Chinese scientists say the novel coronavirus will not be eradicated, adding to a growing consensus around the world that the pathogen will likely return in waves like the flu.
It’s unlikely the new virus will disappear the way its close cousin SARS did 17 years ago, as it infects some people without causing obvious symptoms like fever. This group of so-called asymptomatic carriers makes it hard to fully contain transmission as they can spread the virus undetected, a group of Chinese viral and medical researchers told reporters in Beijing at a briefing Monday.
With SARS, those infected became seriously ill. Once they were quarantined from others, the virus stopped spreading. In contrast, China is still finding dozens of asymptomatic cases of the coronavirus every day despite bringing its epidemic under control.
FAQ: How Long Does COVID-19 Last?
That depends on the severity of infection.
“This is very likely to be an epidemic that co-exists with humans for a long time, becomes seasonal and is sustained within human bodies,” said Jin Qi, director of the Institute of Pathogen Biology at China’s top medial research institute, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences.
A consensus is forming among top researchers and governments worldwide that the virus is unlikely to be eliminated, despite costly lockdowns that have brought much of the global economy to a halt. Some public health experts are calling for the virus to be allowed to spread in a controlled way through younger populations like India’s, while countries like Sweden have opted out of strict lockdowns.
Anthony Fauci, the director of U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said last month that Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, could become a seasonal ailment. He cited as evidence cases now showing up in countries across the southern hemisphere as they enter their winter seasons.
More than 3 million people have been sickened and over 210,000 killed in the global pandemic.
While some, including Donald Trump, have expressed hope that the virus’s spread will slow as the temperature in northern hemisphere countries rises in the summer, Chinese experts on Monday said that they found no evidence for this.
“The virus is heat sensitive, but that’s when it’s exposed to 56 degrees Celsius for 30 minutes and the weather is never going to get that hot,” said Wang Guiqiang, head of the infectious diseases department of Peking University First Hospital. “So globally, even during the summer, the chance of cases going down significantly is small.”
코로나19 감염성 높아져…”1년내 세계인구 최대 70% 감염될지도” It’s generally believed that with the coronavirus the worst is yet to come. But some predictions by global experts… say the virus will likely end up infecting most people in the world. In that case it could become a seasonal illness like the flu. Our Choi Jeong-yoon reports. Public health experts have been trying to gauge how bad the coronavirus outbreak will get, and whether it will become a full-blown pandemic, by calculating the pathogen’s reproduction rate. And according to a recent report by U.S.-based investment bank JP Morgan Chase,… South Korea’s coronavirus epidemic has not yet reached its peak. Taking the speed of secondary infections in China into account ,… the bank predicted that the epidemic could reach its climax in Korea around March 20th and said there could be as many as ten thousand confirmed cases. The bank supposed three percent of the 2-point-4 million people living in Daegu had been exposed to the virus. Daegu is where more than 80 percent of the total confirmed cases have occurred in Korea. However, the South Korean health authorities said it’s too early to make such assumptions. Vice health minister Kim Gang-lip said at a briefing on Wednesday that more thorough statistical analysis needs to be done on the spread of the virus. Meanwhile, some say the virus will ultimately become uncontainable. In an article by the Atlantic,…Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch said the coronavirus will be a global pandemic,… with 40 to 70 percent of the world’s population likely to be infected this year. But he clarified that by saying many of those people won’t have severe illnesses or even show symptoms at all, which is already reportedly the case for many people who have tested positive for the coronavirus. In that way, it could have similarities with influenza, which is often life-threatening to elderly people or those with chronic health conditions, but causes no symptoms at all in around 14 percent of cases. This is leading to an emerging consensus that the outbreak will eventually morph into a new seasonal disease, which The Atlantic says could one day turn the “cold and flu season” into the “cold and flu and COVID-19 season.” Choi Jeong-yoon, Arirang News.
The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget or CRFB, a nonpartisan organization, analyzes the Federal budget to “educate the public on issues with significant fiscal policy impact.” Maya MacGuineas, the CRFB’s President, said, “Like the record levels of borrowing undertaken during World War II, a large share of today’s massive deficits are both inevitable and necessary in light of the current pandemic crisis. Combating this public health crisis and preventing the economy from falling into a depression will require a tremendous amount of resources – and if ever there were a time to borrow those resources from the future, it is now.”
She added, “But just as World War II was followed by years of fiscal responsibility to restore debt to historic levels, it will be important after the crisis and recovery to ensure that debt and deficits return to more sustainable levels.” While that is a worthwhile objective, it is hard to see how that will be achieved under the current political environment.
Deficit could hit $4.3 trillion and over 20% of GDP
The Federal deficit was on track to be over $1 trillion without any additional spending for the coronavirus this fiscal year. Now with the $2 trillion CARES Act, the $484 billion relief package and $134 billion for the Families First Act, the CRFB also estimates that, “nearly $600 billion in additional deficit spending as a result of feedback effects from lower economic output, slower inflation, higher unemployment, and lower interest rates” will occur.
The CRFB’s analysis included, “These projections almost certainly underestimate deficits, since they assume no further legislation is enacted to address the crisis and that policymakers stick to current law when it comes to other tax and spending policies.” The CRFB estimate was $3.85 trillion without the $484 billion relief bill. All of this cumulates in what could be a $4.3 trillion deficit this fiscal year ending in September.
What could also be of particular concern is that the CRFB also assumes, “the economy experiences a strong recovery in 2021 and fully returns to its pre-crisis trajectory by 2025.”
The Congressional Budget Office published an estimate on Friday that the deficit could be $3.7 trillion in fiscal 2020, which includes the $484 billion bill. Keep in mind that the largest previous deficit was $1.4 trillion during the Great Recession.
Federal budget deficit
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
A $4.3 trillion budget deficit translates to 20.8% of the country’s GDP. This would be more than double the largest amount during the Great Recession and only be beaten by a few years during World War II.
Federal budget deficit as a percentage of GDP
Congressional Budget Office, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimate
Debt to hit 100% of GDP and surpass the highest ever recorded
Before the outbreak, the U.S. Federal debt was at 81% of GDP. Unfortunately, an additional $2.5 trillion plus in additional spending along with the economic impact of the coronavirus, will drive the amount of debt to over 100% of GDP by the end of the year. Note that the graph below from the CRFB did not take into account the $484 billion or 2% of GDP impact that was just signed by President Trump.
Federal debt as a percentage of GDP: 2010 to 2025
Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget
Sometime during 2020 the CRFB estimates that the Federal debt held by the public will cross $21 billion plus and equal the size of the economy, and that during 2021 it will match and then surpass the 107% threshold that occurred during World War II.
Federal debt as a percentage of GDP: 1790 to 2050
Congressional Budget Office, Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimate
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House has the votes to pass its latest $484 billion coronavirus relief bill, a measure approved by the Senate on Tuesday that puts about another $370 billion into aid for small businesses damaged by the pandemic, along with $75 billion in relief for hospitals and $25 billion to expand testing. The House will send the relief package proposal to President Donald Trump’s desk to sign into law. » Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision » Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC » Subscribe to CNBC Classic: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCclassic Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is the leader in business news worldwide. Connect with CNBC News Online Get the latest news: http://www.cnbc.com/ Follow CNBC on LinkedIn: https://cnb.cx/LinkedInCNBC Follow CNBC News on Facebook: https://cnb.cx/LikeCNBC Follow CNBC News on Twitter: https://cnb.cx/FollowCNBC Follow CNBC News on Instagram: https://cnb.cx/InstagramCNBC
Deciding when to comment on someone’s behavior in society’s shared spaces has always been complicated. If someone doesn’t pick up after their dog, do you point it out? If someone cuts you off on the highway, do you yell out your window? What about that smoker on the corner—do you tell them cigarettes are bad for you? What if the smoker is a pregnant woman?
The line between righteous and self-righteous is hard to discern in the best of times, and now there’s a pandemic. New rules about physical distancing and personal hygiene mean new questions about what to do when someone isn’t following them. Nowadays, if someone stands too close to you at the grocery store or coughs into the air on the bus or is walking around without a mask, do you say something? If a non-essential business is continuing to fill its shop with customers, do you call it out?
TIME asked several experts in medical ethics and health policy. The upshot: yes, it can make sense to respond when people aren’t following orders that have been put in place to protect oneself and others. But the way you do it really matters, for the sake of decency and results.
“At least for now, we don’t have treatment or vaccines. All we’ve got is behavior. And there is evidence that the behavior works, if we’re diligent about it,” says Arthur Caplan, director of the Division of Medical Ethics at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine. “We shouldn’t be obnoxious, we shouldn’t get nasty,” Caplan says. “But in this day and age, I think you can speak up.” It could, directly or indirectly, save lives.
When it comes to changing people’s minds or behavior, shame and blame generally don’t work as well as empathy and the benefit of the doubt. And a pandemic is a time when extenuating circumstances are widespread. “Everyone is stressed out and fearful for their own health,” says Northeastern University law professor Aziza Ahmed, an expert in health law. “We have to be sensitive to what other people have the capacity to do.”
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Studies on disaster preparedness have found that one of the best ways to get other people to adopt new habits is to model them. “The literature shows that people will change their behavior if there are three conditions in place: they know what to do, why to do it and they see other people like themselves also doing it,” says Monica Schoch-Spana, a medical anthropologist and senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. A crucial part of this, she says, is that authority figures, from political leaders to pastors, are all repeating the same message, to the point that people are “swimming in a sea” of it.
Those waters are murky in the United States, where the response to the pandemic has been politically polarized and messages have been mixed. In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti ordered residents to wear masks when visiting essential businesses that remain open; on Twitter, he posted a new profile picture in which he’s wearing one. Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., President Donald Trump has said he won’t be wearing a mask because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended it, not ordered it, and “I just don’t want to.”
The absence of clarity and consistency from leaders gives individuals more reason to spread the message about best practices themselves (including, yes, wearing a mask). It also gives them more reason to reserve judgment when they do it. “You’re trying to frame it in a way that will motivate people’s behavior, where it’s not like you’re calling them stupid or accusing them of indifference,” Caplan says. “What you’re trying to do is appeal with carrots, not sticks.”
The changing guidance around masks helps illustrate why unwillful ignorance is possible. The CDC at first recommended that only sick people and those caring for them wear masks. Then, as it became more clear that people could spread the disease without appearing sick—making their coughs and sneezes just as dangerous—the CDC recommended everyone wear them. That “why to do it” message goes against our general understanding of what masks are for, and public health experts have had trouble getting it across. “You’re not wearing the mask to protect you, you’re wearing the mask to protect others,” says Stuart Finder, director of the Center of Healthcare Ethics at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “And there are a lot of people who still don’t understand that.”
Even if people have read the latest guidelines, there could be personal reasons they’re not abiding by them. “You can’t assume you know what is inhibiting someone from engaging in the correct behavior,” Schoch-Spana says. Some black Americans, for example, have reported that concerns about being associated with gangs or perceived as criminals have made them reluctant to wear face coverings. A homeless person has an understandable reason for not being home by curfew. Someone could be failing to stay six feet away from you on the sidewalk because they are blind. You might also encounter a person who doesn’t believe in science and dismisses the risks.
Among the tactics experts suggest for handling these situations is the “it’s not you, it’s me” approach: If you’re at the grocery store and someone is standing right behind you, don’t yell, “Move back!” Instead, emphasize that since you or anyone could have the virus without knowing it, it’s best to stay six feet apart, in case they hadn’t heard. Use cues where you can, like the tape many open businesses have started putting on the floor to show customers how to line up at a proper distance.
If you live in a place like Michigan or Laredo, Texas, where the government is issuing $1,000 fines for violations of social distancing rules, position your reminder as an attempt to protect their wallet. If you live in a state like Hawaii, where at least three people have been arrested for flouting quarantine orders, position it as an attempt to protect their liberty. In general, says Finder, “you want to find ways that reinforce that ‘we’re in this together,’ versus ‘You’re not doing what I want you to do.’”
In rare cases, people have gotten violent during such encounters. At an emergency room in New York City, an 86-year-old woman reportedly lost her balance and grabbed the IV pole of another patient, a 32-year-old woman, thereby violating the social distancing rule to stay six feet away from others. The younger woman allegedly pushed her, causing her to fall, sustain a head injury and die.
Not following the guidelines is dangerous. Not coughing into one’s sleeve can endanger someone else’s life. But, Finder says, “If I respond with a kind of violent or authoritative approach, there is actually danger there too.”
However tactfully one approaches the situation, these kinds of interactions carry risks of escalation. In New Jersey, a grocery store worker asked a customer who was standing near her to move back. Instead, he allegedly stepped closer and coughed toward her, laughing and saying he had the coronavirus. The man is now among the many people that the New Jersey attorney general has issued charges against, as people continue to violate executive orders relating to COVID-19.
There is a difference between being a good neighbor and being a vigilante who takes it upon themselves to inform every person they can, on the street or on Instagram, about what they should and should not be doing. As Caplan puts it, “You don’t have to be the town watchman. We don’t need public health crossing guards.” There are law enforcement officials for that.
Schoch-Spana, of Johns Hopkins, says it is reasonable to handle the situation yourself when there is an invasion of your personal space. “It makes sense to say something when someone is encroaching on your health and well-being,” she says. “You have every right to try and correct that behavior, but it should be done politely and with knowledge-sharing and with positive modeling.”
Can wearing gloves really save you from the novel coronavirus, COVID-19? It certainly can help you keep the germs at bay, say experts, but without precautions such as washing hands regularly and the disposal of gloves properly, it’s just unnecessary noise.
A video posted by a former emergency room nurse from Saginaw, Michigan, on Facebook explains the concept of cross contamination.
In her 3-minute-22-second video posted on Facebook on March 31, Molly Lixey uses paint to simulate the presence of germs. She demonstrates how once you’ve got paint – or germs – on your hands and begin to touch your phone, your face or anything else around you, the once sterile surfaces are no longer so. And by retouching these surfaces, even with clean hands, you are helping them migrate and spread.
Lixey’s clip has her pick a scenario; she chooses grocery shopping. She puts on a pair of gloves. Now, she says, she’s in the store and picking up things – and along with those things, germs. “But it’s (the germs) on my gloves, that’s fine right? It’s on my gloves,” she says in the clip. “But now I’m walking along and my phone rings, so I’ve now touched my hands together a couple times, I reach for my phone and oh I have a text message from my husband.”
Lixey continues to pretend shop and with each product she adds a little paint (germs) to her gloves. Now, she suggests that if she gets a phone call, she picks up. Finally, taking her gloves off, she takes stock of all the places the germs have travelled – her hands, face, phone.
“There’s no point in wearing gloves, if you’re not going to wash your hands every time you touch something,” she explains.
The privacy-focused cryptocurrency monero, currently ranked as the 11th most valuable cryptocurrency on data site CoinMarketCap with a total value of just under $1 billion, has added almost 5% in the past week—beating bitcoin’s gains.
The precise reason for monero’s sudden surge wasn’t immediately clear, though there have been a number of positive developments for the bitcoin rival over recent months.
Monero developers recently rolled out an update to its Carbon Chameleon software, designed to improve transaction execution and how the cryptocurrency works with the privacy networks Tor and I2P.
Monero and privacy coins have also recently gained support from some high profile figures in the tech and crypto industry.
“I think we’ll also see privacy integrated into one of the dominant chains in the 2020s,” Coinbase’s chief executive Brian Armstrong wrote in a blog post back in January.
“Just like how the internet launched with HTTP, and only later introduced HTTPS as a default on many websites, I believe we’ll eventually see a privacy coin or blockchain with built in privacy features get mainstream adoption in the 2020s. It doesn’t make sense in most cases to broadcast every payment you make on a transparent ledger.”
The monero price has surged over the last week, beating out bitcoin itself as the broader … [+]
Coinbase
John McAfee, the controversial and outspoken antivirus software developer and curve-ball U.S. presidential candidate, named monero as his cryptocurrency of choice earlier this year.
McAfee made similar allusions to monero’s technological superiority over bitcoin.”Bitcoin was first. It’s an ancient technology. All know it,” McAfee said via Twitter before recommending monero to cryptocurrency users.
“Newer blockchains have privacy, smart contracts, distributed apps and more. Bitcoin is our future? Was the Model T the future of the automobile?”
I am a journalist with significant experience covering technology, finance, economics, and business around the world. As the founding editor of Verdict.co.uk I reported on how technology is changing business, political trends, and the latest culture and lifestyle. I have covered the rise of bitcoin and cryptocurrency since 2012 and have charted its emergence as a niche technology into the greatest threat to the established financial system the world has ever seen and the most important new technology since the internet itself. I have worked and written for CityAM, the Financial Times, and the New Statesman, amongst others. Follow me on Twitter @billybambrough or email me on billyATbillybambrough.com. Disclosure: I occasionally hold some small amount of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
Chinese scientists say the novel coronavirus will not be eradicated, adding to a growing consensus around the world that the pathogen will likely return in waves like the flu.
