Tag: Long

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Health

How Lengthy Can We Stay?

How Long Can We Live?

Given these statistics, you can expect the record for the longest lifespan to also increase. Yet almost a quarter of a century after Calment’s death, no one is known to have reached or exceeded her 122 years. The next was an American named Sarah Knauss, who died two years after Calment at the age of 119. The oldest living person is Kane Tanaka (118), who lives in Fukuoka, Japan. Very few people make it past 115. (Some researchers have even questioned whether Calment really lived as long as she claimed, though most accept her records as legitimate based on the weight of the biographical evidence.)

As the world population approaches eight billion and science increasingly discovers promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the laboratory, the question of the potential limits of human life expectancy is more pressing than ever. When their work is closely examined, it is clear that longevity scientists have a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity. Historically, however, and somewhat frivolously in the view of many researchers, their views have been divided into two broad camps that some journalists and researchers refer to as pessimists and optimists. Those in the first group consider lifespan to be a candle wick that can only burn for so long. They generally think that we are rapidly approaching or have already reached life expectancy and that soon we will not see anyone older than Calment.

In contrast, the optimists see the lifespan as a highly, perhaps even infinitely elastic band. They anticipate significant increases in life expectancy around the world, an increase in the number of extraordinarily long-lived people – and eventually supercenturies who survive Calment and push the record to 125, 150, 200 and beyond. Although unresolved, the longstanding debate has already led to a much deeper understanding of what defines and limits lifespan – and the interventions that could one day extend it significantly.

The theoretical limits The length of a human life has annoyed scientists and philosophers for thousands of years, but for most of history their discussions have been largely based on deliberation and personal observation. In 1825, however, the British actuary Benjamin Gompertz published a new mathematical model of mortality that showed that the risk of death increased exponentially with age. If that risk accelerated further over the course of life, people would eventually reach a point where they essentially had no chance of surviving until the next year. In other words, they would reach an effective life limit.

Instead, Gompertz found that the risk of death was on a plateau with old age. “The lifespan limit is an issue that is likely to never be determined,” he wrote, “even if it should exist.” Since then, other scientists around the world, using new data and more sophisticated math, have found further evidence of accelerating death rates, followed by death plateaus not only in humans but also in numerous other species, including rats, mice, shrimp, nematodes and fruit flies and beetles .

A particularly provocative study in the prestigious research journal Nature in 2016 strongly suggested that the authors had found the limit of human lifespan. Jan Vijg, geneticist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and two colleagues analyzed decades of mortality data from several countries and concluded that while the highest reported age of death in these countries rose rapidly between the 1970s and 1990s, it has failed to rise since then and stagnates on average at 114.9 years. The human lifespan seemed to have reached its limit. Although some individuals, like Jeanne Calment, could live to an astounding age, they were outliers and not indicators of continuous life extension.

“Could someone run a two-minute mile? No. The human body is unable to move that fast due to anatomical restrictions. ‘

Categories
Health

Prime CDC physician says these are attainable lengthy covid signs

Top CDC doctor says these are possible long covid symptoms

VioletaStoimenova | E + | Getty Images

Americans shouldn’t hesitate to seek medical help if they believe they have persistent and debilitating symptoms due to Covid-19, an official with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who was notified on Wednesday.

The so-called Long Covid is still not well understood by health experts, said Dr. John Brooks, chief medical officer for the CDC’s Covid-19 response, told a House committee. A family doctor can help determine if you have long-term Covid or an unrelated illness, he said.

“If you have symptoms that you haven’t had before, there’s something new after Covid [such as] Chest pain, difficulty breathing, you can’t think clearly, you just aren’t getting any better than you imagined, you have a low threshold to seeking care, “Brooks said during a hearing for the House’s Energy and Trade Committee .

In general, people worry about going to the hospital and wasting a doctor’s time on something that isn’t too serious, especially during the pandemic, Brooks said. In potentially long covid cases that researchers are still trying to understand, people shouldn’t, he said.

“That may be fine in the short term, until we can really more clearly distinguish what defines this. We are in the learning stage,” he said.

Symptoms of long-term Covid, which researchers now refer to as post-acute consequences of Covid-19 or PASC, can develop well after the initial infection, and the severity can range from mild to incompetent, according to health officials and health experts.

University of Washington researchers released data in February that showed a third of patients reported persistent symptoms such as fatigue, shortness of breath, and insomnia that lasted for up to nine months.

Dr. Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, told the House Committee on Wednesday that people hospitalized with the virus appear to have a higher chance of developing Covid for long. But people who haven’t been hospitalized can also have persistent symptoms, he said.

Older Americans, women, and obese people also appear to be at higher risk of developing long covid, Collins told the committee. The US agency is working quickly to identify other potential risk factors.

The NIH launched an initiative in February to study long Covid and identify the causes and possible treatments.

Some people who have suffered from long-term Covid say they find relief after being vaccinated, puzzling health experts.

Sheri Paulson, a 53-year-old North Dakota resident who struggled to get out of bed months after her Covid-19 diagnosis, told CNBC in March that she was feeling better five days after her first Pfizer shot in February

Collins said Wednesday that the agency had heard anecdotal reports from people feeling better after the vaccination. But he added that large studies are still needed to determine if and how the shots actually improve symptoms.

Categories
Health

Science Performs the Lengthy Recreation. However Folks Have Psychological Well being Points Now.

Science Plays the Long Game. But People Have Mental Health Issues Now.

When assessing government-funded research projects – presumably a cleaner company – I re-asked the questions that people in crises keep asking me. Is this study useful in any way to my son or sister? Or, more generously, given the pace of research, could this work possibly be useful to someone at some point in their life?

The answer was almost always no. Again, this does not mean that the tools and technical understanding of brain biology have not been further developed. It’s just that these advances didn’t affect mental health in one way or another.

Don’t take my word for it. In his upcoming book, Recovery: Healing the Mental Health Care Crisis in America, Dr. Thomas Insel, former director of the National Institute of Mental Health: “The scientific advances in our field have been breathtaking, but as we studied risk factors for suicide, the death rate had increased by 33 percent. As we identified the neuroanatomy of addiction, deaths from overdose had tripled. While we were mapping the genes for schizophrenia, people with the disease were still chronically unemployed and died 20 years earlier. “

And it continues to this day. Government agencies like the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Mental Health Institute continue to double up, pouring huge sums of taxpayers’ money into biological research to someday find a neural signature or “blood test” for possible psychiatric diagnoses, perhaps someday in the Future useful – while people are in crisis now.

I’ve written about some of these studies. For example, the National Institutes of Health is conducting a $ 300 million study of brain imaging in 10,000+ young children with so many interacting variables for experience and development that it is difficult to pinpoint the study’s main goals. The agency also has a $ 50 million project underway to try to understand the myriad, cascading, and sometimes random, processes that occur during neural development and that could underlie some mental health issues.

This kind of great scientific effort is well-intentioned, but the payoffs are indeed uncertain. The late Scott Lilienfeld, big-budget psychologist and skeptic of brain research, had his own terminology for these types of projects. “They are either fishing expeditions or Hail Marys,” he would say. “Make your choice.” When people drown, they care less about the genetics of breathing than they are about a lifesaver.

In 1973, well-known microbiologist Norton Zinder took over a committee that considered the National Cancer Institute’s grants to study viruses. He concluded that the program had become a “gravy train” for a small group of preferred scientists and recommended that their support be cut in half. A tough, Zinder-like review of current behavioral research spending, I suspect, would result in equally sharp cuts.

Categories
Business

Jobless Claims Tick Up, Exhibiting a Lengthy Highway to Restoration: Stay Updates

The Forecast Salon in Birmingham, Ala. A pickup in business activity nationwide has fed hopes that workers’ prospects are improving. 

Here’s what you need to know:

Credit…Wes Frazer for The New York Times

A year after they first rocketed upward, jobless claims may finally be returning to earth.

More than 714,000 people filed for state unemployment benefits last week, the Labor Department said Thursday. That was up slightly from the week before, but still among the lowest weekly totals since the pandemic began.

In addition, 237,000 people filed for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, a federal program that covers people who don’t qualify for state benefits programs. That number, too, has been falling.

Jobless claims remain high by historical standards, and are far above the norm before the pandemic, when around 200,000 people a week were filing for benefits. Applications have improved only gradually — even after the recent declines, the weekly figure is modestly below where it was last fall.

But economists are optimistic that further improvement is ahead as the vaccine rollout accelerates and more states lift restrictions on business activity. Fewer companies are laying off workers, and hiring has picked up, meaning that people who lose their jobs are more likely to find new ones quickly.

“We could actually finally see the jobless claims numbers come down because there’s enough job creation to offset the layoffs,” said Julia Pollak, a labor economist at the job site ZipRecruiter.

But Ms. Pollak cautioned that benefits applications would not return to normal overnight. Even as many companies resume normal operations, others are discovering that the pandemic has permanently disrupted their business model.

“There are still a lot of business closures and a lot of layoffs that have yet to happen,” she said. “The repercussions of this pandemic are still rippling through this economy.”

Shoppers in Berlin’s Alexanderplatz. Germany and other countries have cut their value-added taxes to encourage consumer spending.Credit…Lena Mucha for The New York Times

The European Central Bank’s chief economist argued on Thursday that fears of a big rise in inflation are overblown, a sign that the people who control interest rates in the eurozone are likely to keep them very low for some time to come.

The comments — by Philip Lane, an influential member of the central bank’s Governing Council whose job includes briefing other members on the economic outlook — are an attempt to calm bond investors who are nervous that the end of the pandemic will lead to high inflation.

Fueling their fears, inflation in the eurozone rose to an annual rate of 1.3 percent in March from 0.9 percent in February, according to official data released on Wednesday, the fastest increase in prices in more than a year.

Market-based interest rates have been rising because investors worry that President Biden’s $2 trillion stimulus program will provoke a broad increase in prices for years to come. The interest rates that prevail on bond markets ripple through the financial system and can make mortgages and other types of borrowing more expensive, creating a drag on economic growth.

Despite big monthly swings in inflation during the last year, the average had been remarkably stable at an annual rate of about 1 percent, Mr. Lane wrote in a blog post on the central bank’s website on Thursday. That is well below the European Central Bank’s target of 2 percent.

“The volatility in inflation over 2020 and 2021 can be attributed to a host of temporary factors that should not affect medium-term inflation dynamics,” Mr. Lane wrote.

That is another way of saying that the European Central Bank is not going to panic about short-lived fluctuations in inflation and put the brakes on the eurozone economy anytime soon.

On the contrary, Mr. Lane’s analysis suggests that the European Central Bank will continue trying to push inflation toward the 2 percent target. In March, the central bank said it would increase its purchases of government and corporate bonds to try to keep a lid on market-based interest rates.

Mr. Lane said it was no surprise to see “considerable volatility in inflation during the pandemic period.” He attributed the ups and downs to quirky factors that are not likely to recur.

Germany and some other countries cut their value-added taxes to encourage consumer spending, then raised them again later. The price of fuel fluctuated wildly. People spent almost nothing on travel, but increased spending on home exercise equipment or products that they needed to work from home. That affected the way inflation is calculated and made the annual rate look higher, Mr. Lane said.

“The medium-term outlook for inflation remains subdued,” he wrote, “and closing the gap to our inflation aim will set the agenda for the Governing Council in the coming years.”

Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi oil minister, has argued that increasing oil output too fast would be risky.Credit…via Reuters

OPEC and its allies, including Russia, are meeting by videoconference Thursday to discuss whether to ease production curbs on oil as countries around the world try to expand from pandemic lockdowns.

Analysts say recent events will support the views of Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman, the Saudi oil minister, who has argued for caution in increasing supply, noting the risks of swamping the market. But other outcomes are possible at the meeting of the group known as OPEC Plus, including modest increases and even cuts in oil production,

France’s reimposition of a national lockdown, announced Wednesday, underlines persistent doubts about the pace of recovery from the pandemic, as have rising case numbers in the United States.

After modest increases when the Suez Canal was recently blocked by a cargo ship, oil prices were rising again on Thursday, with Brent crude, the global benchmark, more than 1 percent higher, to more than $63 a barrel.

“All signs seemingly point to the group maintaining current production levels,” Helima Croft, head of commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets, an investment bank, wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday.

Yet pressure may also come to increase supply. Members of the OPEC Plus group are withholding an estimated eight million barrels of a day, or about 9 percent of current global consumption. As the global economy recovers, it will become increasingly difficult for the Saudis to persuade others to restrain supplies.

By: Ella Koeze·Data delayed at least 15 minutes·Source: FactSet

Wall Street’s rally continued on Thursday as tech shares extended their gains. Shares in Europe and Asia were also higher, as traders focused on optimism about the economic recovery.

The S&P 500 rose 0.8 percent in early trading, on track for a record close, while the Nasdaq composite gained 1.8 percent.

Bond yields pulled further back from their recent 14-month high. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note fell to 1.69 percent.

Adding to the optimism about the economy, a measure of manufacturing activity rose to its highest since 1983, the Institute for Supply Management said.

New data released on Thursday showed a slight rise in claims for unemployment benefits, though the data from the week before showed claims at the lowest since the start of the pandemic. On Friday, the Labor Department will publish its monthly jobs report for March.

  • On Wednesday, President Biden laid out a $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which included money for a range of activities, including repairing roads and bridges, building affordable housing and caregiving facilities, and expanding access to broadband. It would be paid for by an increase in corporate taxes, undoing some of the cut by his predecessor, President Donald J. Trump.

  • The infrastructure plan also includes spending about $50 billion on the semiconductor industry, where a global shortage in chips has disrupted car manufacturing. Shares in Micron Technology, an Idaho-based chip maker, rose nearly 5 percent in premarket trading.

  • The plan includes $174 billion to encourage the manufacture and purchase of electric vehicles. Tesla shares rose 2.4 percent in early trading and ChargePoint Holdings, which has a large network of electric-vehicle charing stations, rose as much as 14 percent, adding to a 19 percent increase on Wednesday.

  • Most European stock indexes were higher even as more lockdowns were announced in the region. In France, restrictions have been expanded to more regions and schools will close for several weeks. In Italy, business closures will extend until the end of April. But a series of reports published on Thursday showed manufacturing activity picking up in Europe.

  • Oil prices rose ahead of a meeting between the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, at which they are set to decide production quotas for May. West Texas Intermediate, the U.S. benchmark, climbed 2.7 percent to just above $60 a barrel.

  • QuantumScape, a California-based start-up working on a technology that could make batteries cheaper, said it had reached a technical requirement that would clear the way for a $100 million investment by Volkswagen. QuantumScape’s shares jumped 16 percent in early trading.

  • On Friday, markets will be closed in the United States, Europe and some other countries for Good Friday.

The occupancy rate in nursing homes in the fourth quarter of 2020 was down 11 percentage points from the first quarter, but there are hurdles to staying out of facilities.Credit…Amr Alfiky/The New York Times

The pandemic has intensified a spotlight on long-running questions about how communities can do a better job supporting seniors who need care but want to live outside a nursing home.

The coronavirus had taken the lives of 181,000 people in U.S. nursing homes, assisted living and other long-term care facilities through last weekend, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation — 33 percent of the national toll.

The occupancy rate in nursing homes in the fourth quarter of 2020 was 75 percent, down 11 percentage points from the first quarter, according to the National Investment Center for Seniors Housing & Care, a research group. The shift may not be permanent, but this much is clear: As the aging of the nation accelerates, most communities need to do much more to become age-friendly, said Jennifer Molinsky, senior research associate at the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard.

“It’s about all the services that people can access, whether that’s the accessibility and affordability of housing, or transportation and supports that can be delivered in the home,” she said.

But there are hurdles for those who wish to stay out of a facility, Mark Miller reports for The New York Times:

  • A major shortage of age-friendly housing in the United States will present problems for seniors who wish to stay in their homes. By 2034, 34 percent of households will be headed by someone over 65, according to the Harvard center. Yet in 2011, just 3.5 percent of homes had single-floor living, no-step entry and extra-wide halls and doors for wheelchair access, according to Harvard’s latest estimates.

  • Medicare does not pay for most long-term care services, regardless of where they happen; reimbursement is limited to a person’s first 100 days in a skilled nursing facility. Medicaid, which covers only people with very low incomes, has long been the nation’s largest funder of long-term care. From its inception, the program was required to cover care in nursing facilities but not at home or in a community setting. “There’s a bias toward institutions,” said Judith Solomon, a senior fellow specializing in health at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Adam Bouhmad, second from right, has helped low-income families in Baltimore get affordable internet service through his Waves project.Credit…Jared Soares for The New York Times

A year after the pandemic turned the nation’s digital divide into an education emergency, President Biden is making affordable broadband a top priority, comparing it to the effort to spread electricity across the country. His $2 trillion infrastructure plan, announced on Wednesday, includes $100 billion to extend fast internet access to every home.

The money is meant to improve the economy by enabling all Americans to work, get medical care and take classes from wherever they live. Although the government has spent billions on the digital divide in the past, the efforts have failed to close it partly because people in different areas have different problems. Affordability is the main culprit in urban and suburban areas. In many rural areas, internet service isn’t available at all because of the high costs of installation.

“We’ll make sure every single American has access to high-quality, affordable, high speed internet,” Mr. Biden said in a speech on Wednesday. “And when I say affordable, I mean it. Americans pay too much for internet. We will drive down the price for families who have service now.”

Longtime advocates of universal broadband say the plan, which requires congressional approval, may finally come close to fixing the digital divide, a stubborn problem first identified and named by regulators during the Clinton administration. The plight of unconnected students during the pandemic added urgency.

“This is a vision document that says every American needs access and should have access to affordable broadband,” said Blair Levin, who directed the 2010 National Broadband Plan at the Federal Communications Commission. “And I haven’t heard that before from a White House to date.”

Some advocates for expanded broadband access cautioned that Mr. Biden’s plan might not entirely solve the divide between the digital haves and have-nots.

The plan promises to give priority to municipal and nonprofit broadband providers but would still rely on private companies to install cables and erect cell towers to far reaches of the country. One concern is that the companies won’t consider the effort worth their time, even with all the money earmarked for those projects. During the electrification boom of the 1920s, private providers were reluctant to install poles and string lines hundreds of miles into sparsely populated areas.

Taxpayers who received unemployment benefits last year — but who filed their federal tax returns before a new tax break became available — could receive an automatic refund as early as May, the Internal Revenue Service said on Wednesday.

The latest pandemic relief legislation — signed into law on March 11, in the thick of tax season — made the first $10,200 of unemployment benefits tax-free in 2020 for people with modified adjusted incomes of less than $150,000. (Married taxpayers filing jointly can exclude up to $20,400.)

But some Americans had already filed their tax returns by March and have been waiting for official agency guidance. Millions of U.S. workers filed for unemployment last year, but the I.R.S. said it was still determining how many workers affected by the tax change had already filed their tax returns.

On Wednesday, the I.R.S. confirmed that it would automatically recalculate the correct amount of benefits subject to taxation — and any overpayment will be refunded or applied to any other outstanding taxes owed. The first refunds are expected to be issued in May and will continue into the summer.

The I.R.S. said it would begin processing the simpler returns first, or those eligible for up to $10,200 in excluded benefits, and then would turn to returns for joint filers and others with more complex returns.

There is no need for those affected to file an amended return unless the calculations make the taxpayer newly eligible for additional federal credits and deductions not already included on the original tax return, the agency said. Those taxpayers may want to review their state tax returns as well, the I.R.S. said.

People who still haven’t filed and expect to do so electronically can simply answer the questions asked by their online tax preparer, which will factor in the new tax break when they file. The agency provided an updated worksheet and additional guidance in March for taxpayers that prefer paper.

Microsoft’s HoloLens headsets, demonstrated above in 2017, will equip soldiers with night vision, thermal vision and audio communication.Credit…Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

Microsoft said Wednesday that it would begin producing more than 120,000 augmented reality headsets for Army soldiers under a contract that could be worth up to $21.9 billion.

The HoloLens headsets use a technology called the Integrated Visual Augmentation System, which will equip soldiers wearing them with night vision, thermal vision and audio communication. The devices also have sensors that help soldiers target opponents in battle.

The deal is likely to create waves inside Microsoft, where some employees have objected to working with the Pentagon. Employees at other big tech companies, like Google, have also rejected what they say is the weaponization of their technology.

But Microsoft has long courted Defense Department work, including a $10 billion contract to build a cloud-computing system. Amazon had been seen as a front-runner to win the contract, but the Defense Department chose Microsoft.

Amazon claimed that President Donald J. Trump had interfered in the process because of his feud with Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive and the owner of The Washington Post. A legal fight over the contract is still active.

Soldiers have tested the Microsoft headsets for two years, the company said. The Army said the devices would be used in combat and training.

Microsoft said its testing of the headsets had helped the Defense Department’s “efforts to modernize the U.S. military by taking advantage of advanced technology and new innovations not available to military.”

The devices will “provide the improved situational awareness, target engagement and informed decision-making necessary” to overcome current and future adversaries, the Army said in a news release.

In 2018, Microsoft won a $480 million bid to make prototypes of the headsets. The Army said Wednesday that the new contract to produce them on a larger scale was for five years, with the option to add up to five more years.

Categories
World News

Faculties in Lengthy Seaside, Calif., Begin Reopening This Week

Schools in Long Beach, Calif., Start Reopening This Week

Elementary school students returned to classrooms in Long Beach, CA on Monday, and the Los Angeles to Boston locations prepared for significant expansions to in-person tuition as the majority of the country’s counties have now started reopening school buildings, many of which have already opened have been closed for more than a year.

On Monday, Burbio, which monitors around 1,200 districts, including the 200 largest in the country, reported that 53.1 percent of students were in schools that offered face-to-face lessons and that for the first time the proportion of students who attended virtual or virtual School attendance in hybrid classes had declined.

The change, the Burbio officials said, appeared to be due to the return of elementary and middle schools to face-to-face teaching and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s new rules, which allowed schools to be three feet of social distance instead of allowing six feet in elementary schools.

However, there are still some barriers to reopening. On the west coast, large neighborhoods in the rest of the nation have generally lagged behind their peers. The rising infections in Southern California after the winter vacation were partly responsible for a slow recovery in the school system in Los Angeles.

Part of the slow start was due to opposition from teachers whose unions in democratically-ruled Washington, Oregon and California are generally more powerful than many other states and who are wary of returning to what they consider to be dangerous jobs. Despite federal instructions that elementary schools in particular are safe if health precautions are followed.

Even some schools where teachers have agreed to return are still experiencing setbacks. For example, schools in Oakland and San Francisco are slated to reopen next month to elementary and special needs students. But labor agreements in these two California cities have allowed significant numbers of teachers to opt out, leaving some schools with insufficient teachers to reopen and causing others to look for substitutes.

Public schools in California’s three main districts – Los Angeles, San Diego and Fresno – have announced that they will be releasing elementary school students back onto campus later in April, as new coronavirus cases have fallen across the country.

And on Monday, Long Beach – the state’s fourth largest borough with about 70,000 students – began leaving about 14,000 elementary school students in school buildings for about two and a half hours a day, five days a week.

Long Beach School District opened earlier than other major California school systems because local unions agreed last summer to reopen as soon as health conditions allowed, and because the city was vaccinating teachers earlier than other counties in the state could begin.

Unlike most other cities in Los Angeles County, Long Beach has its own health department, which gives the city its own vaccine supplies and the ability to set its own vaccine priorities at a time when the entire county made teachers wait until other Groups such as residents aged 65 and over were vaccinated.

Class disturbed

Updated March 29, 2021

The latest on how the pandemic is changing education.

“A city with its own health department can be quicker,” said Jill Baker, the city’s headmistress, who described the return to the classroom this week as “exciting and meaningful.”

The school district is one of the largest employers in the city, and two-thirds of students are entitled to free or discounted lunches. Therefore, vaccinating school workers and reopening classrooms was seen as economically important, Ms. Baker said.

In-person classes for older students are scheduled to resume on April 19th. Grades 6 through 8 can return on April 20th and grades 9 through 11 on April 26th. The last day of school is in mid-June.

Categories
Business

Google Goals to Be the Anti-Amazon of E-Commerce. It Has a Lengthy Approach to Go.

Google Aims to Be the Anti-Amazon of E-Commerce. It Has a Long Way to Go.

OAKLAND, Calif. – Google has tried, with little success, copying Amazon’s Playbook to become the internet’s mall. Now it is trying something else: the anti-Amazon strategy.

Google is trying to present itself as a cheaper and less restrictive option for independent sellers. And it focuses on driving traffic to the sellers’ websites rather than selling their own version of products like Amazon does.

Last year, Google eliminated merchant fees and allowed sellers to list their goods in search results for free. Attempts are also being made to make it easier for small, independent stores to upload their product inventory to appear in search results and buy ads on Google by partnering with Shopify, which operates online stores for 1.7 million merchants who sell directly to consumers.

But like Google’s many attempts during its two-decade quest to compete with Amazon, this one shows little sign of work. Google doesn’t have anything as enticing as the $ 295 billion that flowed through Amazon’s third-party marketplace in 2020. The amount of goods people buy on Google is “very small” by comparison – probably around $ 1 billion, said Juozas Kaziukenas, founder of Marketplace Pulse, a research company.

Amazon is a staple in the lives of many Americans. It has usurped Google as a starting point for buyers and has become important for marketers alike. Amazon’s global advertising business grew 30 percent to $ 17.6 billion in 2020, followed by Google and Facebook in the US.

As the pandemic has forced many stores to go online, Google has created a new opening to advertise to sellers who are unsure about whether to build their stores on Amazon.

Christina Stang, 33, opened Fritzy’s roller-skating store near Pacific Beach, San Diego last March. Shelter-in-place orders forced them to set up an online storefront on Shopify.

She was lucky. She sat on a huge supply of skates as demand increased as skating videos became popular on TikTok during the pandemic.

She linked her Shopify account to Google’s retail software and started buying so-called smart shopping ads. Google’s algorithms work within an allocated budget and choose where to display ads and which products to offer. In 2020, she spent $ 1,800 on ads that were viewed 3.6 million times for $ 247,000 in revenue.

She considered selling her products on the Amazon marketplace, but worried about what Amazon’s fees would mean for her already low profit margins. She also loved that Google was redirecting people to their carefully curated website instead of keeping them in their own store like Amazon.

“I could sell on Amazon and not make real money, but have a bigger online presence,” said Ms. Stang. “It didn’t seem like a good idea.”

Recently, however, she has experienced one of the downsides of being in the middle of the Google and Shopify partnership. Your shop hasn’t been able to list products since January because Google suspended your account. Their shipping costs were said to be more expensive on Google than on their Shopify-powered website, although they were no different.

Shopify told her it was a Google issue. Google’s customer service reps recommended that she hire a web designer. She continues to make it without Google, but it has hurt her largely positive experience.

“That cut my knees off completely,” she said. “I’m a small business and I don’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to solve this problem.”

Sellers often complain about Amazon’s fees, which can make up a quarter of any sale without the advertising costs and pressure to spend more to be successful. Merchants on Amazon have no direct relationship with their customers, which limits their ability to communicate with them and generate future business. And because everything is in the Amazon world, it’s more difficult to create a unique look and feel that expresses a brand’s identity in the way companies can on their own websites.

Since 2002 when a price comparison site called Froogle was launched, a confusing game of the word “frugal” that required a rebranding five years later, Google has struggled to develop a cohesive vision for its shopping experience.

It tried to challenge Amazon directly by piloting its own same-day delivery service, but the project closed when costs skyrocketed. Attempts have been made to partner with traditional retail giants only to see the alliances wither due to a lack of sales. It built its own marketplace to make it easier for shoppers to buy the things they find on Google, but couldn’t get consumers off their Amazon habit.

Last year, Google enlisted Bill Ready, a former chief operating officer at PayPal, to fill a new leadership position and drive a revision of its purchasing strategy.

Around the time of his hiring, Sundar Pichai, the executive director of Google, warned executives that the new approach could mean a short-term cut in advertising revenue, according to two people familiar with the conversations who asked for anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss them publicly . He asked the teams to support the e-commerce push as it was a priority for the company.

As the pandemic fueled huge demand for online purchases, Google eliminated fees so retailers could list products for free, and in 2012 it went back to a decision to only allow advertisers to display goods on their shopping page.

Three months after Mr. Ready was hired, Google said the free listings were showing up in top search results. Then Google said customers could buy products directly from merchants on Google with no commissions. Google will also open its platform to third parties like Shopify and PayPal so sellers can continue to use their existing tools to manage inventory and orders, as well as process payments.

The partnership with Shopify was particularly significant as hundreds of thousands of small businesses came to the software platform during the pandemic. According to research firm eMarketer, around 9 percent of online shopping sales in the United States in October were in stores operated by Shopify. That was a 6 percent increase last year and the second largest after Amazon’s 37 percent share.

Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify, said Google and Shopify are developing new ways for merchants to sell through Google services, such as experiments that allow customers to buy items directly on YouTube and see which products are doing business on Google Maps.

Mr. Ready walked a fine line when it came to Amazon, which is a big buyer of ads on Google, but made it clear that he believed that Amazon’s dominance in e-commerce posed a threat to other retailers.

“Nobody wants to live in a world where there is only one place to buy something and retailers don’t want to be dependent on gatekeepers,” he said in an interview.

Google said it had increased the number of sellers that appear in its results by 80 percent in 2020, with the most significant growth coming from small and medium-sized businesses. And existing retailers are listing more products.

Overstock.com, a seller of discount furniture and home bedding, said it has paid in the past to list products on Google. But now that the listings are free, Overstock is also adding low-margin products.

“If all purchases start and end on Amazon, it’s bad for the industry,” said Jonathan E. Johnson, CEO of Overstock. “It’s nice to have another 800-pound tech gorilla in this room.”

It remains unclear whether an increase in the number of retailers and entries on Google will ultimately change online shopping habits.

BACtrack, a manufacturer of breathalyzers, has more than doubled its advertising spend on Amazon in the past two years because that is where customers are located, while 6 percent less was spent on advertising its products on Google.

“It seems like more and more people are skipping Google and going straight to Amazon,” said Keith Nothacker, CEO of BACtrack.

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Some Lengthy Covid-19 Sufferers Really feel Higher After Vaccine Doses

Some Long Covid Patients Feel Better After Getting the Vaccine

A survey of 345 people, mostly women and mostly in the UK, found that two weeks or more after their first dose of vaccine, 93 felt slightly better and 18 felt normal again – a total of 32 percent reported improved long-term Covid symptoms.

In this survey by Gez Medinger, a London-based filmmaker who experienced post-Covid symptoms, 61 people, just under 18 percent, felt worse. Most of them reported only a slight decrease in their condition. Almost half – 172 people – said they didn’t feel any different.

Another survey by the Survivor Corps, a group of over 150,000 Covid survivors, found that on March 17, 225 out of 577 respondents reported some improvement, while 270 felt no change and 82 felt worse.

Jim Golen, 55, of Saginaw, Minnesota, believes some long-term Covid symptoms have worsened since he was vaccinated. Mr. Golen, a former hospice nurse who also has a small farm, has had months of trouble including blood clots in the lungs, chest pain, brain fog, insomnia, and shortness of breath with every effort. At the end of last year, after seeing several doctors, “I finally felt better,” he said.

Since receiving the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine in mid-January, his chest soreness and shortness of breath have returned with a vengeance, especially when taxing himself on activities like collecting sap from maple trees on his farm. Even so, Mr Golen said he was “very happy” to be vaccinated, stressing that the effects of Covid were worse and that it was crucial to prevent it.

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Health

Some Lengthy Covid Sufferers Really feel Higher After Getting the Vaccine

Some Long Covid Patients Feel Better After Getting the Vaccine

A survey of 345 people, mostly women and mostly in the UK, found that two weeks or more after the second dose of vaccine, 93 felt slightly better and 18 felt normal again – a total of 32 percent reported improved long-term Covid symptoms.

In this survey by Gez Medinger, a London-based filmmaker who experienced post-Covid symptoms, 61 people, just under 18 percent, felt worse. Most of them reported only a slight decrease in their condition. Almost half – 172 people – said they didn’t feel any different.

Another survey by the Survivor Corps, a group of over 150,000 Covid survivors, found that on March 17, 225 out of 577 respondents reported some improvement, while 270 felt no change and 82 felt worse.

Jim Golen, 55, of Saginaw, Minnesota, believes some long-term Covid symptoms have worsened since he was vaccinated. Mr. Golen, a former hospice nurse who also has a small farm, has had months of trouble including blood clots in the lungs, chest pain, brain fog, insomnia, and shortness of breath with every effort. At the end of last year, after seeing several doctors, “I finally felt better,” he said.

Since receiving the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine in mid-January, his chest soreness and shortness of breath have returned with a vengeance, especially when taxing himself on activities like collecting sap from maple trees on his farm. Even so, Mr Golen said he was “very happy” to be vaccinated, stressing that the effects of Covid were worse and that it was crucial to prevent it.

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‘Proper Now Feels So Lengthy and With out Any Finish in Sight’

‘Right Now Feels So Long and Without Any End in Sight’

As the reality of an indefinite psychological marathon worsened, many journalists began counting their blessings in entries that were filled with both gratitude and fear.

“There have been many losses in recent months, including transportation on public buses and cycling as the bike path is washed out and the library is closed. … When I hear that this could take another year, I am desperate. But I take it one day at a time and am grateful that I can pay my bills, have a roof over my head and have found out how to get food so far. “- Retired from Michigan in her 70s.

In their preliminary analysis, Dr. Mason and Dr. Will firmly that feelings of guilt, privilege and gratitude be expressed early in the epidemic and appear in about a third of the total of 530 English-speaking contributors. Ten of these journalists devoted most of their posts to giving thanks – for what they have and what they took for granted.

Updated

Apr. 15, 2021, 11:32 p.m. ET

“Some of that is white-liberal guilt that feels bad when so many aren’t,” said Dr. Mason. “But we have a lot of colored people who are not privileged and feel guilt for a slightly different reason. You see family members die, lose jobs, and fail to pay rent. “

“The world seems to be imploding again with the police murdering black and brown people, children murdering innocent protesters, teachers are afraid to go to school, the economy continues to collapse, a hurricane. It’s overwhelming … we’re all just sick of it. “- Nonprofit worker and mother in her forties from New Jersey

During the summer, Covid-19 outbreaks spread across much of the country, despite Black Lives Matter protesters taking to the streets in more than 400 cities. California was on fire in August and struck by one of the worst wildfires of all time. And all of this seemed to fuel an increasingly evil, highly polarized presidential campaign that kicked off in September and October.

Many people, especially younger journalists, were ready to scream. “At this point, selfish or whatever it sounds, I’d rather be homeless than spend another day in this house,” wrote a young woman, a late-teenage student, from New York. “That may sound dramatic and I’m angry, but I’m done with it.”

The magazines swell and flinch like a living organism, creating a growing sense that the world is coming from its berths. “The record temperature measured in Death Valley reminds me not to forget the despair over the climate crisis,” wrote another woman, a software engineer in California in her 50s. “The pandemic made everything feel like it was falling apart.”

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Medical specialists attempt to set up ‘lengthy Covid’ analysis for sufferers with lasting signs

Medical experts try to establish 'long Covid' diagnosis for patients with lasting symptoms

Critical care carers insert an endotracheal tube into a patient with coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in the intensive care unit (ICU) at Sarasota Memorial Hospital in Sarasota, Florida on February 11, 2021.

Shannon Stapleton | Reuters

Some Covid-19 patients suffer from shortness of breath, fatigue, headaches and “brain fog” for months to almost a year after their first illness. Now global medical experts are working to better diagnose and treat what they tentatively refer to as “long covid”.

Earlier this week, the World Health Organization hosted a global meeting with “patients, clinicians and other stakeholders” to improve the agency’s understanding of the post-Covid medical condition, also known as Long Covid, WHO director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said Friday.

The meeting was the first of many to come. The goal will ultimately be to produce an “agreed clinical description” of the disease so that doctors can diagnose and treat patients effectively, he said. Given the number of people infected with the virus worldwide – nearly 108 million people as of Friday – Tedros warned that many of these persistent symptoms are likely to appear.

“This disease affects patients with severe and mild Covid-19,” Tedros said during a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “Part of the challenge is that long-term Covid patients can have a range of different symptoms that can be persistent or come and go.”

Limited dates

So far, there have been a limited number of studies that will determine what symptoms are most common and how long they might last. The main focus was on people with a serious or fatal illness, not people who have recovered but still report persistent side effects, sometimes referred to as “long distance riders”.

Most Covid patients are believed to recover only weeks after their initial diagnosis, but some have symptoms for six months or even almost a year, medical experts say.

One of the largest global studies on Long Covid, published in early January, found that many people who have persistent illness after infection cannot work full-time six months later. The study, published on MedRxiv and not peer reviewed, interviewed more than 3,700 people, ages 18 to 80, from 56 countries to identify symptoms.

The most common symptoms after six months were fatigue, post-exercise fatigue, and cognitive dysfunction, sometimes called brain fog.

Is that unique to Covid-19?

“We really don’t know what is causing these symptoms. That is a focus of research right now,” said Dr. Allison Navis, a professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, during a call to the Infectious Diseases Society of America on Friday.

“The question that arises is whether this is something that is unique to Covid itself – and it is the Covid virus that is causing these symptoms – or whether this could be part of a general post-viral syndrome,” Navis said, adding, that medical experts see similar long-term symptoms after other viral infections.

Another study, published in the medical journal The Lancet in early January, looked at 1,733 patients discharged from a hospital in Wuhan, China, between January and May last year. Of these patients, 76% reported at least one symptom six months after their first illness. The proportion was higher among women.

“We found that fatigue or muscle weakness, sleep disorders, and anxiety or depression were common even 6 months after symptoms appeared,” the researchers wrote in the study.

They found that symptoms reported months after the Covid-19 diagnosis was consistent with data previously found in follow-up studies of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), a coronavirus.

Post-Covid clinics are going online

Some large medical centers are currently setting up post-Covid clinics to care for patients with persistent symptoms. Navis said her clinic on Mount Sinai, New York treated a “fairly even” distribution of men and women with persistent illness, and the average age of patients was 40 years.

Dr. Kathleen Bell, a professor at the University of Texas’ Southwestern Medical Center, said her hospital’s long-term Covid-19 clinic began last April when a wave of infections hit Italy and New York at the start of the pandemic.

Bell said on the Infectious Diseases Society of America conference call on Friday that a number of professionals are required to staff the clinics because symptoms are uneven, including experts who can treat muscle weakness, heart-related disorders, and cognitive problems in the insane and health Problems after their diagnosis.

“It forces all of us, in many ways, to come together and make sure we have open lines of communication to address all of these issues for patients,” said Bell.

Bell added that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention held a phone call in January with long Covid centers across the country to discuss their model for treating patients.

“I think the CDC is now trying to bring centers together and get some firmer guidelines on it, which is very exciting,” said Bell.

– CNBC’s Sam Meredith contributed to this report.