The company said on Tuesday that its sales in the fourth quarter increased nearly 21 percent, higher than the 17 percent that Wall Street expected.

The strong fourth quarter, buoyed in part by stimulus spending by consumers, caps a year of staggering growth at Target. Target reported that its sales growth for 2020 of more than $15 billion “was greater than the company’s total sales growth over the prior 11 years.”

After years of investment in its online ordering and in-store pickup services, the company has emerged as a top winner during the pandemic, gaining billions in market share from less adept retailers.

Amid such strong results in 2020, the company was also being hailed for its decision to raise its starting wage to $15 an hour last year.

“Target tops a record year with a phenomenal fourth quarter,” Molly Kinder, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on Twitter. “After — but not despite — raising its starting wage to $15/hour.”

The company did not provide guidance for the coming year. Analysts noted that it would be difficult for Target to top its growth in 2020 as other retailers are likely to see their businesses bounce back in the next few months.

Credit…Rosem Morton for The New York Times

Instacart, the grocery delivery company, said on Tuesday that it has raised another $265 million in a funding that values it at $39 billion, more than doubling its valuation for the second time in a year.

Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which are existing investors in Instacart, participated in the latest financing for the eight-year-old start-up. Over the last year, Instacart has raised two rounds of funding totaling $525 million. It was previously valued at $17.7 billion.

The pandemic has supercharged Instacart’s growth. Customers eager to avoid shopping in stores are using the company’s app-based grocery ordering service. Laid-off workers have also turned to gig-economy jobs, like Instacart shopping, to make money. Instacart now has 500,000 shoppers who work on contract.

“This past year ushered in a new normal, changing the way people shop for groceries and goods,” Nick Giovanni, Instacart’s chief financial officer, said in a statement.

Instacart has weathered criticism of its business model as it has expanded. Earlier this year, layoffs of some of Instacart’s few unionized workers prompted accusations of union busting. Grocery stores have said the app’s fees of around 10 percent have made it difficult to make a profit.

The company delivers goods from 600 retailers across 45,000 stores in the United States and Canada. It has expanded beyond groceries to include office supplies, sporting goods, prescription drugs and pet supplies from chains including Staples, Dick’s Sporting Goods, CVS and Petco.

Instacart said it planned to use the new funding to hire more employees and to expand business lines including advertising for consumer packaged goods companies and enterprise software for retailers.

In a statement, Jeff Jordan, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, said his firm had been impressed by the way Instacart had shown resilience in the pandemic and “met the moment of 2020.”

The company has been named as a candidate to go public. In January, it appointed Mr. Giovanni, formerly of Goldman Sachs, as chief financial officer.

Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

Gary Gensler, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, fields questions regularly as a professor at M.I.T. But on Tuesday, his audience will consist of senators on the banking committee, who will vet his nomination by asking him about some of the same topics as his students — like cryptocurrency and financial market plumbing — in a more pointed fashion.

Republicans’ focus, a person familiar with the committee minority’s thinking told the DealBook newsletter, will be on Mr. Gensler’s record as the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under President Barack Obama. They believe he revealed a tendency to “aggressively” advocate regulation and stretch regulatory power to its limits. Their fear is that he will write rules to advance liberal policy priorities, citing climate change specifically.

Corporate climate disclosures will be another hot topic. The S.E.C. last week said it would look more closely at corporate climate statements, and Mr. Gensler’s opening statement calls for “strengthening transparency and accountability in our markets” in general.

Democrats say they welcome additional discussion on increased disclosure:

“I’ll be carefully watching Gary Gensler’s answers on issues like climate risk disclosure, corporate diversity, and investor protection,” said Tina Smith of Minnesota.
Bob Menendez of New Jersey intends to ask about increased disclosure of corporate political spending, a representative said. He wants companies to reveal more about their donations and seek shareholder approval for spending.
Chris Van Hollen of Maryland is curious about the rules and limits on the timing and disclosure of insider stock trades.

And then there is GameStop. The committee chairman, Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio, railed against Wall Street during the meme-stock frenzy, and that episode is sure to come up on Tuesday A representative for Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said that he intended to ask Mr. Gensler about payment for order flow.

Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming and the first senator to invest in Bitcoin, will focus on the nominee’s commitment to “financial regulations that foster innovation,” according to a representative. Mr. Gensler, who teaches blockchain courses at M.I.T. and is also a former Goldman banker, should be game. Alluding to his job at the intersection of finance and technology, the banker-turned-regulator-turned-academic cautiously acknowledged the promise of fintech in his statement and said rules must evolve with new tools.

The confirmation hearing for Rohit Chopra, nominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will also take place on Tuesday. Republicans are wary of Mr. Chopra, the person familiar with their thinking said; they view him as a protégé of Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts and a banking committee member, who created the C.F.P.B. and whose progressive economic policy positions conservatives starkly oppose.

Mr. Chopra is expected to revive the enforcement powers of the bureau which had waned under the Trump administration.

In a copy of his opening statement, Mr. Chopra said, “consumers continue to discover serious errors on their credit reports or feel forced to make payments to debt collectors on bills they already paid or never owed to begin with, including for medical treatment related to Covid-19.”

Credit…Audrey Mcavoy/Associated Press

U.S. markets

The S&P 500 was unchanged in early trading on Tuesday. On Monday, it gained 2.4 percent, the most since June. The Nasdaq and Dow Jones industrial average had jumped by the most since early November.
Traders are recovering from a volatile few days when a sell-off in government bonds rattled the equity market. On Monday, the rout eased but now bond yields are pushing higher again. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose 3 basis points, or 0.03 percentage point, to 1.45 percent on Tuesday.
Analysts at RBC Capital Markets said markets had been testing the central banks’ resolve to keep interest rates low globally and that policymakers would have to take action to drive this message home.
“However, we remain convinced that the structural upward pressure on yields remains,” they wrote in a note. “The reopening of the economies coupled with sizable fiscal spending programs and supply constraints will make it difficult for bond markets” to gain. Bond prices rise when their yields decline.
Shares in Zoom rose more than 6 percent in early trading after the video conferencing company said its revenue surged 326 percent in its past fiscal year to $2.65 billion.

Europe

Stock indexes across Europe were mostly higher. The Stoxx 600 Europe gained 0.5 percent.
The annual inflation rate for the eurozone was 0.9 percent in February, the same as the previous month and in line with economists’ expectations, data published Tuesday showed. “These numbers represent the calm before the storm,” Claus Vistesen, an economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a note. In a few months, he wrote, inflation will jump to reflect the change in energy prices over the past year.

Asia

Most stock indexes in Asia dropped after China’s top financial regulator said that the high leverage in the financial system needed to be reduced. Guo Shuqing said he was “very worried” about bubbles in China’s property sector and that bubbles in U.S. and European markets could burst.

Credit…Pierre Albouy/Reuters

Volvo Cars said it would convert its entire lineup to battery power by 2030, phasing out internal combustion engine vehicles faster than other automakers like General Motors.

Volvo, based in Sweden and owned by Geely Holding of China, has been ahead of larger rivals in converting to electric power. In 2019, all the models it sold were either hybrids or ran solely on batteries.

By 2030, Volvo will “phase out any car in its global portfolio with an internal combustion engine, including hybrids,” the company said in a statement on Tuesday.

Hybrids have better fuel economy than conventional vehicles, but they may not be much better for the climate or for urban air quality if drivers do not use the electric capabilities.

G.M.’s promise to sell only emission-free vehicles, which it made in January, does not take effect until 2035.

Volvo acknowledged that it was responding in part to pressure from governments, many of which have announced bans on internal combustion engines in coming years.

The company said its decision was based “on the expectation that legislation as well as a rapid expansion of accessible high quality charging infrastructure will accelerate consumer acceptance of fully electric cars.”

In another break from industry practice, Volvo’s electric models will be sold exclusively online, bypassing dealers.

“Instead of investing in a shrinking business, we choose to invest in the future — electric and online,” Hakan Samuelsson, the chief executive of Volvo, said in a statement.

Credit…Wes Frazer for The New York Times

A unionizing campaign that had deliberately stayed under the radar for months has in recent days blossomed into a star-studded showdown to influence the workers.

On one side is the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and its many pro-labor allies in the worlds of politics, sports and Hollywood. On the other is one of the world’s dominant companies, an e-commerce behemoth that has warded off previous unionizing efforts at its U.S. facilities over its more than 25-year history: Amazon.

The attention is turning this union vote into a referendum not just on working conditions at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., which employs 5,800, but on the plight of low-wage employees and workers of color in particular, Michael Corkery and Karen Weise report for The New York Times. Many of the employees in the Alabama warehouse are Black, a fact that the union organizers have highlighted in their campaign seeking to link the vote to the struggle for civil rights in the South.

The warehouse workers began voting by mail on Feb. 8 and the ballots are due at the end of this month. A union can form if a majority of the votes cast favor such a move.

Amazon’s countercampaign, both inside the warehouse and on a national stage, has zeroed in on pure economics: that its starting wage is $15 an hour, plus benefits. That is far more than its competitors in Alabama, where the minimum wage is $7.25 an hour.

“It’s important that employees understand the facts of joining a union,” Heather Knox, an Amazon spokeswoman, said in a statement.

The situation is getting testy, with union leaders accusing Amazon of a series of “union-busting” tactics.

The company has posted signs across the warehouse, next to hand sanitizing stations and even in bathroom stalls. It sends regular texts and emails, pointing out the problems with unions. It posts photos of workers in Bessemer on the internal company app saying how much they love Amazon.

Credit…Rajah Bose for The New York Times

The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other new Covid-screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.

But so far the fever scanners, which look like airport metal detectors and detect skin temperature, have flagged fewer than 10 people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus, Natasha Singer and Kellen Browning report for The New York Times. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology had been effective because they have not tracked those students to see if they went on to get tested for the virus.

Administrators at Idaho and other universities said their schools were using the new tech, along with policies like social distancing, as part of larger campus efforts to hinder the virus. Some said it was important for their schools to deploy the screening tools even if they were only moderately useful. At the very least, they said, using services like daily symptom-checking apps may reassure students and remind them to be vigilant about other measures, like mask wearing.

Some public health experts said it was understandable that colleges had not methodically assessed the technology’s effectiveness against the coronavirus. After all, they said, schools are unaccustomed to frequently screening their entire campus populations for new infectious diseases.

Even so, some experts said they were troubled that universities lacked important information that might help them make more evidence-based decisions on health screening.

“It’s a massive data vacuum,” said Saskia Popescu, an infectious-disease epidemiologist who is an assistant professor at George Mason University. “The moral of the story is you can’t just invest in this tech without having a validation process behind it.”

Tags earnings, Live, market, report, Stock, target, Updates, Volvo

World News

Covid-19: Reside Updates on Brazil Variant, Instances and Vaccine

Post author By
Post date March 2, 2021

A funeral on Monday in Manaus, Brazil, for a person who died of Covid-19. A variant from Brazil, P.1, is a new worry for scientists.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Raphael Alves/EPA, via Shutterstock

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news.

B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can dodge antibodies, blunting the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Scientists have also had their eye on a third concerning variant, which arose in Brazil, called P.1. Research has been slower on P.1 since its discovery in late December, leaving scientists unsure how much to worry.

“I’ve been holding my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, an epidemiologist at the Broad Institute.

Now, three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It most likely arose there in November and then fueled a surge in coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city partly because of an increased contagiousness, the research found.

But it also gained the ability to infect some people who had immunity from previous bouts of Covid-19. And laboratory experiments suggest that P.1 could weaken the protective effect of a Chinese vaccine now in use in Brazil.

The studies have yet to be published in scientific journals. Their authors caution that findings on cells in laboratories do not always translate to the real world and that they’ve only begun to understand P.1’s behavior.

“The findings apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other places,” said Nuno Faria, a virologist at Imperial College London who helped lead much of the new research.

But even with the mysteries that remain around P.1, experts say that it is a variant to take seriously. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

To reduce the risks of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Dr. Faria said it was important to double down on every measure we have to slow the spread of the coronavirus. Masks and social distancing can work against P.1. And vaccination can help drive down its transmission and protect those who do get infected from severe disease.

“The ultimate message is that you need to step up all the vaccination efforts as soon as possible,” he said. “You need to be one step ahead of the virus.”

United States ›	United StatesOn March 1	14-day change
New cases	56,672	–21%
New deaths	1,425	–17%

World ›	WorldOn March 1	14-day change
New cases	293,587	+2%
New deaths	6,610	–21%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Juan Arredondo for The New York Times

In most parts of the United States, getting a coronavirus vaccine can feel like trying to win the lottery. People scour the internet for appointments under complex eligibility standards that vary from state to state, and even county to county.

In Indiana and Kentucky, anyone over 60 can get vaccinated, but you have to be 65 or 70 almost everywhere else. About 18 states are offering shots to grocery workers, and 32 are vaccinating teachers.

Then there is Gila County, Ariz., where any resident over 18 can walk into a clinic without an appointment and get a vaccine.

“The whole process is incredibly easy,” said Frank Struck, 24, an electrician and maintenance worker who got inoculated at a hospital in Globe, a town in the county, about 90 miles east of Phoenix. “No bureaucracy, no crazy lines — you just go in, get the shot and come out with peace of mind.”

Gila County started off with a set of qualifying standards as well. But it has been so successful at vaccinating its residents that it is now one of the first places in the United States to open eligibility to the general population.

During a pandemic that has claimed the lives of at least 209 county residents, many people in the county of 54,000 people have welcomed the broader availability of the vaccines, a boon that follows a harrowing surge in hospitalizations around the start of the year. The expanded vaccination campaign has coincided over the past two weeks with a 52 percent plunge in new cases.

Health officials and elected leaders warn that big challenges persist in Gila County, in part because, in a county where anybody can get the vaccine, not everybody wants it.

About 28 percent of county residents have received at least one dose so far, compared with the nationwide level of 14 percent, according to local health officials. Rhonda Mason, the chief nursing officer at the hospital in Globe, said the challenge ahead was to overcome misinformation and skepticism.

Credit…Frederic J. Brown/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Tens of thousands of students walked into classrooms in Chicago public schools on Monday for the first time in nearly a year. Restaurants in Massachusetts were allowed to operate without capacity limits, and venues like roller skating rinks and movie theaters in most of the state opened with fewer restrictions. And South Carolina erased its limits on large gatherings.

Across the country, the first day of March brought a wave of reopenings and liftings of pandemic restrictions, signs that more Americans were tentatively emerging from months of isolation, even if not everyone agrees that the time is ripe.

There are plenty of reasons for optimism: Vaccinations have increased significantly in recent weeks, and daily reports of new coronavirus cases have fallen across the United States from their January peaks.

In Kentucky, all but a handful of school districts are now offering in-person classes, while the state races to vaccinate teachers as quickly as possible. Gov. Andy Beshear told reporters last week that the state’s falling infection statistics showed that immunizations were beginning to make an impact.

“It means vaccinations work,” he said. “We’re already seeing it. We’re seeing it in these numbers. It’s a really positive sign.”

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, President Biden’s chief medical adviser for Covid-19, said at a news briefing on Monday that for small groups of people who have all been fully vaccinated, there was a low risk in gathering together at home. Activities beyond that, he said, would depend on data, modeling and “good clinical common sense,” adding that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention would soon have guidance for what vaccinated people could safely do.

The positive signs come with caveats. Though the national statistics have improved drastically since January, they have plateaued in the last week or so, and the United States is still reporting more than 65,000 new cases a day on average — comparable to the peak of last summer’s surge, according to a New York Times database. The country is still averaging about 2,000 deaths per day, though deaths are a lagging indicator because it can take weeks for patients to die.

More contagious variants of the virus are circulating in the country, with the potential to push case counts upward again. Testing has fallen 30 percent in recent weeks, leaving experts worried about how quickly new outbreaks will be known. And millions of Americans are still waiting to be vaccinated.

Given all that, some experts worry that the reopenings are coming a bit too soon.

“We’re, hopefully, in between what I hope will be the last big wave, and the beginning of the period where I hope Covid will become very uncommon,” said Robert Horsburgh, an epidemiologist at the Boston University School of Public Health. “But we don’t know that. I’ve been advocating for us to just hang tight for four to six more weeks.”

The director of the C.D.C., Dr. Rochelle Walensky, said at the briefing on Monday that she was “really worried” about the rollbacks of restrictions in some states. She cautioned that with the decline in cases “stalling” and with variants spreading, “we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained.”

And the plateauing case levels “must be taken extremely seriously,” Dr. Walensky warned at a briefing last week. She added: “I know people are tired; they want to get back to life, to normal. But we’re not there yet.”

After some counties in Washington State allowed movie theaters to reopen, Nick Butcher, 36, made up for lost time by attending screenings of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy for three straight nights. He bought some M&Ms at the concession stand, sat distanced from others in the audience, and said he felt as though things were almost back to normal.

“I’m actually getting optimistic, over all,” said Mr. Butcher, a software engineer at Microsoft who recently recovered from a case of Covid-19, as did several relatives. “This week is one of the first times I’ve gone into my office almost since the pandemic started.”

Credit…Rajah Bose for The New York Times

Before the University of Idaho welcomed students back to campus last fall, it spent $90,000 installing temperature-scanning stations, which look like airport metal detectors, in front of its dining and athletic facilities in Moscow, Idaho. When the system detects a student walking through with an unusually high temperature, the student is asked to leave and get tested for the coronavirus.

But so far, the fever scanners, which register skin temperature, have flagged fewer than 10 people out of the 9,000 students living on or near campus. Even then, university administrators could not say whether the technology had been effective because they have not tracked students detected with fevers to see if they went on to get tested.

The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.

But the struggle at many colleges to keep the virus at bay has raised questions about the usefulness of the technologies. According to a New York Times database, there have been more than 530,000 virus cases on campuses since the start of the pandemic.

One problem is that temperature scanners and symptom-checking apps cannot catch the estimated 40 percent of people with the coronavirus who do not have symptoms but are still infectious. Temperature scanners can also be wildly inaccurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cautioned that such symptom-based screening has only “limited effectiveness.”

The schools have a hard time saying whether — or how well — the devices have worked. Many universities and colleges are not rigorously studying effectiveness.

More than 100 schools are using a free symptom-checking app, CampusClear, that can permit students to enter campus buildings. Others are asking students to wear symptom-monitoring devices that can continuously track vital signs like skin temperature.

Administrators at Idaho and other universities said their schools were using the technology, along with policies like social distancing, as part of larger campus efforts to hinder the virus. Some said it was important for their schools to deploy the screening tools even if they were only moderately useful.

At the very least, they said, using services like daily symptom-checking apps may reassure students and remind them to be vigilant about other measures, like mask wearing.

Credit…Karla Ortiz

The books that Americans cooked from during 2020 will stand as cultural artifacts of the year when a virus forced an entire nation into the kitchen.

The pandemic has been good to cookbooks. Overall sales jumped 17 percent from 2019, according to figures from NPD BookScan, which tracks about 85 percent of book sales in the United States.

Some of the smash hits were predictable. The world domination of Joanna Gaines, the queen of shiplap, continued. The second volume of her hugely popular “Magnolia Table” cookbook franchise sailed to the top of the New York Times list of the best-selling cookbooks in 2020. Ina Garten, the cooking doyenne from the Hamptons, landed the second spot with “Modern Comfort Food,” followed by “The Happy in a Hurry Cookbook,” by the “Fox & Friends” host Steve Doocy and his wife, Kathy.

But the stir-crazy year upended the way people cook and think about food in fundamental ways.

One of the year’s 10 best-selling cookbooks on a list complied by BookScan offered 600 air-fryer recipes, owing as much to the appliance’s ability to crisp up takeout French fries as it does to its popularity with the Trader Joe’s set, who made it through the year by heating up vegetarian egg rolls and mac-and-cheese bites. It sold more than 135,000 copies.

By contrast, 30,000 copies may not sound like much, but those sales figures were big for “Cool Beans” by Joe Yonan, a treatise whose own editor predicted “would never set the world on fire.”

Everyday cooks went in search of new cuisines and projects to break up the routine. Practiced cooks who might have spent a Saturday afternoon before the pandemic hand-rolling pasta sought recipes that would help keep weeknight cooking from becoming a grind.

Plenty of people simply needed help getting any meal on the table, which drove the popularity of general cookbooks. That category was the largest of cookbooks bought in 2020, according to BookScan. Sales showed a 127 percent increase over 2019.

And underscoring the great American food dichotomy, both dessert and diet books sold well.

Credit…Scott Olson/Getty Images

Scientists and doctors who study infectious disease in children largely agreed, in a recent New York Times survey about school openings, that elementary school students should be able to attend in-person school now. With safety measures like masking and opening windows, the benefits outweigh the risks, the majority of the 175 respondents said.

They gave The Times comments on key topics, including the risks to children of being out of school; the risks to teachers of being in school; whether vaccines are necessary before opening schools; how to achieve distance in crowded classrooms; what kind of ventilation is needed; and whether their own children’s school districts got it right.

In addition to their daily work on Covid-19, most of the experts had school-aged children themselves, half of whom were attending in-person school.

They also discussed whether the new variants could change even the best-laid school opening plans. “There will be a lot of unknowns with novel variants,” said Pia MacDonald, an infectious disease epidemiologist at RTI International, a research group. “We need to plan to expect them and to develop strategies to manage school with these new threats.”

Most of the respondents work in academic research, and about a quarter work as health care providers. We asked them what their expertise taught them that they felt others needed to understand.

Over all, they said that data suggests that with precautions, particularly masks, the risk of in-school transmission is low for both children and adults.

Credit…Joe Cavaretta/South Florida Sun-Sentinel, via Associated Press

New York City added workers in the food service and hotel industries to the list of people eligible for coronavirus vaccination on Monday, the same day the governors of Florida and Ohio announced expansions for eligibility in their states.

The expansions come as the supply of vaccines being distributed nationally is ramping up, and after a third vaccine, a single-shot dose from Johnson & Johnson, was authorized for emergency use by the Food and Drug Administration over the weekend. The pace of U.S. vaccinations is again accelerating, up to about 1.82 million doses per day on average, according to a New York Times database, above last month’s peak before snowstorms disrupted distribution.

In New York City, people who work in regional food banks, food pantries and “permitted home-delivered” meal programs became eligible on Monday to receive a vaccine. Hotel workers who have direct contact with guests also became eligible.

The governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, said on Monday that people 50 and older who work in K-12 schools, law enforcement or firefighting would become eligible on Wednesday. Florida was one of the first states that decided to vaccinate anyone 65 and older, even before most essential workers, which led to long lines and confusion.

Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said on Monday that the state would receive more than 448,000 doses this week, including more than 96,000 doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine. He said that “in response to this significant increase in the amount of vaccine coming into Ohio,” a new group of people would be eligible on Thursday to get a shot.

That group includes people with Type 1 diabetes, pregnant women and certain workers in child care and funeral services, as well as law enforcement and corrections officers.

To stay ahead of more contagious and possibly more deadly virus variants, states have been racing to ramp up vaccinations and expand eligibility. But they have often done so before the supply could increase quickly enough, creating shortages and making it harder for people to get vaccination appointments.

Credit…Tony Dejak/Associated Press

A Frontier Airlines flight from Miami to La Guardia Airport in New York was canceled on Sunday night after a large group of passengers, including several adults, refused to wear masks, the airline said.

By Monday morning, the airline was facing accusations of anti-Semitism for its treatment of the passengers, who are Hasidic Jews, as well as demands for an investigation from the Anti-Defamation League of New York and other groups. Frontier steadfastly held to its position that the passengers had refused to comply with federal rules requiring them to wear masks.

Several phone videos that have surfaced do not show the confrontation that took place between the passengers and the Frontier crew members, only the aftermath. The video footage from inside the aircraft appeared to show members of the group wearing masks. Some passengers said that the episode escalated because just one member of the group, a 15-month-old child, was not wearing one.

Videos of the passengers exiting the plane amid chaos, captured by other people on the flight, were posted on Twitter by the Orthodox Jewish Public Affairs Council. In one video, a passenger says, “This is an anti-Semitic act.”

Another video showed a couple holding a maskless baby in a car seat, as children could be heard crying and a woman explained that the young children in their group, sitting in the back of the plane, had taken off their masks to eat.

A Frontier Airlines spokeswoman said in a statement that “a large group of passengers repeatedly refused to comply with the U.S. government’s federal mask mandate.”

Tags Brazil, cases, Covid19, Live, Updates, Vaccine, Variant

Business

Shares Rally After Rout in Bonds Subsides: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date March 1, 2021

Senator Elizabeth Warren plans to introduce legislation Monday that would apply a 2 percent tax to individual net worth above $50 million, and an additional 1 percent surcharge above $1 billion.

Here’s what you need to know:

Stocks on Wall Street rallied in early trading on Monday, following global markets higher as a rout in government bonds subsided.

The S&P 500 rose 1.5 percent while the Stoxx Europe 600 index was up by about the same amount. Over the weekend, U.S. federal regulators authorized the one-shot Johnson & Johnson Covid-19 vaccine, adding to the positive market sentiment.

The Senate this week will begin work on a $1.9 trillion relief package passed by the House on Saturday. Democrats in the Senate, which is evenly split, face political and procedural challenges. Lawmakers are aiming to send the bill to President Biden for enactment by March 14, when unemployment benefits will begin to expire for some jobless workers.

The 10-year yield on U.S. Treasury notes was at 1.43 percent, down from as high as 1.61 percent on Thursday. Globally, long-dated bond yields fell from Australia to Britain on Monday. Last week, rising yields and higher inflation expectations led some traders to question when central banks would have to pull back on their easy-money policies. And the Bank of England’s chief economist said central bankers needed to avoid being complacent about how difficult it might be to tame inflation.

The prospect of tighter monetary policy knocked stock indexes down from their recent highs. Last week, the S&P 500 fell nearly 2.5 percent while the Nasdaq fell nearly 5 percent as technology stocks lost value.

On Monday, the Nasdaq rose about 1.7 percent. “We do not expect the tech sell-off to extend much further, and continue to see value in the sector for longer-term investors,” strategists at UBS wrote in a note.

Elsewhere in markets

Homebuilders such as Persimmon, Barratt Developments and Taylor Wimpey were the biggest gainers in the FTSE 100 index ahead of the British government’s budget presentation on Wednesday, when the chancellor is expected to announce a new mortgage guarantee program to help people buy houses with small deposits.
Johnson & Johnson climbed about 1.5 percent. Over the weekend, regulators in the U.S. approved the company’s coronavirus vaccine for emergency use, making it the third vaccine to be authorized in the country.
Boeing rose 4 percent after United Airlines said it was adding 25 planes to its order for the 737 Max jet, bringing its total to 180 in the coming years, and that it had sped up the delivery timeline as it seeks to position itself for the expected recovery in travel. United also rose 4 percent.

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, plans to introduce legislation on Monday that would tax the net worth of the wealthiest people in America, a proposal aimed at persuading President Biden and other Democrats to fund sweeping new federal spending programs by taxing the richest Americans.

Ms. Warren’s wealth tax would apply a 2 percent tax to individual net worth — including the value of stocks, houses, boats and anything else a person owns, after subtracting out any debts — above $50 million. It would add an additional 1 percent surcharge for net worth above $1 billion.

The proposal, which mirrors the plan Ms. Warren unveiled while seeking the 2020 presidential nomination, is not among the top revenue-raisers that Democratic leaders are considering to help offset Mr. Biden’s campaign proposals to spend trillions of dollars on infrastructure, education, child care, clean energy deployment, health care and other domestic initiatives. Unlike Ms. Warren, Mr. Biden pointedly did not endorse a wealth tax in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

But Ms. Warren is pushing colleagues to pursue such a plan, which has gained popularity with the public as the richest Americans reap huge gains while 10 million Americans remain out of work as a result of the pandemic.

Polls have consistently shown Ms. Warren’s proposal winning the support of more than three in five Americans, including a majority of Republican voters.

“A wealth tax is popular among voters on both sides for good reason: because they understand the system is rigged to benefit the wealthy and large corporations,” Ms. Warren said. “As Congress develops additional plans to help our economy, the wealth tax should be at the top of the list to help pay for these plans because of the huge amounts of revenue it would generate.”

She said she was confident that “lawmakers will catch up to the overwhelming majority of Americans who are demanding more fairness, more change, and who believe it’s time for a wealth tax.”

Mr. Biden did not propose any tax increases to offset the $1.9 trillion economic aid package that he hopes to sign later this month. Mr. Biden has said he will pay for long-term spending — as opposed to a temporary economic jolt — with tax increases on high earners and corporations.

Business groups and Republicans have already begun to raise concerns about Mr. Biden’s tax plans. Those same groups are not fans of Ms. Warren’s plan, which was a centerpiece of her 2020 Democratic presidential campaign.

Critics say the tax would be difficult for the federal government to calculate and enforce, that it would discourage investment and that it could be ruled unconstitutional by courts. Ms. Warren has amassed letters of support from constitutional scholars who say the plan would pass muster.

Berkshire Hathaway released its latest annual results on Saturday, and the accompanying letter to investors from Warren Buffett, the conglomerate’s chairman and chief executive, revealed a clear theme: The investor known as the Oracle of Omaha isn’t taking as many risks — or big swings at deal-making — as he used to, according to the DealBook newsletter.

Berkshire is spending more of its $138 billion in cash on smaller investments, rather than deploying it on the huge acquisitions that he famously made in the past. Berkshire bought back nearly $25 billion of its own shares last year, a record for a company that until recently was reluctant to spend its cash this way.

In his letter to investors, Mr. Buffett sang the praises of buybacks — at Berkshire and at the companies it invests in — writing, “As a sultry Mae West assured us: ‘Too much of a good thing can be … wonderful.’”

When it came to deal-making, Mr. Buffett admitted a big mistake in his last major corporate takeover. He wrote that the $37 billion he paid for Precision Castparts, a maker of airplane parts, was too much. (The 2016 transaction resulted in a $10 billion write-down last year.) “No one misled me in any way,” he wrote. “I was simply too optimistic.”

Berkshire’s biggest bets today include a $120 billion stake in Apple and majority stakes in Burlington Northern railroad and Berkshire Hathaway Energy. That relative conservatism comes as Berkshire’s stock has underperformed the S&P 500 in recent years.

Credit…Brian Snyder/Reuters

Lael Brainard, a governor on the Federal Reserve’s Washington-based board, said that the coronavirus pandemic made clear that the global financial system has some weak spots, and offered suggestions for fixing some of the top problems.

Ms. Brainard pointed out that when spooked investors dashed for cash last March, it caused strains in both short-term markets and the market for government debt, and it took big interventions from the Fed to stem the meltdown.

“A number of common-sense reforms are needed to address the unresolved structural vulnerabilities” in key markets, Ms. Brainard said, speaking from prepared remarks at a webcast event.

Some money market mutual funds, which companies and ordinary investors use to earn more interest than they would if they kept their cash in a savings account, saw massive outflows last year and required a Fed rescue — the second time money funds have needed an emergency intervention in a dozen years. Ms. Brainard suggested that solutions like swing pricing, which penalizes people who pull their cash out during times of trouble, are worth considering.

While banks held up pretty well amid the pandemic meltdown, Ms. Brainard said that strength was owed to post-financial crisis reforms that required big banks to hold shock-absorbing buffers. The Fed’s rescues also helped, she noted.

“Bank resilience benefited from the emergency interventions that calmed short-term funding markets, and from the range of emergency facilities that helped support credit flows to businesses and households,” she said, noting that bank capital fell at the onset of the crisis before rebounding later in the year.

Ms. Brainard’s tone seemed to contrast with that of her colleague, Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Randal K. Quarles. Mr. Quarles suggested during a webinar last week that banks’ strong performance signals that efforts to limit their payouts to conserve capital during times of stress — such as the ones the Fed employed last year — should be rare.

But when it comes to the need for a re-examination of what happened in money market mutual funds, the two are more aligned.

“The March 2020 market turmoil highlighted some structural vulnerabilities” in the funds, Mr. Quarles said in a letter last week, written in his capacity as chair of the global Financial Stability Board. Mr. Quarles said the board will provide reform recommendations in July and a final report in October.

Credit…Felix Schmitt for The New York Times

Heidelberg, Germany, is at the forefront of a movement: the push to get rid of cars entirely.

Heidelberg, a city of 160,000 people on the Neckar River, is one of only six cities in Europe considered “innovators” by C40 Cities, an organization that promotes climate-friendly urban policies and whose chairman is Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York. (The others are Oslo, Copenhagen, Venice, and Amsterdam and Rotterdam in the Netherlands.)

Eckart Würzner, Heidelberg’s mayor, is on a mission to make his city emission free, Jack Ewing reports for The New York Times. And he’s not a fan of electric vehicles — he wants to reduce dependence on cars, no matter where they get their juice.

Heidelberg is buying a fleet of hydrogen-powered buses and designing neighborhoods to discourage all vehicles and encourage walking. It is building a network of bicycle “superhighways” to the suburbs and bridges that would allow cyclists to bypass congested areas or cross the Neckar without having to compete for road space with motor vehicles. Residents who give up their cars get to ride public transportation free for a year.

“If you need a car, use car sharing,” Mr. Würzner said in an interview.

Battery-powered vehicles don’t pollute the air, but they take up just as much space as gasoline models. Eckart Würzner, Heidelberg’s mayor, complains that Heidelberg still suffers rush-hour traffic jams, even though only about 20 percent of residents get around by car.

“Commuters are the main problem we haven’t solved yet,” Mr. Würzner said. Traffic was heavy on a recent weekday, pandemic notwithstanding.

Credit…Ting Shen for The New York Times

A police reform bill in Massachusetts has managed to strike a balance on regulating facial recognition, allowing law enforcement to harness the benefits of the tool while building in protections that might prevent the false arrests that have happened before, Kashmir Hill reports for The New York Times.

The bill, which goes into effect in July, creates new guardrails: Police first must get a judge’s permission before running a face recognition search, and then have someone from the state police, the F.B.I. or the Registry of Motor Vehicles perform the search. A local officer can’t just download a facial recognition app and do a search.

The law also creates a commission to study facial recognition policies and make recommendations, such as whether a criminal defendant should be told that they were identified using the technology.

Lawmakers, civil liberties advocates and police chiefs have debated whether and how to use the technology because of concerns about both privacy and accuracy. But figuring out how to regulate it is tricky. So far, that has generally meant an all-or-nothing approach.

City councils in Oakland, Calif., Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Minneapolis and elsewhere have banned police use of the technology, largely because of bias in how it works. Studies in recent years by MIT researchers and the federal government found that many facial recognition algorithms are most accurate for white men, but less so for everyone else.

Credit…Simon Newman/Reuters

SoftBank said on Friday that it had settled its legal dispute with Adam Neumann, a WeWork co-founder, opening the way for the co-working company to go public just 16 months after SoftBank rescued it from collapse.

SoftBank had offered to buy $3 billion of stock from WeWork shareholders, including Mr. Neumann, who stepped down as C.E.O. during the company’s disastrous attempt at listing in 2019. In April, as the coronavirus was emptying WeWork offices, SoftBank said that it wouldn’t go ahead with the purchase, prompting Mr. Neumann to sue.

As part of the agreement, SoftBank is now spending only $1.5 billion on the stock, according to two people with knowledge of the settlement. But the lower bill is because SoftBank is cutting the number of shares it will buy in half; that means Mr. Neumann will get $480 million instead of up to $960 million. (SoftBank has invested well over $10 billion in WeWork, making it the company’s largest shareholder and allowing it to operate despite losses.)

According to these people, SoftBank also pledged to pay $50 million for Mr. Neumann’s legal fees, to extend a $430 million loan it made to him by five years and to pay the last $50 million of a $185 million consulting fee it owed him.

Settling the dispute removes a big obstacle to taking WeWork public. SoftBank has been in talks to merge with BowX Acquisition, a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, run by Vivek Ranadivé, the founder of Tibco Software and owner of the N.B.A.’s Sacramento Kings.

Such a deal, which would give WeWork a public listing, raises some crucial questions.

SoftBank owns 70 percent of WeWork’s shares but has direct control of just under half of shareholder votes. Would those numbers change after an offering? Who does control WeWork?

Would investors balk at WeWork’s financial performance, again? It’s not clear how the company has performed recently; it last publicly disclosed a full set of financials some 18 months ago. A glut of office space is coming onto the market, which might be more attractive to companies than taking WeWork space. And individuals may be less likely to use a co-working space now that they’ve gotten used to working from home.

Tags Bonds, Live, rally, Rout, Stocks, Subsides, Updates

Business

Shares Rise because the Bond Market Steadies: Stay Updates

Post author By
Post date February 26, 2021

Presiden Biden’s plan to fight the coronavirus includes some of the country’s largest corporate lobbying groups as well as some big-name companies.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Biden has compared the fight against the coronavirus to wartime mobilization, but with the exception of pharmaceutical companies, the private sector has done relatively little in the effort. It has not made a major push to persuade Americans to remain socially distant, wear masks or get vaccinated as soon as possible.

Biden administration officials and business leaders will announce a plan on Friday to change that, David Leonhardt of The New York Times reports in The Morning newsletter.

The plan includes some of the country’s largest corporate lobbying groups — like the Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers and groups representing Asian, Black and Latino executives — as well as some big-name companies.

Ford and Gap Inc. will donate more than 100 million masks for free distribution. Pro sports leagues will set aside more than 100 stadiums and arenas to be used as mass vaccination sites. Uber, PayPal and Walgreens will provide free rides for people to get to vaccination sites. Best Buy, Dollar General and Target will give their workers paid time off to get a shot. And the White House will urge many more companies to do likewise.

Many of the steps are fairly straightforward. That they have not happened already is a reflection of the Trump administration’s disorganized pandemic response. Trump officials oversaw a highly successful program to develop vaccines, but otherwise often failed to take basic measures that other countries did take.

“We’ve been overwhelmed with outreach from companies saying, ‘We want to help, we want to help, we want to help,’” said Andy Slavitt, a White House pandemic adviser. “What a missed opportunity the first year of this virus was.”

Credit…Hannah Mckay/Reuters

The Bank of England’s chief economist warned on Friday that inflation could overshoot the central bank’s target and cause policymakers to act more aggressively, adding his voice to a debate that has roiled financial markets in recent days.

Andy Haldane described inflation as a sleeping tiger that had been “stirred from its slumber” by the large amounts of monetary and fiscal support used to protect the economy from the pandemic, according to a speech published on the bank’s site.

Central bankers and economists on both sides of the Atlantic are debating the path of inflation and whether easy-money policies will need to be halted sooner than expected to contain it. In some circles, there are concerns that more fiscal stimulus, including President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic relief package, will causes prices to rise as the vaccine rollout supports an economic recovery. Others, such as Jerome H. Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve, say there will be only a short-term increase in inflation but that over a longer period, disinflationary pressures might to prevail.

Still, markets have been unnerved by an increase in inflation expectations. Ten-year U.S. Treasury bond yields have jumped more than 40 basis points this month, the most since 2016. In Britain, the yield on 10-year government bonds has climbed nearly 50 basis point this month to the highest level in more than a year.

“My judgment is that we might see a sharper and more sustained rise in U.K. inflation than expected, potentially overshooting its target for a more sustained period,” Mr. Haldane said. The Bank of England has a target annual inflation rate of 2 percent. It was at 0.7 percent in January, but the central forecasts it rising to the target by the middle of the year.

“There is a tangible risk inflation proves more difficult to tame, requiring monetary policymakers to act more assertively than is currently priced into financial markets,” he said. He added that it was right for people to caution against tightening policy prematurely but that the bigger risk was complacency by central banks.

Mr. Haldane has been one of the most bullish central bank policymakers. A few weeks ago, he wrote that in the British economy, there was an “enormous amounts of pent-up financial energy waiting to be released, like a coiled spring.”

As of

Data delayed at least 15 minutes

Source: Factset

Stocks on Wall Street rose on Friday, trying to find a footing after a steep decline on Thursday as a sell-off in the bond market eased up.

Trading was unsteady, however, with the S&P 500 swinging from gains to losses and back again.

Bond prices rose and the yield on 10-year Treasury notes dropped slightly to 1.47 percent. On Thursday, the yield on those government bonds rose above 1.5 percent, setting off a slide in U.S. stocks that rippled across the globe.

The S&P 500 fell close to 2.5 percent on Thursday, and stock indexes in Asia and Europe followed suit. The performance in Asia — the Hang Seng index in Hong Kong lost 3.6 percent and the Nikkei 225 in Tokyo fell 4 percent — was its worst since March, by one measure, though it followed months of significant gains as investors bet on the prospect of global economic recovery from the pandemic.

Major European markets were also lower on Friday. The Stoxx Europe 600 lost 1.6 percent, and London’s FTSE 100 fell 2.5 percent.

Investors have recently been rattled by the sharp rise in government bond yields, which are the basis for a wide range of lending, from mortgage rates to corporate borrowing, have risen sharply this month as investors anticipate a quick pickup in growth this year.
This month, yields on 10-year Treasury notes have risen by the most since late 2016, as inflation expectations have climbed to multiyear highs and traders worried that inflation would force the Federal Reserve to pull back on their easy-money policies sooner than expected.

The rising yields have dampened enthusiasm for risky investments, like stocks, with once high-flying shares of technology companies leading the retreat. Through Thursday, the S&P 500 had dropped about 2 percent for the week, but the technology-heavy Nasdaq composite had tumbled more than 5 percent — on track for its sharpest weekly decline since late October.

There has been a debate about how much central banks will be able to tolerate higher levels of inflation before they begin easing their efforts to support economies hit by the pandemic. Policymakers have tried to reassure investors that they will look past a short-term rise in inflation and are only focused on whether there will be a sustained increase in prices.

But traders have been testing this message, pushing bond yields higher.

“Central banks are watching,” Holger Schmieding, an economist at Berenberg Bank wrote in a note. “But financial markets are not their prime concern.” Yet, if market moves led to the kind of tightening of financing costs or excess volatility that could derail the economic recovery, “they would try to do something about it,” he added.

Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters

A tumultuous day in financial markets left onlookers questioning whether the Federal Reserve had showed too little concern as longer-term interest rates crept higher — and spurred speculation that the central bank’s leadership may need to speak out against the rise.

Yields on all but very short-term government debt moved sharply higher on Thursday, driven in part by expectations that economic growth will snap back after the pandemic. Fed officials had been sanguine as rates moved up in recent weeks, pointing to the increase as a sign of growing economic confidence and playing down the risk of a sudden increase in borrowing costs.

Still, the sudden jump Thursday rippled through financial markets, and analysts at Evercore ISI said the Fed’s message might change as a result. The jump in yields could make borrowing by the government, consumers and businesses more expensive, slowing progress toward the Fed’s economic goals.

“The Fed leadership holds some responsibility for this, as the absence of any indication of concern or — more appropriately in our view — central bankerly carefulness” in recent days “has been read in markets as a green light to ramp real yields higher,” Krishna Guha and Ernie Tedeschi wrote in a reaction note, capturing a narrative fast developing among financial analysts.

On Thursday, yields on the 10-year Treasury note surged as high as 1.6 percent. That rate was below 1 percent for much of 2020 and had been steadily increasing this year in part as investors expect that a flood of new government spending and the rollout of the coronavirus vaccine would lead to fast economic growth later this year.

Despite several public appearances in recent days, central bank officials including the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, and John C. Williams, the New York Fed chief, have not voiced concerns over the shift in yields. Raphael Bostic, the Atlanta Fed president, said Thursday afternoon that he did not yet see the increases as cause for concern.

“The Fed has thus far not been willing to soothe markets” and that has helped fuel the move in yields, analysts at TD Securities wrote on Thursday.

Some economists are speculating that the Fed might shift the size or style of its bond buying to focus on holding down longer-term interest rates.

“A change of tone at least seems warranted in our view and possibly more,” Mr. Guha and Mr. Tedeschi wrote. “This could well come in the next 24 hours.”

Credit…Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

AT&T is selling part of its TV business, which consists of the DirecTV, AT&T TV and U-verse brands, to the private equity firm TPG in a spinoff deal as it looks to shed assets to deal with a burdensome debt load and focus on its mobile telephone and streaming businesses.

The deal, which will give TPG a minority stake, values the TV business at $16.25 billion — about a third of the $48.5 billion AT&T paid just for DirecTV in 2015.

AT&T carries $157 billion of debt, as of December, the result of megadeals including its purchases of DirecTV and Time Warner, which it paid $85.4 billion for in 2018. The entertainment industry has been disrupted by Netflix and an array of competitors fighting for viewers’ attention, complicating plans for DirecTV, which lost more than 3.2 million subscribers in 2020, and for HBO, considered the crown jewel of Time Warner’s business.

Investors have worried that AT&T will not be able to become profitable enough to manage the debt load. The company made about $53.8 billion in pretax profit last year, meaning it carries a little more than $3 of total debt for every dollar of pretax profit. Traditionally, AT&T prefers that ratio to be closer to 2.5 to 1.

Under the terms of the deal with TPG, AT&T will own 70 percent of the new stand-alone company, which will go by DirecTV, and TPG will own 30 percent. The board of the new entity will include two representatives from each company and the chief executive of AT&T’s video unit, Bill Morrow.

The companies hope to fix challenges facing DirecTV — namely a subscriber base that has been bleeding customers faster than most pay-TV services. Annual sales at the DirecTV group fell 11 percent last year to $28.6 billion, and operating profit decreased 16.2 percent to $1.7 billion. The company is also counting on growth of AT&T TV, the company’s new service that streams TV over the internet to a set-top box.

“We certainly didn’t expect this outcome when we closed the DirecTV transaction in 2015, but it’s the right decision to move the business forward,” said John Stankey, AT&T’s chief executive, who as an executive at WarnerMedia led both the DirecTV and Time Warner deals.

TPG has ample experience with corporate partnerships, including taking a joint stake in Intel’s McAfee computer security unit and teaming up with Humana in its deal for the hospice provider Kindred. It has owned parts of Spotify, Creative Artists Agency, the cable provider Astound Broadband, and Entertainment Partners, which provides software to the entertainment and video industry.

AT&T has not ruled out more divestitures.

Credit…Kayana Szymczak for The New York Times

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced this week that it would “enhance its focus on climate-related disclosure in public company filings” and eventually update guidelines issued in 2010.

The timing of the announcement comes just days before the Senate confirmation hearings for Gary Gensler, President Biden’s pick to lead the commission, puts the issue “front and center,” the securities law partner Joseph Hall of Davis Polk told the DealBook newsletter.

The regulator “is setting the stage, sending a signal that we are no longer in an administration where ‘climate change’ is a forbidden term,” Mr. Hall said. “It’s a warning flare to let people know new disclosure rules are coming down the pike.” He predicted that “senators will be all over this” issue during next week’s hearings, and “battle lines will be drawn.”

Democrats will probably push Mr. Gensler on adopting specific disclosure requirements, tied to metrics, which are more burdensome for companies but make cross-industry comparisons easier, Mr. Hall said. Republicans will probably lobby for a principles-based system that gives companies extra leeway but critics say is too vague. The S.E.C. is likely to try to strike a balance, Mr. Hall believes, but whatever happens, any move on climate-related disclosures will be “hugely consequential.”

“It’s a significant statement and one companies can see as an opportunity,” said Wes Bricker a vice chair of PricewaterhouseCoopers and a former chief accountant at the S.E.C.

Mr. Bricker said he thought that many companies had already moved beyond requirements under the old framework, responding to the market’s increasing demands for transparency on their environmental impact. For companies that are not there yet, the S.E.C.’s announcement is a reminder of the direction things are heading.

Surveying the climate-related disclosure scene across companies and grappling with an understanding of what matters to investors now is “very constructive,” Mr. Bricker said.

It may be some time before any changes are mandated, but he said that there was likely to be an immediate effect anyway. He believes that the S.E.C.’s message will begin to subtly nudge any company that is on the fence about a disclosure toward more transparency.

Volkswagen, Europe’s largest carmaker, reported a steep drop in profit and sales for 2020 caused by the pandemic as well as the continuing cost of its diesel emissions scandal. Net profit fell 37 percent from the previous year to 8.8 billion euros, or $10.7 billion. That was after Volkswagen subtracted 9.7 billion euros from operating profit to cover expenses stemming from revelations in 2015 that the company deceived regulators about emissions from its diesel vehicles. Volkswagen said it expected sales in 2021 to be significantly higher than in 2020.
In its first earnings report as a public company, DoorDash showed how it has benefited from the pandemic even as it hinted that difficulties might lie ahead. The delivery company on Thursday posted revenue of $970 million for the fourth quarter, up 226 percent from a year earlier, as total orders jumped 233 percent. Yet it also reported a loss of $312 million, compared with a loss of $134 million a year earlier.
Airbnb posted declining revenue and a whopping $3.9 billion loss on Thursday in its first earnings report as a publicly traded company. The company brought in $859 million in revenue in the last three months of the year, down 22 percent from a year earlier. Its loss was driven by $2.8 billion in costs associated with stock-based compensation related to its I.P.O., as well as an $827 million accounting adjustment for an emergency loan it took out last year to weather the pandemic.

Tags Bond, Live, market, rise, Steadies, Stocks, Updates

Business

Jobless Claims Fall as Labor Market Continues Gradual Restoration: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date February 25, 2021

Coronavirus caseloads have been dropping amid vaccination efforts, but until employers and consumers feel that the pandemic is under control, economists say, the labor market won’t fully recover.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

New claims for unemployment fell last week, the government reported on Thursday, the latest sign that the labor market’s recovery, however slow and unsteady, is continuing.

A total of 710,000 workers filed first-time claims for state benefits during the week that ended Feb. 20, a decrease of 132,000, the Labor Department said. In addition, 451,000 new claims were filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program covering freelancers, part-timers and others who do not routinely qualify for state benefits, a decline of 61,000.

Neither figure is seasonally adjusted. On a seasonally adjusted basis, new state claims totaled 730,000, a decline of 111,000.

Although initial jobless claims are nowhere near the eye-popping levels seen last spring, they are still extraordinarily high by historical standards. There are roughly 10 million fewer jobs than there were last year at this time.

Coronavirus caseloads have been dropping amid efforts to get vaccines to people who are most vulnerable. But until employers and consumers feel that the pandemic is under control, economists say, the labor market won’t fully recover.

“Until people feel this is sustained and that there’s not another huge wave coming, I can’t imagine we’re going to see big changes in jobless claims for a while,” said Allison Schrager, an economist at the Manhattan Institute.

Leaders at the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department have said that the damage to the labor market is much deeper than has been reflected in published government figures. They estimate that the true unemployment rate is closer to 10 percent than to the 6.3 percent recorded in the Labor Department’s most commonly cited measure.

Testifying before Congress this week, Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, said: “The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain.”

Those hardest hit are in the service industry, particularly in restaurants, hospitality, leisure and travel. At the career site Indeed, job postings over all are 5 percent higher than they were a year ago, with demand greatest for warehouse and construction workers and drivers, said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at the company.

“We need job postings to stay elevated above prepandemic baseline to pull people back into the labor market,” she said.

Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Shares in GameStop were up 45 percent in premarket trading on Thursday, following another surge in the share price of the video game retailer that was at the center of a retail trading frenzy last month. On Wednesday, GameStop’s shares doubled to $91.71 and the volume of trading was more than 10 times the level of the previous day.

Some of the popular posts on Reddit’s Wallstreetbets forum, where users have been hyping up certain stocks in memes, read “ROUND 2!” and “THE COMEBACK!!!!!” Other meme stocks also rose: AMC shares gained 17 percent in premarket trading, and BlackBerry, Nokia and Koss were also among the gainers.

Earlier this week, GameStop announced its chief financial officer would leave the company next month. The company is under pressure from a large shareholder to shift from a brick-and-mortar business to a digital and e-commerce firm.

U.S. markets

Futures of U.S. stock indexes were little changed before the latest weekly report on state unemployment benefit claims. Economists expect a fall in the number, but the levels are still high by historical standards.
Bond yields continued to jump. The yield on 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose 5 basis points, or 0.05 percentage point, to 1.43 percent. This month, the yield has climbed 37 basis points.
Analysts at Bank of America raised their forecast for bond yields, expecting the 10-year yield to be at 1.75 percent at the end of the year because of stronger economic growth. Last month, they forecast 1.5 percent for year-end.
Federal Reserve policymakers have been playing down concerns about inflation. In a second day of testimony to lawmakers on Wednesday, the Fed chair, Jerome H. Powell, reiterated his message that a short-term jump in inflation, which is expected this year, is different from sustained higher inflation. And so the central bank could keep its easy money policies for awhile. Separately, the vice chair, Richard Clarida, said monetary policy was “entirely appropriate not only now, but — given my outlook for the economy — for the rest of the year.”

Europe

Most European stock indexes were higher. The Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 0.3 percent.
Shares in Mondi, a British company which sells packaging and paper products, dropped 1.2 percent after Bloomberg reported it was looking into a takeover of its rival DS Smith. Shares of Smith were up 6.6 percent.

Credit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

With the debate over raising the federal minimum wage heating up, Senator Bernie Sanders is putting the spotlight on some of the nation’s largest employers and their pay practices in a hearing on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Walmart and McDonald’s, which have not yet raised their starting wages to $15 an hour, will be the primary focus of Mr. Sanders’s scrutiny.

Mr. Sanders, a Vermont independent, plans to highlight research by the Government Accountability Office showing that Walmart and McDonald’s are among the companies with the highest number of employees qualifying for Medicaid and food stamps in many states.

“One of the scandals in the current economy is that there are millions of workers working for starvation wages,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview this week.

The chief executives of Walmart and McDonald’s were invited to attend Thursday’s hearing of the Senate Budget Committee but declined. W. Craig Jelinek, the chief executive of Costco, which pays some of the highest wages in the retail industry, is the only top executive who agreed to testify.

“A small percentage of our work force may come to us on public assistance and we welcome them,” Walmart said in an email to Mr. Sanders’s office last week. “We hire them, train them and give them the chance to earn a paycheck. And we are immensely proud of their work and their continued efforts to successfully support themselves and their families.”

McDonald’s responded in a similar vein in a letter to Mr. Sanders’s office on Tuesday: “We appreciate the findings of the G.A.O. report that identify a small percentage of our work force that may utilize public assistance, and we work to prepare them for career opportunities both inside and outside of the McDonald’s system.”

In its letter, McDonald’s added that its average wage was nearly $12 an hour, but the company did not provide its starting wage nor respond to a follow-up request from The New York Times for the number.

Last week, Walmart said that it was raising the wages of 425,000 workers and that about half of its work force in the United States would earn at least $15 an hour. But the company’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, stopped short of saying whether the company would eventually extend a $15 minimum to all employees.

Mr. Sanders said Walmart’s profits continued to be supported by taxpayers, who are paying for the health care and food expenses of the company’s lowest-paid workers and further enriching the retailer’s founding family and large shareholders, the Waltons.

“I think the American people really should not have to subsidize through their taxes the wealthiest family in the world,” Mr. Sanders said. “We are going to make that point over and over and over again.”

Credit…Ad Council

A broad promotional effort to combat Covid-19 vaccine skepticism began rolling out on Thursday, backed by the nonprofit advertising group Ad Council and a coalition of experts known as the Covid Collaborative.

The campaign, “It’s Up to You,” encourages Americans to seek out facts about the available vaccines. The Ad Council commissioned research that concluded that 40 percent of the public had yet to decide whether to be vaccinated as soon as possible. In Black and Hispanic communities, which have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic, 60 percent of people do not feel fully informed, according to the study.

Public service announcements will appear in English and Spanish on television, social media and other platforms. More than 300 companies, community groups and public figures — including Facebook, iHeartMedia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and Dr. Sanjay Gupta of CNN — contributed to the $52 million push, as did the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Several spots point viewers toward a landing page, GetVaccineAnswers.org, using messages such as “Getting back to the moments we missed starts with getting informed” and this one: “You’ve got questions. That’s normal.” A punchy video from Google shows animated arms with colorful post-vaccination bandages coalescing into the shape of the United States, while an offering from Verizon juxtaposes scenes of human connection with images of weddings and graduations conducted over video chat.

The Ad Council endeavor is one of several concurrent campaigns aimed at raising awareness and acceptance of the vaccines, including efforts from vaccine producers such as Pfizer and Moderna.

NBCUniversal built a vaccination push around the informational site PlanYourVaccine.com, while the #ThisIsOurShot campaign features health care workers who have been vaccinated. In Britain, an ad debunking myths about the vaccine was broadcast simultaneously across several television channels this month, focusing on ethnic minority communities.

Credit…Hilary Swift for The New York Times

The Biden administration is hoping that its nominee for U. S. trade representative, Katherine Tai, who is scheduled to appear for her confirmation hearing on Thursday morning before the Senate Finance Committee, can serve as a consensus builder and help bridge the Democratic Party’s varying views on trade, Ana Swanson reports for The New York Times.

Ms. Tai, the chief trade counsel to the House’s powerful Ways and Means Committee, has strong connections in Congress, and supporters expect her nomination to proceed smoothly. But if confirmed, she will face bigger challenges, including filling in the details of what the Biden administration has called its “worker-focused” trade approach.

As trade representative, Ms. Tai will be a key player in restoring alliances strained under former President Donald J. Trump, as well as formulating the administration’s China policy, where she is expected to draw on prior experience bringing cases against China at the World Trade Organization during her time working in the office of the United States Trade Representative, from 2007 to 2014.

She will also take charge on matters that divide the Democratic Party, like whether to keep or scrap the tariffs Mr. Trump imposed on foreign products, and whether new foreign trade deals will help the United States compete globally or end up selling American workers short.

Credit…Steven Ferdman/Getty Images

Coinbase, the most valuable cryptocurrency company in the United States, filed to go public on Thursday amid a surge in prices in digital money.

It is the latest milestone for Coinbase, which was founded in 2012 as a site for buying and selling cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and has now become a giant in the industry, with 43 million retail traders and 7,000 institutions as customers. Its fortunes have soared along with the price of Bitcoin, which was trading at more than $51,000 apiece as of Thursday.

Coinbase pulled back the curtains on its finances in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, revealing that it earned $322.3 million last year, on top of $1.3 billion in revenue. That compares with a $30.4 million loss atop $533.7 million in revenue for 2019.

The company makes money from fees charged for customer trades. In a letter to prospective investors, its co-founder and chief executive, Brian Armstrong, warned that the company’s financials may be volatile, because they are tied to the sometimes whipsawing prices of cryptocurrencies.

The company drew controversy last fall when Mr. Armstrong told employees to leave their social activism out of the workplace. Current and former employees have also complained about the company’s management of Black workers.

The company is planning a direct listing, where it simply puts its privately traded shares onto a public stock market — the Nasdaq, in this case — as opposed to a traditional initial public offering.

Such deals have gained popularity among technology companies in recent years for being a simpler way to going public, especially if they do not need to raise money. Last month, Coinbase said it was pursuing a direct listing.

Tags Claims, continues, fall, jobless, Labor, Live, market, recovery, slow, Updates

Business

GameStop Finance Chief to Depart After Inventory-Buying and selling Frenzy: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date February 24, 2021

A GameStop store in the Koreatown area of Los Angeles. Jim Bell, the company’s chief financial officer, who joined the company in mid-2019, is leaving.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

GameStop’s chief financial officer, Jim Bell, is leaving the company in late March, following a stock-trading frenzy that briefly sent shares in the video game retailer surging.

The company gave no reason for Mr. Bell’s departure in its announcement on Tuesday, but noted it would look for a successor “with the capabilities and qualifications to help accelerate GameStop’s transformation.” Mr. Bell joined GameStop less than two years ago.

GameStop jumped into the headlines in late January when amateur investors used trading apps to buy options and pump up its share price, defying hedge funds that had bet the price would fall. The chaotic trading led to congressional hearings last week, but executives from GameStop, which was essentially caught in the middle, were not called to testify.

GameStop’s share price closed at about $45 on Tuesday. It reached $483 on Jan. 28 after starting the year at $19.

The wild swings in share price were detached from what was happening at the company, where a major stockholder has been trying to force a turnaround. In early January, Ryan Cohen, the manager of RC Ventures and a large stockholder, joined the GameStop board. He has been pressuring the company’s executive team to overhaul GameStop’s strategy and focus on digital growth. The company has more than 5,000 stores, many in American malls and shopping strips, but has steadily lost sales to major online retailers like Amazon.

Mr. Bell joined the company in June 2019 at the age of 51 from Wok Holdings, which owns the restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s. In a short statement, GameStop thanked Mr. Bell “for his significant contributions and leadership, including his efforts over the past year during the Covid-19 pandemic.”

Credit…Pool photo by Susan Walsh

Stocks on Wall Street were set to open slightly higher on Wednesday, and most commodities prices were rising, after the Federal Reserve chief on Tuesday reiterated the need to provide plenty of support for the economic recovery from the pandemic.

“The economic recovery remains uneven and far from complete, and the path ahead is highly uncertain,” Jerome Powell, the Fed chair, told the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday. He will speak to lawmakers in the House later on Wednesday.

The S&P 500 index reached record highs earlier in the month as traders bet on the recovery and a successful vaccine rollout. Easy-money policies has also helped push asset prices higher. But fears that stronger economic growth and higher inflation would prompt the Fed to withdraw some monetary support have caused bond prices to fall, pushing up yields. This temporarily unsettled stock markets.

On Wednesday, yields on U.S. bonds resumed their march higher, after falling the previous day. The yield on 10-year notes was at about 1.38 percent.

On Tuesday, Mr. Powell tried to reassure investors. He said that the central bank planned to keep buying bonds until it saw “substantial further progress” toward its twin goals of full employment and stable inflation. The United States can “expect us to move carefully, and patiently, and with a lot of advance warning” when it comes to slowing that support, Mr. Powell said.

Futures of West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. crude oil benchmark, rose more than 1 percent to $62 a barrel, the highest in 13 months. This week, for the first time since 2011, copper prices climbed above $9,000 a metric ton in London.

Elsewhere in markets

Bitcoin prices rose on Wednesday, helping lift the share price of Tesla, which recently invested $1.5 billion in the cryptocurrency, and the shares of other blockchain-based companies, such as Riot Blockchain and Marathon Patent Group, in premarket trading.
Most European stocks indexes gained and the Stoxx Europe 600 rose 0.3 percent. The fourth quarter growth of Germany’s economy was revised higher to 0.3 percent, from 0.1 percent.
Most Asian indexes fell. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong dropped 3 percent with financial and consumer stocks falling the most after the government announced a plan to increase a tax on stock trading. Shares in Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing fell by nearly 9 percent, the most in the index.

Credit…Christopher Lee for The New York Times

A winter storm in Texas that pushed its power grid to the brink of collapse and left millions without electricity during a brutal cold snap has led to the resignations of five officials who oversaw the state’s electric grid.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which governs the flow of power for more than 26 million Texans, has been blamed for the widespread failures. The governor, lawmakers and federal officials quickly began inquiries into the system’s failures, particularly its preparation for cold weather, reports Rick Rojas for The New York Times.

The five board members, who announced on Tuesday that they intended to resign after a meeting set for Wednesday morning, were all from outside of Texas, a point of contention for critics who questioned the wisdom of outsiders playing such an influential role in the state’s infrastructure. In a statement filed with the Public Utility Commission, four board members said they were stepping down “to allow state leaders a free hand with future direction and to eliminate distractions.” In a footnote, the filing added that a fifth member was also resigning.

Those departing are the chairwoman, Sally Talberg, a former state utility regulator who lives in Michigan; Peter Cramton, the vice chairman and an economics professor at the University of Cologne in Germany and the University of Maryland; Terry Bulger, a retired banking executive who lives in Illinois; and Raymond Hepper, who is a former official with the agency overseeing the power grid in New England. Another person who was supposed to fill a vacant seat, Craig S. Ivey, has withdrawn from the 16-member board.

The board became the target of blame and scrutiny after the winter storm last week brought the state’s electric grid precariously close to a complete blackout that could have taken months to recover from. In a last-minute effort to avert that, the council, known as ERCOT, ordered rolling outages that plunged much of the state into darkness and caused electricity prices to skyrocket. Some customers had bills well over $10,000.

The second and final day of the DealBook DC Policy Project featured discussions on the prospects of bipartisan deal-making in Washington, overhauling of the financial markets and corporate America’s role in fighting the pandemic.

Here are the highlights from the sessions on Tuesday:

“We’ll lose 1.3 million jobs.”

Elements of Democrats’ stimulus proposals, including raising the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour, attracted criticism from Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah. But he mentioned potential common ground with the Biden administration, including on climate change. Mr. Romney defended his traditional conservatism amid the G.O.P.’s embrace of right-wing populism, but noted that if former President Donald J. Trump ran for re-election in 2024, “I’m pretty sure he will win the nomination.”

“I think it’s pathological that you could have greater than 100 percent short interest.”

Lessons from meme-stock mania were among the topics discussed by Vlad Tenev, the chief executive of the online brokerage firm Robinhood. He defended the practice of directing trades to market makers for a fee, which allows Robinhood to offer commission-free trading. Also on the panel, Jay Clayton, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, said that the markets were functioning the way they should in many ways, including by promoting competition among brokers and market makers.

“There will continue to be vaccinations required for Covid.”

The chief executive of CVS Health, Karen S. Lynch, spoke about the fight against the pandemic, saying that people would probably need booster shots and might need to keep wearing masks next year. But whether businesses should require employees to be inoculated was a “company-by-company response,” she said.

Credit…Desiree Rios for The New York Times

During two enormous crises — a public health emergency and an economic crash — restaurant service workers have found themselves double-exposed.

Many say their average tips have declined, while they’ve been saddled with the added work of policing patrons who aren’t social distancing, or as one service worker put it, “babysitting for the greater good,” Emma Goldberg reports for The New York Times.

On top of this, women, who make up more than two-thirds of servers, say they are facing “maskual harassment” — a term coined by the nonprofit organization One Fair Wage to describe demands that servers remove their masks to receive a tip.

The economic challenges have raised existential questions: Could this crisis herald the end of tipping, or a raise in the minimum wage for tipped workers? Depending on subjective gratuities has long been a fraught issue, but rarely has it had the safety consequences that it does now, when workers are struggling to enforce public health compliance from the customers whose tips they depend on.

Natasha Van Duser, 27, who tended bar in Manhattan, had never thought to show up to work with pepper spray. That was before last spring, when, she said, a customer dining outside spat on her and threatened to kill her when she asked him to put on a mask before walking to the bathroom; there were others who shouted expletives at her or suggested she take the temperature of their behinds instead of their foreheads.

In a recent national study of more than 1,600 workers, conducted by One Fair Wage and the Food Labor Research Center at the University of California, Berkeley, over three-quarters of workers reported “witnessing hostile behavior” from customers who were asked to comply with coronavirus protocols, more than 40 percent reported a change in the frequency of unwanted sexual comments during the pandemic and more than 80 percent reported that their tips had declined.

Credit…Matt Chase

Boredom’s impact on the economy is under-researched, experts say, possibly because there has been no modern situation like this one, but many agree that it’s an important one, Sydney Ember reports for The New York Times.

Feeling bored may result in different kinds of behaviors, like increasing novelty seeking and increasing reward sensitivity, said Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, who studies boredom.

This swirl of reactions to boredom can help explain the GameStop phenomenon, Ms. Westgate said. Investing in the stock was not just an act that felt engaging, powered by a propensity for taking risks and the excitement of reward, but also something that felt meaningful: For many traders, it was a form of protest.

Early in the pandemic, bread-making fervor prompted stores across the country to sell out of yeast. Puzzle sales have skyrocketed. Gardening has taken off as a hobby. Home improvement, too, has boomed. Sherwin-Williams said it had record sales in the fourth quarter and for the year, in part because of strong performances in its do-it-yourself and residential repaint businesses. Pandemic boredom evidently has nothing on watching paint dry.

There has also been an increase in sales of things like video games to keep us occupied, as well as things to help relieve the stress of the pandemic (and, perhaps, boredom from being at home), including self-help books, candles and messaging appliances.

It is possible that not being bored during certain periods of the day is also making people less productive, said Bec Weeks, who worked as a senior adviser for the Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian government and is a co-founder of a behavioral science app called Pique.

Research has shown that mind-wandering, an activity that can happen during periods of boredom, can result in greater productivity. But during the pandemic, some of the best opportunities for mind-wandering, like the daily commute to work, have been lost for the millions of people now working from home.

“Even in those moments when we used to be bored, there were often a lot of things going on that we didn’t realize,” Ms. Weeks said.

Credit…Andrea Chronopoulos

Last month, Laurence D. Fink, BlackRock’s chief executive, wrote that the company wanted businesses it invests in to remove as much carbon dioxide from the environment as they emit by 2050 at the latest.

But crucial details were missing from the pledge, including what proportion of the companies BlackRock invests in will be zero-emission businesses in 2050. On Saturday, in response to questions from The New York Times, a BlackRock spokesman said that the company’s “ambition” was to have “net zero emissions across our entire assets under management by 2050,” The New York Times’s Peter Eavis and Clifford Krauss report.

As the biggest companies strive to trumpet their environmental activism, the need to match words with deeds is becoming increasingly important.

Household names like Costco and Netflix have not provided emissions reduction targets. Others, like the agricultural giant Cargill and the clothing company Levi Strauss, have struggled to cut emissions. Technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which run power-hungry data centers, have slashed emissions, but are finding that the technology often doesn’t exist to carry out their “moonshot” objectives.

Determining how hard companies are really trying can be very difficult when there are no regulatory standards that require uniform disclosures of important information like emissions.

Institutional Shareholder Services, a firm that advises investors on how to vote on corporate matters, analyzed what corporations are doing to reduce emissions. Just over a third of the 500 companies in the S&P 500 stock index have set ambitious targets, it found, while 215 had no target at all. The rest had weak targets.

“To realize the necessary emission reductions, more ambitious targets urgently need to be set,” said Viola Lutz, deputy head of ISS ESG Climate Solutions, an arm of Institutional Shareholder Services. “Otherwise, we project emissions for S&P 500 companies will end up being triple of what they should be in 2050.”

The U.S. Postal Service on Tuesday chose Oshkosh Defense, a manufacturer of military vehicles, to build the next generation of postal delivery trucks, shunning an all-electric vehicle maker that had been in the running for the multibillion-dollar, 10-year contract.

Under an initial $482 million deal, Oshkosh will complete the design and then assemble 50,000 to 165,000 vehicles over 10 years, the Postal Service said.

Oshkosh was awarded the contract over two other bidders. One, the Workhorse Group, a small producer of electric delivery trucks based in Loveland, Ohio, was counting on the postal contract to provide a surge in revenue. At its height this month, the company’s stock was up more than tenfold in a year, in part on hopes it would win all or part of the postal contract. On Tuesday, after the Postal Service announced its decision, Workhorse shares lost nearly half their value. The other final bidder was Karsan, a Turkish maker of trucks and buses that was considered a long shot for the contract.

The choice of Oshkosh, which has no track record in producing electric vehicles, over Workhorse raised questions among some environmentalists over President Biden’s promised push to electrify the federal fleet. But some critics had also raised concerns that too swift a transition to plug-in trucks made by a fledgling company — and the buildup of charging infrastructure that would require — could burden a Postal Service already struggling with delivery delays.

Oshkosh has promised to shift to battery-powered vehicles if necessary, reflecting a wider push by automakers to bolster their offerings of electric vehicles to cut down on the industry’s carbon footprint. The new vehicles will be equipped with either fuel-efficient gasoline engines or electric batteries, and they will be retrofitted to keep pace with advances in electric vehicle technology, the Postal Service said.

The Post Office operates almost 230,000 vehicles and has one of the world’s largest civilian vehicle fleets, but its aging fleet — which federal data shows gets only about 10 miles a gallon — had also long been due for an upgrade.

Tags chief, depart, finance, frenzy, GameStop, Live, StockTrading, Updates

World News

Covid-19 Information: Reside World Updates

Post author By
Post date February 24, 2021

President Biden touring a Pfizer manufacturing site on Friday in Kalamazoo, Mich.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The White House said on Tuesday that weekly shipments of coronavirus vaccines to the states would rise by one million doses to 14.5 million, as vaccine manufacturers continue to ramp up production.

The figure was provided to governors in a call with Jeffrey Zeints, the president’s coronavirus response coordinator, said Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, on Tuesday. With tens of millions of eligible Americans waiting to get shots, state officials have been clamoring for more vaccine, saying health practitioners could easily double or triple the number of shots they are administering.

Ms. Psaki said the increase was the fifth boost in distribution in five weeks, and said it came just short of doubling the vaccine shipments underway at the time Mr. Biden took office on Jan. 20.

Before snowstorms disrupted vaccine distribution last week, the average number of daily doses administered across the country had been steadily increasing as the two federally approved vaccine manufacturers, Pfizer and Moderna, get more efficient and expand production. While that acceleration was expected well before Mr. Biden assumed office, officials have been anxious to highlight every increase in shipments as evidence that the new administration is fiercely battling the pandemic. As of Tuesday, the seven-day average rate of doses administered across the country was 1.4 million a day, after peaking at about 1.7 million before the storms, according to a New York Times vaccine database.

Many vaccination appointments last week that were postponed by snowstorms and other disruptive weather are resuming this week. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti said vaccinations would start back up again on Tuesday at all of the city-run sites and indicated that people whose inoculations had been delayed by the weather would be given priority over those making new appointments.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday morning, top officials from Pfizer and Moderna reiterated previous supply commitments in front of lawmakers Both firms promised earlier this month to deliver a total of 400 million doses by the end of May, weeks ahead of schedule, and a total of 600 million by the end of July.

John Young, Pfizer’s chief business officer, testified that his firm will be able to ship more than 13 million doses per week by mid-March, compared to a weekly shipment of just four to five million at the start of this month. He cited a variety of reasons, including federal regulatory approval to count each vial as holding six doses instead of five, more efficient production processes and faster laboratory tests of the vaccine before it is shipped.

Dr. Stephen Hoge, president of Moderna, testified that his company expects to double its current shipments to more than 10 million per week by April.

More supply is expected to come from Johnson & Johnson, but not as quickly as federal officials initially had hoped. Federal regulators are widely expected to grant emergency use authorization for that vaccine by early next week.

Dr. Richard Nettles, a company vice president testified that the firm is prepared to deliver 20 million doses of its vaccine by the end of March. Of that, he said, nearly four million doses could be shipped as soon as the Food and Drug Administration gives the firm the green light. Unlike the other two authorized vaccines, Johnson & Johnson’s requires only one dose.

Dr. Nettles’s testimony was the first public indication by the company of how many doses it could supply before April.

His promise falls short of the 37 million doses that Johnson & Johnson’s federal contract called for it to deliver by the end of March. Asked what accounted for the gap, Dr. Nettles did not directly answer. But he implied that the company would catch up, saying the firm will deliver the entire 100 million doses it has promised by the end of June, as the contract requires.

Together with the deliveries from Moderna and Pfizer, which developed its vaccine with a German partner, BioNTech, the new supply from Johnson & Johnson would mean that the nation would have enough doses on hand by the end of next month to vaccinate about 130 million Americans. That would cover roughly half of all eligible adults and 40 percent of the total population.

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs contributed reporting.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 22	14-day change
New cases	59,462	–40%
New deaths	1,454	–28%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 22	14-day change
New cases	287,166	–19%
New deaths	6,753	–25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Wilfredo Lee/Associated Press

From the beginning, Florida’s vaccination effort has focused almost exclusively on people 65 and older. The only other people eligible for shots in the state have been those with certain underlying medical conditions, health care workers and paramedics — and not any of the other kinds of essential workers that many states have begun to vaccinate.

Nor would Florida say when their turns would come. As of last week, Florida was the only state that had not released a priority order for making more categories of people eligible, according to the Kaiser Permanente Foundation.

That changed on Tuesday when Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, said he wanted to add law enforcement officers and schoolteachers to the eligible pool if they are 50 or older. Mr. DeSantis said they could start getting vaccinated as soon as next week at mass vaccination sites that the Federal Emergency Management Agency plans to open in Miami, Orlando, Tampa and Jacksonville.

“I think that we’re going to have the ability to do that, between the federally supported sites and some of the new vaccine that may be coming online very, very soon,” Mr. DeSantis said at a news conference in Hialeah, near Miami.

Other states have continued to expand their eligibility requirements for vaccines as they race to immunize as many vulnerable people as possible before more contagious variants become dominant. But vaccine supply has not yet caught up with the demand, even as weekly supplies will increase for states.

In California, 10 percent of the state’s first vaccine doses will be saved for teachers and school employees beginning on March 1. The state has already expanded access to residents with chronic health conditions and disabilities and has begun to vaccinate farmworkers, according to the Los Angeles Times. New York also expanded its vaccine eligibility requirements for people with chronic health conditions.

States have increasingly expanded eligibility to teachers, grocery workers, other essential workers and high-risk adults, according to a New York Times vaccine rollout tracker.

In Florida, the governor had initially resisted the Biden administration’s push for FEMA sites there. He changed his mind when he realized that they would bring tens of thousands of additional vaccine doses to the state.

Labor unions, workers and younger people in Florida have expressed frustration with the state government leaving them in the dark about which groups would be next to receive the vaccines. It remains unclear when people who are not police officers or teachers 50 and older could expect to get a shot. People younger than 65 with serious health conditions who are supposed to be eligible now have had trouble finding providers in the state who are willing to vaccinate them.

Florida has more than 4.4 million residents who are 65 or older; about 45 percent of them have received at least one dose of vaccine, Mr. DeSantis said on Tuesday, though the rate varies considerably from county to county. His administration indicated last week that it hoped to reach 50 percent before widening eligibility.

Mr. DeSantis also announced that CVS Health was expanding Covid-19 vaccinations at more than 80 pharmacy locations in 13 Florida counties, including at Navarro Discount Pharmacy and CVS pharmacy y más, which cater to Latinos.

Jackson Health System, a nonprofit medical complex in Miami-Dade County, expanded its vaccine appointments Tuesday to residents 55 to 64 years old who have one of 13 medical conditions, including several types of cancer, cardiomyopathy, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, congestive heart failure, end-stage renal disease, morbid obesity and more.

Last week, Mr. DeSantis faced criticism when he opened a pop-up vaccination site to people 65 and older in Lakewood Ranch, an affluent and mostly white community in Manatee County that was developed by a Republican political donor. The vaccinations there were limited to residents of the two wealthiest ZIP codes in the county at a time when Black communities lagged behind in vaccinations.

The Bradenton Herald, a local newspaper, reported that Vanessa Baugh, a county commissioner who helped organize the vaccination site, had created a V.I.P. list of vaccine recipients that included herself and the developer of Lakewood Ranch, Rex Jensen. The Herald also reported that the Manatee County sheriff is investigating whether Ms. Baugh broke state law.

Mr. DeSantis defended the pop-up site last week, saying, “If Manatee County does not like us doing this, we are totally fine with putting this in counties that want it.”

Later in the week, he opened another pop-up site in Pinellas Park, a largely white middle-income community near St. Petersburg.

Credit…Daniel Dreifuss for The New York Times

A variant first discovered in California in December is more contagious than earlier forms of the coronavirus, two new studies have shown, fueling concerns that emerging mutants like this one could hamper the sharp decline in cases over all in the state and perhaps elsewhere.

In one of the new studies, researchers found that the variant has spread rapidly in a San Francisco neighborhood in the past couple of months. The other report confirmed that the variant has surged across the state, and revealed that it produces twice as many viral particles inside a person’s body as other variants do. That study also hinted that the variant may be better than others at evading the immune system — and vaccines.

“I wish I had better news to give you — that this variant is not significant at all,” said Dr. Charles Chiu, a virologist at the University of California, San Francisco. “But unfortunately, we just follow the science.”

Neither study has yet been published in a scientific journal. And experts don’t know how much of a public health threat this variant poses compared with others that are also spreading in California.

A variant called B.1.1.7 arrived in the United States from Britain, where it swiftly became the dominant form of the virus and overloaded hospitals there. Studies of British medical records suggest that B.1.1.7 is not only more transmissible, but more lethal than earlier variants.

Some experts said the new variant in California was concerning, but unlikely to create as much of a burden as B.1.1.7.

“I’m increasingly convinced that this one is transmitting more than others locally,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the research. “But there’s not evidence to suggest that it’s in the same ballpark as B.1.1.7.”

Dr. Chiu first stumbled across the new variant by accident. In December, he and other researchers in California were worried about the discovery of B.1.1.7 in Britain. They began looking through their samples from positive coronavirus tests in California, sequencing viral genomes to see if B.1.1.7 had arrived in their state.

On New Year’s Eve, Dr. Chiu was shocked to find a previously unknown variant that made up one-quarter of the samples he and his colleagues had collected. “I thought that was crazy,” he said.

It turned out that researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles separately discovered the same variant surging to high levels in Southern California. Dr. Chiu announced his initial finding, and the Cedars-Sinai team went public two days later.

Since then, researchers have been looking more closely at the new variant, known as B.1.427/B.1.429, to pinpoint its origin and track its spread. It has shown up in 45 states to date, and in several other countries, including Australia, Denmark, Mexico and Taiwan. But it has so far taken off only in California.

It was unclear at first whether the variant was inherently more transmissible than others, or whether it had surged in California because of gatherings that became superspreading events.

Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

Federal regulators have informed Pfizer and BioNTech that they plan to approve the companies’ request to store their vaccine at standard freezer temperatures instead of in ultra-cold conditions, potentially expanding the number of sites that could administer shots, according to two people familiar with the companies who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to announce new guidance to providers as early as Tuesday, modifying documents related to the emergency use authorization that was previously granted for the vaccine, they said.

Pfizer and BioNTech, its German partner, said Friday that they had submitted new data to the F.D.A. showing their vaccine could be safely stored at -13 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit for up to two weeks. That could open up the possibility that smaller pharmacies and doctors’ offices could administer shots using their existing refrigerators or freezers.

Regulators had previously approved distribution only if the vaccine was stored in freezers that kept it between -112 and -76 degrees Fahrenheit. Pfizer ships its vials in specially designed containers that can be used as temporary storage for up to 30 days, then refilled with dry ice every five days. The vaccine can be refrigerated for up to five days in a standard refrigerator if it had not yet been diluted for use in patients.

Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

New coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are on the downswing in the United States and around the world, but hot spots along the East Coast have been sticking around longer compared to the rest of the country.

In the current wave of regional outbreaks, eight states that border the Atlantic Ocean have seen upticks in the past few months and only recently have started to level off or decline.

South Carolina leads the nation with the highest rate of new virus cases, followed by New York, New Jersey, Rhode Island, North Carolina, Florida, Delaware and Georgia.

It has become a familiar pattern across the country — cases go up in one region, and down in another — a sequence driven in some part by weather. A few months ago, the Upper Midwest, where it starts to get cold in the fall, was outpacing other regions in new infections. And before that, cases in the Sunbelt surged.

“It’s whack-a-mole,” said Leana Wen, an emergency physician and public health professor at George Washington University. “One part of the country sees a surge, and then another, and then it declines.”

In New York City on Tuesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio said that he believed the city’s case numbers and positive test rates had not declined more dramatically because of population density, a legacy of poverty and a high number of New Yorkers without health care.

“There’s challenges for sure,” Mr. de Blasio said at a news conference. “But I feel very good about our ability to turn it around with intensive vaccination — if we can get supply.”

According to health data, the city’s seven-day average positive test rate was 7.3 percent on Sunday, the latest day for which data was available, down from a recent peak of 9.7 percent from Jan. 2-4. (New York State, which compiles testing data and calculates statistics differently from the city, most recently reported the city’s seven-day average at 4.49 percent, down from 6.4 percent on Jan. 4-7.)

New cases have declined to half their peak globally, largely because of steady improvements in some of the same places that endured devastating outbreaks this winter. The global decline has been driven by six countries, led by the United States, which still leads the world in the number of new cases a day, based on a seven-day average, followed by Brazil and France.

Public health experts in the worst-hit countries attribute the progress to some combination of increased adherence to social distancing and mask wearing, the seasonality of the virus and a buildup of natural immunity among groups with high rates of existing infection.

“It’s a great moment of optimism, but it’s also very fragile in a lot of ways,” said Wafaa El-Sadr, an epidemiologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. “We see the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s still a long tunnel.”

The emergence of new variants of the virus, however, has caused great concern, increasing the pressure to get people vaccinated as soon as possible. A variant first found in Britain is spreading rapidly in the United States, and it has been implicated in surges in Ireland, Portugal and Jordan. The variant first found in South Africa, which weakens the effectiveness of vaccines, has also surfaced in the United States.

Allison McCann, Lauren Leatherby and Josh Holder contributed reporting.

GLOBAL ROUNDUP

Credit…Russell Cheyne/Reuters

Scotland will emerge from its lockdown in three-week stages over the next few months, beginning with reopening schools, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon announced on Tuesday.

Scotland’s schools, which began reopening on Monday, will resume in-person instruction in phases through March, Ms. Sturgeon said, and stay-at-home orders would begin to be relaxed on April 5, allowing communal worship and some businesses to reopen. Most businesses and activities would be allowed to resume after April 26, Ms. Sturgeon said.

About one-third of adults in Scotland have received at least the first dose of a Covid vaccine. The progress with vaccinations and the early data suggesting that vaccination significantly reduces the risk of hospitalization were “extremely welcome and encouraging news,” Ms. Sturgeon told lawmakers on Tuesday.

Much of Scotland has been locked down since early January because of the rapid spread of a new variant of the virus. The variant now accounts for more than 85 percent of new cases in Scotland, Ms. Sturgeon said on Tuesday. The country reported 655 new cases on Monday and 56 deaths from Covid-19.

The first studies of Britain’s mass inoculation program indicate that a single dose of either the Oxford-AstraZeneca or Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine averts most coronavirus-related hospitalizations, researchers said on Monday, though they said it was too early to give precise estimates of the effect. Scotland is aiming to offer every adult a first dose of vaccine by the end of July.

Ms. Sturgeon said the timeline for relaxing restrictions would be contingent on data showing that the virus was being kept at bay. To that end, she said, contact tracing was vital, and travel restrictions would probably remain in force for some time. “Maximum suppression is important for our chances of getting back to normal,” she said.

“I know how hard all of this continues to be after 11 long months of this pandemic,” Ms. Sturgeon said, but “I think that we can be much more hopeful today than we have been able to be this entire pandemic.”

On Monday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson laid out a long-awaited plan for completely lifting restrictions in England by June 21. His plan also begins with schools, and would keep pubs and most other businesses shut for at least another month.

Ms. Sturgeon’s plan for Scotland is more limited in scope, at least so far; she said more details would be released in March.

Here’s what else is going on around the world:

Galicia, in northwestern Spain, on Tuesday became the country’s first region to approve fines for people who refuse to get vaccinated against Covid-19. The law, which was approved in Galicia’s regional parliament, sets fines of as much as 60,000 euros, or nearly $73,000, if a person’s decision to refuse vaccination is deemed to result in “a very serious risk or harm for the health of the population.” The law was approved by lawmakers of the conservative Popular Party, which governs Galicia, but fiercely criticized by opposition politicians as an attack on individual choice. The central government of Spain, which is led by the Socialist Party, also opposed the Galician law.

Ukraine said it had obtained its first vaccine supply on Tuesday, buying 500,000 doses of an Oxford-AstraZeneca version made in India. Ukraine, which has been reporting more than 5,000 cases a day, said the doses were earmarked for front-line medical workers. “We are grateful to our Indian partners,” President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine wrote on Twitter after the delivery on Tuesday.
In Japan, the pressures of the pandemic have been compounded for women. Many have lost their jobs, others live alone and some women have faced disparities in housework and child care. The rising psychological and physical toll of the pandemic has been accompanied by a worrisome spike in suicide among women. In Japan, 6,976 women died by suicide last year, nearly 15 percent more than in 2019. It was the first year-over-year increase in more than a decade.
Sixteen lawmakers in Lebanon received a vaccine inside the parliament building, violating regulations aimed at keeping the process fair and transparent and sparking controversy about jumping the vaccine line. On Tuesday, Adnan Daher, the parliamentary secretary, confirmed to reporters that 16 lawmakers had received shots. He said the lawmakers were all of the proper age and their turn to be vaccinated had come. But according to lists compiled by local news outlets, about half were younger than 75.
Lab monkeys, whose DNA resembles that of humans, are a tool for developing Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals. The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain.

Credit…John Minchillo/Associated Press

A recent sampling of coronavirus cases in New York City found that the more contagious B.1.1.7 variant first found in Britain made up about 6.2 percent of new cases earlier in February.

The 6.2 percent estimate, released Tuesday by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, offers the best sketch yet of the spread of the B.1.1.7 variant in New York City since the first city case was detected last month.

The B.1.1.7 variant has clearly taken hold in New York City. But so far it is not spreading as fast as some disease modelers predicted.

“It certainly is not in a dizzying ascent, or taking over,” said Dr. Ronald Scott Braithwaite, a professor at N.Y.U. Grossman School of Medicine who has been modeling New York City’s epidemic and is an adviser to the city. “Six percent is a ways away from becoming a majority strain.”

One study found that nationwide B.1.1.7 cases are doubling about every 10 days and the Centers for Disease Control has predicted the B.1.1.7 variant could become the dominant source of infection across the country in March.

The variant was first identified in Britain late last year and has caused a surge of cases in a number of countries. But its trajectory in New York is far from clear.

Across the city, the number of new coronavirus cases has been slowly declining since early January, although more than 20,000 new cases are still being detected weekly. The test positivity rate remains over 7 percent.

Until recently Professor Braithwaite’s modeling team had predicted that unless the current pace of vaccinations accelerated, the B.1.1.7 variant could lead to a third wave of cases in New York City and a surge in hospitalizations and deaths. The variant is more contagious and it is also likely deadlier.

But his model, which is watched by New York City health officials, now predicts that as B.1.1.7 becomes a larger share of infections it will cause a plateau in new cases, before cases continue their slow decline.

Dr. Braithwaite said he was more worried about the B.1.351 variant, first detected in South Africa, which has been found in New York State. Existing vaccines are not as effective against that variant.

Over the last month, New York City has taken steps to sequence and screen more and more coronavirus samples to detect variants. But surveillance remains spotty.

The 6.2 percent estimate comes from a recent sample of 724 cases, of which 45 were found to be caused by the B.1.1.7 variant. The sample was conducted at the Pandemic Response Laboratory in New York City, which does about 20,000 coronavirus tests daily. The laboratory has begun doing genomic sequencing of some of the positive cases.

An earlier sample of cases from January found that under 3 percent of cases were B.1.1.7. In the first week of February, there was a major jump to 7.4 percent. But in the most recent sample involving cases sequenced between Feb. 8 and Feb. 14, the percentage dropped to 6.2, according to the Health Department.

Credit…Oded Balilty/Associated Press

JERUSALEM — The Israeli government promised to send thousands of extra Covid-19 vaccines to friendly nations like the Czech Republic and Honduras, but critics have rekindled a debate about Israel’s responsibilities to vaccinate Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

On Tuesday, the governments of the Czech Republic and Honduras confirmed that Israel had promised them each 5,000 vaccine doses manufactured by Moderna. The Israeli news media reported that Hungary and Guatemala would be sent a similar number, but the Hungarian and Israeli governments declined to comment, while the Guatemalan government did not respond to a request for comment.

The donations are the latest example of a new expression of soft power: vaccine diplomacy, in which countries rich in vaccines seek to reward or sway those that have little access to them.

Jockeying for influence in Asia, China and India have donated thousands of vaccine doses to their neighbors. The United Arab Emirates has done the same for allies like Egypt. And last week, Israel even promised to buy tens of thousands of doses on behalf of the Syrian government, a longtime foe, in exchange for the return of an Israeli civilian detained in Syria.

The vaccines allocated on Tuesday were given without conditions, but they tacitly reward recent gestures from the receiving countries that implicitly accept Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, which both Israelis and Palestinians consider their capital.

Israel has given at least one shot of the two-dose, Pfizer-manufactured vaccine to just over half its own population of nine million — including to people living in Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories — making it the world leader in vaccine rollouts. That has left the Israeli government able to bolster its international relationships with its surplus supply of Moderna vaccines.

But the move has angered Palestinians because it suggests that Israel’s allies are of greater priority than the Palestinians living under Israeli control in the occupied territories, almost all of whom have yet to receive a vaccine.

Israel has pledged at least twice as many doses to faraway countries as it has so far promised to the nearly five million Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Credit…Apu Gomes/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Governor Gavin Newsom of California signed a $7.6 billion stimulus package that will send $600 payments to about 5.7 million low-income Californians.

The relief package was “desperately needed to millions and millions of Californians,” Mr. Newsom said at a news conference on Tuesday.

In Washington, Democratic lawmakers are pressing forward with a much larger $1.9 trillion stimulus bill. The House is preparing for a final vote on the measure by the end of the week, as Democrats race to get it to President Biden’s desk before unemployment benefits begin to lapse in mid-March.

The California stimulus package provides $2.1 billion in funding for grants to small businesses struggling during the pandemic. It also includes fee waivers for bars, restaurants, barbershops and other hard-hit businesses.

The legislation comes as Mr. Newsom is facing blowback from small business owners angered over the state’s lockdowns. An effort to recall Mr. Newsom is gaining steam: since March, 1.5 million Californians have signed a petition to oust him.

“The backbone of our economy is small business. We recognize the stress, the strain that so many small businesses have been under and we recognize as well our responsibility to do more,” Mr. Newsom said on Tuesday.

In November, Mr. Newsom announced that the state would provide temporary tax relief and $500 million in grants for businesses impacted by the pandemic.

Although reported coronavirus cases in California have steadily declined in past weeks, a new variant spreading in the state could pose a fresh threat. Two new studies show that a variant first found in California is more contagious than earlier forms of the virus. Scientists have warned that new variants could set back the nation, even as new cases and hospitalizations drop.

Credit…Al Bello/Getty Images

Some Covid-19 vaccine doses administered on Feb. 15 at a drive-through inoculation site on Long Island were deemed ineffective and patients who received them must be revaccinated, New York State officials said on Tuesday.

The doses were made ineffective when a staff member, who was taking syringes to the site, saw that the temperature of one cooler was approaching a level that could be too low for the shots, said Jack Sterne, a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s office. The staff member then added a hand warmer to it, against protocol, to try to raise the temperature, as Newsday first reported.

Only 81 of the 1,379 vaccines administered that day were affected — and more than 3 million have been doled out across the state without similar issues, Mr. Sterne said.

Still, in response, Mr. Sterne said that officials would increase staff training around the handling of vaccines.

Those who received the ineffective doses faced no health risks, have all been notified and will receive priority for rescheduled appointments, Jill Montag, a spokeswoman for the state’s health department, added.

“New Yorkers’ health and safety is our top priority, and due to this vaccine’s very specific temperature sensitivity, we have a process in place to identify if any temperature excursions occur,” Ms. Montag said in a statement. “This process worked, allowing us to quickly pinpoint this issue, identify the extremely small number of individuals impacted, and immediately begin taking action.”

Credit…Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

The enormous scale of illness and death wrought by the coronavirus is traced in figures that have grown so far beyond the familiar yardsticks of daily life that they can sometimes be difficult to get a handle on.

The news on Monday that the United States had recorded 500,000 Covid-19-related deaths in just a year is just the latest example.

One way to put that in context is to compare it to other major causes of death in 2019, the year before the pandemic took hold in the country.

500,000 deaths is …

Three times the number of people who died in the U.S. in any kind of accident, including highway accidents, in 2019 (167,127).
More than eight times the number of deaths from influenza and pneumonia (59,120).
More than 10 times the number of suicides (48,344).
More than the number of deaths from strokes, diabetes, kidney disease, Alzheimer’s and related causes, combined (406,161).
Only heart disease (655,381) and cancer (599,274) caused more deaths.

When full data for 2020 is available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Covid-19 will certainly be one of the leading killers. But trying to project where it will rank may be complicated. A very large share of deaths from Covid-19 have been people who were medically vulnerable because of other significant health problems like cancer, lung or heart disease. Some number of them would probably have succumbed to those causes, and been counted in those categories, if their deaths had not been hastened by Covid-19.

Credit…Sarah Silbiger/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Biden’s nominee for health secretary, Xavier Becerra, pledged Tuesday morning to work to “restore faith in public health institutions” and to “look to find common cause” with his critics, as Republicans sought to paint him as a liberal extremist who is unqualified for the job.

Appearing before the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Mr. Becerra, the attorney general of California, was grilled by Republicans who complained that he has no background in the health profession, and who targeted his support for the Affordable Care Act and for abortion rights.

“Basically, you’ve been against pro-life, on the record,” Senator Mike Braun, Republican of Indiana, said to Mr. Becerra. He asked whether Mr. Becerra would commit to not using taxpayer money for abortions, which is currently barred by federal law, except in instances where the life of the mother is at stake, or in incest or rape.

“I will commit to following the law,” Mr. Becerra replied — leaving himself some wiggle room should the law change.

Tuesday’s appearance was the first of two Senate confirmation hearings for Mr. Becerra; he is scheduled to appear before the Senate Finance Committee on Wednesday. Despite the tough questions, Mr. Becerra appears headed for confirmation in a Senate evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but with Vice President Kamala Harris available to break a tie.

If confirmed, Mr. Becerra will immediately face a daunting task in leading the department at a critical moment, during a pandemic that has claimed half a million lives and has taken a particularly devastating toll on people of color. He would be the first Latino to serve as secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services.

While Mr. Becerra, a former member of Congress, lacks direct experience as a health professional, he took a deep interest in health policy while in Washington and helped write the Affordable Care Act. He has more recently been at the forefront of legal efforts to defend it, leading 20 states and the District of Columbia in a campaign to protect the act from being dismantled by Republicans.

Republicans and their allies in the conservative and anti-abortion movements have seized on Mr. Becerra’s defense of the A.C.A. as well as his support for abortion rights.

The Conservative Action Project, an advocacy group, issued a statement on Monday signed by dozens of conservative leaders, including several former members of Congress, complaining that Mr. Becerra had a “troubling record” with respect to “policies relating to the sanctity of life, human dignity and religious liberty.”

They cited in particular his vote against banning “late-term abortion,” and accused him of using his role as attorney general “to tip the scales in favor of Planned Parenthood,” a group that advocates abortion rights. Asked by Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, about the late-term abortion vote, Mr. Becerra noted that his wife is an obstetrician-gynecologist, and said he would “work to find common ground” on the issue. Mr. Romney was not impressed. “It sounds like we’re not going to reach common ground there,” he replied.

Democrats are emphasizing Mr. Becerra’s experience leading one of the nation’s largest justice departments through an especially trying period, and his up-from-the-bootstraps biography. A son of immigrants from Mexico, he attended Stanford University as an undergraduate and for law school. He served 12 terms in Congress, representing Los Angeles, before becoming the attorney general of his home state in 2017.

Credit…Bryan Tarnowski for The New York Times

The world needs monkeys, whose DNA closely resembles that of humans, to develop Covid-19 vaccines. But a global shortage, resulting from the unexpected demand caused by the pandemic, has been exacerbated by a recent ban on the sale of wildlife from China, the leading supplier of the lab animals.

The latest shortage has revived talk about creating a strategic monkey reserve in the United States, an emergency stockpile similar to those maintained by the government for oil and grain.

As new variants of the coronavirus threaten to make the current batch of vaccines obsolete, scientists are racing to find new sources of monkeys, and the United States is reassessing its reliance on China, a rival with its own biotech ambitions.

The pandemic has underscored how much China controls the supply of lifesaving goods, including masks and drugs, that the United States needs in a crisis.

American scientists have searched private and government-funded facilities in Southeast Asia as well as Mauritius, a tiny island nation off southeast Africa, for stocks of their preferred test subjects, rhesus macaques and cynomolgus macaques, also known as long-tailed macaques.

But no country can make up for what China previously supplied. Before the pandemic, China provided over 60 percent of the 33,818 primates, mostly cynomolgus macaques, imported into the United States in 2019, according to analyst estimates based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The United States has about 22,000 lab monkeys — predominantly pink-faced rhesus macaques — at its seven primate centers. About 600 to 800 of those animals have been subject to coronavirus research since the pandemic began.

Scientists say monkeys are the ideal specimens for researching coronavirus vaccines before they are tested on humans. The primates share more than 90 percent of our DNA, and their similar biology means they can be tested with nasal swabs and have their lungs scanned. Scientists say it is almost impossible to find a substitute to test Covid-19 vaccines in, although drugs such as dexamethasone, the steroid that was used to treat former President Donald J. Trump, have been tested in hamsters.

The United States once relied on India to supply rhesus macaques. But in 1978, India halted its exports after Indian news outlets reported that the monkeys were being used in military testing in the United States. Pharmaceutical companies searched for an alternative, and eventually landed on China.

But the pandemic upset what had been a decades-long relationship between American scientists and Chinese suppliers.

Credit…Daniel Dreifuss for The New York Times

Over the past year, hospital intensive care units have been overrun with critically ill Covid-19 patients, who develop severe pneumonia and other organ dysfunction. At times, the influx of coronavirus cases overwhelmed the resources in the units and the complexity of the care these patients required.

An interactive graphic by The New York Times explores how coronavirus surges affected I.C.U.s and their specialty medical staff.

New cases in the United States have fallen since their peak in early January, but almost three-quarters of the nation’s I.C.U. beds were occupied over the week ending Feb. 18.

The national average for adult I.C.U. occupancy was 67 percent in 2010, according to the Society of Critical Care Medicine, though this number and all hospitalization figures vary depending on the place, time of year and size of hospital.

When the coronavirus rips through a community, I.C.U.s fill up. Hospitals have been forced to improvise, expanding capacity by creating I.C.U.s in areas normally used for other purposes, like cardiac or neurological care, and even hallways or spare rooms.

Elective surgeries often get put on hold to keep beds available, and early in the pandemic, hospitals saw huge drops in people admitted for any reason other than Covid-19. I.C.U. staff members, regardless of specialty, often spent most or all of their time on Covid patients.

“We’re all exhausted,” said Dr. Nida Qadir, the co-director of the medical intensive care unit at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. “We’ve had to flex up quite a bit.”

Tags Covid19, global, Live, News, Updates

Business

Powell to Testify as Concentrate on Financial Ache Persists: Reside Updates

Post author By
Post date February 23, 2021

Jerome Powell is returning to Capitol Hill as Democrats push for a new $1.9 trillion spending plan.

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Al Drago for The New York Times

After it rocketed higher last year, the United States’ official unemployment rate has fallen to 6.3 percent. But top economic officials are increasingly citing a different figure, one that puts the jobless rate at a far higher 10 percent.

The higher figure includes people who have stopped looking for work, and the disparity between the official rate and the expanded statistic underlines the unusual nature of the pandemic shock and reinforces the idea that the economy remains far from a full recovery.

The reality that labor market weakness lingers, a year into the pandemic, could come up again as Jerome H. Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, testifies before Congress starting on Tuesday. Mr. Powell is set to speak before the Senate Banking Committee at 10 a.m. Tuesday, then before the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics tallies how many Americans are looking for work or are on temporary layoff midway through each month. That number, taken as a share of the civilian labor force, is reported as the official unemployment rate.

But economists have long worried that by relying on the headline rate, they ignore people they shouldn’t, including would-be employees who are not actively applying for jobs because they are discouraged or because they are waiting for the right opportunity.

Now, key policymakers are all but ditching the headline statistic, rather than just playing down its comprehensiveness. In an alternate unemployment figure, they’re adding back people who have left the job market since last February, along with those who are misclassified in the official report.

“We have an unemployment rate that, if properly measured in some sense, is really close to 10 percent,” Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen said on CNBC last week. And a week earlier, Mr. Powell cited a similar figure in a speech about lingering labor market damage.

“Published unemployment rates during Covid have dramatically understated the deterioration in the labor market,” Mr. Powell said recently. People dropped out of jobs rapidly when the economy closed, and with many restaurants, bars and hotels shut, there is nowhere for many workers who are trained in service work to apply.

Mr. Powell will be testifying as Democrats look to pass $1.9 trillion in new economic relief, an effort that has raised concerns in some quarters about the potential for higher inflation. Mr. Powell has said he and his colleagues do not expect inflation to move much higher persistently, and has typically pushed for additional government support to help the economy through the pandemic.

Rates on longer-term government bonds — which serve as benchmarks for things as varied as mortgages and credit-card debt — have been grinding higher and investors will also be watching carefully for any hints at how the Fed is interpreting that increase.

Credit…Eve Edelheit for The New York Times

The S&P 500 was set for a fourth straight of day losses on Tuesday. Stock futures indicated the index would fall 0.8 percent when the market opens, following European stock markets lower. Tech stocks have suffered some of the heaviest losses, and futures of the Nasdaq, a tech-heavy index, dropped 1.4 percent.

Stocks have dropped recently as a rise in U.S. inflation expectations and bond yields has raised concerns that the Federal Reserve will tighten its monetary policy sooner than expected, upending the easy-money policies that have helped bolster stocks during the pandemic.

The central bank’s policymakers have said they would look past a short-term rise inflation and keep supporting the economy, but investors will be listening for more details when Jerome H. Powell, the central bank chair, testifies before the Senate Banking Committee later on Tuesday and the House on Wednesday.

The official unemployment rate in the United States has fallen to 6.3 percent, but top economic officials are increasingly citing a figure that puts the jobless rate at 10 percent. The disparity reinforces the idea that the economy remains far from a full recovery.

Stocks

Premarket trading indicates that tech stocks will continue their decline. On Monday, the information technology sector of the S&P 500, which includes Apple and Microsoft, dropped 2.3 percent, leading losses in the overall index. And the Nasdaq fell 2.8 percent.
Tesla shares dropped nearly 9 percent in premarket trading on Tuesday, after falling about 9 percent on Monday as Bitcoin prices also tumbled. Over the weekend, Elon Musk tweeted that prices of Bitcoin and Ether, the two largest cryptocurrencies, “do seem high.” A few weeks ago, the electric carmaker said it bought $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, sending prices of both soaring.

Europe

The Stoxx 600 Europe fell 1 percent, with tech stocks dropping the most.
The unemployment rate in Britain rose to 5.1 percent for the three months ending in December, 1.4 percentage points higher than it was a year earlier, official statistics showed on Tuesday. Job losses have fallen particularly hard on young people: The number of employees on company payrolls has declined by 726,000 in the past year, nearly three-fifths of these workers were under 25.
HSBC shares fell 1.8 percent in London after Europe’s largest bank said its pretax profit dropped 34 percent last year. It also announced plans to increase investments in Asia as it was “moving the heart of the business” there, including relocating some senior executives. The bank also said it would start paying dividends again.

Shoppers at the Macy’s flagship store in Manhattan’s Herald Square on Black Friday.
The retailer posted a net loss of $3.9 billion for the year that ended Jan. 31.Credit…Gabby Jones for The New York Times

Macy’s, the department store company that also owns Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury, said on Tuesday that its net sales in 2020 tumbled 29 percent to $17.3 billion, highlighting the toll that the pandemic has taken on mall chains and apparel stores.

The retailer, which is based in New York, swung to a net loss of $3.9 billion for the year that ended Jan. 31, from a $564 million profit the prior year. But the company said it “anticipates 2021 as a recovery and rebuilding year,” particularly after a better than expected fourth quarter and holiday selling season, which was profitable even as sales dropped by 19 percent.

With its hundreds of stores, Macy’s is often viewed as a barometer for the health of department stores, malls and American consumers. Even before the pandemic hit, Macy’s was under strain. Last February, the company said that it planned to close about 125 of its least productive stores over three years and cut about 2,000 corporate and support function positions. Sales in 2019 had fallen to $24.6 billion from $25 billion a year earlier, though it was profitable at the time.

On the second day of the DealBook DC Policy Project, we will hear from more policymakers and business leaders about the challenges for the coronavirus vaccine rollout, the future of financial regulation and the outlook for bipartisanship in polarized times.

Here is the lineup (all times Eastern):

12:30 P.M. – 1 P.M.

Karen Lynch of CVS Health on the vaccine rollout

Karen Lynch took over CVS Health this month as the pharmacy chain takes center stage in efforts to fight the pandemic. It is working with the government to distribute the coronavirus vaccine in its stores, as well as in nursing homes and assisted-living facilities. To aid in those efforts, the company hired 15,000 employees at the end of last year, staffing up to deal with what President Biden has called “gigantic” logistical hurdles to the vaccine rollout.

2:30 P.M. – 3 P.M.

Vlad Tenev of Robinhood and Jay Clayton, former S.E.C. chairman, on the markets

At the center of the recent meme-stock frenzy was the online brokerage firm Robinhood, which has attracted millions of users with commission-free trades but drew outrage among its users when it halted trading in GameStop and other stocks at the height of the mania.

Vlad Tenev, Robinhood’s chief executive, is fresh from facing hours of hostile questioning at a congressional hearing last week about his company’s business practices. Joining him to discuss what regulators should now do — if anything — is Jay Clayton, the veteran Wall Street lawyer who led the Securities and Exchange Commission during the Trump administration. From the beginning of his tenure, Mr. Clayton said that his mission was protecting “the long-term interests of the Main Street investor.”

5:30 P.M. – 6 P.M.

Senator Mitt Romney on finding common ground

Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, crossed party lines to vote to convict President Donald J. Trump on articles of impeachment, twice. He is also drafting a bill with Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, that would raise the minimum wage while forbidding businesses to hire undocumented immigrants. This is typical of Mr. Romney’s approach, speaking to concerns on both sides of the aisle in an era of stark partisan divisions.

Credit…Jerome Favre/EPA, via Shutterstock

HSBC is deepening its focus on Asia as it looks to unload some of its troubled Western operations, the bank said on Tuesday.

Noel Quinn, the chief executive, said the bank would invest $6 billion to expand its wealth management and wholesale banking business in Hong Kong, China and Singapore over the next five years. He also said he was considering relocating some of the bank’s top executives to Hong Kong because it would be “important to be closer to growth opportunities.”

Underscoring the turn toward Asia, the bank, which is based in London, also said it was considering the sale of its U.S. retail banking network and was in talks with potential buyers for its French consumer banking unit.

HSBC, which derives more than half of its revenue from China, has come under increasing political pressure from China and Britain over its business operations in Hong Kong, the former British colony. Pro-Beijing lawmakers in the city have publicly pressured it to embrace the Communist Party’s firmer grip on Hong Kong. When some executives have pledged support to Beijing, British members of Parliament have hammered the bank.

The political focus on HSBC is unlikely to ease and any future public statement about plans to move top executives to Hong Kong could prompt further criticism from British lawmakers.

“We haven’t firmed up our plans yet,” Mr. Quinn said on a call with reporters. “But the majority of executives will remain in London.”

HSBC, which reported its profit before tax in 2020 fell by 34 percent to $8.8 billion compared with a year earlier, blamed the pandemic for its financial performance.

Credit…Richa Naidu/Reuters

The company that makes the aluminum cans used by LaCroix, White Claw and other beverage giants is spinning off that business in a deal that values the new company at $8.5 billion, the company announced Tuesday.

The deal by the Ardagh Group, which is based in Luxembourg, would be in the form of a merger with a special-purpose acquisition vehicle, or SPAC, backed by an affiliate of the Gores Group, a private equity firm based in California.

It is a bet on the continued growth of the can business, as companies increasingly weigh the environmental consequences of their products. Nestlé announced the sale of its water business for $4.3 billion this month, in part a move to shift away from water packaged in plastic. Aluminum cans are far easier to recycle than plastic bottles.

Ardagh will retain a roughly 80 percent stake in the company after the deal. Investors are contributing a $600 million private placement, while Gores is putting in $525 million in cash. The new company, Ardagh Metal Packaging, will issue $2.65 billion of new debt. Those proceeds will go to Ardagh.

The deal, involving an already-public company carving off a unit with the backing of a SPAC, is the latest twist on a SPAC transaction. The Gores Group’s experience in SPACs was part of its appeal to Ardagh as a buyer, said Ardagh’s chair, Paul Coulson.

The Gores SPAC, named Gores Holdings V, is the seventh such deal the group has done. “You don’t really want to be going to a surgeon and have him perform his first surgery,” Mr. Coulson said.

Ardagh generates more half its roughly $7 billion in annual sales from making cans for beverage companies. This past year, sales by the unit grew 2 percent, fueled by beverage sales and environmental awareness, while earnings before interest tax depreciation and amortization grew 8 percent. Ardagh will keep its glass packaging business.

For beverage companies, cans have become an increasingly important tool for branding, providing colorful and sleek packaging.

When Ardagh acquired its canning operation in 2016 for $3 billion, it did most of its business with legacy brands like large soda and beer companies. It has since worked with younger and faster-growing seltzer-based brands like White Claw, LaCroix and Truly Hard Seltzer to help charge its growth. To prepare for further expected expansion in the United States, it bought a factory in Huron, Ohio.

Globally, the company is considering growth in Europe and Brazil, where beer sales remain strong as consumers are increasingly shifting from tap to cans.

Credit…Anastasiia Sapon for The New York Times

Nearly a month into the second run of the Paycheck Protection Program, $126 billion in emergency aid has been distributed by banks, which make the government-backed loans, to nearly 1.7 million small businesses.

But a thicket of errors and technology glitches has slowed the relief effort and vexed borrowers and lenders alike, Stacy Cowley reports for The New York Times.

Some are run-of-the-mill challenges magnified by the immense demand for loans, which has overwhelmed customer service representatives. But many stem from new data checks added by the Small Business Administration to combat fraud and eliminate unqualified applicants.

Instead of approving applications from banks immediately, the S.B.A. has held them for a day or two to verify some of the information. That has caused — or exposed — a cascade of problems. Formatting applications in ways that will pass the agency’s automated vetting has been a challenge for some lenders, and many have had to revise their technology systems almost daily to keep up with adjustments to the agency’s system. False red flags, which can require time-consuming human intervention to fix, remain a persistent problem.

Numerated, a technology company that processes loans for more than 100 lenders, still has around 10 percent of its applications snarled in error codes, down from a peak of more than 25 percent, said Dan O’Malley, the company’s chief executive.

Nearly 5 percent of the 5.2 million loans made last year had “anomalies,” the agency revealed last month, ranging from minor mistakes like typos to major ones like ineligibility. Even tiny mistakes can spiral into bureaucratic disasters.

Credit…Leah Millis/Reuters

Wally Adeyemo, President Biden’s nominee for deputy Treasury Secretary, plans to emphasize the importance of rebuilding the United States’ alliances to combat China’s unfair trade practices and halt foreign interference in the country’s democratic institutions at his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, according to a copy of his prepared remarks, which were reviewed by The New York Times.

His remarks highlight the importance that the Biden administration is placing on multilateralism as it seeks to undo many of the economic policies put in place by former President Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Adeyemo will tell members of the Senate Finance Committee that Treasury Secretary Janet L. Yellen has asked him to focus on national security matters at the department. If confirmed, he will be a pivotal player in the country’s economic diplomacy efforts.

“We must reclaim America’s credibility as a global leader, advocating for economic fairness and democratic values,” Mr. Adeyemo will say.

Mr. Adeyemo is expected to be introduced at the hearing by Senator Elizabeth Warren, the progressive Democrat from Massachusetts. Ms. Warren, who established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before joining the Senate, worked with Mr. Adeyemo, who served as her first chief of staff.

Mr. Adeyemo will discuss the nexus between economic and national security, arguing that “Made in America” policies will make the country more competitive around the world. If confirmed, he is expected to conduct a broad review of Treasury’s sanctions program, which the Trump administration used aggressively, but often haphazardly, against Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and other countries.

“Treasury’s tools must play a role in responding to authoritarian governments that seek to subvert our democratic institutions; combating unfair economic practices in China and elsewhere; and detecting and eliminating terrorist organizations that seek to do us harm,” Mr. Adeyemo, a former Obama administration official, will say.

Born in Nigeria, Mr. Adeyemo emigrated with his parents to the United States when he was a baby and settled in Southern California outside Los Angeles. At the hearing, he will also talk about his working-class upbringing and the need to ensure that low-income communities and communities of color, which have been hit hardest by the pandemic, receive relief.

Credit…Kate Munsch/Reuters

Adam Neumann, the flamboyant co-founder of WeWork, and SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate that rescued the co-working company in 2019, have in recent weeks made significant headway toward settling their drawn-out legal dispute, according to two people with knowledge of the matter. That battle has stalled SoftBank’s efforts to take WeWork public.

As part of its multibillion-dollar bailout of WeWork, SoftBank offered to pay $3 billion for stock owned by Mr. Neumann and other shareholders. Several months later, after the coronavirus pandemic had emptied WeWork’s locations, SoftBank withdrew the offer. Mr. Neumann then sued SoftBank for breach of contract.

SoftBank was already a big investor in WeWork when it withdrew plans for an initial public offering in 2019. Now, SoftBank has plans to combine WeWork with a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company, a type of deal that has recently become a popular way of quickly bringing private companies public. The legal dispute between Mr. Neumann and SoftBank is a threat to such a deal because it leaves unresolved the question of how much control SoftBank has over WeWork.

The settlement talks, which were reported earlier by The Wall Street Journal, could still fall apart, the two people said. Under the terms being discussed, SoftBank would buy half the number of shares that it had originally agreed to, one of the people said. As a result, it would pay $1.5 billion, not $3 billion. Mr. Neumann would get nearly $500 million instead of almost $1 billion, but he would retain more of his shares.

Under Mr. Neumann, WeWork grew at a breakneck pace and was using up so much cash that it was close to bankruptcy before SoftBank stepped in. Under the management team SoftBank installed, WeWork has tried to cut costs by slowing its growth and negotiating deals with the landlords it rents space from.

Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Movie theaters in New York City will be permitted to open for the first time in nearly a year on March 5, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced at a news conference on Monday.

The theaters will only be permitted to operate at 25 percent of their maximum capacity, with no more than 50 people per screening. Masks will be mandatory, and theaters must assign seating to patrons to guarantee proper social distancing. Tests for the virus will not be required.

Movie theaters were permitted to open with similar limits in the rest of the state in late October, but New York City was excluded out of concern that the city’s density would hasten the spread of the virus there.

The virus has battered the movie theater industry. In October, the owner of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in the United States, temporarily closed its theaters as Hollywood studios kept postponing releases and cautious audiences were hesitant to return to screenings. AMC Entertainment, the world’s largest movie theater chain, has increasingly edged toward bankruptcy.

The economic effects of the pandemic have been particularly felt in New York City, one of the biggest movie markets in the United States. Theaters in the city closed in mid-March, as the region was becoming an epicenter of the pandemic in the country.

While other indoor businesses, including restaurants, bowling alleys and museums, had been allowed to open in the city, Mr. Cuomo had kept movie theaters closed out of concern that people would be sitting indoors in poorly ventilated theaters for hours, risking the further spread of the virus.

Theaters that open will be required to have enhanced air filtration systems. Public health experts say when considering indoor gatherings, the quality of ventilation is key because the virus is known to spread more easily indoors.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement was applauded by the National Association of Theater Owners.

“New York City is a major market for moviegoing in the U.S.; reopening there gives confidence to film distributors in setting and holding their theatrical release dates, and is an important step in the recovery of the entire industry,” the association said in a statement.

In a statement, AMC’s chief executive, Adam Aron, said the company would open all 13 of its New York City theaters on March 5.

The move came just days after Mr. Cuomo said that indoor family entertainment centers and places of amusement could reopen statewide, at 25 percent maximum capacity, on March 26. Outdoor amusement parks will be allowed to open with a 33 percent capacity limit in April.

The governor also said that the state was working on guidelines to allow pool and billiards halls to reopen after the state lost a lawsuit from pool hall operators. Those establishments will be allowed to reopen at 50 percent capacity with masks required, he said.

Cases in New York remain high despite climbing down from their January peak. Over the last seven days, the state averaged 38 cases per 100,000 residents each day, as of Sunday. That is the second-highest rate per capita of new cases in the last week in the country, after South Carolina.

Tags Economic, Focus, Live, pain, Persists, Powell, Testify, Updates

World News

Covid-19 World Information: Dwell Updates on Variants, Instances and Deaths

Post author By
Post date February 22, 2021

Here’s what you need to know:

Video

transcript

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transcript

Boris Johnson Maps Out Plan to Lift Virus Lockdown

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain outlined a plan to remove lockdown measures as a path toward “freedom” for the region.

We cannot escape the fact that lifting lockdown will result in more cases, more hospitalizations and sadly, more deaths, and this would happen whenever lockdown is lifted, whether now or in six or nine months, because there will always be some vulnerable people who are not protected by the vaccines. This roadmap should be cautious, but also irreversible. We’re setting out on what I hope and believe is a one-way road to freedom, and this journey is made possible by the pace of the vaccination program. In England, everyone in the top four priority groups were successfully offered a vaccine by the middle of February. The sequence will be driven by the evidence. So outdoor activity will be prioritized as the best way to restore freedoms while minimizing the risk. At every stage, our decisions will be led by data, not dates.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain outlined a plan to remove lockdown measures as a path toward “freedom” for the region.CreditCredit…Pool photo by Geoff Caddick

LONDON — Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said Monday that schools in England would reopen on March 8 and that people would be allowed to socialize outdoors starting on March 29, the tentative first steps in a long-awaited plan to ease a nationwide lockdown prompted by a highly contagious variant of the coronavirus.

Mr. Johnson’s “road map” was intended to give an exhausted country a path back to normalcy after a dire period in which infections skyrocketed and hospitals overflowed with patients. At the same time, Britain rolled out a remarkably successful vaccination program, injecting 17 million people with their first doses.

That milestone, combined with a decline in new cases and hospital admissions, paved the way for Mr. Johnson’s announcement. But the prime minister emphasized repeatedly that he planned to move slowly in reopening the economy, saying that he wanted this lockdown to be the last the nation had to endure.

Under the government’s plan, pubs, restaurants, retail shops, and gyms in England will stay closed for at least another month — meaning that, as a practical matter, daily life will not change much for millions of people until the spring.

“We’re setting out on what I hope is a one-way journey to freedom,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement to the House of Commons. “This journey is made possible by the success of the vaccine program.”

The specific timetable, Mr. Johnson said, will hinge on four factors: the continued success of the vaccine rollout; evidence that vaccines are reducing hospital admissions and deaths; no new surge in cases that would tax the health service; and no sudden risk from new variants of the virus.

“At every stage,” the prime minister said, “our decisions will led by data, not dates.”

Mr. Johnson was scheduled to present the plan to the nation in an evening news conference, along with data that he said showed that the two main vaccines — from Pfizer and AstraZeneca — both reduced severe illness.

Mr. Johnson’s appearance in Parliament ended days of speculation about the government’s timetable. But it is likely to kindle a new round of debate about whether Mr. Johnson is easing restrictions fast enough.

With pubs and restaurants not allowed to offer indoor service until May, some members of Mr. Johnson’s Conservative Party are likely to revive their pressure campaign to lift the measures more quickly.

Mr. Johnson, however, appears determined to avoid a repeat of his messy reopening of the economy last May after the first phase of the pandemic.

Then, the government’s message was muddled — workers were urged to go back to their offices but avoid using public transportation — and some initiatives, like subsidizing restaurant meals to bolster the hospitality industry, looked reckless in hindsight.

Under Mr. Johnson’s plan, the current coronavirus restrictions would be lifted in four steps, with a gap of five weeks between steps. That way, the government would have four weeks to analyze the impact of each relaxation and another week’s notice of the changes to the public and businesses.

All the moves would be made throughout England, with no return to the regional differences in rules that applied last year, depending on local infection rates. The government warned that the dates specified are the earliest at which the restrictions would be lifted, and that the steps may happen later.

When students go back to school, they will be regularly tested for the virus while older pupils will be required to wear face masks. Those living in nursing homes will be allowed one regular visitor, but few other restrictions will be lifted.

Starting on March 29, up to six people would be allowed to meet outdoors, including in gardens. Outdoor sports will be permitted and though people will be urged to stay in their areas, they will not be urged to remain in their homes.

Then, no earlier than April 12, retail shops will reopen, along with hairdressers, beauty salons, gyms, museums, and libraries, while people will be able to eat and drink outside in pub and restaurant gardens in small groups.

Starting on May 17, up to six people, and groups drawn from two households, will be able to meet indoors, including in pubs and restaurants. Hotels will also be able to reopen and spectators will be allowed into sporting events in limited numbers.

Restrictions on foreign travel could also be eased, though that will be addressed by one of several policy reviews being launched by the government. These will also focus on the possible use of vaccine passports to help open up the economy, and on guidance and rules on social distancing measures such as the use of face masks.

United States ›	United StatesOn Feb. 21	14-day change
New cases	55,195	–44%
New deaths	1,247	–32%

World ›	WorldOn Feb. 21	14-day change
New cases	292,003	–20%
New deaths	5,729	–25%

U.S. vaccinations ›

Credit…Angela Weiss/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Movie theaters in New York City will be permitted to open for the first time in nearly a year on March 5, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced at a news conference on Monday.

The virus has battered the movie theater industry. In October, the owner of Regal Cinemas, the second-largest cinema chain in the United States, temporarily closed its theaters as Hollywood studios kept postponing releases and cautious audiences were hesitant to return to screenings. AMC, the world’s largest movie theater chain, has increasingly edged toward bankruptcy.

While other indoor businesses, including restaurants, bowling alleys and museums had been allowed to open in the city, Mr. Cuomo had kept movie theaters closed out of concern that people would be sitting indoors in poorly-ventilated theaters for hours, risking the further spread of the virus.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement was applauded by the National Association of Theater Owners.

Cases in New York remain high despite climbing down from its January peak. Over the last seven days, the state averaged 38 cases per 100,000 residents each day, as of Sunday. That is the second-highest rate per capita of new cases in the last week in the country, after South Carolina.

Credit…James Estrin/The New York Times

The Food and Drug Administration said on Monday that vaccine developers would not need to conduct lengthy randomized controlled trials to evaluate vaccines that have been adapted to target concerning coronavirus variants.

The recommendations, which call for small trials more like what’s required for annual flu vaccines, would greatly accelerate the review process at a time when scientists are increasingly anxious about how the variants might slow or reverse progress made against the virus.

The guidance was part of a slate of new documents the agency released on Monday, including others addressing how antibody treatments and diagnostic tests might need to be retooled to respond to the virus variants. Together, they amounted to the federal government’s most detailed acknowledgment of the threat the variants pose to existing vaccines, treatments and tests for the coronavirus and come weeks after the F.D.A.’s acting commissioner, Dr. Janet Woodcock, said the agency was developing a plan.

“We want the American public to know that we are using every tool in our toolbox to fight this pandemic, including pivoting as the virus adapts,” Dr. Woodcock said in a statement Monday.

Most of the vaccine manufacturers with authorized vaccines or candidates in late-stage trials have already announced plans to adjust their products to address the vaccine variants. The Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines use mRNA technology that the companies have said can be used to alter the existing vaccines within six weeks, although testing and manufacturing would take longer.

Moderna has already begun developing a new version of its vaccine that could be used as a booster shot against a virus variant that originated in South Africa, known as B.1.351, which seems to dampen the effectiveness of the existing vaccines.

A fast-spreading coronavirus variant first observed in Britain has also gained a worrisome mutation that could make it harder to control with vaccines. That variant with the mutation was found in the United States last week.

Still, the guidance did not appear to be written with the assumption that new vaccines were imminent, or would be needed at all. Despite the recent indications that some variants — and particularly B.1.351 — make the currently authorized vaccines less effective, the shots still offer protection and appear to greatly reduce the severity of the disease, preventing hospitalizations and death.

An updated Covid-19 vaccine can skip the monthslong process of a randomized clinical trial that would compare it with a placebo, the agency said. But a tweaked vaccine will still need to go undergo some testing. In trials proposed by the F.D.A., researchers will draw blood from a relatively small group of volunteers who have been given the adapted vaccine. Scientists will then observe what percentage of volunteers’ samples produce an immune response to the variants in the lab, and how large that response is. The vaccines will be judged acceptable if they produce an immune response that is relatively close to what is prompted by the original vaccines.

The volunteers will also be monitored carefully for side effects. The agency said the testing can be done in a single age group and then extrapolated to other age groups.

The guidance also encouraged the use of animal studies to support the case for modified vaccines, in case immune response studies come up with ambiguous conclusions.

The F.D.A. acknowledged that many questions remain unanswered, such as what type of data would trigger the need for an adapted vaccine and who would make that decision. The agency also noted that scientists have not yet determined what level of antibodies in a vaccinated person’s blood would protect someone from the virus.

Some other vaccines are regularly updated in a similar way. Because the influenza virus evolves rapidly from one year to the next, vaccine developers have to come up with new recipes annually.

The newly tweaked Covid-19 vaccines would be authorized under an amendment to the emergency authorization granted to the original vaccine, regulators said.

Credit…David Goldman/Associated Press

The number of Americans hospitalized for Covid-19 is at its lowest since early November, just before the surge that went on to ravage the country for months.

There were 56,159 people hospitalized as of Feb. 21, according to the Covid Tracking Project. That’s the lowest since Nov. 7. It’s a striking decline for a nation that is approaching 500,000 total deaths and once had some of the world’s worst coronavirus hot spots.

On Monday evening, President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to have a moment of silence for the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from Covid-19.

While deaths remain high, because it can take weeks for patients to die from Covid-19, the number of U.S. hospitalizations has steadily and rapidly declined since mid-January, when the seven-day average reached about 130,000, according to a New York Times database. Experts attributed that peak to crowds gathering indoors in colder weather, especially during the holidays, when more people traveled than at any other time during the pandemic.

Experts have pointed to a variety of explanations for why the country’s coronavirus metrics have been improving over the past few months: more widespread mask use and social distancing after people saw friends and relatives die, better knowledge about which restrictions work, more effective public health messaging, and, more recently, a growing number of people who have been vaccinated. The most vulnerable, like residents of nursing homes and other elderly people, were among the first to receive the vaccine.

While scientists hope the worst is behind us, some warn of another spike in cases in the coming weeks, or a “fourth wave,” if people become complacent about masks and distancing, states lift restrictions too quickly or the more contagious variants become dominant and are able to evade vaccines.

The change can be felt most tangibly in intensive care units: Heading into her night shift in the I.C.U. at Presbyterian Rust Medical Center in Rio Rancho, N.M., Dr. Denise A. Gonzales, the medical director, said she had seen a difference in her staff.

“People are smiling. They are optimistic,” she said. “They’re making plans for the future.” During the worst of the crisis, “working in such a highly intense environment where people are so sick and are on so much support and knowing that statistically very few are going to get better — that’s overwhelming.”

Though the winter wave that hit her hospital system was “twice as bad” as the summer surge, she said it seemed more manageable because hospitals had prepared to move patients around, staff had more knowledge about P.P.E. and treatment therapies, and facilities had better airflow.

At the CoxHealth hospital system in Springfield, Mo., there was a “moment of celebration” as staff emptied the emergency Covid-19 I.C.U. wing built last spring. “We have not defeated this disease,” said Steve Edwards, the system’s chief executive. “But the closing of this unit, at least for now, is a tremendous symbolic victory.”

Staff members wearing biohazard suits and heavy-duty masks were pictured in a rare occasion of relief and joy that Mr. Edwards shared on Twitter.

This is a moment of celebration as we vacated the emergency Covid ICU. Our number of Covid patients at Cox South has dropped to 43, and only 5 critical. We are mindful of future worries, but for now, HERE COMES THE SUN! pic.twitter.com/57t2TvWweB

— Steve Edwards (@SDECoxHealth) February 18, 2021

Dr. Kyan C. Safavi, the medical director of a group that tracks Covid-19 hospitalizations at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said the number of newly admitted patients has dropped sharply. The hospital is admitting about 10 to 15 new patients daily, a decline of about 50 percent from early January, Dr. Safavi said.

“Everybody’s physically exhausted — and probably a little bit mentally exhausted — but incredibly hopeful,” Dr. Safavi said.

Credit…Pool Photo by Jane Barlow, via AFP–Getty Images

The first studies of Britain’s mass inoculation program showed strong evidence on Monday that the coronavirus vaccines were working as intended, offering among the clearest signs yet that the vaccines slash the rate of Covid-19 hospital admissions and may be reducing transmission of the virus.

A single dose of either the AstraZeneca vaccine or the one made by Pfizer could avert most coronavirus-related hospitalizations, the British studies found, though researchers said it was too early to give precise estimates of the effect.

The findings on the AstraZeneca shot, the first to emerge outside of clinical trials, represented the strongest signal yet of the effectiveness of a vaccine that much of the world is relying on to end the pandemic.

And separate studies of the Pfizer vaccine offered tantalizing new evidence that a single shot may be reducing the spread of the virus, showing that it prevents not only symptomatic cases of Covid-19 but also asymptomatic infections.

The findings reinforced and went beyond studies out of Israel, which has also reported that the vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech offered significant protection from the virus in real-world settings, and not only in the clinical trials held last year. No other large nation is inoculating people as quickly as Britain, and it was the first country in the world to authorize and begin using both the Pfizer shot and the one developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford.

The studies released on Monday — two on the Pfizer shot and one on it and the AstraZeneca injection — showed both vaccines were effective against the more infectious coronavirus variant that has taken hold in Britain and spread around the world.

“Both of these are working spectacularly well,” said Aziz Sheikh, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who helped run a study of Scottish vaccinations.

Still, the findings contained some cautionary signs. And even as British lawmakers cited the strength of the vaccines in announcing a gradual loosening of lockdown restrictions, government scientists warned that many more people needed to be injected to prevent cases from spreading into vulnerable, vaccinated groups and occasionally causing serious disease and death.

Credit…Alyssa Schukar for The New York Times

The U.S. economy remains mired in a pandemic winter of shuttered storefronts, high unemployment and sluggish job growth. But attention is shifting to a potential post-Covid boom.

Forecasters have always expected the pandemic to be followed by a period of strong growth as businesses reopen and Americans resume their normal activities. But in recent weeks, economists have begun to talk of something stronger: a supercharged rebound that brings down unemployment, drives up wages and may foster years of stronger growth.

There are hints that the economy has turned a corner: Retail sales jumped last month as the latest round of government aid began showing up in consumers’ bank accounts. New unemployment claims have declined from early January, though they remain high. And measures of business investment have picked up.

Economists surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia this month predicted that U.S. output would increase 4.5 percent this year, which would make it the best year since 1999. Some expect an even stronger bounce: Economists at Goldman Sachs forecast that the economy would grow 6.8 percent this year and that the unemployment rate would drop to 4.1 percent by December, a level that took eight years to achieve after the last recession.

“We’re extremely likely to get a very high growth rate,” said Jan Hatzius, Goldman’s chief economist. “Whether it’s a boom or not, I do think it’s a V-shaped recovery,” he added, referring to a steep drop followed by a sharp rebound.

The growing optimism stems from several factors. Coronavirus cases are falling in the United States. The vaccine rollout is gaining steam. And largely because of trillions of dollars in federal help, the economy appears to have made it through last year with less structural damage than many people feared last spring.

Consumers are also sitting on a trillion-dollar mountain of cash, a result of months of lockdown-induced saving and rounds of stimulus payments.

“There will be this big boom as pent-up demand comes through and the economy is opening,” said Ellen Zentner, chief U.S. economist for Morgan Stanley. “There is an awful lot of buying power that we’ve transferred to households to fuel that pent-up demand.”

Even if there is a strong rebound, however, economists warn that not everyone will benefit.

Standard economic statistics like the unemployment rate and gross domestic product could mask persistent challenges facing many families, particularly the Black and Hispanic workers who have borne the brunt of the pandemic’s economic pain. That could lead Congress to pull back on aid when it is still needed.

Credit…Mike Stobe/Getty Images

New Jersey, home to several major league sports teams, will allow a limited number of fans to attend sports and entertainment events at venues with 5,000 or more seats as soon as next week, Gov. Philip D. Murphy said on Monday.

Indoor venues will be limited to 10 percent of their seating capacity, while outdoor venues will be limited to 15 percent capacity, Mr. Murphy said in a radio interview on WFAN. The events can begin next Monday at 6 a.m.

Mr. Murphy’s announcement comes two weeks after a similar decision by New York’s governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, whose plan allowed fans at venues with 10,000 or more seats starting this week, provided that seating is limited to 10 percent of the venue’s capacity.

Mr. Cuomo’s announcement covered several New York City-area sports franchises, like the Nets, Knicks, Rangers and Islanders, which can begin to have fans in the stands as soon as Tuesday. Attendees in New York have to show proof of a negative P.C.R. test for the coronavirus taken within 72 hours of the event.

Mr. Murphy said that New Jersey would not require test results, but people at the venues will be required to wear face coverings at games and remain socially distanced. Public health experts say when considering indoor gatherings, the quality of ventilation is key because the virus is known to spread more easily indoors.

Cases in New Jersey, while still high, are now on the decline, nearing levels reported in early November. Over the last seven days the state averaged 33 cases per 100,000 residents each day, as of Sunday. That was the third-highest rate per capita of new cases in the last week, after New York and South Carolina.

The governor’s announcement will allow his state’s pro hockey team, the Devils, to play home games starting next Tuesday, the team’s first home game after the change takes effect.

“This is a day toward which our entire staff has been planning, working, and looking forward to for the past 11 months,” said the team’s president, Jake Reynolds, in a statement.

The state also has two pro football teams, the Giants and the Jets; a Major League Soccer team, the Red Bulls; and a National Women’s Soccer League franchise, Sky Blue F.C. Mr. Murphy said he hoped those teams would still be able to have fans when their seasons began later this year.

“I’ll be shocked if we’re not at a higher level of capacity for Jets, Giants, Rutgers football, you name it, as we get into the summer and fall,” Mr. Murphy said.

Several other states have already permitted sports fans inside venues during the pandemic, especially at outdoor stadiums for football and baseball. But Mr. Cuomo and Mr. Murphy had resisted until December, when Mr. Cuomo worked with the N.F.L. to allow a limited number of fans at a Buffalo Bills playoff game in their open-air stadium.

Mr. Murphy also said that New Jersey would start to allow parents and guardians to watch their children play both indoor and outdoor college sports, provided venues meet capacity limits, on Monday. The state reopened high school sports to parents earlier this month, with indoor attendance limited to 35 percent or 150 people.

New Jersey will also allow houses of worship and religious services to operate at 50 percent capacity effective Monday, the governor said. The limit is an increase from the previous cap of 35 percent maximum capacity up to 150 people.

Alison Saldanha contributed reporting.

Credit…Valery Hache/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The French Riviera, the famed strip along the Mediterranean coast that includes jet-setting hot spots like Saint-Tropez and Cannes, will be locked down over the next two weekends in an attempt to fight back a sharp spike in coronavirus infections.

France has been under a nighttime curfew since mid-January and restaurants, cafes and museums remain closed, but the government of President Emmanuel Macron has resisted putting a third national lockdown in place.

It has been a calculated gamble, with Mr. Macron hoping that he could tighten restrictions just enough to stave off a new surge of infections without resorting to the more severe rules in place in many other European countries.

The strategy has largely worked, but infection rates remain at a stubbornly high level of about 20,000 new cases per day. Officials have made it clear that the existing national restrictions would not be loosened and that more local lockdowns could be enforced in the coming days.

The French Riviera, which includes the city of Nice, has the country’s highest infection rate, and officials have grown increasingly alarmed as they surged to 600 cases per week per 100,000 residents — about three times the national rate.

“The epidemic situation has sharply deteriorated,” Bernard Gonzalez, a regional official for the Alpes-Maritimes area, said on Monday as he announced the lockdown, which will affect the coastal area between the cities of Menton and Théoule-sur-Mer.

Officials said that controls at the border with Italy, in airports and on roads would be toughened and that the police would carry out random coronavirus tests. New measures also include a closure of all larger shops and an acceleration of the vaccination campaign.

Infection rates surged as many French people flocked to the coast, attracted by the temperate Mediterranean weather as they sought to escape gloomy cities like Paris.

“We will be happy to receive lots of tourists this summer, once we win this battle,” Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, said last week. “But it is better to have a period while we say ‘Do not come here, this is not the moment.’”

Credit…Thomas Mukoya/Reuters

NAIROBI, Kenya — Officially, Tanzania has not reported a single coronavirus case since April 2020. According to government data, the country has had only 509 positive cases and 21 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

Almost no one believes those numbers to be credible. But they fit with President John Magufuli’s declaration that the pandemic was “finished.”

Now, facing criticism from the World Health Organization and skepticism from the public as Tanzanians take to social media to voice concern about a growing number of “pneumonia” cases, Mr. Magufuli is changing course and asking people to take precautions against the coronavirus and wear masks.

Speaking during a church service in the port city of Dar es Salaam, the president asked congregants to continue praying for the disease to go away but also urged them to follow “advice from health experts.”

In a statement released by his office, Mr. Magufuli said his government had never barred people from wearing masks but urged them to use only those made in Tanzania.

“The masks imported from outside the country are suspected of being unsafe,” the statement said.

Mr. Magufuli’s comments come a day after the director-general of the World Health Organization urged the country to start reporting coronavirus cases and share data.

Mr. Magufuli, 61, who was re-elected last October, has derided social distancing, publicized unproven treatments as a cure for the virus, questioned the efficacy of coronavirus testing kits supplied by the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and said that “vaccines don’t work.”

Yet health experts, religious entities and foreign embassies have issued warnings about the rising number of cases — and as deaths follow, the reality is harder to dismiss.

The vice president of the semiautonomous island of Zanzibar, Seif Sharif Hamad, died last week after contracting the virus, according to his political party. The United States Embassy in Tanzania also said in a statement it was “aware of a significant increase in the number of Covid-19 cases” since January.

Lawmakers are increasingly asking the health authorities to explain why so many people were dying from respiratory problems.

Speaking on Friday at the funeral of a government official, however, Mr. Magufuli said that citizens should put God first and not be instilled with fear about the virus.

“It is possible that we wronged God somewhere,” he said. “So let’s stand with God, my fellow Tanzanians.”

In his statement, the W.H.O. chief, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said he had spoken to “several authorities” in the country about their plans to mitigate the spread of the coronavirus but had yet to receive any response.

“This situation remains very concerning,” he said.

Credit…Todd Heisler/The New York Times

President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris plan to have a moment of silence during a candle lighting ceremony at the White House this evening to remember the nearly 500,000 people in the country who have died from Covid-19. They will ask Americans to join them.

Mr. Biden will also call for lowering federal flags to half-staff for the next five days, when the number of deaths is expected to pass the somber milestone. About 100,000 of these deaths have occurred since Jan. 18.

“Tonight’s events, including the president’s remarks, will highlight the magnitude of loss at this milestone marked for the American people and so many families across the country,” Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, said during a briefing Monday afternoon. “It will also speak to the power of the American people to turn the tide on this pandemic by working together, following public health guidelines and getting in line to be vaccinated as soon as they are eligible.”

Even as the number of deaths each day remains high, there are signs of improvement across the country. Since mid-January, the number of U.S. hospitalizations has steadily and swiftly declined. And the number of new cases has decreased more than 40 percent over the past two weeks and is down 70 percent since its high point on Jan. 8, according to a New York Times database.

Experts credit the declines, in part, to widespread mask-wearing, social distancing and vaccinations. About 12 percent of people in the country have received at least one vaccine dose, and about 5 percent are fully vaccinated.

Credit…Kirsten Luce for The New York Times

Around the United States, the vaccine rollout has reflected the same troubling inequalities as the pandemic’s death toll, leaving Black, Latino and poorer people at a disadvantage. In New York City, home to more than three million immigrants from all over the world, data released last week suggests that vaccination rates in immigrant enclaves scattered across the five boroughs are among the city’s lowest.

This month, The New York Times interviewed 115 people living in predominantly immigrant neighborhoods about the rollout and their attitudes toward the vaccines.

Only eight people said they had received a shot. The interviews revealed language and technology roadblocks: Some believed there were no vaccine sites nearby. Others described mistrust in government officials and the health care system. Many expressed fears about vaccine safety fomented by news reports and social media.

The broader public may find it difficult to understand why people in communities ravaged by the coronavirus would be reluctant to line up to get vaccinated, said Marcella J. Tillett, the vice president of programs and partnerships at the Brooklyn Community Foundation.

“This is where there has been a lot of illness and death,” said Ms. Tillett, whose foundation is distributing funds to social service organizations for vaccine education and outreach. “The idea that people are just going to step out and trust a system that has harmed them is nonsensical.”

To be sure, thousands of immigrant New Yorkers have gotten vaccinated, navigating the system with patience, if not ease. Others have relied on social service organizations. BronxWorks recently held a five-day vaccine pop-up on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, administering hundreds of shots each day.

To increase participation in immigrant enclaves and communities of color, the city has opened vaccine mega-sites at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx and Citi Field in Queens, which offer vaccinations to eligible residents of each borough. (There have been reports of suburbanites coming in to claim doses.)

The state is holding online “fireside chats” in several languages, opening new sites in Brooklyn and Queens, and continuing to bring pop-up sites to neighborhood organizations.

On Monday, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority would boost bus service to the two new vaccine sites from public housing projects and community centers in Brooklyn and Queens to better serve Black, Latino and poorer New Yorkers who are most vulnerable to the virus.

Still, obstacles remain.

Credit…Audra Melton for The New York Times

Coronavirus clusters at six elementary schools in Georgia resulted from poor social distancing and, to a lesser extent, inadequate mask use by students, public health officials reported on Monday.

Teachers played a role in transmitting the virus in all but one of the clusters, and two of the clusters probably involved teacher-to-teacher transmission that was followed by teacher to student transmission, the study found.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention examined nine clusters of three or more linked infections involving teachers and students in Cobb County, Ga., between Dec. 1 and Jan. 22, a period when the county, in suburban Atlanta, was experiencing a surge in cases.

Some 2,600 elementary school students — about 80 percent of the district’s total — were going to school in person at the time, and some 700 staff members were working in person.

The researchers identified transmission clusters involving 13 educators and 32 students at six schools in the county; some schools had more than one cluster.

In four of the nine clusters, an educator was identified as the index patient, or original source of infection. One cluster had a student as the index patient, and the researchers could not determine who the index patient was in the rest.

The study was limited in many ways, the investigators conceded. They said it was “challenging” to try to distinguish between infections acquired at school and those that were acquired in the community.

Some clusters may have been missed, they said, because almost half the people who were identified through contact tracing as having possibly been exposed refused to be tested.

Because infected adults are more likely to have symptoms and be tested, teachers may have been identified more frequently than students as index cases, the researchers said, while instances of student-to-student or student-to-teacher transmission may have gone undetected.

Even so, the authors said, their findings were consistent with studies in other countries. One in Britain found that transmission at schools happened most often from teacher to teacher; a German study found that in-school transmission rates were three times as high when the cluster began with an educator, rather than a student.

The C.D.C. investigators urged teachers to follow precautions to prevent coronavirus infection when they are not in school, and to limit their interactions with colleagues at meetings and over lunch.

They also called for teachers to be vaccinated. “Although not a requirement for reopening schools, adding Covid-19 vaccination for educators as an additional mitigation measure, when available, might serve several important functions, including protecting educators at risk for severe Covid-19 associated illness, potentially reducing in school SARS-CoV-2 transmission and minimizing interruption to in-person learning,” the researchers said.

Credit…Ariana Drehsler for The New York Times

A coronavirus testing campaign in San Francisco has found more evidence that a variant first observed in California may be more contagious.

Looking at more than 600 cases in one of the city’s predominantly Latino communities, scientists found that the proportion of virus samples carrying this variant greatly increased from late November to late January.

Although the study was relatively small, and no one knows whether the variant affects the effectiveness of vaccines, “this is not the time to let down the guard,” said Joe DeRisi, the co-president of the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and one of the scientists involved in the new study. A more contagious variant could threaten to reverse the decline in cases seen over the past couple of months in California and elsewhere.

The results were announced on Monday by the University of California at San Francisco, which carried out the research in collaboration with the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Latino Task Force for Covid-19. The data have not yet been published.

The variant first came to light on Jan. 17, when the California Department of Public Health reported that it had become noticeably common in several communities across the state. The variant, which has gone by several names, is now known as B.1.429.

The variant might have become common in one of two ways. It might be more contagious, or it might simply have gone through a superspreading event, fueling its spread. “Just by random chance, a bad wedding or choir practice can create a large frequency difference,” Dr. DeRisi said.

Soon after the announcement, researchers at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles reported that B.1.429 was rapidly becoming more common around that city. But those findings were based on a limited sample of just 185 coronavirus genomes that had been fully sequenced.

To get more samples, Dr. DeRisi and his colleagues focused their efforts on the predominantly Latino community in the Mission District neighborhood. There they have been running a community testing program since last April, called Unidos en Salud.

Looking at their samples from late November, the researchers found that 16 percent of the coronaviruses belonged to B.1.429. By January, after sequencing 630 genomes, the team found 53 percent were B.1.429.

Because the researchers were running their tests in a community, they could investigate how the B.1.429 variant spread from person to person. In some cases, entire families came to get tested. In other cases, the researchers followed up on positive tests to ask if they could test other people in the same household. The researchers studied the spread of B.1.429 and other variants in 326 households.

The researchers found that B.1.429 was more likely to spread among people living in the same house than other variants were. People had a 35 percent chance of getting infected if someone else in their home was infected with the B.1.429 variant. If the person was infected with another variant, the rate was only 26 percent.

“What we see is a modest, but meaningful difference,” Dr. DeRisi said.

Credit…Vassil Donev/EPA, via Shutterstock

When vaccines arrived this winter in Bulgaria, which had one of the highest excess mortality rates in Europe, the authorities hoped people would clamor for a shot.

Instead, they were greeted by many with a shrug and skepticism.

Just 1.4 percent of the nation’s seven million people have been inoculated with the first dose, according to the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control.

The rollout of mass vaccination programs has been slow in many parts of Europe, but Bulgaria is lagging even further behind.

In an effort to speed up progress, Prime Minister Boiko Borisov called for “green corridors” allowing anyone who wanted a vaccination to get one, regardless of whether they were in a priority group under the country’s vaccination plan.

The goal was to administer around 10,000 shots per day, he said. The reaction appears to be better than expected: The lines evoked the period of communist rule, when people would spend hours waiting to get basic supplies like oil or meat.

Since Friday, 30,000 people received their first vaccination, according to data provided by the health ministry.

In comparison, around 120,000 total doses have been administered since vaccination campaign began in December.

Apostol Dyankov, a 38-year-old environmental expert in Sofia, received his shot on Sunday.

“I spent the weekend, browsing Twitter to figure out where this was for real,” he said. “The news was so unexpected that I couldn’t believe it’s actually happening. The lines I saw on the news reminded me of socialist times, when a store would receive a shipment of bananas.”

Donka Popopa, an owner of a construction business, described a chaotic scene at a vaccination site in Plovdiv, the country’s second-largest city, where medical workers were vaccinating all comers.

“We waited for several hours, even though we were told to come in the morning,” she said, adding that it had been difficult to figure out whether and when her employees were eligible for vaccination.

The health minister, Kostadin Angelov, told reporters in Sofia on Sunday that the turnout was a triumph.

“I would like to thank all the people who believed in science,” he said. “To those who have not been vaccinated, I would like to say something loud and clear: Bulgarians, hope is in your hands, the decision is yours. Please, trust the science, trust the doctors.”

Officials acknowledge, however, that maintaining the early burst of enthusiasm will be a challenge.

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