A judge on Tuesday prohibited several federal agencies and officials of the Biden administration from working with social media companies about “protected speech,” a decision called “a blow to censorship” by one of the Republican officials whose lawsuit prompted the ruling.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty of Louisiana granted the injunction in response to a 2022 lawsuit brought by attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri. Their lawsuit alleged that the federal government overstepped in its efforts to convince social media companies to address postings that could result in vaccine hesitancy during the COVID-19 pandemic or affect elections.
Doughty cited “substantial evidence” of a far-reaching censorship campaign. He wrote that the “evidence produced thus far depicts an almost dystopian scenario. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a period perhaps best characterized by widespread doubt and uncertainty, the United States Government seems to have assumed a role similar to an Orwellian ‘Ministry of Truth.’”
Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt, who was the Missouri attorney general when the lawsuit was filed, said on Twitter that the ruling was “a huge win for the First Amendment and a blow to censorship.”
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry said the injunction prevents the administration “from censoring the core political speech of ordinary Americans” on social media.
“The evidence in our case is shocking and offensive with senior federal officials deciding that they could dictate what Americans can and cannot say on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other platforms about COVID-19, elections, criticism of the government, and more,” Landry said in a statement.
The Justice Department is reviewing the injunction “and will evaluate its options in this case,” said a White House official who was not authorized to discuss the case publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.
“This administration has promoted responsible actions to protect public health, safety, and security when confronted by challenges like a deadly pandemic and foreign attacks on our elections,” the official said. “Our consistent view remains that social media platforms have a critical responsibility to take account of the effects their platforms are having on the American people, but make independent choices about the information they present.”
The ruling listed several government agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and the FBI, that are prohibited by the injunction from discussions with social media companies aimed at “encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech.”
The order mentions by name several officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and others.
Doughty allowed several exceptions, such as informing social media companies of postings involving criminal activity and conspiracies; as well as notifying social media firms of national security threats and other threats posted on platforms.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit also included individuals, including conservative website owner Jim Hoft. The lawsuit accused the administration of using the possibility of favorable or unfavorable regulatory action to coerce social media platforms to squelch what it considered misinformation on masks and vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also touched on other topics, including claims about election integrity and news stories about material on a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, the president’s son.
Administration lawyers said the government left it up to social media companies to decide what constituted misinformation and how to combat it. In one brief, they likened the lawsuit to an attempt to put a legal gag order on the federal government and “suppress the speech of federal government officials under the guise of protecting the speech rights of others.”
“Plaintiffs’ proposed injunction would significantly hinder the Federal Government’s ability to combat foreign malign influence campaigns, prosecute crimes, protect the national security, and provide accurate information to the public on matters of grave public concern such as health care and election integrity,” the administration says in a May 3 court filing.
A historic garden in Wilmington, Delaware, that disappeared for more than a half-century suddenly reemerged during the pandemic. Jim Axelrod has the story in “Eye on America.”
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Telemedicine exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic. Dr. Celine Gounder joins “CBS Mornings” to discuss teh best uses for telemedicine and offers tips for making the most of your visit.
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During the COVID-19 pandemic, West Virigina had one of the largest vaccine incentive lotteries in the nation, spending more than $20 million on sweepstakes prizes. Now, questions are mounting over the lottery’s effectiveness and where some of the money went. Scott MacFarlane reports.
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The pandemic upended our day-to-day norms (and spending habits). As the lockdowns swept the country, people saved money on categories that were closed or restricted, such as dining out, traveling, or going to the movies.
However, when restrictions cooled and the world opened up again, so did millions of wallets — enter: “revenge spending.”
Typically used by economists, revenge spending happens after an “unprecedented economic event” (like the pandemic), which in turn causes an increase in consumer spending beyond normal levels as individuals feel an urgency to spend to “make up for lost time,” according to the Corporate Finance Institute.
When vaccine mandates were lifted and the lockdown ended, a spike in recreational and travel spending ensued, which in turn caused an increase in demand and, of course, prices (notice higher than normal airfare lately?).
While there has been a confluence of factors that contributed to the rampant level of inflation of the past year, revenge spending didn’t exactly help keep it in check.
“People want to get back out and do things they haven’t done for the past two years,” Garrett Melson, a portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers, told CNN in April of 2022 when revenge spending was running rampant. “They will complain about prices but they are still going out to spend.”
However, as recession fears loom and the economy remains uncertain, revenge spending is cooling, and so might inflation, the New York Timesreported. If the slowdown of revenge spending continues, it could help bring down inflation in the same way it contributed to an uptick in prices for certain services.
“We see some slowing in so-called revenge categories,” Yelena Shulyatyeva, senior U.S. economist at BNP Paribas, told the outlet.
Omair Sharif, the founder of Inflation Insights, added that he doesn’t anticipate the same surge in prices for airfare and hotels compared to last year.
“We’re just not getting the same kind of pop any longer,” he told The Times. “Airfares have pretty much stalled out.”
In May, average airfare dropped by nearly 13% compared to the same period in 2022, and hotel prices rose at a significantly lower rate (3%) year-over-year, as compared to the nearly 19% year-over-year increase from 2021 to 2022.
Some U.S. company leaders are calling for their remote workers to return to the office. Meta this week announced that it was mandating that all workers return to the office for three days a week starting in September. Carter Evans has more.
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“Am I showing off my boobs? Or do I just have boobs…and exist?” asks TikTok creator Rachel Levin in a viral video from November 2021. Even though the clip is nearly two years old, the audio has continued to resonate among the platform’s users—nearly 11,000 posts using the sound bite exist, many of which feature women in tops of varying necklines, pondering the exact same question.
This content is imported from Tiktok. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.
Questioning how we view breasts—and exactly how visible they can be to remain “appropriate”—is nothing new. The “Free the Nipple” campaign began in 2012, and a film of the same name was released in 2014. The image of the “bra-burning feminist” is synonymous with the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, although the actual burning of bras has since been proven to be a myth. But perhaps the most significant event regarding how society views wearing bras in recent history has been the COVID-19 pandemic. Beginning in March 2020, when offices shut down worldwide and remote work protocols were put into place, working in sweatpants, and often, braless, from one’s living room (or bed) became the new normal for many. In the years since the pandemic began, a shift away from traditional bras is tangible: remote work is still common, fashion trends like backless tops and sheer dresses are gracing red carpets, the body positivity movement is continuing to evolve, and bodily autonomy, in the wake of the overturn of Roe v. Wade, is at the forefront of our minds.
Julia Fox in L.A. on May 11, 2023.
Rachpoot/Bauer-Griffin
For some, the onset of the pandemic was, in fact, the catalyst for saying goodbye to bras, and the practice has stuck. “I’m a 42H and I haven’t worn a bra since June 2020,” reveals Agnes Bebon, a marketing manager based in Montreal, who added that she overhauled her wardrobe when she made the decision to go braless because she “was finally dressing for myself and not hiding my body.” (Though she also notes that she does wear sports bra-like tops now, following back-to-office mandates.) “Bras were always uncomfortable, never fit right, and left marks on me. I stopped wearing them around the same time that I started making real efforts to like my body, and part of that was me accepting that, yeah, my boobs are big and they sag a bit, but that’s fine and I’m hot.”
For Suze Heller, a writer and baker based in Asheville, North Carolina, letting go of bras during the early days of lockdown was for more than comfort. “Part of it was figuring out what was gender-affirming as my body changed in the last few years,” they said, noting that they went from wearing bralettes before the pandemic began to “no bra for a while and then binders and now sports bras.” The singularity of what is considered office appropriate has changed now that hybrid work is common, in that multiple people I interviewed mentioned wearing bralette-type undergarments to the office—something they never would have thought to do before COVID-19.
The reasons for reevaluating one’s relationship with bras are plentiful, but a common thread appears to be a journey toward body neutrality. Victoria Paris, an influencer based in Los Angeles, also said she started wearing bras less frequently in 2020. “I think I just stopped caring as much about the way I looked because…I wasn’t going into an office, I wasn’t going to school. I wasn’t worried about how people saw me,” she says of her early COVID uniform, which consisted of oversized shirts and tank tops with no bra. Paris, who is known largely for her fashion, travel, and home decorating content and has had partnerships with brands like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie, frequently posts photos of her outfits, many of them braless.
And as confident as she may appear, the creator also admits that it wasn’t easy to start. As a teen and into her early twenties, “I was extremely insecure about not wearing a bra and the way that looked…even my breast shape,” Paris says. However, since she started going braless more frequently over the past three years, she’s felt empowered to start embracing the way her breasts look naturally. “For the longest time, I was so caught up over, ‘I don’t want saggy boobs,’ even though there’s nothing wrong with having saggy boobs. It’s natural, it’s beautiful, it’s womanly.” And when she posts a photo in which her nipples show or it’s clear she’s not wearing a bra? “Honestly, I feel like [my followers] never see me in a bra, so they wouldn’t even clock it. That’s just how they see me.”
Unsurprisingly, the fashion world is catching on. Stacey Chia, a New York City-based communications manager at the fashion label Tanya Taylor says she’s noticed trends like “thicker fabrics on tops, backless dresses, [and] deep V-necklines that really mean you can’t wear a bra, and if you wanted some sort of coverage, you’d have to use nipple covers,” over the past few years that signify a cultural shift away from bras. As far as her own preferences go, she says she often opted for bralettes before the pandemic, but once it began, “I even found myself even ditching the bralettes, since I had a uniform of loose button-downs” throughout COVID, adding, “I think the pandemic opened us up to a new level of comfort with our bodies and other aspects of our lives as well.”
A vintage brasserie ad.
CSA Images
Aja Barber, a London-based stylist and author of Consumed: The Need for Collective Change: Colonialism, Climate Change, and Consumerism, on the other hand, let go of bras years before the pandemic began, although lockdown did solidify her shift away from them for the long term. By her late twenties, in fact, Barber had become fed up with uncomfortable clothing, including tight-fitting trousers, heeled shoes, and, of course, bras. “I’ve never been a super keen bra wearer,” she says. “I’ve never been that excited about it. I’ve always thought that bra shopping was burdensome and annoying and money that I really didn’t want to spend in that direction.”
As a way to still feel fashionable and put-together, “I would buy summer dresses that normally have some sort of tightness in the chest area to push things together and keep [my breasts] up. That’s how you get away with not wearing a bra,” she says of how her habit of going braless began. “But I fully expect that in my later years I will become that braless old woman, and I do not care at all.”
Since Barber primarily works from home, her bralessness doesn’t pose any issues to her level of professionalism. Though she raises the point that there’s a great degree of privilege when it comes to who can go braless in professional or formal settings and still be taken seriously, reflecting on a former co-worker who was an “older white woman who would wear sweatpants and an old sweater and never a bra.” Barber notes, “I do think that there’s a bit of white privilege wrapped up in the ability to come to work looking that way. As a Black person, I don’t think I have that privilege ever.”
Similarly, there’s a great deal of privilege when it comes to size, given that fatphobia remains present both in the workplace and the fashion industry. “I think it’s more acceptable for smaller breasted people to go braless, but I feel like if I [a D/DD] went braless, it would be very frowned upon,” says Megan Watson, a Chicago-based environmental consultant. “And especially for fat and plus size people—I feel like it adds to the anti-fat rhetoric if we don’t wear bras, i.e., we don’t care about our appearances, we don’t put in the effort, etc…,” she adds.
Conversely, the early days of quarantine have pushed some to discover a new appreciation for the pulled-together feeling that wearing a bra can provide. “At the beginning of quarantine, I relished in the ability to wear leggings and a sweater and call it a day,” says Caldwell Harden, a client services manager based in New York City. “But as quarantine lagged on, I just grew tired of not making an effort with my outfits and I started really thinking about how I got dressed every day. Soon, I started seeing a correlation in the effort I put into my outfit and my outlook towards the day.” Eventually, Harden returned to wearing a bra on a daily basis.
“I find when I don’t wear a bra, I usually am putting less effort into my appearance generally, and I just feel less prepared to take on the day,” Harden says. “My clothes and style are a type of armor for me to face the world, and my bras and undergarments are the chainmail.”
Rihanna attends Jean Paul Gaultier’s fall/winter 2014/2015 show during Paris Fashion Week.
Michel Dufour
Wearing (or not wearing) a bra is a personal choice, of course, though it’s also worth considering what its fundamental purpose is. “Bras can be helpful for women who have breast pain, which is very common, because, if properly fitted, the bra can provide support to the breast and can help reduce discomfort,” says Dr. Deanna J. Attai, MD, FACS, an associate clinical professor in the Department of Surgery at UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine and the UCLA Health Burbank Breast Care. She also mentioned that a supportive bra is usually recommended for “at least during the immediate postoperative period” for people who have undergone surgery. Otherwise, Dr. Attai says, “There are no good medical reasons for or against wearing a bra.”
If there are no serious health risks to going braless, and if not wearing a bra is now considered acceptable, and even stylish in many circumstances given the cultural shift of the past three years, it might be time to rethink what we believe is palatable when it comes to breasts, what feels comfortable, sexy, and gender-affirming, and, most importantly, who really gets to decide what we do with our breasts.
Madeline Diamond a writer and editor with bylines in Buy Side from WSJ, New York magazine, Travel + Leisure, and more. Originally from Southern California, she now lives in Brooklyn and can often be found in her favorite park, cappuccino in hand.
The head of the World Health Organization urged countries across the globe to prepare for the next pandemic, warning that future health emergencies could be even worse than the COVID-19 pandemic.
WHO director-general Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus’s warning comes weeks after the group officially ended the COVID global health emergency. During a meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland, Tedros said COVID is still a threat — but not the only one we may have to confront.
“The threat of another variant emerging that causes new surges of disease and death remains, and the threat of another pathogen emerging with even deadlier potential remains,” he said.
More than 6.9 million people globally have died of COVID, according to a WHO tally. Tedros noted that the COVID pandemic showed “basically everyone on the planet” needs to be better protected.
“We cannot kick this can down the road,” he said. “If we do not make the changes that must be made, then who will? And if we do not make them now, then when? When the next pandemic comes knocking — and it will — we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively and equitably.”
Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus
DENIS BALIBOUSE / REUTERS
The 194 WHO member states are working on a global pandemic accord, with negotiations set to continue over the next year. Tedros said it’s an important initiative to keep the world safer.
“And for enhanced international cooperation, the pandemic accord — a generational commitment that we will not go back to the old cycle of panic and neglect that left our world vulnerable, but move forward with a shared commitment to meet shared threats with a shared response,” he said.
Since 2009, American scientists have discovered more than 900 new viruses, “60 Minutes” reported last year. One potential threat comes from the human encroachment on natural bat habitats. Experts warn that such encounters increase the risk of pathogen transmission from bats to humans, potentially sparking future pandemics.
More than 1 billion people are at risk because of a “battle” between the global economic system and nature, Ryan McNeill, a deputy editor of data journalism at Reuters, told CBS News. He is one of the authors of a recent series exploring hot spots around the world. In West Africa, 1 in 5 people lives in a high-risk “jump zone,” which Reuters describes as areas with the greatest likelihood of viruses jumping from bats to humans. Parts of Southeast Asia are also areas of concern. In South America, deforestation has created more high-risk areas than anywhere else in the world, McNeill said.
“Scientists’ fear about that region what we don’t know, and that the next pandemic could emerge there,” he said.
The WHO has urged a focus on researching a handful of specific infectious diseases. The organization notes these pathogens, including Ebola, Marburg, Lassa fever, Nipah and Zika viruses, pose the greatest public health because of their epidemic potential.
Ten-year-old Ta’kari Tatum lost two loved ones during the COVID-19 pandemic and saw many of his classmates struggling with their mental health during the lockdowns. Ta’kari joins “CBS Mornings” to discuss how he is taking the lessons he learned from his family about coping with tough times and spreading awareness through his book, “Snap It,” and his organization, The Rubber Band Mentality.
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The U.S. is expected to see an influx of migrants with the pandemic-era policy known as Title 42 set to expire on Thursday. However, the Biden administration Wednesday announced a policy that would ban asylum-seekers from receiving U.S. protection if they fail to request refugee status in another country, like Mexico, first. Manuel Bojorquez has the details.
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With many jobs going remote since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many office buildings remain empty. Many of those buildings were financed by loans from regional banks, and as their valuations have gone down, this has in turn contributed to the major Wall Street hit those bank stocks have taken. Carter Evans has more.
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The Biden administration will allow the COVID-19 public health emergency declaration to expire on May 11. Elise Preston takes a look at what that means in practical terms.
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Emergency responses—being, well, emergency responses—aren’t designed to last forever, and this morning, the World Health Organization declared the one that’s been in place for the COVID-19 pandemic since January 2020 officially done. “This virus is here to stay. It is still killing, and it’s still changing,” Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the director general of the WHO, said at a press conference; although the coronavirus will continue to pose a threat, the time had simply come, he and his colleagues said, for countries to move away from treating it as a global crisis.
And, really, they already have: The United States, for instance, ended its national emergency last month and will sunset its public-health emergency next week; countries around the world have long since shelved testing programs, lifted lockdowns, dispensed with masking mandates, and even stopped recommending frequent COVID shots to healthy people in certain age groups. In some ways, the WHO was already a straggler. Had it waited much longer, the power of its designation of COVID as a “public health emergency of international concern,” or PHEIC, “would have been undermined,” says Salim Abdool Karim, the director of the Centre for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa.
There’s no disputing that the virus’s threat has ebbed since the pandemic’s worst days. By and large, “we are in our recovery phase now”—not perfectly stabilized, but no longer in chaotic flux, says René Najera, the director of public health at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Still, ending the emergency doesn’t mean that the world has fully addressed the problems that made this an emergency. Global vaccine distribution remains wildly inequitable, leaving many people susceptible to the virus’s worst effects; deaths are still concentrated among those most vulnerable; the virus’s evolutionary and transmission patterns are far from predictable or seasonal. Now, ending the emergency is less an epidemiological decision than a political one: Our tolerance for these dangers has grown to the extent that most people are doing their best to look away from the remaining risk, and will continue to until the virus forces us to turn back.
The end to the PHEIC, to be clear, isn’t a declaration that COVID is over—or even that the pandemic is. Both a PHEIC and a pandemic tend to involve the rapid and international spread of a dangerous disease, and the two typically do go hand in hand. But no set-in-stone rules delineate when either starts or ends. Plenty of diseases have met pandemic criteria—noted by many epidemiologists as an epidemic that’s rapidly spread to several continents—without ever being granted a PHEIC, as is the case with HIV. And several PHEICs, including two of the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade and the Zika epidemic that began in 2015, did not consistently earn the pan- prefix among experts. With COVID, the WHO called a PHEIC more than a month before it publicly labeled the outbreak a pandemic on March 11. Now the organization has bookended its declaration with a similar mismatch: one crisis designation on and the other off. That once again leaves the world in a bizarre risk limbo, with the threat everywhere but our concern for it on the wane.
For other diseases with pandemic potential, understanding the start and end of crisis has been simpler. After a new strain of H1N1 influenza sparked a global outbreak in 2009, disrupting the disease’s normal seasonal ebb and flow, scientists simply waited until the virus’s annual transmission patterns went back to their pre-outbreak baseline, then declared that particular pandemic done. But “we don’t really have a baseline” to return to for SARS-CoV-2, says Sam Scarpino, an infectious-disease modeler at Northeastern University. This has left officials floundering for an end-of-pandemic threshold to meet. Once, envisioning that coda seemed more possible: In February 2021, when the COVID shots were still new, Alexis Madrigal wrote in The Atlantic that, in the U.S. at least, pandemic restrictions might end once the country reached some relatively high rate of vaccination, or drove daily deaths below 100—approximating the low-ish end of the flu’s annual toll.
Those criteria aren’t perfect. Given how the virus has evolved, even, say, an 85 percent vaccination rate probably wouldn’t have squelched the virus in a way public-health experts were envisioning in 2021 (and wouldn’t have absolved us of booster maintenance). And even if the death toll slipped below 100 deaths a day, the virus’s chronic effects would still pose an immense threat. But thresholds such as those, flawed though they were, were never even set. “I’m not sure we ever set any goals at all” to designate when we’d have the virus beat, Céline Gounder, an infectious-disease physician at NYU and an editor-at-large for public health at KFF Health News, told me. And if they had been, we probably still would not have met them: Two years out, we certainly have not.
Instead, efforts to mitigate the virus have only gotten laxer. Most individuals are no longer masking, testing, or staying up to date on their shots; on community scales, the public goods that once seemed essential—ventilation, sick leave, equitable access to insurance and health care—have already faded from most discourse. That COVID has been more muted in recent months feels “more like luck” than a product of concerted muffling from us, Scarpino told me. Should another SARS-CoV-2 variant sweep the world or develop resistance to Paxlovid, “we don’t have much in the way of a plan,” he said.
If and when the virus troubles us again, our lack of preparedness will be a reflection of America’s classically reactive approach to public health. Even amid a years-long emergency declaration that spanned national and international scales, we squandered the opportunity “to make the system more resilient to the next crisis,” Gounder said. There is little foresight for what might come next. And individuals are still largely being asked to fend for themselves—which means that as this emergency declaration ends, we are setting ourselves up for another to inevitably come, and hit us just as hard.
As the final roadblocks to declaring normalcy disappear, we’re unlikely to patch those gaps. The PHEIC, at this point, was more symbolic than practical—but that didn’t make it inconsequential. Experts worry that its end will sap what remaining incentive there was for some countries to sustain a COVID-focused response—one that would, say, keep vaccines, treatments, and tests in the hands of those who need them most. “Public interest is very binary—it’s either an emergency or it’s not,” says Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at George Mason University. With the PHEIC now gone, the world has officially toggled itself to “not.” But there’s no going back to 2019. Between that and the height of the pandemic is middle-ground maintenance, a level of concern and response that the world has still not managed to properly calibrate.
The World Health Organization on Friday declared an end to the COVID-19 global health emergency.
Speaking at a press conference at the agency’s headquarters in Geneva, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said he had accepted the advice of an expert committee, which met on Thursday, regarding the pandemic’s status. “It is therefore with great hope that I declare COVID-19 over as a global health emergency,” he said.
Airlines expecting a hectic summer travel season are planning to hire thousands of new workers this year, lifting a job market that has been hit by layoffs in technology and turmoil in the banking industry.
United Airlines said Wednesday that it hired 7,000 new workers in the first four months of this year and plans to hit 15,000 new hires by year-end, matching the number it hired last year. By 2026, United projects adding 50,000 workers to a workforce that was about 93,000 at the start of this year.
“We are in hiring mode here at United Airlines,” Kate Gebo, the company’s executive vice president of human resources, told reporters. Airline officials said they already have enough pilots to operate the peak summer schedule.
The carrier said it plans to fill more than 4,000 flight attendant jobs by year-end and that it has received some 12,000 applications for the positions. United will hold a career fair for aspiring flight attendants in Houston on Thursday.
Some of the new hires at United will replace retiring employees. United executives said they plan to hire 2,300 pilots this year and expect 250 to 300 to retire — federal law requires airline pilots to retire by age 65.
The airline is also hiring for a range of other roles, including customer service representatives, contact service agents, ramp service employees and maintenance technicians.
Hiring boom
Airlines have been in a hiring frenzy since being caught understaffed when air travel bounced back from the depths of the pandemic more quickly than anticipated. Shortages of pilots and flight attendants contributed to a jump in the rates of canceled and delayed flights last year.
The nation’s passenger airlines received $54 billion in taxpayer money to keep people on the payroll through the pandemic, and they were prohibited from making layoffs, but they got around that prohibition by paying workers to quit or take early retirement.
Since bottoming out in November 2020, airline-industry jobs have jumped by more than 117,000 — an increase of 32% — to more than 480,00 as of this February, the latest figures available from the Transportation Department. That is a 5% increase over the pre-pandemic peak.
Delta Air Lines hasn’t disclosed its 2023 hiring plans, but CEO Ed Bastian has said the airline has hired nearly 20,000 workers since the start of 2021.
Southwest Airlines planned to hire 7,000 workers this year, but executives said last week they will reduce that number because the airline hasn’t received as many new Boeing jets as it expected.
A pilot shortage has been especially severe at smaller, so-called regional airlines that operate flights for bigger carriers under the United Express, American Eagle and Delta Connection brands.
Wanted: Aircraft mechanics
Gebo said the next bottleneck is expected to involve aircraft technicians. While there is no federal age limit for aircraft mechanics, Gebo said 40% to 50% of United’s technicians are already eligible to retire under the airline’s guidelines.
The tight labor market is causing United to offer higher wages for non-union jobs, Gebo said, and the airline faces higher rates in contracts it is negotiating with pilots and other union workers.
United said 3,800 of its new jobs this year will be in Chicago, where the company is headquartered and runs a big operation at O’Hare International Airport. Airline executives said they will add another 2,300 in Denver, 2,100 in Houston, 2,000 in Newark, New Jersey, and 1,600 in San Francisco. United has hub airports in each of those cities.
As some U.S. hotels hung on to practices they adopted during the early stages of the coronavirus pandemic — such as eliminating daily room cleanings — the number of hotel housekeepers fell by more than 102,000 last year from prepandemic levels, new data show.
The total number of hotel housekeeping jobs as of May 2022 was 364,990, a 22% decline from the total of 467,270 such positions during the same period in 2019, according to numbers released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Lyft is preparing to lay off hundreds of employees just days after new CEO David Risher took the helm of the ride-hailing service. It’s the latest in a series of layoffs that have rocked the once high-flying technology industry.
In a blog post Friday, Risher told employees the company would “significantly reduce” the workforce as part of restructuring. Risher, a former Amazon executive, said the cuts were aimed at making Lyft a “faster, flatter company where everyone is closer to our riders and drivers.”
“I own this decision, and understand that it comes at an enormous cost,” Risher continued. “We’re not just talking about team members; we’re talking about relationships with people who’ve worked (and played) together, sometimes for years.” The note came at end of his first week as Lyft’s CEO.
Employees will find out if they’re keeping their jobs by Thursday, April 27, Risher said. Those laid off will get at least 10 weeks’ severance pay and health insurance coverage through the end of October, according to the post.
The Wall Street Journal reported that at least 1,200 positions, or more than 30% of Lyft’s staff, would be cut, citing unnamed sources. These include sofware engineers, product managers and other white-collar workers across the U.S., since Lyft doesn’t count its drivers as employees.
A Lyft spokesperson declined to confirm the size of the cuts.
“David has made clear to the company that his focus is on creating a great and affordable experience for riders and improving drivers’ earnings,” the spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News. “To do so requires that we reduce our costs and structure our company so that our leaders are closer to riders and drivers.”
Latest cuts
The planned layoffs are the second round of cuts for Lyft in the current downturn, after the company shed 700 jobs, or about 13% of its workforce, in November.
Risher was a Lyft board member before being recruited to replace co-founders Logan Green and John Zimmer, who stepped down from leadesrhip roles earlier this month. In an interview with The Associated Press shortly after his hiring was announced, Risher cited expense control as one of his top priorities.
By ensuring Lyft is “super efficient,” Risher said the company would be in a better position to lower its fares to lure back passengers who had shifted to using Uber more frequently because that service was offering lower prices for the same trips.
It was a theme Risher emphasized again in his Friday email explaining why he decided to slash the payroll, which doesn’t include Lyft’s drivers — a group that is classified as independent contractors.
“We need to bring our costs down to deliver affordable rides, compelling earnings for drivers, and profitable growth,” Risher wrote.
Losing ground to Uber
Lyft has been struggling to turn a profit ever since the pandemic, when fewer customers were traveling but more were ordering items online. Unlike competitor Uber, Lyft never expanded beyond ride-hailing into deliveries, and it restricted its business to North America.
During the past year, it has become even clearer that consumers fell out of the Lyft habit as Uber’s ridership bounced back to pre-pandemic levels and Lyft’s losses mounted, causing its stock to plunge by 68%.
Lyft’s stock rose 6% on Friday to about $10.44 after the layoffs were announced.
Recurring waves of layoffs are emerging as a new phenomenon in the tech industry, reversing more than a decade of mostly unbridled growth.
Both Facebook owner Meta Platforms and e-commerce giant Amazon have gone through two rounds of major layoffs during the past year. Pandemic-fueled demand for digital services and products resulted in hiring sprees that they and other tech companies began to regret as the COVID-19 threat waned and growth tapered off.
In Rome this month, Cindy McCain started her new job as executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme, an organization working in 123 countries with the ambitious goal of ending world hunger. She talks with correspondent Seth Doane about the increased political and logistical challenges of feeding the world’s neediest, a task made more critical by the pandemic and war in Ukraine; and about the advice she continues to carry with her from her husband, the late Sen. John McCain.
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April 11, 2023 – The 30-second commercial, part of the government’s We Can Do This campaign, shows everyday people going about their lives, then reminds them that, “Because COVID is still out there and so are you,” it might be time to update your vaccine.
But in real life, the message that COVID-19 is still a major concern is muffled if not absent for many. Many data tracking sources, both federal and others, are no longer reporting, as often, the number of COVID cases, hospitalizations, and deaths.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in February stopped updating its public COVID data site, instead directing all queries to the CDC, which itself has been updating only weekly instead of daily since last year.
Nongovernmental sources, such as John Hopkins University, stopped reporting pandemic data in March, The New York Times also ended its COVID data-gathering project last month, stating that “the comprehensive real-time reporting that The Times has prioritized is no longer possible.” It will rely on reporting weekly CDC data moving forward.
Along with the tracking sites, masking and social distancing mandates have mostly disappeared. President Joe Biden signed a bipartisan bill on Monday that ended the national emergency for COVID. While some programs will stay in place for now, such as free vaccines, treatments, and tests, that too will go away when the federal public health emergency expires on May 11. The HHS already has issued its transition roadmap.
Many Americans, meanwhile, are still on the fence about the pandemic. A Gallup poll from March shows that about half of the American public says it’s over, and about half disagree.
Are we closing up shop on COVID-19 too soon, or is it time? Not surprisingly, experts don’t agree. Some say the pandemic is now endemic – which broadly means the virus and its patterns are predictable and steady in designated regions – and that it’s critical to catch up on health needs neglected during the pandemic, such as screenings and other vaccinations
But others don’t think it’s reached that stage yet, saying that we are letting our guard down too soon and we can’t be blind to the possibility of another strong variant – or pandemic – emerging. Surveillance must continue, not decline, and be improved.
Time to Move On?
In its transition roadmap released in February, the HHS notes that daily COVID reported cases are down over 90%, compared to the peak of the Omicron surge at the end of January 2022; deaths have declined by over 80%; and new hospitalizations due to COVID have dropped by nearly 80%.
It is time to move on, said Ali Mokdad, PhD, a professor and chief strategy officer of population health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
“Many people were delaying a lot of medical care, because they were afraid” during COVID’s height, he said, explaining that elective surgeries were postponed, prenatal care went down, as did screenings for blood pressure and diabetes.
His institute was tracking COVID projections every week but stopped in December.
As for emerging variants, “we haven’t seen a variant that scares us since Omicron” in November 2021, said Mokdad, who agrees that COVID is endemic now. The subvariants that followed it are very similar, and the current vaccines are working.
“We can move on, but we cannot drop the ball on keeping an eye on the genetic sequencing of the virus,” he said. That will enable quick identification of new variants.
If a worrisome new variant does surface, Mokdad said, certain locations and resources will be able to gear up quickly, while others won’t be as fast, but overall the U.S. is in a much better position now.
Amesh Adalja, MD, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security in Baltimore, also believes the pandemic phase is behind us
“This can’t be an emergency in perpetuity,” he said “Just because something is not a pandemic [anymore] does not mean that all activities related to it cease.”
COVID is highly unlikely to overwhelm hospitals again, and that was the main reason for the emergency declaration, he said.
“It’s not all or none — collapsing COVID-related [monitoring] activities into the routine monitoring that is done for other infectious disease should be seen as an achievement in taming the virus,” he said.
Not Endemic Yet
Closing up shop too early could mean we are blindsided, said Rajendram Rajnarayanan, PhD, an assistant dean of research and associate professor at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro.
Already, he said, large labs have closed or scaled down as testing demand has declined, and many centers that offered community testing have also closed. Plus, home test results are often not reported.
Continued monitoring is key, he said. “You have to maintain a base level of sequencing for new variants,” he said. “Right now, the variant that is ‘top dog’ in the world is XBB.1.16.”
That’s an Omicron subvariant that the World Health Organization is currently keeping its eye on, according to a media briefing on March 29. There are about 800 sequences of it from 22 countries, mostly India, and it’s been in circulation a few months.
Rajnarayanan said he’s not overly worried about this variant, but surveillance must continue. His own breakdown of XBB.1.16 found the subvariant in 27 countries, including the U.S., as of April 10.
Ideally, Rajnarayanan would suggest four areas to keep focusing on, moving forward:
Active, random surveillance for new variants, especially in hot spots
Hospital surveillance and surveillance of long-term care, especially in congregate settings where people can more easily spread the virus
Surveillance of animals such as mink and deer, because these animals can not only pick up the virus, but the virus can mutate in the animals, which could then transmit it back to people
With less testing, baseline surveillance for new variants has declined. The other three surveillance areas need improvement, too, he said, as the reporting is often delayed.
Continued surveillance is crucial, agreed Katelyn Jetelina, PhD, an epidemiologist and data scientist who publishes a newsletter, Your Local Epidemiologist, updating developments in COVID and other pressing health issues.
“It’s a bit ironic to have a date for the end of a public health emergency; viruses don’t care about calendars,” said Jetelina, who is also director of population health analytics for the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. “COVID-19 is still going to be here, it’s still going to mutate,” she said, and still cause grief for those affected. “I’m most concerned about our ability to track the virus. It’s not clear what surveillance we will still have in the states and around the globe.”
For surveillance, she calls wastewater monitoring “the lowest-hanging fruit.” That’s because it “is not based on bias testing and has the potential to help with other outbreaks, too.” Hospitalization data is also essential, she said, as that information is the basis for public health decisions on updated vaccines and other protective measures.
While Jetelina is hopeful that COVID will someday be universally viewed as endemic, with predictable seasonal patterns, “I don’t think we are there yet. We still need to approach this virus with humility; that’s at least what I will continue to do.”
Rajnarayanan agreed that the pandemic has not yet reached endemic phase, though the situation is much improved. “Our vaccines are still protecting us from severe disease and hospitalization, and [the antiviral drug] Paxlovid is a great tool that works.”
Keeping Tabs
While some data tracking has been eliminated, not all has, or will be. The CDC, as mentioned, continues to post cases, deaths, and a daily average of new hospital admissions weekly. The World Health Organization’s dashboard tracks deaths, cases, and vaccine doses globally.
In March, the WHO updated its working definitions and tracking system for SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern and variants of interest, with goals of evaluating the sublineages independently and to classify new variants more clearly when that’s needed.
Some public companies are staying vigilant. The drugstore chain Walgreens said it plans to maintain its COVID-19 Index, which launched in January 2022.
“Data regarding spread of variants is important to our understanding of viral transmission and, as new variants emerge, it will be critical to continue to track this information quickly to predict which communities are most at risk,” Anita Patel, PharmD, vice president of pharmacy services development for Walgreens, said in a statement.
The data also reinforces the importance of vaccinations and testing in helping to stop the spread of COVID-19, she said.
