20220520
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-cases-rise-americans-a...
As cases rise, Americans are ‘checked out’ on COVID-19
COVID-19 cases are on the rise, but many Americans are over thinking of the virus as a crisis.
Even in blue cities, restaurants are packed with people, and many Americans don’t wear masks even on the subway or on airplanes.
Amid this national attitude, it may be extremely difficult for local or national leaders to try to reimpose any COVID-19 restrictions.
An Axios-Ipsos poll this week found just 36 percent of Americans said there was significant risk in returning to their “normal pre-coronavirus life.”
At the same time, cases are rising to over 100,000 per day.
About 18 percent of the U.S. population now lives in “high” risk areas where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urges everyone to wear masks indoors, and another 27 percent lives in “medium” areas where higher-risk people should consider wearing masks.
But experts say that the average American is not constantly checking the CDC risk levels in their area.
“People have checked out a little bit,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president at the polling firm Ipsos. “People aren’t as tuned in.”
While CDC Director Rochelle Walensky this week called on Americans in “high” risk areas to wear masks, there has not been a similar push from President Biden, who has the biggest megaphone in the government.
Unlike earlier in his tenure, Biden has not been issuing sustained warnings about COVID-19, instead focusing on the war in Ukraine and efforts to fight rising prices.
This week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D), often seen as an ideological ally of Biden, declined to reimpose mask mandates despite the city rising to a “high” COVID-19 level.
“It appears as though there’s a new norm that is settling in our city and our country,” Adams said. “Variants are going to come. If every variant that comes, we move into shutdown thoughts, we move into panicking, we’re not going to function as a city.”
Andy Slavitt, the Biden administration’s former senior adviser on COVID-19 response, acknowledged the difficulties in responding given current attitudes.
“You have to understand that at this point in time that you can’t make people necessarily care more than they do,” he said, saying there are “fewer policy levers,” available.
He called for a “middle zone conversation” on masks, where people could be encouraged to wear them in certain instances even if they are not mandated.
Unlike in the early days of the pandemic, there are tools available that help make the virus more manageable and reduce the need for tighter restrictions.
Vaccines and booster shots provide strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization. The Pfizer treatment pills known as Paxlovid reduce the risk of severe illness or death by roughly 90 percent if taken within five days of the onset of symptoms.
But even funding in Congress to boost supplies of treatments and purchase updated vaccines for the fall is stalled, a sign of the diminishing political appetite for the COVID-19 response.
The U.S. passing 1 million deaths from the virus this week did little to shake up the environment.
The fall and winter pose an even greater risk as the weather gets colder, and as the virus continues to evolve. There is a potential for a new variant to circulate that evades the current vaccines’ protection even more.
Jackson of Ipsos polling said there is at least some room for attitudes to change if the situation gets significantly worse, noting that only about one-third of Americans said the pandemic is “over.”
“It’s not necessarily something they’re going to shut their lives down about, but when we ask point blank, ‘Is the pandemic over?’ two thirds say, ‘no,’ ” he noted.
Hospitalizations are still relatively low, compared with spikes earlier in the pandemic, but they are on the rise, with over 20,000 people in the hospital with the virus, according to a New York Times tracker.
Deaths are at a relative low, but there are still around 300 Americans dying from the virus every day.
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha this week said deaths have not risen along with cases in part because of the effect of treatments like Paxlovid, but those stores are at risk of running out without new funds.
“We’re using therapeutics to save lives; we’ve got to continue doing that,” Jha said. “At some point, we’re going to run out of the treatments we have. And without additional resources, we will find ourselves in the fall or winter with people getting infected and no treatments available for them because we will have run out.”
Slavitt said the administration’s main focus should be getting funding from Congress and working on updated vaccines.
“My own view is a little bit soured that human nature is such that, you know, whatever science makes easy, people might do,” he said. “But whatever requires even the slightest bit of sacrifice, or compromise for the sake of some other unknown person getting infected, is a much harder stretch and a much harder messaging.”
www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/shanghai-makes-way-towards-c...
Shanghai makes way towards COVID lockdown exit, Beijing plays defence
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Shanghai cautiously pushed ahead on Saturday with plans to restore part of its transport network in a major step towards exiting a weeks-long COVID-19 lockdown, while Beijing kept up its defences in an outbreak that has persisted for a month.
Shanghai's lockdown since the beginning of April has dealt a heavy economic blow to China's most populous city, stirred debate over the sustainability of the nation's zero-COVID policy and stoked fears of future lockdowns and disruptions.
Unlike the financial hub, Beijing has refrained from imposing a city-wide lockdown, reporting dozens of new cases a day, versus tens of thousands in Shanghai at its peak. Still, the curbs and endless mass testing imposed on China's capital have unsettled its economy and upended the lives of its people.
As Beijing remained in COVID angst, workers in Shanghai were disinfecting subway stations and trains before planned restoration of four metro lines on Sunday.
While service will be for limited hours, it will allow residents to move between districts and meet the need for connections to railway stations and one of the city's two airports. More than 200 bus routes will also reopen.
Underlining the level of caution, Shanghai officials said commuters would be scanned for abnormally high body temperatures and would need to show negative results of PCR tests taken within 48 hours.
Shanghai found 868 new local cases on Friday, compared with 858 a day earlier, municipal health authorities said on Saturday, a far cry from the peak in daily caseloads last month.
No new cases were found outside quarantined areas, down from three a day earlier, health authorities added.
The city of 25 million has gradually reopened shopping malls, convenience stores and wholesale markets and allowed more people to walk out of their homes, with community transmissions largely eliminated in recent days.
Still, Shanghai on Friday tightened curbs on two of its 16 districts. On Saturday a third district in central Shanghai increased restrictions on residents and businesses.
The authorities "urge enterprises to strictly implement safe production, which is their responsibility, especially in meeting some epidemic prevention and control requirements," an official from the city's emergency bureau told a news conference on Saturday.
Delta Airlines said on Friday it would resume one daily flight to Detroit from Shanghai via Seoul on Wednesday.
DRAWING COMPARISONS
Most of Beijing's recent cases have been in areas already sealed up, but authorities remained on edge and quick to act under China's ultra-strict policy.
In Fengtai, a district of 2 million people at the centre of Beijing's counter-COVID efforts, bus and metro stations have been mostly shut since Friday and residents told to stay home.
A Fengtai resident was stocking up on groceries at a nearby Carrefour on Saturday, uncertain whether restrictions would continue.
"I'm not sure if I can do more shopping over the next week or so, so I've bought a lot of stuff today and even bought some dumplings for the Dragon Boat holiday" in early June, she said, asking not to be identified.
On Friday, thousands of residents from a neighbourhood in Chaoyang, Beijing's most populous district, were moved to hotel quarantine after some cases were detected, according to state-run China Youth Daily.
Social media users on China's Twitter-like Weibo were swift to draw parallels with Shanghai, where entire residential buildings were taken to centralised quarantine facilities in response to a single positive COVID case in some instances.
While unverified accounts from residents of the Nanxinyuan neighbourhood garnered thousands of comments and shares on Weibo, a related hashtag could not be searched on the platform on Saturday, suggesting online censorship.
"Perhaps... except for Shanghai people, no one will feel for Beijing's Nanxinyuan. However, I don't actually know whether there are people who will see this sentence," Shanghai-based director and actor Xie Tiantian wrote on Weibo.
Sun Shuwei, a tech startup employee, told Reuters the situation at Nanxinyuan, just 2 km (1.2 miles) from his home, has prompted him to consider leaving Beijing.
"This has left me very agitated," Sun said.
(NOTE: At the peak, on April 26, 2022, Mainland China had 93890 new case with a 7-day average of 30,368 new cases. On May 20, 2022, the number of new cases dropped to 5,54 with a 7-day average of 5,454.)
www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/shanghai-detects-new-i...
Locked-down Shanghai finds new cases, breaking "zero COVID" streak
■ Shanghai had 5 days of no cases outside quarantined areas
■ Curbs and mass testing imposed in two districts
■ City plans to lift lockdown in June
■ More cities in China bring COVID under control
SHANGHAI/BEIJING, May 20 (Reuters) - Shanghai announced its first new COVID-19 cases outside quarantined areas in five days on Friday and imposed stricter curbs in two districts, but did not signal any change to the planned end of a prolonged city-wide lockdown on June 1.
The commercial hub of 25 million, in its seventh week of lockdown, has been slowly allowing more people to leave their homes in recent days, with many residential compounds issuing passes for brief walks or trips to the supermarket.
20220520
www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/as-cases-rise-americans-a...
As cases rise, Americans are ‘checked out’ on COVID-19
COVID-19 cases are on the rise, but many Americans are over thinking of the virus as a crisis.
Even in blue cities, restaurants are packed with people, and many Americans don’t wear masks even on the subway or on airplanes.
Amid this national attitude, it may be extremely difficult for local or national leaders to try to reimpose any COVID-19 restrictions.
An Axios-Ipsos poll this week found just 36 percent of Americans said there was significant risk in returning to their “normal pre-coronavirus life.”
At the same time, cases are rising to over 100,000 per day.
About 18 percent of the U.S. population now lives in “high” risk areas where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) urges everyone to wear masks indoors, and another 27 percent lives in “medium” areas where higher-risk people should consider wearing masks.
But experts say that the average American is not constantly checking the CDC risk levels in their area.
“People have checked out a little bit,” said Chris Jackson, senior vice president at the polling firm Ipsos. “People aren’t as tuned in.”
While CDC Director Rochelle Walensky this week called on Americans in “high” risk areas to wear masks, there has not been a similar push from President Biden, who has the biggest megaphone in the government.
Unlike earlier in his tenure, Biden has not been issuing sustained warnings about COVID-19, instead focusing on the war in Ukraine and efforts to fight rising prices.
This week, New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D), often seen as an ideological ally of Biden, declined to reimpose mask mandates despite the city rising to a “high” COVID-19 level.
“It appears as though there’s a new norm that is settling in our city and our country,” Adams said. “Variants are going to come. If every variant that comes, we move into shutdown thoughts, we move into panicking, we’re not going to function as a city.”
Andy Slavitt, the Biden administration’s former senior adviser on COVID-19 response, acknowledged the difficulties in responding given current attitudes.
“You have to understand that at this point in time that you can’t make people necessarily care more than they do,” he said, saying there are “fewer policy levers,” available.
He called for a “middle zone conversation” on masks, where people could be encouraged to wear them in certain instances even if they are not mandated.
Unlike in the early days of the pandemic, there are tools available that help make the virus more manageable and reduce the need for tighter restrictions.
Vaccines and booster shots provide strong protection against severe illness and hospitalization. The Pfizer treatment pills known as Paxlovid reduce the risk of severe illness or death by roughly 90 percent if taken within five days of the onset of symptoms.
But even funding in Congress to boost supplies of treatments and purchase updated vaccines for the fall is stalled, a sign of the diminishing political appetite for the COVID-19 response.
The U.S. passing 1 million deaths from the virus this week did little to shake up the environment.
The fall and winter pose an even greater risk as the weather gets colder, and as the virus continues to evolve. There is a potential for a new variant to circulate that evades the current vaccines’ protection even more.
Jackson of Ipsos polling said there is at least some room for attitudes to change if the situation gets significantly worse, noting that only about one-third of Americans said the pandemic is “over.”
“It’s not necessarily something they’re going to shut their lives down about, but when we ask point blank, ‘Is the pandemic over?’ two thirds say, ‘no,’ ” he noted.
Hospitalizations are still relatively low, compared with spikes earlier in the pandemic, but they are on the rise, with over 20,000 people in the hospital with the virus, according to a New York Times tracker.
Deaths are at a relative low, but there are still around 300 Americans dying from the virus every day.
White House COVID-19 response coordinator Ashish Jha this week said deaths have not risen along with cases in part because of the effect of treatments like Paxlovid, but those stores are at risk of running out without new funds.
“We’re using therapeutics to save lives; we’ve got to continue doing that,” Jha said. “At some point, we’re going to run out of the treatments we have. And without additional resources, we will find ourselves in the fall or winter with people getting infected and no treatments available for them because we will have run out.”
Slavitt said the administration’s main focus should be getting funding from Congress and working on updated vaccines.
“My own view is a little bit soured that human nature is such that, you know, whatever science makes easy, people might do,” he said. “But whatever requires even the slightest bit of sacrifice, or compromise for the sake of some other unknown person getting infected, is a much harder stretch and a much harder messaging.”
www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/shanghai-makes-way-towards-c...
Shanghai makes way towards COVID lockdown exit, Beijing plays defence
BEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) -Shanghai cautiously pushed ahead on Saturday with plans to restore part of its transport network in a major step towards exiting a weeks-long COVID-19 lockdown, while Beijing kept up its defences in an outbreak that has persisted for a month.
Shanghai's lockdown since the beginning of April has dealt a heavy economic blow to China's most populous city, stirred debate over the sustainability of the nation's zero-COVID policy and stoked fears of future lockdowns and disruptions.
Unlike the financial hub, Beijing has refrained from imposing a city-wide lockdown, reporting dozens of new cases a day, versus tens of thousands in Shanghai at its peak. Still, the curbs and endless mass testing imposed on China's capital have unsettled its economy and upended the lives of its people.
As Beijing remained in COVID angst, workers in Shanghai were disinfecting subway stations and trains before planned restoration of four metro lines on Sunday.
While service will be for limited hours, it will allow residents to move between districts and meet the need for connections to railway stations and one of the city's two airports. More than 200 bus routes will also reopen.
Underlining the level of caution, Shanghai officials said commuters would be scanned for abnormally high body temperatures and would need to show negative results of PCR tests taken within 48 hours.
Shanghai found 868 new local cases on Friday, compared with 858 a day earlier, municipal health authorities said on Saturday, a far cry from the peak in daily caseloads last month.
No new cases were found outside quarantined areas, down from three a day earlier, health authorities added.
The city of 25 million has gradually reopened shopping malls, convenience stores and wholesale markets and allowed more people to walk out of their homes, with community transmissions largely eliminated in recent days.
Still, Shanghai on Friday tightened curbs on two of its 16 districts. On Saturday a third district in central Shanghai increased restrictions on residents and businesses.
The authorities "urge enterprises to strictly implement safe production, which is their responsibility, especially in meeting some epidemic prevention and control requirements," an official from the city's emergency bureau told a news conference on Saturday.
Delta Airlines said on Friday it would resume one daily flight to Detroit from Shanghai via Seoul on Wednesday.
DRAWING COMPARISONS
Most of Beijing's recent cases have been in areas already sealed up, but authorities remained on edge and quick to act under China's ultra-strict policy.
In Fengtai, a district of 2 million people at the centre of Beijing's counter-COVID efforts, bus and metro stations have been mostly shut since Friday and residents told to stay home.
A Fengtai resident was stocking up on groceries at a nearby Carrefour on Saturday, uncertain whether restrictions would continue.
"I'm not sure if I can do more shopping over the next week or so, so I've bought a lot of stuff today and even bought some dumplings for the Dragon Boat holiday" in early June, she said, asking not to be identified.
On Friday, thousands of residents from a neighbourhood in Chaoyang, Beijing's most populous district, were moved to hotel quarantine after some cases were detected, according to state-run China Youth Daily.
Social media users on China's Twitter-like Weibo were swift to draw parallels with Shanghai, where entire residential buildings were taken to centralised quarantine facilities in response to a single positive COVID case in some instances.
While unverified accounts from residents of the Nanxinyuan neighbourhood garnered thousands of comments and shares on Weibo, a related hashtag could not be searched on the platform on Saturday, suggesting online censorship.
"Perhaps... except for Shanghai people, no one will feel for Beijing's Nanxinyuan. However, I don't actually know whether there are people who will see this sentence," Shanghai-based director and actor Xie Tiantian wrote on Weibo.
Sun Shuwei, a tech startup employee, told Reuters the situation at Nanxinyuan, just 2 km (1.2 miles) from his home, has prompted him to consider leaving Beijing.
"This has left me very agitated," Sun said.
(NOTE: At the peak, on April 26, 2022, Mainland China had 93890 new case with a 7-day average of 30,368 new cases. On May 20, 2022, the number of new cases dropped to 5,54 with a 7-day average of 5,454.)
www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/shanghai-detects-new-i...
Locked-down Shanghai finds new cases, breaking "zero COVID" streak
■ Shanghai had 5 days of no cases outside quarantined areas
■ Curbs and mass testing imposed in two districts
■ City plans to lift lockdown in June
■ More cities in China bring COVID under control
SHANGHAI/BEIJING, May 20 (Reuters) - Shanghai announced its first new COVID-19 cases outside quarantined areas in five days on Friday and imposed stricter curbs in two districts, but did not signal any change to the planned end of a prolonged city-wide lockdown on June 1.
The commercial hub of 25 million, in its seventh week of lockdown, has been slowly allowing more people to leave their homes in recent days, with many residential compounds issuing passes for brief walks or trips to the supermarket.