December
2, 2020 1:15 AM By Jonathan
Cable
LONDON
(Reuters) - Britain’s economy will contract this quarter and it will take at
least two years for GDP to reach pre-COVID-19 levels, according to a Reuters
poll which also found London would agree a free-trade deal with the European
Union.
As a second wave of the coronavirus swept across Europe, Britain, which
has suffered the continent’s highest death toll from the pandemic, reimposed
tough restrictions on economic activity.
Those lockdowns have particularly hurt its huge services industry as
hospitality venues were forced to close and shops to shut their doors.
After a roaring third quarter in which it grew 15.5%, the economy is
likely to contract 2.7% this quarter, deeper than the 2.5% contraction
pencilled in last month, the poll found. Next quarter it will grow 1.7%.
“The scope for a swift bounce back in the first quarter is muted,” said
Stefan Koopman at Rabobank.
“Even when the vaccine is rolled out relatively quickly and
successfully, restrictions will largely remain in place and firms and
households will have to adjust to the new trading relationship with the EU.”
After the historic 19.8% contraction in the second quarter the economy
is expected to shrink 11.2% this year and expand 5.3% in 2021, little changed
from last month, the Nov. 26-Dec. 1 poll of around 60 economists found.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-economy-poll/uk-economy-wont-reach-pre-covid-19-level-for-at-least-two-years-reuters-poll-idUKKBN28C04A
The Covid
Pandemic Could Cut Business Travel by 36%—Permanently Between 19% and 36% of all business trips could disappear,
given efficiencies developed during the lockdown, our Middle Seat columnist and
airline experts estimate Dec. 1, 2020 8:48 am ET
Even if Covid-19 vaccines become widespread, business
travel is likely to be changed by the pandemic. Travel budgets have been
slashed and some meetings will remain virtual; conferences and conventions may
be crimped.
But by how much? It matters not only
to airlines and their employees but also their customers—travelers. That’s
because higher fares paid by corporate customers actually subsidize cheap fares
for vacationers. What’s more, less business travel means that airlines schedule
fewer flights on business routes, like trips to New York, Chicago, London and
Tokyo. That means fewer seats for leisure travelers.
Estimates of permanent change in the
airline industry have ranged from the CEOs of American, United and Delta all
saying business travel will come roaring back in full, though it may take a few
years, to observers like Bill
Gates who recently suggested
Guesses aside, a look at data suggests between 19% and 36%
of all air trips are likely to be lost, based on a business-travel analysis I
worked on with three airline-industry veterans.
“Brick-and-mortar retail has been
devastated by ecommerce and I think this is a parallel story,’’ says Jay
Sorensen, president of IdeaWorks, an airline-industry consulting firm and a
member of our group. The others are Ben Baldanza, former chief executive of
Spirit Airlines and a current board member of JetBlue , and consumer advocate Charlie Leocha, president
of Travelers United, a passenger-advocacy organization.
We started meeting weekly online
when the pandemic began. We compared notes on our own trips and commiserated on
the abrupt travel-industry depression. And we became frustrated with the lack
of good data on how the Covid-19 pandemic would affect airlines and travel.
We compiled data on business travel
from disparate sources and broke down the market by travel purposes, such as
sales, technical support or conventions and trade shows. That’s not how the
market is usually measured. Most data on business travel looks at how much auto
makers or universities or other industries spend on trips. Then we estimated
the minimum and maximum percentage of trips that might be lost to technology in
each category. Some purposes are more easily replaced by technology than
others. Sales calls are more likely to fully return to in-person meetings
because of the competitive nature of winning business. But internal company
training sessions could become virtual rather than in-person. Multiplying the
estimates of lost trips by the share of business travel in each of our seven
categories gave an overall estimate of trips lost: 19% to 36%.
Business travel has a
disproportionate effect on airlines: The top 10% to 15% of customers at global
carriers typically account for about 40% of revenue.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-covid-pandemic-could-cut-business-travel-by-36permanently-11606830490?mod=mhp
In
better news for continental Europe’s winter fuel needs, Nord Stream 2 will now
be finished. Sadly only in time for winter 2021-2022. Germany follows President
Trumps “America first” lead and put Germany (and continental Europe) first.
Germany Says Nord Stream 2 Picked
a Ship to Finish Gas Pipeline By Vanessa
Dezem and Dina
Khrennikova December 1, 2020, 12:24 PM GMT
·
·
Nord Stream 2 has picked a ship to finish laying sections
of its pipeline under the Baltic Sea, a German agency overseeing the work said,
indicating the Russian company has found a way to get around U.S. sanctions
that have halted the project.
Germany’s Maritime and Hydrographic Agency said on
Tuesday “it assumes” the company building the natural gas pipeline will use
the Akademik Cherskiy. If confirmed, it would end the mystery about how the
Russia’s gas export company Gazprom PJSC will finish work after Switzerland’s
AllSeas Group SA pulled out of the project last year.
More
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/germany-says-nord-stream-2-picked-a-ship-to-finish-gas-pipeline?srnd=premium-europe
Finally, was China just
incompetent or was there a Covid-19 cover up? Perhaps both?
The Wuhan files Leaked documents
reveal China's mishandling of the early stages of Covid-19 Exclusive
by Nick Paton Walsh , CNN Updated 0005 GMT (0805 HKT) December 1,
2020
----
That same day, Chinese authorities reported 2,478 new confirmed cases --
raising the total global number to more than 40,000, with fewer than 400 cases
occurring outside of mainland China. Yet CNN can now reveal how official
documents circulated internally show that this was only part of the picture.
In a report marked "internal document, please keep
confidential," local health authorities in the province of Hubei, where
the virus was first detected, list a total of 5,918 newly detected cases on
February 10, more than double the official public number of confirmed cases,
breaking down the total into a variety of subcategories. This larger figure was
never fully revealed at that time, as China's accounting system seemed, in the
tumult of the early weeks of the pandemic, to downplay the severity of the
outbreak.
The previously undisclosed figure is among a string of revelations
contained within 117 pages of leaked documents from the Hubei Provincial Center
for Disease Control and Prevention, shared with and verified by CNN.
Taken together, the documents amount to the most significant leak from
inside China since the beginning of the pandemic and provide the first clear
window into what local authorities knew internally and when.
The Chinese government has steadfastly rejected accusations made by the
United States and other Western governments that it deliberately concealed
information relating to the virus, maintaining that it has been upfront since
the beginning of the outbreak. However, though the documents provide no
evidence of a deliberate attempt to obfuscate findings, they do reveal numerous
inconsistencies in what authorities believed to be happening and what was
revealed to the public.
The documents, which cover an incomplete period between October 2019 and
April this year, reveal what appears to be an inflexible health care system
constrained by top-down bureaucracy and rigid procedures that were ill-equipped
to deal with the emerging crisis. At several critical moments in the early
phase of the pandemic, the documents show evidence of clear missteps and point
to a pattern of institutional failings.
One of the more striking data points concerns the slowness with which
local Covid-19 patients were diagnosed. Even as authorities in Hubei presented
their handling of the initial outbreak to the public as efficient and
transparent, the documents show that local health officials were reliant on
flawed testing and reporting mechanisms. A report in the documents from early
March says the average time between the onset of symptoms to confirmed
diagnosis was 23.3 days, which experts have told CNN would have significantly
hampered steps to both monitor and combat the disease.
---- The files were
presented to CNN by a whistleblower who requested anonymity. They said they
worked inside the Chinese healthcare system, and were a patriot motivated to
expose a truth that had been censored, and honor colleagues who had also spoken
out. It is unclear how the documents were obtained or why specific papers were
selected.
The documents have been verified by six independent experts who examined
the veracity of their content on behalf of CNN. One expert with close ties to
China reported seeing some of the reports during confidential research earlier
this year. A European security official with knowledge of Chinese internal
documents and procedures also confirmed to CNN that the files were genuine.
More
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/11/30/asia/wuhan-china-covid-intl/index.html
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 northern
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.
Update: we seem to have started new sunspot cycle 25 this month ,
though it’s unlikely to affect 2020-2021s coming winter.
Northern Eur-Asia turned snowy fast in
mid-October. The Arctic sea ice
expansion was slow, and from a very low level at the end of September, but with
the vastly expanded snow cover, sea ice formation sped up.
With the Laptev sea ice virtually back
to normal at the end of November I’m
starting to think that it will likely be a normal to slightly warmer winter
ahead for western Europe.
The failure of the Kara Sea ice to
return to normal, leads me to bet on a warmer western European winter ahead.
Interestingly, the Hudson’s Bay sea ice is far above normal this season.
Arctic
and Antarctic Sea Ice.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
https://www.natice.noaa.gov/pub/ims/ims_gif/DATA/cursnow_asiaeurope.gif
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all
is vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1:2. King James Version.
Covid-19 Corner This
section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Why
is the world rushing to vaccinate millions, if not hundreds of millions of
trusting, desperate, but gullible people, with vaccines on the strength just
three self serving press releases? Where is the peer reviewed science. Where
are the long term studies in animals and people? What about the court case against the Astra-Oxford vaccine in India.
Vaccinate in haste repent at leisure?
U.S. plans for first COVID
vaccines as pandemic deaths surge again
December
1, 2020 1:04 PM
By Julie
Steenhuysen , Doina Chiacu
WASHINGTON
(Reuters) - Top U.S. health officials announced plans on Tuesday to begin
vaccinating Americans against the coronavirus as early as mid-December, as
nationwide deaths hit the highest number for a single day in six months.
Some 20 million people could be inoculated against COVID-19 by the end
of 2020 and most Americans will have access to highly effective vaccines by
mid-2021, the chief adviser of President Donald Trump’s Operation Warp Speed
program said.
“Within 24 hours, maybe at most 36 to 48 hours, from the approval, the
vaccine can be in people’s arms,” Moncef Slaoui, a former GlaxoSmithKline
executive who is overseeing the vaccine portion of the U.S. program, said at an
event conducted by The Washington Post newspaper.
His comments came on the same day that another 2,295 fatalities
nationwide were linked to COVID-19, even before California, the most populous
U.S. state, reported full results. Officials in several states said numbers
were higher in part due to a backlog from the Thanksgiving holiday.
A statement from the public health director for Los Angeles County
highlighted the ravages of the surging pandemic. Barbara Ferrer, the public
health director, said that while Tuesday was the county’s “worst day thus far”
of the pandemic, “...it will likely not remain the worst day of the pandemic in
Los Angeles County. That will be tomorrow, and the next day and the next as
cases, hospitalizations and deaths increase.”
Health officials pleaded with Americans to stick with coronavirus
restrictions even with a vaccine in sight.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is moving to shorten
the length of self-quarantine recommended after potential exposure to the
coronavirus to 10 days, or seven days with a negative test, a federal
spokesperson said on Tuesday. The CDC currently recommends a 14-day quarantine
in order to curb the transmission of the virus.
Some 60 million to 70 million doses of
COVID-19 vaccine could be available per month beginning in January, after the
expected regulatory approval of products from Pfizer Inc and Moderna Inc,
Slaoui said.
More
https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-usa/u-s-plans-for-first-covid-vaccines-as-pandemic-deaths-surge-again-idUKKBN28B4ZP?il=0
U.S. Covid Cases Found as Early
as December 2019, Says Study Bloomberg News December 1, 2020, 8:36 AM GMT Updated on December 1, 2020,
8:44 AM GMT
Testing has found Covid-19 infections in the U.S. in
December 2019, according to a study , providing further evidence
indicating the coronavirus was spreading globally weeks before the first cases
were reported in China.
The study published Monday identified 106 infections from
7,389 blood samples collected from donors in nine U.S. states between Dec. 13
and Jan. 17. The samples, collected by the American Red Cross, were sent to the
U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for testing to detect if there
were antibodies against the virus.
“The findings of this report suggest that SARS-CoV-2
infections may have been present in the U.S. in December 2019, earlier than
previously recognized,” the paper said.
Reports of a mysterious pneumonia spreading in Wuhan,
China, first emerged in late December 2019. After multiplying rapidly
throughout the city in the following weeks, the disease spread across the
globe, with the first U.S. case emerging on Jan. 19.
The revelations in the paper by researchers from the CDC
reinforce the growing understanding that the coronavirus was silently
circulating worldwide earlier than known, and could re-ignite debate over the
origins of the pandemic.
It’s not the first evidence showing the virus could have
existed or infected people outside China before 2020. A patient
in France was found to have contracted the virus after being hospitalized
with flu-like symptoms at the end of December, contradicting official
statistics showing Covid-19 reached the country from people returning from
Wuhan at the end of January.
The CDC study indicated there were isolated infections in
the western part of the U.S. in mid-December. Antibodies were also found in
early January in other states before the virus was known to have been
introduced to those places.
The scientists indicated it’s unlikely that the antibodies
developed to curb other coronaviruses, as 84 samples were found to have neutralizing
activity specific to SARS-CoV-2.
They also noted it wasn’t possible to determine the
magnitude of infections on a state or national level based on the samples, or
whether the cases were locally transmitted or travel-related.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-01/covid-infections-found-in-u-s-in-2019-weeks-before-china-cases?srnd=premium-europe
Covid-19 Likely in U.S. in
Mid-December 2019, CDC Scientists Report New analysis of
blood donations finds virus was present on West Coast earlier than previously
believed
Nov. 30, 2020 7:27 pm ET
The new coronavirus infected people in the U.S. in mid-December 2019, a
few weeks before it was officially identified in China and about a month
earlier than public health authorities found the first U.S. case, according to
a government study published Monday.
The findings significantly strengthen evidence suggesting the virus was
spreading around the world well before public health authorities and
researchers became aware, upending initial thinking about how early and quickly
it emerged.
More
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-likely-in-u-s-in-mid-december-2019-cdc-scientists-report-11606782449
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
The Spectator https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national
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.
The Race To Crack Battery
Recycling—Before It’s Too Late Millions of EVs will soon hit the road, but
the world isn’t ready for their old batteries. A crop of startups wants to
crack this billion-dollar problem.
11.30.2020 07:00
AM
Every day, millions of lithium-ion batteries roll off the line at Tesla’s Gigafactory
in Sparks, Nevada. These cells, produced on site by Panasonic, are destined to
be bundled together by the thousands in the battery packs of new Teslas. But
not all the batteries are cut out for a life on the road. Panasonic ships
truckloads of cells that don’t pass their qualification tests to a facility in
Carson City, about a half hour’s drive south. This is the home of Redwood
Materials, a small company founded in 2017 with an ambition to become the
anti-Gigafactory, a place where batteries are cooked down into raw materials
that will serve as the grist for new cells.
Redwood is part of a wave of new startups racing to solve a
problem that doesn’t really exist yet: How to recycle the mountains of
batteries from electric vehicles that are past their prime. Over the past
decade, the world’s lithium-ion production capacity has increased tenfold to meet the growing demand for EVs. Now
vehicles from that first production wave are just beginning to reach the end of
their lifespan. This marks the beginning of a tsunami of spent batteries, which
will only get worse as more electric cars hit the road. The International
Energy Agency predicts an 800 percent increase in the number of EVs over
the next decade, each car packed with thousands of cells. The dirty secret of
the EV revolution is that it created an e-waste timebomb—and cracking
lithium-ion recycling is the only way to defuse it.
Redwood’s CEO and founder J. B. Straubel understands the
problem better than most. After all, he played a significant role in creating
it. Straubel is cofounder and, until last year, was the CTO at Tesla, a company
he joined when it was possible to count all of its employees on one hand.
During his time there, the company grew from a scrappy startup peddling sports
cars to the most
valuable auto manufacturer on the planet . Along the way, Tesla also became
one of the world’s largest battery producers. But the way Straubel sees it,
those batteries aren’t really a problem. “The major opportunity is to
think of this material for reuse and recovery,” he says. “With all these
batteries in circulation, it just seems super obvious that eventually we're
going to build a remanufacturing ecosystem.”
There
are two main ways to deactivate lithium-ion batteries. The most common
technique, called pyrometallurgy, involves burning them to remove unwanted
organic materials and plastics. This method leaves the recycler with just a
fraction of the original material—typically just the copper from current
collectors and nickel or cobalt from the cathode. A common pyro method, called
smelting, uses a furnace powered with fossil fuels, which isn’t great for the
environment, and it loses a lot of aluminum and lithium in the process. But it is
simple, and smelting factories that currently exist to process ore from the
mining industry are already able to handle batteries.
More
https://www.wired.com/story/the-race-to-crack-battery-recycling-before-its-too-late/?utm_source=pocket&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=pockethits
When Pope Pius VII agreed to come to Paris to officiate at
Napoleon's coronation, it was initially established that it would follow the
coronation liturgy in the Roman Pontifical. [4]
However, after the Pope's arrival, Napoleon persuaded the papal delegation to
allow the introduction of several French elements in the rite [5]
– such as the singing of the Veni Creator followed by the collect of
Pentecost for the monarch's entrance procession, the use of Chrism instead of
the Oil of Catechumens for the anointing (although the Roman anointing prayers
were used), placing the sacred oil on the head and hands rather than the right
arm and back of the neck, and the inclusion of several prayers and formulas
from the coronations of French kings, to bless the regalia as it was delivered.
In essence, French and Roman elements were combined into a new rite unique to
the occasion. [6]
Also, the special rite composed ad hoc allowed Napoleon to remain mostly
seated and not kneeling during the delivery of the regalia and during several
other ceremonies, and reduced his acceptance of the oath demanded by the Church
in the beginning of the liturgy to one word only.[ citation needed ]
Not wanting to be an Old
Regime monarch, Napoleon explained:
"To be a king is to inherit old ideas and genealogy. I don't want to
descend from anyone."
More
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronation_of_Napoleon_I
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