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A Inexperienced Wave? Mexico’s Marijuana Market Could Be Middling

A Green Wave? Mexico’s Marijuana Market May Be Middling

MEXICO CITY – Mexico, a country that has been shaped by cartels for decades, is about to take an important step in drug policy. This week the House of Commons approved a landmark law legalizing recreational marijuana that would make it the world’s largest legal drug market.

Given that legalization is far from certain to garner Senate and President approval, many in the business world are predicting a Mexican green boom: a newly legal industry, tens of thousands of jobs, millions of dollars in profits for savvy entrepreneurs and welcome tax revenue for the US government.

However, many business analysts and economists are cautious, warning that the cannabis industry here is more of a green slip than a boom. The opening of a legal market is more legal and symbolic than economic in nature, they argue, citing relatively low domestic demand and low export opportunities for the product as well as seemingly restrictive regulatory measures.

“It’s hard to see any obvious far-reaching implications for the Mexican economy,” said Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard University. “You will see a small drag on measured GDP,” he added, “but the people who claim that legalization will make this a big boost to the economy make no sense at all.”

But industry sponsors are excited about the prospects.

The cannabis industry “is finally going to generate income in terms of employment, in terms of the local economy, in terms of taxes,” said Erick Ponce, a Mexican entrepreneur and president of the Cannabis Industry Promotion Group, a local research and advocacy group.

“We definitely see it as a major economic boom for the country, especially in the middle of a pandemic,” added Ponce.

The Mexican marijuana industry could be worth up to $ 3.2 billion annually, and big cannabis companies like Canada’s Canopy Growth are already watching the market, according to a January report by a cannabis data analytics firm, New Frontier Data.

But Canada can be a cautionary story. Ahead of its own legalization in 2018, investors and analysts predicted a surge in cannabis cash, but the deal was not a sweeping success.

In the final quarter of 2020, the country’s national statistics agency estimated that consumers were spending Canadian $ 918 million (about $ 736 million) on legal weed products, significantly less than predicted prior to legalization. The result was sluggish and most manufacturers are still reporting losses running into the millions. In December, Canopy Growth announced it was closing five facilities and laying off more than 200 employees to accelerate profitability.

“The green rush part didn’t happen,” said Michael Armstrong, associate professor at the Goodman School of Business at Brock University in Ontario. “It was a positive boost for Canada, but by no means a dramatic one.”

Official figures show that Canada, with a much smaller population, has many more regular users than Mexico: Before legalization, around 15 percent of Canadians said they had smoked marijuana in the past three months, according to the national statistics bureau, a consumer base of more than 5 million potential users.

In contrast, a 2016 study by the Mexican government found that only about 1.2 percent of the population aged 12 to 65 said they had smoked a pot in the previous month, and 2.1 percent, about 1.8 Million, last year.

Legalization advocates argue that such numbers are misleading: in a country like Mexico, where the majority of the population is against weed legalization, many people do not admit to smoking it.

“Cannabis is a problem with stigma, with taboo,” said entrepreneur Ponce. “We don’t really know the impact of the local market because there are no real statistics.”

But even if surveys underestimate the number of potential consumers, most experts downplay the size of the market in Mexico.

“I don’t think there will be much demand,” said Jorge Javier Romero Vadillo, political scientist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico. And “I don’t think this regulatory process will significantly increase demand.”

Romero said the new law’s stringent licensing requirements for the cultivation, packaging and sale of marijuana could keep smallholders and sellers out of the legal market.

“With the rules they want to apply, which are very restrictive, they are going to open a tiny market,” he said. “They are rules that are so strict, with a barrier to entry that is so high that few will choose to enter the legal market.”

California, which legalized recreational marijuana in 2018, had similar teething troubles: In the first year of legalization, legal vendors in the state sold $ 500 million less than the previous year when it was licensed for medical use only.

According to Daniel Sumner, director of the Center for Agricultural Issues at the University of California at Davis, strict regulations and high taxes kept the majority of California producers and sellers in the gray or black market. In many communities, marijuana-related businesses have faced severe local opposition.

Sales have increased significantly recently as the number of licensed growers and vendors has gradually increased and the state introduced cannabis taxes of $ 1 billion last year, according to Sumner.

“It’s a formidable business,” he said, but “it’s a drop in the ocean” in the context of California’s annual budget of more than $ 200 billion.

With a relatively small consumer base and complex regulatory measures, Mexico’s recreational market is unlikely to come close to that, analysts say.

Instead, some industry leaders say the real money in Mexico may be in medical cannabis, which has been legal in Mexico since 2017, as well as industrial hemp, which is also regulated in the new bill and could be used to make anything from plastics to paper.

“The marijuana market is a very small market,” said Guillermo Nieto, president of the National Cannabis Industries Association, a Mexico City-based trade group. “Agriculturally, liking industrial hemp legalization won’t help us.”

In the short term, some business people say Mexico’s biggest gains could be doing what Mexico is already best at: manufacturing – in this case, possibly cannabis products such as supplements and cosmetics.

Still, the biggest impact may be more symbolic than monetary: As the largest economy to legalize the drug to date, Mexico, home to around 128 million people, could encourage other countries, including its northern neighbor, to follow suit.

“Sometimes it’s nerve-wracking to be the first to step into a pond that could be infested with sharks,” said Miron, the Harvard professor. “But when four or five other people have done it and it’s okay, more people will try.”

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Health

Germany declares a Covid ‘third wave’ has begun; Italy set for Easter lockdown

Germany declares a Covid 'third wave' has begun; Italy set for Easter lockdown

People walk past a sign reminding them to wear the mandatory face mask in downtown Munich on March 4, 2021. (Photo by Alexander Pohl / NurPhoto via Getty Images)

Alexander Pohl NurPhoto via Getty Images

LONDON – The head of the German health department warned on Friday that a third wave of coronavirus infections had already started.

It comes at a time when the country has started to gradually relax lockdown restrictions amid government efforts to accelerate the introduction of vaccinations to as many adults as possible.

Chancellor Angela Merkel had previously warned that the country could enter a third wave of infections if restrictive public health measures were lifted too quickly.

Italy is reportedly set to impose another near-national lockdown over the Easter weekend to curb the spread of the virus.

The move, which is expected to be signed on Friday, comes just over a year after it became the first country in the world to impose nationwide lockdown measures.

What’s going on in Germany?

“We have clear signs: the third wave in Germany has already started,” Lothar Wieler, head of the Robert Koch Institute for Infectious Diseases, told reporters during a press conference on Friday.

“The virus is not going to go away, but once we have basic immunity in the population we can control it,” he added.

Wieler said he was “very concerned” about the public health crisis. He described the German vaccination campaign as a race against an ever-evolving virus, but expressed confidence that the country could ultimately bring the virus under control.

Up until this point, Wieler reiterated the importance of people wearing face masks in public and keeping a safe distance from others.

Chancellor Angela Merkel attends the 215th session of the Bundestag. Topics include the epidemic situation of national scope and the impact of the lockdown on the economy.

Kay Nietfeld | Image Alliance | Getty Images

The RKI announced on Thursday that the number of confirmed Covid cases had increased by 14,356 over a period of 24 hours, the highest daily number recorded in Germany in the last two weeks. This corresponds to an increase of 2,444 cases compared to the previous week.

The recent boom coincides with the spread of a highly infectious variant of the virus, first discovered in the UK. It was found that the variant known as B.1.1.7 accounts for over 46% of new infections nationwide.

To date, according to the Johns Hopkins University in Germany, more than 2.5 million people with 73,127 deaths have contracted Covid.

Italy faces an Easter lock

The government of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi held talks with regional governments and local authorities from March 15 to April 6 to discuss stricter health measures, the Italian news agency ANSA reported on Friday, citing unnamed sources.

As part of these measures, Italy is expected to fight the spread of the virus by moving almost the entire country to its so-called “red zone” from April 3-5, including Easter Sunday and Easter Monday.

Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.

Barcroft Media | Barcroft Media | Getty Images

The red zone is the maximum level of restriction in Italy’s tiered coronavirus system. Schools, non-essential shops, restaurants and bars will be closed at this level.

Sardinia, a large Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea, is currently the only region in the country’s white zone. This decision, announced on March 1, means that many measures to contain the spread of the virus in the area have been halted.

At the national level, the total number of Covid infections in Italy last week was over 3 million, mainly due to the rapid spread of variant B.1.1.7. So far, Italy has recorded 3.1 million Covid cases and 101,184 deaths.

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Entertainment

Raymond Cauchetier, Whose Digicam Caught the New Wave, Dies at 101

Raymond Cauchetier, Whose Camera Caught the New Wave, Dies at 101

Raymond Cauchetier was born on January 10, 1920 in Paris as the son of a piano teacher who raised the boy alone. He never knew his father, had no education beyond high school and kept the small hallway on the fifth floor where he was born for life.

It was near the Bois de Vincennes where a colonial exhibition opened in 1931 at the age of eleven. “Every evening I could see a faithful, brilliantly lit replica of the magnificent temple of Angkor Wat through the kitchen window,” he recalled. He dreamed of seeing Angkor Wat one day.

When the Germans invaded Paris in 1940, he fled by bicycle and joined the resistance. In the French Air Force he was used as a combat photographer in Vietnam after the war. In 1951 he bought a Rolleiflex, a camera popular with war correspondents, and used it for most of his life. General Charles de Gaulle awarded him the Legion of Honor for his battlefield work.

After the end of the war in 1954, Mr. Cauchetier stayed and photographed people and landscapes in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. His first photo book “Ciel de Guerre en Indochine” (“The Air War in Indochina”) sold 10,000 times. In 1956 the Smithsonian Institution organized an exhibition of his work “Faces of Vietnam” which was shown in museums and universities in the United States.

His childhood dream of visiting Angkor Wat was realized in 1957 when he created a collection of 3,000 photographs that critics consider priceless. It was handed over to Prime Minister Norodom Sihanouk and destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.

Back in Paris and unable to find work as a photojournalist, he was hired to take photos for Photo-Romans, a popular type of photo novel. He met Mr. Godard through a publisher and soon immersed himself in the New Wave. When he showed up, he and his Japanese wife Kaoru traveled widely photographing Romanesque sculptures in church settings. She survived him.

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World News

Our bodies once more pile up in Bolivia as Latin America endures an extended, lethal coronavirus wave.

Bodies again pile up in Bolivia as Latin America endures a long, deadly coronavirus wave.

In Bolivia, bodies are piling up at home and on the streets, reflecting the terrifying images of last summer when a deadly spike in coronavirus infections overwhelmed the country’s fragile medical system. Bolivian police say they recovered 170 bodies of people believed to have died from Covid-19 in January and health officials say the intensive care units are full.

“If 10 or 20 patients die, their beds will be full again in a matter of hours,” said Carlos Hurtado, a public health epidemiologist in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s largest city.

The virus resurgence in Bolivia is part of a larger second wave across Latin America where some of the toughest quarantine in the world is giving way to pandemic fatigue and economic worries.

The International Monetary Fund announced on Monday that it was revising its 2021 growth forecast for Latin America and the Caribbean from 3.6 percent to 4.1 percent. The fund warned that in some cases the surge could jeopardize an economic recovery that is likely to take longer than other parts of the world, and forecast regional production will not return to pre-pandemic levels until 2023.

As the number of new cases falls, deaths remain at record highs in many parts of the region, just as some governments are starting vaccination efforts.

In Brazil and Mexico, an average of more than 1,000 people have died from Covid-19 every day for weeks. Its total pandemic death toll is second only to that of the United States. Deaths in Brazil have reached their summer peak, while in Mexico they are far higher than any previous high, although they have started to fall in the past few days.

In Bolivia last summer, the New York Times revised mortality figures suggested the country’s actual death toll was nearly five times the official figure, suggesting that Bolivia had suffered one of the worst epidemics in the world. According to a Times analysis, about 20,000 more people died from June to August than in previous years – a large number in a country of about 11 million people.

Bolivia currently reports an average of 60 coronavirus deaths per day, approaching last summer’s numbers. Experts believe the higher mortality rate is caused by the contagious virus variants that originate from neighboring Brazil and elsewhere, but they lack the tools to analyze the viruses’ genetic code.

Despite the rising death rate, the Bolivian authorities failed to implement quarantine measures to contain the first wave of the virus a year ago. Officials in Bolivia and other Latin American countries are hailing their emerging vaccination programs as a reason to avoid lockdowns, although few countries in the region outside of Brazil have sourced significant numbers of doses.

Only 20,000 doses of vaccine have arrived in Bolivia, although the government plans to vaccinate eight million people by September.

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Health

New coronavirus variants are fueling a ‘second wave’ in Africa, WHO warns

New coronavirus variants are fueling a ‘second wave’ in Africa, WHO warns

Funeral directors wearing personal protective equipment carry a coffin during the funeral of a COVID-19 victim amid a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) nationwide lockdown at Olifantsvlei Cemetery, southwest of Joburg, South Africa, on Jan. 6, 2021.

Siphiwe Sibeko | Reuters

According to the World Health Organization, new and more contagious variants of Covid-19 are spreading across Africa, causing an increase in infections and deaths.

In the week leading up to Thursday, more than 175,000 new cases and more than 6,200 deaths were reported across the continent, the WHO said in an update, while infection rates were between December 29 and January 25 compared to the previous four weeks increased by 50%.

The number of deaths doubled to 15,000 over the same period, concentrated in 10 mainly South and North African countries. Infection rates are increasing in 22 countries.

“The variant that was first discovered in South Africa has quickly spread beyond Africa. So what keeps me awake at night is that it is very likely to be circulating in a number of African countries,” said WHO Regional Director for Africa , Dr. Matshidiso Moeti, at a virtual press conference on Thursday.

The variant first discovered in South Africa leads to record infection rates on the subcontinent and has now been identified in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya and the French region in the Indian Ocean in Mayotte, Zambia, together with 24 countries outside Africa.

The highly contagious strain originally identified in Great Britain has since found its way to Nigeria and Gambia.

The CDC in Africa has set up sequencing laboratories across the continent, and the WHO urged all nations to send at least 20 samples per month to the sequencing laboratories to coordinate a targeted response.

“In addition to the new flavors, COVID-19 fatigue and the aftermath of year-end gatherings can create a perfect storm and fuel Africa’s second wave and overwhelming health facilities,” Moeti said.

“Africa is at a crossroads. We need to hold on to our guns and duplicate the tactic that we know works so well. That is wearing masks, hand washing and safe social distancing. Countless lives depend on it.”

Infections last week fell slightly in South Africa, the worst-hit country on a continent that has largely avoided the exponential spread of the virus that stalled many major economies in various places over the past year.

As of Friday morning, South Africa had recorded 1,437,798 cases of Covid-19 and 43,105 deaths. The entire continent has reported around 3.5 million cases and 88,985 deaths, according to a BBC data aggregation compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

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Business

From ‘unloved’ to ‘favourite,’ Britain’s inventory market rides a wave.

From ‘unloved’ to ‘favorite,’ Britain’s stock market rides a wave.

The start of 2021 was rocky for the UK. Leaving the European Union sparked enormous bureaucracy that has desperately sought help from some industries, and the country is once again in lockdown due to a rapidly spreading strain of the coronavirus.

But there was a glimmer of hope. In the UK, more than four million people have been partially vaccinated against the coronavirus, a promising rate of vaccination.

Investors seeking a wave of optimism about vaccine rollouts have turned to the UK stock market, which had a strong start to the year, rising more than 6 percent in the first week.

In the first two and a half weeks of January, the FTSE 100, the UK’s benchmark index for large companies, rose 4.3 percent, outperforming the S&P 500 index, which was up 2.6 percent, and the Stoxx Europe 600 index, which was up 3 percent. Even when the profits are converted into US dollars, the FTSE 100 still has a clear head start.

In addition to the introduction of vaccines to help secure an economic recovery, another factor is attracting investors: the relative cheapness of UK stocks.

The UK FTSE 100 index benefits from an investment strategy in which traders buy so-called value stocks. These are companies that are believed to be trading below their real value because their business has been disrupted by a recession, particularly in the financial and energy sectors, and the FTSE 100 has a large stake in these stocks.

Citigroup analysts have made the UK stock market their “preferred” stock market.

“I would like to stress that the very unloved and terribly horrific UK market might be worth a look this year,” said Robert Buckland, a Citigroup equity strategist, in a presentation last week. “We all know it’s been a place to avoid for many, many years.”

Updated

Jan. 21, 2021, 8:46 ET

The UK stock market has been lagging behind for years. The last time the FTSE’s earnings looked better than the US and European benchmarks was in 2016, when a sharp fall in the pound boosted the profits of the FTSE 100 companies, which have three-quarters of their sales overseas.

When converted to US dollars, the FTSE 100’s annual return was the worst of the three indices over the past nine years.

Why are investors now betting on a trend reversal? For one, a lot of them are ready for a bargain. The bull market for stocks has been dominated by expensive stocks in American tech companies, which makes some investors nervous about how much they can go further. An alternative is cheap stocks in industries that tend to do well in times of economic recovery.

And then there is the UK’s free trade agreement with the European Union. Some investors put aside the details of whether it was a good deal or a bad deal to make it easier for an agreement to finally be reached in late December.

The deal “reduced the uncertainty of the overhang people,” said Caroline Simmons, the UK’s chief investment officer at UBS Global Wealth Management. And it could encourage the return of foreign investors who were deterred by Brexit, she said. Up until last week, the Swiss asset management company stated for the first time since 2013 that UK stocks were among its most preferred deals.

Two Schroders wealth managers in London are hoping that interest in large companies will return to smaller companies that are lagging behind. Rory Bateman and Tim Creed raised £ 75 million ($ 102 million) in December for their British Opportunities Trust, a fund that will invest in public and private companies that are affected by the pandemic but that they expect to be they recover with a little more capital.

The vaccines were the “beginning of the mood reversal in Britain,” Bateman said. “The momentum is definitely shifting.”

However, this strategy depends heavily on the success of the vaccine launch and can easily be reversed by signs of delays in manufacture or distribution. And the UK stock index could fall back to the bottom of the stack.

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Health

China Locations Over 22 Million on Lockdown Amid New Covid Wave

China Places Over 22 Million on Lockdown Amid New Covid Wave

When a handful of new coronavirus cases emerged in a province around Beijing earlier this month – apparently spread at a wedding reception in the village – the Chinese authorities took action.

They locked down two cities with more than 17 million people, Shijiazhuang and Xingtai. They ordered a crash test regime for almost every resident, which was completed within a few days.

They stopped transportation and canceled weddings, funerals and, most importantly, a conference of the Communist Party in the province.

This week, the locks were expanded to include another city on the outskirts of Beijing, Langfang, and a county in Heilongjiang, a northeastern province. The districts in Beijing, the Chinese capital, were also closed.

In total, more than 22 million people have been ordered to stay in their homes – twice as many as last January when the Chinese central government locked Wuhan, the downtown area where the virus was first reported, in what was considered exceptional at the time.

The flare remains small compared to the devastation in other countries, but it threatens to undermine the country’s Communist Party’s success in fighting the virus, sending the economy back on track after last year’s slump and the population comes back close to normal life.

The urgency of the government’s current response contrasts with that of officials in Wuhan last year, who feared a backlash if they exposed the mysterious new diseases that then emerged. Local officials had held a Communist Party conference there, but it has now been canceled in Hebei despite knowing the risk of the disease spreading among the people.

Since Wuhan, authorities have created a playbook that mobilizes party cadres to respond quickly to new outbreaks by sealing off neighborhoods, running extensive testing, and quarantining large groups if necessary.

“In the prevention and control of infectious diseases, one of the most important points is to seek the truth from facts, to openly and transparently share epidemic information and never to allow it to be covered up or underreported,” said Chinese Premier Li Keqiang at a meeting on Friday the State Council, China’s Cabinet.

China, a country of 1.4 billion people, has reported an average of 109 new cases per day over the past week, according to a New York Times database. Those would be welcome numbers in countries where things are far worse – including the United States, which averages more than 250,000 new cases a day – but they’re the worst in China since last summer.

China’s National Health Commission has not reported any new deaths, but the World Health Organization, using information from China, has recorded 12 so far in 2021. The National Health Commission did not respond to requests to explain the discrepancy.

In Hebei, the province where the new outbreak has concentrated, officials declared a “state of war” last week with no signs of an early lifting.

During the pandemic, officials were particularly concerned about Beijing, home to the central leadership of the Communist Party. Last week, Hebei Party Secretary Wang Dongfeng pledged to ensure that the province is “the moat for Beijing’s political security.”

The outbreaks, which have occurred with minimal cases after such a long time, have heightened concern across China, where residents in most places felt the pandemic was a thing of the past.

New cases have also been reported in northern Shanxi Province and northeastern Heilongjiang and Jilin provinces. Shanghai urged residents not to leave the city on Wednesday, announcing that those who had traveled to risk areas would be quarantined for two weeks and only leave after two tests, while those who had traveled to areas with At the highest risk, government facilities were quarantined.

Updated

Jan. 13, 2021, 9:04 p.m. ET

Rumors swirled in Wuhan that the city might face another lockdown; While these appeared unfounded, the officials noticeably tightened temperature controls on some streets.

In Shunyi, a district in northeast Beijing that includes Beijing Capital International Airport and rural villages, residents have been ordered to stay indoors since a spate of cases just before the New Year. At Beijing’s main train stations, workers sprayed disinfectant in public spaces.

After a taxi driver tested positive in Beijing over the weekend, authorities tracked down 144 passengers for additional tests, according to The Global Times, a state tabloid. Now anyone who gets into a taxi or car service in Beijing has to scan a QR code from their phone so that the government can quickly track them down.

The government has pushed ahead with plans to vaccinate 50 million people before next month’s New Year celebrations, a holiday that traditionally hundreds of millions of people cross the country to visit their families. More than 10 million cans had been distributed by Wednesday.

Despite the vaccinations, officials have already warned people not to travel before vacation.

“If these measures are well implemented, it can ensure that there is not a major epidemic recovery,” Feng Zijian, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control, said at a briefing in Beijing on Wednesday.

While the new restrictions have pestered millions, there doesn’t seem to be any significant public opposition to them.

“In my opinion, measures like a city-wide lockdown are actually pretty good,” said Zhao Zhengyu, a Beijing university student who now lives in her parents’ home in Shijiazhuang, where she was on winter hiatus when the outbreak broke out there.

Many in the city feared a repeat of Wuhan’s lockdown, but it sounded unimpressed.

Ms. Zhao’s parents now work from home and only collect groceries from a market in their residential area. She complained that she couldn’t meet friends or study in the library, but said that online learning had become routine.

“Maybe we’ve gotten used to it,” she said.

The response underscored how quickly the government is mobilizing its resources to contain outbreaks.

After the lockdown was announced in Shijiazhuang on January 6, authorities collected more than 10 million coronavirus test samples over the next three days – almost one for every resident, officials said at a press conference in the city. These tests gave 354 positive results, although some of the cases were asymptomatic.

A second round of mass nucleic acid testing began on Tuesday.

“In fact, this is a kind of war system – that uses wartime social control in peacetime – and that war system works during a pandemic,” said Chen Min, a writer and former newspaper editor who goes by the pseudonym Xiao Shu. Mr. Chen was in Wuhan last year when the city was locked down.

The way the country was governed gave him the means to fight the epidemic – even if some measures seemed excessive.

“Chinese cities are enforcing housing systems – smaller ones have hundreds of residents, large ones tens of thousands – and if you close the gates you can lock in tens of thousands of people,” Chen said in a telephone interview. “If you run into this type of problem now, you will surely use this method. That would be impossible in western countries. “

Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher contributed to the coverage. Claire Fu contributed to the research.

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Business

New warnings of a Covid ‘Christmas wave and New 12 months’s wave’

New warnings of a Covid ‘Christmas wave and New Year’s wave'

Dr. Stephen Parodi, director of Kaiser Permanente’s Nationwide Covid Response, warned that new coronavirus cases are imminent unless Americans change their behavior during a Tuesday night interview on The News with Shepard Smith.

“If we don’t make the choice now to change the future, I worry that we will see Christmas Day and a New Year wave in January, and hospitals will be beyond the breaking point of what we really see,” said Parodi.

According to the Covid Tracking Project, the US broke coronavirus records again this week. Wednesday marked the second deadliest day of coronavirus in the United States since the pandemic began, and on Thursday the country hit record hospital stays of 117,000 people in hospitals due to Covid. The virus is spiraling out of control in California. Nearly 19,000 people are being hospitalized because of the pandemic, and patients are being taken to the hallways of intensive care units. That’s one in six people hospitalized across the country.

Parodi told host Shepard Smith he was concerned about his employees who continue to work overtime and are exhausted. Parodi said his staff were frustrated that the current surge in cases could have been prevented, but instead they are now grappling with it after Thanksgiving.

Air traffic in the United States exceeded 1 million passengers a day on the weekend before Christmas, despite warnings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to the Transportation Security Administration.

Parodi said he hoped the general public would prove the evidence of another surge in false cases and stay home this year.

“This year we have to make the sacrifice,” urged Parodi. “What I tell my patients is that this Christmas has to be different so that next year all the people we like to meet will be here next year.”