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Tag: epidemics and outbreaks

  • China scraps virus tracking app as country braces for Covid impact | CNN

    China scraps virus tracking app as country braces for Covid impact | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Beijing
    CNN
     — 

    China is bracing for an unprecendented wave of Covid-19 cases as it dismantles large parts of its repressive zero-Covid policy, with a leading expert warning Omicron variants were “spreading rapidly” and signs of an outbreak rattling the country’s capital.

    Changes continued Monday as authorities announced a deactivation of the “mobile itinerary card” health tracking function planned for the following day.

    The system, which is separate from the health code scanning system still required in a reduced number of places in China, had used people’s cell phone data to track their travel history in the past 14 days in an attempt to identify those who have been to a city with zone designated “high-risk” by authorities.

    It had been a point of contention for many Chinese people, including due to concerns around data collection and its use by local governments to ban entry to those who have visited a city with a “high-risk zone,” even if they did not go to those areas within that city.

    But as the scrapping of parts of the zero-Covid infrastructure come apace, there are questions about how the country’s health system will handle a mass outbreak.

    Throughout the weekend, some businesses were closed in Beijing, and city streets were largely deserted, as residents either fell ill or feared catching the virus. The biggest public crowds seen were outside of pharmacies and Covid-19 testing booths.

    Media outlet China Youth Daily documented hours-long lines at a clinic in central Beijing on Friday, and cited unnamed experts calling for residents not to visit hospitals unless necessary.

    Health workers in the capital were also grappling with a surge in emergency calls, including from many Covid-positive residents with mild or no symptoms, with a hospital official on Saturday appealing to residents in such cases not to call the city’s 911-like emergency services line and tie up resources needed by the seriously ill.

    The daily volume of emergency calls had surged from its usual 5,000 to more than 30,000 in recent days, Chen Zhi, chief physician of the Beijing Emergency Center said, according to official media.

    Covid was “spreading rapidly” driven by highly transmissible Omicron variants in China, a top Covid-19 expert, Zhong Nanshan, said in an interview published by state media Saturday.

    “No matter how strong the prevention and control is, it will be difficult to completely cut off the transmission chain,” Zhong, who has been a key public voice since the earliest days of the pandemic in 2020, was quoted saying by Xinhua.

    The rapid rollback of testing nationwide and the shift by many people to use antigen tests at home has also made it difficult to gauge the extent of the spread, with official data now appearing meaningless.

    Authorities recorded 8,626 Covid-19 cases across China on Sunday, down from the previous day’s count of 10,597 and from the high of more than 40,000 daily cases late last month. CNN reporting from Beijing indicates the case count in the Chinese capital could be much higher than recorded.

    One note seen on a residential building in Beijing is indicative of the larger situation, reading: “Due to the severe epidemic situation in recent days, the number of employees who can come to work is seriously insufficient, and the normal operation of the apartment has been greatly affected and challenged.”

    The country is only days out from a major relaxation of its longstanding zero-Covid measures, which came as a head-spinning change for many Chinese living under the government’s stringent controls and fed a longstanding narrative about the deadliness of Covid-19.

    Last Wednesday, top health officials made a sweeping rollback of the mass testing, centralized quarantine, and health code tracking rules that it had relied on to control viral spread. Some aspects of those measures, such as health code use in designated places and central quarantine of severe cases, as well as home isolation of cases, remain.

    Outside experts have warned that China may be underprepared to handle the expected surge of cases, after the surprise move to lift its measures in the wake of nationwide protests against the policy, growing case numbers and rising economic costs.

    While Omicron may cause relatively milder disease compared to earlier variants, even a small number of serious cases could have a significant impact on the health system in a country of 1.4 billion.

    Zhong, in the state media interview, said the government’s top priority now should be booster shots, particularly for the elderly and others most at risk, especially with China’s Lunar New Year coming up next month – a peak travel time where urban residents visit elderly relatives and return to rural hometowns.

    Health authorities on Sunday ordered improvements in medical capabilities in rural areas by the end of the month.

    Measures to be undertaken include increasing ICU wards and beds, enhancing medical staff for intensive care and setting up more clinics for fevers, China’s National Health Commission said in a statement.

    Meanwhile, experts have warned a lack of experience with the virus – and years of state media coverage focusing on its dangers and impact overseas, before a recent shift in tone – could push those who are not in critical need to seek medical care, further overwhelming systems.

    Bob Li, a graduate student in Beijing, who tested positive for the virus on Friday said he wasn’t afraid of the virus, but his mother, who lives in the countryside, stayed up all night worrying about him. “She finds the virus a very, very scary thing,” Li said.

    “I think most people in rural China may have some misunderstandings about the virus, which may come from the overhyping of this virus by the state in the past two years. This is one of the reasons why people are so afraid,” he said, adding that he still supports the government’s careful treatment of Covid-19 during the pandemic.

    There are clear efforts to tamp down on public concern about Covid-19 – and its knock-on effects, like panic buying of medications.

    China’s market watchdog said on Friday that there was a “temporary shortage” of some “hot-selling” drugs and vowed to crackdown on price gouging, while major online retailer JD.com last week said it was taking steps to ensure stable supplies after sales for certain medications surged 18 times that week over the same period in October.

    A hashtag trending on China’s heavily moderated social media platform Weibo over the weekend featured a state media interview with a Beijing doctor saying people who tested positive for Covid-19 but had no or mild symptoms did not need to take medication to recover.

    “People with asymptomatic inflections do not need medication at all. It is enough to rest at home, maintain a good mood and physical condition,” Li Tongzeng, chief infectious disease physician at Beijing You An Hospital, said in an interview linked to a hashtag viewed more than 370 million times since Friday.

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  • As China moves away from zero-Covid, health experts warn of dark days ahead | CNN

    As China moves away from zero-Covid, health experts warn of dark days ahead | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    China’s zero-Covid policy, which stalled the world’s second-largest economy and sparked a wave of unprecedented protests, is now being dismantled as Beijing on Wednesday released sweeping revisions to its draconian measures that ultimately failed to bring the virus to heel.

    The new guidelines keep some restrictions in place but largely scrap the health code system that required people to show negative Covid-19 tests for daily activities and roll back mass testing. They also allow some Covid-19 cases and close contacts to skip centralized quarantine.

    They come after a number of cities in recent days started to lift some of the harsh controls that dictated – and heavily restricted – daily life for nearly three years in China.

    But while the changes mark a significant shift – and bring relief for many in the public who’ve grown increasingly frustrated with the high costs and demands of zero-Covid – another reality is also clear: China is underprepared for the surge in cases it could now see.

    Experts say though much is still unknown about how the next weeks and months will progress, China has fallen short on preparations like bolstering the elderly vaccination rate, upping surge and intensive care capacity in hospitals, and stockpiling antiviral medications.

    While the Omicron variant is milder than previous strains and China’s overall vaccination rate is high, even a small number of severe cases among vulnerable and under-vaccinated groups like the elderly could overwhelm hospitals if infections spike across the country of 1.4 billion, experts say.

    “This is a looming crisis – the timing is really bad … China now has to relax much of its measures during the winter (overlapping with flu season), so that was not as planned,” said Xi Chen, an associate professor at the Yale School of Public Health in the United States, pointing to what was likely an acceleration in China’s transition, triggered by public discontent.

    The guidelines released Wednesday open up a new chapter in the country’s epidemic control, three years after the first cases of Covid-19 were detected in central China’s Wuhan and following protests against the zero-Covid policy across the country starting late last month.

    Where China once controlled cases by requiring testing and clear health codes for entry into a number of public places and for domestic travel, those codes will no longer be checked except for in a handful of locations like medical institutions and schools. Mass testing will now be rolled back for everyone except for those in high-risk areas and high-risk positions. People who test positive for Covid-19 but have mild or asymptomatic cases and meet certain conditions can quarantine at home, instead of being forced to go to centralized quarantine centers, as can close contacts.

    Locations classified by authorities as “high risk” can still be locked down, but these lockdowns must now be more limited and precise, according to the new guidelines, which were circulated by China’s state media.

    The changes mark a swift about-face, following mounting public discontent, economic costs and record case numbers in recent weeks. They come after a top official last week first signaled the country could move away from the zero-Covid policy it had long poured significant resources into – though another official on Wednesday said the measures were a “proactive optimization,” not “reactive” when asked in a press briefing.

    “China has pursued this policy for so long, they’re now between a rock and a hard place,” said William Schaffner, a professor of infectious diseases at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center in the US. “They don’t have good options in either direction anymore. They had really hoped that this epidemic globally would run its course, and they could survive without impact. And that hasn’t happened.”

    As restrictions are relaxed, and the virus spreads across the country, China is “going to have to go through a period of pain in terms of illness, serious illness, deaths and stress on the health care system” as was seen elsewhere in the world earlier in the pandemic, he added.

    Since the global vaccination campaign and the emergence of the Omicron variant, health experts have questioned China’s adherence to zero-Covid and pointed out the unsustainability of the strategy, which tried to use mass testing and surveillance, lockdowns and quarantines to stop a highly contagious virus.

    But as some restrictions are lifted, in what appears to be a haphazard transition following years of focus on meticulously controlling the virus, experts say change may be coming before China has made the preparations its health officials have admitted are needed.

    “An uncontrolled epidemic (one which only peaks when the virus starts running out of people to infect) … will pose serious challenges to the health care system, not only in terms of managing the small fraction of Covid cases that are severe, but also in the ‘collateral damage’ to people with other health conditions who have delayed care as a consequence,” said Ben Cowling, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong.

    But even with easing restrictions, Cowling said, it was “difficult to predict” how quickly infections will spread though China, because there are still some measures in place and some people will change their behavior – such as staying at home more often.

    “And I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that stricter measures are reintroduced to combat rising cases,” he said.

    Experts agree that allowing the virus to spread nationally would be a significant shift for a country that up until this point has officially reported 5,235 Covid-19 deaths since early 2020 – a comparatively low figure globally that has been a point of pride in China, where state media until recently trumpeted the dangers of the virus to the public.

    Modeling from researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University published in the journal Nature Medicine in May projected that more than 1.5 million Chinese could die within six months if Covid-19 restrictions were lifted and there was no access to antiviral drugs, which have been approved in China.

    However, death rates could fall to around the levels of seasonal flu, if almost all elderly people were vaccinated and antiviral medications were broadly used, the authors said.

    Last month, China released a list of measures to bolster health systems against Covid-19, which included directives to increase vaccination in the elderly, stockpile antiviral treatments and medical equipment, and expand critical care capacity – efforts that experts say take time and are best accomplished prior to an outbreak.

    “(Is China prepared?) If you look at surge capacity three years on and the stockpiling of effective antivirals – no. If you talk about the triage procedures – they are not strictly enforced – and if you talk about the vaccination rate for the elderly, especially those aged 80 and older, it is also overall no,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    Chinese authorities, he added, would likely be closely assessing outcomes like the death rate to decide policy steps going forward.

    Citizens wearing masks board a subway train on Monday in Henan province's Zhengzhou, where negative Covid-19 test results are no longer required for riding public transport.

    The US has at least 25 critical care beds per 100,000 people, according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development – by contrast, China has fewer than four for the same number, health authorities there said last month.

    The system also provides limited primary care, which could drive even moderately sick people to hospitals as opposed to calling a family doctor – putting more strain on hospitals, according to Yale’s Chen.

    Meanwhile, weak medical infrastructure in rural areas could foster crises there, especially as testing is reduced and younger people living in cities return to rural hometowns to visit elderly family members over the Lunar New Year next month, he said.

    While China’s overall vaccination rate is high, its elderly are also less protected than in some other parts of the world, where the oldest and most vulnerable to dying from Covid-19 were prioritized for vaccination. Some countries have already rolled out fourth or fifth doses for at-risk groups.

    By China’s accounting, more than 86% of China’s population over 60 are fully vaccinated, according to China’s National Health Commission, and booster rates are lower, with more than 45 million of the fully vaccinated elderly yet to receive an additional shot. Around 25 million elderly who have not received any shot, according to a comparison of official population figures and November 28 vaccination data.

    For the most at-risk over 80 age group, around two-thirds were fully vaccinated by China’s standards, but only 40% had received booster shots as of November 11, according to state media.

    But while China refers to third doses for its widely used inactivated vaccines as booster shots, a World Health Organization vaccine advisory group last year recommended that elderly people taking those vaccines receive three doses in their initial course to ensure sufficient protection.

    The inactivated vaccines used in China have been found to elicit lower levels of antibody response as compared to others used overseas, and many countries using the doses have paired them with more protective mRNA vaccines, which China has not approved for use.

    Cowling said evidence from Hong Kong’s outbreak, however, showed China’s inactivated vaccines worked well to prevent severe disease, but it was critical that the elderly receive three doses in the initial course, as recommended by the World Health Organization. They should then use a fourth dose on top of that to keep immunity high, he added.

    Top health officials on November 28 announced a new plan to bolster elderly vaccination rates, but such measures will take time, as will other preparations for a surge.

    Minimizing the worst outcomes in a transition out of zero-Covid depends on that preparation, according to Cowling. From that perspective, he said, “it doesn’t look like it would be a good time to relax the policies.”

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  • Amazon CEO explains thinking behind layoffs as unionized warehouse workers protest outside | CNN Business

    Amazon CEO explains thinking behind layoffs as unionized warehouse workers protest outside | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy on Wednesday said an “uncertain” economy pushed the e-commerce giant to move forward with rare and wide-ranging layoffs after having gone on a significant hiring spree for much of the pandemic.

    “We had the lens of a very uncertain economic environment, as well as our having hired very aggressively over the last several years,” Jassy said in an interview at the New York Times DealBook summit on Wednesday. “We just felt like we needed to streamline our costs.”

    The remarks came as part of Jassy’s first interview since Amazon

    (AMZN)     confirmed earlier this month it had begun laying off corporate workers, with plans for layoffs to continue into early next year. The company is reportedly planning to cut up to 10,000 employees, though it has not confirmed a figure.

    Amazon, more than most tech companies, experienced a staggering pandemic boom as more customers shifted their spending online during the health crisis. Like other tech companies, it has since changed course and begun cutting employees as it confronts a shift in demand as well as rising inflation and recession fears.

    “A lot has happened in the last few years that I’m not sure people anticipated,” Jassy said. “You just look in 2020, our retail business grew 39% year-over-year, at a $245 billion annual run rate, which is unprecedented, and it forced us to make decisions in that time to spend a lot more money and to go much faster in building infrastructure than we ever imagined we would.”

    “We built a physical fulfillment center footprint over 25 years that we doubled in 24 months,” Jassy said.

    Even so, Jassy said he thinks the team “made the right decision” regarding its infrastructure build out. Regarding the hiring spree, Jassy said he now looks at is as a “lesson for everyone.”

    “I don’t necessarily think it was the wrong thing to have been doubling down, because we were growing so well and we had so many ideas that we thought were good for customers and good for the business, but I think it’s a good lesson, I think, for everybody,” Jassy said. “When you’re hiring, even when things are going really well, that it’s good to think about if there’s some kind of sudden change, even one that you just have a little bit of a hard time imagining. Would you like the incremental headcount that you’re adding at that time, or do you want to be a little bit more conservative?”

    As Jassy spoke, Amazon warehouse workers who helped organize the company’s first-ever US labor union at a Staten Island facility gathered in the rain outside of the venue to protest their chief executive’s appearance in New York.

    Despite the landmark union victory in April, Amazon has so far refused to formally recognize the grassroots worker group known as the Amazon Labor Union, or come to the bargaining table. The company has aggressively pushed back against the workers’ victory through the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

    While the NLRB battle indicates the labor union is on the cusp of being certified, Jassy suggested Amazon’s legal battle with the worker group isn’t done yet. He said there “were a lot of irregularities in that vote,” which is why the company filed objections with the NLRB. (Amazon’s objections were previously rejected by an NLRB hearing officer.)

    Jassy also emphasized that the last two Amazon union elections held resulted in workers voting not to unionize, and that Amazon prefers to have a direct relationship with fulfillment center workers rather than going through unions.

    Labor activist Chris Smalls joins members of the Amazon labor union and others for a protest outside of the New York Times DealBook Summit as Amazon's CEO, Andy Jassy, will be appearing on November 30, 2022 in New York City.

    “In my own opinion on where we are with that legal process is that we’re far from over with it,” Jassy said. “I think that it’s going to work its way through the NLRB, it’s probably unlikely the NLRB is going to rule against itself, and that has a real chance to end up in federal courts.”

    In an interview with CNN Business ahead of Jassy’s remarks, Amazon Labor Union President Chris Smalls slammed that Jassy “even had the audacity to feel comfortable to come to New York City knowing that we haven’t negotiated anything yet.”

    “We definitely want to take this opportunity to let him know that the workers are waiting and we are ready to negotiate our first contract,” he added of the demonstration, which he called a “welcoming party” for Jassy.

    Smalls said he’s been contacted by a few laid-off Amazon employees in corporate roles, who have since grown interested in the protections of unions. “I tell them — you may have good salary, you may have good perks, you may got good stocks and benefits, obviously better than warehouse workers, but at the end of the day, you’re still an at-will employee,” Smalls said.

    “I explained to them, the one building that can’t be touched right now by mass layoffs is JFK8 Staten Island,” he said. “I encourage them to do what they have to do, if that means form a union, so be it, we support it.”

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  • DoorDash to lay off 1,250 corporate employees | CNN Business

    DoorDash to lay off 1,250 corporate employees | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    DoorDash on Wednesday said it will lay off about 1,250 corporate employees after growing its team too quickly during the pandemic, making it the latest tech company to cut staff in recent weeks.

    The cuts represent about 6% of DoorDash’s staff, according to a company spokesperson.

    DoorDash CEO Tony Xu shared the layoff news in a memo to staff early Wednesday, calling it “the most difficult change to DoorDash that I’ve had to announce in our almost 10-year history.”

    “If you are among those impacted, I am truly sorry and I apologize to have some of you wake up to this news as opposed to reading it during more normal hours,” Xu added.

    Like other tech companies, DoorDash experienced a pandemic boom as more consumers embraced online deliveries and shied away from stores and restaurants amid the health crisis. Xu said that DoorDash “sped up our hiring to catch up with our growth and started many new businesses in response to feedback from our audiences.”

    While “most of our investments are paying off,” Xu wrote, “we were not as rigorous as we should have been in managing our team growth.” He added: “That’s on me. As a result, operating expenses grew quickly.”

    A wave of layoffs have spread throughout the tech industry recently as companies react to rising inflation, looming recession fears, and a shift in pandemic demand. Meta, Twitter, and Amazon have all announced significant job cuts, with the heads of some of these companies admitting to misreading pandemic demand.

    In his memo, Xu nodded to the shifting economic climate. “We too are not immune to the external challenges and growth has tapered vs our pandemic growth rates,” he wrote.

    Shares of DoorDash are down more than 60% so far this year.

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  • Amazon confirms it has begun laying off employees | CNN Business

    Amazon confirms it has begun laying off employees | CNN Business

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    CNN
     — 

    Amazon confirmed on Wednesday that layoffs had begun at the company, two days after multiple outlets reported the e-commerce giant planned to cut around 10,000 employees this week.

    The initial cuts at Amazon will impact roles on the devices and services team, per a memo shared publicly by Dave Limp, senior vice president of devices & services at Amazon

    “After a deep set of reviews, we recently decided to consolidate some teams and programs. One of the consequences of these decisions is that some roles will no longer be required,” Limp said. “We notified impacted employees yesterday, and will continue to work closely with each individual to provide support, including assisting in finding new roles.”

    Limp did not specify how many employees have been cut.

    Amazon spokesperson Kelly Nantel told CNN Business in a statement that the company looks at all of its businesses as part of an annual operating review process. “As we’ve gone through this, given the current macro-economic environment (as well as several years of rapid hiring), some teams are making adjustments, which in some cases means certain roles are no longer necessary,” Nantel added.

    She continued: “We don’t take these decisions lightly, and we are working to support any employees who may be affected.”

    On Tuesday evening into Wednesday morning, many laid-off Amazon workers posted publicly on LinkedIn that they had been impacted by the job cuts and were looking for work. Some of these posts mentioned they were on teams involved with Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa.

    Amazon and other tech firms significantly ramped up hiring over the past couple of years as the pandemic shifted consumers’ habits towards e-commerce. Now, many of these seemingly untouchable tech companies are experiencing whiplash and laying off thousands of workers as people return to pre-pandemic habits and macroeconomic conditions deteriorate.

    Facebook-parent Meta recently announced 11,000 job cuts, the largest in the company’s history. Twitter also announced widespread job cuts after Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.

    In a sobering sign of the times, a growing number of business leaders in the tech sector – from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey – have been issuing remorseful apologies in recent weeks as their employees lose their livelihoods.

    After reaching record highs during the pandemic, shares of Amazon have shed more than 40% in 2022 so far.

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  • Federal judge blocks Title 42 rule that allowed expulsion of migrants at US-Mexico border, restoring access for some asylum seekers | CNN Politics

    Federal judge blocks Title 42 rule that allowed expulsion of migrants at US-Mexico border, restoring access for some asylum seekers | CNN Politics

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    CNN
     — 

    A federal judge on Tuesday blocked Title 42 – a controversial rule that’s allowed US authorities to expel more than 1 million migrants who crossed the US-Mexico border.

    Tuesday’s court order leaves the Biden administration without one of the key tools it had deployed to address the thousands of migrants arriving at the border on a daily basis and could restore access to asylum for arriving migrants.

    In turn, the Biden administration requested a stay on the ruling for five weeks, according to a court filing.

    While the rule was drafted by the Trump administration during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Biden administration has relied heavily on it to manage the increase of migrants at the border.

    District Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington, DC, found the Title 42 order to be “arbitrary and capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.”

    Prior to Title 42, all migrants arrested at the border were processed under immigration law. Thousands of migrants sent back to Mexico have been waiting along the border in shelters. Officials have previously raised concerns about what the end of Title 42 may portend, given limited resources and a high number of people trying to enter the country.

    Sullivan’s ruling also comes on the heels of the resignation of US Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Chris Magnus, who had been asked to resign by Mayorkas last week. CBP Deputy Commissioner Troy Miller is now serving as the acting commissioner.

    CNN has reached out to the White House, Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security for comment.

    Sullivan faulted the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which issued the public health order, for “its decision to ignore the harm that could be caused” by issuing the policy. He said the CDC also failed to consider alternative approaches, such as letting migrants self-quarantine in homes of US-based friends, family, or shelters. The agency, he said, should have reexamined its approach when vaccines and tests became widely available.

    “With regard to whether defendants could have ‘ramped up vaccinations, outdoor processing, and all other available public health measures,’… the court finds the CDC failed to articulate a satisfactory explanation for why such measures were not feasible,” Sullivan wrote.

    The judge also concluded that the policy did not rationally serve its purpose, given that Covid-19 was already widespread throughout the United States when the policy was rolled out.

    “Title 42 was never about public health, and this ruling finally ends the charade of using Title 42 to bar desperate asylum seekers from even getting a hearing,” American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, who argued the case, said in a statement.

    The injunction request came from the ACLU, along with other immigrant advocacy groups, involves all demographics, including single adults and families. Unaccompanied children were already exempt from the order.

    The ACLU does not oppose the Biden administration’s request for a stay of Tuesday’s ruling through December 21, the administration noted in their filing.

    The public health authority was invoked at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and has been criticized by immigrant advocates, attorneys and health experts who argue it has no health basis and puts migrants in harm’s way.

    Sullivan had previously blocked the Biden administration from expelling migrant families with children apprehended at the US-Mexico border.

    Earlier this year, in anticipation of lifting Title 42 and under pressure from lawmakers, the Department of Homeland Security released a 20-page plan to manage a potential increase of migrants at the border. A separate federal judge struck down the administration’s intent to end Title 42 at the time.

    The CDC said at the time it’s no longer necessary given current public health conditions and the increased availability of vaccines and treatments for Covid-19.

    But in May, a federal judge in Louisiana blocked the Biden administration from ending Title 42.

    Since that court order, the administration has continued to use Title 42 and most recently, expanding it to include Venezuelan migrants who have arrived at the US southern border in large numbers.

    In October, there were more than 204,000 arrests along the US southern border and over 78,400 expulsions under Title 42, according to CBP data.

    This story has been updated with additional details.

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  • Everything you need to know about Biden’s student loan forgiveness program | CNN Politics

    Everything you need to know about Biden’s student loan forgiveness program | CNN Politics

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    Washington
    CNN
     — 

    President Joe Biden’s federal student loan forgiveness program, which promises to deliver up to $20,000 of debt relief for millions of borrowers, is on hold indefinitely as legal challenges work their way through the courts.

    About 26 million people had already applied by the time a federal district court judge struck down the program on November 10 – prompting the government to stop taking applications. No debt has been canceled thus far.

    The administration officially launched the application on October 17, following a brief “beta period” during which its team assessed whether tweaks were needed.

    If the courts ultimately allow the program to move forward, not every student loan borrower is eligible for the debt relief. First, only federally held student loans qualify. Private student loans are excluded.

    Second, high-income borrowers are generally excluded from receiving debt forgiveness. Individual borrowers who make less than $125,000 a year and married couples or heads of households who make less than $250,000 annually will see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.

    If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness. Pell grants are awarded to millions of low-income students each year, based on factors including their family’s size and income and the cost charged by their college. These borrowers are also more likely to struggle to repay their student debt and end up in default.

    Here’s what else borrowers need to know about the new student loan forgiveness plan:

    It’s unclear when, or if, borrowers will see debt relief under Biden’s program.

    Administration officials expected to be able to grant relief before federal student loan payments are set to resume in January, when the pandemic-related pause expires. But now that timeline is in jeopardy.

    The White House has said that it has already approved 16 million applications for debt relief. The Department of Education will hold on to that information so it can quickly process those borrowers’ relief if the government prevails in court.

    If and when the program moves forward, an estimated 8 million borrowers may receive debt relief automatically because the Department of Education already has their income on file.

    If the government restarts taking applications, borrowers can apply online here: https://studentaid.gov/debt-relief/application.

    Applicants can expect to receive an email confirmation once their application is successfully submitted. Then, borrowers will be notified by their loan servicer when the debt cancellation has been applied to their account.

    Borrowers were expected to have until December 31, 2023, to submit an application.

    There are a variety of federal student loans and not all are eligible for relief. Federal Direct Loans, including subsidized loans, unsubsidized loans, parent PLUS loans and graduate PLUS loans, are eligible.

    But federal student loans that are guaranteed by the government but held by private lenders are not eligible unless the borrower applied to consolidate those loans into a Direct Loan by September 29.

    The Department of Education initially said these privately held loans, many of which were made under the former Federal Family Education Loan program and Federal Perkins Loan program, would be eligible for the one-time forgiveness action – but reversed course in September when six Republican-led states sued the Biden administration, arguing that forgiving the privately held loans would financially hurt states and student loan servicers.

    Defaulted Federal Family Education Loans and defaulted Perkins Loans are still eligible for the debt relief even if they are privately held.

    If Biden’s program is allowed to move forward, eligibility is based on a borrower’s adjusted gross income for either tax year 2020 or 2021. Adjusted gross income can be lower than your total wages because it considers tax deductions and adjustments, like contributions made to a 401(k) retirement plan.

    A taxpayer’s adjusted gross income can be found on line 11 of IRS Form 1040.

    The Department of Education says it already had income information for nearly 8 million borrowers, likely because of financial aid forms or previously submitted income-driven repayment plan applications. If the program is allowed to move forward, those borrowers will automatically receive the debt relief if they meet the income requirement, unless they choose to opt out. The department has said it will email borrowers who will be considered for debt relief but don’t need to apply.

    Millions of other borrowers will need to apply for student loan forgiveness if the Department of Education doesn’t have their income information on file. When they submit the application, borrowers are required to self-attest that their income is under the eligibility threshold. They are required to certify that the information provided is accurate upon penalty of perjury.

    The Biden administration has said that applicants who are “more likely to exceed the income cutoff” will be required to submit additional information, like a tax transcript. Officials expect that just 5% of borrowers with eligible federal student loans would not qualify due to the income threshold.

    Borrowers will not have to pay federal income tax on the student loan debt forgiven, thanks to a provision in the American Rescue Plan Act that Congress passed last year.

    But it’s possible that some borrowers may have to pay state income tax on the amount of debt forgiven. There are a handful of states that may tax discharged debt if state legislative or administrative changes are not made beforehand, according to the Tax Policy Center. The tax liability could be hundreds of dollars, depending on the state.

    Yes, some current students are eligible. Eligibility for borrowers who filed the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as the FAFSA, as an independent will be based on the individual’s own household income.

    Eligibility for borrowers who are enrolled as dependent students, generally those under the age of 24, will be based on parental income for either 2020 or 2021.

    Yes, if your income meets the eligibility threshold.

    Yes, if your income meets the eligibility threshold. A parent borrower with federal Parent PLUS loans for multiple children is still only eligible for up to $20,000 of loan forgiveness.

    But a parent is only eligible for up to $20,000 in debt relief if he or she received a Pell grant for his or her own education. If only the child received a Pell grant, the parent is eligible for up to $10,000 in forgiveness.

    Most borrowers can log in to Studentaid.gov to see if they received a Pell grant while enrolled in college. Information about Pell grants received is displayed on the account dashboard and on the My Aid page. This is also where borrowers can find out how much they owe and what kind of loans they have.

    Borrowers who received a Pell grant before 1994 won’t see their Pell grant information online, but they are still eligible for the $20,000 in student loan forgiveness.

    As long as borrowers received at least one Pell grant, they are eligible.

    The Biden administration has said that eligible borrowers who have received Pell grants will automatically receive the additional debt relief.

    Yes, defaulted federal student loans are eligible for debt relief.

    For borrowers who have a remaining balance on their defaulted student loans after the cancellation is applied, there will be an opportunity to get out of default once payments resume in January 2023 as part of what the Department of Education is calling its “Fresh Start” initiative.

    The Biden administration is facing several lawsuits over the student loan forgiveness program. Many of the plaintiffs argue that the Department of Education is overstepping its authority.

    In one case, a federal judge in Texas struck down the program on November 10, declaring it illegal. The Department of Justice has appealed the ruling to the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals, but debt relief is on hold while that case plays out.

    Previously, the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals put a temporary, administrative hold on the program on October 21, barring the administration from canceling loans covered under the policy while the court considers a challenge brought by six Republican-led states. The appeals court then granted an injunction on the program on November 14, which will remain in place until the appeals court, or the Supreme Court, issues a further order in the case.

    A lower court judge dismissed the lawsuit on October 20, ruling that the plaintiffs did not have the legal standing to bring the challenge.

    On the same day as the lower court dismissal, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett rejected a separate challenge to Biden’s student loan forgiveness program, declining to take up an appeal brought by a Wisconsin taxpayers group.

    The Biden administration is also facing lawsuits from Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich and the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.

    Lawyers for the government say that Congress gave the secretary of education “expansive authority to alleviate the hardship that federal student loan recipients may suffer as a result of national emergencies,” like the Covid-19 pandemic, according to a memo from the Department of Justice.

    Borrowers who have debt remaining after either $10,000 or $20,000 is wiped away could see their monthly payment amounts recalculated if they are enrolled in a standard repayment plan. Under a standard repayment plan, borrowers pay a fixed amount that ensures loans are paid off within 10 years.

    Borrowers who are already enrolled in an income-driven repayment plan are not likely to see their monthly payment amounts change due to the forgiveness, because their payments are based on household income and family size.

    Borrowers have not been required to make payments on their federal student loans since March 2020 because of the government’s pandemic-related pause. Biden has extended the pause through the end of this year, and payments will resume in January 2023.

    Along with Biden’s August announcement about canceling some federal student loan debt, he also said he would create a new plan that would make repayment more manageable for borrowers.

    There are currently several repayment plans available for federal student loan borrowers that lower monthly payments by capping them at a portion of their income.

    The new income-driven repayment plan that Biden is expected to propose would cap payments at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from 10% that is offered in most current plans, as well as reduce the amount of income that is considered discretionary. It would also forgive remaining balances after 10 years of repayment, instead of 20 years.

    Biden is also proposing that the new plan cover the borrower’s unpaid monthly interest. This could be very helpful for people whose monthly payments are so low that they don’t cover their monthly interest charge and end up seeing their balances explode, growing larger than what was originally borrowed.

    But we don’t know when these changes will take effect. The Department of Education has not provided any sense of timing, but has said it will propose a new rule to create the repayment plan. The department’s formal rule-making process usually includes soliciting public comments and can take months, if not more than a year.

    Yes. Borrowers have not been required to make payments on their federal student loans since March 13, 2020, because of the pandemic-related pause. But if borrowers did make payments, they are allowed to contact their loan servicer to request a refund.

    This story has been updated with additional information.

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  • Opinion: Life in zero-Covid China is becoming intolerable | CNN

    Opinion: Life in zero-Covid China is becoming intolerable | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Matthew Bossons is managing editor of the Shanghai-based online publication Radii. He has lived in China since 2014. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.


    Shanghai
    CNN
     — 

    In the lead-up to China’s Communist Party Congress last month, watercooler chatter in many offices here focused on a single question: Will the Congress abandon its zero-Covid policy?

    It didn’t take long for an answer. In his opening speech, Chinese President Xi Jinping reaffirmed the nation’s commitment to zero-Covid — a stance made all the more inviolable since securing his unprecedented third term.

    I can confirm that zero-Covid is alive and well. In the weeks since Xi’s speech, I’ve had dozens of nucleic acid tests, canceled a domestic work trip and seen multiple colleagues hauled off to quarantine hotels or locked down at home. (On Friday, China announced limited easing of some measures — though no mention of when the changes would take effect.)

    Students in many cities in China are back to remote learning. My 5-year-old daughter is on her second week off school after her kindergarten closed due to restrictions related to Covid-19. At this point, she has spent more time at home in 2022 than in the classroom.

    Restrictions at a moment’s notice have made it nearly impossible to plan more than 20 minutes ahead of time. This is bad for business, of course, but it also affects ordinary people’s ability to go about their lives — you never know when you might get locked down in your apartment, workplace, a local mall or even Shanghai Disneyland.

    People line up last week for Covid-19 screening in a market enclosed by a temporary wall in Guangzhou, China.

    Some friends, who have suffered through an unexpected lockdown or two, have even taken to carrying a backpack full of clothes, toiletries and work essentials with them at all times in case they get trapped at the local pub.

    While I fully agree that China’s hard-line approach to Covid-19 containment has saved lives, the policy’s impacts are beginning to seem worse than the disease.

    Economically speaking, all is not well in China, and the situation is at least partially to blame on China’s uncompromising stance on Covid-19.

    One in five urban youth in the country are jobless, business meetings and trade shows are being postponed or canceled, and workplaces are regularly shuttered over concerns about the coronavirus, including the recent lockdown at a Foxconn manufacturing center — which left employees literally fleeing down a highway.

    China’s anti-virus measures are becoming increasingly difficult to defend as implementation becomes inconsistent and, at times, downright illogical.

    Last week I returned to Shanghai from Guangzhou — a city in southern China dealing with a Covid-19 outbreak — and left the airport without so much as a peep about quarantining or self-isolating.

    I walked around Shanghai — riding public transit, sitting maskless in an office, cramming in packed elevators — for three days before public health authorities contacted me and told me I needed to quarantine.

    You would presume that traveling from a city with a well-publicized disease outbreak would be enough to warrant immediate notice of self-isolation upon debarking the plane. Alas, not.

    But here’s the real kicker: While I needed to stay home for four days, my wife and daughter, who live with me, were allowed to leave the apartment and wander around the city at will. Now, let’s assume I was infected with the virus and that my family were now carriers: Why would a policy intended to protect people’s health “to the greatest extent possible,” to quote Xi, allow for such a flagrant risk to public wellness?

    Most troublingly, I suspect China is on the verge of an explosive mental health crisis caused — or exacerbated —- by the isolation and uncertainty that come with prolonged and unexpected lockdowns.

    Demand for counseling services is up, and a nationwide survey conducted across China in 2020 found that nearly 35% of respondents were dealing with psychological distress amid the pandemic.

    During Shanghai’s marathon two-month lockdown this year, phones were reportedly ringing off the hook at the offices of mental health specialists. In my apartment complex, two people tragically took their lives during the citywide shutdown, and speculation in our community chat group is that the lockdown was at least partially to blame.

    Earlier this month, a 55-year-old woman reportedly suffering from anxiety disorders jumped to her death from her locked-down apartment building in the capital city of China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region.

    Her adult daughter could not exit the apartment following her mother’s suicide as the door had allegedly been “welded shut for a month.”

    Also this month, a 3-year-old boy died following a suspected gas leak at a locked-down residential compound in the western city of Lanzhou. On social media, the boy’s father alleged that he tried to alert local health workers to call an ambulance but was denied prompt access to emergency services due to his Covid-19 testing status.

    “My child might have been saved if he had been taken to the hospital sooner,” the father wrote in a now-deleted social media post.

    While there is no shortage of vocal zero-Covid defenders on Chinese social media, there are also some voicing disapproval online and offline in the country.

    On the heels of the Inner Mongolia suicide, Chinese social media users lamented the role lockdowns have played in fueling mental health issues and criticized government officials for not paying attention to the needs of those trapped in their apartments.

    “Over the past three years, lockdowns and epidemic prevention chaos in various parts of China have repeated … destroying the mental health of ordinary people and causing anxiety and extreme emotions, including anti-social and self-destructive behaviors,” one user wrote on Weibo, China’s Twitter-like, microblogging platform.

    Following the young boy’s death in Lanzhou, the internet rage machine was running at full capacity, with related hashtags on Weibo racking up hundreds of millions of views.

    Anger was primarily directed at the government’s censorship of posts related to the incident and “excessive Covid-19 prevention measures.” Unverified videos circulating online show city residents taking to the streets in a rare show of resistance, shouting at what appears to be public health workers and riot police.

    Unfortunately for those hoping for a swift end to zero-Covid, negative public feedback is unlikely to result in any immediate changes. But if the economic situation does not improve and discontent grows, it could force the government to reevaluate its position — it has happened before.

    After all, a dissatisfied, unemployed population is not easy to govern, even when you have the world’s shiniest array of censorship tools.

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  • Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

    Silicon Valley’s greatest minds misread pandemic demand. Now their employees are paying for it. | CNN Business

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    CNN Business
     — 

    In the early months of the pandemic, Facebook only grew bigger and more central to our lives. With lockdowns spreading, countless people began shopping, socializing and working on Facebook and other online platforms. As CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in March 2020, usage was so high that the company was “just trying to keep the lights on.”

    Against that backdrop, Zuckerberg’s company went on a remarkable hiring spree. Facebook, which later rebranded as Meta, went from

    48,268     staffers in March 2020 to more than 87,000 as of September of this year. In other words, it hired another Facebook’s worth of staff. And it looked like the company would only keep hiring to support its ambitious plans to build a future version of the internet called the metaverse.

    On Wednesday, however, Zuckerberg reversed course and laid off more than 11,000 employees, marking the most significant cuts in the company’s history. In a memo to staff, Zuckerberg coughed up some of the hardest words in the English language. “I got this wrong,” he wrote, “and I take responsibility for that.”

    “At the start of Covid, the world rapidly moved online and the surge of e-commerce led to outsized revenue growth,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Many people predicted this would be a permanent acceleration that would continue even after the pandemic ended. I did too, so I made the decision to significantly increase our investments. Unfortunately, this did not play out the way I expected.”

    Silicon Valley operates on many myths, but one of them is the idea of the founder as a visionary who can see key trends coming years if not decades out. But Zuckerberg is one of a growing list of prominent tech leaders who are cutting costs and issuing mea culpas after failing to anticipate a whiplash in the market between 2020 and 2022.

    The tech industry, already seemingly invincible in early 2020, only grew more dominant during the pandemic while other parts of the economy were upended. Consumers shifted spending online. The Federal Reserve maintained near-zero interest rates at the time, giving tech companies easier access to capital. And private and public market valuations for tech companies only seemed to go higher.

    As the world reopened, however, many consumers have returned to their offline lives. Meanwhile, high inflation and fears of a looming recession have cut into consumer and advertiser spending, disrupting the core businesses of many of the biggest names in tech, after years of rapid growth.

    Now the industry is cutting thousands of jobs.

    Last month, home fitness company Peleton — which had been embraced by investors during the pandemic — underwent its fourth round of layoffs in 2022. Last week, payment-processing giant Stripe said it was eliminating 14% of its staff. And Twitter recently announced widespread job cuts after its new owner Elon Musk bought the company for $44 billion, funded in part by debt financing.

    While Musk was largely silent regarding the mass layoffs, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who ran the company until late 2021, said in a contrite thread that he takes responsibility for the situation. “I grew the company size too quickly. I apologize for that,” Dorsey wrote.

    Twitter headquarters is seen on Friday, October 28, 2022 the day after Elon Musk aquired Twitter for $44 billion.

    Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, one of the most valuable startups in the world, similarly told employees that leadership takes responsibility for the pandemic-era miscalculations that resulted in people losing their livelihoods.

    “For those of you leaving: we’re very sorry to be taking this step and John and I are fully responsible for the decisions leading up to it,” Collison wrote. “We were much too optimistic about the internet economy’s near-term growth in 2022 and 2023 and underestimated both the likelihood and impact of a broader slowdown.”

    Other big tech companies, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are now pausing or slowing hiring amid recession fears after a wave of expansion. Amazon, in particular, had seen breakneck growth during the pandemic, doubling its fulfillment centers in a two-year-period, only to shift earlier this year to focusing on “cost efficiencies.”

    The e-commerce giant is now freezing corporate hiring “for the next few months” and reportedly looking to cut costs in some of its unprofitable units. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser said senior leadership regularly reviews investment outlook and financial performance, adding, “As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.”

    While there have been layoffs in Silicon Valley over the years, the latest wave of cost cuts appears to be hitting every corner of the industry, including the engineers and coders who were often considered untouchable. The tech bubble may not have burst, but the bubble on top of the bubble certainly has.

    Zuckerberg said Meta’s layoffs would be spread throughout the company, including impacting both its family of apps and the Reality Labs division that is tasked with helping build the metaverse. He noted that some teams — such as recruiting — will be affected more than others.

    With Musk at the helm, Twitter slashed half its staff, including on its ethical AI, marketing and communication, search and public policy teams.

    Roger Lee, a startup founder based in San Francisco, has been closely tracking layoffs in the tech industry since the onset of the pandemic via his website Layoffs.fyi. Initially, his goal was to informally keep track of staffing reductions to help look for potential candidates to recruit for his own company, a digital 401(k) provider for small businesses. Eventually, laid-off workers began submitting their own data and compiling spreadsheets for his website to attract the attention of recruiters.

    “I did not, unfortunately, anticipate the extent to which the layoffs were going to surge,” Lee told CNN Business. With nearly two months still left to go, he said the number of tech employees laid off in 2022 has already surpassed 100,000 based on his data.

    Lee said some of the biggest trends he’s been seeing recently are major job losses across recruiting, human resources, and sales teams. While “engineers are still in better shape relative to the other roles,” Lee said his data indicate even these positions have suffered cuts in recent months.

    “No one knows how long this current period is going to last,” he said.

    Already, there’s been a clear shift in the industry’s mood. Blind, a popular online forum that lets employees at major companies commune anonymously to share interview tips and brag about compensation packages, has emerged as a sobering forum where people are posting about layoffs rather then their jobs.

    Some laid-off workers are also banding together on social media and crowdsourcing spreadsheets for recruiters. These workers have created documents featuring hundreds of names and LinkedIn profiles (as well as visa statuses) of former Twitter and Meta workers.

    While some companies may be better equipped to weather the storm than others, it’s becoming apparent that no company is completely unaffected, said Nikolai Roussanov, a professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

    “Tech has been clobbered so much precisely because it has been seen as very immune to fluctuations in the real economy, but in the end, nobody is immune,” Roussanov said. “And that realization, I think, is important and perhaps what contributed to these sky-high valuations coming down pretty quickly.”

    Meta’s market cap has fallen from a peak of more than $1 trillion last year to less than $300 billion. Amazon, meanwhile, has seen its market cap drop by $1 trillion from a peak last summer.

    Roussanov said current fears of a recession are not unwarranted, but in many ways, “there is a little bit of a self-fulfilling nature to this.” He added: “As these fears become more and more widespread, they slow down people’s consumption, they slow down firm investment, and that kind of snowballs on itself.”

    What’s going on in tech right now is “perhaps a taste of what’s yet to come” elsewhere, Roussanov said.

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  • Xi Jinping has secured his power at home. Now he’s stepping back out on the international stage | CNN

    Xi Jinping has secured his power at home. Now he’s stepping back out on the international stage | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    After securing his iron grip on power in a leadership reshuffle late last month, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is now moving back onto the world’s stage – in person – in an apparent bid to bolster China’s standing amid rising tensions with the West.

    A handful of state visits in Beijing last week, which included meetings between Xi and leaders of Tanzania, Pakistan, Vietnam and Germany, and expected travel to international summits later this month are a sharp change of pace for Xi, who has drastically limited his foreign guests and only left the country once since start of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    For more than two years, Xi – who is the most important figure in China’s Communist Party by a long shot – hunkered down as China ramped up a stringent zero-Covid policy that seeks to eliminate the virus using border controls, mandatory quarantines, lockdowns and routine mass testing.

    China continues to restrict its citizens under that policy, but Xi’s recent and expected diplomatic schedule suggests he is no longer willing to forfeit his place alongside other world leaders after assuming a norm-breaking third term following the ruling Communist Party’s National Congress last month.

    There Xi gave a stark assessment of external threats facing China. Those growing challenges stem from “a grim and complex international situation,” with “external attempts to suppress and contain China” threatening to “escalate at any time,” Xi told his party members and the nation in a work report delivered during the congress.

    “(Xi) made it very clear … that the big challenges China will face (stem from) the less and less conducive international environment – and that is an area that China must contest,” said Steve Tsang, director of the University of London’s SOAS China Institute.

    Xi’s apparent ramping up of foreign engagement is likely a bid to counter those headwinds, but also one based on a calculation: “He must have come to some kind of a conclusion that the risk of Covid is more containable than he had thought before,” according to Tsang.

    For a leader whose aim throughout his decade in power has been to enhance China’s global stature, a diminished physical presence on the world’s stage – such as sending his foreign minister to last year’s G20 – threatens to hinder Xi’s personal diplomacy.

    Even as other leaders resumed international travel and hosted dignitaries, Xi’s roster of diplomatic events remained largely dominated by remote engagements – speaking in online summits to the leaders of key partner countries, delivering addresses via video link, taking “cloud” group photos with counterparts at virtual events – in an apparent bid to minimize potential Covid-19 risk.

    A handful of foreign leaders have met Xi in Beijing this year, marking his first in-person state meetings since 2020. But the vast majority who visited before the party congress were there for Beijing’s Winter Olympics in February. Then, China-friendly nations like Russia and Egypt attended, while the US and its allies launched a diplomatic boycott over China’s human rights record.

    Xi made his first foray out of the country since the start of the pandemic in September to attend a meeting of the China-led Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Uzbekistan.

    Xi’s foreign affairs priorities in the weeks and months ahead will likely continue to focus on shoring up relationships with friendly nations, experts say, as he finds himself operating in a very different world from the last time he was playing regular host or attending summits like G20 or the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation leaders’ summit – both of which convene later this month and which he is expected to attend, though yet unconfirmed by Beijing.

    Since then, Western concerns about China’s rising global power have been fanned by Beijing’s close rapport with Moscow, damning reports on China’s human rights record in its Xinjiang region and shrinking liberties in Hong Kong, as well as negative views of how China has handled the pandemic.

    “The main challenge that China faces is the deterioration of relations with the US … With the US being hostile, China faces great headwinds in its relations with the West, especially in terms of decoupling of the economy,” said Yun Sun, director of the China Program at the Washington-based think tank Stimson Center.

    “China will not directly discuss the US as the competitor, but instead will try to rally support and solidarity from the rest of the world,” she said.

    Xi’s meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on Friday, the first between Xi and a G7 leader in about three years, may be one aspect of that strategy, as a Germany that is more friendly toward China has the potential to hinder solidarity in an approach toward China from within the European Union, experts say.

    During his visit, which also included talks with Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Scholz voiced support of economic partnership with China, “on equal footing,” but said he raised issues like human rights, market access and the future of self-governing Taiwan, while also stressing that China’s relationship with one EU member affects all.

    Scholz brought up the responsibility to push for peace in Ukraine, and Xi used the meeting to release what may be his strongest comments about the escalation of the conflict.

    Xi called for the international community to “oppose the threat or use of nuclear weapons” and prevent a “nuclear crisis in Eurasia” – drawing an apparent red line, even as China has yet to condemn Russia’s invasion of its neighbor and as Xi maintains a close rapport with President Vladimir Putin.

    Scholz, who came in for heavy criticism at home for taking the trip, which was seen by critics as an endorsement of Xi’s rule, said later those comments on nuclear weapons alone made the trip “worth it.”

    Xi’s strategy in upcoming summits may fall along similar lines.

    “He will try to demonstrate that China is still committed to the world, and is ready to assume its due leadership,” said Sun of the Stimson Center.

    However, there will be challenges, nearly three years into the pandemic, as China’s top leader is only beginning to re-engage in person. Sun added: “There is a lot of catch-up to do.”

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  • Hong Kong says it’s back open for business. Will the world buy it? | CNN

    Hong Kong says it’s back open for business. Will the world buy it? | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    At a glitzy finance summit in Hong Kong this week, the city’s leader triumphantly told a room packed with top Wall Street executives that the Asian hub was back in business. “The worst is behind us,” he declared.

    Two days later, tens of thousands of rugby fans descended on the city’s largest stadium for the Hong Kong Sevens, its biggest (and usually booziest) annual sporting event, which had been suspended since 2019 due to political unrest, and, later, Covid-19.

    The two high-profile international events sent a clear message: After almost three years of border closures, mandatory quarantines, and restrictions on businesses and social gatherings, Hong Kong was finally reopening.

    For much of the pandemic, the semi-autonomous Chinese city maintained some of the region’s most stringent restrictions, including one of the world’s longest mandatory quarantines for international arrivals. With the economy tanking and concerns mounting that Hong Kong was being left behind as the world moved on, the government finally threw open the city’s doors in September and ended formal quarantine to the relief of millions of people.

    “We were, we are and we will remain one of the world’s leading financial centers,” vowed Hong Kong leader John Lee at Wednesday’s summit, attended by more than 200 investors from 20 countries. “You can take that to the bank.”

    Speaking on Friday ahead of the kickoff of the Sevens, Hong Kong Rugby Union CEO Robbie McRobbie hailed the return of the tournament as a “catalyst, watershed,” a symbol that “Hong Kong is still a vibrant, resilient city.”

    But experts warn the push to revive Hong Kong, while welcome and long overdue, faces many challenges ahead.

    The past few years of isolation, which coincided with an ongoing political crackdown, have taken their toll, they said. Despite what Lee and other leaders insist, the Hong Kong that’s reopening is not the same city the world knew before the pandemic – and the true impact of that change remains to be seen.

    Last year, as many destinations reopened to travelers and relaxed restrictions, Hong Kong appeared to be stuck in a different reality.

    Restaurants, bars and gyms were frequently forced to shutter or limit their hours. Residential buildings were placed under lockdown for days. At one point, public gatherings were capped at two people. And most residents didn’t leave the city for years, unable or unwilling to spend up to three weeks in hotel quarantine at their own cost upon return.

    Businesses were hit hard. The Sevens tournament makes up 95% of the Hong Kong Rugby Union’s revenue, so “we’ve had three years of redundancies and cutbacks,” said McRobbie.

    Many disillusioned residents chose to leave permanently; this past year, the city recorded its steepest drop in population since records began in 1961. Companies, too, began eyeing other locations – most notably Singapore, Hong Kong’s longtime regional rival.

    But Hong Kong authorities, eager to reopen the border with mainland China – which still shows no sign of easing its strict zero-Covid policy that aims to stamp out infections – remained reluctant to loosen restrictions for fear cases would spike and close that door.

    Then, a severe outbreak fueled by the highly contagious Omicron variant at the start of the year put an end to Hong Kong’s hope of maintaining zero daily cases.

    Under mounting public pressure, the government lifted flight bans with certain countries and shortened hotel quarantine in March – but these small concessions did little to lure people back.

    According to media reports in August, some Wall Street banks warned their executives would only attend Wednesday’s finance summit if there was quarantine-free travel – a widely-speculated factor behind the government’s ultimate decision to scrap quarantine.

    Finance leaders in the city breathed a sigh of relief at the news.

    “We’ve been closed for too long,” said Sebastian Paredes, CEO of Singaporean bank DBS’ Hong Kong operations. “We are beginning to open up following the other parts of the world that have already opened up. And this is a tangible demonstration that Hong Kong is back.”

    Attendees at the Global Financial Leaders' Investment Summit in Hong Kong on November 2.

    Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia Pacific Economist of French investment bank Natixis, agreed the week’s dual big events were “a big sign of Hong Kong moving away from Covid restrictions to a new world.”

    However, the remaining restrictions pose a competitive disadvantage.

    International visitors must take Covid tests for seven straight days after arrival in Hong Kong, and for the first three days are barred from restaurants, bars and gyms. But the testing doesn’t stop there – bars and clubs that don’t serve food require proof of a negative rapid antigen test from all patrons.

    A mask mandate – indoors and outdoors – is also in effect, though photos of the finance summit show attendees sitting at tables without face coverings. They included the city’s Financial Secretary Paul Chan, who was declared a “recovered case” by health authorities after testing positive for Covid upon arrival from a trip abroad on Tuesday.

    Hong Kong's Financial Secretary Paul Chan makes a speech at the Global Financial Leaders Investment Summit in Hong Kong on November 2, 2022.

    These rules are “still largely prohibiting the overseas travel market,” said McRobbie, the Hong Kong rugby chief. Before the pandemic, roughly half the fans at the Sevens came from abroad; this year, that number is “negligible,” he said.

    The long stretch of isolation and financial hardship has also created challenges for companies hoping for a comeback. Many people have left the sports and events sectors in the past few years in favor of more stable jobs, leaving the industry short staffed, McRobbie added.

    This partial reopening has left the city in an awkward Covid limbo, said Vera Yuen, an economics lecturer at the University of Hong Kong.

    “If we want to open up our border with the Mainland China, our restriction is too lenient … so it’s not allowed,” she said. “But then if we want to open ourselves up to the world, we are still too stringent. We are now stuck in between, hoping to see better policies in the future.”

    Others also warn of growing political challenges. “Clouds are certainly coming to Hong Kong from different angles,” said banker Garcia-Herrero, pointing to the West’s response to the sweeping national security law Beijing imposed on Hong Kong in 2020.

    Under this law, pro-democracy activists have been jailed or exiled, independent newsrooms shut down, and former lawmakers targeted. Meanwhile, authorities have changed school curricula to emphasize Chinese history and culture, and pushed greater economic cooperation in the Greater Bay Area, a national scheme to link China’s southern Guangdong province closer with Hong Kong and Macao.

    The law has been widely criticized by foreign governments and human rights organizations, with the United States sanctioning Lee and other top Hong Kong officials over their role in the crackdown. Hong Kong authorities have repeatedly claimed the law has restored order and stability after the city’s 2019 anti-government, pro-democracy protests.

    For the US and the European Union, the national security law and crackdown represent “a change in the rules of the game in what was agreed upon,” said Garcia-Herrero.

    These rising tensions could spell trouble for Hong Kong’s trade and diplomatic relationships with other countries. Hong Kong is afforded more freedoms than other Chinese cities, thus has long been seen as a gateway between the mainland and the West – a position that looks increasingly precarious as its civil liberties erode.

    “The West would now understand that Hong Kong is not only part of China, but it’s closer to China than before,” said Yuen, the economics lecturer. “The worst scenario is that the West would treat Hong Kong as the same as the mainland China, and then Hong Kong would suffer the kind of sanctions.”

    And this drawing closer together is likely to continue. In an effort to stem the brain drain, the government is spending 30 billion Hong Kong dollars ($3.8 billion) to draw in global businesses and fresh talent – which Yuen said is expected to “attract a lot of mainland workers” who may be eager to escape an even more dire job market across the border.

    Despite these geopolitical frictions, some argue Hong Kong’s innate advantages will allow a revival – even if the city is heading in a different direction than before.

    Asia doesn’t have many other financial centers that can match Hong Kong’s open regulatory environment, low salaries tax and existing financial infrastructure – “therefore, even if the image may be tarnished a little bit, there are not many other places to go,” said Garcia-Herrero.

    Yuen echoed this point, saying the city’s proximity to China remains appealing to businesses and investors hoping to tap into the vast and lucrative mainland market.

    Travelers in the departure hall at Hong Kong International Airport following the government's scrapping of hotel quarantine, on September 26.

    “We can plug into China and sort of maintain the status as having a little bit of autonomy, and (being) different from them, given different Covid policies and (systems of) governance,” she said.

    But, both experts acknowledged, the path forward is now fraught with new risks. International businesses may come to Hong Kong, but be warier in how much they invest in the city, keeping in mind the threat of US sanctions and regional conflict.

    Today’s Hong Kong is increasingly under Beijing’s control, with China growing more assertive on the world stage as leader Xi Jinping enters a third term in power surrounded by loyalists. Those rising tensions between China and its rivals have caused growing divides “as the world deglobalizes,” said Garcia-Herrero – effects that inevitably spill over into Hong Kong, caught in the middle.

    “It will never be, in my opinion, what it used to be in terms of the openness of Hong Kong to both the West and the East,” she said.

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  • Lessons from past outbreaks can stop new epidemics in their tracks | CNN

    Lessons from past outbreaks can stop new epidemics in their tracks | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the CDC from 2009-2017, oversaw responses to the H1N1 influenza, Ebola and Zika epidemics, is President and CEO of Resolve to Save Lives, and Senior Fellow for Global Health at the Council on Foreign Relations.

    Precious Matsoso is the former Director-General of the South African National Department of Health and was the World Health Organisation Director of Public Health Innovation and Intellectual Property. Precious Matsoso is currently the Director of the Health Regulatory Science Platform, a division of the Wits Health Consortium and an Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Pharmacy and Pharmacology, University of the Witwatersrand.



    CNN
     — 

    In late June of this year, Ghana’s health authorities received some disturbing news: Two cases of viral hemorrhagic fever were detected in the country. Blood samples from the infected individuals came back positive for Marburg virus, a deadly disease that can kill most of those infected.

    The outbreak triggered emergency response efforts across all levels of government in Ghana. Nearly 200 contacts were identified and interviewed. Health care workers were reminded how to keep themselves and their patients safe from Marburg infection. Volunteers in the community with no medical background were trained to recognize signs of the disease, refer people with suspected Marburg infection to the appropriate authorities and deliver information to the community to help reduce disease threats.

    Following these efforts, no further cases were detected. After a conservative waiting period, the outbreak was declared over on September 16.

    Why didn’t this story make headlines? Because it was an epidemic that didn’t happen.

    The public and the media tend to focus on what’s going wrong: Covid-19, monkeypox, polio, and now Ebola. But this focus obscures what is happening on the ground, every day: Local and national public health workers and epidemiologists, or “disease detectives,” around the world are stopping outbreaks in their tracks and preventing epidemics.

    To celebrate these efforts, Resolve to Save Lives has issued its second report on “Epidemics That Didn’t Happen.” The new report details six outbreaks that were stopped in 2021 – stories that otherwise would not make headlines but that offer valuable insights into what public health can and does do right. The case studies show what is possible when local, state and national communities mobilize a whole-of-society effort to prevent epidemics.

    One lesson that stands out is that, because outbreaks begin and end in communities, well-coordinated action at the local level is crucial. Rabies is nearly always fatal, and after one tragic case in Tanzania, public health workers joined with community leaders to make sure that every other exposed person received the vaccine, saving lives. Without sensitive community engagement, more children would have died. When local efforts are supported by national and local government, we can stop and prevent epidemics.

    Another lesson is the substantial return on investment we can realize by prioritizing and funding preparedness efforts. The 2014-16 West Africa Ebola outbreak claimed more than 11,000 lives and cost the global economy an estimated $53 billion. To prevent another devastating loss of lives and livelihoods, Guinea coordinated substantial improvements to its health security at national and subnational levels. It established the National Agency for Health Security and one national and 38 district-level emergency operation centers. The country also hired and trained public health doctors and others in outbreak response. Then, when an Ebola outbreak emerged in January 2021, the country was ready to coordinate a strong response. The outbreak was declared over with just 23 cases because Guinea made sustained investments to prepare for the next health threat.

    Finally, there is a crucial role that coordination among local, state and federal agencies plays in epidemic prevention. Following an outbreak of Nipah virus in Kerala, India in 2018 that saw 18 cases – 17 of which were fatal – state officials identified gaps in response efforts and improved them. When a case was identified in the state in 2021, officials across local, district, state and national bodies immediately convened to plan and execute response measures. Within days, officials identified 240 contacts, tested fruit bats (reservoirs of the virus) in the affected area and conducted a risk communication campaign with the public. This outbreak began and ended with just the single index case.

    These case studies demonstrate what can happen – and what won’t happen – when countries invest in and prioritize preparedness so they are ready to act quickly and strategically when outbreaks strike. Offering a preview of what a public health renaissance could look like, they show what is possible when all levels of society work together to maintain a resilient health system built on pillars of community trust and equity.

    These are important lessons as we continue to strengthen preparedness in the face of new diseases and as the World Health Organization considers a global pandemic treaty instrument to make our world better prepared. A pandemic treaty instrument that is driven by this country- and community-first experience and vision, and built on principles of solidarity and equity, has the potential to help countries greatly improve their preparedness for the next disease threat. And as our new report shows – preparedness is not only possible, it’s happening every day. To protect us all, the global community must consistently invest in preparedness and prioritize it with political and financial resources.

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  • Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

    Germany’s leader and top CEOs have arrived in Beijing. They need China more than ever | CNN Business

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    Hong Kong/London
    CNN Business
     — 

    German Chancellor Olaf Scholz arrived in China on Friday with a team of top executives and a clear message: business with the world’s second largest economy must continue.

    Scholz met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People after landing in the capital Friday morning, according to a Chinese state media account. The German chancellor is also expected to meet with Premier Li Keqiang.

    Joining Scholz for the whirl-wind one day visit is a delegation of 12 German industry titans, including the CEOs of Volkswagen

    (VLKAF)    , Deutsche Bank

    (DB)    , Siemens

    (SIEGY)     and chemicals giant BASF

    (BASFY)    , according to a person familiar with the matter. They are set to meet with Chinese companies behind closed doors.

    The group entered China without participating in the usual seven-day hotel quarantine. Images showed hazmat-clad medical workers greeting their jet at Beijing’s Capital International Airport to test the official delegation for Covid-19.

    During the Friday morning meeting between the two leaders, Xi called for Germany and China to work together amid a “complex and volatile” international situation, and said the visit would “enhance mutual understanding and trust, deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields and plan for the next phase of Sino-German relations,” according to a readout from state broadcaster CCTV.

    Scholz’s visit — the first by a G7 leader to China in roughly three years — comes as Germany slides towards recession. But it has fired up concerns that the economic interests of Europe’s biggest economy are still too closely tied to those of Beijing.

    Since the invasion of Ukraine this year, Germany has been forced to ditch its long dependence on Russian energy. Now, some in Scholz’s coalition government are growing nervous about the country’s deepening ties with China. Beijing has declared its friendship with Russia has “no limits,” while China’s relations with the United States are deteriorating.

    The tension was highlighted recently by a fierce debate over a bid by Chinese state shipping giant Cosco to buy a 35% stake in the operator of one of the four terminals at the port of Hamburg. Under pressure from some members of the government, the size of the investment was limited to 24.9%.

    The potential deal has raised concerns in Germany that closer ties with China will leave critical infrastructure exposed to political pressure from Beijing, and disproportionately benefit Chinese companies.

    But Germany is hardly in a position to rock the boat with Beijing as it grapples with the challenge of reviving its struggling economy. Its consumers and companies have borne the brunt of Europe’s energy crisis, and a deep recession is looming.

    If the European Union and Germany were to decouple from China, it would lead to “large GDP losses” for the German economy, Lisandra Flach, director of the ifo Center for International Economics, told CNN Business.

    The Kiel Institute for the World Economy estimates that a major reduction in trade between the European Union and China would shave 1% off of Germany’s GDP.

    Germany needs to shore up its export markets as ties with Russia, once its main supplier of natural gas, continue to unravel.

    When it comes to China, Germany won’t want to “lose also this market, this economic partner,” said Rafal Ulatowski, an assistant professor of political science and international studies at the University of Warsaw.

    “They [will] try to keep these relations as long as it’s possible.”

    As Western countries have imposed swingeing economic sanctions on Russia, China has publicly maintained its “neutrality” in the war while ramping up its trade with Moscow.

    That has triggered a backlash in Europe, where some companies are already becoming wary of doing business in China because of its stringent “zero Covid” restrictions.

    Pressure on Berlin is also mounting over China’s human rights record. In an open letter Wednesday, a coalition of 70 civil rights groups urged Scholz to “rethink” his trip to Beijing.

    “The invitation of a German trade delegation to join your visit will be viewed as an indication that Germany is ready to deepen trade and economic links, at the cost of human rights and international law,” they wrote in the memo, published by the World Uyghur Congress. Based in Germany, the organization is run by Uyghurs raising awareness of allegations of genocide in China’s Xinjiang region.

    It suggested Berlin was “loosening economic dependence on one authoritarian power, only to deepen economic dependence on another.”

    In an op-ed published in a German newspaper on Wednesday, Scholz said he would use his visit to “address difficult issues,” including “respect for civil and political liberties and the rights of ethnic minorities in Xinjiang province.”

    A spokesperson for the German government addressed wider criticism last week, saying at a press conference that it had no intention of “decoupling” from its most important trading partner.

    “[The chancellor] has basically said again and again that he is not a friend of decoupling, or turning away, from China. But he also says: diversify and minimize risk,” the spokesperson said.

    Last year, China was Germany’s biggest trading partner for the sixth year in a row, with the value of trade up over 15% from 2020, according to official statistics. Together, Chinese imports from, and exports to, Germany were worth €245 billion ($242 billion) in 2021.

    Still, the furore surrounding the Hamburg port deal is a reminder of the tradeoffs Germany has to confront if it wants to maintain close ties with such a vital export market and supplier.

    A spokesperson for Hamburger Hafen und Logistik (HHLA), the company operating the port terminal, told CNN Business on Thursday that it was still negotiating the deal with Cosco.

    Flach, of the ifo Center for International Economics, said the deal warranted scrutiny because “there is no reciprocity: Germany cannot invest in Chinese ports, for instance.”

    A container ship from Cosco Shipping moored at the Tollerort Container Terminal owned by HHLA, in the harbor of Hamburg, Germany on Oct. 26.

    However, it is easy to overstate the impact of the potential agreement, said Alexander-Nikolai Sandkamp, assistant professor of economics at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy.

    “We’re not talking about a 25% stake in the Hamburg harbor, or even the operator of the harbor, but a 25% stake in the operator of a terminal,” he told CNN Business.

    Jürgen Matthes, head of global and regional markets at the German Economic Institute, told CNN Business that critics were no longer simply weighing the business benefits of Chinese investment in the country.

    “Politics and economics have to be looked at together and cannot be taken separately any longer,” he said. “When geopolitics comes into play, the view of China has very much declined and become much more negative.”

    China’s recent treatment of Lithuania has also deepened concerns that Beijing “does not hesitate to simply break trade rules,” Matthes added. The small, Eastern European nation claimed last year that Beijing had erected trade barriers in retaliation for its support for Taiwan.

    China has defended its downgrading of relations with Lithuania, saying it is acting in response to the European nation undermining its “sovereignty and territorial integrity.” This year, after a Lithuanian official visited Taiwan, Beijing also announced sanctions against her and vowed to “suspend all forms of exchange” with her ministry.

    As the German delegation touches down on Friday, they will be faced with another issue, which has become the single biggest headache for companies across China.

    “The biggest challenge for German businesses remains China’s zero-Covid policy,” said Maximilian Butek of the German Chamber of Commerce in China.

    “The restrictions are suffocating economic growth and heavily impact China’s attractiveness as a destination for foreign direct investment,” he told CNN Business.

    An aerial view of the urban landscape in Shanghai on Sept. 25. The city underwent a months-long Covid lockdown earlier this year.

    He said the broader restrictions were so stifling that some companies had moved their regional headquarters to other locations, such as Singapore. “Managing the whole region without being able to travel freely is almost impossible,” he added.

    In a brief statement, Volkswagen told CNN Business that its CEO was attending the trip since “there have been no direct meetings for almost three years” due to the coronavirus pandemic.

    “In view of the completely changed geopolitical and global economic situation, the trip to Beijing offers the opportunity for a personal exchange of views,” the automaker said.

    Despite Beijing’s Covid curbs and geopolitical tensions, Germany has every economic incentive to stay close to China.

    Its dependency on China can be seen across industries. While about 12% of total imports came from China last year, the country was responsible for 80% of imported laptops and 70% of mobile phones, Sandkamp said.

    The automobile, chemical and electrical industries are also reliant on Chinese trade.

    “If we were to stop trading with China, we would run into trouble,” Sandkamp added.

    China made up 40% of Volkswagen’s worldwide deliveries in the first three quarters of this year, and it’s also the top market for other automakers such as Mercedes.

    Wariness among some German officials over the country’s closeness with China could filter into a more restrictive trade policy, though economic cooperation is still in both parties’ interests.

    Last week, Germany’s economy minister Robert Habeck told Reuters that the government was efforting a new trade policy with China to reduce dependence on Chinese raw materials, batteries and semiconductors.

    Unidentified sources also told the news agency that the ministry was weighing new rules that would make business with China less attractive. The ministry did not respond to a request for comment from CNN Business.

    But “despite all odds and challenges, China remains unrivaled in terms of market size and market growth opportunities for many German companies,” said Butek, of the German Chamber.

    He predicted that “the large majority will stay committed to the Chinese market and is expecting to expand their business.”

    Companies appear to be toeing that line. Last week, BASF CEO Martin Brudermüller was quoted in Chinese state media as saying that Germans should “step away from China-bashing and look at ourselves a bit self-critically.”

    “We benefit from China’s policies of widening market access,” he said at a company event, according to state-run news agency Xinhua, pointing to the construction of a BASF chemical engineering site in southern China.

    — CNN’s Simone McCarthy, Chris Stern, Lauren Kent, Claudia Otto and Arnaud Siad contributed to this report.

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  • China is caught in a zero-Covid trap of its own making | CNN

    China is caught in a zero-Covid trap of its own making | CNN

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    Editor’s Note: A version of this story appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in China newsletter, a three-times-a-week update exploring what you need to know about the country’s rise and how it impacts the world. Sign up here.


    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    It’s been little more than a week since Chinese leader Xi Jinping began his norm-breaking third term in power with a ringing endorsement of his relentless zero-Covid policy.

    But the commitment to stick with it is already fueling scenes of chaos and misery across the country.

    In the northwestern city of Xining, residents spent last week pleading desperately for food as they suffered through the latest of the country’s stringent lockdowns; to the west, in Lhasa, the regional capital of Tibet, angry crowds have been protesting in the streets after more than 70 days of stay-home orders.

    In the central province of Henan, migrant workers have abandoned a locked-down Foxconn factory en masse, walking for miles to escape an outbreak at China’s largest iPhone assembling site. And, in the eastern financial hub of Shanghai, things are gloomy even at Disneyland – the park abruptly shut its gates on Monday to comply with Covid prevention measures, trapping visitors inside for compulsory testing.

    In many other parts of the country, lockdowns, mandatory quarantines, incessant mass testing edicts and travel restrictions continue to cripple businesses and daily life, even as the rest of the world moves on from the pandemic.

    Rather than relax Covid restrictions – as some had hoped for in the lead-up to the Communist Party’s five-yearly leadership reshuffle, Chinese authorities have ramped them up after Xi’s sweeping endorsement of the strategy.

    “The 20th Party Congress didn’t provide a timetable for moving away from zero-Covid. Instead it highlighted the importance of sticking to the existing approach,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    The congress reinforced Xi as an unrivaled supreme leader, and saw him stack the Communist Party’s top ranks with staunch allies – including those who had loyally carried out his Covid policies.

    “The new political ecology also provided more incentive for local governments to impose more draconian Covid control measures,” Huang said.

    A renewed zeal for the policy can be seen most clearly in smaller cities. While metropolises like Beijing and Shanghai can draw on their experiences of major flareups to implement more targeted lockdown measures, smaller cities with no such know-how tend to pursue zero-Covid goals in a more aggressive and extensive manner, Huang said.

    The repeating cycle of lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing is taking a heavy toll on the economy and society. Public patience is wearing thin, and frustrations are building.

    On Monday in Baoding city, Hebei province, a father wielding a knife drove through a Covid checkpoint in a desperate bid to buy milk powder for his son. Video footage of the scene and his subsequent arrest sparked uproar online; the following day local police tried to soothe tempers by saying the man had been fined only 100 yuan ($13.75) and that his child’s “milk powder problem” had been “properly resolved.”

    On Tuesday, the death of a 3-year-old in Lanzhou, Gansu province, sparked another outcry, after the child’s family said lockdown measures had delayed emergency responders. Police said later the child had stopped breathing by the time officers arrived, but did not address the family’s accusations that an ambulance had been delayed. CNN has reached out to Lanzhou authorities for comment.

    In another sign of how sensitive the issue has become, Chinese stocks rallied on Wednesday following unverified social media rumors that China was forming a committee to prepare an exit from the zero-Covid policy.

    Those rumors were quashed, however, when the Foreign Ministry said it was “unaware” of any such plan.

    Meanwhile, experts say they see no signs of the Chinese government taking steps that would suggest it is rethinking its approach.

    Chinese health officials maintain that changing tack now would risk a huge surge in infections and deaths that could overwhelm the country’s fragile health care system.

    Beijing has so far refused to approve for use the mRNA vaccines developed in Western countries, which have been shown to be more potent than those made and used in China. Experts say China also lacks an emergency response plan to cope with surging infections.

    But Jin Dongyan, a virologist at the University of Hong Kong, said such catastrophic scenarios could be avoided with proper preparation.

    Instead of spending vast amounts of time and resources on testing, contact tracing, quarantining and imposing lockdowns, authorities should introduce more effective vaccines and antiviral therapies and boost the vaccination rate among the elderly, Jin said.

    With boosted immunity, asymptomatic or mild cases could be allowed to recover at home – freeing up space at hospitals to treat more severe cases, he said.

    “Using lockdown and containment measures to deal with an infectious disease with such a low mortality rate and high transmissibility is no longer appropriate. The whole world has abandoned this approach – nobody can stand the cost, it’s simply not working,” he said.

    Another hurdle to pivoting from zero-Covid is a pervasive fear of the virus among large swaths of the public, instilled by the Chinese government to justify its harsh control measures, experts say.

    “Authorities have demonized Covid, exaggerating its severity and mortality rate and talking up long-Covid symptoms. Many ordinary people are still very afraid of the virus, with recovered Covid patients suffering from severe discrimination and stigmatization,” Jin said.

    It was partly such fears that drove thousands of migrant workers to flee in panic from the Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou, he said.

    Videos of people traveling on foot, dragging their luggage on roads and across fields, went viral on Chinese social media over the weekend. Zhengzhou, a city of 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases.

    The Foxconn facility has been racing to control an outbreak since mid-October, though the company has not disclosed the number of infections among its workers. On Wednesday, the Zhengzhou Airport Economy Zone, where the Foxconn plant is located, announced new lockdown measures.

    As the Foxconn exodus thrust the Zhengzhou outbreak into the spotlight, the city’s health authorities have tried to allay public fears. On Monday, the Zhengzhou municipal health commission published a WeChat article with the headline: “Covid is not that horrible, but preventable and treatable.”

    Huang, the expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, said misconceptions about the virus would complicate matters if China did at some point decide to move away from zero Covid.

    “Even if in the future, China wants to change the narrative and play down the seriousness of the disease, some people might not buy into the new narrative,” he said.

    As the winter approaches, experts warn that China could be hit by a new wave of infections – and a new cycle of draconian lockdowns.

    China reported 2,755 local infections for Tuesday, the highest daily tally since August.

    “Judging from the situation in China, there will be a major outbreak sooner or later. China has deployed tremendous efforts and paid a heavy cost to prevent that from happening, but in the end, it won’t be able to stop such a highly infectious disease from spreading,” Jin said.

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  • Families of Halloween crush victims identify lost items as South Korean police admit mistakes | CNN

    Families of Halloween crush victims identify lost items as South Korean police admit mistakes | CNN

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    Seoul, South Korea
    CNN
     — 

    ln a cavernous Seoul gymnasium Tuesday, grieving families inspected neat rows of belongings left behind at the scene of the deadly street crush in Itaewon.

    Shoes, bags, glasses, notebooks, wallets, cardholders and colorful hats were laid out on makeshift tables and exercise mats along the polished floor – waiting to be claimed by the next of kin of 156 victims killed in Saturday night’s crowd surge.

    “Found it. I think this is the one,” said one woman, as she recognized a black coat, hugging it as she cried.

    The middle-aged woman, who had arrived with her husband, collapsed to the floor in tears after discovering a missing pair of knee-high boots. It was among rows of black boots, stilettos and sneakers. In many cases, there was just one shoe.

    Another younger woman, wearing a cast on her left arm, walked into the gymnasium to find her lost shoe. This woman, who didn’t want to be named, said she was in front of a bar in the alley when the crush happened.

    Stuck in the crowd, she said she passed out from asphyxiation “to the point I thought I was dead, but a foreigner shouted at me to wake up.” Her arm was badly bruised during the incident, and after she came to, the woman said she just held on until the crowd eased and she could be rescued.

    Family members walked into the gymnasium, one by one and in small groups, escorted by officials who hurriedly put on white gloves and showed them to the tables, so they could inspect and claim the carefully arranged possessions.

    South Korea is in deep mourning for the 156 people killed, including 26 foreigners, in the crowd crush on Saturday night when as many as 100,000 people crammed into the narrow streets of Itaewon to celebrate Halloween.

    Officials expected large numbers due to the popularity of the area for Halloween parties in pre-Covid years, but police have admitted they were unprepared for this year’s crowd.

    Alongside the shoes and bags were 156 miscellaneous items including hats and masks.

    Speaking to the media on Tuesday, Yoon Hee-keun, head of National Police Agency, bowed deeply as he began a press conference, admitting for the first time failings on the behalf of the police in the capital that night.

    Yoon said officers failed to adequately respond to the emergency calls that flooded into the police call center before the disaster.

    “The calls were about emergencies telling the danger and urgency of the situation that large crowds had gathered before the accident occurred,” Yoon said. “However, we think the police response to the 112 (emergency telephone number) calls was inadequate.”

    South Korean police received at least 11 calls from people in Itaewon about concerns of a possible crush as early as four hours before the incident occurred on Saturday night, records given to CNN by the National Police Agency show.

    The first call was made at 6:34 p.m. Saturday from a location near the Hamilton Hotel, which borders the alley where the deadly surge occurred, the records show.

    “People are going up and down the alley now, but it looks really dangerous. People can’t come down but people keep coming up (the alleyway), so I fear people might be crushed,” one caller said, according to the record.

    “I managed to get out, but it’s too crowded. I think you need to control this. Nobody is controlling (the crowd). I think police officers should be standing here and moving some people so that others can go through the alleyway. People cannot even go through but there are more people pouring down,” the caller added.

    Then at 8:09 p.m., another person in Itaewon reported that there were so many people in the area that they were falling over and getting hurt. The caller asked for traffic control, the record shows.

    The deadly crowd surge took place just after 10 p.m.

    The items included 258 articles of clothing.

    On Monday, Oh Seung-jin, director of the agency’s violent crime investigation division, said about 137 personnel had been deployed to Itaewon that night, compared to about 30 to 90 personnel in previous years before the pandemic.

    “For this time’s Halloween festival, because it was expected that many people would gather in Itaewon, I understand that it was prepared by putting in more police force than other years,” said Oh.

    However, police at the scene were tasked with cracking down on illegal activity such as drug taking and sexual abuse in the area “rather than on site control,” Oh said.

    Police walk among personal belongings retrieved from the scene of a fatal Halloween crowd surge.

    On Tuesday, South Korea’s Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said a “lack of institutional knowledge and consideration for crowd management” was partly to blame for the crowd crush.

    “One of the reasons was a lack of deep institutional knowledge and consideration for crowd management. However, the police are investigating,” Han said.

    “Even if more police were put in (to the site), there seems to have been a limit in the situation as we don’t have a crowd management system, but we’ll need to wait for the police investigation to find out the cause,” he added.

    screengrab will ripley walk and talk

    CNN reporter returns to Itaewon’s narrow alley one day after the Halloween disaster. See what’s it like

    At a Tuesday Cabinet meeting, President Yoon Suk Yeol urged the need to establish systems to prevent similar tragedies.

    “In addition to side streets where this time’s large disaster happened, (we) need to establish safety measures at stadiums, performance venues and etc. where crowds gather,” he said, adding that the government will hold a national safety system inspection meeting with relevant ministers and experts soon.

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  • Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

    Workers flee China’s biggest iPhone factory over Covid outbreak | CNN Business

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    New Delhi
    CNN Business
     — 

    Foxconn, one of Apple’s largest suppliers, is wrestling with major disruption at its biggest iPhone assembly factory in China, as anxious workers reportedly flee the locked-down facility, according to social media videos.

    The Taiwanese company is racing to control a Covid outbreak at its campus in the central Chinese city of Zhengzhou.

    The exodus is putting a tremendous strain on Foxconn just before the key holiday shopping season begins and highlights how the country’s stringent zero-Covid policy is hurting international business.

    “[We] fully understand your eagerness to go back home,” Foxconn told its employees over the weekend, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account.

    “For employees who voluntarily stay in the company’s factory area, the port government and the company will jointly ensure everyone’s…health and safety,” it added.

    Analysts said the chaos at Zhengzhou could jeopardize Apple and Foxconn’s output in the coming weeks. Ivan Lam, senior research analyst at Counterpoint, estimated that between 10% and 30% of iPhone 14 production could be affected in the near term if the situation did not stabilize.

    The Zhengzhou campus is the world’s biggest iPhone factory and typically accounts for as much as 85% of iPhone assembly capacity, according to Lam’s estimates.

    A Foxconn spokesperson told Chinese state media that the company is trying to boost production at other sites.

    “At present, because now is the peak production season… [there is] a large demand for workers,” a Foxconn spokesperson told Henan Daily on Monday, adding that the company was “also coordinating back-up production capacity at other sites.”

    Foxconn and Apple did not respond to a request for comment from CNN.

    Shares in Foxconn, also known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, fell 2.6% on Tuesday.

    Videos of many people leaving Zhengzhou on foot have gone viral on Chinese social media in recent days. The city, which has a population of more than 12 million, imposed sweeping lockdown measures earlier last month after identifying dozens of Covid-19 cases.

    State media has said that many Foxconn workers are among those walking miles to escape the city. Calling it a “helpless move for some employees,” a Foxconn manager told media outlet Yicai that workers are panicking over the spread of the virus at the factory and lack of access to official information.

    Foxconn said it was organizing vehicles for employees wishing to return home, according to a post on Zhengzhou government’s official WeChat account over the weekend.

    The company has also quadrupled daily bonuses for workers at the plant this month, it said in a post on its official WeChat account on Tuesday.

    While these disruptions will impact iPhone production in the near term, analysts say it may not dent Apple’s iPhone shipments in the key holiday season.

    “I think in one to two weeks, things will get back to normal, given the current status,” Lam said.

    “They still have a lot of alternative production sites,” he said, adding that Foxconn had already begun shifting production to other facilities in China, such as in the southern province of Guangdong. “Things are under control now.”

    And, as Beijing shows few signs of moving away from its rigid Covid policies, Apple has started to boost production in other countries, including India, to reduce its dependence on China.

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  • Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

    Covid-19 vaccines will be on the 2023 vaccine schedule, but that doesn’t mean they’re required in schools | CNN

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    CNN
     — 

    Covid-19 vaccines will be part of recommended immunization schedules in 2023 for both children and adults, after a unanimous vote by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s independent Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices.

    That doesn’t make the vaccines mandatory for anyone, a point that was emphasized in a discussion before Thursday’s vote. The board members addressed concerns from the public that adding Covid-19 vaccinations to the schedule would force schools to require the shots.

    “We recognize that there is concern around this, but moving Covid-19 to the recommended immunization schedule does not impact what vaccines are required for school entrance, if any,” said Dr. Nirav Shah, a committee member and director of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    “Indeed, there are vaccines that are on the schedule right now that are not required for school attendance in many jurisdictions, such as seasonal influenza. Local control matters, and we honor that. The decision around school entrance for vaccines rests where it did before, which is with the state level, the county level and at the municipal level, if it exists at all. They are the arbiters of what vaccines are required, if any, for school entry. This discussion does not change that.”

    In fact, Covid-19 vaccines are explicitly banned from being included in school mandates in at least 20 states. Only California and the District of Columbia have announced that Covid-19 shots will be among mandated vaccinations for students, but those mandates were not implemented for this school year.

    It’s been nearly a year since eligibility for the Covid-19 vaccine was expanded to include everyone in the US 5 and older, but coverage among children still lags behind that of adults. Even as these vaccines and the related mandates have become highly politicized over the course of the pandemic, experts say vaccine hesitancy among parents isn’t new.

    Although the Covid-19 shot will not become mandatory for school, all 50 states do have laws requiring specific vaccines for students – most of which include shots for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis (DTaP) and varicella.

    Uptake for these vaccines, mandated by schools long before Covid-19, fell during the pandemic.

    In the 2020-21 school year, vaccination coverage for kindergarteners fell to less than 94% – dropping below the overall target of 95% that was set as an objective by the US Department of Health and Human Services in the Healthy People project for the first time in six years.

    A CNN analysis of the latest CDC data suggests that students in states with stricter school vaccine requirements are more likely to have their shots.

    All school immunization laws grant exemptions to children for specific medical reasons. But 44 states and Washington, DC, also grant religious exemptions, and 15 states allow philosophical or moral exemptions for children, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

    According to the CNN analysis, states that were stricter with exemptions were much more likely to still meet the 95% coverage target. In the 2020-21 school year, an average of about 96% of kindergarten students had their MMR vaccine in states that allowed only medical exemptions, compared with 92% of students in states that also allowed philosophical or moral exemptions.

    The full effect of the pandemic on children’s routine vaccination rates isn’t clear: It will be another few months before the CDC shares national data for compliance rates for mandatory vaccinations in the 2021-22 school year, and schools are in the midst of outreach and programming to ensure that as many students as possible will continue through the 2022-23 school year up to date on their vaccines.

    Correcting the drop in vaccination coverage in students will probably depend more on better access to care, information and outreach – and school vaccine mandates can help.

    With many people who are hesitant, it’s “because of something they’ve heard or something they’ve read,” said Dr. Jesse Hackell, a pediatrician who co-authored a clinical report about countering vaccine hesitancy in 2016. “Most people [who are hesitant] have a very free-floating worry about vaccines. It’s not specific in most cases.”

    A small share of parents – about 2% or 3% – are adamantly opposed to vaccines, and that rate has stayed mostly consistent over the years, said Hackell, who is also chair of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committee on Practice and Ambulatory Medicine.

    Overall vaccination coverage fell among kindergarteners in the 2020-21 school year, but the share of students who had an exemption also declined from 2.5% to 2.1%, according to CDC data. The rate has changed by less than 1 percentage point over the past 10 years.

    About 3% of kindergarteners in the US – about 120,000 students – were considered to be out of compliance with mandatory vaccines in the 2020-21 school year.

    “Mandates may not do anything to those people who would pull their kids out of public school,” Hackell said. “But the vast majority of parents are not opposed. They’re hesitant, or they’re uncertain. And when there’s pressure to do it for another reason, such as getting your kid into school, they come around.”

    Responsibility for enforcing vaccine mandates falls to the education system, and practices vary by state. Some students are ultimately turned away because they aren’t up to date, but most states offer provisional enrollment periods that allow kids to stay in school if they are in progress with at least one shot in a series or evidence of an upcoming appointment.

    According to the CDC, “school officials may prefer to keep students in school where they have access to education, safe supervision, nutrition, and social services while working with parents or guardians to get children vaccinated.”

    And many states do their best to help students stay up to date on their immunizations, with vaccination drives and direct followup with parents.

    “I think that the drop in the past year or two is partly pandemic-related,” Hackell said. “What we’re seeing, I think, is a little bit of a disparity between kids who have a medical home and have a private [doctor] versus kids who get their immunizations from a public source” like a school clinic.

    Mississippi is an impressive example of finding ways to keep child vaccination rates high, Hackell says. Public schools are the only option for many in the state, where poverty rates are higher than anywhere else in the US.

    Despite the large public need and additional resource struggles that the pandemic brought, 99% of kindergarteners in Mississippi met required vaccination coverage in the 2020-21 school year – better than any other state, according to the CDC.

    “They’ve done a tremendous job at that,” Hackell said, and it demonstrates the power of mandates. Mississippi is strict with exemptions – one of just six states allowing medical reasons only – and just 0.1% of kindergarteners were exempt in the 2020-21 school year.

    Hackell says he would be most concerned if he sees a sustained drop in vaccination rates for highly transmissible diseases, especially measles and polio. And he’s worried about pockets of low vaccination rates in certain communities.

    Schools are public spaces with a level of control, and 95% vaccination coverage is a goal with intent.

    “We know it’s never going to be 100% because there are some people who cannot medically be vaccinated. But if you have 95%, that means in any given school classroom of 30 kids, there might be one unvaccinated kid. And so if that child brings a case of something into the class, there’s nobody else to give it to,” he said. “It stops there with one case.”

    And when it comes to adding Covid-19 vaccines to the CDC’s recommended immunization schedule, the focus is still on public health – not on adding another requirement.

    “I’ve had parents who come in my office, and I say, ‘What are you here for?’ And they say, ‘Well, we’re here for vaccines so that our kids can go to school.’ And I’ve said, ‘OK, I understand that, but really I’m not vaccinating so you can go to school, I’m vaccinating because I want to prevent serious disease and death in your kids,’ ” Dr. Matthew Daley, an ACIP member and senior investigator with the Institute for Health Research at Kaiser Permanente Colorado, said at Thursday’s advisory meeting.

    “And the fact that there’s a school immunization requirement helps because it brought you into the office, but that’s not my goal. My goal is to prevent serious disease.”

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  • Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

    Under Xi Jinping, zero-Covid is accelerating China’s surveillance state | CNN

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    Hong Kong
    CNN
     — 

    As a new, deadly virus overtook the central city of Wuhan and spread throughout China in early 2020, the country’s ruling Communist Party and its leader Xi Jinping were faced with a crisis on a scale not seen in decades.

    In Wuhan, there was chaos. The city shut itself off from the outside world, while hospitals were overrun with the sick and dying – but it was too late to stop the virus’ advance. Huge swaths of China, too, locked down, grinding the country to a halt. Online, public outrage over apparent delays in the official release of information – and the silencing of whistleblowers – lit up social media faster than the censors could repress it.

    Outside China, observers watching the start of what would become the Covid-19 pandemic began to ask: could this be a catastrophe so big it calls into question the legitimacy of the Communist Party and its leader?

    Nearly three years later, however, Xi is poised to cement his place as China’s most powerful leader in decades, when he is anointed with a likely norm-breaking third term as the party chief on Sunday.

    In the months following that initial outbreak, Xi oversaw the assembly of a toolbox of brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantines, and digital tracking. All that was used to bring the virus to heel and largely keep it outside China’s shuttered borders – an approach that initially appeared to earn broad public support as China lived largely virus-free and the pandemic raged overseas.

    But, now, as Xi steps into an expected new era of his rule, that system – known today as the “dynamic zero-Covid” policy – is facing both social and economic pushback.

    Public frustration – the true scale of which is difficult to gauge – appears to be rising over lockdowns that can shutter people in their homes for weeks on end with fleeting advance notice, digital health codes that dictate where people can move, and the constant threat of being sent to centralized quarantine. Meanwhile, the country’s economy is faltering, with both the IMF and World Bank recently downgrading China’s GDP growth forecasts, citing zero-Covid as one of the major drags.

    As China’s Communist Party National Congress meets this week to approve the party’s priorities for the next five years, many are watching for signs restrictions could be loosened. But with Xi having personally tied himself to the policy, any change would need to come straight from the top – and from a leader, who throughout his rule, has sought to extend, not curtail, the party’s control on daily life.

    China’s advanced online ecosystem – run on mobile phone superapps and ubiquitous QR codes – has offered arguably unrivaled convenience for consumers to shop, dine and travel. Now, those technologies play a role in constraining daily life.

    Mobile phone health codes are the backbone of a system designed to track citizens and designate whether they are cleared to enter various venues, upping state control on people’s movement to an extent never before seen in China.

    Across the country, basic activities like going to the grocery store, riding public transport, or entering an office building depend on holding an up-to-date, negative Covid test and not being flagged as a close contact of a patient – data points reflected by a color code.

    Going out in public can be a risk in itself, as being placed under quarantine or barricaded by authorities into a mall or office building as part of a snap lockdown could simply depend on whether someone in the general vicinity ends up testing positive.

    “(You see) all the flaws of big data when it has control over your daily life,” said one Shanghai resident surnamed Li, who spent a recent afternoon scrambling to prove he didn’t need to quarantine after a tracking system pinned his wife to a location near to where a positive case had been detected.

    Li, who’d been with his wife at the time but received no such message, said they were eventually able to reach a hotline and explain their situation, ultimately returning her health code to green.

    “If you don’t complain, the next step is your neighborhood committee seals up your door,” he said.

    The clear message from Beijing is that these steps are necessary to prevent large-scale loss of life and overwhelmed medical systems.

    “The essence of persisting with dynamic zero-Covid is putting people first and prioritizing life,” read a recent editorial in the People’s Daily – one of three along similar lines released by the party mouthpiece last week in an apparent bid to lower public expectation about any policy changes ahead of the Party Congress.

    But as local officials pursue Beijing’s edict of stopping the spread of the virus above all other considerations – the system too, over and over again, has led to human tragedy.

    The past year is marked by grim examples well-known across China: the expectant mother in Xi’an who miscarried after being denied treatment due to expired test results, the off-duty nurse who died from an asthma attack in Shanghai as a hospital branch was closed for Covid-19 disinfection, and, last month, the 27 passengers who died in a crash in the middle of the night as they were bussed into a different jurisdiction for compulsory quarantine.

    “What makes you think that you won’t be on that late-night bus one day?” read a viral comment, which garnered more than 250,000 likes before it was censored – one of a number of glimpses into rising frustration with the cost of the policy.

    Last week, a rare political protest in Beijing saw banners hung from a bridge along the capital’s busy Third Ring Road that zoned in on social controls under the policy.

    “Say no to Covid test, yes to food. No to lockdown, yes to freedom. No to lies, yes to dignity. No to cultural revolution, yes to reform. No to great leader, yes to vote. Don’t be a slave, be a citizen,” one banner read, while the other called for the removal of “dictator and national traitor Xi Jinping.”

    Speaking before some 2,300 mostly surgical-mask clad Communist Party members at the opening of the party’s five-yearly leadership reshuffle on Sunday, Xi gave a sweeping endorsement of China’s Covid controls, saying the party had “protected the people’s health and safety to the greatest extent possible” and “made tremendous, encouraging achievements in both epidemic and social development.”

    The impact of those controls is becoming sharper, as lockdowns – which have repeatedly left people struggling for access to food and medicine and grappling with lost income and a mental toll – have become more frequent.

    Last month, CNN counted more than 70 Chinese cities placed under full or partial Covid lockdowns in a period of a couple weeks, impacting more than 300 million people.

    In the run up to the Party Congress, controls amplified – as local authorities around the country sought to tamp down on outbreaks coinciding with the major political event.

    Chinese leader Xi Jinping meets with medical workers at Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan in March 2020.

    “Maintaining the zero-Covid strategy is now substantially more costly than it was a year ago, because the latest (viral) strains are so much more transmissible and outbreaks are occurring more frequently,” said epidemiologist Ben Cowling of the University of Hong Kong’s School of Public Health.

    “At the same time, the threat posed by Covid is reduced because of the higher vaccine coverage and the availability of antivirals. Taken together, I think the point has already been crossed where continuing zero-Covid could be considered a cost-effective strategy,” he said, adding that maintaining high vaccine coverage was key for a planned transition away from zero-Covid.

    Xi’s proclaimed success over the virus and China’s accompanying propaganda campaign is one reason why it may be difficult for China to change course.

    “The issue is Xi Jinping already associated himself with the ‘successful’ model of fighting Covid, so the zero-Covid policy now is a de facto Xi Jinping policy,” said Alfred Wu, an associate professor at the National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, adding that China’s handling of the virus in comparison to other countries remains a point of national pride for many Chinese.

    And backing away from the policy will come with significant consequences. Allowing the virus to spread within the country of 1.4 billion would likely increase Covid-19 deaths to unseen levels in the country, experts say – and China so far has staked its policy around preventing those outcomes at all costs.

    Outside experts say that, since the virus will stay in circulation beyond China, keeping tight controls and closed borders is just delaying the inevitable, and the focus should be on preparing, for example through raising elderly vaccination rates and increasing ICU capacity, as well as getting or expanding access to the most effective vaccines and treatments.

    While China backed a massive vaccination campaign since early 2021, it has relied on homegrown shots, which produce lower levels of protective antibodies than mRNA vaccines developed in the West.

    So far, however, China has appeared most focused on bolstering the pillars of zero-Covid: mass testing capacity and mass quarantine facilities.

    “The vaccines take time, the ICU expansion takes time – and if you don’t see effort to prepare for the change, that implies that they are not planning to change the policy any time soon,” said Yanzhong Huang, a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

    And while experts say it’s possible economic and other considerations could see China loosen certain controls in the coming year, an eventual end to zero-Covid may not see an end to all of its vestiges – especially as Xi, including in his Sunday address, has made clear his focus on increasing “security” in China.

    Already the health code system has been used to diffuse social protest – with petitioners who lost their savings in rural banks barred from protesting after their health codes inexplicably turned red.

    “One scenario is that (China) might drop the zero-Covid policy, but some of the key components of the policy might be retained and repurposed,” said Huang, pointing to Xi’s focus on maximizing security in China, including via high tech means.

    “Zero-Covid has provided a proof of concept – this actually works,” he said.

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  • White-collar workers are feeling the brunt of the Fed’s rate hikes. Here’s why | CNN Business

    White-collar workers are feeling the brunt of the Fed’s rate hikes. Here’s why | CNN Business

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    A version of this story first appeared in CNN Business’ Before the Bell newsletter. Not a subscriber? You can sign up right here. You can listen to an audio version of the newsletter by clicking the same link.


    New York
    CNN Business
     — 

    September’s hotly anticipated jobs data ended up cooling markets on Friday. Stocks fell sharply as investors evaluated the report, which showed more jobs than expected were added to the US economy and indicated that more pain-inflicting interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve lie ahead.

    But a breakdown of the numbers shows that the Fed’s plans to weaken the labor market to fight persistent inflation may already be working, just not for everybody.

    White-collar office workers appear to be feeling the brunt of the Fed’s actions: The financial and business sector saw a large decline in employment last month. Legal and advertising services also experienced drops. Service and construction workers, meanwhile, are still thriving.

    What’s happening: The US economy added 263,000 jobs in September, higher than analyst estimates of 250,000. The unemployment rate came in at 3.5%, down from 3.7% in August.

    Leading the gain in jobs was the leisure and hospitality industry, which added 83,000 jobs in September — and employment in food services and drinking places made up 60,000 of those jobs alone. Manufacturing and construction also came in hot, adding 22,000 and 19,000 jobs, respectively.

    The largest non-governmental losses in jobs came from the financial industry, which shed 8,000 between August and September. Large banks hire in cycles, extending offers to recent graduates in the early fall months. That makes this September’s drop particularly significant.

    Business support services — such as telemarketing, accounting and administrative and clerical jobs — are also bleeding jobs. The sector lost 12,000 in September. Meanwhile, legal services lost 5,000 jobs, and advertising services also dropped 5,000 jobs.

    What it means: The Federal Reserve’s hawkish policy appears to be cooling certain parts of the economy, but not others. Finance workers are likely beginning to worry as their industry depends on stock and lending markets which have been particularly hard hit by Fed actions.

    Friday’s numbers indicate that we’re beginning to see that impact in the employment data.

    What remains to be seen is whether the Fed can cool the economy just by loosening employment in white-collar industries or if these losses will trickle down to other industries, hurting lower-income workers.

    Coming up: Earnings season begins in earnest this week with big banks like JPMorgan, Citigroup

    (C)    , Morgan Stanley

    (MS)     and BlackRock

    (BLK)     reporting. Investors will be watching closely for any guidance on hiring and layoff plans.

    Two key inflation indicators, PPI and CPI are also set to be released. Expect markets to react poorly if inflation comes in hot.

    A panel of top US economists just released its economic outlook for the next year, and it’s not great.

    The panel of 45 forecasters, led by the National Association for Business Economics (NABE), said they expected slower growth, higher inflation, higher interest rates, and weakening employment in both 2022 and 2023 than they previously expected.

    Most of the worries come down to the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policy.

    “More than three-quarters of respondents believe the odds are 50-50 or less that the economy will achieve a ‘soft landing’,” said NABE Vice President Julia Coronado. “More than half the panelists indicate that the greatest downside risk to the U.S. economic outlook is too much monetary tightness.”

    NABE panelists downgraded their median forecast for real GDP for the fourth quarter of 2022 to a 0.1% increase, compared to a 1.8% increase in the May 2022 survey. The vast majority of respondents placed more than a 25% probability of a recession occurring in 2023, with the most likely start date in the first quarter.

    The latest report comes as a growing number of economists are predicting that recession is imminent. Former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers told CNN on Thursday that it’s “more likely than not” the US will enter a recession, calling it a consequence of the “excesses the economy has been through.”

    Friday’s jobs report showed that the share of workers telecommuting or working from home because of the pandemic ticked lower — falling to just 5.2% in September from 6.5% in August.

    Fully remote work in the United States, which many predicted would remain the norm long after the pandemic, appears to be edging away, especially as the job market loosens for white collar workers and employees have less leverage.

    Last week, a KPMG survey of US-based CEOs found that two-thirds believed in-office work would be the norm within the next three years.

    Still, it may not be enough to help an ailing commercial real estate market, where the outlook is dire. New York City office properties declined by nearly 45% in value in 2020 and are forecast to remain 39% below their pre-pandemic levels long-term as hybrid policies continue, according to a recent study from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

    Looking forward: The Bureau of Labor Statistics has noted that while hybrid work may still be popular, Covid-19 is no longer fueling work from home trends. The October report will rephrase its telework questions to remove references to the pandemic.

    Since May 2020, each jobs report has asked: “At any time in the last four weeks, did you telework or work at home for pay because of the Coronavirus pandemic?”

    In May 2020, 35.4% answered yes.

    Starting next month, the question will be revised. “At any time in the last week did you telework or work at home for pay?” it will ask, limiting the timeline and eliminating any reference to the pandemic.

    The US bond market is closed for Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

    Coming later this week:

    ▸ Third quarter earnings season begins. Expect reports from big banks like JPMorgan Chase

    (JPM)    , Wells Fargo

    (WFC)    , Citigroup

    (C)    , Morgan Stanley

    (MS)    , PNC

    (PNC)     and US Bancorp

    (USB)     and consumer staples like Pepsi

    (PEP)    , Walgreen

    (WBA)    s and Domino’s

    (DMPZF)    . 

    ▸ CPI and PPI, two closely watched measures of inflation in the US are also due to be released. 

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  • Opinion: The Fed doesn’t have a choice anymore. Get ready for a recession | CNN Business

    Opinion: The Fed doesn’t have a choice anymore. Get ready for a recession | CNN Business

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    Editor’s Note: Gad Levanon is the chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute. He’s the former head of The Conference Board’s Labor Market Institute. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own.

    To many economists and analysts, the US economy has represented a paradox this year. On the one hand, GDP growth has slowed significantly, and some argue, even entered a recession. On the other hand, overall employment growth has been much stronger than normal.

    While GDP declined at an annualized rate of 1.1% in the first half of 2022, the US economy added 2.3 million jobs in the last six months, far more than in any other six-month period in the 20 years prior to the pandemic.

    This tight labor market – and the rapid wage growth it has spurred – is causing inflation to become more entrenched. The Consumer Price Index, which measures a basket of goods and services, was 8.3% year-over-year in August. That’s lower than the 40-year high of 9.1% in June, but still painfully high. To address it, the Federal Reserve is likely to drive the economy into a recession in 2023, crushing continued job growth.

    Why has employment growth remained so strong? First, the US economy is holding on better than many expected. The Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow estimate for real GDP growth in the third quarter of 2022 is 2.3%, suggesting that while the economy is now growing much more slowly than it did last year, we are still not in a recession. When the demand for goods and services strengthens, so does the demand for workers producing these goods and services.

    Second, despite the slowing of the economy and the growing fears of recession, layoffs are still historically low. Initial claims for unemployment insurance, an indicator highly correlated with layoffs, were 219,000 for the week ended October 1 – higher than the week prior, but still one of the lowest readings in recent decades. After years of increasingly traumatic labor shortages, many employers are reluctant to significantly reduce the number of workers even as their businesses are slowing. That’s because companies are worried that they will have trouble recruiting new workers when they start expanding again.

    Third, many industries are growing faster than normal because they are still recovering from the pandemic. Convention and trade show organizers, car rental companies, nursing homes and child day care services, among others, are all growing fast because they are still well below pre-pandemic employment levels.

    Fourth, just as some industries are growing because they are still catching up, others are experiencing high growth as they adjust to a new normal of higher demand. Demand for data processing and hosting services, semiconductor manufacturing, mental health services, testing laboratories, medical equipment and pharmaceutical manufacturing is higher than before the pandemic. And it’s likely that these represent structural changes to buying patterns that will keep demand high.

    Fifth, during the pandemic, corporate investments in software and R&D reached unprecedented levels, which drove a rapid increase in new STEM jobs. Because these workers are especially well paid, they have had plenty of disposable income to spend on goods and services, which has supported job growth throughout the economy.

    These factors are spurring positive momentum that will not disappear overnight. Employment growth is likely to slow down from its historically high rates, but it will still remain solid in the coming months. ManpowerGroup’s Employment Outlook Survey shows that the hiring intentions for the fourth quarter are still very high, despite dropping from the previous quarter.

    Next year, however, will look very different. Many of the industries that are still recovering from the pandemic will have reached pre-pandemic employment levels. With demand saturated, those industries may revert to slower hiring. But this alone is unlikely to push job growth into negative territory. What will do that is monetary policy.

    There are two ways to rein in the labor market: Either reduce demand for workers or increase the labor supply. But it’s hard to engineer a boost in labor supply. That takes the kind of legislative action needed to increase immigration, drive people into the labor force or grow investment in workforce training. This is likely to prove elusive in today’s polarized political environment.

    The only option that leaves the Fed is to engineer a recession by continuing to raise interest rates. Expect to see that happen in 2023.

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