Tag Archives: COVID-19. Pandemic

As America counts, the world holds its breath for U.S. election outcome

By Luke Baker, Libby George and Daria Sito-Sucic

LONDON/LAGOS/SARAJEVO (Reuters) – A day after Americans voted in a bitterly contested election, the rest of the world was none the wiser on Wednesday, with millions of votes still to count, the race too close to call and a mounting risk of days or even weeks of legal uncertainty.

Donald Trump’s pre-emptive declaration of victory at the White House was condemned by some U.S. political commentators and civil rights groups, who warned about the trampling of long-standing democratic norms.

Most world leaders and foreign ministers sat on their hands, trying not to add any fuel to the electoral fire.

“Let’s wait and see what the outcome is,” said British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab. “There’s obviously a significant amount of uncertainty. It’s much closer than I think many had expected.”

But while Raab and others urged caution, the Slovenian prime minister broke ranks, congratulating Trump and the Republican party via Twitter.

“It’s pretty clear that American people have elected @realDonaldTrump and @Mike_Pence for #4moreyears,” wrote Janez Jansa, one of several east European leaders, including Hungary’s Viktor Orban, who are fervent Trump allies. “Congratulations @GOP for strong results across the #US.”

The latest vote tally showed Democrat challenger Joe Biden with a lead in the Electoral College – 224 votes to 213, with 270 needed for victory – but with counting still be completed in at least five major ‘battleground’ states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Georgia.

In 2000, the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore hinged on Florida. It was ultimately decided in Bush’s favor by the U.S. Supreme Court, in a ruling five weeks after the vote.

In his comments, Trump suggested the Supreme Court – to which he has nominated three of the nine justices – would have to decide the winner again.

On Twitter, the hashtags #Trump, #Biden and #USElections2020 were trending from Russia to Pakistan, Malaysia to Kenya and across Europe and Latin America, underscoring how much every region of the world sees the outcome as pivotal.

In Russia, which U.S. intelligence agencies have accused of trying to interfere in the election, there was no official reaction.

But Pro-Kremlin lawmaker Vyacheslav Nikonov, the grandson of Stalin’s foreign minister, advised Russians to stock up on popcorn to watch the show he predicted was about to unfold, saying U.S. society was fatally split.

“The result of the elections is the worst outcome for America,” Nikonov, who welcomed Trump’s 2016 win, wrote on Facebook. “Whoever wins the legal battles half of Americans will not consider them the lawful president. Let’s stock up on large quantities of popcorn.”

‘IT AFFECTS US ALL’

In Australia, crowds watched the results roll in while drinking beer in an American bar in Sydney.

“The news is so much better when Trump is in,” said Glen Roberts, wearing a red ‘Make Europe Great Again’ baseball cap. “You never know what he said, it’s so good. I think it’ll be less interesting if Trump loses.”

Others were quick to underline the ramifications of the U.S. vote worldwide. “I think it affects us all, what happens over there really matters for the next four years over here,” said Sydney resident Luke Heinrich.

New York-based Human Rights Watch, one of the world’s leading civil rights groups, warned about the need to reserve judgment on the results until every vote is counted. With a very high number of mail-in ballots this year because of the Covid-19 pandemic, full tallies are expected to take days in some states.

Executive director Kenneth Roth said premature declarations of victory were dangerous.

“Autocrats might be perfectly happy to undermine democracy in the United States by welcoming a premature declaration of victory,” he said.

China, whose relations with the United States have sunk to their worst in decades under Trump, said the election was a domestic affair and it had “no position on it”.

Chinese social media users, however, were quick to mock the failure of the U.S. electoral system to deliver a quick and clear result.

“Whether he wins or loses, his final mission is to destroy the appearance of American democracy,” one user on China’s Twitter-like Weibo platform wrote on Wednesday.

“Let Trump be re-elected and take the U.S. downhill,” another wrote.

In Nigeria, one leading politician, Senator Shehu Sani, said the uncertainty in the United States was reminiscent of Africa.

“Africa used to learn American democracy, America is now learning African democracy,” he tweeted to his 1.6 million followers.

(Reporting by Luke Baker in London, Libby George in Lagos and Daria Sito-Sucic; Additional reporting by Stephanie Ulmer-Nebehay in Geneva, Crispian Balmer in Rome, Justyna Pawlak in Warsaw, Andrew Osborn in Moscow, Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels and Tony Munroe and Gao Liangping in Beijing; Editing by Alex Richardson)

U.S. manufacturing near two-year high; road ahead difficult

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. manufacturing activity accelerated more than expected in October, with new orders jumping to their highest level in nearly 17 years amid a shift in spending toward goods like motor vehicles and food as the COVID-19 pandemic drags on.

The survey on Monday from the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) was the last piece of major economic data before Tuesday’s bitterly contested presidential election. But the outlook for manufacturing is challenging.

While the coronavirus crisis has boosted demand for goods complementing the pandemic life, a resurgence in new cases across the country could lead to authorities re-imposing restrictions to slow the spread of the respiratory illness as winter approaches, which could crimp activity. Government money for businesses and workers hit by the pandemic, which boosted economic growth in the third quarter, has dried up.

“Manufacturing rebounded strongly with fewer restrictions on economic activity and stimulus efforts, but the path forward will be more difficult as the economy continues to cope with the pandemic,” said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The ISM said its index of national factory activity increased to a reading of 59.3 last month. That was the highest since November 2018 and followed a reading of 55.4 in September.

A reading above 50 indicates expansion in manufacturing, which accounts for 11.3% of the U.S. economy. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the index rising to 55.8 in October.

The jump in activity, however, likely overstates the health of the manufacturing sector. A report from the Federal Reserve last month showed output at factories dropping 0.3% in September and remaining 6.4% below its pre-pandemic level.

Manufacturers and suppliers said last month they “continue to operate in reconfigured factories” and with every month were “becoming more proficient at expanding output.”

Though sentiment among manufacturers remained upbeat, there were two positive comments for every cautious comment, a slight decrease compared to September.

The outcome of Tuesday’s vote is expected to lead to a brief period of uncertainty. President Donald Trump is trailing former Vice President and Democratic Party candidate, Joe Biden, in national opinion polls.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading higher following their steepest weekly loss. The dollar was steady against a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices rose.

NEW ORDERS SURGE

Fifteen industries, including apparel, food, furniture and transportation equipment reported growth last month. Textile mills and printing reported a contraction.

Manufacturing’s continued recovery will likely keep the economy floating, with growth expected to slow sharply in the fourth quarter after a historic 33.1% annualized rate of expansion in the July-September period.

Growth last quarter, which followed a record 31.4% pace of contraction in the April-June quarter, was juiced up by more than $3 trillion in government pandemic relief. There is no deal in sight for another round of fiscal stimulus.

A separate report from the Commerce Department on Monday showed construction spending rose a moderate 0.3% in September, slowing after a 0.8% increase in August.

The coronavirus crisis has pulled spending away from services towards goods that complement the changed life-style. Spending on goods has surpassed its pre-pandemic level.

Makers of chemical products reported “business continues to be robust.” Food manufacturers said they had “increased production due to stores stocking up for the second wave of COVID-19.” Manufacturers of computer and electronic products said the coronavirus continued “to have an effect on supplier support and operations, more from a decreased labor perspective rather than unavailable material.”

The ISM’s forward-looking new orders sub-index surged to a reading of 67.9 last month, the highest reading since January 2004, from 60.2 in September. Customers’ inventories remained too low for the 49th straight month and order backlogs steadily increased, which bodes well for future production.

“On the upside, social distancing efforts, which have been a factor in consumers pivoting spending away from services and toward goods, is showing no signs of abating, especially as virus case counts are surging again,” said Sarah House, a senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities in Charlotte, North Carolina.

“This shift to goods spending should continue to underpin orders, but is unlikely to go on with the same muster as it did earlier when an initial flurry of spending on manufactured goods aimed at setting up at-home offices and remote classrooms boosted goods spending.”

With orders booming, manufacturing employment expanded for the first time since July 2019. The ISM’s manufacturing employment gauge rose to a reading of 53.2 from 49.6 in September. That likely supported overall job growth in October.

According to a Reuters survey of economists, nonfarm payrolls probably increased by 700,000 jobs last month after rising 661,000 in September. Employment growth has cooled from a record 4.781 million in June. About 11.5 million of the 22.2 million jobs lost during the pandemic have been recovered.

The government is scheduled to publish October’s employment report on Friday.

(Reporting By Lucia Mutikani,; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Andrea Ricci)

Global CO2 emissions show biggest ever drop in first half of 2020

By Nina Chestney

LONDON (Reuters) – Global carbon dioxide emissions fell by 8.8% in the first six months of this year, the biggest drop for a first half-year period, due to the effects of coronavirus-related restrictions, a study showed on Wednesday.

Research published in the journal Nature Communications by a group of scientists from China, France, Japan and the United States, said emissions fell by 1,551 million tonnes or 8.8% in the first half of the year, compared to the same period last year.

The 8.8% reduction represents largest ever fall in emissions over the first half year, larger than for any economic downturn. The drop was also larger than the annual decrease during World War Two, although mean emissions are much bigger now than at that time.

The scientists used data based on real-time activity and analyzed the daily, weekly and seasonal trends of CO2 emissions before and after the COVID-19 pandemic and the economic downturn it triggered.

This spring, governments around the world imposed lockdowns to contain the COVID-19 pandemic which curtailed energy use for industrial production and transport. This resulted in greenhouse gas emissions declining.

Warmer-than-usual weather across much of the northern hemisphere also meant that emissions were somewhat lower than they would have been in the same period of last year.

The study said the fall in daily CO2 emissions was most pronounced in April when the toughest restrictions were in place. Emissions began to recover in late April and May as economic activity resumed in China and parts of Europe.

But falls in transport-related emissions persisted.

“By July 1, the pandemic’s effects on global emissions diminished as lockdown restrictions relaxed and some economic activities restarted, especially in China and several European countries,” the paper said.

“However, substantial differences persist between countries, with continuing emission declines in the U.S. where coronavirus cases are still increasing substantially,” it added.

(Reporting by Nina Chestney. Editing by Jane Merriman)

U.S. labor market slowing as fiscal stimulus fades

By Lucia Mutikani

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits unexpectedly increased last week, supporting views the economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic was running out of steam amid diminishing government funding.

The weekly jobless claims report from the Labor Department on Thursday, the most timely data on the economy’s health, also showed 26 million people were on unemployment benefits in early September. The faltering labor market recovery and a recent rise in new coronavirus infections has piled pressure on Congress and the White House to come up with another rescue package.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell told lawmakers on Wednesday that Congress and the U.S. central bank needed to “stay with it” in working to support the economy’s recovery. More fiscal stimulus is looking increasingly unlikely before the Nov. 3 presidential election.

“The high level of joblessness shows that the country isn’t out of the woods yet and it won’t be if the pleading of Fed officials for more stimulus isn’t heard by government officials down in Washington,” said Chris Rupkey, chief economist at MUFG in New York. “The economy is running on empty.”

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits rose 4,000 to a seasonally adjusted 870,000 for the week ended Sept. 19. Data for the prior week was revised to show 6,000 more applications received than previously reported. Economists polled by Reuters had forecast 840,000 applications in the latest week.

Unadjusted claims increased 28,527 to 824,542 last week. Economists prefer the unadjusted claims number given earlier difficulties adjusting the claims data for seasonal fluctuations because of the economic shock caused by the coronavirus crisis.

Six months after the pandemic started in the United States, jobless claims remain above their 665,000 peak during the 2007-09 Great Recession, though applications have dropped from a record 6.867 million at the end of March.

While the reopening of businesses in May boosted activity, demand in the vast services industries has remained lackluster, keeping layoffs elevated. Job cuts have also spread to industries such as financial services and technology that were not initially impacted by the mandated business closures in mid-March because of insufficient demand.

A total 630,080 applications were received for the government-funded pandemic unemployment assistance last week. The PUA is for the self-employed, gig workers and others who do not qualify for the regular state unemployment programs. Altogether, 1.5 million people filed claims last week.

Stocks on Wall Street were trading lower. The dollar gained versus a basket of currencies. U.S. Treasury prices rose.

STALLED PROGRESS

The claims report also showed the number of people receiving benefits after an initial week of aid dropped 167,000 to 12.58 million in the week ending Sept. 12.

Economists believed the so-called continuing claims are declining as people exhaust their eligibility for benefits, which are limited to 26 weeks in most states.

Indeed, just under one million workers exhausted their first six months of state unemployment benefits in August. At least 1.6 million workers filed for extended unemployment benefits in the week ending Sept. 5, up 104,479 from the prior week.

The continuing claims data covered the period during which the government surveyed households for September’s unemployment rate. The decline in mid-September implied a further decrease in the unemployment rate from 8.4% in August.

“Only faster progress against the virus itself will assuage the unemployment struggles of so many workers in fields like entertainment who can’t return to their jobs until social distancing restrictions are relaxed ,” said Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation in New York.

The Fed has cut interest rates to near zero and vowed to keep borrowing costs low for a while, and has also been pumping money into the economy. Government money to help businesses has virtually dried up. Tens of thousands of airline workers are facing layoffs or furloughs next month.

A $600 weekly unemployment benefits supplement ended in July and was replaced with a $300 weekly subsidy, whose funding is already running out. The death toll from COVID-19 in the country topped 200,000 on Tuesday, the highest number of any nation.

The ebbing fiscal stimulus is already restraining the economy after activity rebounded sharply over the summer. Gross domestic product is expected to rebound at as much as a record 32% annualized rate in the third quarter after tumbling at a 31.7% rate in the April-June period, the worst performance since the government started keeping records in 1947.

But retail sales and production at factories moderated in August. Business activity cooled in September, reports have shown. Goldman Sachs on Wednesday cut its fourth-quarter GDP growth estimate to a 3% rate from a 6% pace, citing “lack of further fiscal support.”

(Reporting by Lucia Mutikani; Editing by Andrea Ricci)

Vaccine makers face biggest medical manufacturing challenge in history

By Julie Steenhuysen and Kate Kelland

CHICAGO/LONDON (Reuters) – Developing a COVID-19 vaccine in record time will be tough. Producing enough to end the pandemic will be the biggest medical manufacturing feat in history.

That work is underway.

From deploying experts amid global travel restrictions to managing extreme storage conditions, and even inventing new kinds of vials and syringes for billions of doses, the path is strewn with formidable hurdles, according to Reuters interviews with more than a dozen vaccine developers and their backers.

Any hitch in an untested supply chain – which could stretch from Pune in India to England’s Oxford and Baltimore in the United States – could torpedo or delay the complex process.

Col. Nelson Michael, director of the U.S. Army’s Center for Infectious Disease Research who is working on the government’s “Warp Speed” project to deliver a vaccine at scale by January, said companies usually have years to figure this stuff out.

“Now, they have weeks.”

Much of the world’s attention is focused on the scientific race to develop a vaccine. But behind the scenes, experts are facing a stark reality: we may simply not have enough capacity to make, package and distribute billions of doses all at once.

Companies and governments are racing to scale-up machinery to address a critical shortage in automated filling and finishing capacity – the final step in the manufacturing process of putting the vaccine into vials or syringes, sealing them and packaging them up for shipping.

“This is the biggest logistical challenge the world has ever faced,” said Toby Peters, an engineering and technology expert at Britain’s Birmingham University. “We could be looking at vaccinating 60% of the population.”

Several developers, including frontrunner Moderna, are experimenting with new ways to mitigate the extreme cold storage demands of their vaccines, which at present need to be kept at minus 80 degrees Celsius (-112 Fahrenheit).

SiO2 Materials Science is working on producing vials that won’t shatter at super-cold temperatures.

Travel restrictions, meanwhile, are posing more prosaic problems; Johnson & Johnson, which plans to start clinical trials this summer, has struggled to send its vaccine experts to oversee the launch of production sites, for example.

‘NEVER IN HISTORY’

By setting up massive clinical trials involving 10,000 to 30,000 volunteers per vaccine, scientists hope to get an answer on whether a vaccine works as early as this October. But even if they succeed, manufacturing in bulk, getting regulators to sign off and packaging billions of doses is a monumental challenge.

Seth Berkley, chief executive of the GAVI vaccines alliance, said in reality, the world is unlikely to go straight from having zero vaccines to having enough doses for everyone.

“It’s likely to be a tailored approach to start with,” he said in an interview. “We’re looking to have something like one to two billion doses of vaccine in the first year, spread out over the world population.”

J&J has partnered with the U.S. government on a $1 billion investment to speed development and production of its vaccine, even before it’s proven to work. It has contracted Emergent Biosolutions and Catalent to manufacture in bulk in the United States. Catalent will also do some fill-and-finish work.

“Never in history has so much vaccine been developed at the same time – so that capacity doesn’t exist,” said Paul Stoffels, J&J’s chief scientific officer, who sees filling capacity as the main limiting factor.

Emergent’s manufacturing plant in Bayview, Maryland, can accommodate four vaccines in parallel using different manufacturing platforms and equipment.

Funded by the government in 2012, the plant includes single-use disposable bioreactor equipment featuring plastic bags rather than stainless steel fermentation equipment, which makes it easier to switch from one vaccine to another.

This month, the company received an additional $628 million to make those four suites available to support any candidate the government selects, CEO Bob Kramer told Reuters.

BLOW-FILL-SEAL-REPEAT

As well as working with J&J, New Jersey-based Catalent signed a deal with British drugmaker AstraZeneca last week to provide vial-filling and packaging services at its plant in Anagni, Italy. It aims to handle hundreds of millions of doses, starting as early as August 2020 and possibly running through until March 2022.

It has ordered high-speed vial-filling equipment to boost output at its Indiana plant, where it is also hiring an additional 300 workers.

Michael Riley, Catalent’s North American president for biologics, told Reuters his biggest challenge was trying to compress work that normally takes years into months.

Adding to the challenge is that glass vials are in short supply.

To save glass, companies plan to use larger vials of five to 20 doses – but this raises new problems, such as potential waste, if not all the doses are used before the vaccine spoils.

“The downside is that after a healthcare practitioner opens a vial, they need to then vaccinate 20 people in a short, 24-hour time,” said Prashant Yadav, a global healthcare supply-chain expert at the Center for Global Development in Washington.

As part of the same drive, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Defense have awarded ApiJect Systems up to $138 million to upgrade its facilities to be able to make up to 100 million plastic pre-filled syringes by the end of this year, and as many as 600 million in 2021.

The company plans to use a technology called Blow-Fill-Seal, where syringes are blown out of plastic, filled with vaccine and sealed in seconds. This will need Food and Drug Administration approval, CEO Jay Walker told Reuters.

BREAKING COLD CHAIN

SiO2 Materials Science is, meanwhile, ramping up capacity of plastic vials with a glass lining, which are more stable at ultra-low temperatures.

“You can bring us down to minus 196 Celsius, which none of the vaccines need,” Chief Business Officer Lawrence Ganti said. “You can throw it against the wall and it doesn’t break. Our founder has done that. He’s thrown frozen vials at me.”

The company expects to boost production from the current 5-10 million vials a year to 120 million within three-and-a-half months, he told Reuters.

Once packaged, many vaccines need to be kept cold – and some leading contenders made from genetic material such as messenger RNA need to be kept very cold – presenting another challenge that may limit access.

“People who work with mRNA store it at minus 80 degrees centigrade, which is not something you’re gonna find in most pharmacies or doctor’s offices,” said Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and co-inventor of the rotavirus vaccine.

Peters of Birmingham university has been gathering data from poorer regions of Africa and Asia, and said breaks in the temperature-controlled supply chain – “cold chain” – are already frequent.

In some places, it is common to lose 25% or more of vaccines because of broken cold chains, he told Reuters.

“So if you’re looking to manufacture four billion, and you reckon you’re going to lose 25%, then you have to manufacture five billion,” he said. “It’s all the elements to move it from the point of manufacture to the point of aggregation, right down to the health centres and then out to the community.”

QUARANTINE QUAGMIRE

Companies developing mRNA vaccines, including Moderna and Translate Bio, which is partnering with Sanofi, are working to make candidates stable at higher temperatures.

Ron Renaud, CEO of Translate Bio, said he was confident this would happen “within a short amount of time”.

Colleen Hussey, a Moderna spokeswoman, said: “We are getting more confident that we could run our supply chain at -20C, which is an easier storage condition than deep freezing,” she said.

Moderna plans to add a small period of time in which the vaccine can be stored at normal fridge temperatures of 2 to 8 degrees Celsius in doctors’ offices or clinics.

“We will know more in the next 2-3 months,” she said.

The pandemic is also presenting obstacles of a less technical nature.

Catalent, which has some 30 plants globally, has had to write special permission slips in eight languages explaining that their workers are considered essential.

J&J is having trouble getting experienced personnel to far-flung labs to oversee the transfer of technology to contract manufacturers because they’re subject to 14-day quarantines.

“It is absolutely a factor,” said Stoffels. “If you have to send your people to the middle of India to get to filling capacity, that’s not easy at the moment.”

(Reporting by Julie Steenhuysen in Chicago and Kate Kelland in London; Writing by Josephine Mason; Editing by Pravin Char)

Lockdowns may have averted 3 million deaths in Europe by curbing COVID-19: study

By Kate Kelland

LONDON (Reuters) – Wide-scale lockdowns including shop and school closures have reduced COVID-19 transmission rates in Europe enough to control its spread and may have averted more than three million deaths, researchers said on Monday.

In a modeling study of lockdown impact in 11 nations, Imperial College London scientists said the draconian steps, imposed mostly in March, had “a substantial effect” and helped bring the infection’s reproductive rate below one by early May.

The reproduction rate, or R value, measures the average number of people that one infected person will pass the disease on to. An R value above 1 can lead to exponential growth.

The Imperial team estimated that by early May, between 12 and 15 million people in the 11 countries – Austria, Belgium, Britain, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland – had been infected with COVID-19.

By comparing the number of deaths counted with deaths predicted by their model if no lockdown measures had been introduced, they found some 3.1 million deaths were averted.

“Measuring the effectiveness of these interventions is important, given their economic and social impacts, and may indicate which course of action is needed to maintain control,” the researchers said in a summary of their findings.

A second study by scientists in the United States, published alongside the Imperial-led one in the journal Nature, estimated that anti-contagion lockdown policies implemented in China, South Korea, Italy, Iran, France and the United States prevented or delayed around 530 million COVID-19 cases.

Focusing their analysis on these six countries, the U.S. research team compared infection growth rates before and after the implementation of more than 1,700 local, regional and national policies designed to slow or halt the spread of COVID-19, the disease caused by the new SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

They found that without anti-contagion policies in place, early infection rates of SARS-CoV-2 grew by 68% a day in Iran and an average of 38% a day across the other five countries.

Using econometric modeling normally used in assessing economic policies, they found lockdowns had slowed the infection rate with “measurable beneficial health outcomes in most cases”.

(Reporting by Kate Kelland, editing by Gareth Jones)