Tag Archives: Pandemic

Biden offers tax credits for COVID-19 vaccination paid time off

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden on Wednesday announced tax credits to certain businesses that provide paid time off for their employees to get COVID-19 shots as he seeks to get corporate America more involved in the vaccination campaign.

“I’m calling on every employer, large and small, in every state to give employees the time off they need with pay to get vaccinated,” the Democratic president said.

Biden said the tax credits would apply to businesses with fewer than 500 employees.

In a speech, Biden also said he expects the United States to reach his 100-day goal of getting 200 million coronavirus vaccine shots in arms by the end of the day even as the nation faces an increase in infections.

“Today we hit 200 million shots,” Biden said. “It’s an incredible achievement for the nation.”

Biden said the vaccine effort is entering a new phase with everyone over age 16 now eligible to be vaccinated. Biden said 80% of all seniors have received at least one shot, leading to a dramatic decline in the deaths of elderly Americans.

“If you’ve been waiting for your turn, wait no longer,” Biden said.

Biden administration officials said the government plans to reimburse businesses for the cost of giving workers as many as 80 hours paid time off to get their shots or recover from any vaccination side effects.

The tax credit is for up to $511 per day for each worker, through September. Businesses with fewer than 500 employees employ roughly half of U.S. private sector workers. The tax credits were authorized under Democratic-backed COVID-19 pandemic relief legislation passed by Congress and signed by Biden despite Republican opposition.

The administration’s chief problem in its response to the pandemic is now shifting from securing enough vaccine supply to convincing enough Americans to seek out the available shots.

The United States has expanded vaccination eligibility to most American adults, and more than half that population has had at least one vaccine dose, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A third of U.S. adults are fully vaccinated, as well as 26% of the population overall, it said.

But COVID-19 is still killing hundreds of Americans daily and many Americans have shown a reluctance to get vaccinated. Countries around the world with less successful vaccination campaigns than the United States are dealing with a spike in infections. The U.S. COVID-19 death toll of more than 568,000 leads the world.

(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt and Steve Holland; Editing by Will Dunham)

Nowhere as worrisome for COVID-19 as South America, Brazil especially concerning – Pan American Health official

By Julia Symmes Cobb

BOGOTA (Reuters) – South America is now the most worrying region for COVID-19 infections, as cases mount in nearly every country, the director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) said on Wednesday.

“Nowhere are infections as worrisome as in South America,” Director Carissa Etienne said during a weekly news conference.

Brazil has seen the most merciless surge. Scientists forecast it will soon surpass the worst of a record January wave in the United States, with daily fatalities climbing above 4,000 on Tuesday.

“The situation in Brazil is concerning countrywide,” said COVID-19 incident director Sylvain Aldighieri. “Our concern at the moment is also for the Brazilian citizens themselves in this context of health services that are overwhelmed.”

Brazil needs access to more COVID-19 vaccines now and should be able to receive them through global partnerships, Aldighieri said.

PAHO can expand its help to Brazilian states if requested, he said, adding it is already aiding with virus genetic sequencing, procuring oxygen and coronavirus testing.

Intensive care units are nearing capacity in Peru and Ecuador, and in parts of Bolivia and Colombia cases have doubled in the last week, Etienne said, adding that the southern cone is also experiencing an acceleration in cases.

The United States, Brazil and Argentina are among the 10 countries seeing the highest number of new infections globally, she added.

The Americas recorded more than 1.3 million new coronavirus cases and over 37,000 deaths last week, Etienne said, more than half of all deaths reported globally.

“We cannot ease public health and social interventions without good data and justification,” Etienne said, adding slowing and stopping transmission “requires decisive action by local and national governments.”

More than 210 million vaccine doses have been administered across the Americas, Etienne said.

Bolivia, Nicaragua and Haiti may be affected by Serum Institute of India vaccine shipment delays, said sub-director Jarbas Barbosa, but the World Health Organization is appealing to the Indian government to ensure shipment agreements.

(Reporting by Julia Symmes Cobb; Editing by Bill Berkro)

Analysis: The housing boom, central banks and the inflation conundrum

By Sujata Rao

LONDON (Reuters) – A multi-year boom in global house prices which even a pandemic has failed to halt is forcing central banks around the world to confront a knotty question – what, if anything, should they be doing about it?

The surge in property values from Australia to Sweden is often viewed benignly by governments as creating wealth. But history also shows the risk of de-stabilizing bubbles and the high social cost as millions find home ownership unaffordable.

The irony is that while the cheap money created by low or negative interest rates has driven the price rises, they barely figure in central banks’ calculations of inflation, one of the key drivers of their monetary policy.

While housing costs, whether rent or home repairs, are assigned varying weights in inflation indices ranging from 40%-plus in the United States to 6.5% in the euro zone, house prices themselves are left out. As they spiral higher and higher, many argue this is no longer tenable.

“The debate of whether we actually are reflecting inflation properly will come up more and more. House prices will start getting a lot of attention,” said Manoj Pradhan, co-author of a book called The Great Demographic Reversal, which predicts a global inflation resurgence in coming years.

Global residential property prices have risen 60% in the past 10 years, according to a Knight Frank index. In 2020, even as COVID-19 choked the world economy, they climbed an average 5.6%, with 20%-30% jumps in some markets.

While low interest rates have long been the main driver of the rally, existing government subsidies for home ownership and more recently pandemic-era support such as suspending property taxes have been factors too.

Many of these one-off support measures will start to be wound down, but governments often fight shy of politically tricky measures to keep a lid more firmly on prices, such as banning multiple property ownership or easing building regulations.

That raises the question of what central banks can do.

FIRST SALVO

New Zealand’s government fired the first salvo in February when it told its central bank to consider the impact of interest rates on house prices, which soared 23% last year.

Others are considering the question too. European Central Bank President Christine Lagarde said last week that measuring housing’s role in the rising cost of living had emerged as a key point in a strategic policy review due to be unveiled this year.

If real inflation is higher than the official consumer price index is measuring, it could imply that central bank or government policies are more expansionary than they should be.

“If housing does not signal inflation via the CPI, then the economy is more likely to run hot, and what you get over time is generalized inflation pressures,” Pradhan said.

At present rental inflation is subdued due to pandemic hardship, or because low interest rates and remote working are encouraging home-buying.

Morgan Stanley’s chief cross-asset strategist Andrew Sheets said this may be giving a misleading signal. “The rental market will be weak and the housing market will be strong and that (rental weakness) could show up as a disinflationary force.”

There are strong arguments for excluding headline shifts in house prices from inflation indexes. Housing is, for most people a lifetime purchase rather than an ongoing expense, which they are designed to gauge.

Including house prices in the inflation measures central banks use to guide policy is also widely seen as impractical, given their extreme volatility.

More central banks may however consider adapting inflation indices to include a measure of the costs associated with living in one’s own home, such as maintenance and home improvements.

At present, inflation measures used by the Fed, the Bank of Japan, New Zealand and Australia include so-called owner-occupier costs. But the gauge employed by the Bank of England does not, and they are also not factored into the main inflation measure used by the ECB.

The ECB has argued for their inclusion, but collecting timely data from 19 countries and differing home ownership levels across the bloc would complicate the task.

Crucially, economists believe including these costs might have lifted euro zone inflation by 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points, taking the ECB nearer its elusive inflation target of close to 2%.

LONG-DORMANT INFLATION

Ultimately, such policymaking shifts may be risky amid uncertainty created by the pandemic.

Adding property prices to CPI indexes just as long-dormant inflation finally awakes could send readings soaring, heaping pressure on central banks to tighten policy even as economies nurse pandemic-time wounds.

Some analysts, such as at ING Bank, predict that with some exceptions housing rallies may anyway start to cool as support measures introduced during the pandemic are unwound.

Voters’ anger may even goad governments into slugging property investors with higher taxes – as New Zealand did at the end of March.

Those who argue against extending central bank remits further into housing say tighter policy could even exacerbate the problem by crimping property supply.

George Washington University professor Danny Leipziger argues housing markets are more effectively cooled by regulation and measures outside central banks’ scope, such as raising capital gains taxes and increasing the supply of housing.

“I have no problem with the ECB adding rental or home-owners’ costs to its basket,” Leipziger said. “But if I am concerned about house prices in Berlin or Madrid, asking the ECB to deal with it is not the right way.”

(Additional reporting by Dhara Ranasinghe and David Milliken; Editing by Mark John and Jan Harvey)

Return the favor: South Korea looks to U.S. for COVID-19 vaccine aid

By Sangmi Cha

SEOUL (Reuters) – South Korea hopes the United States will help it tackle a shortage of coronavirus vaccine in return for test kits and masks Seoul sent to Washington earlier in the pandemic, the foreign minister said on Wednesday.

The government has drawn fire from the media for not doing enough to secure enough vaccines early, with just 3% of the population inoculated, due to tight global supply and limited access.

“We have been stressing to the United States that ‘A friend in need is a friend indeed,'” the minister, Chung Eui-yong, told reporters at the Kwanhun Club of South Korean journalists.

He said South Korea had airlifted Washington a large volume of coronavirus test kits and face masks in the early stages of the pandemic “in the spirit of the special South Korea-U.S. alliance,” despite tight domestic supply at the time.

“We are hoping that the United States will help us out with the challenges we are facing with the vaccines, based on the solidarity we demonstrated last year.”

The allies were in talks, added Chung, who also flagged South Korea’s potential contribution to preserving a global semiconductor supply chain U.S. President Joe Biden is keen to maintain.

Diplomatic efforts have not yielded any concrete steps, however, as the talks with Washington are still in an early stage, health ministry official Son Young-rae told reporters.

Opposition lawmaker Park Jin urged more aggressive vaccine diplomacy, calling for the government to invoke its free trade pact (FTA) with Washington to secure pharmaceutical products.

“The government needs to be more proactive,” Park told Reuters.

“The FTA provides us a legal base to demand (vaccines) as it stipulates the two countries’ commitment to promoting the development of, and facilitating access to, pharmaceutical products.”

The U.S. embassy in Seoul did not immediately reply to a Reuters’ request for comment.

About 1.77 million people in South Korea have had their first dose of the AstraZeneca Plc or Pfizer vaccines. The low rate compares with a 40% vaccination rate in the United States, according to Reuters data.

Tuesday’s 731 new coronavirus infections, up from 549 cases a day earlier, took South Korea’s tally to 115,926, with 1,806 deaths.

New U.S. COVID cases fall 0.4% last week, after rising for four weeks

(Reuters) – New cases of COVID-19 in the United States fell 0.4% last week after rising for four weeks in a row, according to a Reuters analysis of state and county data.

Health experts say new cases have plateaued at a high level as more infectious variants of the virus offset progress made in vaccinations. The country logged nearly 70,000 new cases per day in the week ended April 18, compared with 55,000 new cases a day in March and about 30,000 new cases this time last year.

Michigan continued to lead the states, with nearly twice as many new cases per 100,000 people last week as Rhode Island and New Jersey, the states with the next highest rates of infection based on population.

The average number of COVID-19 patients in hospitals rose 5% to more than 41,000 across the country, increasing for a third week in a row, according to the Reuters analysis.

Deaths from COVID-19, which tend to lag infections by several weeks, fell 2.8% last week, excluding a backlog of deaths reported by Oklahoma, according to the Reuters analysis. Including the backlog, reported deaths fell by 27%.

Cumulatively, nearly 568,000 people have died from the coronavirus pandemic, or one in every 576 U.S. residents.

Vaccinations plateaued at 3.1 million shots per day last week, after setting records the previous seven weeks. U.S. health regulators called for a pause in administering the Johnson & Johnson vaccine last week due to reports of brain blood clots in six women who received the shot out of some 7 million vaccinated.

As of Sunday, 40% of the U.S. population has received at least one dose of a vaccine, and 25% was fully vaccinated, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Greece opens to tourists, anxious to move on from crisis season

By Karolina Tagaris

RHODES, Greece (Reuters) – Greece began opening to tourists on Monday with few bookings but hopes for a better season to help make up for a 2020 devastated by the coronavirus pandemic.

On Rhodes island, where most visitors are from abroad, hoteliers are scrubbing, polishing and painting in anticipation of a make-or-break year.

“We’re preparing the hotel in order to start as soon as the government gives us the green light,” said George Tselios, general manager of Sun Beach Hotel, whose customers are from Scandinavia, Germany, Austria and Britain.

Greece will formally open on May 14 but starting Monday, tourists from the European Union, the United States, Britain, Serbia, Israel and the United Arab Emirates will not quarantine if they are vaccinated or test negative for COVID-19.

Tourism, which generates a fifth of Greece’s GDP and one in five jobs, is vital for an economy which had climbed out of a decade-long slump only to slip back into recession last year as COVID-19 struck.

In a normal year, Rhodes would have already laid out the umbrellas for a season that runs from March through October. In mid-April, it resembled a ghost city.

Shuttered luxury resorts towered over a long, sandy, empty coastline. Beach towns normally bursting with crowds of British tourists were silent, with boarded up shops, tavernas and bars.

Many have been closed since 2020, when just 7.4 million people visited Greece, fewer than any year in its decade-long economic crisis and down from a record 31.3 million in 2019.

From hotels to restaurants and daily cruise boats, the many businesses surviving on state aid cannot afford another lost summer.

“Most of them feel the country cannot survive another crisis,” Rhodes’s deputy mayor for tourism, Konstantinos Taraslias, said.

Nearly 600,000 tourists visited Rhodes last year, down from 2.3 million in 2019. Just over half its 650 hotels opened, the hoteliers’ association said.

WIDESPREAD TESTING

Greece says it is better placed this summer thanks to widespread testing, quarantine hotels and plans to vaccinate islanders and tourism workers.

“We’ve done everything within our power to have a better season,” said George Hatzimarkos, governor of Greece’s most popular region, the south Aegean islands, which besides Rhodes includes Mykonos and Santorini.

“We’ll be absolutely ready,” by mid-May, Hatzimarkos said.

But bookings are few and most for August to October, said the president of Rhodes’ hoteliers, Manolis Markopoulos, forecasting a year of last-minute reservations.

“We can understand it because guests really want to be sure that they will fly,” he said. “But that does not mean that we will not get bookings later.”

While Greece fared better than much of Europe in containing the first wave of the pandemic, a continuous rise in infections has forced it to impose several lockdowns to protect its strained health service.

Tourists will be subject to lockdown restrictions, which include night-time curfews. Restaurants and bars have been closed since November.

Giannis Chalikias, who manages nine businesses on Rhodes, said only one is open and struggling to meet the obligations of the remaining eight.

“We’re going through an unprecedented situation,” he said. “We’re waiting day by day for people to get vaccinated… so that we can open and have a normal season.”

(Editing by Ed Osmond)

Oil steadies as dollar slumps but pandemic surge weighs

By Devika Krishna Kumar

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Oil prices were little changed on Monday, supported by a weaker U.S. dollar but pressured by concerns about the impact on demand from rising coronavirus cases in India and other countries.

Brent crude was down 4 cents, at $66.73 a barrel by 11:06 AM ET (1506 GMT), after rising 6% last week. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) U.S. oil was up 3 cents at $63.16 a barrel, having gained 6.4% last week.

The U.S. dollar traded at a six-week low versus major peers on Monday, with Treasury yields hovering near their weakest in five weeks.

With oil priced in dollars, a softer greenback could spur demand from holders of other currencies.

“If today’s broad-based weakness in the US dollar is sustained, the energy complex should be able to maintain the bulk of last week’s gains,” said Jim Ritterbusch, president of Ritterbusch and Associates.

“The primary hazard to continued oil price strength is the possible pre-emergence of Covid-19 case counts on a broad scale”

India reported a record rise in infections, which lifted overall cases to just over 15 million, making the country the second-worst affected after the United States, which has reported more than 31 million infections.

Deaths from COVID-19 in India also rose by a record 1,619 to nearly 180,000.

The capital region of Delhi ordered a six-day lockdown, joining around 13 other states across India that have decided to impose restrictions, curfews or lockdowns in their cities.

“This new wave of measures, while so far likely to be less stringent than what we saw in March 2020, when gasoline and gasoil/diesel demand in the country fell by close to 60%, is nevertheless set to weigh on transportation fuel consumption,” consultancy JBC said.

Hong Kong will suspend flights from India, Pakistan and the Philippines from April 20 due to imported coronavirus infections, authorities said on Sunday.

Lending some support, Saudi Arabia’s crude oil exports fell in February to their lowest in eight months, the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) said on Monday, as the world’s biggest oil exporter voluntarily capped output to support oil prices.

JP Morgan now expects Brent prices to break the $70 mark by May, compared with September in its previous forecast, the bank said in a recent note. It still expects them to finish the year at a similar level of about $74.

(Additional reporting by Ahmad Ghaddar in London, Aaron Sheldrick in Tokyo; Editing by Jan Harvey, Kirsten Donovan, Alexander Smith and David Gregorio)

New UK challenge trial studies if people can catch coronavirus again

By Reuters Staff

LONDON (Reuters) – British scientists on Monday launched a trial which will deliberately expose participants who have already had COVID-19 to the coronavirus again to examine immune responses and see how many get re-infected.

In February, Britain became the first country in the world to give the go-ahead for so-called “challenge trials” in humans, in which volunteers are deliberately exposed to COVID-19 to advance research into the disease caused by the coronavirus.

The study launched on Monday differs from the one announced in February as it seeks to re-infect people who have previously had COVID-19 in an effort to deepen understanding about immunity, rather than infecting people for the first time.

“The information from this work will allow us to design better vaccines and treatments, and also to understand if people are protected after having COVID, and for how long,” said Helen McShane, a University of Oxford vaccinologist and chief investigator on the study.

She added that the work would help understanding of what immune responses protect against reinfection.

Scientists have used human challenge trials for decades to learn more about diseases such as malaria, flu, typhoid and cholera, and to develop treatments and vaccines against them.

The first stage of the trial will seek to establish the lowest dose of the coronavirus needed in order for it to start replicating in about 50% of participants, while producing few to no symptoms. A second phase, starting in the summer, will infect different volunteers with that standard dose.

In phase one, up to 64 healthy participants, aged 18-30, who were infected with coronavirus at least three months ago will be re-infected with the original strain of SARS-CoV-2.

They will then quarantine for at least 17 days and be monitored, and anyone who develops symptoms will be given Regeneron monoclonal antibody treatment.

Brazil scrambles to secure sedatives as hospitals overwhelmed by COVID-19

By Reuters Staff

SAO PAULO (Reuters) – An emergency shipment of sedatives needed to intubate severely ill COVID-19 patients arrived in Brazil late on Thursday from China, as the South American country scrambles for supplies due to severe shortages of the vital drugs.

In recent days, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo have both sounded the alarm over shortages of sedatives, with Sao Paulo’s Health Secretary saying the city’s ability to care for seriously ill COVID-19 patients is on the verge of collapse.

Brazil has become the epicenter of the pandemic, with more Brazilians dying of the virus each day than anywhere else in the world.

President Jair Bolsonaro has opposed lockdowns and held large events in which he often does not wear a mask. He has only recently embraced vaccines as a possible solution.

The cargo of 2.3 million drugs, donated by major Brazilian companies including miner Vale and oil producer Petrobras, touched down in Sao Paulo just after 10 p.m. local time.

As the health crisis worsens, Brazil is also negotiating with other countries for emergency supplies, with donations from Spain expected to arrive next week.

Brazil has recorded a total of 365,444 coronavirus deaths – second only to the United States – and 13,746,681 confirmed COVID-19 cases.

Brazil’s COVID-19 response cost thousands of lives, says humanitarian group

By Reuters Staff

RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – The Brazilian government’s “failed response” to the pandemic led to thousands of otherwise avoidable deaths and created a humanitarian catastrophe that is still playing out, aid group Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said on Thursday.

Brazil’s COVID-19 outbreak is the deadliest in the world after the United States and is currently leading in average daily mortalities. Last week more than a quarter of all global deaths were in Brazil.

A brutal second wave has hospitals saying they are running short of crucial drugs for intubating patients and most Brazilian states report that intensive care units are at or near capacity.

Right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro has opposed lockdowns, and has held large events in which he often does not wear a mask. He has only recently embraced vaccines as a possible solution.

“More than one year into the COVID-19 pandemic, the failed response in Brazil has caused a humanitarian catastrophe,” said Christos Christou, a medical doctor and president of MSF, sometimes called Doctors Without Borders in English.

“Each week there is a grim new record of deaths and infections – the hospitals are overflowing and yet there is still no coordinated centralized response,” Christou said in a briefing with reporters, adding the situation was expected to become even worse in the weeks ahead.

Bolsonaro has openly fought against state and local governments seeking to institute lockdowns, saying Brazilians need to get on with normal life and that job losses are more dangerous than the virus.

MSF Director-General Meinie Nicolai said the surge in cases cannot be blamed only on the contagious Brazilian COVID-19 variant, known as P.1.

“The P.1 variant is certainly a problem, but this doesn’t explain the situation in Brazil,” she said.