fortune--2020-04-03--Americans face hunger crisis that is ‘catastrophic beyond imagination’ as SNAP benefits are harder f

Americans face hunger crisis that is ‘catastrophic beyond imagination’ as SNAP benefits are harder for some to get

In the middle of the stock market boom in 2018, as unemployment hit 50-year lows, there were 37 million Americans, including 11 million children, living in food-insecure households.
Since COVID-19 stormed the U.S., tens of thousands of senior centers that provide pantry items and hot meals to elderly citizens have closed, and jobless claims jumped from 282,000 two weeks ago to 6.6 million Thursday, the largest increase in American history.
“I don’t think the vast majority of Americans have a clue about the severity of the hunger crisis we’re entering into now,” says Joel Berg, CEO of Hunger Free America. “This is just catastrophic beyond imagination on so many levels.”
There are now at least 10 million recently unemployed Americans living without a steady paycheck, a figure not seen since the Great Depression. Unemployment websites and phone lines have been hit with a deluge of activity, which they were poorly prepared for. Benefits for many have been rendered inaccessible as a flood of new applicants attempt to figure out how to make do without any income.
Food assistance programs, like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), which are thought to be some of the most effective programs in lifting Americans out of poverty and decreasing unemployment numbers, will also soon be overwhelmed. In New York City alone, applications to SNAP (often referred to as food stamps) increased from 6,000 per day two weeks ago to 16,000 each day this week, says Berg.
SNAP benefits are currently available to families that make less than 30% above the U.S. federal poverty line ($26,200 for a family of four) and have less than $2,250 in savings.
SNAP, like Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, is an appropriated entitlement program, which means that anyone who is eligible will receive benefits, but that there is no permanent direct funding. The regular appropriation for the program has already been capped, and so Congress authorized another $15.6 billion to cover the rise in caseloads as part of the $2 trillion stimulus bill passed last week. The program is countercyclical, which means enrollment is expected to increase during bad times and then decrease again once the economy recovers, so the one-time funding increase is necessary.
Anti-hunger advocates and some congressional leaders, however, argue that just expanding the spending cap is not enough, and there needs to be extra money added to the monthly program allotments as well as funding to help states deal with infrastructure issues that arise due to an increase in caseloads.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer pushed for the inclusion of a 15% rise in the maximum allotment of SNAP, which would cost about $5 billion and amount to another $25 per person per month or $100 for a family of four. The current maximum allotment is $646 per month for a family of four. The measure was denied by Senate Republicans and did not make it into the final bill.
“When you think about it rationally, I don’t see a legitimate reason why anyone wouldn’t think it’s a good idea to extend SNAP benefits especially when it was done before, and we saw that it had a significant impact on the economy and allowed people to get what they needed while they were having a hard time,” said Alexandra Cawthorne Gaines, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress.
During the 2008 recession, Congress increased minimum SNAP benefits by 14%, and subsequent research found that it was one of the most effective investments made during that period. Every dollar increase in SNAP generates about $1.74 in economic activity, and a United States Department of Agriculture report found that an increase in SNAP benefits was closely linked to a decrease in the unemployment rate.
Advocates are still hoping for increased provisions in what will likely be a fourth stimulus bill. “My hope is that Republicans in Congress get on the stick and support the Democrats’ attempts to dramatically increase food aid…The same way they came around on some of these other things like paid sick leave and expanded unemployment insurance and cash checks,” said Berg.
Berg also noted a large increase in people registering to use soup kitchens and food pantries for the first time in New York City, but a smaller jump in actual attendance. “The poor generally have some stuff in their pantry, but that’s going to go pretty darn quickly, and so with each passing week that this happens, the worse it’s going to get,” he said.
Donations will also eventually dry up. “In general there’s an outpouring of private charity in the beginning, but then people worry about their own families and other things,” he explained. Citymeals on Wheels, a New York–based organization that supplies meals to the homebound and elderly, has already reported a significant shortage in its reserve of emergency meals.
But even if kitchens manage to stay open, “there’s no way all the private charity on the planet is going to do anything near what we need,” said Berg. “My biggest worry is the vast disconnect between the extent of the problem and the response from the federal government.”
The lack of action also comes after years of a steady rollback of SNAP and other welfare benefits by the Trump administration. “This administration has spent quite a bit of time making it more difficult to access SNAP for people who really need it,” said Gaines.
Until recently, the President and Republicans were actively fighting to remove 700,000 unemployed Americans from the food stamp rolls by April 1. The change would have required all able-bodied adults without children to work at least 20 hours in order to receive benefits after three months. A federal judge issued an injunction blocking the Trump administration from acting on the change, and Congress also blocked the bill in its second stimulus package, which the President signed off on. Still, the Trump administration is actively appealing the court ruling, which Berg called ironic. “God knows how much money and scarce Justice Department time is going into fighting that right now,” he said.
The Trump administration also recently put into effect a public charge rule that makes it more difficult for immigrants to apply for SNAP and other welfare programs. Under the rule, which was initially blocked by the courts but allowed to continue by a Supreme Court decision of 5-4, immigrants will have more trouble becoming permanent residents or citizens if they rely on such programs.
When the USDA was asked whether it would continue to limit access to SNAP after the public health crisis ended, representatives said that its first priority was making sure people receive the help they need during the pandemic but suggested it would still stick with its previous timeline.
Republicans approved an earlier stimulus bill in March that would allow states to request special approval from the USDA to provide emergency benefits to households already registered for SNAP worth their maximum monthly allotment. The bill also provided $500 million to WIC and $400 million to the Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) for food banks.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Tuesday that he would not actively consider more legislative aid at the moment, which would include more money for SNAP programs. “I’m not going to allow this to be an opportunity for the Democrats to achieve unrelated policy items that they would not otherwise be able to pass,” he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
Congress has increased unemployment benefits enough to make any additions to the SNAP program moot, said Robert Rector, senior research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. “If we’ve learned [anything] in the last three weeks [it] is that Congress is not good at making these decisions because through their unemployment system they have made it economically irrational for about half of the labor force to work and now they want to throw more money on top of that,” he said.
Rector argued that more benefits encourage workers to file and live off unemployment instead of seeking work. “We’ve basically made it so that at least half of the workforce is now better off financially not working than they were before…We have absolutely no idea what we’re doing.”
Many studies show that welfare benefits do not stop people from working, and most working-age SNAP recipients work.
Meanwhile, hunger advocates continue to ring the alarm. “I could see a world where there’s a population of people who live in food deserts where systems are stretched thin in terms of food banks and pantries and they’re not able to easily access food, so you see this potential dire situation for those folks,” said Gaines. “The canaries in the coal mine are always low-income people in this country, so you could certainly see a situation in which you have people who are actively starving.”
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fortune--2020-04-03--Singapore’s richest man—a ventilator tycoon—has grown $3.7 billion richer amid coronavirus demand bo

Singapore’s richest man—a ventilator tycoon—has grown $3.7 billion richer amid coronavirus demand boom

There are likely more unemployed Americans right now than at any time in history

As the coronavirus pandemic wrecks economies, markets and fortunes, three founders of a company that makes ventilators have added a combined $7.3 billion to their wealth this year.
Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co. shares have climbed 41%, fueled by a surge in demand for the life-saving devices. Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, has flooded hospitals worldwide with patients struggling to breathe.
Chairman Li Xiting, a Singapore citizen and the city-state’s richest man, has added $3.7 billion to his net worth this year and has a $12.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. That puts him among the top five gainers in the world. Jeff Bezos — the world’s richest person — is up $3.4 billion, while Bill Gates is down $15.3 billion.
The global health crisis has exposed a shortage of ventilators — the equipment health-care providers rely on to keep critically sick patients alive. While companies from Ford Motor Co. to General Motors Co. rush in to help ramp up production, Mindray’s board secretary Li Wenmei said that global demand is at least 10 times what’s available at hospitals. New York is just a few days away from exhausting its supply, according to state Governor Andrew Cuomo.
The death toll worldwide has exceeded 53,000 while infections have topped 1 million. Italy and Spain are the most impacted in Europe, but the disease has also spread rapidly across the U.S., where President Donald Trump warned of 100,000 deaths or more.
The Society of Critical Care Medicine estimates that 960,000 patients would need ventilator support in the U.S., but the nation only has about 200,000 such machines. In Italy, the country with the most number of fatalities, a severe ventilator shortage has forced doctors to triage patients.
Until late last month, Mindray’s ventilators didn’t have approvals in the U.S. market but the Food and Drug Administration authorized their use under an emergency rule designed to help ease the shortage. That move has also boosted the prospects of Mindray.
That authorization is “providing opportunities for Chinese ventilator products to enter the U.S. market quickly,” analysts led by Tian Jiaqiang at Citic Securities Co. wrote in a research note this week.
Mindray, which makes 3,000 ventilators a month, isn’t the only manufacturer of the machine in China. Beijing Aeonmed Co. also got FDA authorization last month, according to the regulator’s website. Shares of Jiangsu Yuyue Medical Equipment & Supply Co., another maker, have rallied 98% this year in Shenzhen, boosting its market value to $5.7 billion.
Giant Rivals
Though Mindray, with a market capitalization of $44 billion, is dwarfed by medical-device giants like Dublin-based Medtronic Plc, the Chinese firm has the potential to expand its market share, said Nikkie Lu, an analyst with Bloomberg Intelligence.
“It’s had a very good track record,” with its products able to enter markets like Europe and Hong Kong, she said.
In an earnings filing this week, Mindray said orders from Europe especially have increased dramatically, with Italy purchasing the first batch of almost of 10,000 pieces of equipment including ventilators and monitors.
The company, which has 17 subsidiaries in China and operations in 30 countries, makes health monitoring systems, ventilators, defibrillators, anesthesia machines and infusion systems. The firm has a direct sales team in the U.S. and long-time global partners include Mayo Clinic, the Johns Hopkins Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital and Cleveland Clinic, according to its annual report.
Not Forever
The boost to the wealth of Mindray Chairman Li, who founded the firm in 1991 along with Xu and Cheng, contrasts with the erosion in net worth of his peers in Asia. Li Ka-shing, Hong Kong’s richest man, has lost $7.1 billion this year as the city fights a recession from the double-whammy of the pandemic and last year’s political protests. Singapore reported the biggest economic contraction in a decade in the first quarter, and expects a severe recession for the year.
The ventilator boom won’t last forever, said Bloomberg Intelligence’s Lu. As more societies age, demand will grow for breathing-support devices, but not to match the scale seen during this crisis, she said.
“Sales will definitely drop after the outbreak.”
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fortune--2020-04-03--Joe Biden’s health care plan for the coronavirus and beyond

Former Vice President Joe Biden is the overwhelming favorite to win the Democratic nomination for President following outsize victories in primaries across multiple states. And with the coronavirus crisis—a public health and financial catastrophe the likes of which many of us have never seen—on everyone’s mind, health care will loom large this election season. Hospitals are already being overwhelmed. Nearly 10 million people have filed for unemployment benefits in the past two weeks alone, and with many health plans tied to employment, this could put lots of people in danger of losing their insurance.
As Biden and his sole remaining opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, along with other Democrats sparred over the course of this campaign, Medicare for All became a clarion call for establishing candidates’ progressive bona fides. Some, such as Sanders, advocated for far-reaching proposals that would go beyond even what European nations like the U.K. have in place with single-payer systems.
The Sanders plan would wipe out pretty much all of the U.S. private health insurance industry, with a few exceptions, replacing it with a public health program even more generous than Medicare and Medicaid.
While both Sanders’ and Biden’s plans have plenty of details that need to be filled in, Biden’s proposal is a lot more nuanced.
Coronavirus and the health care debate
Sanders has argued that the staggering costs that someone with COVID-19 may have to face in America underscores the importance of a single-payer system with zero premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs. Biden has retorted that countries such as Italy, which have seen considerable numbers of deaths, haven’t been able to contain the situation despite a nationalized health system.
Biden doubled down on his position Monday. “The thing that is needed is, for example, we have a whole number of hospitals that are being stretched, including rural hospitals; they are going to need more financing. That doesn’t come from a single-payer system,” he said during an interview on MSNBC.
It all depends on your perspective. “The testing debacle and the holes in coverage and care on COVID-19 are arguments for Medicare for All,” wrote Drew Altman, CEO of the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF), in a tweet last month. “The poor performance of the federal gov’t and superior performance of states are arguments against. You can make the case you prefer.”
What complicates the issue is that universal coverage and access to health care isn’t quite the same thing as financing for the medical providers who would guarantee such coverage. Sanders would argue that a fully public system that allows a government entity to negotiate prices on behalf of patients would lower everyone’s medical bills, including all the associated costs of coronavirus testing. Biden might say the tradeoff is the financial hit hospitals may face in a time when the health system is already overburdened, understaffed, and suffering from a dearth of tests and medical equipment.
Biden and Sanders have both proposed nixing out-of-pocket costs for patients with coronavirus. “Under the Biden plan, in terms of coronavirus specifically, he’s said no one should face out-of-pocket expenses for getting tested or getting treated,” Larry Levitt, executive vice president of KFF, told Fortune. “Biden’s plan would make [it] clear people wouldn’t face those costs for treatment whether or not they’re insured or uninsured or underinsured.”
The mechanics of how a bill to cover coronavirus health care expenses would work, and if (and when) such a bill would sunset, isn’t clear—and it would have to get congressional approval.
Last week, President Donald Trump signed a historic $2 trillion stimulus bill meant to address COVID-19, including $100 billion in emergency funds for hospitals and health providers grappling with the financial domino effect of the coronavirus. The bill doesn’t address patient costs, but several health insurance companies have said they’ll waive bills for coronavirus-related medical care.
Amid the current economic crisis, many will also turn their attention to current available options for health care, as loss of employment could count as a qualifying event to purchase health insurance through the Obamacare exchange.
What’s in Biden’s broader health care plan?
Coronavirus is one gigantic health care issue. An overhaul of the entire U.S. health system is titanic.
Biden and Sanders have tussled over Medicare for All and whether or not it’s the correct approach to wrangling the fragmented U.S. health system. It’s been a central component of the debates between Biden and Sanders, head-to-head notably held without a live audience because of social distancing measures necessitated by the coronavirus pandemic.
Unlike Sanders’ plan, which would essentially end almost all private health insurance in America, Biden has taken a more incremental approach.
The cornerstone of Biden’s health care proposal is building on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, which was signed into law a decade ago and is still facing challenges in the Supreme Court by the Trump administration and GOP lawmakers.
A so-called public option would be the largest change under Biden’s plan.
The vast majority of working Americans have health insurance through their employers. The ACA built an interface for people, such as those who don’t receive insurance through their employers or a public program such as Medicare or Medicaid, to connect with the individual insurance market. Biden wants to build on that by adding a federally funded public option to the ACA’s marketplaces.
Biden’s public option is envisioned as a Medicare-like alternative for those who buy private, individual health plans through the Obamacare marketplaces. Unlike private health plans, a public option would be funded by the government.
That would, theoretically, cut premiums and out-of-pocket costs compared to the private insurance available via the ACA—though not necessarily eliminate them completely. The thinking is that a public plan would be able to have more negotiating power with hospitals, drugmakers, and other sectors of the health industry, and a far wider pool of plan holders that could drive down costs.
Nearly half of all Americans receive insurance through their employers. Currently, if employers offer a minimum standard of coverage, its employees are not eligible for a plan on the Obamacare marketplaces that offer private insurance plans.
Biden would do away with that provision, giving workers the option of transitioning to an ACA plan or—if his full proposal passes—a public option on the ACA marketplace if their employers’ offerings don’t fit their needs.
“One of the most significant elements of Biden’s plan is that workers could choose a public option rather than what their employers offer them,” said Levitt.
Workers’ ability to transition from their employer-sponsored health care to an Obamacare marketplace that offers a public option could, in theory, significantly cut out-of-pocket health costs for low-income workers who may not receive sterling medical benefits.
But Biden’s plan is more of a guidance than a step-by-step explanation of what might happen on an individual basis. The steak still needs to match the sizzle.
“The public option Biden has proposed is quite far-reaching by historical standards,” said Levitt. “It’s a fair assumption a public option would give people a broader choice pool, but there are a lot of details in Biden’s plan about how the public option would work that still need to be worked out.”
Former President Barack Obama supported a public option in the initial debate over the ACA but gave it up as a concession once it was clear that no comprehensive health care bill including a public option would pass even with a Congress dominated by Democrats between 2009 and 2010.
Wide swaths of the health care industry aren’t interested in any sort of expansive federal involvement in health care price negotiations that may eat into their bottom lines—including both Sanders’ Medicare-for-All proposal or Biden’s public option. The Partnership for America’s Health Care Future (PAHCF), which includes major trade associations such as American Medical Association (AMA), the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), the Federation of American Hospitals (FAH), and others have released statements slamming these ideas, warning they would limit patients’ access to hospitals under financial duress.
“Unfortunately, Vice President Biden’s proposal for a new government insurance system through a ‘public option’ would undermine the progress our nation has made and ultimately lead our nation down the path of a one-size-fits-all health care system run by Washington,” said Lauren Crawford Shaver, executive director of PAHCF, in a statement last year.
Then there’s the issue of the Obamacare marketplace plans themselves. Currently, only people who make anywhere from 100% to 400% of the Federal Poverty Level (FPL) qualify for subsidies to help pay their health insurance premiums on the exchanges. In 2020, FPL stands at $12,760 in annual income for individuals and $26,200 for a family of four.
Biden’s plan would enhance those premium subsidies significantly by lifting the cap and calculating how much a household might have to pay for insurance on a more generous basis—it would set a ceiling of 8.5% of income on purchasing health insurance.
On the Medicare and Medicaid fronts, Biden would significantly expand Medicare’s ability to negotiate prescription drug prices (a proposal that has been embraced by Democratic and Republican politicians alike but yet to be enacted) in an effort to lower costs.
As for Medicaid, the program that provides insurance to some of the poorest people in the country, Biden would seek to extend coverage via an interesting workaround.
The ACA significantly expanded Medicaid coverage by offering much more federal funding for states, which increased the pool of residents who qualified for the program to all households at 138% of the Federal Poverty Level. That was, originally, a mandatory requirement—but the Supreme Court struck down the original provision and made it an optional expansion by states.
Medicaid is a state and federal partnership program, so qualifications differ significantly based on where someone lives. For instance, in states such as Texas and Alabama, which chose not to expand Medicaid under the ACA, individual, nondisabled adults without children wouldn’t qualify for the program at all; even parents in a family of three would have to make about $3,700 or less per year to qualify.
Most states took the money and expanded Medicaid. But 14 still have not, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and some 4.5 million impoverished Americans would be able to receive health insurance at little to no cost were those states to expand their programs.
Biden’s plan would rely on the Obamacare marketplaces to extend coverage to those who have fallen through the cracks by allowing these people to buy into a public option that covers a wider array of benefits than certain private health plans.
These series of proposals would not ensure universal coverage, according to KFF’s Levitt, and though they may significantly lower out-of-pocket medical costs for many, a significant chunk of people would still struggle financially in the health system, depending on the specific plans which people seek.
There are multiple other elements to Biden’s plan, including ending the practice of “surprise billing,” wherein patients may be left with a massive hospital bill because they were treated by an out-of-network doctor at a facility that was in-network for their health plan.
Women’s health care has also become a major issue amid the pandemic as some states attempt to further enact restrictions on abortion. Biden has proposed repealing the Hyde Amendment, which largely prohibits the federal funding of abortion services, and using the Justice Department to fight back against state laws which make it difficult to get an abortion—including mandatory waiting periods and ultrasound requirements.
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fortune--2020-04-04--Big beer’s hard seltzer turf war is still heating up

2020 is the year the hard seltzer turf war that has been brewing truly heats up.
With volume tripling from year-ago levels and shipments reaching more than 82 million cases annually, hard seltzer easily outsells vodka. The buzzy drink has appeared in Super Bowl ads the past two years, and more than half of American alcohol drinkers now consume at least one hard seltzer each week.
The leading brand, White Claw, even has its own cultural catchphrase: “Ain’t no laws when you’re drinking Claws.”
By 2023, consumption of hard seltzers is projected to triple, according to industry researcher IWSR. That pace of growth has led to an acceleration in new entrants to the market, with as many as 100 alcoholic seltzer brands selling as many as 400 different variations this year. And while the COVID-19 crisis will result in some challenges to distribution in the coming months, hard seltzer is expected to be the fastest-growing alcoholic beverage over the next several years.
Former “Bachelorette” contestant and fan favorite Mike Johnson and Smirnoff teamed up to launch the “Will You Accept This Rosé?” campaign by surprising fans on Jan. 13, 2020, in Brooklyn. Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for Smirnoff Seltzer
For years, two brands have captured close to 80% of the hard seltzer market: White Claw and Truly. But in the past six months, Big Beer rivals have stepped up their investments in the category. Anheuser-Busch InBev, which has admitted it is playing catch-up, is selling hard seltzers under the Bud Light and Natural Light brands. Molson Coors launched Vizzy in March, and Constellation Brands, previously “surprised” by the popularity of hard seltzers, is spending $40 million to support the launch of Corona Hard Seltzer.
“If this is what consumers are looking for, we are going to embrace it,” says Marcel Marcondes, U.S. chief marketing officer at AB InBev. He attributes the popularity of hard seltzers to a few key factors: They are flavorful, easy to drink, and relatively low in calories, aligning with a preference among more Americans to make healthier drink choices.
The world’s largest brewer’s portfolio is a mix of brands angling for different drinkers. Natural Light is for younger, legal-age drinkers who seek affordability. Bon & Viv targets women more than men. And Bud Light is aimed to lure drinkers who haven’t yet tried a hard seltzer, but just might if it’s encased in a familiar brand.
AB InBev has earned some heady growth of late, capturing 16.2% of volume when combining the sale of all three brands, ranking third after White Claw and Truly. “The data is extremely encouraging,” Marcondes says. “We are closing the gap by the day.”
Truly dubs itself a “cleaner” option, with 5% ABV, 100 calories, and a gram of sugar per can. Courtesy of Truly Hard Seltzer
The company has had some experience entering a category late but eventually winning out. During the light-beer wars of the 1970s to 1980s, Miller Lite and Coors Light hit shelves years before Bud Light—but Bud Light today is the top-selling beer in America.
Conversely, some insiders question if repeat purchasing rates are solid enough for Bud Light Seltzer to proclaim an early win. “Judge no trend on a few weeks of scan data,” says Bart Watson, chief economist at the Brewers Association. “It hasn’t continued to explode out the gate.”
From a branding perspective, the nation’s largest companies have generally steered toward launching hard seltzer variations of well-established brands: Bud Light, Corona, Smirnoff, and Barefoot are a few key examples. But interestingly, White Claw and Truly were new brands, crafted for a newly emerging category, by rivals that have been in the business for decades. White Claw’s parent is Mark Anthony Brands, owner of Mike’s Hard Lemonade. Truly is produced by Boston Beer, owner of the Sam Adams craft beer.
Boston Beer CEO Dave Burwick describes this new competition as “the White Walkers on their way to the wall,” a reference to evil characters in the HBO hit series Game of Thrones. “We are strengthening the brand in preparation,” Burwick says. “Our goal is to be No. 1.”
Truly enacted a reformulation last year to improve the taste of the brand’s flavors, inked a distribution deal with the National Hockey League, and is adding new flavors like Truly Lemonade Seltzer.
Burwick thinks that when it comes to brand building in the category, drinkers are looking for a brand that has a singular idea—rather than trying to serve multiple needs. White Claw seemingly agrees. “Brands stand for different things to the consumer,” says Phil Rosse, president of White Claw. “We don’t buy brands, we create them.”
Ficks is a beverage company that sells hard seltzers made in California using fruit juice, and delivered directly to consumers. Courtesy of Ficksdrink Co
Thanks to White Claw’s hot growth, Mark Anthony Brands says it is on the verge of being the fourth-largest beer seller in the U.S. And unlike most, it has never acquired a brand, only created them internally.
Most weeks, White Claw commands an estimated 60% of the market. Rosse says the growth of hard seltzer hasn’t cannibalized sales in the rest of the Mark Anthony portfolio, as sales have risen in the double digits for Mike’s Hard Lemonade and premixed margarita cocktails. Even with all the new entrants, White Claw sales have continued to soar as much as 300% in 2020 versus the prior year.
“For the last 21 years, we have focused on the concept that people are looking for more flavorful products,” Rosse says of White Claw’s innovation priorities. The company recently launched a second variety pack featuring tangerine, watermelon, and mango-flavored alcoholic seltzers.
Rob Wilson, managing director at L.E.K. Consulting, says he understands why the $1-billion-and-counting hard seltzer category is so alluring to Big Beer, but he thinks habits may have hardened in favor of White Claw and Truly. “I think it is going to be tough sledding for the other brands,” he adds.
A few newer entrants are trying to break through. Maha, made by AB InBev and craft brand Golden Road Brewing, is a hard seltzer brand lauding the use of only organic ingredients. Molson Coors brand Leinenkugel’s recently debuted beers with a “splash of seltzer.” Ficks Beverage Co.’s hard seltzers have zero added sugar, and CEO Ron Alvarado says the brand was built around a competitive claim of having fewer ingredients than most rivals.
The 8.4-ounce cans contain a blend of Barefoot wine, seltzer water, and natural flavors. Courtesy of Barefoot Wine
Because hard seltzers appeal to drinkers who may generally enjoy a vodka soda or a wine spritzer, wine and spirits makers are getting in on the action to defend share. In the process, they are adding another 7 million cases to the total seltzer market in the U.S., IWSR estimates.
E. & J. Gallo Winery jumped into the seltzer craze in March with the launch of four Barefoot flavor combinations, including pineapple and passion fruit and strawberry and guava. “At Barefoot, we always look at what the consumer is looking for and where the Barefoot brand fits in,” says Anna Bell, vice president of marketing. “We believe the wine base is unique in the category.”
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fortune--2020-04-04--Teaching a machine to see: Italian doctors turn to Chinese A.I. to diagnose COVID-19

Each day, overworked Italian medical technicians upload detailed images of Italians’ lungs to a computer server that sits in an underground radiology lab in Rome. As Italy’s coronavirus crisis has worsened, the volume of scans has climbed into the thousands.
In a perverse way, the rise in numbers is just what the Roman lab is looking for. That’s because inside the server is an A.I.-powered diagnostic tool that, its developers say, can detect blazingly fast if a person has coronavirus—in less than a minute. The more images the server gets, the more help it can ultimately be to Italian doctors on the front lines of the deadly outbreak.
The technology, called “Infer-Read,” was developed by InferVISION, a Chinese startup that generated international attention at the height of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak this winter. Rome’s 400-bed Polyclinic Bio-Medical University Hospital, where the lab is located, is the first in Europe to license and put the Chinese technology to work to help fight the contagion.
Italy’s experience offers a glimpse of the potential—and limitations—of A.I.’s role in fighting the coronavirus outbreak. While the Chinese system has failed to live up to some early promises of enabling diagnosis without human intervention, it has accelerated the diagnosis process in potentially life-saving ways.
“This new kind of system doesn’t do the job on its own, but it can serve as a very important tool to help a skilled radiologist,” said Bruno Beomonte Zobel, coordinator of the imaging center at Polyclinic Bio-Medical University Hospital. “If we get the images for, let’s say, 500 suspected cases of coronavirus, the system will be very good at determining that only 200 of them merit close inspection by a radiologist. That kind of time savings is extraordinary.”
There’s a lot on the line. As of Friday morning, COVID-19, the respiratory disease caused by the coronavirus, had killed nearly 14,000 Italians, the highest death toll of any country. Meanwhile, total confirmed cases across Italy have topped 115,000, and health officials warn the actual number could be far higher as undiagnosed cases continue to go untested.
Coronavirus, or something more ordinary?
Earlier this year, Chinese doctors started using InferVISION’s technology to help overwhelmed hospital staff more rapidly determine whether a patient arriving at the emergency ward with a nasty cough was actually suffering from the highly contagious coronavirus rather than, say, a more ordinary case of pneumonia or bronchitis.
The InferVISION system is based on machine learning. It relies heavily on image-recognition algorithms that examine roughly 600 digital images of a single patient’s lungs to make such a diagnosis. Doctors feed it a standard CT, or computerized tomography, scan—the kind available in most any medical clinic in an industrialized country. Outside China, medical experts caution against relying too heavily on CT chest scans for coronavirus diagnoses until further efficacy studies are conducted. The Chinese though are bullish on the practice— as they are on the role of A.I. to successfully flag the disease.
The InferVISION software is designed to read the chest scans and flag which patients appear to be infected by the coronavirus. It makes its determination within 20 seconds, as opposed to hours or days for conventional testing. A big selling point for the Italians was that the system could make a diagnosis directly from the scans—no need for a technician to be on hand. (Ultimately, the Italians decided it was best to give the technology human supervision.)
In Italy, where more than 60 doctors and medical professionals have caught the coronavirus and died, any time-saving advancements could be a life-saver. The usual testing method relies on a swab in the nose or throat. It can produce a diagnosis in about a day if the testing is done on-site, but a potential excruciating three-day wait is more typical.
I learned that from experience. I was in Milan, a hotbed of infections, just before Italy issued its nationwide lockdown. A few days later I started to run a fever and had developed a light cough. A virologist I interviewed persuaded me to get a test—telling me how to get it done quickly. What followed were three sleepless nights.
The test came back negative. But I would have gladly opted for anything faster had such an option been available then.
Training to see
According to Beomonte Zobel, the Chinese technology has limits. For starters, the diagnostic tool had to be trained on lung scans from thousands of infected Italians in order to build a reliable diagnostic model for the larger Italian population. That would suggest such a tool would only be effective in countries where they’re testing aggressively and the infection numbers are high.
And, it’s not an off-the-shelf solution. What the system learned in Hubei Province about infected Chinese doesn’t completely apply in Italy. Only after the tool analyzed repeated uploaded images of suspected Italian cases could it spot with any reliability which of the chest scans showed signs of coronavirus infection. Furthermore, what it learns in Italy might not give doctors in other countries much of a head start in diagnosing coronavirus-infected lungs there.
“We couldn’t rely on what the system ‘learned’ in China, because Italians have different [physical] characteristics, and are on average at least a decade older than the Chinese,” Beomonte Zobel told Fortune, explaining those differences were substantial enough for the Italian doctors to conclude they needed to train the tool on local cases to ensure a higher degree of accuracy in diagnoses. “The virus also mutates, and so it is slightly different than the one in China.”
It took the better part of a month to overcome that learning curve, and now Beomonte Zobel’s team is quickly scaling up. He envisions the lab will be able to handle “a few hundred” tests per day from anywhere in the country. It’s currently fielding about 150 daily. That somewhat low number is more the fault of Italian red tape associated with data protection and privacy rules, he said, than any glitch in the technology.
“Sometimes the Italian bureaucracy can be as complicated as the coronavirus,” Beomonte Zobel joked.
Technology under the spotlight
The rapid spread of the coronavirus outbreak is generating vigorous debate about the proper tools needed to fight the contagion. A series of studies, for example, have emerged in recent weeks questioning the effectiveness of using CT scans alone to make an accurate coronavirus diagnosis. The American College of Radiology, for example, warned its members that chest scans of Covid-19 “are not specific, and overlap with other infections” while acknowledging that, nonetheless, “some medical practices are requesting chest CT to inform decisions on whether to test a patient for COVID-19, admit a patient or provide other treatment.” They conclude: “The ACR strongly urges caution in taking this approach.”
Beomonte Zobel is aware of these doubts. That’s why, he says, the final call must still be made by a trained radiologist. However, he noted, the Italian experience using the “Infer-Read” system has already sped up diagnoses tremendously.
More tests needed
The race to develop reliable and speedy Covid-19 testing systems has taken on new urgency in recent weeks as the number of cases surpasses 1 million worldwide. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked a new system developed by Abbott Laboratories last week that promises to detect positive cases within five minutes, and negative cases within 13 minutes. The Abbott technology is a portable device that works differently from the InferVISION apparatus—it doesn’t rely on chest scans. Rather, it’s a molecular testing kit that seeks to detect the presence of a fragment of the coronavirus genome in the patient from a nasolaryngeal swab. Another, developed by Henry Schein Inc., relies on blood samples and promises results within 15 minutes.
Frontline doctors are relieved to see any kind of innovation to speed up detection if it means saving lives.
Back in Rome, Beomonte Zobel said nobody is asking a diagnostic tool such as the A.I.-based InferVISION system to become the sole line of defense against the outbreak in Italy, which is still seeing more than 2,000 new cases a day.
“This isn’t going to turn the tide,” he said. “It will speed up the diagnosis for the patients it sees. But the main benefit isn’t for this moment. It is as a step in a process that will leave us better prepared for the next pandemic.”
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fortune--2020-04-04--Joe Biden is officially looking for a running mate

Joe Biden said Friday night that he has spoken to Bernie Sanders to inform him he was starting the vetting process for a running mate, saying he wanted to give his rival advanced notice so as not to appear “presumptuous.”
It was the first time he has publicly acknowledged private conversations with his only remaining rival in the Democratic primary race.
“I am in the process and I’ve actually had this discussion with Bernie because he’s a friend,” Biden said during a virtual fundraiser. “We’re competitors. He’s a friend. I don’t want him to think I’m being presumptuous, but you have to start now deciding who you’re going to have background checks done on as potential vice presidential candidates.”
Biden holds a nearly insurmountable lead in delegates, but with many states delaying elections because of the coronavirus pandemic, Sanders has signaled he isn’t planning to drop out of the race yet. Biden said he’s likely going to start the process of vetting running mates in mid-April.
The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The fundraiser was hosted by Brad Smith, the president of Microsoft Corp., and his wife, Kathy Surace-Smith, the senior vice president of Nanostring Technologies Inc. The event was live-streamed, and the Biden campaign said 181 people attended.
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fortune--2020-04-03--What does it mean to ‘recover’ from the coronavirus?

Along with the daily spikes in confirmed coronavirus cases and deaths, a third, more hopeful number is also ticking upward: the number of people who have recovered from COVID-19, which on Friday topped 219,000.
So far, authorities have confirmed over 1 million cases of COVID-19 and 53,000 coronavirus-related deaths globally. According to predictive models, the pandemic has not yet peaked, meaning the world will continue to see jumps in all three coronavirus categories: cases, fatalities, and recoveries.
The growing number of recoveries comes with a growing number of questions about what it means to overcome COVID-19: about a patient’s contagiousness, subsequent immunity to the disease, and long-term effects. Much about the aftermath of the illness remains unclear or unknown, and there is even uncertainty about the term “recover” in the coronavirus context.
The medical definition of “recovery” depends on the disease, said Keiji Fukuda, clinical professor and director of the School of Public Health at the University of Hong Kong. With illnesses like the common cold, someone is considered recovered when they feel better. With other diseases, like influenza C, clinicians can conduct a lab test to determine if someone has recovered, Fukuda said.
With COVID-19, “the difficulty is that some people who feel subjectively well still have laboratory and chest CT [scan] evidence of infection. When we have more information about the relationship of infection and symptoms for COVID, we will have a better idea of how to define ‘recovered’ for COVID-19,” Fukuda said. For now, “we are still trying to determine what recovery means.”
What are the long-term effects?
Early evidence suggests that coronavirus victims may experience lingering health effects of COVID-19, even after testing negative. Medical experts in Hong Kong who have observed discharged COVID-19 patients report the patients had shortness of breath and may have lost some lung function, but the researchers were unsure how long those ailments would last.
In the past, reduced lung function was reported in patients with severe cases of SARS and MERS—two respiratory illnesses caused by coronaviruses—who needed intensive-care ventilation. COVID-19 patients who require ventilators (around 5% of cases, according to the World Health Organization) may lose some lung function, but for most patients who recover from mild COVID-19 infections, there should be “no lasting effect,” Dr. Shu-Yuan Xiao, a pathology professor at the University of Chicago School of Medicine, told ABC News.
Paramedics transport a patient wearing a face mask to the emergency room entrance of the Wyckoff Heights Medical Center in Brooklyn on April 2, 2020. ANGELA WEISS—AFP/Getty Images
One 70-year-old man in Wuhan who recovered from COVID-19 after eight days in an intensive care unit told Chinese news outlet Caixin Global in March that even a month after being discharged he was unable to “breathe as freely as before” and often felt as though his “windpipe and throat are blocked.”
London-based freelance journalist Tobi Akingbade was not tested for the virus but had been in direct contact with a confirmed case prior to the onset of her symptoms. She was told by the U.K.’s National Health Service to self-isolate after describing her symptoms over the phone.
Akingbade documented her experience with a mild COVID-19 case on Twitter. “Day 13: Walked down the stairs for the first time[,]” wrote Akingbade. Her symptoms included fever, cough, difficulty breathing, migraine, and intense fatigue, and they began to subside after nine days or so. “Now I struggle with fatigue and minor breathing issues,” she wrote.
For people with COVID-19 who are not hospitalized, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) provides symptoms-based criteria to determine whether they’ve recovered from the illness.
People can stop home isolation, the CDC says, when they have not had a fever for 72 hours, when “other symptoms have improved,” like coughing and shortness of breath, and they must also receive two negative tests in a row, 24 hours apart. If they do not have access to a test, the first two criteria remain, and they must also wait for seven days to pass since the onset of symptoms before they can stop home isolation.
Access to testing kits continues to be an issue in the U.S., so many people have to judge for themselves when they have recovered.
One 22-year-old college student in New York City, who asked not to be named, awoke in mid-March with a sore throat. Her roommate, who complained of the same symptom the day before, was notified by his workplace that a recent visitor to the office had tested positive.
The student’s symptoms expanded to aches, fever, fatigue, and difficulty breathing. Following CDC guidelines, she and her roommate self-quarantined in their apartment but did not try to get tested. “I was like, ‘Look, I’m young, I’m probably fine […] I don’t want to burden the health care system,'” the student said. A friend who had stayed over in the same apartment that week later tested positive for the coronavirus.
Eight days after the onset of her symptoms, “I felt completely normal,” said the student, who has no underlying health conditions. “I think no longer having those issues with my breathing and my fitness made me feel like, ‘Oh, okay, I’ve definitely gotten better.'”
There are some patients who’ve been declared recovered and discharged from the hospital, only to test positive for the virus again, but that phenomenon is most likely explained by faulty testing.
How long are patients contagious?
Another unknown in the COVID-19 recovery is the window in which a person with COVID-19 is contagious. One study in Germany estimated it would take 10 days after patients with mild illness first fell sick for them to become low-risk for spreading the disease. Another study out of Wuhan, China, found that the virus could live in a recovered patient’s respiratory tract for anywhere from eight to 37 days.
“It is clear that people are infectious and can infect other individuals during the first days, but we don’t know for how long they can remain infectious,” said Roberto Bruzzone, codirector of the University of Hong Kong’s HKU-Pasteur Research Pole for the study of infectious disease.
Two people, one wearing a face mask as a precautionary measure against COVID-19, sit on a nearly empty TfL underground tube carriage as they travel on the Victoria Line in London on April 2, 2020, as life in Britain continues during the nationwide lockdown to combat the novel coronavirus pandemic. TOLGA AKMEN—AFP/Getty Images
Health officials in China mandate that recovered patients self-isolate for two weeks after they are discharged, just in case, and then get tested once more.
“There is a principle of caution at this moment, and this is why probably some patients are being held in hospitals or in specialized structures before being discharged,” Bruzzone said.
Are recovered patients immune?
Another marker of coronavirus recovery is at least some degree of immunity to it.
The immune system of an infected person who recovers from the disease produces antibodies to fight against the virus. With some viruses, like polio, post-recovery immunity is lifelong. In other cases, like with the common cold coronaviruses, antibody levels gradually decline after recovery from infection, which is why people get colds again and again over their lifetimes.
Scientists in China, Italy, and the U.S. are exploring whether the antibodies extracted from recovered patients’ blood can be used to treat people sickened by COVID-19.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) last week approved, on a conditional basis, the treatment of COVID-19 patients with recovered patients’ antibodies. The FDA said that promising data out of China, where recovered COVID-19 patients are now donating their antibody-filled blood plasma to hospitals, prompted the approval.
It is not yet known—and it’s too soon to tell—how long the body’s immune response to the new coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, will last; some experts predict one to two years.
What’s the psychological impact?
Sustaining the life of COVID-19 patients is doctors’ most-immediate priority, said J. Wesley Boyd, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and a faculty member of the school’s Center for Bioethics. A distant second, he said, is “psychological sequelae.”
“Many of those who recover will no doubt suffer a panoply of psychological symptoms,” Boyd said, including anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, survivor’s guilt, and “prolonged feelings of heightened vulnerability.”
The U.S. CDC website calls attention to coronavirus stigma, warning that social outcasting of patients can occur “after a person has been released from COVID-19 quarantine even though they are not considered a risk for spreading the virus to others.”
Because COVID-19 sickens people indiscriminately, there shouldn’t be stigma associated with COVID-19, Boyd said. But still, he says, “I could imagine that for a period after one recovers from COVID-19 others might wonder if that person is still infectious and exercise caution being near that person or socializing with them for a while after they were sick.”
It’s a brand-new disease, he said, so “we really don’t know how people will be treated over time once they recover.”
The 70-year-old Wuhan man who talked to Caixin said his family members and social groups have “effectively isolated” him. “Everyone seems to think I pose a risk to their health, so in that sense, my recovery has only been temporary.”
The widespread nature of COVID-19—Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch estimates 40% to 70% of people worldwide will be infected by the coronavirus—may ultimately reduce the chance of such treatment, Boyd said. “It is possible—if not likely—that so many people are ultimately going to test positive for COVID-19 around the globe, that it will be the norm, not the exception, to recover from infection.”
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