Our live coverage of the coronavirus pandemic has moved here.
Cathay Pacific Group, the owner of Hong Kong flag carrier Cathay Pacific, is cutting 5,900 jobs across its global workforce in a bid to stay afloat, the company said Wednesday.
Cathay is just one of many airlines across the world that have been decimated by the Covid-19 pandemic, as anti-epidemic measures have forced travelers to stay home.
The company said it would shutter its regional carrier, Cathay Dragon, and lay off 5,300 employees based in Hong Kong. About 600 employees based outside of Hong Kong are likely to be affected “subject to local regulatory requirements,” the company said in a statement.
Tang said that in spite of these efforts, the company was burning through up to 2 billion Hong Kong dollars (about $260 million) in cash each month, which was “simply unsustainable.”
He said the changes announced today would reduce those expenditures by about 500 million Hong Kong dollars ($65 million) per month.
Tang said Cathay expects to operate at just 25% of its 2019 capacity in the first half of next year, and less than 50% for the entirety of 2021.
Bank tellers are out and robotics engineers are in, according to a new report that says the coronavirus recession is accelerating technological changes that could displace 85 million jobs within the next five years.
“Automation, in tandem with the Covid-19 recession, is creating a ‘double disruption’ scenario for workers,” said the report published Wednesday by the World Economic Forum, which warns that inequality is likely to increase unless displaced workers can be retrained to enter new professions.
More than two-fifths of large companies surveyed by the WEF plan to reduce their workforces due to the integration of technology.
The coronavirus pandemic has caused a sharp spike in unemployment around the world. Several major economies in Europe and elsewhere have extended support for wages in order to offset the alarming rise in joblessness. Unemployment in the United States, meanwhile, continues to march higher while lawmakers quarrel over new stimulus measures.
The pandemic risks deepening existing inequalities because industries that have been hardest hit, including travel and tourism, hospitality and retail, tend to have younger, and lower-wage workers who are disproportionately female.
The World Bank has warned that the pandemic could increase income inequality and push up to 115 million people into extreme poverty this year.
Read the full story:
Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak is warning residents that more restrictions could be needed if people aren’t more careful about stopping the spread of Covid-19.
The state’s daily case count has doubled in the past month, according to state health officials. The test positivity rate in Nevada is now 9.1%, the highest rate since early September and 82% higher than the goal set by the World Health Organization.
“We’re beginning – just beginning – to see an alarming trend in the number of cases and hospitalizations in Nevada,” he said.
Mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn led CNN’s Anderson Cooper today on “Full Circle” through a short guided meditation, a discipline which he said can help bring calm in these turbulent times.
After Anderson closed his eyes, Kabat-Zinn started the session by ringing bells and instructing viewers to follow the sounds into silence and the sensations of the breath leaving the body.
“You drop into the present moment when you do this,” he said. “The breath can be a glide path … back into this moment however it is, and remembering this is it.”
Kabat-Zinn said that a simple habit of meditating for as little as five minutes per day can have powerful psychological and even biological benefits that can be especially helpful to people in times of stress and change.
“You can learn by exercising this muscle on a regular basis to rest in this awareness, that’s embracing your body breathing,” he said. “It can transform your biology… it also rearranges your brain in various ways.”
“This looks a lot like its doing nothing,” Kabat-Zinn said. “It’s not doing nothing. I prefer to call it ‘non-doing’… and actually you can get a lot more work done sometimes by practicing ‘non-doing.’”
Watch the moment:
Washington state is requiring people to wear masks at all times in living areas on colleges campuses, including dormitories and Greek houses, following a series of coronavirus outbreaks.
The state is dealing with 35 coronavirus outbreaks at colleges and universities, Gov. Jay Inslee said Tuesday at a news conference. More than 800 cases are “directly attributable to these congregants living and social gatherings associated with campuses,” the governor said.
Being outdoors or in “sleeping areas” would be the only exceptions to the order. Common areas will be limited to five people at a time. Colleges and universities must also provide quarantine facilities for all group housing, including fraternities and sororities.
Inslee also encouraged residents to limit the number of people they invite to their homes.
Ireland reported 13 new coronavirus deaths on Tuesday, the highest amount it has reported in a day since May.
During a press conference, Ireland’s Chief Medical Officer Tony Holohan said the deaths reported occurred in recent days.
Another 1,269 cases were also recorded.
On Monday — the same day the country’s case count surpassed 50,000 — the Irish government announced it would impose the strictest level of restrictions in the country for the next six weeks, in an effort to tackle a surge in cases.
Watch:
Southern Miss interim head football coach Scotty Walden tested positive for Covid-19 Tuesday morning, the university has announced.
Walden left the team facility to self-isolate at his home and will take a PCR test Wednesday to confirm his status. Until his return, he will oversee the team’s activities from home.
Southern Miss is scheduled to play Liberty University in a game this Saturday.
Southern Miss’s game against UTEP scheduled for last Saturday was postponed, with Southern Miss citing “an increase in COVID-19 cases in the program.”
Moderna and Pfizer, the two frontrunners in the US race for a Covid-19 vaccine, will be making presentations to an all-day meeting Thursday of a US Food and Drug Administration advisory committee, but both companies said they will not be presenting data from their Phase 3 clinical trials.
“This is not a moment where we will be sharing data. This is a discussion from the FDA to discuss the requirements for efficacy, safety and manufacturing,” a spokesperson for Pfizer said in an email to CNN.
Both companies have said they could possibly apply to the FDA for authorization to market their vaccines in the coming weeks if their Phase 3 clinical trial data turns out to be positive.
Pfizer has said it could apply for emergency use authorization after the third week in November. Moderna has said the federal government could give an EUA to the company’s experimental Covid-19 vaccine in December if the company gets positive interim results in November.
Once the companies apply for emergency use authorization from the FDA, the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee will advise the agency on whether it thinks authorization should be given.
The Thursday meeting is scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., but Dr. Paul Offit, a member of the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, said members have been asked to keep their schedules clear until 7 p.m. because it might run long.
Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said “general parameters” will be discussed for how to measure vaccine safety and efficacy.
Tennessee has seen a slight increase in its Covid-19 case rate and positivity rate, as well as a dramatic rise in hospitalizations, with numbers up over 50% since Oct. 1, Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey announced Tuesday.
Dr. Piercey said the increase in hospitalizations is primarily because most of Tennessee’s cases are now coming from rural areas.
To help mitigate the rise in hospitalizations, the state is working with hospital partners on different targeted approaches, including additional funding for hospital staffing, and amping up Covid-19 specific nursing homes to reduce the load of nursing home patients on hospitals, Gov. Bill Lee said.
Dr. Piercey added that Tennessee’s alternative care sites continue to exercise and prepare in the catastrophic event the state would need to open one of the sites.
In a news conference on Tuesday, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker said that four regions would be operating under the standard resurgence mitigations by the end of this week, including no indoor dining or indoor bar service and limiting in-person gatherings to no more than 25 people.
“New restrictions were announced yesterday for region 5, Southern Illinois, so that means four of our 11 regions have triggered our fail-safe state action metric,” Pritzker added.
The governor also discussed how the new wave of the virus is disrupting small businesses in these regions, saying, “They will receive priority consideration for the 220 million dollars in the current round of business interruption grants.”
According to Pritzker, of the seven regions that are still operating under phase 4 of the Restore Illinois Plan, five are now at a rolling positivity average above 7%, with the other two regions above 6.5%.
“All continue to show increases over last week, and most regions of the state continue to see increases in COVID related hospital admissions,” Pritzker said.
“As colder weather approaches and flu season is upon us, we’re going to see the rippling effects of these current unfortunate trends.”
The state of Colorado is seeing its highest seven-day average count of Covid-19 cases.
“We are at our highest daily count since the beginning of the pandemic,” state epidemiologist Dr. Rachel Herlihy said at a news conference Tuesday. “We have had three waves of illness. A spring wave, a July wave and now a fall wave.”
The one-week rolling average was listed at 960 as of Tuesday. The record for a single-day case count was set Oct. 15 at 1,155. Health officials say some of the increase compared to the early days of the pandemic is likely to be due to higher testing capacity, but it is still a dangerous trend. “We cannot go on as we have been,” said Gov. Jared Polis. “The status quo is not acceptable.”
The biggest concern is the possibility of stressing the state’s hospital capacity.
“We are still seeing an increase in hospitalizations,” Polis said, amounting to about one out of every four hospital beds being filled with a coronavirus patient.
“We are projected to exceed the level of hospitalizations we saw in the spring in about mid-November,” Herlihy said. She added that, with more people likely to be indoors and gathered together during the holidays, they could exceed their intensive care capacity by late December.
In about a week, the United States may see a “rapid acceleration” in Covid-19 cases, Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration, predicted on Monday.
“We’re seeing hospitalizations go up in 42 states right now, cases are going up in 45 states, and there really is no backstop,” Gottlieb said. “The summer was a backstop of sorts to the spring surge and we have no therapeutic backstop and this season, the fall and winter season, is when this coronavirus is going to want to spread.”
There are 4,591 new cases of Covid-19 in Wisconsin today, according to state health officials.
Department of Health Services Secretary-Designee Andrea Palm said during a press conference Tuesday afternoon that the numbers include backlogged cases that accumulated when the state’s electronic disease surveillance system went through an upgrade and enhancement over the weekend.
She said that the numbers may be higher over the next few days as they work through importing the data.
Wisconsin has 178,482 total positive cases since the pandemic began. Palm said that 43% of the state’s total cases have come within the past month and 62% over the past two months.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said during the press conference that the ruling made by a circuit court judge on Monday denying a temporary injunction on the state’s emergency order limiting public gatherings to 25% capacity was critically important in helping prevent the spread of the virus.
He said that he wants to see small businesses, including restaurants and bars, succeed but that it won’t happen until everyone starts taking this pandemic seriously.
Canada continues to battle a second wave of Covid-19 as total cases top 200,000 and deaths near the grim milestone of 10,000 victims since the pandemic began.
Alarmingly, public health officials say hospitalizations continue to rise as the positivity rate nationally during the last week is now above 3%, and higher than that in hotspots like Montreal and Toronto.
While schools remain open for in-person learning throughout most of the country, there have been targeted restrictions in many urban centers with restaurant and bar closures, limits on social gatherings and closure of gyms and theaters.
While new, daily cases have plateaued and the growth rate of new cases has stabilized, Canadian hospitals are seeing more patients who are critically ill.
“The number of people experiencing severe illness is also increasing. Over the past 7 days there were on average over 950 individuals with COVID-19 being treated in Canadian hospitals including close to 200 in critical care and an average of 22 deaths reported each day,” said Dr. Theresa Tam, chief public health officer of Canada during a press conference in Ottawa.
Trudeau was asked about Halloween Tuesday as several cities in Ontario, including Toronto and Ottawa, recommended against trick or treating on Halloween night saying community transmission of the virus was too high.
Trudeau confirmed his three children will be following local public health guidelines and would not be trick or treating in Ottawa on Halloween night.
The issue of Halloween divides even doctors with some saying trick or treating is a relatively low risk activity given it is outside.
A Toronto infectious disease specialist tweeted that the ban on trick or treating didn’t “sit right.”
“The goal should be to find ways to do things safely rather than cancel. Halloween shouldn’t be too tough to do safely: Outside, wearing masks, restricted to family units, distant from others - is about as low risk as it gets,” tweeted Dr. Isaac Bogoch with the University of Toronto.
Some editorials were scathing with The Globe and Mail’s medical specialist Andre Picard writing, “We’ve spent months being spooked by a virus. It’s time for a little pushback,” he says in an opinion piece, adding, “This is masked, distanced candy-collecting. To suggest that is dangerous is downright diabolical.”
There is little indication local authorities will relent before Halloween although officials said that they were relying on individual compliance and they were not planning any enforcement initiatives.
Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson has tested negative for Covid-19 after being in a meeting Friday with an individual who later tested positive, the governor said.
After contact tracing took place, the governor was notified early Monday morning, that there were questions about his exposure, “even though I had remained over six feet away from the individual,” Hutchinson said.
The governor said as a precaution, he was administered an antigen Covid-19 test early Monday morning, followed by a PCR test that was also negative.
According to Hutchinson, the meeting with the infected individual did not lot rise to the level of CDC quarantine guidance. The governor said that “out of an abundance of caution,” he would be limiting his meetings in order to make sure no one is inadvertently exposed.
Arkansas Health Secretary Dr. José Romero said it is the Health Department’s recommendation that the governor undergo testing on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and again on Monday of next week, with both rapid tests and PCR based test being offered to the governor. Additional testing will be added as necessary, the health secretary said.
For two days in a row, the number of people in the hospital with coronavirus rose by more than 700 in 24 hours, according to numbers released by the national health agency on Tuesday.
In the last 24 hours, 795 new coronavirus patients were admitted to the hospital, according to the health agency.
The overall number of people currently in the hospital for coronavirus now stands at 12,435.
On Monday, the number of new hospital admissions for coronavirus had risen by 743, to 11,640.
To compare, last Tuesday there were 257 new Covid-19 hospitalizations in France, according to the health agency website.
The Mountain West conference has canceled the season-opening football game between the New Mexico Lobos and the Colorado State Rams, blaming coronavirus cases within the county the Lobos play.
The conference statement says, “Due to the prevalence of the COVID-19 virus in Bernalillo County and in accordance with state guidelines, the University of New Mexico is unable to participate in the scheduled football game on Saturday, Oct. 24, at Colorado State University.”
University of New Mexico is based in Albuquerque, a city within Bernalillo County.
The game, scheduled to play in Fort Collins, Colorado, has been declared a no contest and will not be rescheduled.
The conference had originally postponed all 2020 fall sports back on Aug. 10. In late September, the Mountain West reversed course and announced an eight-game, conference only regular season to start Oct. 24.
There are five other Mountain West football openers slated to kick off this Saturday.
New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy wants residents to buy into the idea of holiday celebrations that are “smaller, inside your bubble, maybe even outside if the weather allows” he said during a gaggle with reporters.
Murphy added that celebrating this way, “buys us the ability to have a more normal experience for next year’s holidays.”
Murphy said that while he suspects recent Covid-19 spikes in the state are due to increases in gatherings and that they are “beyond our ability to effectively regulate or easily enforce compliance.”
He added that in the past, gatherings around high religious holidays that happened more publicly were easier to regulate.
Murphy did not comment on a timeline for if and when any Covid-19 restrictions would be rolled back for the state.
Murphy mentioned conversations he had with Dr. Anthony Fauci where he was told New Jersey is entering the second wave in a “very strong position,” adding that even though cases are up, they are from a “very low base.”
Hungary’s justice minister, Judit Varga, has tested positive for coronavirus.
In a Facebook statement Tuesday, Varga said she has “mild respiratory symptoms” and will work from home during the quarantine period.
Hungary has recorded at least 48,757 cases of coronavirus and 1,211 deaths so far in the pandemic, according to Johns Hopkins University.
Arkansas today reported 840 new probable and confirmed cases of Covid-19, passing the 100,000 case mark, Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced Tuesday.
The state also reported 14 more Covid-19-related deaths, bringing the total number of deaths to 1,576, as well as 24 new hospitalizations, for 637 total hospitalized Covid-19 patients, according to Hutchinson.
Ventilator use has gone up slightly, to 101 people.
“We’d like to see that below 100,” Arkansas Health Secretary Dr. José Romero said.
The state is currently reporting a cumulative positivity rate of 7.6%.
One thing to note: These numbers were released by the state’s public health agency and may not line up exactly in real time with CNN’s database drawn from Johns Hopkins University and the Covid Tracking Project.
