“We need to bend the curve in the state of California,” Newsom said, as he announced a statewide order for Californians to stay home.
“There’s a social contract here, people I think recognize the need to do more … They will begin to adjust and adapt as they have been quite significantly. We will have social pressure and that will encourage people to do the right thing,” he said, in addressing how this order will be enforced.
Newsom added: “Home isolation is not my preferred choice … but it is a necessary one …This is not a permanent state, this is a moment in time.”
The stay home order is in place till further notice.
All dine-in restaurants, bars and clubs, gyms and fitness studios will be closed, according to the order. Public events and gatherings are also not allowed. Essential services will stay open, however, such as pharmacies, grocery stores, takeout and delivery restaurants, and banks.
Newsom said he made the decision “based upon some new information” and projections that came in from Johns Hopkins University.
He reiterated throughout the press conference and in response to questions from reporters: “We need to meet this moment and flatten the curve together.”
“We have 416 hospitals in CA, but within the hospital system we have a capacity to surge beyond the 78,000 currently staffed beds by an additional 10,000,” Newsom said. “If we change our behaviors that inventory will come down, if we meet this moment, we can truly bend the curve.”
“It’s now just time to absorb and recognize that we need to change our behaviors in a way that meets this moment and allows a recognition that this moment will pass,” he added.
“The supply chain must continue, and Californians must have access to such necessities as food, prescriptions and healthcare,” the order said. “When people need to leave their homes, whether to obtain or perform the functions above, or to otherwise facilitate authorized necessary activities, they should at all times practice social distancing.”
California estimates that more than half of the state — 25.5 million people — will get the new coronavirus over the next eight weeks, according to a letter sent by Gov. Gavin Newsom to U.S. President Donald Trump.
The curbs take effect at midnight on Saturday but will not affect trade, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said.
Meanwhile, Illinois joined California in ordering residents to stay at home, while New York state ordered non-essential businesses to close.
About one in five Americans will soon be under a “stay at home” order.
The virus has claimed nearly 230 lives in the US and infected more than 18,500 people.
Globally more than 270,000 patients have tested positive for the respiratory illness and more than 11,000 have died.
As both the number of cases and the global death toll continued to soar, many countries and regions took new measures on Friday, including:
Spain: The government warned that army patrols would catch people outside without good reason
Bavaria: Germany’s second most populous state became the first state in impose a lockdown
France: Police said patrols at Paris railway stations had been reinforced to stop people going on trips for the weekend
Indonesia: A state of emergency will be in force in the capital Jakarta from Monday - bars, cinemas and many other businesses will be shut down.
Why did the US restrict border traffic?
President Donald Trump said on Friday: “In normal times, these massive flows [of immigrants] place a vast burden on our healthcare system, but during a global pandemic, they threaten to create a perfect storm that would spread the infection to our border agents, migrants and to the public at large.”
Hours after he spoke, the White House announced that a staff member in Vice-President Mike Pence’s office had tested positive for coronavirus, though a spokeswoman said the unnamed patient did not come into close contact with Mr Pence or Mr Trump.
Earlier this week President Trump announced that the border with Canada would be closed to non-essential traffic “by mutual consent”.
During Friday’s news conference, Mr Pompeo said the restrictions would take effect on Saturday and also apply to Mexico. They are due be in place for at least 30 days.
US citizens “should arrange immediate return” unless they intend to remain abroad for some time, Mr Pompeo said.
Doctors in Italy have warned against the misconception that young people will not suffer as badly as the elderly from COVID-19.
It comes as the head of the World Health Organisation (WHO) said young people are “not invincible” and can still die from coronavirus or be confined to hospital “for weeks”.
Dr Antonio Pesenti, the head of Lombardy’s intensive crisis care unit, said many younger people were being admitted to hospital with severe cases of the coronavirus.
“50% of our patients in the intensive care unit, which are the most severe patients, are over 65 years old,” he said.
“But that means that the other 50% of our patients are younger than 65.
“We have patients who are 20 years old or 30 years old, quite a few, and those are severe like the old ones.”
Dr Pesenti said that in his experience the only difference between the two groups was that “younger people are usually healthier, so they survive more.”
Part of the reason Italy has had a higher mortality rate than other countries is because it has a larger population of older people.
However, the fact that the elderly are more likely to die from the virus does not mean young people will experience a milder form of the disease or are less likely to get infected.
In Italy almost a quarter of their nearly 28,000 coronavirus patients are aged between 19 and 50.
Speaking at an online press conference in Geneva on Friday, director general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: “Every day, we are learning more about this virus and the disease it causes.
“One of the things we are learning is that although older people are the hardest hit, younger people are not spared.
"Data from many countries clearly show that people under 50 make up a significant proportion of patients requiring hospitalisation.
"Today, I have a message for young people: you are not invincible. This virus could put you in hospital for weeks, or even kill you.
"Even if you don’t get sick, the choices you make about where you go could be the difference between life and death for someone else.
However, there are major divergences between the performance of different countries. Rich and middle-income East Asian countries like Taiwan, Vietnam, and Singapore have managed to nearly halt the outbreak in its tracks, while more ramshackle countries like the U.S. and U.K. have botched it almost beyond belief.
While it is obviously too early to conduct a full accounting of what works and what doesn’t, some broad lessons about best practices are still apparent. America will need to learn these lessons quickly if it wants to save itself from potentially horrifying outcomes, both now and in future pandemics.
It’s fair to say there are three broad levels to any pandemic response, each built on top of the other. The foundation is the national health care system, which provides the necessary broad access to testing and treatment. The second is the state’s administrative bureaucracy and welfare state, which coordinates additional response measures. That means stuff like setting up mass testing checkpoints at border crossings and around the country, securing stockpiles of necessary medical supplies, constructing emergency hospitals, and so on. It also means deploying income support to individuals and businesses should mass lockdowns or quarantines become necessary, to keep people from being ruined financially and the economy ticking over. The third is citizen awareness: The population must be ready to upgrade their hygiene habits, accept drastic restrictions on movement, and avoid gathering together, so transmission is limited.
Of all these, mass testing deserves special emphasis, because without it any emergency response is all but hamstrung. A nation cannot fight an epidemic without knowing where the disease actually is.
The best-performing countries, however, excelled on all three levels. Taiwan has a Medicare-style single-payer system (indeed, it was actually based initially on America’s Medicare system, except made universal), which allowed them to deploy testing, treatment, and quarantine without any fuss. They also had pandemic response plans drawn up after the SARS outbreak in 2002, which had been regularly reviewed and practiced. Finally, their citizens had been educated and prepared to take any epidemic seriously, so that people did not try to escape lockdowns and spread the disease further.
Even middle-income countries can manage this. Vietnam, whose per-capita GDP was only about $6,600 in 2018 (or about 12 percent as much as the U.S.), squelched its initial epidemic with a lightning-fast deployment of mass testing, contact-tracking, quarantine, and public education measures (though it has since been dealing with new infections from foreign travelers). If the state is on top of the situation, mass lockdowns and the associated economic devastation can be limited or avoided.
Joe Biden’s sweep of primaries means Bernie Sanders’ ambition of socialism for the poor seems out. In its place, Congress and the White House are now devising a $1 trillion package of government grants, unsecured loans and tax breaks to bail out airlines, cruise lines and other highly levered companies. So long, Bernie. Instead, Washington is only interested in socialism for the connected rich, whose share prices have plummeted.
Yes, the COVID-19 crisis has taken us all by surprise. And yes, the economic fallout will be extraordinary. But why are so many companies already in such grave trouble? The answer is excessive leverage.
Start with the airlines. Rather than using their profits from the past five years to pay off debts and save for a rainy day, the big four — American, United, Delta and Southwest — instead grew their combined liabilities to $166 billion, all while spending $39 billion on share repurchases. That number, which is only from the big four, is almost 80% of what they’re asking for now from U.S. taxpayers. Similarly, the three largest Cruise companies—Carnival, Norwegian, and Royal Caribbean—have liabilities of $47.5 billion and engaged in share repurchases of $8 billion.
Airline executives enriched themselves
Had these companies paid down liabilities instead of using stock repurchases to bid up their stock prices, they would have been far better prepared to weather this emergency. Of course, higher share prices made their stock options more valuable. This allowed top airlines executives to pay themselves $666 million in compensation over the five-year period. The top cruise executives managed to haul in $448 million. Now, taxpayers are unwillingly being called upon to bail out their profligate behavior.
The vast majority of the economy is going to be affected by the current crisis. Why should sweetheart deals go out to the companies affected first, the companies that have most imperiled themselves by over-borrowing and spending? Are energy, shipping, dining, entertainment, technology, auto and luxury goods companies next? Since vast swaths of the economy will be affected, an initial bailout to the travel industry would sow the seeds of a second round of broad bailouts. The likely beneficiaries will be the most politically connected.
Bailouts encourage moral hazard in the form of reckless lending, the kind that fueled the last financial crisis. Why be responsible by maintaining a low debt-to-equity ratio if the government will always be a backstop? COVID-19 is already revealing problems in the rampant lending during the past few years. But let us not repeat the cycle. Bailouts incentivize the worst behavior. Furthermore, academic research has repeatedly showed that government-controlled lending is wasteful and ineffective.
It is understood that the wage subsidy will apply to firms where bosses have already had to lay off workers due to the coronavirus, as long as they are brought back into the workforce and instead granted a leave of absence.
The chancellor said the move would mean workers should be able to keep their jobs, even if their employer could not afford to pay them.
He said they were “unprecedented measures for unprecedented times.”
“I know that people are worried about losing their jobs, about not being able to pay the rent or mortgage, about not having enough set by for food and bills… to all those at home right now, anxious about the days ahead, I say this: you will not face this alone,” Mr Sunak added
The wages cover, which relates to gross pay, will be backdated to the start of March and last for three months, but Mr Sunak said he would extend the scheme for longer “if necessary”.
The scheme, which will be run by HMRC, is expected to make the first grants to businesses “within weeks”, a Treasury spokeswoman said.
‘Hugely welcome’
Employers’ body the CBI said Mr Sunak’s announcement was “a landmark package”.
“It marks the start of the UK’s economic fightback - an unparalleled joint effort by enterprise and government to help our country emerge from this crisis with the minimum possible damage,” said director general Carolyn Fairbairn.
The Resolution Foundation think tank also said the package was “hugely welcome”, reaching lower-paid workers that were most at risk of job losses.
But other lobby groups warned of the potential risk to firms which had to wait for the money to arrive.
On this day, 13 July 1917, thousands of workers joined a spontaneous strike in São Paulo following the police killing of a 21-year-old shoemaker, Antonio Martinez, at a demonstration against the high cost of living two days previously. The stoppage soon became a general strike, and workers could only be persuaded to return to work three days later after being given a 10% pay increase.
We have too many anniversaries today to post about them all on here for all of them, follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/wrkclasshistoryhttps://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1166252556893226/?type=3
Beautiful dark diorite statue of God Amun from Karnak, the highly sacred precinct of Amun Ra.
Dated to the reign of Tutankhamun ( 1336 - 1327 BCE.)
Now in Louvre Museum in Paris.
Chytrid is an introduced fungus that has driven over 90 species of frog to extinction and decimated hundreds more. It’s not often that we hear good news in the fight against chytrid, but today is one of those days.
After disappearing from mainstream science for almost 30 years and thought to perhaps be lost to chytrid, the so-called “starry night” toad has been “rediscovered” by a team of scientists.
I say lost to mainstream science, because I feel it’s very important to acknowledge that the indigenous Arhuaco people who live in and manage the forest never lost track of this species. It was only after years of negotiation with the Arhuaco that scientists were allowed to enter their land and document the toads’ continued existence.
Harlequin toads, of which the “starry night” toad is one, have been particularly badly hit by anthropogenic factors like chytrid fungus, climate change, and habitat loss. Of the 96 known harlequin toad species, a full 80 are either critically endangered or extinct.
The “starry night” toad is still considered critically endangered, but that it exists at all (and exists within land protected and managed by the Arhuaco) is a huge dose of good news.
