Tag: Minimum

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Health

Operating low on oxygen, emergency employees in Los Angeles County are advised to manage the minimal vital.

Running low on oxygen, emergency workers in Los Angeles County are told to administer the minimum necessary.

California’s daily coronavirus case numbers remain about four times what it was during the state’s summer flood, and officials predict the aftermath of a December wave related to holiday gatherings will worsen over the winter.

After new infections – fueled by Thanksgiving trips and gatherings, then Christmas festivities – led to a surge the state hadn’t seen before, the trend in its new cases flattened somewhat in the early days of 2021.

But there are more than twice as many Covid-19 patients in California hospitals as there were a month ago, and many intensive care units in the state are overcrowded. It has also been found that at least six people in the state are infected with the new, more transmissible variant of the virus first identified in the UK.

The state is also facing a lack of oxygen for patients and has deployed the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the California Emergency Medical Services Authority to help with the delivery and refilling of oxygen tanks.

As a sign of how bad the shortage is, Marianne Gausche-Hill, the medical director of the Los Angeles County EMS agency, issued guidelines on Sunday for emergency responders to administer the “minimum amount of oxygen” required keep the patient’s oxygen saturation at a level or just over 90 percent. (Levels in their low 90s or below are an issue for people with Covid-19.)

In the brutal logic of the pandemic, more cases inevitably lead to more suffering and death. As of Monday evening, 4,258 people had died with Covid-19 in the past two weeks, compared to 3,043 in the two weeks prior.

Updated

Jan. 5, 2021, 6:31 p.m. ET

“This is a deadly disease, this is a deadly pandemic,” Governor Gavin Newsom told reporters on Monday. “It remains deadlier today than at any point in the history of the pandemic.”

Some progress has been made. For example, California’s daily average of 38,086 cases per day for the past week is an 11 percent decrease from the average for two weeks earlier. And although hospital stays in Covid-19 have increased 18 percent to 20,618 in the past two weeks, that means a slight flattening of the curve, according to Governor Newsom.

But the state’s last major Covid-19 surge in the summer only caused about 10,000 infections on the worst days. And in Los Angeles County, the recent crisis has made the healthcare system so thin that patients arriving at a hospital were recently ordered to wait in an outdoor tent.

Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said Sunday that the county’s recent spike infected a new person every six seconds and that many transmissions were in private settings.

“It’s a message for all of America: We may not all have the same density as LA, but what is happening in LA can and will come to many churches in America,” he said.

The state’s worst outbreak is centered in southern California and the San Joaquin Valley, where intensive care units are zero percent. Officials are now working to recruit additional nurses to handle the flood of patients. Governor Newsom said 90 patients were being held in “alternative care locations” outside of hospitals to ease the burden.

More vaccinations would help ease the burden on California, but Governor Newsom said vaccinations were only just increasing after some early challenges. So far, the state has only administered about 35 percent of the coronavirus vaccine doses received.

“That’s not good enough,” he said. “We recognize that.”

In the meantime, says Dr. Mark Ghaly, the secretary of state for health and human services, Californians should be extra careful when meeting with people outside of their household as the virus is so widespread.

“The same activities that you did a month ago today are much riskier today than from a Covid transmission perspective,” he said.

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Business

Moderna will increase minimal 2021 Covid vaccine manufacturing by 20% to 600 million doses

Moderna increases minimum 2021 Covid vaccine production by 20% to 600 million doses

A health worker holds a Moderna COVID-19 vaccine bottle on the first day Orange County residents 65 and older can be vaccinated on December 29, 2020 at a drive through at the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.

Paul Hennessy | NurPhoto | Getty Images

Moderna is increasing its Covid-19 vaccine production this year, increasing the expected minimum dose by 20% to 600 million, the company said on Monday.

The company says it is working to produce up to 1 billion doses of its Covid vaccine this year. The U.S. is well on its way to securing 100 million shots of Moderna’s vaccine by the end of March and an additional 100 million by June, the Massachusetts-based company said in a statement.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Moderna’s emergency coronavirus vaccine approval to anyone age 18 and older in the U.S. in December and started the drug’s first launch.

The federal government has agreed to buy 200 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine, with an option to secure an additional 300 million, the company said.

Moderna’s Covid-19 vaccine, which uses the new mRNA technology and requires two doses four weeks apart, has also been approved in Canada for people aged 18 and over. The company has agreed to supply this country with 40 million doses of its vaccine, with the option to provide an additional 16 million.

“Our effectiveness in delivering early supplies to the US and Canadian governments, as well as our ability to increase baseline production estimates for 2021, are both signals that our increase in mRNA vaccine production is a success,” said Juan Andres, director made a statement to Moderna’s technical department.

The U.S. government, under the Trump administration’s Operation Warp Speed, said it would distribute close to 6 million doses of Moderna’s vaccine in an emergency once FDA approved.

The introduction of the vaccine in the nation has been slower than originally planned. So far, the US has only distributed more than 13 million doses of vaccine, but given only 4.2 million “shots in the arms,” ​​according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last updated on Saturday. By the end of December, officials wanted to vaccinate 20 million people with Pfizers and Moderna’s two-dose vaccines against Covid-19.

Minister of Health and Human Services Alex Azar defended the operation’s vaccine distribution Monday on ABC’s Good Morning America. He said there was a delay in getting the cans first made available, ordered by the states, and then delivered, all of which was slowed down by the holidays.

However, the US has seen a “rapid uptake” of vaccines in the past few days, Azar said.

“We said our goal is to actually have 20 million first doses available by December. Those are available,” said Azar. It is unclear what Azar meant when he said the cans were “available” as only 13 million were distributed in the US on Saturday morning.

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Business

27 Locations Elevating the Minimal Wage to $15 an Hour

27 Places Raising the Minimum Wage to $15 an Hour

It started in 2012 with a group of protesters outside a McDonald’s calling for a minimum wage of $ 15 – an idea that even many liberal lawmakers viewed as fancy. In the years since then, their struggle has grown in importance across the country, including conservative states with low union membership and generally weak labor laws.

On Friday, 20 states and 32 cities and counties will raise their minimum wages. In 27 of those places, the lower wage limit will hit or exceed $ 15 an hour, according to a National Employment Law Project report released Thursday that supports minimum wage increases.

The strength of the movement – an electoral move to increase the Florida minimum wage to $ 15 by 2026, which was passed in November – could once again put pressure on Congress to raise the federal minimum wage from $ 7.25 an hour, elected since 2009 Joseph R. Biden Jr. has endorsed $ 15 an hour at the federal level and other working group changes, such as ending the practice of lower minimum wages for workers such as restaurant workers who receive tips.

But even without action by Congress, labor activists said they would continue their campaign at the state and local levels. By 2026, 42 percent of Americans will be Work in a location with a minimum wage of at least $ 15 an hour. This is based on an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute given in the NELP report.

“These record increases in wages in states are the result of years of advocacy from workers and years of marching in the streets and organizing their peers and their communities,” said Yannet Lathrop, researcher and policy analyst for the group.

Wage rates rise as workers struggle in a recession caused by the coronavirus pandemic that has left millions of people unemployed.

“The Covid crisis has really exacerbated inequalities in society,” said Greg Daco, chief US economist for Oxford Economics. “This has given more strength to these movements that want to make sure everyone benefits from a strong job market in the form of sustainable salaries.”

Workers during the pandemic were exposed to vacations, wage cuts and working hours. Low-wage service workers have not been able to work from home, and the customer-centric nature of their work puts them at higher risk of contracting the virus. Many retailers gave workers wage increases – or “hero wages” – at the start of the pandemic to quietly end the practice over the summer, although the virus continued to rise in many states.

“The coronavirus pandemic has driven many working families into deep poverty,” said Anthony Advincula, communications director at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, a nonprofit focused on improving wages and working conditions. “This increase in the minimum wage will be a tremendously welcome boost for low-wage workers, especially in the hospitality industry.”

Mary Kay Henry, international president of the Service Employees International Union, said the labor movement would make it a priority in 2021 to get even more workers to $ 15 an hour or more.

“There are millions more workers who need more money in their pockets,” she said, adding that the election of Mr. Biden and elected Vice President Kamala Harris would intensify efforts. “We have an incredible opportunity.”

Because many of the hourly service workers are Black, Hispanic, Native American, and Asian, people of color can benefit most from minimum wage increases. A 2018 study by the Economic Policy Institute found that workers of color were far more likely to receive poverty-level wages than white workers.

“It is the most dramatic act of creating racial equality,” said Ms. Henry.

Some economists say raising the minimum wage will benefit the economy and could be an important part of the recovery from the pandemic recession. This is in part because lower-income workers typically spend most of the money they make and that spending is mostly made where they live and work.

Kate Bahn, director of labor policy at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, said post-2007-09 recession growth was anemic for years as wages stagnated and the labor market slowly found its way back.

“It has been widely recognized that the weak wage growth we have seen over the past 30 years and since the Great Recession reflects structural imbalances in the economy and structural inequality,” said Ms. Bahn.

Many corporate groups counter that an increase in the minimum wage will harm small businesses already affected by the pandemic. According to the National Restaurant Association, more than 110,000 restaurants closed permanently or long-term during the pandemic.

An increase in the minimum wage could lead employers to lay off some workers in order to pay others more, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California at Irvine.

“There is a lot of research that suggests that raising the minimum wage can lead to job losses,” he said. “Many workers are being helped, but some are injured.”

A 2019 study by the Congressional Budget Office found that a minimum wage of $ 15 would raise wages for 17 million workers who earned less than that and potentially another 10 million workers who made a little more. According to the study’s median estimate, 1.3 million other workers would lose their jobs.

In New York, the Senate Republicans had urged Democrat Governor Andrew M. Cuomo to stop the increases that came into force on Thursday on the grounds that they could be the “last straw” for some small businesses.

While raising the minimum wage above a certain point could result in job losses, Ms. Bahn of the Washington Center for Equitable Growth argued, “We are a long way from that point.”

Economic research has shown that recent minimum wage increases have not resulted in huge job losses. In a 2019 study, researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York found that wages for recreational and hospitality workers in the boroughs of New York bordering Pennsylvania that had a lower minimum had risen sharply while employment growth continued . In many cases, higher minimum wages are introduced over several years to give companies time to adjust.

Regardless of whether there is federal action, more state electoral initiatives will seek to raise the minimum wage, said Arindrajit Dube, an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“Basically, people think this is a question of fairness,” said Dube. “There is widespread support for the idea that people who work should be paid a living wage.”

Jeanna Smialek contributed to the reporting.