Baltic Dry Index. 2404 Fri. Brent Crude 107.35
Spot Gold 1864
Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000
Deaths 53,100
Coronavirus Cases 03/05/22 World 513,992,403
Deaths 6,263,3466
In central banking as in diplomacy, style, conservative tailoring, and an easy association with the affluent count greatly and results far much less.
John Kenneth Galbraith.
The US Fed begins its two day meeting later today with a 50 basis point rate hike expected tomorrow. It is the equivalent of rescuing the Titanic by bailing out by using a bucket.
But yesterday Australia beat them to the punch.
Later this week, the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street is expected to join in the global interest rate hiking party with yet another rate hike of its own.
After 40+ years of falling interest rates and virtually non-existant global inflation, we have an entirely new set of rules in our global stock casinos. “Buy the dip” has become for most stocks “sell the rally.”
Food price inflation for 2022 and 2023 is a given, depending on what happens next in China’s gridlocked ports, a wider general scarcity of goods, is likely to generate “demand pull” inflation along with “cost push” inflation until interest rates get high enough to trigger the next global recession.
But before that, rising stagflation.
An unrepayable debt crisis looms.
Stocks anyone?
U.S. stocks gain in seesaw session, benchmark Treasury yield hits 3% ahead of Fed
May 2, 2022 9:26 PM GMT+1
NEW YORK, May 2 (Reuters) - Wall Street ended a volatile trading day higher on Monday and benchmark U.S. Treasury yields breached the 3% mark as investors braced for a widely anticipated U.S. Federal Reserve interest rate hike.
All three major U.S. stock indexes gyrated between positive and negative territory throughout the session, and the 10-year Treasury yield touched its highest level in more than three years. read more
Wall Street's last-minute rally came on the heels of the S&P 500's worst January-April percentage drop since 1932, as market participants steadied themselves for any signs of increased hawkishness from the Fed at the conclusion of its monetary policy meeting on Wednesday.
"The market is faced with a number of challenges and there's not a lot of conviction one way or the other," said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut.
"It's becoming very reminiscent of the early '70s," Pavlik added. "We've hit 3% on the 10-year (Treasury yield), interest rates are going up, there's a war going on, the economy is slowing down. All we need is Richard Nixon to come out of the ground."
A report from the Institute for Supply Management showed U.S. factory activity losing steam, its purchasing managers' index (PMI) coming in well below consensus. read more
This followed a PMI report from China showing factory activity contracting for the second straight month as widespread COVID-19 shutdowns disrupted production and supply chains. read more
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI) rose 84.29 points, or 0.26%, to 33,061.5, the S&P 500 (.SPX) gained 23.45 points, or 0.57%, to 4,155.38 and the Nasdaq Composite (.IXIC) added 201.38 points, or 1.63%, to 12,536.02.
At its low point for the day, the S&P 500 was down as much as 1.7%.
The glum China factory data dragged European stocks to a sharply lower close, although the STOXX 600 pared its losses following a sudden 3% plunge earlier in the session - what some brokers called a "flash crash" caused by an erroneous trade.
More
https://www.reuters.com/business/global-markets-wrapup-1-2022-05-02/
Alibaba’s shares fall in Hong Kong following unconfirmed rumors linking Jack Ma to probe
Alibaba’s Hong Kong-listed shares were about 1% lower Tuesday — after earlier falling more than 9% —following unconfirmed rumors that linked the company’s founder Jack Ma to a national security investigation.
Chinese state media reported earlier in the morning that the Hangzhou security bureau on April 25 took “criminal coercive measures” on an individual with the last name Ma over suspicion of using the internet to endanger national security.
CNBC was unable to confirm the Chinese report. Alibaba and the Jack Ma Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Subsequent state media updates indicated the person had a first name with two Chinese characters, rather than one. Jack Ma’s first name in Chinese only has one character.
Such “coercive measures” can include detention, arrest or bail. The security bureau is also investigating the case, state media said.
Jack Ma stepped down from Alibaba’s board in 2020 and no longer has executive responsibilities, the company said in a July 2021 statement.
The flawed math behind Elon Musk’s Twitter deal
Opinion by Steven Pearlstein May 2, 2022
A cocky, publicity-seeking libertarian billionaire bets virtually all of his stock in his overvalued electric car company to finance a highly leveraged, $44 billion hostile takeover of an overvalued, money-losing social media platform, on which he boasts 84 million followers.
It’s hard to imagine a megadeal that better captures the absurdity of the era in American finance than Elon Musk’s ploy for Twitter.
The only plot twist making for a better tale of speculative excess would be if Musk, a crypto evangelist, had arranged to pay in bitcoin.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict that we will come to see this deal as a market top, when sky-high valuations and over-indebtedness reach a convulsive crescendo in a megadeal driven by hype, overconfidence and ego. In many respects, it is reminiscent of AOL’s disastrous takeover of Time Warner two months before the massive tech and telecom bubble burst in the spring of 2000.
At some point in the not-too-distant future — once the hype has finally drained from the tech-crazy stock market and defaults start to roil the overleveraged credit markets, once housing prices fall back to earth and the crypto fantasy is dispelled, once we’ve settled into an extended period of stagflation — people will look back at this moment and say, “What were they smoking.”
More
Fears of a Fed mistake grow as this week’s anticipated interest rate hike looms
The Federal Reserve is tasked with slowing the U.S. economy enough to control inflation but not so much that it tips into recession.
Financial markets expect the central bank on Wednesday to announce a half-percentage point increase in the Fed’s benchmark interest rate. The fed funds rate controls the amount that banks charge each other for short-term borrowing but also serves as a signpost for many forms of consumer debt.
Doubts are rising about whether it can pull it off, even among some former Fed officials. Wall Street saw another day of whipsaw trading Monday afternoon, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 rebounding after being down more than 1% earlier in the session.
“A recession at this stage is almost inevitable,” former Fed vice chair Roger Ferguson told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in a Monday interview. “It’s a witch’s brew, and the probability of a recession I think is unfortunately very, very high because their tool is crude and all they can control is aggregate demand.”
Indeed, it’s the supply side of the equation that is driving most of the inflation problem, as the demand for goods has outstripped supply in dramatic fashion during the Covid-era economy.
After spending much of 2021 insisting that the problem was “transitory” and would likely dissipate as conditions returned to normal, Fed officials this year have had to acknowledge the problem is deeper and more persistent than they acknowledged.
Ferguson said he expects the recession to hit in 2023, and he hopes it “will be a mild one.”
Hiking and ‘the recession that comes with it’
That sets up this week’s Federal Open Market Committee as pivotal: Policymakers not only are almost certain to approve a 50-basis-point interest rate hike, but they also are likely to announce a reduction in bond holdings accumulated during the recovery.
Chair Jerome Powell will have to explain all that to the public, drawing a line between a Fed determined to crush inflation while not killing an economy that lately has looked vulnerable to shocks.
“What that means is you’re going to have to hike enough to maintain credibility and start to shrink the balance sheet, and he’s going to have to take the recession that comes with it,” said Danielle DiMartino Booth, CEO of Quill Intelligence and a top advisor to former Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher while he served. “That’s going to be an extremely difficult message to communicate.”
-----Monday brought fresh signs that growth at least could be slowing: The ISM Manufacturing Index for April decreased to 55.4, indicative of a sector still expanding but at a reduced pace. Perhaps more importantly, the employment index for the month was just 50.9 — a reading of 50 indicates expansion, so April pointed to a near-halt in hiring.
More
Australia hikes its interest rate for the first time in more than a decade
Australia hiked its interest rate for the first time in more than a decade, a widely expected move as consumer prices surge.
Its central bank said Tuesday that the cash rate will be increased by 25 basis points to 0.35% — the first rate hike since November 2010.
Philip Lowe, governor of the Reserve Bank of Australia, said it is the right time to begin withdrawing some of the “extraordinary monetary support” that was put in place to help the Australian economy during the pandemic.
“The economy has proven to be resilient and inflation has picked up more quickly, and to a higher level, than was expected,” Lowe said in a statement. “There is also evidence that wages growth is picking up. Given this, and the very low level of interest rates, it is appropriate to start the process of normalising monetary conditions.”
Analysts had widely expected the country to hike rates, given that inflation was fast heating up in the country. Prices of food, petrol and other consumer goods were all up in the last quarter.
Australia’s consumer price index jumped 2.1% for the quarter, exceeding expectations of a 1.7% increase. , data showed last week.
On an annual basis, consumer inflation rocketed 5.1% - the highest since 2001, and again higher than analyst forecasts of a 4.6% increase.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/03/australias-interest-rate-decision-may-2022.html
Finally, mainstream media catches up. Better late than never, I suppose. Presented without need for comment. The next 4-6 weeks will provide the details of just how bad the global fertiliser crisis will be in the food supply chain, even if the main northern hemisphere foodstuffs growing areas get favourable rains and growing conditions in May and early June.
Can the World Feed Itself? Historic Fertilizer Crunch Threatens Food Security
Sun, May 1, 2022, 1:00 PM
(Bloomberg) -- For the first time ever, farmers the world over — all at the same time — are testing the limits of how little chemical fertilizer they can apply without devastating their yields come harvest time. Early predictions are bleak.
In Brazil, the world’s biggest soybean producer, a 20% cut in potash use could bring a 14% drop in yields, according to industry consultancy MB Agro. In Costa Rica, a coffee cooperative representing 1,200 small producers sees output falling as much as 15% next year if the farmers miss even one-third of normal application. In West Africa, falling fertilizer use will shrink this year’s rice and corn harvest by a third, according to the International Fertilizer Development Center, a food security non-profit group.
“Probably farmers will grow enough to feed themselves. But the question is what they will have to feed the cities,” said Patrice Annequin, a senior fertilizer market specialist for IFDC based in Ivory Coast. When you add increased hunger across West Africa on top of existing risks like terrorism, “this is absolutely dangerous for many governments in our region.”
For the billions of people around the world who don’t work in agriculture, the global shortage of affordable fertilizer likely reads like a distant problem. In truth, it will leave no household unscathed. In even the least-disruptive scenario, soaring prices for synthetic nutrients will result in lower crop yields and higher grocery-store prices for everything from milk to beef to packaged foods for months or even years to come across the developed world. And in developing economies already facing high levels of food insecurity? Lower fertilizer use risks engendering malnutrition, political unrest and, ultimately, the otherwise avoidable loss of human life.
“I’m reducing the use of fertilizer in this crop cycle. I can’t afford such stratospheric prices,” Marcelo Cudia, 61, a farmer in the Philippines’ rice-producing region of Central Luzon, said outside the patch of land he’s been cultivating for the last 13 years. About 12,000 miles away, Brazilian soybean farmer Napoleão Rutilli is facing the same tough choices. “If fertilizers are expensive, we’ll use less fertilizers. If we’ll use less, we’ll produce less,” said the second-generation farmer, 33. “Food prices will increase and everyone will suffer.”
Why Are Fertilizer Prices Going Up?
Commercial farmers rely on a combination of three key nutrients — nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium — to fuel their harvests. Those inputs have always been key, but it was only about a century ago that humanity learned to manufacture mass-produced ammonia-based nutrients. The discovery of the Haber-Bosch method in the early 1900s, which is still used to make fertilizer today, has allowed farmers to vastly increase their yields. The agriculture industry has since come to depend on — even hinge on — man-made fertilizer. Although soil’s needs are different region to region, the general trend is pretty undisputed: More fertilizer use brings more food production.
But as costs for synthetic nutrients have skyrocketed — in North America, one gauge of prices is nearly triple where it was at the start of the pandemic — farmers have had to start paring back use, sometimes dramatically. That’s put the world in uncharted territory.
“Fertilizer prices are up an average of 70% from last year,” said Timothy Njagi, a researcher at the Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development in Kenya, referring to prices in the country. “The fertilizer is available locally, but it’s out of reach for the majority of farmers. Worse, many farmers know that they cannot recover these costs.”
Prices have been climbing for more than a year for a host of reasons: runaway pricing for natural gas, the main feedstock for much of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer; sanctions on a major Belarusian potash producer; back-to-back late-summer storms on the U.S. Gulf Coast that temporarily shut-in production in the region; plus Covid-19 restrictions that have disrupted every global supply chain, including chemicals.
That tightening in the physical fertilizer market has galvanized China, the largest phosphate producer, to restrict outgoing shipments in order to build up a stockpile at home, further exacerbating the global shortage. Add Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which effectively cut off nearly a fifth of the world’s nutrient exports, and the fertilizer industry and its pricing mechanisms are arguably more broken than ever before.
“Fertilizer sales are very, very low, to the point of desperately low, and this should be traditionally the busiest time of the year,” said Jo Gilbertson, head of fertilizer at Agricultural Industries Confederation, a U.K.-based trade association. “The seeds of the problem are being sown now.”
----In the Philippines, urea — a key nitrogenous fertilizer — is now about 3,000 pesos (about $57) per bag, and even more when transported to the fields. That’s more than three times the price at this time last year, said Roger Navarro, president of Philippine Maize Federation Inc. “Farmers will tend to decrease the usual fertilizer dose of their crop and that will lessen the production,” he said, forecasting a 10% drop in yields. “It is rather sad, but this is reality.”
The yield outlook is even worse elsewhere. Peru’s agricultural industry is facing a deficit of 180,000 metric tons of urea, and output of staples such as rice, potatoes and corn could tumble as much as 40% unless more fertilizer becomes available. The International Rice Research Institute predicted crop yields could drop 10% in the next season, meaning there’ll be 36 million fewer tons of rice — enough to feed 500 million people. In Sub-Saharan Africa, food production could drop by about 30 million tons in 2022, equivalent to the food requirement of 100 million people, the IFDC said in December — and that forecast was made before the war in Ukraine pushed prices to new records this spring.
More
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/world-feed-itself-historic-fertilizer-120018356.html
It is the highest impertinence and presumption, therefore, in kings and ministers to pretend to watch over the economy of private people, and to restrain their expense. They are themselves, always, and without any exception, the greatest spendthrifts in the society.
Adam Smith.
Global Inflation/Stagflation Watch.
Given our Magic Money Tree central banksters and our spendthrift politicians, inflation now needs an entire section of its own.
Euro zone factory output growth stalled in April
May 2, 2022 9:17 AM GMT+1
LONDON, May 2 (Reuters) - Euro zone manufacturing output growth stalled last month as factories struggled to source raw materials while demand took a knock from steep price increases and fears about the economic outlook, a survey showed.
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, coupled with renewed COVID-19 related lockdowns in China, have exacerbated supply chain bottlenecks and left factories struggling and forward looking indicators in the survey did not point to an imminent turnaround.
S&P Global's final manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) fell to a 15-month low of 55.5 in April from March's 56.5, just above below an initial "flash" estimate of 55.3 and still comfortably above the 50 mark that separates growth from contraction.
But an index measuring output, which feeds into a composite PMI due on Wednesday and seen as a good gauge of economic health, sank to 50.7 from 53.1, its lowest since June 2020, when the bloc was enduring the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic.
"Manufacturing output came to a near standstill across the euro zone in April," said Chris Williamson, chief business economist at S&P Global.
"Companies not only reported that ongoing problems with component shortages were aggravated by the Ukraine war and new lockdowns in China, but that rising prices and growing uncertainty about the economic outlook were also hitting demand."
Input costs rose at one on the fastest rates in the survey's history and factories passed that on to customers by raising their prices at a record pace. The output prices index climbed to 77.3 from 74.2, its highest since S&P Global started collecting the data in late 2002.
More
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/euro-zone-factory-output-growth-stalled-april-pmi-2022-05-02/
Japan's April factory activity expands at slower rate
May 2, 2022 1:44 AM GMT+1
TOKYO, May 2 (Reuters) - Japan's manufacturing activity grew at a slower pace from the previous month in April as supply chain disruptions and strict Chinese coronavirus lockdown measures hurt overseas demand.
Activity in the sector was held up by resilience in output, overall orders and optimism about the year ahead, even as producers grew more wary of persisting price pressures, the Ukraine war, logistics logjams and the global economic outlook.
The final au Jibun Bank Japan Manufacturing Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) fell to a seasonally adjusted 53.5 in April from the prior month's 54.1 final.
That was largely in line with a 53.4 flash reading. The 50-mark separates contraction from expansion.
"Latest PMI data pointed to a sustained expansion in the Japanese manufacturing sector at the start of the second quarter," said Usamah Bhatti, economist at S&P Global, which compiles the survey.
---- The PMI survey showed that input prices jumped at the strongest pace since August 2008, pushing manufacturers to raise selling prices at the fastest rate in the survey history.
That saw firms' optimism about conditions for the 12 months ahead to drop to its lowest since July 2020.
More
Surging prices force consumers to ask: Can I live without it?
Published Sun, May 1 2022 7:00 AM EDT
Sandy Magny plans to take her teenage daughter to West Palm Beach, Florida, this summer, even though airfares are surging.
It won’t be cheap, but Magny doesn’t want to miss out on visiting her family. The 40-year-old paralegal, who lives in the Bronx and works in the financial district of Manhattan, is finding there are other things she can do without.
“I do bring lunch more,” she said. “I could make coffee in the office.”
Magny is one of millions of people starting to shift where her dollars go after two years of the Covid-19 pandemic. Consumer prices have increased at the fastest clip in four decades. The cost of everything from housing to a latte is on the rise, begging the questions: When — and where — will consumers cut spending?
Some companies are already feeling the impact as they try to pass higher costs along to customers.
Amazon’s most recent quarterly sales grew at the slowest pace since the 2001 dot-com bust. Netflix lost subscribers in the last quarter for the first time in more than a decade. Video game maker Activision Blizzard, home appliance giant Whirlpool and 1-800-Flowers all reported weaker sales in the last quarter.
---- The changes in consumer behavior have some executives on edge.
“We do believe that the consumer is going to be spending,” Macy’s CFO Adrian Mitchell said at JP Morgan’s Retail Round-Up last month. “But are they going to be spending on discretionary items that we sell, or are they going to be spending on an airline ticket to Florida, or travel, or going out to restaurants more?”
Coca-Cola CEO James Quincey told CNBC last week that customers won’t “swallow inflation endlessly.”
Consumer spending, as measured by the Commerce Department, rose a seasonally-adjusted 1.1% in March. And spending remains strong even among low-income households with an annual income of less than $50,000, according to Bank of America data. (The data exclude households that do not have access to cards.)
But consumer confidence, a measure of shoppers’ sentiments around market conditions reported by The Conference Board, ticked lower in April.
“We’re not really seeing many signs of slowdown, despite the worries that are happening in the market,” said Anna Zhou, a U.S. economist for Bank of America.
One reason is the amount of money that people socked away during the pandemic. On average, low-income households have $3,000 in their savings and checking accounts – nearly double what they had at the start of 2019, according to the Bank of America’s internal data. That has given consumers a buffer, even as they pay more at the gas pump and grocery store, Zhou said.
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/01/inflation-forces-consumers-to-rethink-spending-habits.html
Warren Buffett says inflation ‘swindles almost everybody,’ Munger rails against bitcoin, market ‘mania’ at Berkshire meeting
Updated Sat, Apr 30 2022 5:54 PM EDT
Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett on Saturday put fresh money behind Activision and Chevron and doled out sharp criticism against speculation in the market.
Speaking at Berkshire Hathaway’s first in-person annual meeting since 2019, Buffett went so far as to say the market’s turned into a “gambling parlor.”
The Oracle of Omaha also commented on inflation, building on prior remarks he has made. Buffett had previously said that inflation “swindles” equity investors, but noted Saturday that it “swindles the bond investor, too. It swindles the person who keeps their cash under their mattress. It swindles almost everybody.”
Buffett and his longtime partner, Vice Chairman Charlie Munger, fielded shareholder questions on a broad range of issues for hours.
Buffett also said that Berkshire had been increasing its stake in Activision Blizzard as part of a merger arbitrage bet that Microsoft’s proposed deal to buy the video game company will close. Additionally, Berkshire revealed it had ramped up its stock bets by more than $51 billion during the first quarter amid the broader market’s downturn.
Munger, meanwhile, blasted stock trading app Robinhood.
“It’s so easy to overdo a good idea. ... Look what happened to Robinhood from its peak to its trough. Wasn’t that pretty obvious that something like that was going to happen?” Munger said.
Buffett also stressed the importance of cash as “new forms of money” like bitcoin pop up.
“The United States government affects that this became exchangeable for lawful money in the United States,” Buffett said, displaying an image of an old $20 bill. “That’s what money is.”
More
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/30/berkshire-hathaway-annual-meeting-live-updates.html
Below, why a “green energy” economy may not be possible, and if it is, it won’t be quick and it will be very inflationary, setting off a new long-term commodity Supercycle. Probably the largest seen so far.
The “New Energy Economy”: An Exercise in Magical Thinking
https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/R-0319-MM.pdf
Mines, Minerals, and "Green" Energy: A Reality Check
https://www.manhattan-institute.org/mines-minerals-and-green-energy-reality-check
"An Environmental Disaster": An EV Battery Metals Crunch Is On The Horizon As The Industry Races To Recycle
by Tyler Durden Monday, Aug 02, 2021 - 08:40 PM
Covid-19 Corner
This section will continue until it becomes unneeded.
Time for a fourth Covid vaccine dose? Here’s why medical professionals are skeptical
Published Mon, May 2 2022 12:32 AM EDT
Countries are beginning to offer a fourth dose of the Covid-19 vaccine to vulnerable groups, but medical professionals are undecided on whether it would benefit the wider population.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has so far authorized a fourth shot only for those aged 50 and above, as well as those who are immunocompromised. And the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was skeptical of the need for a fourth dose for healthy adults in the absence of a clearer public health strategy.
Those decisions came as a study from Israel found that although a fourth dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offers protection against serious illness for at least six weeks after the shot, it provides only short-lived protection against infection, which wanes after just four weeks.
No ‘good evidence’ yet
The medical consensus so far is that there hasn’t been enough research on how much protection a fourth dose can offer.
The World Health Organization hasn’t given an official recommendation on a fourth dose, and “there isn’t any good evidence at this point of time” that it will be beneficial, said WHO chief scientist Soumya Swaminathan.
“What we know from immunology is that if you give another booster, you will see a temporary increase in the neutralizing antibodies. But what we’ve also seen is that these neutralizing antibodies will wane quite rapidly,” Swaminathan told CNBC in an interview.
“This happened after the third dose. And it’s happened again after the fourth dose,” she added.
Paul Goepfert, professor of medicine at the University of Alabama, shared that view, saying that “a fourth dose doesn’t really do much of anything ... I’m not sure we need to get out and just jump up and down screaming that everybody needs to get aboard.”
Since the study from Israel shows the fourth dose can provide protection against serious disease, countries such as Israel, Denmark and Singapore have made a second booster shot available to high-risk groups.
---- Annual booster shots?
Questions are being raised over the need for more booster shots as the emergence of more Covid variants may require more targeted vaccines.
Anthony Fauci, White House chief medical advisor, told NBC News in January that people may need to get booster shots every year or two.
However, blanket vaccine approaches may not continue to work.
It is possible that high-risk groups — such as the elderly — may need an annual vaccine, said Swaminathan. But “it’s not clear whether a healthy adult is going to need a regular annual shot.”
It’s also important to note that the current vaccines being administered may not work for future variants of Covid-19, she said.
If the virus “changes so much that you need to change your vaccine composition, then you won’t need another shot,” Swaminathan added. “The challenge of changing the vaccine composition is that you’re always playing catch-up.”
---- The WHO announced on Tuesday that weekly new Covid deaths had fallen to the lowest level since March 2020.
But the more contagious omicron BA.2 subvariant remains the dominant strain in the United States, making up 68.1% of all cases in the country during the week that ended on April 23, according to data from the CDC.
Although experts predict that the BA.2 subvariant is unlikely to be more severe than the original omicron strain, it should remain a concern.
More
COVID's new Omicron sub-lineages can dodge immunity from past infection - study
Sun, May 1, 2022, 10:37 AM
JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Two new sublineages of the Omicron coronavirus variant can dodge antibodies from earlier infection well enough to trigger a new wave, but are far less able to thrive in the blood of people vaccinated against COVID-19, South African scientists have found.
The scientists from multiple institutions were examining Omicron's BA.4 and BA.5 sublineages - which the World Health Organization last month added to its monitoring list. They took blood samples from 39 participants previously infected by Omicron when it first showed up at the end of last year.
Fifteen were vaccinated - eight with Pfizer's shot; seven with J&J's — while the other 24 were not.
"The vaccinated group showed about a 5-fold higher neutralisation capacity ... and should be better protected," said the study, a pre-print of which was released over the weekend.
In the unvaccinated samples, there was an almost eightfold decrease in antibody production when exposed to BA.4 and BA.5, compared with the original BA.1 Omicron lineage. Blood from the vaccinated people showed a threefold decrease.
South Africa may be entering a fifth COVID wave earlier than expected, officials and scientists said on Friday, blaming a sustained rise in infections that seems to be driven by the BA.4 and BA.5 Omicron sub-variants.
Only about 30% of South Africa's population of 60 million is fully vaccinated.
"Based on neutralisation escape, BA.4 and BA.5 have potential to result in a new infection wave," the study said.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/covids-omicron-sub-lineages-dodge-093733782.html
World's weekly COVID-19 deaths drop 10% to lowest level since pandemic began
May 1, 2022 / 3:31 PM
May 1 (UPI) -- COVID-19 deaths are at the lowest level since the pandemic began more than two years ago with cases the fewest in five months though there are some hotspots, including Mainland China where the pandemic originated.
Coronavirus' seven-day moving average of deaths was 2,301, the lowest since 1,911 on March 25, 2020, according to tracking by Worldometers.info. That includes 1,366 reported Saturday with 1,691 April 18. The record was 17,006 Jan. 20, 2021, amid the Delta variant surge.
Cases' moving average dropped to 567,259, which is the lowest since 564,755 on Nov. 23 before the Omicron variant emerged. On Saturday infections were 423,738. The record was 3,817,940 Jan. 21.
In all, 513,501,302 cases have been reported worldwide, including 3,970,821 in the past week, for a 16% decrease in tracking by Worldometers.info on Sunday. And deaths rose by 16,108 over seven days, a 10% drop, for a cumulative 6,261,273.
Infections and fatalities decreased on every continent except cases up in North America and Africa, and deaths rising in Oceania.
A subvariant, BA.2.12.1, along with another version of Omicron, called BA.2.12, has led to a spike but illnesses are not as severe or even as deadly.
That includes the United States, which leads the world in deaths and cases. But it is moving out of the pandemic phase, according to Dr. Anthony Fauci, the White House's chief medical adviser and director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
More
Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada.
NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Tracker. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html
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
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, among other things, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.
"Extremely fast-charging" battery hits 60 percent in under 6 minutes
Nick Lavars May 01, 2022
By rethinking a key battery component, scientists in China have come up with what's described as "extremely fast charging" technology that sees a lithium-ion battery hit 60 percent capacity in under six minutes. The breakthrough is billed as a significant one for the world of electric vehicles where recharge times lag far behind refueling times for conventional cars, and could make them a far appealing proposition on that front.
Led by researchers from the University of Science and Technology of China, the work focuses on one of the two electrodes in a lithium-ion battery, called the anode. This is of big interest to scientists in the field because redesigned anodes could offer great performance benefits, that include holding far more energy and charging up much more quickly.
One exciting possibility includes replacing the mix of graphite and copper with pure lithium metal, hailed as a "dream material" that could allow for up to 10 times the capacity of current devices. Other interesting examples include introducing experimental nanospheres into the anode to boost capacity, or doing away with the anode altogether to make for a smaller and cheaper battery.
The authors of this new study looked to improve on the standard anode by designing a new porous architecture with graphite particles of a certain size strewn throughout. The idea was to address the non-ordered nature of today's anodes, which feature spaces that mean the batteries don't lend themselves so well to fast charging, by using particle-level theoretical modeling to determine the optimal arrangement.
With the ideal distribution of different sized particles and spaces in the anode, the team also added copper nanowires and a copper coating and used heating and cooling treatments to form their novel component. As reported in TechXplore, this anode was incorporated into a standard lithium-ion battery and enabled it to be recharged to 60 percent in 5.6 minutes and to 80 percent in 11.4 minutes.
Described as an "extremely fast-charging lithium ion battery," the scientists see the technology as a promising stepping stone toward more desirable electric vehicles, pointing to the US Department of Energy's "Fast Charge Goal" of 10 mile (16 km) of travel per minute of charging.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances.
Every tax ought to be so contrived as both to take out and to keep out of the pockets of the people as little as possible, over and above what it brings into the public treasury of the State.
Adam Smith.
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