Tag Archives: Pandemic

U.S. coronavirus outbreak soon to be deadlier than any flu since 1967 as deaths top 60,000

By Lisa Shumaker(Reuters) – U.S. deaths from the novel coronavirus topped 60,000 on Wednesday and the outbreak will soon be deadlier than any flu season since 1967, according to a Reuters tally.

America’s worst flu season in recent years was in 2017-2018 when more than 61,000 people died, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The only deadlier flu seasons were in 1967 when about 100,000 Americans died, 1957 when 116,000 died and the Spanish flu of 1918 when 675,000 died, according to the CDC.

The United States has the world’s highest coronavirus death toll and a daily average of 2,000 people died in April of the highly contagious respiratory illness COVID-19, according to a Reuters tally. The first U.S. death was recorded on Feb. 29 but recent testing in California indicates the first death might have been on Feb. 6, with the virus circulating weeks earlier than previously thought.

On Tuesday, COVID-19 deaths in the United States eclipsed in a few months the 58,220 Americans killed during 16 years of U.S. military involvement during the Vietnam War. Cases topped 1 million.

The actual number of cases is thought to be higher, with state public health officials cautioning that shortages of trained workers and materials have limited testing capacity.

The outbreak could take nearly 73,000 U.S. lives by Aug. 4, compared with an April 22 forecast of over 67,600, according to the University of Washington’s predictive model , often cited by White House officials.

In early March, the prospect that the coronavirus would kill more Americans than the flu was unthinkable to many politicians who played down the risk of the new virus.

Republican President Donald Trump tweeted on March 9: “So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

On March 11, Democratic New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio told New Yorkers during a radio interview to eat out at restaurants if they were not sick.

That same day, top U.S. infectious diseases expert Dr. Anthony Fauci warned Congress that the coronavirus was at least 10 times more lethal than the seasonal flu.

There is as yet no treatment or vaccine for coronavirus while flu vaccines are widely available along with treatments.

(Writing by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Howard Goller)

China committed to Phase 1 trade deal despite pandemic: U.S. official

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – China remains “very, very committed” to meeting its commitments under a Phase 1 trade deal with the United States, despite the unprecedented economic and health impacts of the new coronavirus pandemic, a senior U.S. trade official said on Wednesday.

The official told reporters that U.S. officials were talking regularly, and often daily, about implementation of the trade deal and to make sure that China fulfilled its extensive agreements to buy U.S. goods and services.

The U.S. Trade Representative’s office kept China on its priority watch list for concerns about intellectual property protections and enforcement, and was watching closely to see if it implemented changes agreed as part of the trade agreement, the official said.

(Reporting by Andrea Shalal, Editing by Franklin Paul)

Florida to unveil reopening plan as data shows painful contraction of U.S. economy

By Maria Caspani and Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Florida Governor Ron DeSantis on Wednesday was preparing to unveil his plan for loosening restrictions on business activity in one of the most populous states in the United States as data showed the economy contracted 4.8% in the first three months due to the shutdowns aimed at battling the coronavirus.

Commerce Department data showed the economy shrank at its sharpest pace since the Great Recession due to the stringent measures to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, ending the longest expansion in U.S. history.

Economists generally define a recession as at least two months of negative growth in a row.

“The economy is in free fall, we could be approaching something much worse than a deep recession,” said Sung Won Sohn, a business economics professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. “It’s premature to talk about a recovery at this moment, we are going to be seeing a lot of bankruptcies for small and medium sized businesses.”

With millions unemployed, about a dozen states have been forging ahead to restart shuttered commerce without being ready to put in place the large-scale virus testing or means to trace close contacts of newly infected individuals.

Public health experts have urged caution, saying that a premature rollback of social-distancing policies could trigger a resurgence of infections.

In Florida, the largest state so far to contemplate re-opening, DeSantis is expected to announce a “phase one” loosening of restrictions a day after it reported a record-high 83 deaths and more than 700 new infections from the previous 24 hours on Tuesday. Despite being spared the worst of the pandemic, the state has so far tallied 32,846 cases of COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus, including 1,171 deaths.

U.S. deaths from the novel coronavirus was approaching 60,000 on Wednesday, and cases crossed the 1 million mark. The death toll has already surpassed the number of American lives lost in the Vietnam War, and the outbreak will soon be deadlier than any flu season since 1967, according to a Reuters tally.

White House adviser Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son in law, said on Wednesday that May would likely become a transition month as states begin reopening in phases.

“I think you’ll see by June, a lot of the country should be back to normal and the hope is is that by July, the country is really rocking again,” he told Fox News.

He said the White House would begin another round of calls on Wednesday with all the governors to ask what additional supplies they need and what their two-month plan is.

Some businesses in Tennessee were allowed to reopen on Wednesday following an executive order issued by Governor Bill Lee to restart the state’s economy.

Some restaurants will be able to serve food to customers seated at tables, granted they observe state-mandated guidelines, while close-contact personal service businesses like barber shops, salons and spas will remain closed for now.

In California, Governor Gavin Newsom said curbside retail, manufacturing and other “lower-risk workplaces” should reopen within weeks as testing and contact-tracing improve.

Health experts have stressed the importance of testing and contact tracing to prevent a resurgence of the virus, but a nationwide strategy remains elusive and Trump has said the testing onus rests with single states.

 

(Reporting by Maria Caspani, Editing by Sonya Hepinstall)

Much of U.S. economy still plugging along despite coronavirus pain

By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Garbage haulers still collect trash. Cops are on the beat. Couriers deliver food and packages. Insurance agents work from home.

The coronavirus crisis would appear to have put the entire U.S. economy on ice. Twenty-six million people have filed for unemployment in just a month, with millions more likely waiting in electronic queues at overtaxed state unemployment systems.

Still the U.S. job count stood at more than 152 million as of February. Paychecks are arriving for tens of millions of government workers, hospital, sanitation, utility and other employees deemed to be doing essential jobs; an army of employees working from home; and even chefs cooking for carry-out. For roughly 42 million retirees, and millions more with disabilities, monthly Social Security payments continue.

When the first gross domestic product reports of the pandemic era are issued Wednesday, the numbers will show a large hit from the virus-fighting efforts that began in mid-March. Forecasters expect anywhere from $2 trillion to $5 trillion of output to be wiped out by year’s end.

But in a nearly $22-trillion economy, that leaves a lot on the table, the foundation for the gradual reopening being announced by state governments to build upon.

While described as a “lockdown,” the restrictions recommended or put in place around the country have just as often amounted to a rearrangement. For tens of millions of Americans, work has shifted from office to home and moved online. Other businesses may have been ordered to close, but have hunted for ways to cope and maintain some revenue.

For some companies, the pandemic could even bring a bumper year.

Wickliffe, Ohio-based Lubrizol Corp, the specialty chemicals maker owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Corp, has avoided layoffs among its 4,700 U.S. employees. And it continues to churn out products like the gelling agent used to make hand sanitizer.

“We’ve tripled our production of that material,” Chief Executive Officer Eric Schnur told Reuters, “and we still can’t get enough of that to our customers.”

Procter & Gamble Co and Kimberly-Clark Corp both recently posted their best sales growth in years on demand for cleaning and personal hygiene products, as evidenced by shelves stripped bare of toilet paper at grocery stores nationwide.

Citrix Systems Inc, the software maker enabling millions of people to work from home, posted record sales in the first quarter.

None of this is to downplay the staggering blow the pandemic has dealt to the U.S. economy. The United States won’t thrive on teleconferencing and toilet paper, of course, and the scope of the downturn is unprecedented. It could get worse if the virus isn’t controlled or a vaccine developed. In the meantime, small entrepreneurs and those thrown out of work are depending on trillions of dollars in approved government aid to keep them afloat.

Even if the health crisis passes soon and the economic rebound is sharp, there may be lasting structural change — whether in the type of jobs available, the travel and dining habits of consumers, or the look of Main Street if small businesses collapse.

BIG GOVERNMENT, ESSENTIALS AND THE HOME OFFICE

Still, parts of the economy have been buffered.

Start with government, accounting for a steady 17.5% of U.S. gross domestic product at the combined federal, state and local levels over the past three years, or $3.7 trillion of GDP in 2019.

That includes administrators, clerical workers and technology staff running the benefits programs that other Americans now rely upon, as well as firefighters and others who maintain basic services, including teachers leading online classrooms.

Much of that employment is likely to continue, at least for now. But difficult choices loom for state and local governments as costs for their pandemic responses rise, while key revenue sources like sales and income taxes tumble. That could force layoffs.

Calls for a broad package of federal help for local governments have so far been resisted by leading congressional Republicans. However the Federal Reserve this week expanded the scope of a $500-billion lending program for state, county and local governments. That will allow the Fed to buy short-term bonds from hundreds of local government entities to help them raise money needed to pay staff wages and other bills.

The federal government, meanwhile, will borrow massively to fund nearly $3 trillion in emergency programs. A large share of that is in the form of direct payments to households and expanded unemployment benefits. Jobless families will spend much of that on food, housing and perhaps medical care. Consumer spending accounts for about two-thirds of U.S. output.

In contrast to government, the private sector has absorbed a massive blow: Roughly one of every six workers was laid off in the space of a month. Airlines have been grounded, the industry so stricken it was singled out for direct government loans. Hotels and restaurants were also among the direct casualties of social distancing edicts.

But the dramatic headlines mask what’s still going on among two large categories of workers: those working remotely and those whose occupations are deemed “essential.” The latter category encompasses an enormous swath of workers, including front-line medical personnel, public safety officers, people laboring to keep the food supply intact, those distributing goods around the country and utility workers keeping the lights on and the water flowing.

A Brookings Institution study using the Department of Homeland Security’s guidance on “essential industries” estimated that up to 62 million employees might qualify, as much as 40% of total employment before the crisis.

Searches for “telehealth nurse” increased more than 10-fold from March to mid-April on Indeed.com, the job site’s Chief Economist Jed Kolko said in a recent presentation. Online sellers and food retailers, notably Amazon.com Inc and Walmart Inc, have added tens of thousands of employees to ship goods to homebound Americans instructed not to venture out if possible.

Many of those people bunkered in their houses are still earning income. Up to 37% of U.S. jobs “can plausibly be performed from home,” according to a recent study by Jonathan I. Dingel and Brent Neiman, researchers at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. They estimated those jobs account for an outsized 46% of U.S. wages, and include perhaps 80% of workers in the finance and insurance industries, and in scientific and professional fields.

Many of those jobs could still prove vulnerable. Architects and civil engineers, for example, could be laid off alongside bricklayers and carpenters if construction slumps. The longer a downturn lasts, the more troubles will mount for the nation’s white-collar workforce.

TOUGH RESTRICTIONS, BUT WORK GOES ON

But even in the hardest-hit industries and states, some activity continues.

Michigan, for example, has been hammered by the coronavirus, with more than 38,000 COVID-19 cases. It ranks in the Top 10 nationally both by the total number of cases and in the infection rate, estimated at roughly 3,400 infections per 100,000 people. Michigan’s automotive sector closed down early, and other industries followed under Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s March 23 stay-at-home order, considered among the strictest in the country.

(For a state-by-state breakdown of U.S. coronavirus cases, see: https://tmsnrt.rs/35oYKhr)

The unemployment rate in Michigan, among people covered by unemployment insurance, hit 17.4%, the highest in the country.

But even Michigan’s tough rules deemed 14 industries to have at least some essential workers, including financial services, communications and “critical manufacturing,” along with health and public safety.

Restaurants, bars and many retail outlets had to close to the public. But restaurants could still offer carry out, hotels could stay open if they chose, and construction on many types of projects could continue under social distancing rules.

All businesses were allowed to keep some employees on site for “minimum basic operations” such as maintaining equipment and inventory, guarding property, processing payroll or transactions, or supporting those working remotely.

An analysis of Michigan’s unemployment claims by Michael Horrigan, president of the Upjohn Institute, a labor think tank, showed the differential spread of the crisis across industries and gave some sense of the workforce still on the job.

As of mid-April, as many as 54% of workers in Michigan’s construction sector were still employed, according to Horrigan’s analysis. He compared unemployment claims filed in the industry with employment levels as of the first quarter of 2019, the most recent data from the federal government’s comprehensive Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages. For agriculture, finance and utilities the share of workers still employed could be above 90%, he said.

The numbers will no doubt change as more unemployment claims are processed and as restrictions are lifted, a process Whitmer has already begun.

Based on 2019 output levels for the state by industry, if current levels of joblessness held for a year it would cut Michigan’s GDP by perhaps 23%, knocking the state back to where it was in 2013. Nonetheless, that would still mean Michigan workers and factories would generate $422 billion in goods and services this year.

SOME ADAPT, SOME THRIVE

Across the country, firms are coping in different ways. Some are finding small bits of revenue to sustain themselves, while others are adjusting to an unexpected surge in demand.

Utah greenhouse owners Scott and Karin Pynes had built a solid events business alongside selling plants, but those gatherings vanished overnight under social distancing orders. The Pynes don’t expect to be hosting weddings or corporate events anytime soon, they said in a recent webcast seminar on business survival sponsored by the David Eccles School of Business at the University of Utah.

Their business, Cactus and Tropicals, is still taking online orders for plants and offering outdoor displays and pickups. The Pynes are holding video landscaping consultations by Skype and Zoom, and hunting for a new business model that will work as the economy reopens, perhaps under new rules to keep people more distant from each other.

Scott Pynes said the company has scaled back seasonal hiring, but kept around 85 permanent staff on the payroll with the help of a Small Business Administration loan. With the peak season starting on Mother’s Day, he has his fingers crossed.

“We feel confident we will make it through,” he said in an interview with Reuters. “We will be a bit scarred.”

Richard Schwartz, chief executive of Austin, Texas-based Pensa, faces the opposite challenge — keeping up with a burgeoning workload.

Schwartz’s firm offers automated inventory tracking to retailers so they can plan orders, detect shortages and let manufacturers know to ramp production up or down accordingly. It does that with the help of artificial intelligence software and drones that prowl the aisles of stores to count items on shelves.

Pensa’s flying checkers, he said, were a “sleepy” part of the wholesale-to-retail supply chain before coronavirus hit. Many stores were content to use human workers to jot down inventory on clipboards.

With virus-panicked shoppers emptying shelves and manufacturers struggling to keep pace, robots offer a fast way to keep track of inventory and ordering needs. Schwartz says potential customers now are poised to adopt in a matter of months technology they might have rolled out over years.

Technology “normally goes in fits and spurts,” he said.

Coronavirus, Schwartz said, “is one of those accelerators where it shines a light on a problem.”

(Reporting by Howard Schneider; Additional reporting by Ann Saphir and Timothy Aeppel; Editing by Dan Burns and Marla Dickerson)

Toilet paper trophy hunters on a roll as U.S. shortages start easing

By Martinne Geller and Lisa Baertlein

LONDON/LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – U.S. consumers have begun spotting rare Quilted Northern and Charmin toilet paper rolls on store shelves across the United States, as stocks start building after weeks of severe shortages.

Shoppers who bagged the coveted rolls are crowing on Twitter about their finds. “Found some toilet paper in the wild! Driving it home now,” tweeted @TransForYang on April 23. “This is as close as I’ll ever come to knowing what it feels like driving one of those armored money trucks.”

Empty shelves were still a problem at nearly half of American grocery stores as of mid-April, but supplies were markedly more plentiful than they had been during the prior week, according to the consumer products data tracker NCSolutions.

About 48 percent of U.S. grocery stores were out of stock of toilet paper for some part of the day on April 19, the latest date for which figures were available. In comparison, out-of-stock shelves were prevalent at 73 percent of U.S. grocery stores one week earlier, on April 12, according to the data, provided exclusively to Reuters.

Demand for toilet paper is still up 27 percent from pre-Covid-19 levels, NCSolutions said.

The average U.S. household – 2.6 people – uses about 409 rolls a year, according to Georgia Pacific, maker of Angel Soft and Quilted Northern. It estimated that staying at home 24/7 would boost that by 40 percent, and that a two-person household would use nine double rolls in about two weeks.

Toilet paper is not the only essential item shoppers stocked up on after states started locking down businesses to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus in mid-March. The large size of toilet paper packages versus other staples such as pasta, soap and canned goods means that retail stores rarely keep much in stock, and so are quicker to run out.

In Europe, the shortages at retail stores may be less dire due partly to the fact that some production is done closer to retailers.

“Normally there are fewer and larger factories in the U.S.,” said Magnus Groth, chief executive of Europe’s biggest toilet paper maker, Essity. Groth said Essity, which in the United States sells tissue products to businesses only, met a spike in European demand by boosting production, selling down inventory and securing extra transport capacity.

The U.S. retail market for toilet paper was worth $9.7 billion last year, according to Euromonitor International.

Procter & Gamble dominates with about a 29% share, followed by Kimberly-Clark, maker of Cottonelle and Scott, and privately held Koch Industries-owned Georgia Pacific.

For Charmin maker Procter & Gamble, March and April will be record production months, said Rick McLeod, its vice president of global family care product supply.

The company’s six U.S. plants are running 24/7, focusing on the most popular products. P&G’s plants manufacture massive “parent” rolls of toilet paper and then convert them to small rolls for home use. The parent rolls, which are a standard in the industry, measure more than eight feet in diameter and weigh about a ton.

“Our data says that in-stock levels are improving but notwhere we want them to be certainly,” McLeod said.

Georgia Pacific is now making 1.5 million more roles perday, and is trying to maximize the number of deliveries it canship. Its mills and regional distribution centers have shippedabout 120 percent of normal capacity, while a shift to directshipments where possible has reduced shipping time to retailersby up to three days, a spokesman said.

Store checks last week showed toilet paper was approachingnormal stock levels after being “deeply deficient for over 50days,” said Burt Flickinger, managing director of consulting firm Strategic Resource Group, adding that it was the first week his firm saw adequate levels of shelf stock.

(Additional reporting by Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm and Nivedita Balu in Bengaluru; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)

U.S. still worried about China’s labs amid coronavirus: Pompeo

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said on Wednesday the United States remains worried about laboratories in China and the world needs to get to the bottom of how the novel coronavirus began there.

The United States and China have traded insults and accusations during the deadly coronavirus outbreak that has killed more than 200,000 people around the world and brought the global economy to a crawl.

U.S. President Donald Trump said on April 15 that his government was investigating whether the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan, where the virus emerged. Those claims have no basis in fact, the head of the lab told Reuters on Tuesday.[nL3N2CG18V]

“I can tell you there were real concerns about the labs inside of China,” Pompeo said in an interview with Fox News. “I’m still concerned that the Chinese Communist Party is not telling us about all of what’s taking place in all of the labs.”

A Washington Post opinion column this month said the U.S. State Department in 2018 warned in diplomatic cables about safety and management weaknesses at a Wuhan laboratory.

Pompeo said Chinese authorities are continuing to withhold information about the virus and will not allow U.S. experts access.

“In spite of our best efforts to get experts on the ground, they continue to try and hide and obfuscate. That’s wrong, it continues to pose a threat to the world and we all need to get to the bottom of what actually happened here,” he told Fox.

Most scientists now say the new coronavirus originated in wildlife, with bats and pangolins identified as possible host species.

Yuan Zhiming, a director at the Wuhan Institute of Virology also rejected theories that the lab had accidentally released a coronavirus it had harvested from bats for research purposes.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Jonathan Oatis)

Millions of Americans locked out of unemployment system, survey finds

By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Millions of Americans who have been thrown out of work during the coronavirus pandemic have been unable to register for unemployment benefits since the U.S. economy entered a free fall, according to a poll released on Tuesday.

The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute found in an online poll that for every 10 people who have successfully filed unemployment claims, three or four people have been unable to register and another two people have not tried to apply at a time of acute economic crisis.

Official U.S. statistics show that 26.5 million people have applied for unemployment benefits since mid-March, wiping out all of the jobs gained during the longest employment boom in U.S. history.

EPI’s survey indicates that an additional 8.9 million to 13.9 million people have been shut out of the system, said Ben Zipperer, the study’s lead author.

“This study validates the anecdotes and news reports we’re seeing about people having trouble filing for benefits they need and deserve,” Zipperer said.

Idled workers say they have encountered downed websites and clogged phone lines, as the state governments that administer the program have been overwhelmed by applicants.

“It’s a shame how you work for so many years and then when you need it, you can’t get it,” said Jim Hewes, 48, who said he was unable to file a claim online for more than two weeks after he was furloughed from his job at an Orlando, Florida, second-hand store in March.

Hewes said he mailed off a paper application on April 9 but had not heard back from the state.

“It’s almost set up to fail. It was made complicated so people would get discouraged and give up,” he said.

EPI surveyed 24,607 U.S. adult internet users using Google Surveys between April 13 and April 24. The poll has a confidence interval, an indicator of accuracy, of plus or minus 1%.

Some 9.4% of poll respondents said they had successfully applied for unemployment benefits, while 3.4% said they tried but could not get through.

A further 1.9% said they did not apply because the process was too difficult.

STILL NO PAYMENTS FOR MANY

States like New Jersey and Georgia have struggled to find staffers who know how to update computer systems that run on decades-old technology. Others that have moved to newer technology have also encountered technical woes.

States have also had to incorporate enhanced federal benefits that provide an extra $600 per week and extend coverage to Uber drivers and other independent contractors.

On top of that, many states entered the crisis with fewer workers to handle unemployment claims as an improving economy had allowed them to cut staff.

States had the equivalent of 26,360 full-time workers in their unemployment offices in the 2018 fiscal year, according to the U.S. Labor Department, down 30% from staffing levels during the peak of the Great Recession in 2009 and 2010.

Many Americans who managed to file claims have yet to receive payments weeks after they lost their jobs.

Labor Department statistics show that 71% who apply are getting payments, although that figure varies significantly by state.

Florida, for example, said on Saturday it had sent payments to roughly one in five of those who had successfully submitted claims.

Among those waiting are Rachel Alvarez, 44, who says she now hides snacks in her bedroom so her three children cannot eat them too quickly. The former restaurant server in Naples, Florida, says she has run through her savings since she was laid off on March 25.

“I have nothing,” she said. “As much as I don’t want my kids to see me stress out, each one has seen me cry.”

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Scott Malone and Peter Cooney)

Piglets aborted, chickens gassed as pandemic slams meat sector

By Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter

CHICAGO (Reuters) – With the pandemic hobbling the meat-packing industry, Iowa farmer Al Van Beek had nowhere to ship his full-grown pigs to make room for the 7,500 piglets he expected from his breeding operation. The crisis forced a decision that still troubles him: He ordered his employees to give injections to the pregnant sows, one by one, that would cause them to abort their baby pigs.

Van Beek and other farmers say they have no choice but to cull livestock as they run short on space to house their animals or money to feed them, or both. The world’s biggest meat companies – including Smithfield Foods Inc, Cargill Inc, JBS USA and Tyson Foods Inc – have halted operations at about 20 slaughterhouses and processing plants in North America since April as workers fall ill, stoking global fears of a meat shortage.

Van Beek’s piglets are victims of a sprawling food-industry crisis that began with the mass closure of restaurants – upending that sector’s supply chain, overwhelming storage and forcing farmers and processors to destroy everything from milk to salad greens to animals. Processors geared up to serve the food-service industry can’t immediately switch to supplying grocery stores.

Millions of pigs, chickens and cattle will be euthanized because of slaughterhouse closures, limiting supplies at grocers, said John Tyson, chairman of top U.S. meat supplier Tyson Foods.

Pork has been hit especially hard, with daily production cut by about a third. Unlike cattle, which can be housed outside on pasture, U.S. hogs are fattened up for slaughter inside temperature-controlled buildings. If they are housed too long, they can get too big and injure themselves. The barns need to be emptied out by sending adult hogs to slaughter before the arrival of new piglets from sows that were impregnated just before the pandemic.

“We have nowhere to go with the pigs,” said Van Beek, who lamented the waste of so much meat. “What are we going to do?”

In Minnesota, farmers Kerry and Barb Mergen felt their hearts pound when a crew from Daybreak Foods Inc arrived with carts and tanks of carbon dioxide to euthanize their 61,000 egg-laying hens earlier this month.

Daybreak Foods, based in Lake Mills, Wisconsin, supplies liquid eggs to restaurants and food-service companies. The company, which owns the birds, pays contract farmers like the Mergens to feed and care for them. Drivers normally load the eggs onto trucks and haul them to a plant in Big Lake, Minnesota, which uses them to make liquid eggs for restaurants and ready-to-serve dishes for food-service companies. But the plant’s operator, Cargill Inc, said it idled the facility because the pandemic reduced demand.

Daybreak Foods, which has about 14.5 million hens with contractor-run or company-owned farms in the Midwest, is trying to switch gears and ship eggs to grocery stores, said Chief Executive Officer William Rehm. But egg cartons are in shortage nationwide and the company now must grade each egg for size, he said.

Rehm declined to say how much of the company’s flock has been euthanized.

“We’re trying to balance our supply with our customers’ needs, and still keep everyone safe – including all of our people and all our hens,” Rehm said.

DUMPING HOGS IN A LANDFILL

In Iowa, farmer Dean Meyer said he is part of a group of about nine producers who are euthanizing the smallest 5% of their newly born pigs, or about 125 piglets a week. They will continue euthanizing animals until disruptions ease, and could increase the number of pigs killed each week, he said. The small bodies are composted and will become fertilizer. Meyer’s group is also killing mother hogs, or sows, to reduce their numbers, he said.

“Packers are backed up every day, more and more,” said Meyer.

As the United States faces a possible food shortage, and supermarkets and food banks are struggling to meet demand, the forced slaughters are becoming more widespread across the country, according to agricultural economists, farm trade groups and federal lawmakers who are hearing from farmer constituents.

Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds, along with both U.S. senators from a state that provides a third of the nation’s pork, sent a letter to the Trump administration pleading for financial help and assistance with culling animals and properly disposing of their carcasses.

“There are 700,000 pigs across the nation that cannot be processed each week and must be humanely euthanized,” said the April 27 letter.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) said late Friday it is establishing a National Incident Coordination Center to help farmers find markets for their livestock, or euthanize and dispose of animals if necessary.

Some producers who breed livestock and sell baby pigs to farmers are now giving them away for free, farmers said, translating to a loss about $38 on each piglet, according to commodity firm Kerns & Associates.

Farmers in neighboring Canada are also killing animals they can’t sell or afford to feed. The value of Canadian isoweans – baby pigs – has fallen to zero because of U.S. processing plant disruptions, said Rick Bergmann, a Manitoba hog farmer and chair of the Canadian Pork Council. In Quebec alone, a backlog of 92,000 pigs waits for slaughter, said Quebec hog producer Rene Roy, an executive with the pork council.

A hog farm on Prince Edward Island in Canada euthanized 270-pound hogs that were ready for slaughter because there was no place to process them, Bergmann said. The animals were dumped in a landfill.

DEATH THREATS

The latest economic disaster to befall the farm sector comes after years of extreme weather, sagging commodity prices and the Trump administration’s trade war with China and other key export markets. But it’s more than lost income. The pandemic barreling through farm towns has mired rural communities in despair, a potent mix of shame and grief.

Farmers take pride in the fact that their crops and animals are meant to feed people, especially in a crisis that has idled millions of workers and forced many to rely on food banks. Now, they’re destroying crops and killing animals for no purpose.

Farmers flinch when talking about killing off animals early or plowing crops into the ground, for fear of public wrath. Two Wisconsin dairy farmers, forced to dump milk by their buyers, told Reuters they recently received anonymous death threats.

“They say, ‘How dare you throw away food when so many people are hungry?’,” said one farmer, speaking on condition of anonymity. “They don’t know how farming works. This makes me sick, too.”

Even as livestock and crop prices plummet, prices for meat and eggs at grocery stores are up. The average retail price of eggs was up nearly 40% for the week ended April 18, compared to a year earlier, according to Nielsen data. Average retail fresh chicken prices were up 5.4%, while beef was up 5.8% and pork up 6.6%.

On Van Beek’s farm in Rock Valley, Iowa, one hog broke a leg because it grew too heavy while waiting to be slaughtered. He has delivered pigs to facilities that are still operating, but they are too full to take all of his animals.

Van Beek paid $2,000 to truck pigs about seven hours to a Smithfield plant in Illinois, more than quadruple the usual cost to haul them to a Sioux Falls, South Dakota, slaughterhouse that the company has closed indefinitely. He said Smithfield is supposed to pay the extra transportation costs under his contract. But the company is refusing to do so, claiming “force majeure” – that an extraordinary and unforeseeable event prevents it from fulfilling its agreement.

Smithfield, the world’s largest pork processor, declined to comment on whether it has refused to make contracted payments. It said the company is working with suppliers “to navigate these challenging and unprecedented times.”

Hog farmers nationwide will lose an estimated $5 billion, or $37 per head, for the rest of the year due to pandemic disruptions, according to the industry group National Pork Producers Council.

A recently announced $19 billion U.S. government coronavirus aid package for farmers will not pay for livestock that are culled, according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, the nation’s largest farmer trade group. The USDA said in a statement the payment program is still being developed and the agency has received more requests for assistance than it has money to handle.

Minnesota farmer Mike Patterson started feeding his pigs more soybean hulls – which fill animals’ stomachs but offer negligible nutritional value – to keep them from getting too large for their barns. He’s considering euthanizing them because he cannot find enough buyers after Smithfield indefinitely shut its massive Sioux Falls plant.

“They have to be housed humanely,” Patterson said. “If there’s not enough room, we have to have less hogs somehow. One way or another, we’ve got to have less hogs.”

(Reporting By Tom Polansek and P.J. Huffstutter in Chicago. Additional reporting by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Writing by P.J. Huffstutter; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Brian Thevenot)

China lab rejects COVID-19 conspiracy claims, but virus origins still a mystery

By David Stanway

SHANGHAI (Reuters) – Claims that the coronavirus pandemic originated in a laboratory in the Chinese city of Wuhan have no basis in fact, the head of the lab told Reuters, adding that there were still no conclusive answers as to where the disease started.

Conspiracy theorists have claimed SARS-CoV-2, now responsible for more than 200,000 deaths worldwide, was synthesised by the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), based in the city where the disease was first identified.

Though the scientific consensus is that the coronavirus evolved naturally, such claims have gained traction. U.S. President Donald Trump said on April 15 that his government was investigating whether it had originated in the Wuhan lab.

Yuan Zhiming, professor at WIV and the director of its National Biosafety Laboratory, said “malicious” claims about the lab had been “pulled out of thin air” and contradicted all available evidence.

“The WIV does not have the intention and the ability to design and construct a new coronavirus,” he said in written responses to questions from Reuters. “Moreover, there is no information within the SARS-CoV-2 genome indicating it was manmade.”

Some conspiracy theories were fuelled by a widely read scientific paper from the Indian Institute of Technology, since withdrawn, claiming that proteins in the coronavirus shared an “uncanny similarity” with those of HIV. However, most scientists now say SARS-CoV-2 originated in wildlife, with bats and pangolins identified as possible host species.

“More than 70% of emerging infectious diseases originated from animals, especially wild animals,” Yuan said.

“In recent years, we have seen increasing risks posed by close contact between humans and wild animals, with global climate change and the continuous expansion of human activities,” he said.

All seven known human coronaviruses have origins in bats, mice or domestic animals, scientists say.

Yuan also rejected theories that the lab had accidentally released a coronavirus it had harvested from bats for research purposes, saying the lab’s biosecurity procedures were strictly enforced.

“High-level biosafety labs have sophisticated protective facilities and strict measures to ensure the safety of laboratory staff and protect the environment from contamination,” he said.

‘STILL NO ANSWERS’

Conspiracy theories are common during epidemics.

Russian scientists claimed the SARS outbreak in 2002-2003 originated in a lab, and during the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the late 1970s, some political groups also claimed the virus had been “spliced” together by government scientists.

Though the new coronavirus was first identified in Wuhan, conspiracy theories circulating within China have suggested the virus did not originate there.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Twitter in March that the coronavirus might have emerged in the United States, and there has been speculation on Chinese social media that it reached Wuhan via the World Military Games, held there in October.

Yuan did not comment directly on the claims, but said there were “still no answers” about the virus’s origins. He cited a paper by British and German scientists published this month suggesting that the SARS-CoV-2 variant circulating in the United States was a more “primitive” version of the one in China, and might have appeared there first.

“Tracing the virus’s origin is a very challenging scientific question with strong uncertainty,” Yuan said.

China has been accused of underestimating its total number of cases and trying to cover up the origins of the disease, which the government rejects.

Asked whether his institute would cooperate with an international inquiry into the pandemic, Yuan said that he was unaware of “such a mechanism”, but that the laboratory was already inspected regularly.

He added that his institute was committed to transparency and would share all available data about the coronavirus in a timely fashion.

“I hope everyone will put aside their prejudices and biases in order to provide a rational environment for research on tracing the origin of the virus,” he said.

(Reporting by David Stanway. Editing by Gerry Doyle)

As U.S. states ease restrictions, projected coronavirus death toll rises

By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – As Georgia lifted a ban on eating in restaurants and a handful of other U.S. states began easing other restrictions aimed at fighting the coronavirus pandemic, scientists warned the death toll would climb if governors reopen businesses prematurely.

The outbreak could take more than 74,000 U.S. lives by August, compared with an earlier forecast of 67,000, according to the University of Washington’s predictive model, often cited by White House officials and state public health authorities.

The university’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) said late on Monday that the number of U.S. deaths caused by the virus was not abating as quickly as previously projected after hitting a daily peak on April 15 with about 2,700.

IHME director Christopher Murray said the death toll would climb if states reopen their economies too early.

With President Donald Trump’s administration forecasting an unemployment rate of more than 16% for April and residents chafing under stay-at-home orders, states from Alaska to Mississippi are seeking to restart their battered economies despite a lack of large-scale virus testing.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott said on Monday he would allow the state’s stay-at-home order to expire and begin reopening businesses including restaurants and retail shops in phases beginning on Friday.

The White House released a blueprint on Monday that put the onus on states to implement testing and rapid response programs, despite pleas from New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and others for federal help. It said states were responsible for identifying, and overcoming barriers to, efficient testing.

The U.S. government’s role was to “act as supplier of last resort,” the blueprint said. It would provide guidelines for easing restrictions and administering diagnostic tests, while providing technical assistance on how to best use testing technologies and align supplies with anticipated lab needs.

U.S. Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from hard-hit Washington state, on Tuesday criticized the Republican Trump’s testing blueprint as “nothing new.”

“It doesn’t set specific, numeric goals, offer a timeframe, identify ways to fix our broken supply chain, or offer any details whatsoever on expanding lab capacity or activating needed manufacturing capacity,” she said in a statement.

“Perhaps most pathetically, it attempts to shirk obviously federal responsibilities by assigning them solely to states instead,” she said.

After crowds jammed beaches over the weekend in California, Governor Gavin Newsom said social-distancing enforcement would be stepped up.

Deborah Birx, response coordinator for the White House coronavirus task force, urged Americans on Monday to go on sheltering in place and maintain social distancing until authorities lift their orders.

“We’re beginning to understand more and more that there may be an inverse relationship for how severe the disease is and your age. So younger people could actually be infected and not know they are infected and unintentionally pass the virus on,” she told Fox News on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Susan Heavey in Washington, additional reporting by Peter Szekely in New York; Writing by Maria Caspani, Editing by Howard Goller)