Suez Canal Still Blocked! Inflation. More Covid.

 Baltic Dry Index. 2172 -22 Brent Crude 62.67

Spot Gold 1728

Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000

Deaths 53,100

Coronavirus Cases 26/03/21 World 126,069,031

Deaths 2,767,376

Henley Royal Regatta (or Henley Regatta, its original name pre-dating Royal patronage) is a rowing event held annually on the River Thames by the town of Henley-on-Thames, England. It was established on 26 March 1839, as an afternoon event.

For once we don’t open with the gambling action in the global stock casinos. They’re due for a fall anyway.

Today we open with the growing disaster in the Suez Canal. With each day of closure roughly another 50 ships pile up at either end awaiting passage.

Pretty soon, real economic consequences will start piling up in Europe and much of Asia. Will it be enough to trigger a black swan stock casino event? 

Below, something no central bankster or spendthrift politician can fix. Two continent’s economies are now largely hostage to what happens next.

If shipping has to be rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, it’s anyone’s guess on how big a hit global supply chains will take.

Oil prices recover some ground on fears Suez blockage may last weeks

March 26, 2021 1:15 AM By Yuka Obayashi

TOKYO (Reuters) - Oil prices reversed a sharp sell-off a day earlier to rise 1% on Friday on mounting fears that it could take weeks to dislodge a giant container ship blocking the Suez Canal, which would squeeze supplies of crude and refined products.

Prices, however, were still headed for a third consecutive weekly loss, with the outlook for demand dented by fresh coronavirus lockdowns in Europe.

Brent crude was higher by 54 cents, or 0.9%, at $62.49 a barrel by 0432 GMT, after dropping 3.8% on Thursday.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude was up

65 cents, or 1.1%, at $59.21 a barrel, having tumbled 4.3% a day earlier.

Both benchmarks were on track for a weekly loss of about 3%, following a more than 6% decline last week.

The trapped container ship is blocking traffic in the Suez Canal, one of the world’s busiest shipping channels for oil and refined fuels, grain and other trade between Asia and Europe.

Officials stopped all ships entering the canal on Thursday, and a salvage company said the vessel may take weeks to free.

“Fears of supply tightness grew as the key Suez Canal remained blocked by the giant ship, outweighing concerns over weak demand due to lockdowns in Europe and Asia,” said Satoru Yoshida, a commodity analyst with Rakuten Securities.

Of the 39.2 million barrels per day (bpd) of total seaborne trade in crude in 2020, 1.74 million bpd went through the Suez Canal, according to tanker tracking firm Kpler. Additionally, 1.54 million bpd of refined oil products such as gasoline and diesel fuel flow through the canal, about 9% of global seaborne product trade, Kpler said.

Expectations that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and its allies, known as OPEC+, will likely maintain their lower production also supported prices, Nissan Securities researcher Yasushi Osada said.

The producer group is scheduled to meet on April 1 to decide on May supplies, and OPEC+ sources told Reuters they expected the producer group to broadly stick to current lower levels, as the outlook for demand has deteriorated due to new lockdowns in Europe.

Acting a week ahead of the OPEC+ meeting, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) has deepened crude oil supply cuts to Asian customers in June to 10%-15% from 5%-15% in May, several sources with knowledge of the matter said on Thursday.

Countries in Europe are renewing restrictions to curbthe spread of COVID-19, which will likely reduce fuel demand from the region. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has seen its biggest increase in coronavirus cases since January.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-global-oil/oil-prices-recover-some-ground-on-fears-suez-blockage-may-last-weeks-idUSKBN2BI03O?il=0

Africa Detour Isn’t Best Option Yet for Some Ships: Suez Update

By Ann Koh and Stephen Stapczynski

25 March 2021, 18:10 GMT Updated on 26 March 2021, 05:26 GMT

Shipping rates are surging as the blockage of the Suez Canal is wreaking havoc on global seaborne trade and making the long journey around Africa the only short-term alternative for many cargoes and commodities.

Ships Turn Toward Africa on Concerns Suez Blockage to Last Weeks

Some companies don’t see a two-week detour as a viable option just yet, but that’s likely to change if it becomes clear there will be an extended delay in freeing the Ever Given. Mark Ma, owner of China-based Seabay International Freight Forwarding Ltd., which has 20 to 30 containers waiting to cross the blocked canal, said that if traffic doesn’t resume in a week, “it will be horrible.”

The blockage is creating another setback for global supply chains already strained by the e-commerce boom linked to the pandemic. About 12% of global trade transits the canal that’s so strategic world powers have fought over it.

Key Highlights:

• Work since Tuesday to re-float the Ever Given has so far been unsuccessful, with tugs and diggers failing to budge the 400-meter long vessel
• 238 vessels were queued up Thursday in Egypt, up from 186 Wednesday, according to Bloomberg data

Cheap LNG Shipping Rates Ease Pain of Detours (12:37 p.m. HK)

Liquefied natural gas suppliers are beginning to send shipments around Africa, a journey that takes more time but -- given current charter rates -- isn’t that costly. Unlike oil tanker rates, prices for shipping LNG have remained subdued amid the crisis in Suez. A shift to milder temperatures in Europe and Asia has reduced gas demand, also curbing needs for tankers that ferry the fuel.

At least seven LNG vessels have diverted away from their intended paths through the Suez Canal due to its continued blockage, according to Kpler analyst Rebecca Chia. At least two shipments from the U.S. headed to Asia have changed course in the Atlantic toward South Africa, according to Bloomberg ship-tracking data.

Seabay Owner Says Week’s Delay Will Be ‘Horrible’ (12:23 p.m. HK)

Mark Ma, owner of Seabay International Freight Forwarding Ltd., a company in Shenzhen that handles Chinese goods sold on platforms such as Amazon.com Inc., said his company has 20 to 30 containers on the ships waiting to cross the blocked canal.

“If it can’t be resumed in a week, it will be horrible,” said Ma. “We will see freight fares spike again. The products are delayed, containers can’t return to China and we can’t deliver more goods.”

Detouring ships doesn’t seem like a viable option at the moment, due to risks of taking unfamiliar routes, limited supply to the crew and an extended shipment time. “What if the canal got cleared in 8-10 days? You lose even more time,” said Ma.

----Backlog of Vessels Will Take Days to Clear (9:19 a.m. HK)

Even if the Ever Given sails away immediately, there’s a backlog of about 200 vessels of all types that will take days to clear, leading to an ever-increasing pile-up, according to Arthur Richier, a senior freight analyst at Vortexa. That’s assuming an average transit of 50 vessels a day via the canal.

Egyptian authorities appear to want to wait until Monday for a higher tide to try and tow the vessel away, indicating that the most realistic return to normal for vessel traffic will only happen in a minimum of 10 days, Richier said.

Ships in Red Sea Seen Leaving if Crisis Lasts 2 Weeks (9:12 a.m. HK)

Ships in the Red Sea will be rerouted only if there is an extended delay in unblocking the Suez Canal, according to Randy Giveans, senior vice president of equity research for energy maritime at Jefferies LLC.

So far, only ships outside the Red Sea that were hoping to use the canal are rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope. For vessels already in the area, it would only make a difference if the canal outage was certain to be over two weeks, since that’s how much additional time they would need to get around the Cape.

“Assuming owners aren’t forced to remove all containers aboard the Ever Given, we expect the refloat to be completed by next Thursday,” he said. “If cargo needs to be unloaded and/or extensive repairs must be made to the canal itself, then the downtime could certainly last at least two weeks.”

Heavy-Lift Helicopters May Be Needed to Unload Containers (8:50 a.m. HK)

The failed attempts to move the Ever Given are increasing the odds that heavy-lift helicopters may be needed to unburden it of at least part of its load of 500 containers, according to Nick Sloane, the salvage master responsible for re-floating the Costa Concordia, which capsized off Italy in 2012.

The so-called sky-crane helicopters, able to lift a load of 25,000 pounds, and Russian MI-26 helicopters would be the only ones able to perform the task. The challenge is to find these helicopters and transport them to the site.

There aren’t many of those that are privately owned, said Keith Sailor, director of commercial operations at Aurora, Oregon-based Columbia Helicopters Inc., a company that operates a fleet of heavy-lift helicopters. “If you can’t find one in the region, you’d need to fly one over there in an Antonov cargo plane,” he said. That could take five to eight days.

More

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-25/ship-logjam-doubles-with-little-room-to-maneuver-suez-update-kmp6ycal?cmpid=BBD032521_BIZ&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&utm_term=210325&utm_campaign=bloombergdaily

Suez Canal suspends traffic as ship stuck like 'beached whale'

March 25, 2021  3:32 AM

ISMAILIA, Egypt (Reuters) - A container ship blocking the Suez Canal like a “beached whale” sent new shockwaves through global trade on Thursday as officials stopped all ships entering the channel and the salvage company said it may take weeks to free.

The 400 m (430 yard) Ever Given, almost as long as the Empire State Building is high, is blocking transit in both directions through one of the world’s busiest shipping channels for oil and grain and other trade linking Asia and Europe.

The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) said eight tugs were working to move the vessel, which got stuck diagonally across the single-lane southern stretch of the canal on Tuesday morning amid high winds and a dust storm.

“We can’t exclude it might take weeks, depending on the situation,” Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis which is trying to free the ship, told the Dutch television programme “Nieuwsuur”.

Several dozen vessels, including other large container ships, tankers carrying oil and gas, and bulk vessels hauling grain have backed up at either end of the canal to create one of the worst shipping jams seen for years.

The SCA, which had allowed some vessels to enter the canal in the hope the blockage could be cleared, said it had temporarily suspended all traffic on Thursday.

Thirteen vessels that sailed south from Port Said in a convoy on Wednesday had dropped anchor in the Bitter Lakes waiting area until navigation could be resumed, it said.

Berdowski said the ship’s bow and stern had been lifted up against either side of the canal.

“It is like an enormous beached whale. It’s an enormous weight on the sand. We might have to work with a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tug boats and dredging of sand.”

---- Shipping experts say that if the blockage is unlikely to be cleared in the coming days, some shipping firms may re-route vessels around the southern tip of Africa, which would add roughly a week to the journey.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-egypt-suezcanal-ship/suez-canal-suspends-traffic-as-ship-stuck-like-beached-whale-idUSKBN2BH0BA

How to Dislodge a 200,000-Ton Ship From a Canal Wall

By Ann Koh and Alex Longley

24 March 2021, 19:10 GMT Updated on 25 March 2021, 07:49 GMT

·         SMIT, Nippon Salvage hired to move Ever Given stuck in Suez

·         Salvors could have to remove fuel and ballast water from ship

When you can’t shift a ship that’s stuck fast into the wall of a canal that’s vital to world trade, there’s only one thing to do: call the salvage guys.

The Ever Given container ship -- a 200,000-ton behemoth -- has been blocking what is arguably the world’s most important waterway, the Suez Canal, since Tuesday morning.

The struggle to dislodge it is now turning the world’s attention to the work of SMIT Salvage, a legendary Dutch firm whose employees parachute themselves from one ship wreckage to the next, saving vessels often during violent storms. The company is synonymous with some of the most daring naval salvages, including lifting a sunken Russian nuclear submarine in 2001, and removing fuel from inside the Costa Concordia cruise ship after it ran aground in Italy in 2012.

SMIT, a unit of Royal Boskalis Westminster NV, is one of the companies appointed by Ever Given’s owner to help move the vessel. The first job will be to work out exactly how entrenched in the wall the ship is, said Boskalis spokesman Martijn Schuttevaer.

More

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/how-to-dislodge-a-200-000-ton-ship-from-a-canal-wall

Finally, the WSJ remembers the 1970s Biden Carter era. Does history repeat?

The Coming Demand Surge Brings Back Memories of 1970s Inflation

The lifting of lockdowns and easy monetary and fiscal policy will likely lead to much higher prices.

By William N. Walker  March 24, 2021 6:21 pm ET

The last bout of inflation the U.S. experienced was in the 1970s. Commentators duly note this historic reference but don’t really understand it—many weren’t yet born, and few were adults, at the time. It was no mere inconvenience; it was a catastrophe.

During the first quarter of 1973, consumer food prices shot up at an annual rate of nearly 30% and the wholesale price index for farm products rose at an annual rate of 52%. Red-meat prices surged at an annual rate of 90% during the first quarter. Home heating oil prices nearly doubled in that quarter alone, and soybean prices rose to record highs.

The Journal reported recently that “commodity markets are roaring” and noted dramatic increases in prices of crude oil, copper and nickel as examples of what some predict to be “a supercycle . . . when prices of livestock, grains, metals, oil and gas all climb for years, even decades.”

That article that could have been written in the spring of 1973, when demand also exploded, putting such severe pressure on supplies that within a matter of months, prices of virtually all commodities—foodstuffs, minerals and petroleum—would soar. By the summer, the rate of inflation had shot up to 11%. It would continue at near double-digit annual rates until 1980, when the Federal Reserve, led by Paul Volcker, raised interest rates to nearly 20%. That crushed inflation but ushered in a harsh recession.

There are eerie parallels today. In 1973, the U.S. was coming off a two-year experiment in wage and price controls, which artificially depressed prices and muted signals that the economy was overheating. Then, too, the Fed pursued an easy-money policy, keeping interest rates low—though considerably higher than now, and without today’s purchases of bonds and mortgage securities.

By the end of 1972, before the inflationary jump, the U.S. economy seemed even stronger than it is now, growing at an annual rate of more than 8%. Unemployment was down to 3.4%, and inflation was a seemingly manageable 5.6%. The pre-pandemic 2020 U.S. economy was also very strong, growing at a 3% annual rate, with historically low unemployment of under 4% and inflation hovering around only 1%.

In 2021 we’re emerging from the pandemic shutdown, which cratered growth and slammed the economy—depressing price pressures, not unlike what the price-control program did 50 years ago. Today’s Fed policies are even more expansive. And Congress has just enacted a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill—on top of earlier relief bills costing another nearly $2 trillion, a lot of which remains unspent and will continue to fuel demand this year and beyond.

---- As was the case 50 years ago, there are constraints on supplies: shipping delays are blocking deliveries; manufacturers can’t get parts to ramp up production; real-estate values are skyrocketing, while lumber shortages constrain home building; and most commodity prices are rising precipitously. Experts reassure us that the annual inflation rate will rise only to about 2%. We hope they’re right, but when demand increases faster than supply, prices tend to go up.

More

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-coming-demand-surge-brings-back-memories-of-1970s-inflation-11616624489?mod=opinion_lead_pos10

Pandemic Shopping Habits Are Giving Inflation Experts a Headache

Alexandre Tanzi  March 24, 2021, 5:00 AM EDT

Financial markets are obsessed with where inflation is headed. Statisticians are struggling to figure out where it’s at.

The pandemic has created major headaches for the people whose job it is to determine the rate of inflation right now, and set the benchmarks that will be used to measure it in the future. They face two fundamental problems.

First, gauges like the Consumer Price Index are based on a “basket” of stuff that Americans typically spent their money on in the past –- which looks quite different from what people have been buying in the pandemic year.

Second, the standard way of compiling inflation numbers is to visit stores and check their asking prices. Researchers haven’t been able to do that during lockdown, leaving holes in the data. And a lot of shopping has in any case shifted online, where prices can be tailored to individual shoppers and subject to rapid change –- making them harder to measure.

These are more than just technical issues. The incomes of almost 80 million Americans, from recipients of social security and food stamps to workers in collective wage agreements, are tied in some way to the CPI. When it fails to capture changes in the cost of living, their budgets can get squeezed. (The Federal Reserve uses a different measure of inflation, based on more up-to-date spending patterns, so its interest-rate decisions are less affected by the measurement problem.)

Basket Case

The economy’s rapid rebound from the pandemic slump has triggered concern about an accompanying rise in inflation. Data published Wednesday showed measures of prices paid and charged by U.S. business rose to records in March.

For the technicians of inflation, the immediate challenge is the basket problem.

“In effect, CPI weights suffered sudden obsolescence when the pandemic arrived,” Marshall Reinsdorf, an economist in the International Monetary Fund’s statistics department, said in a November presentation.

For example, dining out accounts for 6.3% of the U.S. CPI basket –- but Reinsdorf estimates that a measure of spending habits during the pandemic would have lowered that weighting by almost half. Meanwhile, Americans have been spending more on food at grocery stores, where prices accelerated last year.

Economist Alberto Cavallo, who teaches at Harvard Business School, has created a U.S. inflation gauge for the Covid-19 era, using a basket based on credit-card transactions that reflect what Americans have been buying. It has consistently delivered a higher reading than the official CPI, and topped 2% last month for the first time since the pandemic began.

More

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-24/inflation-is-harder-to-measure-after-a-year-of-pandemic-spending?srnd=premium-canada

If I'm elected president that's going be a top priority to completely revise the structure of the federal government, to make it economical, efficient, purposeful and manageable. I'm going to institute zero-based budgeting, which assesses every program every year, and eliminates those programs that are obsolete. We will have a balanced budget by 1981, if I'm elected president. It's predicated on very modest projections of employment increases and growth in our national economy.

Candidate Jimmy Carter. 

Source: The First Carter-Ford Presidential Debate, Sep 23, 1976

 

Covid-19 Corner                       

This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.

U.S. Covid Cases Are Rising Again, Reversing Months of Progress

Nic Querolo and Emma Court March 25, 2021

(Bloomberg) -- Covid cases in the U.S. are rising again, reversing course after months of decline and threatening another setback in the return to normality.

The seven-day average of new cases jumped to 57,695 Wednesday, 9.5% above the prior week, marking the biggest increase since Jan. 12, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

While that’s a fraction of the mid-January peak, the change in direction is worrisome as states fling open their economies, variant cases multiply and the country races to vaccinate as many people as possible to stave off another wave.

“We are not out of danger,” said Ali Mokdad, a professor of health metrics sciences at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, which produces influential Covid-19 projections. “We’re slowing down, and in many places going in the wrong direction.”

New York case numbers reported this week by Johns Hopkins appeared artificially inflated after data lags. But that didn’t have a meaningful impact on the national trend, which is rising to roughly the same degree even without New York.

---- An almost 10% uptick should have states reconsidering reopening plans and trying to accelerate vaccination, focusing on the hardest-hit neighborhoods, Weisfuse said. Growing pandemic fatigue among younger Americans, especially those traveling for spring break, is a significant concern, because they’re less likely to have received shots.

The U.S. has vaccinated 1 in 4 people, and last week averaged about 2.5 million doses per day, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. That’s not enough to reach herd immunity and many public-health experts fear another surge could occur before the immunization push reaches full steam. Texas, Tennessee and Alabama are among the slowest in the country, which may reflect vaccine hesitancy among Republicans, especially men.

While vaccinations and waning seasonality of the coronavirus are playing to the U.S.’s advantage, that’s weighed against more-contagious variants, increasing mobility and declining mask-wearing, Mokdad said.

More

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-covid-cases-are-rising-again-reversing-months-of-progress/ar-BB1eXMcj?ocid=uxbndlbing

U.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousand of deaths - research

March 25, 2021  10:20 AM  By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.

That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.

U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

He likened the state-by-state, patchwork response to a car’s cruise control. As the virus worsened people hunkered down, but when the situation improved restrictions were dropped and people were less careful, with the result that “the equilibrium level of daily deaths ... remains in a relatively narrow band” until the vaccine arrived.

Atkeson projected a final fatality level of around 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsides. The outcome, had no vaccine been developed, would have been a far-worse 1.27 million, Atkeson estimated.

The economic response, while mammoth, also could have been better tailored, argued University of California, Berkeley economics professor Christine Romer. She joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others from the last two Democratic administrations in criticizing the spending authorized since last spring, including the Biden team’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-economy/u-s-covid-response-could-have-avoided-hundreds-of-thousand-of-deaths-research-idUSKBN2BH1DK

1 report, 4 theories: Scientists mull clues on virus’ origin

By DARIA LITVINOVA and JAMEY KEATEN  March 25, 2021

GENEVA (AP) — A team of international and Chinese scientists is poised to report on its joint search for the origins of the coronavirus that sparked a pandemic after it was first detected in China over a year ago — with four theories being considered, and one the clear frontrunner, according to experts.

The lengthy report is being published after months of wrangling, notably between U.S. and Chinese governments, over how the outbreak emerged, while scientists try to keep their focus on a so-far fruitless search for the origin of a microbe that has killed over 2.7 million people and stifled economies worldwide.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the report will be released after its publication was delayed earlier this month. By many accounts, the report could offer few concrete answers, and may raise further questions.

It will offer a first glance in writing from 10 international epidemiologists, data scientists, veterinary, lab and food safety experts who visited China and the city of Wuhan — where a market was seen as the initial epicenter — earlier this year to work with Chinese counterparts who pulled up the bulk of early data.

Critics have raised questions about the objectivity of the team, insisting that China’s government had a pivotal say over its composition. Defenders of the World Health Organization, which assembled the team, say it can’t simply parachute in experts to tell a country what to do — let alone one as powerful as China.

“I expect that this report will only be a first step into investigating the origins of the virus and that the WHO secretariat will probably say this,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of Georgetown University’s Global Health Policy and Governance Initiative at the O’Neill Institute. “And I expect some to criticize this as insufficient.”

The Wuhan trip is billed as Phase 1 in a vast undertaking to flesh out the origins of the virus.

The WHO has bristled at depictions of the mission as an “investigation” — saying that smacks of an invasive forensic probe that wasn’t called for under the resolution adopted unanimously by the agency’s member states in May that paved the way for the collaboration. The WHO and China later ironed out the ground rules.

Team member Vladimir Dedkov, an epidemiologist and deputy director of research at the St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute in Russia, summarized the four main leads first laid out at a marathon news conference in China last month about the suspected origins of the first infection in humans. They were, in order of likelihood: from a bat through an intermediary animal; straight from a bat; via contaminated frozen food products; from a leak from a laboratory like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Officials in China, as well as Chinese team leader Liang Wannian, have promoted the third theory — the cold-chain one — while the U.S. administration under President Donald Trump played up the fourth one, of the lab leak. But Dedkov said those two hypothesis were far down the list of likely sources.

He suggested frozen products on which the virus was found were most likely contaminated by infected people.

More

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-geneva-coronavirus-pandemic-china-united-nations-478237854902672ac53ab6d9dbfe59ec

 

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/

Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)

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.

Ultra-sensitive flow microsensors

Research could lead to more breakthroughs in neuroscience, metabolism

Date:  March 22, 2021

Source:  University of Massachusetts Amherst

Summary:  A team of scientists have developed the thinnest and most sensitive flow sensor, which could have significant implications for medical research and applications, according to new research.

A team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed the thinnest and most sensitive flow sensor, which could have significant implications for medical research and applications, according to new research published recently in Nature Communications.

The research was led by Jinglei Ping, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, along with a trio of mechanical engineering Ph.D. students: Xiaoyu Zhang, who fabricated the sensor and made the measurement, Eric Chia and Xiao Fan. The findings pave the way for future research on all-electronic, in-vivo flow monitoring in investigating ultra-low-flow life phenomena that is yet to be studied in metabolism processes, retinal hemorheology and neuroscience.

Flow sensors, also known as flowmeters, are devices used to measure the speed of liquid or gas flows. The speed of biofluidic flow is a key physiological parameter but existing flow sensors are either bulky or lack precision and stability. The new flow sensor developed by the UMass Amherst team is based on graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in honeycomb lattice, to pull in charge from continuous aqueous flow. This phenomenon provides an effective flow-sensing strategy that is self-powered and delivers key performance metrics higher than other electrical approaches by hundreds of times. The graphene flow sensor can detect flow rate as low as a micrometer per second, that is, less than four millimeter per hour, and holds the potential to distinguish minimal changes in blood flow in capillary vessels. The performance of the graphene flow sensor has been stable for periods exceeding half a year.

Ping says the device his team created is the first one to be self-powered and high-performance, and it holds the potential to be implanted for long-term biofluidic flow monitoring. The most straightforward application, he added, may be in healthcare.

More

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210322174954.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29

Another weekend and the big question for Europe and Asia is when will the Suez Canal reopen. As important, how much damage is the closure starting to do to Europe’s economies? Asia’s? Will prolonged closure bring on food shortages, supply chain disruption?  Is a prolonged closure inflationary or deflationary?

Longer term, are new rules needed for super sized container ships? Should they be in canals at all?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Inflation is a burden for all Americans, but it's a disaster for the poor, the sick, and the old.

I outlined a balanced anti-inflation program that couples responsible government restraint with responsible wage and price restraint. It's based upon my knowledge that there is a more powerful force than government compulsion--the force created by the cooperative efforts of millions of Americans working toward a common goal. Business and labor have been increasingly supportive. It's imperative that we in government do our part. We must stop excessive government growth, and we must control government spending habits.

Source: Pres. Carter's 1979 State of the Union message to Congress , Jan 23, 1979