fortune--2020-04-02--Countries that mandate TB vaccine are seeing fewer coronavirus deaths

Countries with mandatory policies to vaccinate against tuberculosis register fewer coronavirus deaths than countries that don’t have those policies, a new study has found.
The preliminary study posted on medRxiv, a site for unpublished medical research, finds a correlation between countries that require citizens to get the bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine and those showing fewer number of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19. Though only a correlation, clinicians in at least six countries are running trials that involve giving frontline health workers and elderly people the BCG vaccine to see whether it can indeed provide some level of protection against the new coronavirus.
Gonzalo Otazu, assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology and lead author of the study, started working on the analysis after noticing the low number of cases in Japan. The country had reported some of the earliest confirmed cases of coronavirus outside of China and it hadn’t instituted lockdown measures like so many other countries have done.
Otazu said he knew about studies showing the BCG vaccine provided protection against not just tuberculosis bacteria but also other types of contagions. So his team put together the data on what countries had universal BCG vaccine policies and when they were put in place. They then compared the number of confirmed cases and deaths from Covid-19 to find a strong correlation.
Among high-income countries showing large number of Covid-19 cases, the U.S. and Italy recommend BCG vaccines but only for people who might be at risk, whereas Germany, Spain, France, Iran and the U.K. used to have BCG vaccine policies but ended them years to decades ago. China, where the pandemic began, has a BCG vaccine policy but it wasn’t adhered to very well before 1976, Otazu said. Countries including Japan and South Korea, which have managed to control the disease, have universal BCG vaccine policies. Data on confirmed cases from low-income countries was considered not reliable enough to make a strong judgment.
Caution Urged
With nearly 900,000 cases and 45,000 deaths, the world is struggling to control Covid-19. Any vaccine for the disease is more than a year away from being available and the effectiveness of drugs under trial won’t be known for months to come. That’s why it’s reasonable to look at whether BCG vaccine could provide protection against Covid-19, said Eleanor Fish, professor at the University of Toronto’s immunology department. Otazu’s study is yet to undergo review by peers, a strict criteria for science studies.
“I would read the results of the study with incredible caution,” Fish said.
Otazu, who said he’s already received comments from other experts, is working on a second version of his study that will address some of their concerns. He has also submitted the study for a formal review process with the journal Frontiers in Public Health.
One of the first to conduct the trial of BCG vaccine’s effectiveness against coronavirus is Mihai Netea, an infectious-disease expert at Radboud Universty Medical Center in the Netherlands. Netea’s team has already enrolled 400 health workers in the trial—200 got the BCG vaccine and 200 received a placebo. He doesn’t expect to see any results for at least two months. He’s also about to start a separate trial to study the effectiveness of the BCG vaccine on those older than 60. Other trials are taking place in Australia, Denmark, Germany, the U.K. and the U.S.
Scientists are still working to better understand why the BCG vaccine may be effective against not just tuberculosis but other disease microbes. Netea’s decade-long work shows that BCG vaccine sensitizes the immune system in such a way that, whenever any pathogen that relies on the same attack strategy as the tuberculosis bacteria attacks, it is ready to respond in a better way than the immune system of those who haven’t received the vaccine.
“It’s like the BCG vaccine creates bookmarks for the immune system to use later in life,” Netea said.
Even if BCG vaccine is shown to be effective, that’s no reason to stockpile.
“People should not hoard or try to get BCG vaccine like they did toilet paper,” Otazu said. There is a small chance that the BCG vaccine could increase the risk of coronavirus, but scientists won’t know until after the clinical trials.
In any case, the BCG vaccine shouldn’t be the only tool to fight Covid-19.
“No country in the world has managed to control the disease just because the population was protected by BCG,” Otazu said. Social distancing, testing and isolating cases will need to be implemented to manage the spread of the disease.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—Hospitals are running low on the most critical supply of all
—More ventilators are coming, but there’s still a shortage of people who can operate them
—China releases data on asymptomatic coronavirus cases—but doubts remain
—”It’ll never be fast enough”: 5 questions for a ventilator manufacturer
—The stock market had its worst quarter since 1987—and its worst Q1 ever
—How to job hunt during the coronavirus pandemic
—PODCAST: Two health care CEOs on why coronavirus tests and vaccines are the ammunition needed to fight COVID-19
—VIDEO: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-04-02--Everything you need to know about the new 401(k) no-penalty withdrawals in the CARES Act

Are growth or value stocks performing better in this market ?
The answer may surprise you

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It sounds awfully tempting.
As part of the CARES Act passed last week, some of the strictest rules about taking money out of your 401(k) are being temporarily lifted to help people affected by the coronavirus pandemic. But the changes drew some mixed reviews from financial planners. While the added flexibility may help some ride out the crisis, there was plenty of hand-wringing that the distribution limits were too high, and that people affected by coronavirus might be tempted to take out huge sums now—and, as a result, either put their eventual retirements in jeopardy or possibly leave themselves with a big tax bill.
Here’s a drill-down on what’s changed, and some guidance on how to approach your 401(k) in the wake of these changes.
What is a coronavirus-related 401(k) distribution? Is it really a no-penalty withdrawal?
One provision of the CARES Act relaxes the rules for taking money from your 401(k). The details? Investors of any age can take out a “coronavirus-related distribution” of as much as $100,000 (or up to 100% of the balance) without paying early withdrawal penalties. The act also increases the maximum “loan” from your 401k to this amount (previously that was limited to $50,000 or 50% of an employee’s balance).
Who is eligible for a 401(k) coronavirus-related distribution?
Unlike the stimulus checks, which will be orchestrated by the government, your company’s 401(k) plan sponsor will determine whether coronavirus-related distributions will be permitted, whether you meet the criteria for this type of distribution, and whether the amount you request fits the hardship you are facing. Generally speaking, anyone who has contracted the virus, has had a spouse or a dependent contract the virus, or has experienced financial hardship because of it, would be considered eligible. Plan sponsors that do permit such distributions can rely on an employee’s self-certification that they have been financially impacted by coronavirus.
Is a coronavirus-related 401(k) distribution a loan?
No. Unlike a 401(k) loan that must be repaid, a coronavirus-related distribution does not need to be repaid, according to Liz Masson, a partner at San Francisco-based law firm Hanson Bridgett. She explains that employees can repay the distribution within three years without regard to annual contribution limits for their 401(k) plans, and that the repayment does not need to be made all at once. Masson adds that any repayment of the distribution would be treated as a “rollover contribution” to the plan. But there’s a catch: an employee who takes a coronavirus-related distribution and does not pay it back will owe tax on the amount, through they will be able to pay the taxes owed over a three-year period says Masson.
Is it a good idea to take this new 401(k) distribution?
“It’s really a last resort,” advises Courtney Knoll, a clinical associate professor of accounting at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and associate director of the UNC Tax Center. The problem? The whole idea of a 401(k) is that you are investing the money over a long-term period, so that the power of compound interest works in your favor throughout the duration of your career. And you’ll likely have to liquidate stocks to take money out, which means selling when the market is down nearly 30%.
Should I take my regular 401(k) distribution this year?
Another major provision under the CARES Act, says Knoll, is that minimum distributions (which refer to the required amount you must take out of your 401(k) upon reaching retirement age) have been waived this year. If you can afford it, “this is a great time not to be taking a distribution,” says Knoll. That’s because your minimum distribution number would have been calculated in 2019, when equity values were much higher. So if a bigger chunk comes out of your account now, the potential for your portfolio to rebound during the year is lessened. The bottom line, according to Knoll: “If you can avoid taking a distribution, you should.”
What if I take a 401(k) coronavirus-related distribution and then get laid off or furloughed?
As a huge number of companies are cutting back their workforces given the near-total economic shutdown, this is an important question. In normal times, if you take a loan from your 401(k) and then leave your company, many plans require that the money be paid back immediately, or else it is considered a taxable distribution. But under the CARES Act, according to Masson, “if an employee takes a coronavirus-related distribution and then leaves the company, the employee would not have to pay the distribution back.”
Can you still contribute if you are laid off, furloughed, or your hours are cut back? That depend on one factor: whether you’re still getting a paycheck. “Because employee contributions to a 401(k) plan are based on salary reduction elections, those contributions would stop when the employee is no longer being paid,” says Masson. She adds that if employees are being paid emergency sick leave or expanded family and medical leave under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA), those payments are eligible for salary reduction contributions to a 401(k) plan.
How is a 401(k) coronavirus-related distribution different from a hardship distribution?
Most plans allow for “hardship distributions” in, say, the case of a major medical event. But these differ from the current coronavirus-related distributions in several ways. Hardship distributions are taxed in the year taken, cannot be repaid to the plan, and are limited to the amount necessary to meet the financial need. One interesting note: Masson points out that in the state of California, COVID-19 has been declared a major disaster—meaning 401(k) plan participants there would be able to utilize a hardship distribution, and could elect a distribution in the “amount of expenses and losses (including loss of income) incurred on account of the disaster.”
Should I keep contributing to my 401(k)?
Experts are pretty much unanimous on this point: if you can keep up contributions—or even increase them—during this time, you should. “I’m not going to tell anyone how to time the market, but it’s clear that buying now is better than buying a month ago,” says Knoll. With the S&P 500 down 27% from its peak, any new money you are able to contribute (especially when paired with an employer match) will be put to work at far lower valuations now than were available for most of the past two years.
What are the 401(k) contribution limits for 2020?
At the end of last year, the IRS announced that for 2020, the maximum contribution for individuals in 2020 would be raised to $19,500. The so-called “catch-up” contribution for employees age 50 and over was raised to $6,500. The limits on annual contributions to an IRA remained unchanged at $6,000 per year.
Does my employer have to keep providing a 401(k) contribution match?
There’s nothing in the CARES Act that addresses this, and Masson notes that in general, employers can amend their 401(k) plans to stop making matching contributions, and that they should promptly notify employees of any changes.
More must-read personal finance coverage from Fortune:
—When are stimulus checks coming? It could take months for some people
—Millions of Americans won’t be able to pay their bills this month. What financial experts advise
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—5 things to know about unemployment benefits in the COVID-19 stimulus package
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—How to defer your student loan payment due to coronavirus
—What to do if you’re worried about getting laid off
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: U.S. tax deadline moved from April 15 to July 15
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-04-02--Millions of Americans won’t be able to pay all their bills this month. What financial experts advise

Navy captain fired after pleading for help for his crew on coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier

If you’re like most Americans, the coming months are going to mean making some hard financial choices. Pay the rent, or pay off high-interest credit card bills? What about medical bills? Food?
Over 6.6 million Americans applied for unemployment last week, setting an all-time record. Many have been laid off, furloughed, or had their hours reduced. Some who are still able to work are having their pay cut significantly. And even if you’re one of the lucky ones who haven’t had your employment affected by the coronavirus pandemic, your investments, including your 401(k), have likely taken a terrifying hit.
This is all to say that many Americans, along with the rest of the globe, are trying to make ends meet and coming up short. Fortune spoke with personal finance expert Bola Sokunbi of Clever Girl Finance and Rod Griffin, senior director of customer education and advocacy at Experian, to help understand the best strategies for anyone who is struggling.
What if I can’t afford to pay my bills?
Both experts agreed that you need to focus on the essentials first. “Look at paying the bills that will keep a roof over your head, food on the table, clothes on your back, and keep you healthy,” Griffin says. “Those are the key issues right now.”
Communicate with all of the companies to which you owe money and explain your situation. Often, and particularly in a worldwide crisis such as this, they’ll help you figure out a plan that works for you. You can also work with the companies you owe to create a plan to pay off more of your debt once you have more money coming in again.
“A big mistake people make is assuming that their landlord, lenders, and creditors know they’re going through hard times,” Sokunbi says. “But you have to communicate.”
If you can’t pay a few bills, that isn’t the end of the world, she says. The entire globe is struggling with an economic downturn of historic proportions. You are not alone, and this is not your fault. “Your credit score is important, but life is happening now,” says Sokunbi. “All of this can be rebuilt.”
Will not paying rent and other bills hurt my credit score?
The short answer: maybe.
Credit cards, loans (including student debt and car payments), and mortgages are reported to credit bureaus, and thus show up on your credit report. So these are the bills that will most likely have the quickest effect on your score if left unpaid. However, governments at the state and federal level, along with several companies, are reducing or suspending payments of mortgages and certain loans.
Griffin encourages people to get their credit reports for a comprehensive look at what debts they have and what they owe to whom. Many of your monthly bills like rent, phone plans, electricity, and childcare won’t be on this report, because they are not typically reported to the credit bureaus.
However, if you don’t pay those bills, creditors can send your case to debt collectors, who will most likely report that delinquency. Then you will end up with a negative mark on your credit report.
But if you communicate with your lenders and creditors, they will often work with you to set up a plan and are far less likely to report you to debt collection agencies. You can also negotiate with them to be granted forbearance or deferment, types of temporary postponement of payments without negative credit affects, Griffin said.
He also noted that an increase in credit utilization is expected during the COVID-19 crisis as people use their credit cards to get through the tough time. That will make credit scores drop, but he said not to worry.
“Once we’re back on our feet, your scores are going to improve again,” he said. “It’s a credit history, but you can control it, you can change it. It will go up and down, and that’s okay.”
Do I have to pay my rent and/or mortgage this month?
Given how swiftly the coronavirus pandemic has swept the globe, you might find some relief when it comes to keeping a roof over your head.
As Fortune has reported, mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac both have ordered lenders to be more flexible with borrowers, reducing or suspending payments for up to 12 months. That action alone covers half of the country’s home loans.
Other lenders are making accommodations such as offering forbearance, which allows borrowers to delay their payments (but could also mean that they owe those payments as a lump sum at the end of the agreed-upon period). Experts say a better option is mortgage modification, which allows you to skip payments for a set time and repay the lender in a variety of ways.
What happens if I don’t pay my utilities?
Normally, utilities providers would shut off your water, lights, heat, or phone service if the bill goes unpaid. That could still happen, but in an unprecedented time of crisis such as the coronavirus pandemic, many governments and companies are freezing shutoffs.
Again, Griffin says the best thing you can do is communicate with your providers that you are unable to pay the bill in full. That communication will curry good favor and work toward a solution that benefits both parties.
When will I get my coronavirus relief check?
The coronavirus relief bill passed by the President and Congress includes $2 trillion worth of stimulus for the American economy, including $1,200 checks that will be issued to qualifying individuals.
Experts believe this will take longer than Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin’s optimistic two- to three-week timeline. Erica York of the Tax Foundation told Fortune that the fastest the federal government has ever issued stimulus checks was six weeks. With that in mind, expect your stimulus check to arrive sometime in May or later.
To get your stimulus check as quickly as possible, make sure the IRS has your direct deposit information. To do that, you can check if your latest tax return included it, or if you haven’t yet submitted your 2019 taxes, make sure to include your bank information for direct deposit when you do. That way, the money will be deposited rather than mailed in the form of a check.
How can I apply for unemployment benefits?
If you’ve been laid off, furloughed, or even, in some cases, had your hours reduced, you can apply for unemployment benefits from your state and the federal government. The CARES (Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security) Act even allocates extra unemployment benefits for those who have lost their work because of COVID-19. This includes part-time employees, freelancers, independent contractors, gig workers, and the self-employed.
These benefits should be quickly paid out, as the CARES Act incentivizes states to move quickly.
On top of unemployment and individual stimulus checks, there are many government and nonprofit resources you can utilize for help paying your bills this month and in the coming months.
Both Griffin and Sokunbi stressed that inability to pay bills right now is not a personal failing. “My best advice right now is there’s a lot that’s out of our control,” Sokunbi says. “Do what you can and then disconnect. Focus on your family, focus on self care. We just have to wait this out.”
More must-read personal finance coverage from Fortune:
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
—5 things to know about unemployment benefits in the COVID-19 stimulus package
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—How to defer your student loan payment due to coronavirus
—What to do if you’re worried about getting laid off
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: U.S. tax deadline moved from April 15 to July 15
Subscribe to Fortune’s Bull Sheet for no-nonsense finance news and analysis daily.


fortune--2020-04-02--Navy captain fired after pleading for help for his crew on coronavirus-stricken aircraft carrier

Millions of Americans won ’ t be able to pay all their bills this month .
What financial experts advise

Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.
The captain of a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier facing a growing outbreak of the coronavirus was fired Thursday by Navy leaders who said he created a panic by sending his memo pleading for help to too many people.
Navy Secretary Thomas Modly said the ship’s commander, Capt. Brett Crozier “demonstrated extremely poor judgement” in the middle of a crisis. He said the captain copied too many people on the memo, which was leaked to a California newspaper and quickly spread to many news outlets.
He said Crozier should have gone directly to his immediate commanders, who were already moving to help the ship.
The USS Theodore Roosevelt, with a crew of nearly 5,000, is docked in Guam, and the Navy has said as many as 3,000 will be taken off the ship and quarantined by Friday. More than 100 sailors on the ship have tested positive for the virus, but none are hospitalized at this point.
Modly said Crozier created a panic by suggesting 50 sailors could die.
“What it does, it undermines our efforts and the chain of command’s efforts to address this problem and creates a panic and creates the perception that the Navy is not on the job, the government is not on the job, and it’s just not true,” Modly said.
More coronavirus coverage from Fortune:
—China releases data on asymptomatic coronavirus cases—but doubts remain
—”It’ll never be fast enough”: 5 questions for a ventilator manufacturer
—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—SBA small-business loans: 8 things to know about the Paycheck Protection Program
—The stock market had its worst quarter since 1987—and its worst Q1 ever
—How to job hunt during the coronavirus pandemic
—PODCAST: Two health care CEOs on why coronavirus tests and vaccines are the ammunition needed to fight COVID-19
—VIDEO: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
Subscribe to Outbreak, a daily newsletter roundup of stories on the coronavirus pandemic and its impact on global business. It’s free to get it in your inbox.


fortune--2020-04-02--Tesla’s shares soar 20% on stronger-than-expected deliveries amid coronavirus outbreak

Tesla delivered 88,400 vehicles in its latest quarter, soundly beating Wall Street’s muted expectations amid the coronavirus outbreak, and sending its shares up 20% in after-hours trading.
For the first quarter of this year, which ended March 31, analysts had predicted that Tesla would deliver just over 80,600 cars.
Despite the stronger-than-expected number, Tesla is well off-pace for meeting its prediction in January that it would deliver 500,000 cars in 2020. But that projection was made before the full scope of the global coronavirus pandemic and its accompanying economic shock.
In late February, coronavirus worries began hammering Tesla’s stock after it had more than tripled in value in less than three months, to a peak of $917.40 on Feb. 19. In after-hours trading on Thursday, it rose $89.52 to $543.99 after falling nearly 6% in regular trading to $454.47.
The financial results behind Tesla’s latest quarterly delivery numbers aren’t expected to be disclosed until the last week of April. They too won’t fully reflect the impact the company is facing today from the ongoing coronavirus crisis or what’s ahead in the coming months.
By the time the latest quarter ended, the coronavirus pandemic had only started to gain full force outside China. Since then, it has continued to spread throughout the U.S. and Europe, which make up 80% of Tesla’s sales, while economic activity in China has rebounded somewhat but remains depressed compared with its status before the outbreak.
The first signs of coronavirus-related trouble for Tesla came in late January, when the company said it would temporarily shutter its new car factory in Shanghai to comply with government lockdown orders there. The Shanghai factory has since reopened, and Tesla said today that the factory “continued to achieve record levels of production, despite significant setbacks.”
In the U.S., Tesla has conducted massive layoffs and shuttered its auto factory in Fremont, Calif., on March 23.
Amid the factory shutdowns, Tesla said it had produced nearly 102,700 vehicles in the first quarter. The total exceeded the number of deliveries, a rarity for Tesla that could suggest declining demand because of the coronavirus.
The negative impact of the coronavirus on Tesla’s second-quarter sales and beyond could be huge. Analyst Toni Sacconaghi of AllianceBernstein, in an April 1 note to investors, drew comparisons to the Great Recession, during which auto sales declined 20% from 2007 to 2009, with a full recovery taking more than a decade. AllianceBernstein expects the lockdown of major parts of the U.S. economy to last until mid-June.
That’s particularly worrisome for Tesla, which has yet to achieve a full year of profitability, even amid the historic economic expansion that the coronavirus brought to an end. However, the company is better positioned than some to weather a serious economic downturn, primarily because of its $8.6 billion in cash.
Some analyst models had projected that Tesla had enough cash to survive more than a year without further investment. But with projections about the economic impact of coronavirus worsening, those estimates may soon be revised downward, too.
More must-read tech coverage from Fortune:
—How the coronavirus stimulus package would change gig worker benefits
—Inside the global push to 3D-print masks and ventilator parts
—Apple focuses on what’s next amid coronavirus outbreak
—A startup is building computer chips using human neurons
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro vs. the Sony WF-1000XM3
Catch up with Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily digest on the business of tech.


fortune--2020-04-02--Coronavirus is (literally) shaking up how the world moves

Happy Thursday, readers. And welcome to the first edition of The Capsule, formerly known as Brainstorm Health Daily. This is Sy, your writer then and now.
You’re getting this email because you subscribed to Brainstorm Health Daily. You can expect everything in The Capsule to be the same—new look, same great taste. As I mentioned to you all on Monday, we’re switching the newsletter to a weekly format, at least for the time being. You’ll get this newsletter in your inbox on Thursday afternoons ET.
Now onto our public health crisis… We’ve all become used to reading some bizarre headlines in these times. But I’m not sure anyone quite expected this.
My colleague Chris Morris, citing a fascinating study by Belgian scientists reported in the journal Nature, explores how the lockdowns and stay-at-home orders necessitated by coronavirus may have literally slowed down the movement of the globe (at least in certain regions).
The reason? A halt in human activity and transportation which has cut down on “seismic noice,” the vibrations which, en masse, extend to the crust of our planet itself.
You may be wondering, wait, is that good or just another element of concern? As it turns out, it could be quite helpful for geoscientists whose jobs are to detect earthquakes, volcanic activity, and the various tectonic shifts of our pale blue dot.
Read on for the week’s news, and see you again next Thursday.
Sy Mukherjee
sayak.mukherjee@fortune.com
@the_sy_guy
DIGITAL HEALTH
New coronavirus tests are on the way. The COVID-19 diagnostics situation is shifting rapidly. Here are just a few updates from the past week (and I'll have a much broader set of pieces to share on this soon): Henry Schein announced it would begin distributing a rapid antibody coronavirus blood test for current and past cases which it says can deliver results in just 15 minutes at the point of care; Abbott Labs has what it says is a five-minute point-of-care test that will be first be deployed in Detroit; the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has issued an emergency use authorization (EUA) to Cellex which can detect antibodies in people who have recovered from COVID-19; at-home genetic testing specialist Color is building a new lab to handle coronavirus testing with the goal of being able to manage 10,000 tests per day in the coming weeks; and that's just a few of the recent developments. This has become an all-hands-on-deck effort.
INDICATIONS
Sanofi says it can produce millions of doses of a coronavirus treatment. French drug giant Sanofi tells Reuters it will be able to offer millions of doses of the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine (which has been touted on multiple occasions by President Trump as a promising drug candidate) should it prove successful in clinical trials. And within the latter point lies the rub—the decades-old treatment has decidedly limited evidence as a COVID-19 treatment and could cause serious side effects in certain patients. Overuse of the medicine could also limit its supply for malaria patients. (Reuters)
THE BIG PICTURE
A ventilator shortage meets a specialist shortage. There's been a significant supply chain problem when it comes to protective medical equipment, particularly the ventilators essential to helping COVID-19 patients. There are many reasons for that—but even beyond the bottleneck, there's another issue at hand: A lack of medical specialists who can even use the ventilators available to them. “We already have a shortage of nurses and physicians in the United States,” Marcus Schabacker, CEO of ECRI, a patient-safety nonprofit organization, told my colleagues Maria Aspan and Naomi Xu Elegant. (Fortune)
Three insurance giants say they'll waive coronavirus-related out-of-pocket costs. At least three major insurers—Aetna, Humana, and Cigna—have announced they'll waive certain out-of-pocket costs borne by patients for COVID-19 treatment. In essence that means COVID-19 patients with qualifying health plans wouldn't have to pony up money for coronavirus treatment; but, given that a multi-day hospital stay is more expensive for insurers than it is for patients (insurance companies usually have to begin providing a larger share of coverage costs after someone hits their deductible, which may happen quickly with an extended hospital visit), this is also likely a PR move that could be followed up for a request for government funding to stem losses. (NPR)
REQUIRED READING
Hospitals are running low on the most critical supply of all—oxygen, by Jeremy Kahn
A record 6.6 million apply for unemployment benefits, by The Associated Press
Commentary: After coronavirus, we need to rethink densely populated cities, by Joel Kotkin
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fortune--2020-04-02--Millions unemployed by the coronavirus pandemic could be retrained to fight it

As COVID-19 cases escalate across the U.S., so do the desperate calls for personal protective equipment for health workers, and the pleas for ventilators they could deploy to save lives. Companies and individual Americans have taken to sewing and 3D-printing face masks, and manufacturing floors are being repurposed to make ventilator parts. There appears to be, at long last, a slow churning of public and private sector activities to produce and distribute that essential gear. Whether health workers can access gear in time before the entire health system gets overwhelmed, we don’t yet know.
But as we cling to a faint hope that masks, ventilators, and other necessary equipment might be coming in relief—who will support and relieve the caregivers who will wear and use that gear? With a growing health worker shortage nationwide, doctors, nurses, and physician’s assistants are already being reallocated from other departments, drafted out of retirement, and allowed to graduate early from medical schools. But who will support them?
Help could come from a neighbor. In many countries, including the U.S., community health workers—local residents without professional medical degrees, hired and trained to support patients—have been a first and last line of defense for epidemics. As a community health worker, a neighbor could help stem the tide of the pandemic by offering prevention tactics, aiding in the detection of new cases, and supporting patients in accessing the care they need.
Other countries have shown how vital community-based strategies are to achieve viral suppression. For instance, South Korea, which reduced COVID-19 transmission from its peak of nearly 1,000 cases per day to less than 100 per day, has shown that getting closer to zero cases requires widespread community-based testing, rapid isolation, care for the sick, and rigorous tracing of contacts. Community health workers were also an essential part of the Ebola response in Liberia, where they teamed up with doctors and nurses to find the sick and get them into care.
And now, with more than 3 million Americans having lost their jobs last week, those unemployed as a result of the virus can help fight it as community health workers. The U.S. had about 56,000 community health workers in 2018, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. But, based on a task force report that showed that countries should have at least one community health worker per 650 people, the U.S. needs at least 500,000 more. They should be hired, trained, and equipped to prevent, detect, and respond to COVID-19, and support patients with health and social care needs. Some could do this work from the relative safety of their own homes, and others, with the right protective gear and training, can go door-to-door in their neighborhoods to identify the sick and help them get medical care.
And by hiring unemployed people already feeling the dire economic impact of this pandemic—from restaurant servers and bartenders to people who staffed hotel check-ins and airline gates—the U.S. could bolster the ranks of local health departments, nonprofit organizations, and national initiatives like the Medical Reserve Corps involved in fighting COVID-19.
While the idea of viewing neighbors as caregivers and health care support might stretch the imagination, there is much that Americans without prior medical expertise could be quickly hired and trained to do in the fight against COVID-19.
First, they could help with prevention by organizing and carrying out social media campaigns that promote social distancing. The implementation of social distancing remains uneven across the country, especially in communities that are most marginalized. Training the people from those communities as community health workers would result in an uptake of following the recommended practices. They could also encourage and outline strategies that promote mental and physical health and resilience.
Second, community health workers could aid in detection. They can be trained to learn the signs and symptoms of COVID-19 to help staff the hotlines run by hospitals and public health departments and refer possible COVID-19 patients to testing centers.
Third, community health workers can support the response by calling people with COVID-19 who are in self-isolation with mild symptoms and, with supervision, monitor them for worsening symptoms and support rapid referral of people who require hospitalization. In addition, in concert with public health officials, they could support rapid home-based testing (once available) while wearing personal protective gear, following up with those who’ve been exposed to a COVID-19 patient to monitor their symptoms and ensure they get tested.
Others have shown what’s possible. The University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Community Health Workers IMPaCT program hires and trains residents to act as first responders to the social needs of those in low-income neighborhoods. These community health workers are now being mobilized to help patients and affected communities deal with the economic fallout from the virus by providing telesupport and helping to arrange food delivery, while reinforcing public health messaging that’s critical for prevention. And in other COVID-19-affected countries, health care leaders have a vision of how this could be implemented at a national scale. Last week, in an opinion piece for The Lancet, health care leaders in the U.K. proposed a national program to train a community health workforce to deal with testing, surveillance, and active case finding. This community health workforce would also provide social care for the 1.5 million elderly and vulnerable populations.
Funds from the government’s coronavirus relief bill could be channeled to health departments, nonprofits, and health care systems to start training and hiring unemployed Americans as community health workers immediately. The philanthropic sector could also support training programs. And corporations, such as those in the hospitality and airline industries, with furloughed workers who want to volunteer their time, can adapt existing training content and deliver it online through their corporate training platforms. Workers could complete the onboarding programs in days.
Hiring unemployed Americans as COVID-19 community health workers today would have lasting effects. A U.S. community health corps could provide economic salvation and form the backbone of a future health system that is always ready to fight the next epidemic. And we wouldn’t have to look far for help—we’d only have to look next door.
Dr. Raj Panjabi is CEO of Last Mile Health and an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School.
Mitchell Weiss is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School and author of We the Possibility: Harnessing Public Entrepreneurship to Solve Our Most Urgent Problems.
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fortune--2020-04-02--The worst part about the U.S. losing 10 million jobs in two weeks? The real number may be much highe

The worst part about the U.S. losing 10 million jobs in two weeks? The real number may be much higher

Take the worst weekly unemployment numbers the U.S. has ever seen. And then double it.
More than 6.6 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits in the week ended March 28. That tops the previous all-time record of almost 3.3 million initial unemployment claims set just a week ago, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
In a two-week period the country has lost 10 million jobs—wiping out the past four years’ worth of U.S. job gains in a period as long as one paycheck.
But the real number of Americans who lost their jobs over the past two weeks is likely much greater than 10 million. Experts say that states are overwhelmed with the number of jobless claims flooding in, and they’re unable to process all the claims, meaning the real total may be even higher.
“In some cases the [state unemployment] websites don’t have a lot of feasibility for handling this…some people who lost their jobs last week still haven’t gotten through. We’re going to continue to see a backlog growing in the system,” says Peter Earle, an economist at think tank American Institute for Economic Research (AIER).
Across the nation unemployment sites are crashing from the influx of traffic, including Michigan’s, which went down for a bit on Tuesday.
Dan White, head of fiscal policy research at Moody’s Analytics, notes that one state he works with said it was receiving about 1.5 million calls per business day, and can only field 11,000 to 12,000 calls. He declined to name the state, but said more unemployment offices this week are turning to the private sector for help.
Pennsylvania is second in the nation with 783,331 initial jobless claims over the past two weeks. That’s more than much bigger states like Texas (431,023 claims), and New York (446,402 claims). The Keystone State leads those states because it has a simple and functioning unemployment site that can handle the volume better, White says. That gap between Pennsylvania and states like New York indicates that there are likely millions of claims in the U.S. that have yet to be processed, he adds.
“Four years of job gains wiped out in 15 days…Unemployment systems are just unable to deal with it,” Earle says.
More must-read personal finance coverage from Fortune:
—Millions of Americans won’t be able to pay their bills this month. What financial experts advise
—Everything you need to know about the coronavirus stimulus checks
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—Everything you need to know about furloughs—and what they mean for workers
—How to defer your student loan payments during the pandemic
—What to do if you’re worried about getting laid off
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEOs
—WATCH: The U.S. tax deadline was pushed back from April 15 to July 15
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fortune--2020-04-02--Faced with a spiraling coronavirus testing scandal, the U.K. pledges to build a diagnostics industry

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The U.K. government committed Thursday to building an emergency diagnostics industry “at scale” in order to ramp up widespread testing for COVID-19, after facing days of criticism that even frontline health care workers were struggling to find out whether they had contracted the disease.
The government committed to ramping up testing to 100,000 tests per day by the end of the month—a 10-fold increase from the current 10,000 tests per day. That was a testing rate lower than those in Spain, Italy, and the U.S.—and came far short of the rate in Germany, which was already testing at least 50,000 people per day, the highest rate in Europe.
On Thursday, Health Secretary Matt Hancock said that the widespread testing in Germany was due to its extensive diagnostics industry, particularly the substantial presence of health care giant Roche, based in Basel, Switzerland.
It was Hancock’s first public appearance after emerging from self-isolation, the result of his testing positive for the coronavirus himself, alongside British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is still in isolation and reportedly experiencing mild symptoms.
“Unlike some countries, we didn’t go into this crisis with a huge diagnostics industry. We have the best scientific labs in the world, but we did not have the scale,” said Hancock.
The German health secretary could call on 100 test labs, he added, “ready and waiting” when the crisis struck. According to the BBC, the U.K. is using only 48 labs for testing.
“We have had to build from a lower base,” Hancock said, adding there had been a shortage of both swabs and reagents critical for doing tests on a wide scale. The U.K. would now build a diagnostics industry, he said, with help from major health care companies that previously hadn’t offered the service.
“This is a huge admission of strategic failure,” tweeted Richard Horton, editor of the medical journal The Lancet and a frequent critic of the U.K. government’s approach in recent weeks.
The U.K. government has faced a growing scandal in recent days over the limited testing for workers in the National Health Service, known as the NHS, where only 5,000 out of about half a million frontline health care workers had received a test for exposure to the virus so far, according to Hancock. That was a higher figure than the one given on Wednesday, when the government said just 2,000 NHS workers had been tested.
Those testing rates were despite reports earlier this week that one in four doctors and one in five nurses in the country is in self-isolation over symptoms and unable to return to work, according to the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of Nursing, taking critical resources out of the health service just when they are needed most. Workers in the NHS are also facing a critical lack of personal protective equipment, according to multiple reports from hospitals.
On Thursday, Hancock said there were sufficient stores of protective equipment, but issues with distribution had prevented them from getting everywhere they were needed.
A report this week from BuzzFeed also alleged that a lack of communication from Public Health England had botched an early offer from the government’s animal health agency to use its resources and testing capabilities, which are usually used to test animals for diseases. A spokesperson from Public Health England said scientists across the government had been redeployed to scale up lab-testing capacity for COVID-19.
That came alongside accusations that the government had underestimated the scale of the virus and its impact on the NHS, brushing off WHO guidance to “test, test, test” and spending time instead on a short-lived strategy of pursuing herd immunity, which government officials later said was a miscommunication.
On Thursday, Hancock said that testing had and would continue to be prioritized for patients, for whom a diagnosis could help inform “life or death” decisions about treatment, followed by frontline NHS workers.
The 100,000 target would include both tests to determine whether someone is currently positive, he said, and antibody tests, to determine whether someone has had the disease and recovered, in order to enable them to return to work safely.
On Thursday, Hancock also batted away repeated questions from journalists about government claims earlier this year that the country and the NHS were well prepared for the scale of the virus. At that time, the government had forecasted that up to 80% of the population of 66.44 million people could eventually be infected, but also claimed that banning large events and closing schools would have little impact on infection rates.
As of Thursday, 33,718 people in the U.K. had been diagnosed with coronavirus; 2,921 people had died. That includes at least five health care workers, including a physician and 40-year veteran of the NHS, Dr. Alfa Saadu, who had come out of retirement to treat the disease as part of a government scheme to call back health care workers.
This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Dr. Saadu’s name.
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—“It’ll never be fast enough”: 5 questions for a ventilator manufacturer
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—VIDEO: World leaders and health experts on how to stop the spread of COVID-19
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fortune--2020-04-02--Hulu could be an essential streaming service—if Disney figures out what to do with it

As new streaming competition arrives this summer in the form of NBC’s Peacock and WarnerMedia’s HBO Max, is it possible that now of all times is the beginning of Hulu’s golden age?
For years, the streaming video pioneer—founded in 2007, when George W. Bush was in the White House and MySpace was the dominant social media platform—juggled a dual existence. On one hand, Hulu was an upstart streaming service that offered viewers a refreshing new way to consume television shows and movies. On the other, the Los Angeles company functioned as a stopgap for major TV networks—at points NBCUniversal, Disney, Time Warner, and News Corp. owned substantial stakes in the company, and licensed their programming to it—as the incumbents adjusted to a world of cord-cutters and a resurgent Netflix.
Drawing on an extensive library of licensed content, Hulu positioned itself as a cable alternative to catch up on recently aired TV. Netflix meanwhile ushered in an era of binge culture by betting big—then extraordinarily big—on original shows and movies as its own licenses began to expire. For a while, the hierarchy of the streaming totem pole was clear, in terms of both subscribers and impact on the pop culture landscape: There was Netflix, then everyone else.
My, how things have changed. Hulu’s complicated ownership structure has been simplified greatly, and it is now controlled by Disney, which secured a 67% majority stake after it acquired 21st Century Fox last year and struck a deal with AT&T, which bought Time Warner in 2018. (NBCUniversal parent Comcast owns the remaining 33%.). These moves ended the built-in conflict over strategy among Hulu’s numerous owners and repositioned Hulu as one of three streaming services, alongside Disney+ and ESPN+, in Disney’s plan to win the streaming wars.
Not everyone is convinced that Disney knows what to do with its precious new asset. “The launch of Disney+ in the window right after the Disney-Fox deal and the buying out of Hulu shows that Disney doesn’t have a [holistic] strategy,” says Michael Pachter, a digital media analyst at Wedbush Securities. “They could have loaded Hulu right on top of Disney+ and made it a channel, but they continued bulling ahead, building its own infrastructure. Disney+ is fine. But they essentially have two Netflix services. Why not just have the same? There’s clearly no commitment to the Hulu brand or content.”
To Disney’s credit, it has started to make changes at Hulu after an initial period of leaving the streamer to its own devices. After Disney streaming chief Kevin Mayer informed Hulu staff in February that all divisions now report to Disney, the FX on Hulu hub launched a month later. FX, which Disney nabbed in the Fox deal, is one of the most critically acclaimed networks in television. Now all Hulu subscribers get exclusive streaming access to the channel’s content, including beloved series like Sons of Anarchy, American Horror Story, and The Americans. There’s more: Four new FX series won’t air on cable TV at all, but rather Hulu. Ex Machina director Alex Garland’s science-fiction miniseries Devs, which stars comedic actor Nick Offerman, was the first to premiere, in early March. (In response to a Fortune inquiry, Hulu deferred to Disney, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)
Stealing a page from the Netflix playbook—featuring original streaming content, rather than licensed broadcast reruns—could prove to be savvy. The move certainly comes at a good time: Hulu over the past year grew twice as fast as Netflix in the U.S., surpassing 30 million subscribers, and soon it will set its sights on international territories, where its red rival has dominated. In early February, then–Disney CEO Bob Iger said Hulu would aim to launch abroad in 2021, following the international debut of Disney+ this year. It’s likely that launch would include a bundle of Disney+, ESPN+, and Hulu—a three-pronged tactic, currently available in the U.S., intended to attract families, adult viewers interested in FX, and sports fans.
“If you roll out where Hulu isn’t, you can piggy back. You can say, ‘Hey, we’re offering Hulu as a bundle,’” says Dan Rayburn, an analyst at Frost & Sullivan focused on digital video and streaming. “Getting Disney+ in first—and I don’t want to call it a Trojan horse, because Disney+ is a great service in its own right—helps Hulu. As opposed to rolling out Hulu and saying, ‘By the way, we have Disney+.’”
Whatever the synergies from a sales perspective, there remains work to integrate the services on a technical level, Pachter says: “I am a Hulu subscriber and a Disney+ subscriber. They each have my email address, and they each email me a lot, but they haven’t figured out I subscribe to both. I’ve yet to be offered an ESPN bundle.”
But that’s nothing new for a sprawling media company that owns everything from Star Wars to Stumptown. Adds Pachter: “This is classic Disney. One hand doesn’t know what the other is.”
More must-read stories from Fortune:
—How COVID-19 is changing the business of Hollywood
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fortune--2020-04-02--Hospitals are running low on the most critical supply of all: Oxygen

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Oxygen supplies have emerged as the latest choke point in the battle against the coronavirus.
Many patients hospitalized with COVID-19 infections, even those not sick enough to be placed on a mechanical ventilator, have impaired lung function and require supplemental oxygen.
The number of these patients—and the amount of oxygen they are requiring—is threatening to exhaust hospitals’ supply, and industrial gas producers are scrambling to keep pace with the demand.
Hospitals normally have large central tanks for the storage of liquid oxygen, which is then evaporated into a gas and piped throughout the facility. Some also use smaller canisters of liquid oxygen.
But in Italy, hospitals have reported their daily consumption of oxygen has more than tripled during the pandemic as the number of patients needing ventilators and other forms of supplemental oxygen has soared. Some hospitals in the north of the country, the region at the epicenter of the outbreak, have been forced to install additional large storage tanks to ensure an adequate supply.
In the U.K., one major London hospital reportedly came close to exhausting its oxygen supply last weekend. This resulted in an urgent letter from the National Health Service instructing doctors to calculate the maximum number of patients they can support on oxygen at any one time, and to limit the use of continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machines, which doctors have been using to help patients who are not yet sick enough to require a ventilator.
A medical worker pushes a trolley of oxygen tanks outside the emergency department of a hospital in Madrid. Many hospitals are exhausting oxygen supplies during the pandemic, potentially putting patients’ lives at risk. Paul Hanna—Bloomberg/Getty Images
CPAP machines and other forms of what’s known as “high-flow nasal oxygen,” which deliver oxygen directly into a patient’s nostrils through tubing, often consume far more oxygen per hour than ventilators. Hooking too many patients up to high-flow piped oxygen simultaneously can also create pressure imbalances across the hospital’s oxygen network, leading the entire system to suddenly fail, jeopardizing all the patients in the hospital who are currently receiving wall-based oxygen, the NHS said.
The NHS warning raises the prospect that even if the U.K. is able to produce enough ventilators to meet the demand from coronavirus patients, the available supply of oxygen may ultimately become a limiting factor in the number of patients able to receive lifesaving treatment.
Meanwhile, in New York City, a number of doctors have said their hospitals have also come perilously close to running out of piped oxygen. They have reported running low on oxygen canisters, which some hospitals have begun using to treat patients because all of their piped oxygen connections are already in use.
Biju Mohan, a vice president at GEP, a global supply-chain consulting firm based in Clark, N.J., and a specialist in the pharmaceutical and health care industries, said estimates of the surge in demand for medical oxygen range widely between 25% and 500%. He said most manufacturers operate with about 20% spare capacity during normal times and that they should have the ability to meet the surging hospital requirements, especially as demand from other users, such as the construction and oil and gas industry, has plummeted as the economy has ground to a halt.
Pulled from the air
In theory, there are few limits on the amount of oxygen manufacturers can produce. Most producers take in air from the atmosphere, filter it, and then use a cryogenic process, in which the air is cooled to extreme temperatures by an air compressor to separate it into its constituent gases, such as oxygen and nitrogen. These are then further purified and distilled into a liquid or bottled in pressurized cylinders and small canisters. Most of the process is driven by basic physics and heat, with few chemical supplies involved.
The bigger practical problem, Mohan said, is that hospitals normally receive oxygen in liquid form, which is then evaporated into gas and piped throughout the hospital. Hospitals have limited storage capacity for liquid oxygen, and delivery fleets are having to make many more trips than normal to keep these tanks filled, he says.
Ganesh Suntharalingam, a doctor who is president of the U.K.’s Intensive Care Society, said during an online seminar sponsored by the Association of Anaesthetists earlier this month, that most hospitals’ oxygen tanks have sensors that automatically order more supply when tank levels drop to a certain threshold. But with the rate of oxygen depletion much higher than normal—and high demand from so many hospitals occurring at the same time—“for that hospital to not run out that day is going to be a challenge.”
In some cases, he said, hospitals could find their oxygen supplies completely depleted “within hours rather than days.”
Mohan said that it should be possible for hospitals to supplement their piped oxygen supplies with large cylinders of oxygen, which are normally used for industrial customers, but that there are regulatory obstacles to doing so—these cylinders are not licensed for use in medical settings. Air Liquide, one of the world’s largest medical gas suppliers, has said it is considering asking for regulatory approval to do this.
In the U.K., the government has asked BOC, an oxygen producer and official supplier to the National Health Service, to quadruple production to meet the anticipated demand as coronavirus cases peak in the coming weeks. “BOC is working closely with government departments within the U.K. to develop processes and procedures to cope with an increased demand of medical gases associated with the current COVID-19 outbreak,” the company, which is a subsidiary of Linde, one of the world’s largest industrial gas producers, said in a statement.
BOC has been building up stocks of medical gases in preparation for the pandemic, the company said, and has also increased its fleet of tankers for trucking gas to hospitals. The British military has been placed on standby to help drive oxygen tankers if BOC’s own drivers start to fall ill or have to self-isolate.
BOC and Air Liquide have both asked medical customers who use oxygen gas in canisters to return empty ones promptly so they can be refilled and sent out again.
Air Products, another major industrial gases producer headquartered in Allentown, Pa., said in a statement that it is “not currently experiencing any production shortages” owing to the pandemic and that it “continues to review and evaluate its entire robust supply chain, redundant backup plans, and network of facilities to meet customers’ demands.
“This is a dynamic and fluid situation, which makes it difficult to predict its future impact or exact duration,” the company said.
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fortune--2020-04-02--Zoom meetings keep getting hacked. Here’s how to prevent ‘Zoom bombing’ on your video chats

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As people and businesses have become increasingly reliant on video chatting since the coronavirus pandemic began, the FBI’s Boston office reported this week that “Zoom bombing” incidents are occurring across America. A disruption specific to the teleconferencing app Zoom, which has recently surged in popularity, this vulnerability has been been exploited by hackers, with disturbing results.
On March 30, for instance, uninvited strangers crashed a Zoom meeting on cyberattacks. When the presenter started covering coronavirus disinformation posted to Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, a Zoom bomber scribbled all over the screen, forcing the meeting to end early.
Zoom hacking issues like this are happening all over the world, from over-the-Internet Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to sensitive, high-level government gatherings. Here’s how Zoom bombings work, and, more importantly, how to prevent them.
What is Zoom bombing?
Many Zoom bombing incidents have amounted to a form of trolling. Hackers gain access to a Zoom meeting and attempt to disrupt the video chat and upset participants by shouting profanity or racial slurs, or putting disturbing or offensive images in their video feed.
The vulnerability also has people wondering if Zoom is safe to use. Particularly in a large meeting, an unwelcome participant might go unnoticed, enabling that person to record the meeting or otherwise gather information. In particularly sensitive cases, this could become a method of corporate espionage or blackmail.
How are hackers joining Zoom meetings they aren’t supposed to be in?
The majority of Zoom bombing attacks appear not to be the product of flaws in Zoom’s code, but rather of users’ overall cybersecurity hygiene and their imperfect command of Zoom’s privacy settings.
If a Zoom meeting is set to public, it can be accessed by anyone with the correct link. According to Roy Zur, cofounder and CEO of cybersecurity firm Cybint, bad actors can find these addresses simply by searching for “zoom.us” on social media sites like Facebook, where public meeting links are often posted. Dedicated forums have also cropped up on sites like Reddit, where r/Zoombombing was described as “dedicated to the posting of Zoom Classroom Meeting IDs.” Reddit says it has now banned the forum for violating site policies.
How can I prevent Zoom bombing of my meetings and video calls?
There are several important, mostly straightforward ways to protect your meetings. Fortune reached out to Zoom for comment. The company recommended users read this detailed guide, which covers precautions for keeping their meetings safe.
Most importantly, Zoom users should not share meeting links publicly. This is perhaps the single most obvious precaution you can take. Rather than posting a meeting link to a Facebook group or in a promotional tweet, distribute information via a more private method, such as email.
Second, set your meetings to “private.” Zoom now sets all new meetings to “private” by default, requiring attendees to provide a password for access. But users often opt to make meetings public for the sake of convenience. Given the wave of Zoom bombings, the inconvenience of requiring a password is probably worthwhile in keeping your meeting safe.
Also, don’t use your personal meeting ID. Every registered Zoom user has a personal meeting ID, linked to what is essentially a permanent virtual meeting room. Because that ID doesn’t change, sharing it publicly increases the chance that future meetings using your personal ID might be Zoom bombed.
To avoid the risk of Zoom bombing, share your personal meeting ID only with your most trusted contacts. Generally, while Zoom will prompt you to use your personal ID for “instant” meetings, scheduled meetings will use a one-time meeting ID, reducing risk. If you’re concerned that you may have already shared your personal meeting ID in an insecure way, Zur recommends contacting Zoom directly to have it changed.
Finally, restrict video sharing. If the meeting host is the only person who needs to share video, such as in a seminar or presentation, the host should change Zoom’s screen-sharing setting to “Host only.” Zoom has already made this change by default for K-12 classes using the software.
Is Zoom safe to use?
Given the wave of Zoom bombings, you might suspect there’s a problem with the Zoom software. But Zur says Zoom is generally doing a good job on security, and the bulk of Zoom bombings are most likely due to lax user practices rather than bugs.
However, the very popularity of Zoom may inherently make it riskier.
“As you see hype around a specific product, it also attracts attackers,” says Zur. But white-hat hackers and cybersecurity organizations, including government-backed organizations, will also follow suit, devoting more time and energy into keeping these newly popular technologies safe, he adds.
More must-read tech coverage from Fortune:
—Everyone is using Zoom, but is that what Zoom wants?
—How the coronavirus stimulus package would change gig worker benefits
—Inside the global push to 3D-print masks and ventilator parts
—Apple focuses on what’s next amid coronavirus outbreak
—A startup is building computer chips using human neurons
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: Best earbuds in 2020: Apple AirPods Pro Vs. Sony WF-1000XM3
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fortune--2020-04-02--SXSW partners with Amazon to put its film festival online

The popcorn will be bring your own and the barbecue won’t be as good, but the Austin, Texas, SXSW Film Festival is moving online after having its 27th edition canceled by the coronavirus pandemic.
SXSW announced Thursday that it’s partnering with Amazon Prime Video to stream as much of its movie line-up as possible for a 10-day period in the U.S. It will be free to viewers with or without an Amazon Prime membership.
South by Southwest organizers have worked frantically to salvage what they could of the festival and bring attention to the many films that had been planning to premiere there. SXSW, which had been scheduled to run March 13-22, last week announced awards for its competition categories, anyway.
Individual films will choose whether they want to opt in to the 10-day “SXSW 2020 Film Festival Collection” on Amazon. Don’t count on movies acquired by Netflix, for example, to participate. The festival declined to say how many films it expects to host.
But for the filmmakers that do join in, the digital platform could offer a measure of solace for their missed SXSW premiere, and all the promotion benefit that a major festival entails. Filmmakers who participate will receive a screening fee.
“Ever since SXSW was canceled by the City of Austin, we’ve been focused on how we could help the incredible films and filmmakers in the SXSW 2020 Film Festival lineup,” said Janet Pierson, director of film at SXSW. “We’re inspired by the adaptability and resilience of the film community as it searches for creative solutions in this unprecedented crisis.”
SXSW and Prime Video are aiming to hold the 10-day online event in late April.
Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios, said she hopes the online SXSW “can help give back some of that experience, and showcase artists and films that audiences might otherwise not have had the chance to see.”
More must-read entertainment coverage from Fortune:
—As people stay home, interest in streaming services is surging. So is piracy.
—SiriusXM offers free access to all as coronavirus pandemic continues
—What to watch on Netflix while social distancing
—What to watch on Disney+ while social distancing
—What to watch on Amazon Prime while social distancing
—Listen to Leadership Next, a Fortune podcast examining the evolving role of CEO
—WATCH: One on one with Grace Potter
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fortune--2020-04-02--More ventilators are coming, but there’s still a shortage of people who can operate them

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Ventilators for critically ill coronavirus patients are in desperately short supply. So are the people who can operate them.
As U.S. deaths from COVID-19 mount, manufacturers from all industries are scrambling to make more of the complex hospital equipment that can breathe on behalf of lung-compromised patients. About 1 million American coronavirus victims might need a ventilator, according to some estimates—and the country currently has fewer than 175,000 of them.
But while medical-device companies, automakers, and 3D printers all spring into manufacturing action, some health experts are worrying about a related—and potentially equally tragic—shortage: that of trained respiratory therapists, the specialist health care workers who can often put breathing tubes down patients’ throats, and know how to adjust the delicate dial settings on their ventilators, without injuring or killing them.
“These are not plug-into-the-wall-and-go machines,” warns Julie Letwat, a health care lawyer with McGuireWoods in Chicago. “These have to be individually calibrated for patients—and if they’re not, the patient dies.”
Intubating patients and adjusting the delicate dial settings on their ventilators can be done by some doctors and nurses, although most are already inundated by other work from the surge of COVID-19 cases. And “we already have a shortage of nurses and physicians in the United States,” says Marcus Schabacker, a physician and the CEO of ECRI, a patient-safety nonprofit organization. “They’re already stretched when we have a bad flu season.”
In the United States, managing ventilators is mostly done by a specially trained group of health care workers called respiratory therapists. But there aren’t enough of them: One 2015 study found that in a crisis-level public health emergency, the number of available respiratory therapists would be the “key constraining component,” meaning the number of patients on ventilators would max out at 135,000.
Which makes some experts warn that all the recent efforts to step up ventilator manufacturing might be missing the real problem.
“You’re going to run out of personnel before you run out of ventilators,” Schabacker says.
Calling in reinforcements
In theory, the numbers should be less dire. There are about 150,000 licensed respiratory therapists in the United States, who could each manage up to six ventilators at once under good circumstances, according to Timothy R. Myers, chief business officer for the American Association for Respiratory Care.
But “if you have critically ill patients, that ratio could go down,” he says. “That means you need more therapists.”
It’s a profession that’s fairly unique to the U.S., and one of its fastest growing. Becoming a respiratory therapist requires an associate’s degree, board certifications, and a license in all states but Alaska. The median annual pay in 2018 was $60,280, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
But it’s also a profession that needed more recruits even before the onset of the coronavirus crisis—especially in some now-crucial locations. New York, which has become the center of the American crisis, “is among the states with the lowest concentration of respiratory therapists compared with the national average,” USA Today reported last week, citing an analysis of BLS data from 2018. “The concentration is similarly low in Washington, the first hotspot in the USA.”
Hospitals in general were seeing vacancy rates for respiratory therapists of between 9% and 12% early this year, before the onset of the pandemic, according to Myers.
“While it was a bit of a shortage, people were able to manage daily operations with some creative staffing and overtime,” Myers says. “But as this virus spreads, if hospital workers are getting exposed and quarantined or testing positive themselves, you’re depleting a workforce” that was already short-staffed.
Now hospitals and medical centers are trying to fill in the gaps by calling respiratory therapists out of retirement—or hustling them into the workforce early. Some states have streamlined their licensing requirements or waived fees for recent retirees, Myers says. He adds that others are also granting temporary licenses to students who have completed some of their respiratory therapy coursework, so that they can relieve hospital staff of some non-ICU duties.
Myers also offers a glimmer of hope: In the coming weeks, as medical-device makers and car companies fulfill their promises to manufacture tens of thousands more ventilators, there will be some fresh recruits to operate them.
They still may not be numerous enough to operate the new machines. But in the next two months, “there are about 6,000 to 7,000 [respiratory-therapist] students in the United States about to graduate,” Myers says. “So there is another potential workforce—a resupply, if you will.”
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to emphasize that respiratory therapists operate and adjust ventilators in addition to intubating patients.
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fortune--2020-04-02--Economics of a pandemic: In times of distress, girls and women are the biggest losers

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Without good policies, economists predict that globally the coronavirus pandemic will hit women and girls harder than men and boys, worsening existing inequalities.
When pandemics hit or disasters occur, existing social and economic gaps are exposed. Those gaps then widen, leaving different sectors of society to recover at different rates; still others may never recover.
“Women might experience a slower financial recovery, which may widen the existing pay gap between men and women and slow the advances women have made worldwide,” says Belinda Archibong, an assistant professor of economics at Barnard College, Columbia University, in New York City, whose research tracks the economic fallout from epidemics.
It’s a socioeconomic outcome that is tracked by economists during times of economic and health distress, such as in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina or during meningitis epidemics that hit the northern swath of Africa every dozen or so years. By studying how people and governments react to the fallout from these smaller events, economists can create playbooks to help dampen the negative outcomes for future epidemics or “unexpected shocks.”
Sevin Yeltekin, professor of economics at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, says the pandemic’s effects could last a lifetime in all areas in which “a structural difference” already exists. In the U.S. and Europe, there will be a worsening of the gender gap in employment and in wages; in Africa and Asia, those gaps will widen, as will gender gaps in education.
“This particular hit that we are receiving right now is going to perhaps prolong the period of advancement a little bit longer,” says Yeltekin. “I think it’s going to be another generation, another 30 years, before that gap is significantly closed.”
That’s because of where we were on the gender gap timeline before the pandemic hit.
“We were only in the headline-making phase,” says Yeltekin, where vocal groups like [soccer’s] U.S. Women’s National Team were bringing attention to the gender pay gap. In reality, “the needle had moved only a little bit.” And, Yeltekin says, in just the few weeks since calls for sheltering in place became a new, national way of life and schools closed for millions of children, she can see that needle is already shifting back, in real time.
“I’ve been on a million Zoom calls over the last week and a half,” Yeltekin tells Fortune. As senior associate dean of education at the Tepper School of Business, Yeltekin was one of the people responsible for getting the university’s roughly 3,000 classes online in less than a week. “So we’re on all these Zoom meetings. And what you will see is women logging in from their homes. These are highly educated, incredibly accomplished women with children running around in the background. And, as a result, getting distracted or being pulled away for a second and having to go and do things.”
By contrast, the men on Yeltekin’s Zoom calls logged on from private rooms at home or from their university offices, undistracted by children or other family members. Even in academia, in “as white-collar as a job gets, it’s just what happens; that’s what we see anecdotally and also in the data in aggregate,” she says.
The result is that women who are working from home during the pandemic may be less productive over the same time frame than men working from home. It’s because of this “horrible confluence of existing gender norms that say women should do home production,” says Archibong, even in the U.S.
Opportunity cost
Even in a household where both husband and wife are professionals who work full-time, when up against an economic shock, the partner who makes more money is going to be the one whose work gets prioritized. And that opportunity cost principle doesn’t bode well for women, despite the Labor Department’s announcement in January that women now outnumber men on U.S. payrolls, holding 50.4% of jobs.
Here’s why: It’s well documented that women earn 70¢ on the dollar, which means less than men doing the same job. More than half of American women say they earn less than their partners, according to a recent survey by TD Ameritrade; more than 64% of part-time jobs are held by women, according to a new report by the Center for American Progress; and, says Yeltekin, those are the very jobs that are the first to be cut when businesses are trying to lower costs during any kind of downturn, such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
And finally, taking a global look, in early March the United Nations reported that no country in the world has achieved gender parity; the U.S. comes in at 53rd out of 153 countries in pay equality.
Therefore, in the majority of U.S. households and households all over the world, “the concentration is going to be to make sure that the man holds down his job by being able to perform his work duties, while the woman takes care of the children and the household. This general fact is going to exacerbate the problem, for sure,” says Yeltekin.
Predictions that swiftly followed the Labor Department’s announcement about how a heavier female footprint in the American workforce could result in structural changes to business, such as the addition of paid family leave and more flexible work hours, may now turn out to be nothing more than an unrealized forecast.
“Unfortunately, this particular shock may have a permanent effect to derail those efforts,” says Yeltekin, who further notes that when you add up the cultural attitudes with how the labor market works, you see how it’s “stacked against women.”
Why will girls lose out?
In families with children who are old enough to care for younger siblings, gender norms may also play out, even in the United States.
“Parents will oftentimes have these attitudes, implicitly or explicitly, that girls or women are better at taking care of the house and being caretakers,” says Archibong. “If everyone is home studying right now, and a daughter has to study for herself, and she also has to take care of her siblings, that could have a disproportionate impact on a girl’s ability to achieve and do well in terms of schooling. So that’s definitely a concern.”
Archibong sees an even more severe coping mechanism in her research tracking meningitis outbreaks in sub-Saharan Africa. An infection of the lungs and brain, meningitis hits 23 countries in Northern Africa every eight to 14 years, affects more than 700 million people, and has a 50% mortality rate if untreated. Archibong’s research focuses on understanding how epidemics play out in the short- and long-run and what policymakers can do to mitigate the effects, specifically with respect to four key issues: education, health, income, and unemployment.
Take education, for example. The reason that parents may not be willing to invest as much in their female children as their male children may be as much cultural as it is economic: There may not be as many jobs available for girls or women; there are fewer businesses that will hire women; and, when they do hire women, they may pay women less—which is true in most countries in the world, including Europe and the U.S.
“So as a parent I’m thinking, ‘Where am I going to get my biggest bang for the buck when I have these increased costs? Maybe I reduce the investment in my daughter’s education relative to my son’s, and my daughters can care for the sick family members,’” Archibong explains.
It’s an approach Archibong has documented in epidemic after epidemic. She has also found that, overwhelmingly, once a girl has been pulled from school, even for as little as three months, she tends to never go back.
“Policy really needs to focus on getting girls, children [overall], back into school and making sure no one falls off after an epidemic,” she says. “Because if you have less education, you have less of a chance of getting a well-paid job, and you even have less of a chance to move up in the economic social ladder.”
What follows, according to Archibong, is an intergenerational poverty cycle in which those women who were pulled from school as girls provide less of an education to their own children.
Mitigating the negative effects
Both Archibong and Yeltekin say good policies can alter the outcomes.
“If there isn’t really targeted, concerted, forceful government policy and spending on the labor market, unemployment, or health, then you could see widening of gender gaps in hiring, in employment, and gender gaps in wages even in the United States,” says Archibong. “This is where institutions really, really, really matter, government actions really, really, really matter in determining these longer-run outcomes.”
Yeltekin, whose research focuses on designing fiscal policy for social insurance and for management of government debt, says the policies that will work in the U.S. to ease the burden of the pandemic need to be targeted.
“While operationally it’s so much easier to give everybody $1,000, because you don’t have to worry about how to pick and choose, that’s not the right policy. The policy really needs to be tailored to focus on the most vulnerable,” who also happen to be disproportionately women, those working hourly wages in nonessential service industries, she says. “We need to solve the public health crisis so we can get rid of the economic crisis. But in the middle of the economic crisis, there are groups of people who are disproportionately adversely affected. It’s not going to be the white-collar male worker who can move his office home and continue to contribute and pick up a salary.”
If the pandemic forces the closure of businesses into the fall, and the economy is stalled for six to seven months, Yeltekin believes, “We will be turning back the clock on gender equality advances by a couple of years.”
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fortune--2020-04-02--These five people have lost over $115 billion this year

As unemployment hits shocking record numbers in the U.S. and the number of people infected by and dying from the COVID-19 coronavirus continues to increase at a rapid pace, the net worth of the superrich hasn’t exactly been a focal point for most people.
Even the nation’s billionaires are seeing significant reductions to their net worth, however. Since the start of the year, the paper value of five of the world’s richest people has dropped by $116.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. And, by some math, they’re not even the hardest hit.
Some billionaires have managed to get notably richer during the pandemic. Jeff Bezos has added $2.75 billion, boosting his net worth to $118 billion. (MacKenzie Bezos is up $826 million.) And the Walton family (Rob, Jim, and Alice) have seen their value rise $273 million, when added together.
Others, who aren’t tied to retail giants, haven’t been so lucky. Here’s a look at five billionaires who have seen the biggest dollar losses this year, as of the end of stock trading on April 1.
Mukesh Ambani –$19.3 billion
Ambani holds a sizable stake in Reliance Industries, owner of the world’s largest oil refining complex. And the oil dispute between Russia and Saudi Arabia, combined with coronavirus market fluctuations, has contributed to a $19.3 billion reduction in his net worth. He also runs a 4G wireless network across India and has substantial real estate holdings. Year to date, he’s down 32.9%, but this comes after a $15 billion gain last year.
Current total net worth: $39.3 billion
Carlos Slim –$19.8 billion
Slim, who owns America Movil, the largest mobile phone operator in Latin America, is down $19.8 billion (or 32.9%) so far this year. He also holds shares in the New York Times and CaixaBank. The fall comes after a rise of just $4 billion in 2019. His current net worth of $40.4 billion is the lowest his fortune has ever fallen.
Current total net worth: $40.4 billion
Warren Buffett –$19.9 billion
The world’s fourth-richest person has dropped $19.9 billion since the start of the year after a $6 billion increase last year. Year to date, shares of his Berkshire Hathaway are down 22%, the same percentage drop as his net worth. The company owns Geico and Dairy Queen (among others) and stakes in Coca-Cola and American Express.
Current total net worth: $69.4 billion
Amancio Ortega –$24 billion
The reclusive owner of the world’s largest clothing retailer has lost $24 billion during the pandemic. Inditex operates more than 7,400 stores around the world, most of which are likely closed now because of stay-at-home orders. Year to date, Ortega is down 31.9%.
Current total net worth: $51.4 billion
Bernard Arnault –$33.5 billion
The chairman and chief executive of LVMH Moët Hennessy – Louis Vuitton, the world’s largest luxury goods company, has seen his net worth fall $33.5 billion since the start of the year. Year to date, he’s down 31.9%. He’s also the largest shareholder in Christian Dior and holds stakes in other luxury goods companies. For a brief period last year, he was the richest man in the world. It’s worth noting, though, that Arnault saw his net worth increase by $38 billion last year.
Current total net worth: $71.7 billion
While those five individuals have lost the most in terms of raw dollars, the percentage drops for each are notably smaller than what other billionaires have faced.
Robert Pera, founder and CEO of wireless product producer Ubiquiti, has seen his net worth fall 45% year to date. So has Reinhold Schmieding, founder and president of Arthrex, an orthopedic surgical device maker.
Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, founder and chairman of the Thai beverage and real estate conglomerate TCC Group, is down 47%. And Russian businessman Gennady Timchenko and Heinrich Deichmann, who runs Europe’s largest shoe retailer, have both seen their net worth fall 48% since Jan. 1.
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