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Mass. businesses struggle on New Year's Eve; 'Can't operate like this' WCVB Boston
The bond market has been a barren field for income, as fixed-income yields remain stuck at historic lows. Yet there are rich pickings elsewhere—if you know where to look.
“With rates just barely above all-time lows, yield opportunities are clustered in the equity markets,” says David King, co-manager of the Columbia Flexible Capital Income fund.
That...
With the threat of the pandemic all but banished from its shores, New Zealand approached the holiday season much as it ordinarily does.
By 11 a.m. on New Year’s Eve, the supply of craft ale at liquor stores in the popular beach town of Raglan was already somewhat depleted, as throngs of New Zealanders prepared to be among the first to bid farewell to a thoroughly unusual year.
With the threat of the pandemic all but banished from its shores, at least for now, New Zealanders have approached the holiday season much as they ordinarily do.
From mid-December, the country slides into a kind of weekslong summer daze, as city workers flee for scenic spots along the coasts and countryside. Schools close until February, public radio adopts summer programming — less news, more tunes and cricket commentary — and dry cleaners and cafes on even Auckland’s busiest streets shut for weeks at a time.
On New Year’s Eve itself, Aucklanders gathered at beachside neighborhoods to watch a five-minute midnight firework display over the harbor. Groups of friends toasted the new year, which arrived at 6 a.m. Eastern, at barbecues at rural holiday homes. And in Gisborne, on the east coast, thousands of revelers together counted down to 2021 at Rhythm and Vines, which bills itself as “the first festival in the world to welcome in the first sunrise of the New Year.”
Masks remained optional throughout, and were rarely worn.
To stave off the threat of another coronavirus outbreak over the summer months, the New Zealand government has introduced improved Bluetooth-powered contact tracing and pushed to maintain high levels of hand-washing. Ashley Bloomfield, the country’s director-general of health, made a video appearance to cheering crowds at Rhythm and Vines and other events across New Zealand, as he urged them to “unite against Covid-19,” over booming dubstep-inflected beats.
The promise of a warm New Zealand summer, along with its Covid-free status, has lured many New Zealanders overseas back home over the Christmas and New Year break for weeks or months at a time.
After being released from two weeks’ mandatory hotel quarantine, Jack Murphy, 33, an advertising planner based in Dublin, spent the evening with friends from high school at a holiday home in Raglan.
Experiencing the pandemic in Ireland, which is set to enter another strict lockdown, had cast summer in New Zealand into even sharper relief, he said. “It’s made all the more special by how privileged and lucky we are to be here, and to come home.”
The S&P 500 finished 2020 with a gain of 16.26% for the year and closed at a record high on Thursday, a remarkable performance after a drastic selloff in February and March.
Some of the names in the broad market index had particularly strong years, with six stocks gaining more than 100%.
| Ticker | Company | 2020 Price Return |
|---|---|---|
| TSLA | Tesla | 743.1% |
| ETSY | Etsy | 301.6% |
| NVDA | Nvidia | 121.9% |
| PYPL | PayPal | 116.5% |
| LB | L Brands | 105.5% |
| ALB | Albermarle Corp. | 102.1% |
| AMD | Advanced Micro Devices | 99.8% |
| FCX | Freeport-McMoRan | 98.6% |
The S&P 500's climb would have been even more dramatic if the top two names on the list had started the year in the index. Both electric vehicle maker Tesla and e-commerce company Etsy were added to the S&P 500 during the final four months of the year.
Those stocks also represent two of the major themes in the market this year, as stocks tied to green energy had strong years, as did those like Etsy that were well-equipped for a stay-at-home world.
The top-eight performers also includes two semiconductor stocks in Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. It was a strong year for the sector broadly, with the PHLX Semiconductor Index rising 51%, outpacing even the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite.
The S&P 500 is a market-weighted group of large cap stocks in the U.S. and is the benchmark that many professional investors measure themselves against. Many popular exchange traded funds and mutual are compared to the S&P 500, with more than $11 trillion tied to or benchmarked against the index as of December 2019, according to S&P Dow Jones Indices.
The constituents in the index are often shuffled throughout the year by a committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. The organization announced on Wednesday that Enphase Energy would join the index on Jan. 7, replacing Tiffany & Co., which is being acquired by LVMH.
Contagiousness is the hallmark of the mutated virus surfacing in the U.S. and more than a dozen other countries.
A more contagious form of the coronavirus has begun circulating in the United States.
In Britain, where it was first identified, the new variant became the predominant form of the coronavirus in just three months, accelerating that nation’s surge and filling its hospitals. It may do the same in the United States, exacerbating an unrelenting rise in deaths and overwhelming the already strained health care system, experts warned.
A variant that spreads more easily also means that people will need to religiously adhere to precautions like social distancing, mask-wearing, hand hygiene and improved ventilation — unwelcome news to many Americans already chafing against restrictions.
“The bottom line is that anything we do to reduce transmission will reduce transmission of any variants, including this one,” said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist affiliated with Georgetown University. But “it may mean that the more targeted measures that are not like a full lockdown won’t be as effective.”
What does it mean for this variant to be more transmissible? What makes this variant more contagious than previous iterations of the virus? And why should we worry about a variant that spreads more easily but does not seem to make anyone sicker?
We asked experts to weigh in on the evolving research into this new version of the coronavirus.
Many variants of the coronavirus have cropped up since the pandemic began. But all evidence so far suggests that the new mutant, called B.1.1.7, is more transmissible than previous forms. It first surfaced in September in Britain, but already accounts for more than 60 percent of new cases in London and neighboring areas.
The new variant seems to infect more people than earlier versions of the coronavirus, even when the environments are the same. It’s not clear what gives the variant this advantage, although there are indications that it may infect cells more efficiently.
It’s also difficult to say exactly how much more transmissible the new variant may be, because scientists have not yet done the kind of lab experiments that are required. Most of the conclusions have been drawn from epidemiological observations, and “there’s so many possible biases in all the available data,” cautioned Muge Cevik, an infectious disease expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland and a scientific adviser to the British government.
Scientists initially estimated that the new variant was 70 percent more transmissible, but a recent modeling study pegged that number at 56 percent. Once researchers sift through all the data, it’s possible that the variant will turn out to be just 10 to 20 percent more transmissible, said Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.
Even so, Dr. Bedford said, it is likely to catch on rapidly and become the predominant form in the United States by March. Scientists like Dr. Bedford are tracking all the known variants closely to detect any further changes that might alter their behavior.
The new mutant virus may spread more easily, but in every other way it seems little different than its predecessors.
So far, at least, the variant does not seem to make people any sicker or lead to more deaths. Still, there is cause for concern: A variant that is more transmissible will increase the death toll simply because it will spread faster and infect more people.
“In that sense, it’s just a numbers game,” Dr. Rasmussen said. The effect will be amplified “in places like the U.S. and the U.K., where the health care system is really at its breaking point.”
The routes of transmission — by large and small droplets, and tiny aerosolized particles adrift in crowded indoor spaces — have not changed. That means masks, limiting time with others and improving ventilation in indoor spaces will all help contain the variant’s spread, as these measures do with other variants of the virus.
“By minimizing your exposure to any virus, you’re going to reduce your risk of getting infected, and that’s going to reduce transmission over all,” Dr. Rasmussen said.
Some preliminary evidence from Britain suggests that people infected with the new variant tend to carry greater amounts of the virus in their noses and throats than those infected with previous versions.
“We’re talking in the range between 10-fold greater and 10,000-fold greater,” said Michael Kidd, a clinical virologist at Public Health England and a clinical adviser to the British government who has studied the phenomenon.
There are other explanations for the finding — Dr. Kidd and his colleagues did not have access to information about when in their illness people were tested, for example, which could affect their so-called viral loads.
Still, the finding does offer one possible explanation for why the new variant spreads more easily. The more virus that infected people harbor in their noses and throats, the more they expel into the air and onto surfaces when they breathe, talk, sing, cough or sneeze.
As a result, situations that expose people to the virus carry a greater chance of seeding new infections. Some new data indicate that people infected with the new variant spread the virus to more of their contacts.
With previous versions of the virus, contact tracing suggested that about 10 percent of people who have close contact with an infected person — within six feet for at least 15 minutes — inhaled enough virus to become infected.
“With the variant, we might expect 15 percent of those,” Dr. Bedford said. “Currently risky activities become more risky.”
The variant has 23 mutations, compared with the version that erupted in Wuhan, China, a year ago. But 17 of those mutations appeared suddenly, after the virus diverged from its most recent ancestor.
Each infected person is a crucible, offering opportunities for the virus to mutate as it multiplies. With more than 83 million people infected worldwide, the coronavirus is amassing mutations faster than scientists expected at the start of the pandemic.
The vast majority of mutations provide no advantage to the virus and die out. But mutations that improve the virus’ fitness or transmissibility have a greater chance to catch on.
At least one of the 17 new mutations in the variant contributes to its greater contagiousness. The mechanism is not yet known. Some data suggest that the new variant may bind more tightly to a protein on the surface of human cells, allowing it to more readily infect them.
It’s possible that the variant blooms in an infected person’s nose and throat, but not in the lungs, for example — which may explain why patients spread it more easily but do not develop illnesses more severe than those caused by earlier versions of the virus. Some influenza viruses behave similarly, experts noted.
“We need to look at this evidence as preliminary and accumulating,” Dr. Cevik said of the growing data on the new variant.
Still, the research so far suggests an urgent need to cut down on transmission of the variant, she added: “We need to be much more careful over all, and look at the gaps in our mitigation measures.”
In keeping with one of the purest dad stereotypes, my father is extremely tricky to buy gifts for, because he only ever wants socks and underwear. Over the years, though, I’ve learned that the key is to come up with something unexpected and, ideally, aligned with his sense of humor. Something like … a wooden box for bats to nest in, so he can watch them zoom over the backyard at dusk, or an antique novelty pipe with a basset hound’s face for a bowl. You know it when you see it.
In November, I spotted what looked like the perfect Dadgift: An item so unhinged, it arguably shouldn’t exist. It was a charcuterie chalet, or, a small cabin constructed from the contents of a charcuterie board. A charcuterie chalet is like a gingerbread house, only instead of cookies, the walls are crackers and meats, and the glue that holds the whole thing together is not icing but sticky cheese. Images of beautiful protein cottages, tidy and minutely detailed and sometimes oddly elegant, began circulating on Instagram in late 2019, but for whatever reason — people having a lot of time on their hands, and maybe also more shelf-stable meat in the pantry? — seemed really to take hold in 2020. “The most savory snack this side of Christmas!” Taste of Home boasted this fall. “Mesmerizing,” I naively observed on these pages.
Initially, I admired the freaky Pinterest minds that looked at cheese-spread and saw adhesive. These meat houses appear enchanting from the outside, but then, so did the witch’s cottage in “Hansel and Gretel.” Appearances can be deceiving.
With that in mind, the first thing I would suggest to those of you considering meat-building is, don’t do it. Just let the meats and cheeses lounge on a plate or a board or whatever. Their natural habitat is what they want, they don’t want to be repurposed as shingles. And do you want to consume charcuterie that’s been manhandled for two to three hours? Trust me, you do not!
Please heed my cautionary tale.
Phase I: “Planning”Looking back, I think it would’ve been useful to make a whimsical sketch of my target creation, like they do on the Great British Bake-Off. I at least should have thought about the materials — soft cheese to hard cheese ratios; whether Brie might adhere the bits more effectively than mascarpone; how either of those elements jell with chorizo — before I went shopping.
But I am not a planner, and I arrived at the grocery store prepared to wing it. My conviction crumbled at the cheese counter, however, where choice overwhelmed my brain. I just started grabbing things: The biggest, sturdiest crackers I could find; whatever dried meat presented itself; bags (!!) of olives; giant bamboo garnish spears in lieu of toothpicks. I threw a wedge of fancy blue, a redundant half-round of Roquefort, a full wheel of Brie, a generous hunk of spicy Gouda, two packs of deli-sliced pepperjack, and a tub of Gouda paste into my overcrowded cart. I figured I could use the Brie and the Gouda spread to stick things together, whereas the solid options could potentially help shore up my interior or even stand on their own. Maybe I will carve little Gouda flames to make a fire, I thought, tossing a thing of mascarpone on top of my pile, just in case.
I spent an egregious $114.67, and emerged with … this:
On Christmas Eve afternoon, I appraised my materials, spreading them all out on a counter. Again, don’t do this! Make a plan first and remove your fighters from the fridge as needed, rather than letting them all sit out for the duration of your scaffolding experience. This is common sense, and I ignored it, opting instead to just dive in.
I laid my foundation: Two slices of the pepperjack, layered three deep and stacked end-to-end in a rectangular formation. Hm yes very orderly … now what? In my head, the meat house was made of sausages, Lincoln Log-style, only I didn’t see anything like that at the store. Kicking myself for not remembering about hot dogs, I considered my crackers and selected my longest, waviest boys for the wall. Their multi-grains sort of recalled stucco!
Next, I broke some of my bamboo spears in half and sank them into the pepperjack, supports for the exterior: Two crackers wide, three crackers deep, each panel pasted to a spit with mascarpone (which at this point was still cold) and feebly buttressed by more crackers in the interior. Somehow this seemed to work, and I congratulated myself as I dairy-spackled decorations — cornichon hedges, a soppressata round as a hobbit door, why not — to the outside.
She began to look like a little home.
Confidence soaring, I turned to a critical feature: The pointy roof. Up until now, I had entertained a vague notion of simply … making a sort of tetrahedron out of support beams, then draping it in speck. You know, ham-thatching a roof.
Picking up my spear halves, though, I realized this plan would potentially wind up crushing the cracker walls, already beginning to sag, because it would sit atop them like a witch hat. Also, I was about an hour into construction; the cheese stench was overpowering; the whole thing would spoil if I did not move quickly. And how quickly can an amateur weave meat?
Gloom descending, I scrapped that idea and scrambled for some crackers. They did not want to stand to attention, preferring to slide down the sides, so I cemented them with a gratuitous layer of Brie grout at my sister’s suggestion.
For a brief and shimmering moment, my methods appeared to actually work. But then I began pasting chorizo rounds to the gables, something I should have finished before I pitched the roof. The slight pressure, combined with the weight of the sausage layer, sent the tidy A-shape listing resolutely to one side, as the wall panels began pulling away from one another. A dollop of cheese dripped from the rafters. She was melting. I shoved her into the fridge to chill for half an hour, ignoring an ominous thunk as I shut the door.
At this point, I had sunk nearly two hours into my project. The sun had set. Christmas festivities loomed. It was time to end this.
I steeled myself for the worst and opened the fridge. As suspected, my roof imploded, its cheerful peak reduced to a mess of cold cuts. My spirits fell with it. Everything stank of salami, including me. My palms were shiny and red with spicy oil. I could not see an end to my labor, except to pile sausage slices over the top of what was now a strange cracker fence, and call it a day. I cut a chunk of gouda to signal a chimney and stationed a few festive rosemary pine trees on the slantiest side, for added support. I crumbled blue cheese around the perimeter, its moldy veins meant to evoke grass peeking through snow — a new and assertive addition to the olfactory landscape.
My meat house was an undeniable eyesore, truly offensive to behold, but it could not be allowed to sit any longer. I summoned my father.
Somewhat surprisingly, my dad loved his meat hovel. Even if he did not immediately understand what he was looking at, he laughed as soon as he saw it, and later hauled it downstairs to show off on the family Zoom. I suspect his reaction has more to do with a parent’s obligation to appreciate their child’s arts — even when the arts are crappy and the child is an adult — than it does with my creation being nice to look at, but either way I’ll take it.
Although making it was a tremendous pain in the ass, and although it was condemned to the trash — largely intact — for health reasons, the meat house had its intended effect. My dad received a gift, he got a kick out of it, and! Most important of all, nobody got food poisoning in the process. A Christmas miracle if ever there was one.
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Here are the Post's 15 most read stories on new restaurants and eateries in 2020 Shawnee Mission PostFor the first time in decades, Times Square will be closed to the public on New Year’s Eve. Instead, dozens of frontline workers and their families will be honored with spots near the stage.
[Follow our New Year’s Eve live coverage
Every December, the eyes of the world are drawn to New York City, where a glittering crystal ball in Midtown Manhattan marks a communal chance for a new beginning. Hundreds of thousands assemble in person; millions more watch on television, pausing for a moment to join an annual ritual.
With some excitement and anticipation, they turn their eyes to Times Square and begin counting along, starting at …
In March, as the pandemic swept through New York City, the groups in charge of the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square realized that things were unlikely to proceed as planned.
Broadway, an industry at the heart of Times Square’s appeal, was shutting down for months. Large gatherings had been banned indefinitely, and several major city events had already been scrapped. Rumors were flying in text messages and on Twitter that officials might lock down the city.
Organizers knew that canceling the festivities would be devastating. New Year’s Eve in Times Square has become a symbol of a booming and vibrant New York City and has been at the center of the holiday for decades.
… months before this year’s celebration, it looked as if that collective ritual, one of the few that remain in an increasingly segmented society, might be threatened.
Tim Tompkins, the president of the Times Square Alliance, said organizers were determined to lower the ball from its perch above the city. They also knew that crowds would flock to the area as they had for more than a century, whether they planned a celebration or not.
What remained unclear was whether and how the event’s producers would adapt the night’s other customs — the performances, the crowds and the confetti — to the reality of the pandemic.
“We knew that we had to be prepared for a crowd no matter what,” Mr. Tompkins said. “And then it was just a question of ‘Oh my God, how are we going to do this?’”
Over months of planning, an answer emerged. This year, for the first time in decades, Times Square will be closed to the public on New Year’s Eve. Only production workers and dozens of selected frontline workers and their families will be permitted near the stage.
On Wednesday, police officials urged the public to stay home.
“There are absolutely no spectators allowed in Times Square,” Chief Terence A. Monahan, the top uniformed member, said at a news conference.
“Don’t even attempt to come down there and watch it,” he added.
As it does every year, the city will close streets in the area, and police officers will operate checkpoints to prevent access. But instead of letting in visitors in drips, all uninvited guests will be turned away, with pedestrians limited starting at 3 p.m. on Thursday. Chief Monahan said the Police Department would have 80 percent fewer officers in Times Square than on a normal New Year’s Eve.
“Anyone that starts to gather, they’re going to be told to move along,” he said. “We are not going to allow people to stand on the street corner and stare up.”
by-eight-foot pens will be spaced out at socially distant intervals on the streets. They will hold around 40 workers who kept the city and country running safely and smoothly in the year’s darkest hours and who have been invited to bring their families along to celebrate.
On the guest list are a pediatrician at Elmhurst Hospital, a public hospital that was overwhelmed by the pandemic; a pizza delivery driver who became ill with the coronavirus; and Ronald Colbert, a Staten Island Ferry operator who will be attending his 40th Times Square ball drop.
“I am just so honored and happy,” said Mr. Colbert, 66, who worked through the pandemic. “The elements of the excitement that Times Square offers — I get to share that again.”
Avenue will not be packed with people trying to catch a glimpse of the outdoor concert, which will be staged according to state and industry guidelines for safe media productions.
This year’s musical guests include Gloria Gaynor singing “I Will Survive,” a disco classic resurfaced as a pandemic anthem, as well as performances by Jennifer Lopez, Billy Porter and Cyndi Lauper.
feet apart will remain the rule of thumb for the television workers who will broadcast Times Square’s billboards across the country. For those who remain stuck at home, “Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest” will still rock on ABC. In a year without party banter, Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen will again offer their New Year’s Eve buddy comedy act on CNN.
The TV networks will project the image of a Times Square transformed by the pandemic, one without the throngs of revelers in glittering gear who wait in the cold for hours to take part in a national spectacle.
Still, Mr. Tompkins and Jeff Straus, the president of Countdown Entertainment, which co-produces the Times Square event, both said it was important to them that an audience of some kind be present if circumstances allowed.
“There’s an energy that you get from watching other people being happy,” Mr. Straus said.
During the spring, when the pandemic ravaged New York City, photos of an eerily vacant Times Square became a grim meme. The deserted plaza became an enduring image of the crisis and a visual shorthand for the devastating circumstances the virus had wrought.
With 2020 closing and the calendar resetting, both men hoped they could provide a fresh start and a new narrative for one of the world’s most famous intersections.
“We want to show a city with a heartbeat,” Mr. Straus said. “And a city that’s alive.”
months ago, in July, Mr. Straus and Mr. Tompkins got the first hint that a celebration resembling those years past would be possible.
Times Square has been home to major New Year’s Eve festivities since as early as 1904, when hundreds of thousands gathered in Midtown Manhattan to watch fireworks light up the newly built New York Times Building, now known as One Times Square.
The ball was first dropped in 1907. Since then, it has been lowered on New Year’s Eve nearly every year, with breaks only in 1942 and 1943 because of World War II-related “dimouts” that required lights to be shut off as a protection against air attacks.
But even without the ball to watch, massive crowds still gathered at Times Square for more muted celebrations described in The Times as having a “weird quality” in the first year but “gayer” and “greater” the next.
“So much of the energy comes from the hordes of people,” said Mr. Tompkins, who has been involved with the ball drop since 2002. “And so there will definitely be a different energy in Times Square.”
Still, that there would be energy at all was hardly guaranteed. Though organizers continued to plan, they nervously watched as a number of similarly large events were canceled by Mayor Bill de Blasio and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.
days into July, however, the city worked with Macy’s to reconfigure its annual fireworks extravaganza.
For Mr. Straus and Mr. Tompkins, it was a clear signal that city officials were determined to preserve New York City traditions while keeping people safely at home.
other events also helped prove that an altered New Year’s Eve was feasible, Mr. Straus said.
The MTV Video Music Awards offered a template for musical performances. The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade showed audiences welcoming a scaled-down tradition, and the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree lighting proved large-scale events could take place safely even amid a surge in the pandemic.
Those watching the New Year’s Eve ceremonies this year, whether on television or through the official online webcast, should expect a more intimate viewing experience, Mr. Straus said. (People seeking something more immersive can also download an app that uses augmented reality to bring Times Square home.)
blocks around Times Square will be used for this year’s celebration, a much smaller footprint than usual. That diminished scale will likely be clear on camera, Mr. Straus said. The sweeping shots showing a blocks-long street party will be axed. Close-ups won’t show smiles, Mr. Straus said, because faces will be covered.
“We want to show a physically distanced Times Square,” Mr. Straus said. “We want to show a Times Square that is wearing masks.”
For the first time in 26 years, Mr. Straus will not be in Times Square, showered by confetti when the clock strikes midnight.
In a break from tradition, he will watch on TV along with much of the country as it counts down the end of a brutal year and looks to make a fresh start in the next …
Our site had millions of readers over the last year. Much of that audience was drawn by reporting which helped readers navigate changes to public life that came with the pandemic, as well as unique stories about Alaska life and politics. Our most-read stories bring back stand-out events from a year full of tumultuous news.
Here are the ten stories that drew the largest audiences
1. Helicopter removes ‘Into the Wild’ bus that lured Alaska travelers to their deaths
“An Army National Guard heavy-lift helicopter has removed the old Fairbanks city bus from the spot near Denali National Park where it once housed Christopher McCandless, the subject of the popular nonfiction book ‘Into the Wild.'”
2. Rescuers found lost Nunam Iqua children in a hole in the snow, huddled around the youngest child
“Snowmaching along the Black River, Simon scanned the white landscape for any minute detail, like he’s been trained to do. A hundred yards away, on the highest snowdrift, he saw something he said was suspicious.”
3. Alaska Senator Murkowski said Friday she would not vote for a justice ahead of Inauguration Day
“Shortly before the announcement that Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had died Friday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski said in an interview that if she was presented with a vacancy on the court, she would not vote to confirm a nominee before the election.”
(In a reversal, Murkowski did vote to confirm Justice Amy Coney Barrett on Oct. 26, 2020.)
4. Business bruised by COVID-19? SBA may have a $10,000 grant for you.
“The Small Business Administration says it’s ready to make immediate “loan advances” of up to $10,000 to companies hurt by the coronavirus. But you don’t have to be a traditional company, and this is a “loan” you won’t have to pay back.”
“Dean Gribble describes it as a “whirlwind” — everything that happened between 10 p.m. on Dec. 31, 2019, when the crew hit the mayday button, and 2 a.m. on New Year’s Day, when he and Lawler were rescued by a U.S. Coast Guard swimmer.”
6. Alaska US Senate race: Gross trails Sullivan but says math is in his favor
“U.S. Senate candidate Al Gross is far behind in the votes counted so far, but his campaign claims he can still beat Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.”
(Gross eventually conceded to Sen. Sullivan, who won his second term with around 54% of the vote, compared to Gross’ 41%.)
7. Here’s why Alaska is the slowest in the nation when it comes to vote counting
“Questions, confusion and speculation about Alaska’s vote-counting process have erupted as state officials wait to count more than 100,000 absentee and other ballots until next week — long after other U.S. states count the vast majority of their votes.”
8. State Senate approves $1,000 stimulus checks
“The Alaska Senate passed the state budget on Monday, including a $1,000 economic stimulus payment to everyone who received a permanent fund dividend last year.”
9. Fairbanks is now considered Alaska’s coronavirus ‘hot spot’
“Alaska’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Anne Zink, explained at a Monday evening press conference that calling Fairbanks a hot spot is about more than just the numbers. It’s based on things like the rate of infection among people who have not recently traveled or been in close contact with someone known to be infected, also known as community transmission, as well as where the disease is spreading in the city.”
10. The state has revised its two-week quarantine requirement. Here’s what we know about the changes.
“For more than two months, Gov. Mike Dunleavy’s administration required people traveling to Alaska from out of state to quarantine for two weeks once they got here. But, that changed Saturday, June 6.”
Health officials and hospitals are struggling with a lack of resources. Holiday staffing and saving doses for nursing homes are also contributing to delays.
In Florida, less than one-quarter of delivered coronavirus vaccines have been used, even as older people sat in lawn chairs all night waiting for their shots. In Puerto Rico, last week’s vaccine shipments did not arrive until the workers who would have administered them had left for the Christmas holiday. In California, doctors are worried about whether there will be enough hospital staff members to both administer vaccines and tend to the swelling number of Covid-19 patients.
These sorts of logistical problems in clinics across the country have put the campaign to vaccinate the United States against Covid-19 far behind schedule in its third week, raising fears about how quickly the country will be able to tame the epidemic.
Federal officials said as recently as this month that their goal was to have 20 million people get their first shot by the end of this year. More than 14 million doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines had been sent out across the United States, federal officials said on Wednesday. But, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, just 2.8 million people have received their first dose, though that number may be somewhat low because of lags in reporting.
States vary widely in how many of the doses they’ve received have been given out. South Dakota leads the country with more than 48 percent of its doses given, followed by West Virginia, at 38 percent. By contrast, Kansas has given out less than 11 percent of its doses, and Georgia, less than 14 percent.
Compounding the challenges, federal officials say they do not fully understand the cause of the delays. But state health officials and hospital leaders throughout the country pointed to several factors. States have held back doses to be given out to their nursing homes and other long-term-care facilities, an effort that is just gearing up and expected to take several months. Across the country, just 8 percent of the doses distributed for use in these facilities have been administered, with two million yet to be given.
The holiday season has meant that people are off work and clinics have reduced hours, slowing the pace of vaccine administration. In Florida, for example, the demand for the vaccines dipped over the Christmas holiday and is expected to dip again over New Year’s, Gov. Ron DeSantis said on Wednesday.
And critically, public health experts say, federal officials have left many of the details of the final stage of the vaccine distribution process, such as scheduling and staffing, to overstretched local health officials and hospitals.
“We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination — which is actually getting the vaccines administered into people’s arms,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, the dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health.
Federal and state officials have denied they are to blame for the slow rollout. Officials behind Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to fast-track vaccines, have said that their job was to ensure that vaccines are made available and get shipped out to the states. President Trump said in a tweet on Tuesday that it was “up to the States to distribute the vaccines once brought to the designated areas by the Federal Government.”
“Ultimately, the buck seems to stop with no one,” Dr. Jha said.
These problems are especially worrisome now that a new, more contagious variant, first spotted in Britain and overwhelming hospitals there, has arrived in the U.S. Officials in two states, Colorado and California, say they have discovered cases of the new variant, and none of the patients had recently traveled, suggesting the variant is already spreading in American communities.
The $900 billion relief package that Mr. Trump signed into law on Sunday will bring some relief to struggling state and local health departments. The bill sets aside more than $8 billion for vaccine distribution, on top of the $340 million that the C.D.C. sent out to the states in installments in September and earlier this month.
That infusion of money is welcome, if late, said Dr. Bob Wachter, a professor and chair of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco. “Why did that take until now when we knew we were going to have this problem two months ago?”
The task of administering thousands of vaccines is daunting for health departments that have already been overburdened by responding to the pandemic. In Montgomery County, Maryland, the local health department has recruited extra staff to help manage vaccine distribution, said Travis Gayles, the county health officer.
“While we’re trying to roll out vaccinations, we’re also continuing the pandemic response by supporting testing, contact tracing, disease control and all of those other aspects of the Covid response,” Dr. Gayles said.
Complicating matters, the county health department gets just a few days of notice each week of the timing of its vaccine shipments. When the latest batch arrived, Dr. Gayles’s team scrambled to contact people eligible for the vaccine and to set up clinics to give out the doses as fast as possible.
Over all, Maryland has given nearly 17 percent of its vaccine doses. In a Wednesday appearance on CBS, Gov. Larry Hogan attributed the slow process to challenges across the board — from the federal government not sending as many doses as initially predicted, to the lack of logistical and financial support for local health departments.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott and top state health officials say vaccines are available in the state but are not being distributed quickly enough to deal with a critical surge of Covid-19 cases that is pushing hospital capacity to the breaking point.
“A significant portion of vaccines distributed across Texas might be sitting on hospital shelves as opposed to being given to vulnerable Texans,” the governor tweeted Tuesday.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom on Wednesday encouraged people to be “humble” in the face of such a complicated task and said that the pace of vaccination would accelerate. California has administered 20 percent of the doses it’s received.
Hesitancy among people offered the vaccine may also be slowing the rollout. Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio said in a news conference on Wednesday that roughly 60 percent of nursing home staff members offered the vaccine in the state had declined it. In Florida, some hospital workers offered the vaccine declined it, and those doses are now designated for other vulnerable groups like health care workers in the community and the elderly, but that rollout has not quite begun, said Justin Senior, chief executive officer for the Safety Net Hospital Alliance of Florida, a hospital consortium.
There are bright spots. Some states and hospitals are finding ways to speedily administer the vaccines they have received. West Virginia said on Wednesday that it had finished giving the first round of vaccine doses to willing residents and workers at all of the state’s 214 long-term-care facilities — putting the state far ahead of most other states that began vaccinating at these facilities under a federal program with CVS and Walgreens.
In Los Angeles, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, which employs some 20,000 people at several facilities, was vaccinating about 800 people a day, said Dr. Jeff Smith, Cedars-Sinai’s chief operating officer. He said Cedars-Sinai expected to vaccinate all of its staff members who have opted for the vaccine within a couple of weeks.
But other communities are falling short of that rapid clip. Dr. Smith said the medical community is worried about staffing shortages when hospitals have to both administer vaccines and treat Covid-19 patients.
In a news conference on Wednesday, Operation Warp Speed officials said they expected the pace of the rollout to accelerate significantly once pharmacies begin offering vaccines in their stores. The federal government has reached agreements with a number of pharmacy chains — including Costco, Walmart, and CVS — to administer vaccines once they become more widely available. So far, 40,000 pharmacy locations have enrolled in that program.
Most vaccines administered across the country to date have been given to health care workers at hospitals and clinics, and to older adults at nursing homes. Gen. Gustave F. Perna, the logistics lead of Operation Warp Speed, on Wednesday described them as “two very difficult, challenging groups” to immunize.
But public health officials warned that reaching these initial groups, who are largely being vaccinated where they live or work, is a relatively easy task. “This is the part where we’re supposed to know where people are,” said Dr. Saad B. Omer, the director of the Yale Institute for Global Health.
It may be more difficult, public health officials say, to vaccinate the next wave of people, which will most likely include many more older Americans as well as younger people with health problems and frontline workers. Among the fresh challenges: How will these people be scheduled for their vaccination appointments? How will they provide documentation that they have a medical condition or a job that makes them eligible to get vaccinated? And how will pharmacies ensure that people show up, and that they can do so safely?
“In the next phase,” said Dr. Jha of Brown University, “we’re going to hit the same wall, where all of a sudden we’re going to have to scramble to start figuring it out.”
Lucy Tompkins and David Montgomery contributed reporting.
