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Again we find the COVID-19 pandemic dominating the news and all our lives.
In the US we are seeing a build up to an awful catastrophe with deaths running into the many thousands and infections into the hundreds of thousands.
In the UK we still seem to be getting worse with many, many deaths and large numbers of cases.
Fortunately in OZ we seem to be bending the curve in a good direction. We can only pray the trend continues.
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Major Issues.
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How a resilient financial system is cushioning the viral shock
APRA has been working for many years behind the scenes to prepare the banking system for a rainy day like this.
Mar 30, 2020 – 12.00am
Financial system resilience lies at the core of APRA’s purpose. Our mandate requires us to identify and assess future risk and provide clear direction to regulated financial institutions to ensure, to the greatest degree possible, they are prepared for adverse circumstances.
A key lesson from the global financial crisis was the importance of resilience. Since the GFC, the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority has pursued an agenda of building financial sector resilience with substantial reforms to strengthen capital frameworks and liquidity requirements, and mitigate operational and contagion risk.
For our banks and other authorised deposit-taking institutions (ADIs), this has included
reforms in a number of areas: raising the quality and quantity of capital, bolstering liquidity, improving the stability of funding, and reinforcing sound lending standards in the mortgage and commercial property lending market. All of these steps have helped improve the banking system’s resilience.
reforms in a number of areas: raising the quality and quantity of capital, bolstering liquidity, improving the stability of funding, and reinforcing sound lending standards in the mortgage and commercial property lending market. All of these steps have helped improve the banking system’s resilience.
Capital buffers for ADIs were implemented in 2013 to meet the internationally agreed Basel III standards – earlier than many jurisdictions around the world – and increased more recently to deliver on the financial system inquiry’s recommendation that ADIs be
"unquestionably strong" from a capital point of view.
"unquestionably strong" from a capital point of view.
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'The world will be different': BlackRock chief says the global economy has been changed forever
By Annie Massa
March 31, 2020 — 8.32am
BlackRock chief executive officer Larry Fink predicted the economy will eventually recover from the coronavirus outbreak, though he said the crisis will reshape investor psychology, business practices and consumer habits.
The pandemic that swept through nations across the globe this year is causing people to re-evaluate "just-in-time" supply chains and dependence on air travel, Fink wrote in his annual letter to shareholders.
"In my 44 years in finance, I have never experienced anything like this," Fink wrote, adding that "as dramatic as this has been, I do believe that the economy will recover steadily, in part because this situation lacks some of the obstacles to recovery of a typical financial crisis."
"People worldwide are fundamentally rethinking the way we work, shop, travel and gather. When we exit this crisis, the world will be different," he said.
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Dow Average suffers worst quarter since 1987
Jeremy Herron and Vildana Hajric
Apr 1, 2020 – 7.59am
US stocks sank, bulging the Dow Jones Industrial Average's loss in the quarter to a level not seen since 1987 as the pandemic almost certainly plunged the American economy into recession.
The blue-chip index tumbled 23 per cent in the three months, closing the session with a 1.8 per cent drop. The S&P 500 fared little better, even after a furious, weeklong 17 per cent rally that halted Tuesday.
The Nasdaq 100 fell least among major indexes, as dip-buyers targeted the cash-rich tech megacaps that make up its core. The Russell 2000 plunged 31 per cent in the quarter, the most in data going back to 1979.
There was almost nowhere to hide for Dow investors, as all but one of the 30 members ended lower for the year.
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Shares rule off worst quarter since 1987
Mar 31, 2020 – 6.46pm
The fastest correction on record became the worst quarter since Ronald Reagan was in the White House with Australian shares sealing a loss of 24 per cent on Tuesday, and striking a hopeful but sombre note ahead of the biggest growth shock in living memory.
The June quarter is expected to cripple the Australian economy as COVID-19 pandemic protection measures settle in for businesses and households, triggering a sharp recession with an uncertain path to recovery. The coronavirus has infected 4557 Australians and caused 19 deaths.
But Monday's incredible 7 per cent rally - the biggest since Malcolm Fraser won re-election as prime minister in 1980 - showed investors are willing to back Australian equities with the right policy stimulus in place and look past the dumpster fire of downgrades.
The S&P/ASX 200 Index fell 2 per cent to 5076.8 points for a drop of 21.2 per cent through March. It is also the worst March on record, and the third-worst quarter since 1935, behind only the December quarter of 1987 (which was punctuated by the Black Monday crash) and the collapse of Bretton Woods in 1974.
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Share market plunge to keep boomers working for longer
The sudden disappearance of a large chunk of their retirement nest-egg is likely to change boomers' behaviour. Here's how.
Apr 1, 2020 – 12.01am
"I guess it means a lot of people are going to have to work for much longer than they were expecting," shrugged my editor as we discussed the calamitous collapse in global share markets.
Amid all the predictions about how the coronavirus will shape our future behaviour – a surge in home-working, for instance, or an even greater shift to online shopping – I can't help thinking that Ben highlighted one of the more profound changes we're likely to witness.
There's no doubt that the latest share market crisis will have a huge psychological impact on the younger members of the baby boomer generation (usually defined as those born between 1946 and 1964).
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Why Howard Marks is suddenly very worried
Last week, Howard Marks was prepared to buy. This week he's turned very bearish on damage done by the pandemic.
Apr 1, 2020 – 4.23pm
Oaktree Capital founder and investing legend Howard Marks is clearly energised by the pandemic crisis. He wrote just five of his famous memos to clients in 2019; now he’s written two in the space of 10 days.
Last week’s note suggested while investors couldn’t predict the bottom of the market, they shouldn’t be afraid to put some capital to work.
But the latest memo strikes a decidedly bearish note, neatly describing the colossal challenge facing investors of all sizes.
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There is no investor playbook for this crisis
COVID-19 is a pandemic without precedent in the modern era. The sooner the finance industry learns to shed its reliance on templates and accept that, the better.
Robin Wigglesworth
Apr 2, 2020 – 9.46am
Wall Street loves a good playbook. Perhaps it is the prevalence of former jocks on trading floors, but whenever markets become turbulent they look at what worked in similar crises and dust off the same strategies. But the coronavirus crisis is confounding because it looks at once like a mosaic of many previous crises — and also completely new.
The most obvious parallel is with the downturn that followed the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks against the US. This was an unconventional shock that had a sharp but ultimately fleeting impact on the global economy and markets. Airlines, tourism and hospitality, for example, were hit hard but bounced back after a while.
In the early stages of the coronavirus crisis, this was the playbook that most investors followed. They ditched assets such as aviation stocks but looked to buy dips with the view that the outbreak would be contained and the economic fallout modest, leading to a V-shaped recovery.
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It's more productive to work from home
Apr 2, 2020 – 12.00am
More than two-thirds of workers say they are more productive working at home than in an office and one in three believe the switch has made them less stressed.
A new survey of 5000 workers in Australia, France, Germany, Italy and the UK reveals most believe remote working will become much more important when the COVID-19 pandemic ends.
Australian workers see the biggest advantage of working from home in using the time they would have otherwise spent commuting – nearly half said they were using it to be more productive while 38 per cent said they spent it with family or on leisure activities.
Before the pandemic, about a third of Australians worked from home at least once a week compared with 45 per cent in the UK and 43 per cent in Germany. Only 26 per cent and 22 per cent of French and Italian workers, respectively, worked regularly from home before the crisis.
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Australia's big four banks hit by RBNZ dividend call
By Clancy Yeates
April 2, 2020 — 11.11am
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has ordered the country's banks to suspend paying dividends, a move that will impact Australia's big four and could, one analyst believes, be copied in Australia.
The RBNZ on Thursday announced a package to support lending as the world economy battles the coronavirus crisis, and as part of this move it also suspended bank dividends.
“To further support the stability of the financial system during this period of economic uncertainty, we have agreed with the banks that during this period there will be no payment of dividends on ordinary shares, and that they should not redeem non-CET1 capital instruments,” the deputy governor and general manager for financial stability, Geoff Bascand, said.
“This initiative further supports the stability of the financial system by maintaining higher levels of capital during the period of falling economic activity resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic."
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Laws created in a crisis are very rarely rolled back
By Greg Barns
April 3, 2020 — 5.00am
These are extraordinary times, not least because we are witnessing the creation of laws which allow for police to impose heavy on-the-spot fines, for public health officials to order detention without trial, and for governments to issue by way of press release vague and sweeping laws that criminalise normal human activities.
The justification for this is that we must flatten the curve of the COVID-19 pandemic. But history tells us that whenever there is a grave crisis in democracies, the loss of rights and freedoms that are utilised do not vanish when the crisis passes.
Politicians, bureaucrats and police rarely hand back powers that they gain in a crisis. Instead, they cement them into the fabric of the legal system.
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Bushfire Crisis And Climate Policy
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There are no entries in this category.
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Coronavirus And Impacts.
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China spree sparks FIRB crackdown
Mar 29, 2020 – 10.30pm
The federal government has placed severe, immediate and indefinite restrictions on all foreign investment bids following at least two cases of Chinese-owned companies in Australia securing tonnes of precious medical supplies and shipping them back to China.
Effective from 10.30pm Sunday, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg lowered to zero the dollar value of every foreign investment bid that would trigger scrutiny by the Foreign Investment Review Board and then, ultimately, by him.
Presently, there are varying foreign investment thresholds depending on the buyer, the country in which they are based, and the type of asset being sought. Thresholds range from $1.192 billion to $275 million to zero.
Under the change, the threshold is zero for everything, meaning all bids will have to be weighed against the national interest.
As well as protecting distressed Australian businesses and assets from fire sale takeovers, the crackdown was sparked after two Chinese-owned property developers, Greenland Australia and Risland Australia, had staff secure more than 100 tonnes of equipment and ship it back home.
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'Go hard go early' might work for NZ
All eyes are on the Ardern government's handling of the coronavirus crisis after its lockdown has resulted in what is essentially a police state.
Mar 29, 2020 – 6.30pm
On midnight last Wednesday in New Zealand, something unimaginable even three weeks earlier happened: a state of emergency was declared and the country went into a "level four" lockdown, effectively becoming a police state.
The aim is to stop the person-to-person transmission of coronavirus. New Zealand now has 514 cases in total, seven in hospital and one in ICU. The first death was recorded on Sunday, a woman in her 70s on the remote west coast of the South Island.
Movement of people is now limited. The only legitimate travel appears to be to the supermarket and back, or maybe to the local park if it is very close by.Only "essential" workers – designated by the government – are allowed to travel, such as those working in important supply chain jobs, at supermarkets, pharmacies and healthcare workers.
Parliament has been all but cancelled for the next four weeks at least.
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Why a wage subsidy is required in hibernation
Mar 29, 2020 – 10.34am
On Wednesday this past week Exante Data privately briefed the Standing Committee on Economics. We focused on our COVID-19 analytics, the importance of data, and the economic pass-through we expect from the shock.
On policy, we commended the steps taken thus far, particularly by the RBA, and including aspects of the Treasury’s second fiscal package.
However, we were critical of the meagre support currently being provided to Australian workers. More has to be done.
In a democracy, good ideas have a way of floating to the top. In our submission to the committee we included two recent notes, which pressed a case for a hibernation of the economy.
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False dawn: We shouldn't read too much into the sharemarket's rebound
By Mohamed A. El-Erian
March 30, 2020 — 10.36am
It's hard to believe, but in just more than a month, US stocks, as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average, a widely followed albeit partial and imperfect proxy, have gone from a record high to the fastest correction in history to the best week since 1938. Driving these moves to a great extent were the contrasting investor sentiments of complacency at first and then panic. If you can correctly characterise last week's strong rally, you hold the key to what lies ahead.
The Dow hit its record on February 12 despite mounting evidence that the coronavirus was already damaging the global economy. China's economy, the world's second largest, had been brought to a virtual standstill. Global supply lines had been disrupted, causing some factories elsewhere to close. International trade was falling. And the source of all this, the highly contagious COVID-19 virus, was already spreading to other countries.
Some of us had been warning for weeks about the threat of the coronavirus because it inflicted "cascading economic sudden stops", which are common in fragile and failing states but not in systemically important economies. They are highly disruptive because they destroy both demand and supply at the same time. As such, this was an urgent and complex policy priority that did not provide a "buy-the-dip" opportunity for investors.
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Coronavirus: why a wage subsidy is not the answer
If the government wants to actually reduce the recession’s depth, as opposed to just appear to be doing so, it needs to do a lot more than a wage subsidy.
That’s because it might not result in enough cash being paid out: businesses that are OK won’t need it, of course, and those that need it won’t ask for it because they’ll be toast already.
A wage subsidy in this situation would be flawed for two reasons: first, a very large number of people either work for themselves, or are contractors or own a small business and aren’t paid a wage by an employer; and second, wages aren’t the only business cost.
For many businesses, possibly most of them, zero revenue means closing down even if the government gives you the equivalent of 80 per cent of your payroll, because the remaining 20 per cent of wages, plus rent, electricity, internet etc are too much of a cash drain to keep going.
And the limit of $1500 per fortnight makes it likely to keep even fewer businesses open. It may surprise those in the government to learn that many businesses pay some staff more than $61,500, which is the annual salary that turns into $937 net per week, of which $1500 per fortnight is 80 per cent.
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The public needs more clarity on COVID-19 data
Infectious disease experts are not being heard at a time when the public desperately needs to know more about the strategies for dealing with the pandemic.
Tony Blakely
Mar 31, 2020 – 9.32am
Australia has some of the best infectious disease modellers in the world. The taxpayer has invested in them with large research grants. Yet we are not hearing what they have to say at the very time we need to – a serious pandemic.
The first communication principle in the Australian Pandemic Plan (prepared just last year) is “openness and transparency”. The public and health experts not inside the Canberra bubble (i.e .not privy to Australian Health Protection Principal Committee papers) are out of the loop. So much for openness and transparency.
What has happened here? There are confidentiality clauses in contracts that give the government the whip-hand to control the flow of information.
And how did that happen? This will be a question for an inquiry at the end of the pandemic. But here is my guess.
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Card data shows panic buying slows, services crashing
Mar 31, 2020 – 9.46am
Credit and debit card data for the first week of major shutdowns around the country shows the growth in panic buying has started to unwind, while spending on services has collapsed even further.
Commonwealth Bank of Australia's latest data shows food spending in the week to March 27 was up 18 per cent on the same week last year. However that growth has slowed compared with the 49.7 per cent jump in the week to March 20.
Food goods spending, which largely comprises grocery stores and supermarkets, is up 40 per cent on the comparable week last year but down from the 74.1 per cent in the week to March 20.
The data shows spending on alcohol has jumped even higher than any time during the COVID-19 crisis, rising 34 per cent in the week after having jumped 20.4 per cent in the week to March 20.
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Shutdown could slash 22pc off economic growth
Mar 31, 2020 – 9.38am
Australia's economic growth could be slashed by up to 22 per cent in the short term from shutdowns of business activity in response to the coronavirus, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has warned.
Huge government and central bank economic rescue packages, however, are likely to partially offset the expected steep declines.
In a preliminary international analysis, the OECD said partial and full shutdowns of economies by governments around the world to contain the virus would lead to sharp contractions in the level of output, household spending, corporate investment and international trade.
"In all economies, the majority of this impact comes from the hit to output in retail and wholesale trade, and in professional and real estate services."
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Drawing the line in the sand on banker benevolence
Bankers are trying to keep viable businesses afloat but their magnanimity doesn't extend to firms that were struggling before the coronavirus outbreak.
Mar 30, 2020 – 6.39pm
It's a fiendishly difficult message for the bosses of the country's big four banks to get across.
On the one hand, they're extremely anxious to reassure hundreds of thousands of their business customers who've watched on with horror as their cash flows have dried up in the past few weeks that there is some relief in sight, in the form of a six-month grace period on all their loan repayments.
At the same time, however, bankers are anxious not to provide false hope to owners of firms that were on the brink of collapse even before the coronavirus outbreak. Because they know from bitter experience the owners of failed firms almost invariably blame their flint-hearted bankers for their collapse.
At The Australian Financial Review Banking & Wealth Summit crisis briefing on Monday, the heads of three of the country's biggest banks tried to drive home the point they simply didn't have the capacity to meet all the demands that would be put on them.
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The coronavirus is the biggest emerging markets crisis ever
For countries like South Africa, India, Brazil and Malaysia, the financial shock wave from this pandemic is running ahead of the disease.
Adam Tooze
Apr 1, 2020 – 9.12am
We used to think the 2007-08 financial crisis set the standard for a savage global shock. But that crisis took more than 12 months to spread from the overbuilt suburbs of California and southern Spain to the financial centres of the world.
The coronavirus pandemic has taken just three months to engulf first China and now Europe and North America. As it has swept West, it has triggered an economic crisis whose violence is set to exceed anything we have previously witnessed.
The global shock has an uneven chronology. In the West, it was the virus that triggered the financial crisis. In the large emerging markets of the world economy – the likes of Brazil, Argentina, sub-Saharan Africa, India, Thailand, and Malaysia – the virus has yet to arrive at full strength. For them, the financial shock wave is running ahead of the disease.
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NSW Premier calls for businesses to 're-tool', make medical supplies
By Lisa Visentin
Updated April 1, 2020 — 9.29amfirst published at 8.28am
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has appealed to local businesses to pivot to producing medical supplies amid confirmation a 95-year-old Sydney woman has become Australia's 20th coronavirus death.
NSW Health executive director of health protection, Dr Jeremy McAnulty, confirmed the total number of NSW COVID-19 cases was now at 2182 as of 8pm Tuesday – an increase of 150 new cases since Monday.
"In total we've tested 103,361 people who have been excluded and sadly there have been nine deaths. [There was] a new death reported yesterday sadly, a 95-year-old woman from the Dorothy Henderson Lodge where a number of cases had been reported previously," Dr McAnulty said on Wednesday.
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Government faces fiscal reckoning as taxes collapse and spending soars
By Eryk Bagshaw and Shane Wright
April 1, 2020 — 12.01am
The government's promised tax cuts may need to be wound back as the nation's finances face what former Reserve Bank of Australia governor Bernie Fraser describes as a "reckoning" to deal with an explosion in budget deficits and public sector debt that could reach $1.5 trillion.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has spent $194 billion on stimulus measures to fight the economic impact of the coronavirus, including a $130 billion wage subsidy package announced on Monday. Economists have generally welcomed the response but forecast the government's plan to be net-debt free by 2030 is now highly unlikely, with some MPs resigned to dealing with an "inter-generational debt" transfer lasting decades.
The government has introduced JobKeeper - a wage subsidy plan to keep people employed and paid during the coronavirus outbreak. But who is eligible and how does it work?
Mr Fraser, who was Reserve Bank governor during Australia's last recession in 1991, predicted there would be a "reckoning" for a swathe of government policies - including tax cuts - as the economy comes to grips with "an awful overhang of debt".
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News Corp suspends print editions of community newspapers
By Zoe Samios
April 1, 2020 — 11.17am
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp will suspend publication of 60 community newspapers including The Manly Daily, The Wentworth Courier and The Diamond Valley Leader due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The company announced on Wednesday morning it would turn its 60 community newspaper mastheads to digital-only products and suspend print publication from April 9 due to rapid declines in advertising revenues.
Community title readers will be given a free 28-day digital subscription to access the titles and News Corp's metro mastheads the Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Courier-Mail and The Advertiser online.
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Emergency flights to restart farm exports
The Morrison government has announced a $170 million package to help fresh produce exporters reach crucial markets during the coronavirus pandemic.
Matt Coughlan
Australian Associated Press April 1, 202011:57am
Hundreds of emergency flights will send fresh produce to key export markets in a bid to help Australian farmers and fishers under economic pressure due to the coronavirus.
The federal government will spend $110 million on flights to China, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Arab Emirates.
Where possible, the planes will return loaded with medical supplies and pharmaceuticals Australia needs to fight the disease.
Fisheries fees of $10 million will be waived, with a further $50 million added to a grants program to reimburse exporters for marketing costs.
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Intentionally incomplete: US intelligence says China concealed extent of outbreak
By Nick Wadhams and Jennifer Jacobs
April 2, 2020 — 10.45am
Washington: China has concealed the extent of its coronavirus outbreak, under-reporting both total cases and deaths it has suffered from the disease, the US intelligence community concluded in a classified report to the White House, according to three US officials.
The officials asked not to be identified because the report is secret, and they declined to detail its contents. But the thrust, they said, is that China’s public reporting on cases and deaths is intentionally incomplete. Two of the officials said the report concludes that China’s numbers are fake.
The report was received by the White House last week, one of the officials said.
The outbreak began in China’s Hubei province in late 2019, but the country has publicly reported only about 82,000 cases and 3300 deaths, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. That compares to more than 189,000 cases and more than 4000 deaths in the US, which now has the largest publicly reported outbreak in the world.
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Coronavirus: Virus mutates into eight strains around the world
· Reuters
The coronavirus is mutating — as viruses do — and eight strains are now making the rounds globally.
The good news is the mutations are not more lethal, said Trevor Bedford, whose website NextStrain.org is tracking the virus’ genome from samples provided to him from throughout the world.
Researchers are dissecting the genomes of the coronavirus and discovering the strains that have emerged since the virus first jumped from animals to humans in a Wuhan, China, wildlife market late in 2019. The work shows how the virus is migrating and splitting into similar but new subtypes.
“In the literal sense of ‘Is it changing genetically?’ the answer is absolutely yes,” Harvard University infectious disease epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch told NPR.
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Healthy-looking people spread coronavirus, more studies show
April 2, 2020 — 5.51am
New York: More evidence is emerging that coronavirus infections are being spread by people who have no clear symptoms, complicating efforts to gain control of the pandemic.
A study conducted by researchers in Singapore and published by the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday is the latest to estimate that around 10 per cent of new coronavirus infections may be sparked by people who were infected with the virus but not experiencing symptoms.
In response to recent studies, the CDC changed how it was defining the risk of infection for Americans.
The agency's new guidance, also released on Wednesday, targets people who have no symptoms but were exposed to persons with known or suspected infections. It essentially says that anyone may be a considered a carrier, whether they have symptoms or not.
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Where are we now and what’s coming for COVID-19 testing
Dr Campbell BSc, MBBS, FAACB, FRCPA is a retired pathologist and editor-in-chief of Lab Tests Online Australasia. He is also a pathology representative, at the Friends of Science in Medicine.
2nd April 2020
Testing for SARS-CoV-2 has two main stages.
The first is diagnostic testing in patients with acute symptoms. The question being asked here is: Are the symptoms in this patient due to COVID-19 or something else? This is the most important question in the early stages of this pandemic.
The second type of testing is designed to answer the question: Has this person been exposed to SARS-CoV-2 and developed an immune response? Can they be removed from isolation and permitted to go back to work/school etc? Is the community developing herd immunity?
These questions are becoming increasingly important as we move to the next phase of the pandemic. And there is a pressing need for answers.
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Coronavirus: The health of nations as Sweden goes it alone
The borders are open in Sweden, as are the cafes and elementary schools, and the only thing stopping the country’s 10.1 million citizens from heading to their summer houses and ski slopes for Easter is Nordic pragmatism and a prime ministerial appeal for everyone to act like adults.
In years to come, scientists will study this Scandinavian country — not an obvious nation of risk-takers — for its risky COVID-19 experiment that is maybe two parts sociological and eight parts epidemiological.
“Us adults need to be exactly that: adults. Not spread panic or rumours. No one is alone in this crisis but each person carries a heavy responsibility,” Prime Minister Stefan Lofven said this week.
Yet there is no mandatory policy, no penalties for defying his appeal.
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House sales will 'collapse', says UBS as it rips up its forecasts
Apr 2, 2020 – 12.02pm
Sales volumes will more than halve in a fast-deteriorating housing market as home inspections and auctions remain banned under COVID-19 restrictions and prices start falling, say UBS economists.
The slumping market prompted the economists on Thursday to scrap their latest forecast for a 5 per cent increase in dwelling prices this year - itself revised down from a 10 per cent growth prediction in February - and say prices were now likely to decline.
The weakened environment would also dampen the pipeline of new housing construction and pull the annual rate of new dwelling approvals – which stood at 172,000 in the latest figures reported on Wednesday – as low as 100,000 in coming months, the economists said.
"We expect existing home sales volumes will collapse – likely more than halving near-term – as long as the ban on auctions and open home inspections remains (which seems likely to persist for months)," economists George Tharenou and Carlos Cacho said in a research note.
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Why markets always panic much more than they should
It is quite rational to fear a virus. But fear in financial markets seems to take on an irrational life of its own.
Robert Shiller
Apr 1, 2020 – 12.28pm
We are feeling the anxiety effects of not one pandemic but two. First, there is the COVID-19 pandemic, which makes us anxious because we, or people we love, anywhere in the world, might soon become gravely ill and even die. And, second, there is a pandemic of anxiety about the economic consequences of the first.
These two pandemics are interrelated, but are not the same phenomenon. In the second pandemic, stories of fear have gone so viral that we often think of them constantly. The sharemarket has been dropping like a rock, apparently in response to stories of COVID-19 depleting our lifetime savings unless we take some action. But, unlike COVID-19 itself, the source of our anxiety is that we are unsure what action to take.
It is not good news when two pandemics are at work simultaneously. One can feed the other. Business closures, soaring unemployment, and loss of income fuel financial anxiety, which may, in turn, deter people desperate for work from taking adequate precautions against the spread of the disease.
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Coronavirus reveals the dread of a ‘non-polar’ world
The two great superpowers cannot lead and there is no persuasive coalition to replace them.
Apr 2, 2020 – 10.14am
It would be tasteless to crown the geopolitical winner of the coronavirus pandemic. What a blessing, then, that there isn’t one.
Not one global power has distinguished itself of late. From the US, there has been no Bretton Woods or Desert Storm in this crisis: no herding of allies into concerted action. Even if President Donald Trump had the inclination for such work, he does not have the finesse.
The mistake is to bank on a change of president this November to restore America’s old knack for leadership. The problem goes deeper than any one man and touches on the country’s underlying dividedness.
The US can afford two squabbling parties. It cannot afford two different accounts of the truth.
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How do hospitals decide who gets the available ventilator?
New guidelines are being fast-tracked to help doctors decide which patients receive life-saving care.
Apr 3, 2020 – 9.53am
Urgent new guidelines, dealing with the difficult question of who will be eligible for an ICU bed and a ventilator in extreme pandemic conditions, are being finalised.
They will deal with how people are considered for ICU admission when resources are limited and the need outstrips what is available. This process called ICU prioritisation, but popularly known as "triage", raises complex ethical issues.
The drive to flatten the curve is, in part, a drive to avoid having to make these decisions.
No one feels the weight of this more than intensive care specialists. For the past two weeks, in addition to their hospital duties, they have been working to the point of exhaustion to shape the guidelines.
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Lag likely in Australia's coronavirus death rate
Apr 2, 2020 – 4.32pm
Australia's coronavirus testing scheme has exceeded 1 per cent of the population for the first time – a world-leading rate that experts say is keeping the national death toll well below the hardest-hit countries.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison announced the milestone on Wednesday, saying more than 1000 tests per 100,000 people put Australia ahead of all other nations on a per capita basis.
With more than 268,500 completed tests nationally, Mr Morrison said health authorities were getting "the best information" possible to track the deadly virus.
NSW has now completed more than 110,500 tests, ahead of 53,500 in Queensland and 49,000 in Victoria.
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Big super warns huge jump in withdrawals may hurt recovery
Apr 3, 2020 – 12.00am
AustralianSuper chief executive Ian Silk has warned the government may have underestimated the number of people who will access their super during the coronavirus crisis, which could in turn limit the scope for industry funds to recapitalise corporate Australia during the recovery from the pandemic.
Mr Silk said estimates by Treasury that Australians would withdraw just $27 billion from their retirement savings could be "dramatically wrong", with industry projections putting the figure as high as $50 billion.
"If we pull the member support lever then there will be less to support corporate Australia and that's a potential outcome of the current settings," he told The Australian Financial Review.
Mr Silk said AustralianSuper would have no problems covering an anticipated $4 billion in likely withdrawals from his fund, but acknowledged its peers might struggle, especially those with homogenous member demographics.
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NY doctors surprised at number of young patients
Michelle Cortez and Olivia Carville
Apr 2, 2020 – 2.44pm
New York | Younger adults in New York City are being hospitalised with COVID-19 infections at surprisingly high rates, said doctors and other healthcare workers treating them, undermining earlier assumptions about who's most at risk from the new coronavirus.
New York has more confirmed cases than anywhere else in the US, and one in five hospitalisations is occurring in people under age 44, according to data released by the city's health department. Globally, moderate to severe cases have occurred in 10 to 15 per cent of adults under 50, according to the World Health Organisation.
On Friday at Manhattan's Mount Sinai Morningside Hospital, a previously healthy 32-year-old male patient turned to Dr Kaedrea Jackson and asked: "Am I going to die?"
The young man, who had no underlying medical conditions, was short of breath with a fever, and his oxygen levels were dropping rapidly. He'd come to the hospital's emergency department four days earlier but was told to go home, drink water, take Tylenol and self-isolate. Now he was back and his condition was deteriorating. "The level of fear in his eyes stood out to me," Jackson, an emergency medicine physician, recalled in an interview. "He was extremely scared. And he was so young."
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'A matter of trust': Experts call for release of coronavirus modelling
By Dana McCauley and Eryk Bagshaw
April 2, 2020 — 11.15pm
Infectious disease experts say the Morrison government should release the scientific modelling underlying its response to the deadly coronavirus, warning the public may grow tired of restrictions if they are not given access to the detailed expert advice.
Raina MacIntyre, head of biosecurity at the NSW Kirby Institute, said Australia should follow the lead of the United Kingdom, New Zealand and United States in making its modelling public to "inform the community and elicit their cooperation".
"The purpose of modelling is to inform disease control strategies, and to engage and bring people along with the necessary measures to control COVID-19," Professor MacIntyre said.
Deputy Chief Medical Office Paul Kelly on Wednesday appeared to backtrack from an earlier commitment to "unlock" the modelling, saying it could be misinterpreted.
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Now the lucky country must decide: what is our least-worst option on COVID-19?
Tony Blakely
Professor
April 3, 2020 — 11.29am
Australia owes a debt of gratitude to its pandemic modellers, public health officials and politicians – we have avoided the explosive beginning of a COVID-19 epidemic that most other countries are now cursed with.
Globally, it looks like – with our ANZAC mates across the ditch – we are advantaged by being at the bottom of the world with a slightly longer time to respond. Without wanting to cheer too early, the daily case notifications out of the state furthest down the path – NSW – are encouraging. The number of locally acquired cases are not increasing (much) in the past week.
If those cases start to track up, and double quicker than every eight days or so, the rest of this opinion article should be dispatched to wrap fish 'n' chips or deleted from your digital files. While I do not have a crystal ball, I do believe that the physical distancing measures are working – we have suffocated the early stage of the epidemic, "squashing the curve" rather than allowing it to increase then flatten.
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How this pandemic will shift our defence posture
The COVID-19 virus particle is 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, yet it has wreaked chaos and will dramatically shift our approach to national security and supply chains.
April 2, 2020
The COVID-19 virus particle is more than 1000 times smaller than the width of a human hair, yet it has wreaked chaos across the globe and shaken the foundations of the world’s greatest powers.
So far Australia appears to be withstanding the pandemic better than most Western democracies. But the virus’s profound economic and human consequences will transform the way in which Australians view national security.
Before the crisis, Scott Morrison was being urged behind the scenes to recast the national security debate to include a clear-eyed assessment of the nation’s most pressing vulnerabilities.
Australia’s overwhelming reliance on imported medicines and fuel, its decimated merchant shipping fleet and hollowed-out manufacturing industry were among the identified priorities.
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https://www.afr.com/wealth/personal-finance/australia-may-have-passed-infection-peak-20200403-p54goj
Australia may have passed infection peak
With expansive testing ramping up, there is no need for protracted, six-month lockdowns. Politicians ignoring this will pay the price.
Apr 3, 2020 – 3.54pm
As we move through the eye of the coronavirus storm, two key events will be turning points for markets. The first is when the rate of increase in the number of new infections and deaths in larger economies starts to noticeably decline, signalling that containment strategies are doing their job.
A second will be when these nations begin to transition businesses out of their lockdowns and back to work, albeit on a "new normal" basis that continues to mitigate ongoing transmission. The Chinese and South Koreans have demonstrated that this is possible.
This is why my team has spent significant time developing models to track live infections/fatalities and to predict the peak in the number of new cases. And there is some good news on this front. Notwithstanding the hand wringing about the laconic and lackadaisical Aussie response to the crisis, the infection and death data indicate we are outperforming many others.
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Why a coronavirus vaccine may never be found
Apr 3, 2020 – 3.10pm
The virus behind COVID-19 is so difficult to fight that any vaccine may be more harmful than the disease and the virus may have to burn out on its own, according to one of Australia's top vaccine experts.
Sydney University professor of infectious diseases David Isaacs said a human vaccine had never been successfully developed against a coronavirus, including Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), two of this century's first epidemics.
"It's possible we will never get a coronavirus vaccine," he said in an interview with AFR Weekend.
"It could be very difficult to make a vaccine that we know is safe in a lot of people. You have to be very careful when you are making a vaccine that it doesn't trigger that immune response that can cause a worse disease."
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Banks urged to 'stretch' to help crisis customers
By David Crowe, Charlotte Grieve and Clancy Yeates
April 4, 2020 — 12.00am
Treasurer Josh Frydenberg is pushing banks to "stretch" as far as possible to defer loan repayments for households in financial distress as more than 200,000 customers plead for debt relief amid the coronavirus crisis.
Mr Frydenberg urged Australians to demand the maximum help with their home loans under emergency measures to suspend repayments for six months.
ANZ Bank chief executive Shayne Elliott said the lending giant was prepared to help shield the economy from the pandemic, but warned a spike in unemployment and a new-found aversion to taking on debt would lead to a hit on housing values.
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This is not hibernation - it's life support: Ken Henry on the COVID-19 economic shock
Peter Hartcher
Political and international editor for The Sydney Morning Herald
April 3, 2020 — 7.28pm
If you'd asked Ken Henry a few months ago whether Australians would stay home when the government asked them to, he would have laughed at you. "I would have said, 'That's ridiculous, they won't do that'," says the longtime secretary of the Australian Treasury.
"It turns out that Australians will do that if that's what it takes. They will tolerate quite heavy limitations on their personal freedoms. People have figured it out – unless you make sacrifices in the short term, you deny yourself a future."
Indeed, Australia's Chief Medical Officer, Brendan Murphy, said on Friday that he was "truly delighted at the way the Australian public has embraced these measures".
It's a time of unimagined possibilities. Good and bad. To preserve lives, Australia has quickly discovered that many things we thought to be essential are, in fact, luxuries. Including hard-won doctrines and policies. Including ones that Henry spent a career fighting for. It's a time, as he puts it to me, when "everything has to be on the table".
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Strain on the banks: Financial systems hinge on our health strategy
By David Crowe
April 3, 2020 — 6.09pm
The enormity of the health and economic crisis has forced Australians to ask hard questions about their financial futures, launching a cascade of pressure on the country's biggest institutions.
Every job lost is making it harder for households to pay the rent or repay the mortgage to the point where landlords go without cash and banks go without payment.
How long can Australia bear the load? Households are being offered extraordinary help to prevent bankruptcies and bad debts, with the banks offering to defer loan repayments for six months.
But there is no free money in the financial system and every loan must be repaid or written off when the health crisis passes.
Only now is it clear how closely bank chief executives and bank regulators have been cooperating with political leaders to agree on emergency measures that can help homeowners, investors and small businesses suspend their repayments.
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A health and economic crisis with the added complication of international relations
By George Megalogenis
April 4, 2020 — 12.00am
There is a credibility gap in the story Scott Morrison tells about the nation’s response to the coronavirus. The Prime Minister likes to talk up his early decision to close the border to China, the source of the pandemic. But he is careful to avoid mentioning the United States, the source of the largest number of confirmed cases in Australia from any individual foreign country.
On Thursday, as he launched into his now customary preamble before announcing new measures to support the economy, the prime minister took a brief, revealing tour of what he saw as his achievements in this crisis so far, a checklist that swung from tough border controls to generous stimulus measures.
The Prime Minister on Thursday announced a free childcare program for Australian parents amid the coronavirus pandemic.
First among them was the ban on visitors from China at the start of February, and the quarantine facilities established on Christmas Island and then the Northern Territory to receive the Australians evacuated from Wuhan.
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The coronavirus may change us for the better
We are heading somewhere different as a result of this crisis. It may not necessarily be somewhere worse.
Apr 3, 2020 – 4.06pm
The daily shockwaves hitting us in the time of the coronavirus mean the extraordinary nature of individual changes can be lost.
Never was this more true than this week when the Morrison government announced, first, an extraordinary $130 billion wage subsidy, then, a few days later, free childcare.
Politicians have taken to ramping up the sound of their announcements over recent decades: a budget surplus of eleventy gazillion dollars (small print, in 30 years' time); spending 30 gazillion dollars on new roads (small print, over 10 years); that sort of thing.
The numbers have become so meaningless and incomprehensible to most voters that it has made the small, local announcements of $5 million for new change rooms at the footy oval (of the sort that have featured in the sports rorts affair) a much more potent political weapon.
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We must know when encroachment on our liberties will end
By The Herald's View
April 5, 2020 — 12.00am
"We are still seeing reckless and irresponsible behaviour that endangers the lives of others," NSW Police Minister David Elliott said last Sunday, explaining why police had been granted new powers to issue on-the-spot fines for breaches of social distancing rules.
Who knew that eating a kebab on a bench could be so reckless.
When the number of coronavirus cases began to rise exponentially in Australia last month, most of us accepted government pleadings to abide by social distancing advice. Bondi beachgoers and backpackers were among the groups that took a little longer to grasp the message, but overall the public realised a greater good would come of limiting interactions with others and willingly acted – voluntarily – to flatten the curve.
But when the advice turned into rules – and when breaches of those rules became easily punishable with the full force of the law – the playing field changed.
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Turns out politicians can drop the ideology and fix things. Never let 'em forget it
Jacqueline Maley
Columnist and senior journalist
April 5, 2020 — 12.00am
Less than a year ago, Scott Morrison was elected on a small-to-negligible policy platform, rightly intuiting that the Australian people, fed up with politicians, wanted little government intervention in their lives.
Now, Morrison has become a circumstantial big-government socialist with a utilitarian streak, who has this week presided over a stonking $130 billion handout for wage subsidies, taking the government's overall pandemic spend to $196 billion.
But that was just Monday’s work. On Sunday he announced a moratorium on evictions. On Thursday he made childcare free. He has also announced quasi-takeovers of private hospitals. Private manufacturers have been called on to join the war effort. It’s like the 12 days of Christmas but with nationalisations and subsidies instead of partridges and pear trees.
The week before the Prime Minister gave citizens specific instructions about their barre classes, haircuts and the kinds of people they can associate with.
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The virus has shaken globalism, which will yield ground to nation-states
Dave Sharma
Member for Wentworth and a former ambassador to Israel.
April 5, 2020 — 12.00am
These are the early stages of a crisis that will be of uncertain duration. Will the coronavirus crisis be like the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s, delivering a short but painful blow to the global economy and a limited disruption to civilian life? Or are we in the summer of 1914, expecting the war will be over by Christmas, only to embark on a four-year struggle that left a world transformed?
Plagues have a long history of causing disruption. The Antonine and Cyprian plagues dramatically weakened the western Roman Empire in its later years, while the Justinianic plague crippled the eastern Roman Empire and fuelled the rise of Islam as a political force.
The Black Death in Europe was a social leveller, strengthening the bargaining power of workers and dealing feudalism a mortal blow.
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Our liberty and prosperity are in peril if COVID-19 triggers an arms race of compassion
Tom Switzer
Columnist
April 4, 2020 — 12.00am
Since the first responsibility of the state is to protect its citizens, it is understandable why, faced with a pandemic on a scale not seen since 1918, drastic measures have been taken to try to keep loss of life to a minimum.
However, some of the emergency policies launched to respond to the coronavirus pandemic could remain in place and that will more deeply entrench government across the economy and civil society.
Political leaders face two challenges: first, to judge carefully when restrictions can be lifted and to strike a balance between the damage caused by the virus and that caused by economic ruin; second, to ensure those restrictions do not leave a legacy in liberal societies, but are removed so society can proceed as before.
This won’t be popular to read in certain circles, but the enthusiasm with which some governments – at home and abroad – have decided to print money and increase police powers has been disturbing.
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Coronavirus Australia: ‘Tough measures working but next six months onerous’, Scott Morrison says
6:09AM April 4, 2020
The federal government is increasingly confident it has broken the back of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic, with new data showing tough border controls and social-distancing measures have nearly halved the growth rate of new infections.
As Australians ended their first week of unprecedented isolation measures, Scott Morrison revealed that health authorities had begun remodelling the trajectory of the disease to take into account the impact of social-distancing practices.
“The early news on some of this early modelling is that at the current rate, if we keep doing what we’re doing, and we keep doing the work to upgrade our ICU capacity and secure the extra ventilators and all the things we are doing right now, then right now that trajectory is promising,’’ the Prime Minister said.
The Weekend Australian has been told the modelling is likely to include a “worst-case scenario” infection rate so the public is aware of the ramifications of breaking social-distancing regulations.
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How the virus could stagger Asia's giants
Roland Rajah
Apr 4, 2020 – 12.00am
COVID-19 looks set to hit the emerging world hard. For Australia, what happens in India and Indonesia could be most consequential.
The rise of these two Asian giants is central to Australia’s nascent Indo-Pacific hopes to counterbalance and diversify away from China’s strategic and economic predominance.
Right now, however, it is India and Indonesia that look to be in trouble while China is doing better.
China appears, for now, to have beaten back the virus while its economic recovery is making headway – even if this remains fraught and far from the V-shaped recovery initially hoped for. India and Indonesia face a more perilous outlook.
The fear is COVID-19 could mercilessly lay bare the reality that, for all their rising economic heft, both remain very much developing countries. Health systems are weak and risk being quickly overwhelmed by the virus, especially if it spreads within dense slums and poorer areas in major cities or to rural villages with limited access to proper water and sanitation.
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Royal Commissions And The Like.
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There are no entries in this category.
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National Budget Issues.
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Morrison's $130b to save six million jobs
Mar 30, 2020 – 7.07pm
Almost half the workforce will receive $1500 a fortnight for the next six months under a record $130 billion wage subsidy, news of which drove the biggest jump in the sharemarket for 40 years.
Unveiling the massive bailout, Prime Minister Scott Morrison expressed hope but could not guarantee that it would be the last major spending package needed to deal with the coronavirus crisis.
Described by the Prime Minister as an "economic lifeline", the subsidy, known as the JobKeeper payment, takes the figure to $214 billion now allocated towards stimulus and support measures in three separate packages in less than three weeks.
This amounts to about 11 per cent of GDP.
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Debt and deficit disaster - the 2020 version
By Shane Wright
March 31, 2020 — 11.55am
The running total of the federal government's efforts to stop Australia succumbing to a coronavirus-induced depression is north of $200 billion.
Its latest plan, a $130 billion wage subsidy program, is on top of the $66 billion in assistance rolled out eight days earlier, which itself came 10 days after the government's initial $17.6 billion stimulus.
That doesn't include the $125 billion of loans and guarantees being offered by the government or Reserve Bank. Some of that will be lost as businesses find themselves unable to repay their debts.
Not since World War II has such a large volume of cash been thrown at a single issue.
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Reserve Bank says cash rate now at ‘effective lower bound’
“Dysfunctional” bond markets and an expected “very material economic contraction” as a result of the coronavirus pandemic drove this month’s unprecedented package of monetary measures, minutes from the March 18 emergency Reserve Bank board meeting showed.
The minutes, released Wednesday, also confirmed the end of conventional monetary policy.
Board members “agreed that the cash rate was now at its effective lower bound” and that there was “no appetite for negative interest rates in Australia”.
The expectation was that “the cash rate would remain at a very low level for several years”.
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Childcare package is not only generous, it's uncomplicated
The old system put two anchors on childcare. In one action, the government has sidestepped the convoluted arrangement.
Apr 2, 2020 – 6.18pm
The generosity of the government's package is not just in the $1.6 billion to be handed over in cash in the next three months, it's the logistics which are going to make business easier for childcare operators.
The first payment will be made next Monday, directly into providers' bank accounts. That will be 50 per cent of the fee they charge per student based on enrolment numbers that go back to the beginning of March – that is, before enrolments started to fall.
The payments continue until June 30, which gives the sector certainty, and the arrangement replaces the "gap fee" system, which has gone into suspension.
The old system put two anchors on childcare. Parents had to pay 20 per cent of the cost for their enrolment. More complicated, the government subsidy initially went to the parent and it was up to them to nominate whether it went directly to the provider.
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Retail spending bounces back in February
· Australian Associated Press
Retail spending increased more sharply than expected in February thanks to a surge in spending on basic necessities in supermarkets and department stores.
Retail trade rose by 0.5 per cent in February to $27.8 billion, seasonally adjusted, according to figures released Friday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
Preliminary retail figures released two weeks ago suggested shoppers frantically buying toilet paper, rice, pasta and other goods due to coronavirus fears would result in a 0.4 per cent rise for the month.
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The big state is back
Economic policymaking has been turned on its head as the Australian government deliberately engineers a recession to preserve lives.
Apr 4, 2020 – 12.00am
When 1 million anxious Australians rushed to Centrelink offices and its website to pre-register for JobSeeker welfare payments last week and retailers stood down tens of thousands of workers, inside the federal government in Canberra alarm bells began ringing.
Big job losses had been expected over coming months due to coronavirus health measures squeezing business activity, but the speed and gravity of the job axings caught the Morrison government off guard.
The hip-pocket hit and devastating personal toll facing millions of Australians from the inevitable deep recession would prove to be an urgent catalyst for the biggest government spending response and public debt blow-out since World War II.
Officials drew up a crisis package comprising $130 billion of wage subsidies in just days, taking the federal government's total coronavirus economic safety net to $214 billion – a massive 11 per cent of annual gross domestic product (GDP).
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Rubicon crossed on fiscal spending
The Coalition’s conversion to aggressive fiscal expansion this week was a fully justified response to an emergency, but a Rubicon has been crossed.
When the 2020-21 budget is brought down on October 6 the deficit will be well into nine figures, potentially $200bn, or 10 per cent of a reduced GDP number (GDP is probably in the process of contracting by 10 per cent, to $2 trillion).
After the global financial crisis, it took a decade to get the budget back to balance — or rather the now dashed hope of balance — because of the relentless pressures on government spending from disability and healthcare and the Coalition’s refusal to increase taxes apart from bracket creep.
Annual cash deficits over those 10 years totalled $361bn. Government debt increased from $101bn in 2008. It was $257bn when the Coalition won the 2013 election, and is $542bn now.
That was from a starting deficit in the GFC year of 2008 of $31.3bn; what will the next 10 years of deficits add up to if the starting point is, say, $200bn?
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Health Issues.
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World-first tool to help medicos detect COVID-19 could save 'thousands of lives'
By Rachel Clun
March 30, 2020 — 12.01am
Sydney scientists have developed a world-first COVID-19 diagnostic tool to help frontline healthcare workers rapidly identify patients.
The free online program trains doctors to spot COVID-19 in CT scans of patients’ lungs.
Widespread use of the tool, named CovED, by medical professionals could save “thousands of lives”, medical radiation scientist at the University of Sydney Professor Patrick Brennan said.
“It’s a tool which makes clinicians, healthcare professionals anywhere in the world able to recognise and identify the disease much more effectively than they could previously,” he said.
“We think it’s really important, we think it will save thousands and thousands of lives.”
Professor Brennan, who is chief executive of the company behind the tool DetectED-X, said testing that is being widely used simply tells health professionals whether patients have COVID-19 or not. But lung CT scans can show doctors how severe the disease is in each patient.
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Coronavirus: health funds delay premium increase to assist members
Private health insurers have announced they will postpone planned April 1 premium rises for at least six months in response to the pandemic.
Private Healthcare Australia chief executive Rachel David said member health funds had been engaged in talks with government and regulators in recent weeks regarding measures to ease financial pressure on customers while maintaining essential health services, including dental care.
“Heath funds, in conjunction with the Department of Health, will review the measure prior to six months after reassessing growth in demand for non-emergency surgery and the impact of COVID-19 on the health system,” Dr David said.
“This is a continuing process and health funds will be regularly reviewing their financial position in coming months to provide as much support as possible to members.
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'Very promising' blood test detects 50 types of cancer
By Stuart Layt
April 3, 2020 — 12.49pm
Researchers have developed a blood test that can detect 50 types of cancer, in what experts believe is the first step towards wide-scale screening for deadly tumours.
Scientists in the US and UK have developed a test that can detect the DNA shed into a person’s bloodstream by cancer.
That DNA is different from the regular DNA that would be found in a person without cancer, and it is also unique to each form of cancer – meaning it is possible to detect what type of cancer a person has and also where in the body it is likely to be located.
The lead author of the research paper, Dr Michael Seiden, president of US Oncology, said they had developed an AI program that scanned the blood samples for changes in the DNA, called "methylation".
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International Issues.
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https://www.afr.com/world/north-america/trump-prepares-nation-for-massive-death-toll-20200330-p54f6n
Trump prepares nation for massive death toll
Updated Mar 30, 2020 – 1.11pm, first published at 12.09pm
Washington | Donald Trump says that holding America's death toll to under 100,000 would be a victory in his administration's battle to limit what has become the world's worst COVID-19 surge, with some of the nation's hospitals already on the brink of collapse.
In a dramatic 90-minute press conference late on Sunday (Monday AEDT), Mr Trump extended to April 30 his 15-day federal social distancing guidelines, which were due to expire on March 31, and said US deaths would peak in two weeks.
"During the next two weeks it's important that everyone follows the guidelines," Mr Trump said. "The better you do [that], the faster this whole nightmare will end."
The President's latest moves and messaging shatter his insistence just last week that the US economy could reopen at Easter, on April 12. It also coincides with a dramatic acceleration in case numbers that have blown past China, where the outbreak originated.
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Amid coronavirus outbreak, Hungary's Viktor Orban reaches for unchecked power
By Loveday Morris
March 31, 2020 — 8.06am
Berlin: The Hungarian parliament handed the country's populist Prime Minister Viktor Orban the power to govern unchallenged for as long as he sees fit, a move rights groups said effectively suspends democracy in the European Union member state in the name of fighting the coronavirus.
The controversial "coronavirus bill," which allows Orban to rule by decree, passed by 137 to 53 votes on Monday, local time, despite opposition efforts to attach an expiration date on the state of emergency. The law also punishes those who "distort" or publish "false" information on the outbreak with five years in jail.
The government has argued that the emergency powers are necessary to fight the outbreak, but political analysts have questioned whether Orban will relinquish them when the health crisis subsides. Hungary has 447 coronavirus cases and 15 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.
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The tragedy of two failing superpowers
Being a superpower is not just about brute strength; it is also about being seen as a competent and decent leader. China is not and the US is failing.
Apr 1, 2020 – 10.50am
History accelerates in crises. This pandemic may not itself transform the world, but it can accelerate changes already under way. One ongoing change has been in the relationship between China, the rising superpower, and the US, the incumbent.
Being a superpower is not just about brute strength; it is also about being seen as a competent and decent leader. After victories in the second world war and the cold war, the US was such a leader.
Despite rising economic strength, China is not. But times can change. The coronavirus may accelerate the process.
Kishore Mahbubani, a former Singaporean diplomat, has written a characteristically provocative book on the struggle for primacy between the two superpowers under the provocative title Has China Won?
The answer, he suggests, is not yet. But it might. This is not just because of its scale, but also because of American mistakes, including false perceptions of Chinese reality.
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China’s divorce spike is a warning to rest of locked-down world
Chinese officials had hoped that cooping up couples would actually lead to a baby boom but divorce filings started rising in March as couples emerged from quarantine.
Sheridan Prasso
Apr 2, 2020 – 6.49am
As the coronavirus raged through China, Wu, a housewife in her 30s in southern Guangdong province, spent almost two months in isolation with her out-of-work spouse. They fought constantly.
Wu, who declined to give her full name because she wants to protect her privacy, ticked off a familiar list of marital irritants, including money (too little), screen time (too much), and housework and child care (not evenly split). One particular annoyance was her husband’s habit of engaging their two children in play in the evening when they were supposed to be going to bed.
“He’s the troublemaker in the house,” she says. “I don’t want to endure any more. We’ve agreed to get a divorce, and the next thing is to find lawyers.”
Although China publishes nationwide statistics on divorce only annually, media reports from various cities show uncouplings surged in March as husbands and wives began emerging from weeks of government-mandated lockdowns intended to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus. Incidents of domestic violence also multiplied.
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US is on coronavirus trajectory similar to Italy, Mike Pence says
April 2, 2020 — 4.43am
Washington: US Vice President Mike Pence said the White House's models for the coronavirus pandemic show the country on a trajectory akin to hard-hit Italy.
Speaking to CNN, Pence said: "We think Italy may be the most comparable area to the United States at this point."
Pence was referencing the prediction models unveiled by the White House on Tuesday that project 100,000 to 240,000 US deaths in the coronavirus pandemic. Those figures assume that the country maintains rigorous social-distancing practices for the duration of the public health crisis.
Italy's health system was stretched beyond capacity weeks ago leading to soaring death tolls. US governors and local officials have warned their states need urgent federal help to avoid a similar fate.
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'Mother of all financial crises': The global recession could be worse than feared
By Peter S. Goodman
April 2, 2020 — 8.03am
The world is almost certainly ensnared in a devastating recession delivered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Now, fears are growing that the downturn could be far more punishing and long lasting than initially feared — potentially enduring into next year, and even beyond — as governments intensify restrictions on business to halt the spread of the pandemic, and as fear of the virus changes the very concept of public space, impeding consumer-led economic growth.
So long as human interaction remains dangerous, business cannot responsibly return to normal. And what was normal before may not be anymore. People may be less inclined to jam into crowded restaurants and concert halls even after the virus is contained.
The abrupt halt of commercial activity threatens to impose economic pain so profound and enduring in every region of the world at once that recovery could take years. The losses to companies, many already saturated with debt, risk triggering a financial crisis of cataclysmic proportions.
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US enters 'deepest recession' ever as 10m claim jobless benefits
Jacob Greber United States Correspondent
Apr 3, 2020 – 5.27am
Washington | Demands on Congress to begin work on its fourth wave of fiscal support for America's tottering economy have intensified after official data showed as many as 10-million Americans filed for unemployment benefits since mid-March.
In an unprecedented surge that has stunned many of the most pessimistic forecasters, some 6.6 million workers filed initial jobless claims last week, according to the Department of Labor, extending the previous week's 3.3 million claims, which were near four-times larger than the previous record.
The news came as global coronavirus cases passed 1 million, three months after China reported the first case, according to the latest Johns Hopkins Unviersity count. The illness has reached at least 181 countries.
"The numbers we are seeing are unprecedented but not surprising," said Australian economist Steven Hamilton, an associate professor at The George Washington University in Washington DC.
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Echoes of the Great Depression: 'Eye-watering' US unemployment figures set to get much worse
By Tom Rees
April 3, 2020 — 11.00am
Unemployment in the US is set to surge to its highest rate since the Great Depression after a second week of record lay-offs dealt a stunning blow to the world's largest economy.
The number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits in the week ending March 28 doubled to almost 7 million, with economists warning that up to 20 million jobs could be lost across the country as lockdowns bite.
Wall Street analysts predicted that unemployment will hit 16 per cent within months - a rate not seen since the end of the Great Depression in the 1930s.
The shocking figures show that employers are shedding workers at a frightening pace to combat a sudden stop in economic activity as the White House struggles to contain the COVID-19 outbreak. The weekly rise was 10 times higher than the pre-coronavirus record set in 1982 and means just under 10 million people have filed for unemployment benefits in the last two weeks. James McCann, of Aberdeen Standard Investments, said: "This is eye-watering and we are still only at the beginning of the layoffs spurred by the lockdowns.
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Singapore to close schools, most workplaces in stricter measures against COVID-19
By John Geddie
April 3, 2020 — 9.11pm
Singapore will close schools and most workplaces except for essential services like supermarkets and banks for one month, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong says, as part of stricter measures to stop the spread of the coronavirus.
While the city has won international praise for its efforts to stem the spread of the virus, its infections have been rising sharply in recent weeks, to 1114 on Friday, and five people have died.
"We have decided that instead of tightening incrementally over the next few weeks, we should make a decisive move now, to pre-empt escalating infections," Lee said in a speech, and promised more support for households and businesses.
Food establishments, markets and supermarkets, clinics, hospitals, utilities, transport and key banking services will remain open.
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Coronavirus: China, Russia make a play for a new order
Academic publishing timelines being what they are, I finished The Dragons and the Snakes — the book about how adversaries have evolved since the Cold War — a year ago, well before the coronavirus crisis. Yet that crisis, along with the oil shock triggered by Moscow’s sudden exit from its OPEC-Plus deal with Saudi Arabia and the resulting collapse in global oil prices, reinforces several of the book’s arguments.
It shows how dangerously dependent on communist China our manufacturing base and supply chains have become, and how overly reliant Western nations are on Russian oil and gas. It illustrates how our narrow definition of warfare (which does not consider strategic supply-chain manipulation, health-system destabilisation or the “oil weapon” as acts of war) contrasts with the understanding in Beijing and Moscow, where strategists include these actions and others in a much broader conception of conflict.
And the chaotic pandemic response highlights how the international community — once relatively unified under the leadership of Western democracies, co-operating through institutions such as the UN and the EU — has fractured. Lockdowns, travel bans and border closures have thrown globalisation into reverse. And as I pointed out in part one of the themes in my book last month, the collapse of confidence in experts and institutions, as with the loss of trust in Washington by many formerly staunch US allies, has much to do with the failure of US-led military interventions during the past two decades.
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I look forward to comments on all this!
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David.
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