Escape from New York (or Los Angeles, or Houston, or Wherever You Live That You Are Entirely Sick Of)
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you likely know by now that I live in Brooklyn, New York. It comprises the second most-densely populated county in the U.S., following only Manhattan. Because of the pandemic, there's almost nowhere indoors to spend time, and what little shared public outdoor space exists within walking (or even biking) distance tends to be crowded on any day that's not sweltering. Like the majority of New Yorkers, I do not have a yard or a balcony. And also like the majority of New Yorkers, there’s really nowhere else for me to go.
On the other hand, rich New Yorkers—and there are many of them—seem to have plenty of options. This past week, CNBC reported that the number of empty apartments for rent in Manhattan (the wealthiest of New York's boroughs) topped 13,000. That’s more than double the number compared to this time last year, and is a record high in the 14 years that data has been collected, according to Douglas Elliman and Miller Samuel, two prominent real estate agencies. As my colleague Suyin Hayes wrote this past week, it appears “some wealthy families have left Manhattan for good and plan to enroll their children in schools closer to their second homes in places like the Hamptons.” With the guidance of Euan Roger of the U.K.’s National Archives, she lays out a fascinating parallel with an epidemic long ago: when the plague hit England in the early 1500s, the wealthy—including the royal court—all left London for their country estates.
Believe it or not, wealth is more equally distributed now than in the 16th century—though increasingly less so. In the not-so-distant past, middle-class families likely had enough purchasing power and accumulated wealth to afford an annual vacation. Maybe not enough to buy a second house in the country or by the beach, but certainly enough to take a couple of weeks off and rent somewhere. But, as Pew Research Center found in a report earlier this year, the median wealth of American families in 2016 (the most recent year for which data are available) was $101,800—less than it was in 1998, accounting for inflation. A 2019 NerdWallet/Harris Poll survey found that the median checking account balance in the U.S. was $1,250—and that’s unlikely to have improved in the pandemic recession.
On the other hand, if you’ve been dreaming of getting away, you might have noticed that airlines are desperately trying to offload tickets. Unsurprisingly, air travel is down during the pandemic: about 66% year-over-year for August, based on the number of people who passed through Transportation Security Administration checkpoints. As my colleague Alex Fitzpatrick reported this week, you can fly domestic for relative pennies these days. And airlines have made a big deal about all that they’ve done to ensure individual passenger safety.
I, however, tend to trust the many epidemiologists who say they personally don’t feel comfortable taking the risk of flying right now. Further, as Alex makes clear in his reporting, just because I am relatively safe (assuming all the other passengers follow the rules, too), that doesn’t make flights safe for the country. Air travel is one of the primary reasons COVID-19 spread so far, so fast, and it’s irrational to believe that it won’t continue to act as a vector for the virus moving forward. I see not traveling by air as similar to wearing a face mask: it’s a bit about my safety, but mostly it’s about me wanting to do what I can to keep this thing from spreading.
That leaves the classic U.S. road trip. If you already have a car, great! If you don’t...well, Edmunds, the car-buying guide, reported earlier this month that used car prices are spiking. “This is an unprecedented historical shift in the used vehicle market, where listing prices typically decrease during this time period due to depreciation,” Edmunds said in a press release. So if you’ve been waiting on indecision, maybe it’s time to take the plunge before prices rise any higher. Or perhaps you should wait; the Hertz car rental company, which went bankrupt in May, may be about to flood the used market with 200,000 additional cars.
OVER THE WEEKEND
The U.S. government takes a big step in approving convalescent plasma as a treatment
As I was writing this, news broke that President Donald Trump is expected to announce later this evening that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will issue an emergency use authorization (EUA) for the use of convalescent blood plasma to treat COVID-19. By the time you read this, it may have already happened—the press conference is slated for 5:30 p.m. eastern time.
The convalescent plasma treatment involves transfusing blood from recovered COVID-19 patients into patients currently sickened by the virus. As my colleague Alice Park has previously reported, the idea is that people who have recovered have likely done so because their immune systems developed antibodies that fight off the virus that causes COVID-19; in theory, those antibodies could be transfused into current patients to improve their ability to battle infection. To date, trials have been promising, but limited.
The Trump Administration action comes just a week after officials at the National Institutes of Health stopped the FDA from issuing an EUA for the treatment, citing the need for more data, and, in particular, data from randomized controlled trials. Trump appears to be the guiding force behind the FDA's decision to go ahead anyway; on Saturday morning he tweeted, "The deep state, or whoever, over at the FDA is making it very difficult for drug companies to get people in order to test the vaccines and therapeutics. Obviously, they are hoping to delay the answer until after November 3rd. Must focus on speed, and saving lives!"
The world passed 800,000 deaths
Globally, the virus is not going away; daily new cases are not falling and may, in fact, be ticking upwards. Over the weekend, the global death count passed 800,000. That’s almost certainly a lowball estimate, too, as deaths lag behind infections (and as it seems likely that many COVID-19 deaths are not being counted as such for a range of reasons). While the U.S. has, for now, seemed to level off (although that might be smoke-and-mirrors, given that testing is also falling), other parts of the world are worsening.
Tragedy struck Peru
Peru currently is on one of the worst recent trajectories of any country. Its average cases per day peaked on Friday, and it has among the worst per capita rates for total infections in the world at 1,741 per 100,000 residents—just ahead of the U.S., which is at 1,720, and behind only Chile, San Marino, Bahrain and Qatar. And the problem doesn’t seem to be abating:
The rising cases and death toll there are already a tragedy, especially given that an early lockdown for a time made the country appear to be a bright spot in the Americas. But the despair was compounded Saturday night when 13 people died while trying to escape police raiding a nightclub in Lima for violating coronavirus restrictions, according to the Associated Press. Peru’s interior minister said that the fatalities occurred when club attendees—who were there for a birthday party—trampled each other while rushing a single exit.
India hit another awful milestone
India is another one of the more troubling hotspots at the moment. While the country’s per capita numbers are still nowhere near Peru’s (or the U.S’s for that matter), the number of daily cases there is growing steadily, and due to the sheer size of the Indian population, which makes for a startlingly rapid rise in overall cases numbers there. It took 169 days for India to go from its first reported case on Jan. 30 to its 1 millionth on July 16. It took only 21 more days to get to 2 million; and then just 16 days to get to 3 million:
As my colleagues Billy Perrigo and Neha Thirani Bagri reported earlier this week, the outbreak has had tremendous economic and political effects on India —as well as, of course, public health impacts. There are reasons to expect things will only get worse. Per-capita infections in India are currently about 220 per 100,000 residents; if they reach anywhere near the U.S.’s 1,720 per 100,000, we’d be looking at something like 23 million cases in India alone—the global total today. And, as Perrigo and Thirani Bagri report, the virus seems to be moving from cities, where there is relatively decent health infrastructure, to the rural parts of the country, where medical experts and facilities can be few and far between.
Germany put on a concert to study viral spread
On Saturday, about 1,500 healthy German volunteers between the ages of 18 and 50 went to see singer-songwriter Tim Bendzko put on a show at an arena in Leipzig—organized by scientists at University Hospital in Halle. Actually, it was three separate shows, and the concertgoers were divided into groups of three. At the first show, the audience wasn’t forced to do anything differently than they would have done pre-pandemic. At the second, they had to follow an “optimized hygiene concept and [maintain] significantly larger distances” from one another. In the third, half as many guests were allowed in as at the other shows, and everyone had to stand five feet apart.
The study, called Restart-19, will follow the participants to see if the virus was more likely to spread in any of the three scenarios. Germany, like many western European countries, is currently facing an uptick in daily cases, though it hasn’t come close to the peaks it saw in the spring.
In the U.S., climate threats compound pandemic worries
In Northern California, wildfires continued to rage over the weekend, forcing some 100,000 people to evacuate their homes, according to the Associated Press. As of writing this afternoon, the three largest fire “complexes” (as the groupings are called) have burned some 1,170 square miles.
Meanwhile, two tropical storms are advancing towards the U.S. Gulf Coast. As with all offshore storms, it is hard to predict when they will hit land or how hard, but current projections suggest they will make landfall early this week in Texas or Louisiana, and at or close to hurricane force. Colorado State University hurricane researcher Phil Klotzbach told the AP that, based on records going back to 1900, two hurricanes have never appeared in the Gulf of Mexico at the same time.
Beyond the psychological distress caused by encountering a new life-threatening disaster while in the midst of another, each of these situations could compound the physical threats posed by COVID-19. In the case of the wildfires, firefighters have no choice but to gather in small camps as they do their work; there are protocols in place to reduce the risk that they spread COVID-19, but there’s little way to ensure complete protection. And with reports that the region is “drastically short” of firefighters, and further loss to these essential, skilled personnel could make it even harder to get these fires under control.
As for the Gulf Coast storms, depending on how their trajectories change, they could force local officials’ hands into calling for mandatory evacuations of heavily populated areas. As of this writing, only a few smaller areas have been evacuated, but New Orleans and Lake Pontchartrain are currently on a hurricane watch, according to CNN. Both Texas and Louisiana have seen significant improvement in coronavirus trends over the past few weeks, but if thousands of residents are suddenly forced to find shelter with one another—especially if that ends up being in large, public indoor facilities—that would up the risk for viral spread dramatically.
All numbers unless otherwise specified are from the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering, and are accurate as of August 23, 1 AM eastern time. To see larger, interactive versions of these maps and charts, click here.
Q&A
The Chancellor of the Nation’s Largest HBCU on Reopening During the Pandemic
TIME Deputy Editor Eben Shapiro interviewed Chancellor Harold L. Martin of North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University for this week’s Leadership Briefnewsletter. This is a short excerpt; read the rest here.
TIME: Students are back at campus. Despite all the safety precautions, I know recently you’ve felt “guarded reluctance” and have made the case against opening. What is your current feeling?
Martin: Guarded but comfortable.
Can you tick off some of the things you are doing to keep your students and the university community healthy and safe?
All of our students who are returning to the campus have been checked for symptoms as they move into the residence hall. We obviously are requiring masking. Safe social distancing. We have a high intensity cleansing protocol on a daily basis and a daily morning ritual of self-assessment, of all students who are living in residence halls. And each of our classrooms was reduced to about 30% occupancy.
How are you accommodating faculty and staff that are reluctant to come back to a classroom setting?
They can apply to telework. We’ve been very generous in providing those employees the opportunity to tele-work. About 60% of our faculty will be tele-working this fall. We’ve ordered a million masks. And then we’ve ordered somewhere around 30 to 40,000 branded cloth masks. All students, faculty and staff will get at least two of those.
What’s been the initial reaction from the student body to the health protocols, including canceling your historic homecoming, which has been dubbed the greatest homecoming on earth?
Our students are responding overall. They are 18, 19, 20 year olds, though, and so we have to continue to remind them of the expectations, quite honestly.
Thanks for reading. We hope you find the Coronavirus Brief newsletter to be a helpful tool to navigate this very complex situation, and welcome feedback at coronavirus.brief@time.com.
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Today's newsletter was written by Elijah Wolfson and edited by Chris Wilson.
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