WASHINGTON (AP) — The number of Americans
seeking unemployment benefits rose last week by the most in two months, to
898,000, a historically high number and evidence that layoffs remain a
hindrance to the economy’s recovery from the pandemic recession.
Confirmed coronavirus cases have been rising
again nationwide in the past month, likely causing more Americans to hold back
from eating out, shopping and engaging in other commerce. Cases have spiked in
Wisconsin, for example, prompting renewed restrictions on business in Milwaukee
and Madison.
Across the country, applications for
unemployment aid are rising while negotiations over a new stimulus package
between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin remain
mired in a stalemate.
“Further recovery looks to have stalled out,”
said AnnElizabeth Konkel, an economist at Indeed. “Holiday hiring is sluggish,
and many businesses need to make significant changes to ride out the colder
months.”
October
15, 20207:13
PM By David
Lawder , Rodrigo Campos
WASHINGTON/NEW
YORK (Reuters) - Strong international cooperation on COVID-19 vaccines could
speed up the world economic recovery and add $9 trillion (6.9 trillion pounds)
to global income by 2025, International Monetary Fund Managing Director
Kristalina Georgieva said on Thursday.
Speaking at a news conference after a meeting of the IMF’s steering
committee, Georgieva also called on the United States and China to keep up
strong economic stimulus that could help boost a global recovery.
She emphasized the need for vaccines to be distributed evenly across the
world in both developing countries and wealthy nations, to boost confidence in
travel, investment, trade and other activities.
“If we may make fast progress everywhere, we could speed up the
recovery. And we can add almost $9 trillion to global income by 2025, and that
in turn could help narrow the income gap between richer and poorer nations,”
Georgieva said.
“We need strong international cooperation and this is most urgent today
for vaccine development and distribution,” she said.
Equitable and affordable access to COVID-19 therapeutics and vaccines
globally will be key to avoiding long lasting scars on the world economy, the
IMF’s International Monetary and Financial Committee said in its statement.
Georgieva also said she had “no doubt” that the U.S. Congress and the
White House would ultimately agree on another spending package but was
uncertain about the timing. Some $3 trillion in U.S. stimulus spending earlier
this year “has been an important positive impulse and we would like to see how
it would be continued again,” she said.
----
The G20 on Wednesday approved a six-month extension to
mid-2021 of the Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) that freezes official
bilateral debt payments, and said they would consider a further six-month
extension in April. But private creditors and lenders outside the Paris Club
are not fully participating.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-imf-worldbank-stimulus/vaccine-cooperation-recovery-could-boost-global-income-9-trillion-by-2025-imf-chief-says-idUKKBN2702P7
Finally, Excel Spreadsheets. How Public Health England
lost its Covid-19 test results.
Meet the Excel warriors saving
the world from spreadsheet disaster Spreadsheets run the world. When they break, governments and
companies turn to an elite group of experts to save the day
14 October 2020
David Lyford-Smith is an expert at solving spreadsheet mysteries.
Once, in a previous job, he was sent a payroll form to look over for a new
starter. It had the number 40,335 in a random box, and payroll wasn’t clear why
it was there. “So they assumed it was a joining bonus for the employee and drew
up a draft pay slip with a £40,335 bonus,” he says. But, when it comes to
spreadsheets, assumptions can be costly.
Lyford-Smith isn’t just a spreadsheet enthusiast. He’s the
technical manager for the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and
Wales (ICAEW), running its Excel community group — and as such has always been
suspicious of numbers in that range. “That’s how Excel stores dates, as serial
numbers,” he says. He was right: that wasn’t a generous signing bonus, but the
new hire’s starting date.
Lyford-Smith is part of a community of accountants, auditors and Excel
power users who have joined forces in a quiet battle against illogical formulas,
copy-and-paste errors, and structural chaos that cause data carnage.
Last week, the government stumbled into its own spreadsheet
nightmare when it admitted contact-tracing efforts were stymied by a simple
data processing mistake. They’re not the first to fall victim to the curse of
Excel – and they won’t be the last either. Last year, Canadian marijuana grower
Canopy Growth had
to correct its quarterly earnings after incorrectly posting a £40 million
loss — the real figure was £88m, miscalculated by a formula error. The
company’s stock fell two per cent. Boeing
leaked employees’ personal data in a hidden spreadsheet column. An
investment bank analysis of Tesla’s purchase of Solar City undervalued the
company by $400m after double
counting its debt in a spreadsheet . These may be egregious errors, but they
are hardly uncommon.
Research suggests more than 90 per cent of spreadsheets
have errors , and half of spreadsheet models used in large businesses have “material defects” . Given
some 750 million people use Excel globally, there are plenty of errors needing
attention. One prominent researcher
calls spreadsheets the dark matter of corporate IT. And that’s why people like
Lyford-Smith have become defenders of the spreadsheet, mitigating the risks by
fixing everyone else’s mistakes.
They’re an organised bunch, which is perhaps no surprise for
spreadsheet specialists. The European
Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group (EUSpRig) runs an annual conference to
gather research (cancelled this year in favour of a webinar series), and
collates best practice, training materials, and horror stories on its website —
and there’s also a Yahoo Groups mailing list, where members offer tips and
tricks, share links to resources and pick apart press coverage of the contact
tracing debacle. In short, they can’t figure out what the real problem was
because the reporting is so disjointed and unclear. One popular share was a YouTube
clip of a satirical Spreadsheet
News Network from Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths — as one member posted, it
“made my day”.
---- The
spreadsheet defenders who guard against corporate chaos come from myriad
backgrounds, but many get their start in accountancy and auditing — professions
that make heavy use of Excel. Such work is particularly common in two settings:
in-house at financial and insurance giants, who have regulatory requirements
around risk management, as well as consultancies and accounting firms.
More
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/spreadsheet-excel-errors?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
Winter Watch .
The Arctic winter sea-ice expansion and
northern hemisphere snow cover. From around mid-October, the northern
hemisphere snow cover usually rapidly expands, while the Arctic ice gradually
expands back towards its winter maximum.
Over simplified, a rapid expansion of
both, especially if early, can be a sign of a harsher than normal arriving norther
hemisphere winter. Perhaps more so in 2020-2021 as we’re in the low of the
ending sunspot cycle, which possibly also influenced this year’s record
Atlantic hurricane season.
Adding to this year’s winter concerns,
a developing La Nina weather pattern in the Pacific. While the La Nina effect
on the winter weather of western Europe is weaker than that of an El Nino
pattern, which tends to make for a milder winter, a La Nina pattern tends to
make for a colder winter.
US National Ice
Center.
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/ims/
You know you’re getting old when the candles cost more than the
cake.
Bob Hope
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Oxford scientists develop five-minute
COVID-19 antigen test October 15,
202010:09 AM
LONDON (Reuters) - Scientists from Britain’s University of Oxford have
developed a rapid COVID-19 test able to identify the coronavirus in less than
five minutes, researchers said on Thursday, adding it could be used in mass
testing at airports and businesses.
The university said it hoped to start product development of the testing
device in early 2021 and have an approved device available six months
afterwards.
The device is able to detect the coronavirus and distinguish it from
other viruses with high accuracy, the researchers said in a pre-print study.
“Our method quickly detects intact virus particles,” said Professor
Achilles Kapanidis, at Oxford’s Department of Physics, adding that this meant
the test would be “simple, extremely rapid, and cost-effective”.
Rapid antigen tests are seen as key in rolling out mass-testing and
re-opening economies while the coronavirus is still circulating, and those that
are already in use are faster and cheaper but less accurate than existing
molecular PCR tests.
Siemens Healthineers on Wednesday announced the launch of a rapid
antigen test kit in Europe to detect coronavirus infections, but warned that
the industry may struggle to meet a surge in demand.
Although the Oxford platform will only be ready next year, the tests
could help manage the pandemic in time for next winter. Health officials have
warned that the world will need to live with coronavirus even if a vaccine is
developed.
“A significant concern for the upcoming winter months is the
unpredictable effects of co-circulation of SARS-CoV-2 with other seasonal
respiratory viruses,” said Dr Nicole Robb, of Warwick Medical School.
“We have shown that our assay (test) can reliably distinguish between different
viruses in clinical samples, a development that offers a crucial advantage in
the next phase of the pandemic.”
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-britain-antigen/oxford-scientists-develop-5-minute-covid-19-antigen-test-idUKKBN270146?il=0
New scoring system identifies
patients at risk for severe COVID-19 Oct. 14, 2020 /
5:05 PM
Oct. 14 (UPI) -- Irish researchers say they have developed a scoring system that can
accurately predict which patients will suffer from severe COVID-19 , they
announced Wednesday.
Researchers at Royal College of Surgeons Ireland University
of Medicine and Health Sciences reported the findings in EBioMedicine .
The scoring system, called the Dublin-Boston score, is designed
to enable clinicians to make more informed decisions when identifying patients
who may benefit from steroids and other treatments after being infected.
The Dublin-Boston score can accurately predict how severe
the infection will be on day seven after measuring the patient's blood for the
first four days, the researchers said.
"The score is easily calculated and can be applied to
all hospitalized COVID-19 patients," study co-author Dr. Gerry McElvaney
said in a statement.
"More informed prognosis could help determine when to
escalate or de-escalate care, a key component of the efficient allocation of
resources during the current pandemic," said McElvaney, a consultant at
Beaumont Hospital in Dublin and a professor of medicine at the Royal College of
Surgeons Ireland.
Developed in conjunction with researchers at Harvard
University and Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, the scoring system works
by checking patients' blood for levels of two molecules that "send
messages" to the body's immune system and help it control inflammation.
RELATED Dexamethasone,
other corticosteroids help hospitalized COVID-19 patients
One of these molecules, interleukin-6, is pro-inflammatory,
and the other, interleukin-10, is anti-inflammatory -- and the levels of both
are altered in severe COVID-19 patients.
Based on changes in the ratio of these two molecules over
time, the researchers developed a point system in which each one-point increase
is associated with a 5.6-fold increased risk for serious illness, the
researchers said.
"The score may also have a role in evaluating whether
new therapies designed to decrease inflammation in COVID-19 actually provide
benefit," McElvaney said.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/10/14/New-scoring-system-identifies-patients-at-risk-for-severe-COVID-19/2041602701433/
Blood type may predict risk for
severe COVID-19, studies say Oct. 14, 2020 /
1:08 PM
There's more evidence that blood type may affect a person's
risk for COVID-19
and severe illness from the disease.
The findings are reported in a pair of studies published
Oct. 14 in the journal Blood Advances.
In one, researchers compared more than 473,000 people in
Denmark with COVID-19 to more than 2.2 million people in the general
population.
Among the COVID-19 patients, there was a lower percentage
of people with blood type O and higher percentages of those with with types A,
B and AB.
RELATED Study:
COVID-19 patients produce 'high-quality' antibodies up to 7 months after
recovery
The findings suggest that people with A, B or AB blood may
be more likely to be infected with COVID-19 than people with type O blood.
Infection rates were similar among people with types A, B and AB blood.
The other study included 95 critically ill COVID-19
patients hospitalized in Canada. Patients with type A or AB blood were more
likely to require mechanical ventilation, suggesting that they had greater
rates of lung injury from COVID-19.
More patients with type A and AB blood required dialysis
for kidney failure, the study added.
RELATED Pandemic-related
job cuts have led 14.6M in U.S. to lose insurance
The results suggest that COVID-19 patients with A and AB
blood types may have an increased risk of organ dysfunction or failure than
those with type O or B blood, according to the researchers.
They also found that while people with blood types A and AB
didn't have longer overall hospital stays than those with types O or B, on
average, they were in intensive care longer, which may indicate more severe
COVID-19.
"The unique part of our study is our focus on the
severity effect of blood type on COVID-19. We observed this lung and kidney
damage, and in future studies, we will want to tease out the effect of blood
group and COVID-19 on other vital organs," said study author Dr. Mypinder
Sekhon, a clinical instructor in the Division of Critical Care Medicine at the
University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
More
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/10/14/Blood-type-may-predict-risk-for-severe-COVID-19-studies-say/5361602693300/
Czechs to build field hospitals
as COVID-19 cases soar October 15,
20208:59 AM
PRAGUE (Reuters) - The Czech Republic will start building capacity for
COVID-19 patients outside of hospitals, government officials said on Thursday,
as the country battles the fastest rate of infections in Europe.
Interior Minister Jan Hamacek told CTK news agency the army would start
building an area for 500 hospital beds at a fairground in Prague from Saturday.
Both military and healthcare personnel will staff the makeshift
hospital, Hamacek told Czech television.
COVID-19 infections have nearly doubled in October alone to a total so
far of 139,290 in a country with a population of 10.7 million. The Health
Ministry reported 9,544 new COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, its highest one-day
tally so far.
Prime Minister Andrej Babis told reporters it was necessary to start
building extra capacity and that the state would purchase 4,000 beds from
hospital and nursing bed maker LINET
“We don’t have time, the outlook is not good. These numbers are
catastrophic,” Babis said.
Earlier this week, the government shuttered bars, restaurants and clubs
and shifted schools to distance learning as it imposed new measures to curb the
fast spread of new infections.
The number of hospitalisations has risen 161% in October to 2,678, with
518 patientes in intensive care. Deaths have climbed to 1,172, up 75% this
month.
The fast rise in cases has put strain on hospitals, which are converting
general wards into COVID-19 units and cancelling non-urgent procedures to cope.
The number hospitalised is six times the peak seen during the first wave of the
virus.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-czech/czechs-to-build-field-hospitals-as-covid-19-cases-soar-idUKKBN2700XB
Germany's confirmed coronavirus
cases rise by 7,334 to 348,557: RKI October 16, 20204:00
AM
BERLIN (Reuters) - The number of confirmed coronavirus cases in Germany increased
by 7,334 to 348,557, data from the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) for infectious
diseases showed on Friday.
The death toll rose by 24 to 9,734, the RKI data showed.
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-germany-cases/germanys-confirmed-coronavirus-cases-rise-by-7334-to-348557-rki-idUKKBN2710C4?il=0
Next, some vaccine links
kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most
informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.
World
Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccines . https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines
NY
Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
Stanford
Website . https://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132
Regulatory
Focus COVID-19 vaccine tracker . https://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker
Some other useful Covid links.
Johns Hopkins Coronavirus
resource centre
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
Rt Covid-19
https://rt.live/
Covid19info.live
https://wuflu.live/
Centers for Disease Control
Coronavirus
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html
When I was a boy the Dead Sea was only sick.
George Burns
Technology Update.
With events happening
fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section.
Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC
energy mankind’s future from the 21st century onwards.
Scientists create the world's
first room temperature superconductor By Nick Lavars October 14, 2020
Since its discovery more than a century ago, superconductivity has come
to play a powerful role in many modern day technologies, such as maglev trains
and MRI scans, but its utility has been limited by the need for extremely cool
operating temperatures. Scientists are now claiming a big breakthrough in this
area, creating what they say is the first material capable of superconductivity
at room temperature.
The work was led by Ranga Dias at the University of Rochester, and aims
to overcome one of the major roadblocks in expanding the uses of
superconductive materials. These materials exhibit no electrical resistance and
expel a magnetic field, but because they typically only function at
temperatures below 140 °C (220 °F), they require expensive equipment to
maintain.
“Because of the limits of low temperature, materials with such
extraordinary properties have not quite transformed the world in the way that
many might have imagined," says Dias. "However, our discovery will
break down these barriers and open the door to many potential
applications."
Dias describes room temperature superconductivity as the “holy grail” of
condensed matter physics, and in research published this week his team has
taken a significant step towards that goal. Researchers have spent years
experimenting with different materials in pursuit of room temperature
superconductors, such as copper oxides and iron-based chemicals, but it was
with widely abundant hydrogen that Dias and his team found success.
“To have a high temperature superconductor, you want stronger bonds and
light elements,” he says. “Those are the two very basic criteria. Hydrogen is
the lightest material, and the hydrogen bond is one of the strongest.”
One downside of this approach is that pure hydrogen can only be
converted to a metallic state at extremely high pressures, so the team instead
turned to alternative materials that are rich in hydrogen, but maintain the
desired superconductive properties and can be metalized at far lower pressures.
The winning formula involves a mix of hydrogen, carbon and sulfur, which
was used to synthesize organic-derived carbonaceous sulfur hydride in
high-pressure research device called a diamond anvil cell. This carbonaceous
sulfur hydride demonstrated superconductivity at around 58 °F (14.5 °C), and at
pressures of around 39 million psi.
“We live in a semiconductor society, and with this kind of technology,
you can take society into a superconducting society where you’ll never need
things like batteries again,” says Ashkan Salamat of the University of Nevada
Las Vegas, a co-author of the research.
Some of the applications for this type of material include more
efficient power grids that transmit electricity without great losses caused by
resistance in today’s wires, more powerful maglev trains or other futuristic
transport solutions, and improved medical imaging technologies.
More
https://newatlas.com/materials/room-temperature-superconductor-world-first/?utm_source=New+Atlas+Subscribers&utm_campaign=d533b1867c-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2020_10_15_08_21&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_65b67362bd-d533b1867c-90625829
US Politics Betting Odds https://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics
Another weekend, and
just over two weeks to go for US voters to decide which old age pensioner they
want to run the USA for the next four years. To the outside world, the USA’s
fascination with OAP Presidents, Senators and judges, is "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma." Oh well, what could
possibly go wrong with 70+ year olds randomly pulling and pushing on the levers
of state? Have a great weekend everyone.
They’re so old that when they order a three-minute egg, they ask
for the money up front.
With apologies to George
Burns
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