Your Evening Briefing
Your Evening Briefing
(Bloomberg) --
Americans are actually following instructions when it comes to the coronavirus, according to the federal government. A report says 90% are washing their hands, avoiding public gatherings and staying indoors. Harvard researchers warn however that such measures may be necessary through 2022 to keep the virus from flaring up again. But thanks to the belated nature of this societal effort, almost 600,000 infections have been reported in the U.S. and 25,000 Americans have died.
Bloomberg is mapping the pandemic globally and across America. For the latest news, sign up for our Covid-19 podcast and daily newsletter.
Here are today’s top stories
Globally, there have been more than 1.9 million infections and 125,000 people have died. In Europe, the pandemic is showing tentative signs of slowing and leaders are mulling how to get citizens back to work. In Saudi Arabia, though, there is an outbreak in Mecca. Here’s the latest.
Former President Barack Obama, after more than a year of studiously avoiding public involvement in the presidential race, endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday in a video describing their close partnership. The Democrat urged Americans to join together in a “great awakening” to remove Trump from the White House. Some battleground states are being particularly hard hit by the pandemic, which bodes ill for the Republican incumbent.
Any U.S. effort to lift coronavirus-related restrictions hinges on a breakthrough that hasn’t come to pass: ratcheting up the nation’s testing capacity to avoid a second wave. One expert said it would require one million tests per day to contain the outbreak. America, far behind much of the world in testing, can barely muster 100,000 per day.
The coronavirus-triggered recession will be the steepest since the Great Depression. It will be even worse if the pathogen lingers or returns, the International Monetary Fund warned. Economists now see the U.S. jobless rate surging to 20% as soon as this month, which would essentially wipe out all the job gains since the last recession.
The virus is hurting black Americans more than whites in almost every way. Covid-19 is more likely to kill black Americans, and the black community will likely take a disproportionate hit from the economic fallout.
Amazon workers, along with U.S. senators and labor leaders, have expressed concern that the company hasn’t been doing enough to keep employees safe as Covid-19 spreads in dozens of its facilities around the world. CEO Jeff Bezos has responded by firing employees who criticize those working conditions.
What’s Joe Weisenthal thinking about? The Bloomberg news director says a Wall Street argument making the rounds—that while nobody’s seen an economic collapse like this, we’ve never seen Congress and the Fed move so quickly to mitigate the damage—is both true and false. Washington has moved quickly, Joe says, when measured in time, passing a $2 trillion bailout package about a month after the recession began. But that’s not quick when measured against how much economic damage was wrought that month, Joe argues. In the last crisis, the number of unemployed Americans rose by about 5 million from the start of the recession until bailout legislation was passed more than a year later. During this crisis, we’ve seen around 16 million new people filing for unemployment in just the last three weeks.
What you’ll need to know tomorrow
- Hedge funds want some of that small business bailout money, too.
- That small business loan fund is already running out of money.
- Get ready for more frequent (and longer lasting) power outages.
- CO2 emissions are falling, but the virus won’t slow climate change.
- Covid-19 does, however, have an insidious link to air pollution.
- People are paying real money to get into virtual nightclubs.
- Nintendo’s Animal Crossing is the biggest hit of the shutdown.
What you’ll want to see in Bloomberg Graphics
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was bagging groceries at a supermarket while attending college when he uploaded a song to SoundCloud in 2016 under the pseudonym Bad Bunny. The track, “Diles,” a Puerto Rican spin on the trap sound of Atlanta, racked up more than 1 million listens and grabbed the attention of a couple well-known producers. Social media and streaming services have made it easier than ever to release music, but the volume of new songs has also made it harder to break through. That’s why Bloomberg came up with the Pop Star Power Rankings, a new chart that measures the rise and fall of the world’s most in-demand musicians.
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