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Tag Archives: plummets
It’s not just the office people don’t want to go to: COVID looks to have permanently severed something as school attendance plummets and keeps dropping – Fortune
- It’s not just the office people don’t want to go to: COVID looks to have permanently severed something as school attendance plummets and keeps dropping Fortune
- Number of chronically absent students has doubled in North Carolina since the COVID-19 pandemic ABC11
- Millions of kids missing weeks of school as attendance tanks in U.S. Honolulu Star-Advertiser
- Millions of kids missing weeks of school as attendance tanks across the US New York Post
- California sees huge post-COVID jump in chronically absent students San Francisco Chronicle
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Tesla Stock Plummets After Elon Musk Bans Journalists From Twitter – Rolling Stone
Elon Musk’s flagship company Tesla’s stock hit a new two-year low of $150.04 on Friday morning, prompting renewed concerns that the billionaire’s recent acquisition and chaotic management of Twitter is crumbling the bedrock of his financial empire.
The stock dive took place the morning after Musk booted several prominent journalists from the platform, and after Musk spent the better part of this week offloading more than 22 million shares of Tesla stock, worth over $3.5 billion. Musk has now sold almost $40 billion worth of the electric vehicle company’s stock in the last year.
Musk’s tumultuous takeover of Twitter, a deal which was announced in April and finalized in October, has coincided with a truly abysmal year for technology markets. But Tesla has been underperforming NASDAQ’s Technology Sector Index (NDXT) by more than 20 points. As of Friday, the company is down 57.12 percent year to date compared to the NDXT being down 35.53 percent. The value of the company has plummeted from over $1 trillion at the beginning of the year, to less than $500 billion, and has cost Musk his title of “world’s richest man” in the process.
Friday’s plunge came after Musk suspended New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, Mashable’s Matt Binder, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, independent reporter Aaron Rupar, political commentator Keith Olbermann, and freelance journalist Tony Webster from Twitter. Most had voiced criticism of Musk’s content moderation decisions. Earlier this week, Musk impulsively rewrote Twitter’s content policies to deem any posts including the real-time location data a bannable offense. The platform-wide policy shift appears to have been retroactively created to justify the platform removing the accounts of Jack Sweeney, who tracked the movements of aircraft and private jets through publicly available aviation data. Musk accused journalists covering Sweeney’s ban of posting “my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service.” Rolling Stone has not identified any instances of the journalists posting direct coordinates to Musk’s location.
Throughout the week, investors have called on Musk to find someone else to run Twitter’s day- to-day operations, and shift his focus back to Tesla. On Wednesday, the EV company’s third-largest investor Leo KoGuan, tweeted that Musk had “abandoned Tesla” and that the company “has no working CEO.” Following the platform’s journalistic purge, investor Joe Cirincion tweeted a call for Musk to leave Twitter, accusing him of “killing the company with his antics.”
The company itself has admitted that they are “highly dependent on the services of Elon Musk, Technoking of Tesla and our Chief Executive Officer,” to manage the company. If investors have taken notice, so have major financial institutions. Goldman Sachs cut its price targets for Tesla earlier this week, citing the increasingly “polarizing” nature of Tesla’s branding given Musk’s involvement at Twitter, and recommended the company shift back to it’s “core attributes of sustainability and technology.”
Musk is also facing the threat of sanctions abroad. European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova on Friday accused the company of having violated the E.U.’s Digital Services Act and the Media Freedom Act through its “arbitrary suspension of journalists.”
“There are red lines,” she tweeted. “And sanctions, soon.”
British pound plummets to record low against the dollar
CNN Business
—
The British pound fell to a new record low against the US dollar of $1.035 on Monday, plummeting more than 4%.
The slide came as trading opened in Asia and Australia on Monday, extending a 2.6% dive from Friday — and spurring predictions the pound could plunge to parity with the US dollar in the coming months.
The unprecedented currency slump follows British Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s announcement on Friday that the United Kingdom would impose the biggest tax cuts in 50 years at the same time as boosting spending.
The new tax-slashing fiscal measures, which include scrapping plans for rising corporation tax and slashing the cap on bankers’ bonuses, have been criticized as “trickle-down economics” by the opposition Labour party and even lambasted by members of the Chancellor’s own Conservative party.
Former Tory chancellor Lord Ken Clarke criticized the tax cuts on Sunday, saying it could lead to the collapse of the pound.
“I’m afraid that’s the kind of thing that’s usually tried in Latin American countries without success,” Clarke said in an interview with BBC radio.
The pound has been hammered by a string of weak economic data, but also the steep ascent of the US dollar, a safe haven investment that sees inflows in times of uncertainty.
The euro also hit a 20-year low of 0.964 per dollar.
But the economic outlook in the UK means the pound is suffering more than most, in the face of a disastrous energy crunch and the highest inflation among G7 nations.
The previous record low for the British pound against the US dollar was 37 years ago on February 25, 1985, when 1 pound was worth $1.054.
“Should there be any escalation to the war in Ukraine…we would see further sharp downside in the Pound as well as the Euro,” said Clifford Bennett, chief economist at ACY Securities, an Australian brokerage firm.
“One should not underestimate the crisis that is all of Europe at the moment and the Pound is more vulnerable than most,” he said.
The soaring US dollar also sent major Asian currencies tumbling on Monday.
China’s yuan slid 0.5% on the onshore market to the lowest level in more than 28 months. The offshore yuan fell 0.4%.
The rapid declines prompted the People’s Bank of China to impose a risk reserve requirement of 20% on banks’ foreign exchange forward sales to clients, starting Wednesday. The move would make it more costly for traders to buy foreign currencies via derivatives, which might slow the pace of the yuan’s declines.
Elsewhere in the region, the Japanese yen dropped 0.6% against the dollar to 144. Last Thursday, the Japanese central bank intervened in the currency market for the first time since 1998 to prop up the yen. The yen rebounded slightly following the intervention, but soon resumed the slide.
The Korean won also plunged 1.6% on Monday versus the greenback, falling below the 1,420 level for the first time since 2009.
Stock markets in the region were in a turmoil on Monday, after US stocks sold off on Friday as recession fears grow.
South Korea’s Kospi declined 2.7%, Japan’s Nikkei 225
(N225) dropped 2.4%, and Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 was down 1.4%. China’s Shanghai Composite Index dipped 0.1%.
“Risk sentiments have been dealt a major blow by the Fed’s latest policy action and guidance,” said DBS analysts in a research report on Monday.
The Federal Reserve on Wednesday approved a third consecutive 75-basis-point hike in an aggressive move to tackle white-hot inflation that has been plaguing the US economy.
Even without the Fed action, Europe is looking at a recession due to the war in Ukraine, and China is looking at “a substantially weak growth dynamic” because of a variety of domestic factors, the DBS analysts said.
“Add on top of that a sharp decline in US dollar liquidity and sharply higher US interest rates, the world economic outlook looks particularly precarious,” they added.
College football rankings: Georgia takes over No. 1 spot from Alabama, Notre Dame plummets in CBS Sports 131
The schedule in Week 2 almost always looks less exciting going in than the results we see on the field, and this year was no different as three top-10 teams all lost on the same day and the presumed best team in the country was taken to the wire on the road as a 20-point favorite. But now that all the dust has settled, the picture at the top looks clearer than ever — and that picture paints the Georgia Bulldogs as the best team in the country.
Georgia took over the No. 1 spot from Alabama in the latest edition of the CBS Sports 131, a comprehensive ranking of every FBS team. Our voters, a group compiled of college football experts from CBS Sports and 247Sports, moved Georgia ahead of Ohio State for No. 2 after the Bulldogs’ impressive season-opening win against Oregon. After the Crimson Tide escaped with a 20-19 win against Texas on Saturday, Georgia’s journey to No. 1 was complete as the Bulldogs are the unanimous No. 1 team entering Week 3.
The reaction to Alabama’s near-upset at the hands of the Longhorns nearly cost them two spots in the rankings; a razor thin margin separates the Crimson Tide from Ohio State at No. 3. Michigan and Oklahoma are the next teams up at No. 4 and No. 5, respectively, with USC making a move up four spots to No. 6 after its impressive win at Stanford.
Kentucky made one of the bigger moves within the top 25, jumping 13 spots to No. 10 after the road win at Florida. Notable moves down included massive falls for Notre Dame (from No. 8 to No. 40) and Texas A&M (from No. 7 to No. 33), but of course those upsets also have positive results in the rankings for Marshall (up 39 spots to No. 32) and Appalachian state (up 19 spots to No. 25). For more on the biggest week-to-week adjustments in the CBS Sports 131 this week, check out the Mover’s Report below the top 25 table.
College football experts from CBS Sports and 247Sports contribute ballots each week, which are averaged together for our rankings. You can see the top 25 below and 26-127 on our rankings page.
| 1 | Georgia | 2-0 | 2 |
| 2 | Alabama | 2-0 | 1 |
| 3 | Ohio State | 2-0 | 3 |
| 4 | Michigan | 2-0 | 4 |
| 5 | Oklahoma | 2-0 | 5 |
| 6 | USC | 2-0 | 10 |
| 7 | Clemson | 2-0 | 6 |
| 8 | BYU | 2-0 | 21 |
| 9 | Arkansas | 2-0 | 12 |
| 10 | Kentucky | 2-0 | 23 |
| 11 | Oklahoma State | 2-0 | 16 |
| 12 | Tennessee | 2-0 | 22 |
| 13 | Miami | 2-0 | 15 |
| 14 | Michigan State | 2-0 | 19 |
| 15 | Penn State | 2-0 | 18 |
| 16 | NC State | 2-0 | 17 |
| 17 | Utah | 1-1 | 13 |
| 18 | Baylor | 1-1 | 9 |
| 19 | Ole Miss | 2-0 | 27 |
| 20 | Florida | 1-1 | 11 |
| 21 | Wake Forest | 2-0 | 26 |
| 22 | Texas | 1-1 | 28 |
| 23 | Mississippi State | 2-0 | 32 |
| 24 | Cincinnati | 1-1 | 25 |
| 25 | Appalachian State | 1-1 | 44 |
Biggest movers
- No. 32 Marshall (+39): Charles Huff has led the Thundering Herd into the program’s Sun Belt era with a bang, declaring Marshall’s plans to be among the best teams in the league with an upset win at Notre Dame.
- No. 29 Washington State (+33): The Cougars went into Wisconsin’s house and beat the Badgers in their own style of game. Now 2-0 with a huge road win on the profile, Washington State becomes a fascinating addition to the top of the Pac-12.
- No. 25 Appalachian State (+19): It’s a strange profile to rank with a 63-61 home loss to North Carolina and a 17-14 upset win on the road at Texas A&M. What’s for certain, however, is that this team does not belong outside of the top 30 after showcasing its ability to compete against Power Five competition in both a high-scoring shootout and a low-scoring defensive battle.
- No. 8 BYU (+13): Down its top two receivers, BYU quarterback Jaren Hall found a way to make enough plays to lead the Cougars to a 26-20 win in double-overtime against Baylor. Up next is a great challenge for BYU’s newly minted status as one of the top teams in the country, traveling to Eugene for a road test against Oregon.
- No. 10 Kentucky (+13): The Wildcats defense had all of the answers for Anthony Richardson and made its claim as the second-best team in the SEC East with a hard-fought road win at Florida.
- No. 37 Wisconsin (-23): Preseason rankings of Wisconsin were based on the belief that this would be another year of consistency from the Badgers. But with a home loss to Washington State and no FBS wins to their name, it’s tough to say “consistency” is enough to rank Wisconsin as a top-30 team in mid-September.
- No. 33 Texas A&M (-26): Through two games, there’s very little to get excited about for Texas A&M, a team that’s still loaded with talent and fielding a defense that’s going to allow the Aggies to remain competitive even against the toughest SEC foes. But until the offense starts to find its rhythm, it’s going to be very difficult to consider Texas A&M a serious threat to win its division.
- No. 40 Notre Dame (-32): An 0-2 start and a banged-up quarterback has left Notre Dame in a difficult position staring down the remainder of a schedule that includes three teams currently ranked in the top 10 of the CBS Sports 131 — USC, Clemson and BYU.
Check out the rest of the CBS Sports 131: Teams ranked 26-131
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Steep water cuts loom as Colorado River shrinks and Lake Mead level plummets
Two major announcements could come Tuesday. The first is a forecast from the US Bureau of Reclamation that could trigger the first-ever Tier 2 water shortage for the Lower Colorado River Basin. The second is the bureau’s next step in its a demand that the seven states in the river basin come up with a way to voluntarily cut up to 25% of their water usage, or the federal government will do it for them.
It was just a year ago that the Department of Interior declared the first shortage on the Colorado River — a Tier 1. But the past 12 months did not bring enough rain and snow. A report from July shows Lake Mead, which the agency uses to determine shortage conditions, is hovering around 1,040 feet above sea level, after having dropped 10 feet in just two, dry months.
Tuesday’s report is all but certain to show Lake Mead will be below 1,050 feet come January — the threshold required to declare a Tier 2 shortage beginning in 2023. The question is how far below that threshold it will be. If the forecast is below 1,045 feet, which recent forecasts would suggest it will be, then mandatory water cuts will expand beyond Arizona, Nevada and Mexico and into California for the first time.
But the growing concern is that the mandatory cuts — a system that was updated as recently as 2019 — aren’t enough to save the river in the face of a historic, climate change-driven drought. States, water managers and tribes are now back at the negotiating table to figure out how to solve the West’s water crisis.
“We thought we were good, but the last few years have been so dry that we realized those tier reductions weren’t enough and aren’t enough,” Bill Hasencamp, the Colorado River resources manager with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, told CNN. “So the two things we’re focused on is how do we get through the next three years without the system crashing, and then how do we develop a long term plan to sustain the Colorado River.”
‘There’s only so much water’
The Colorado River’s water was divvied up among seven states in the West a century ago. The pact gave half of the river’s water to the Upper Basin states (Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico) and half to the Lower Basin (California, Arizona and Nevada). Mexico — through which the river flows before it reaches the Gulf of California — was also guaranteed an allotment.
There was one major problem: Having been written in the 1920s, at a time when precipitation was higher than normal, the pact overestimated how much water the Colorado River carries. It also did not account for the West’s booming population growth and its hotter and drier future in the face of the climate crisis.
At a June Senate hearing, Bureau of Reclamation chief Camille Touton laid out a stark warning. In order to stabilize the Colorado River Basin, states and water districts must come up with a plan by August 15 to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet of water usage by next year. (An acre-foot is the amount of water that would fill one acre a foot deep — roughly 326,000 gallons.)
Touton’s proposed cut is a massive amount — the high end of the target is about 25% less water than states currently receive. And the low end of the target represents the vast majority of Arizona’s yearly allotment of Colorado River water.
Touton also made clear in June that if the states cannot come up with a plan, the federal government will act.
“It is in our authorities to act unilaterally to protect the system, and we will protect the system,” she said at the time. “We need to see the work. We need to see the action. Let’s get to the table and let’s figure this out by August.”
But inter-state negotiations are not going well.
John Entsminger, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, told CNN that so far not enough of the stakeholders have put forth proposals that would get the basin to Touton’s target. He said he hopes the federal government proposes “some pretty strong measures” that could be acted on immediately.
“Frankly, I’m frustrated because the overwhelming sense I’ve gotten from the negotiations is there aren’t enough people taking this seriously enough and understanding this is about adapting to less water in this river,” Entsminger said.
Nevada has already moved to cut its metropolitan water usage, banning non-functional turf and paying people for years to remove water-intensive lawns, Entsminger said. But agriculture, which takes up a lot of the water from the river, must be part of the equation as well.
“You have to have a contribution from the sector that uses 80% of the water,” he said. “That’s not law, politics, it’s just math.”
Entsminger said other stakeholders that are hesitant to give up their water allotments need to accept a new reality: The river is running dry, and sacrifices must be made.
“It doesn’t matter what can be agreed to because there’s only so much water, and mother nature will figure this out at some point,” he said. “At some point, there’s just not water in the river channel.”
The federal government has not often stepped in and taken control of water management plans from the states, but it has the authority to do so in the Lower Colorado River Basin — which includes Arizona, southern Nevada and southern California. And experts told CNN the threat of federal action is something states will respond to.
“We kind of need the federal government to make some threats to spur action,” John Fleck, a Western water expert and professor at the University of New Mexico, told CNN earlier this year. “Progress seems to happen when the federal government comes in and says to states, you need to do this or we’re going to do something you don’t like.”
Bitcoin Plummets Below $20,000 for First Time Since November 2020
Square, another payments company, bought $50 million of Bitcoin and changed its name to Block, in part to signify its work with blockchain technology. Tesla bought $1.5 billion of it. The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz raised $4.5 billion for a fourth cryptocurrency-focused fund, doubling its previous one.
Excitement hit a peak in April last year when Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, went public at an $85 billion valuation, a coming-out party for the industry. Bitcoin topped $60,000 for the first time.
Last summer, El Salvador announced that it would become the first country to classify Bitcoin as legal tender, alongside the U.S. dollar. The country’s president updated his Twitter profile picture to include laser eyes, a calling card of Bitcoin believers. The value of El Salvador’s $105 million investment in Bitcoin has been slashed in half as the price has fallen.
Senators and mayors around the United States began touting cryptocurrency, as the industry spent heavily on lobbying. Mayor Eric Adams of New York, who was elected in November, said he would take his first three paychecks in Bitcoin. Senators Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, and Kirsten Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, proposed legislation that would create a regulatory framework for the industry, giving more authority to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency that crypto companies have openly courted.
Through the frenzy, celebrities fueled the fear of missing out, flogging their NFTs on talk shows and talking up blockchain projects on social media. This year, the Super Bowl featured four ads for crypto companies, including Matt Damon warning viewers that “fortune favors the brave.”
That swaggering optimism faltered this spring as the stock market plummeted, inflation soared and layoffs hit the tech sector. Investors began losing confidence in their crypto investments, moving money to less risky assets. Several high-profile projects crashed amid withdrawals. TerraForm Labs, which created TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin, and Celsius, an experimental crypto bank, both collapsed, wiping out billions in value and sending the broader market into a tailspin.
New Terra Luna 2.0 Crypto Coin Launches, Immediately Plummets
After an epic collapse that wiped out tens of billions of dollars in investments, the Luna cryptocurrency project is back in a new form. Luna 2.0 officially launched on Saturday and immediately sank like a lead ballon—its value dropping more than 70 percent—according to CoinMarketCap. So what is this digital Hindenburg? LUNA is a token affiliated with the Terra blockchain, which has been regarded for its so-called “stablecoin” offerings: cryptocurrencies whose assets are intended to be less volatile by pegging their value to the U.S. dollar or other assets. All that fell apart last week at Terra, and Luna’s value quickly tanked to almost zero. Holders of the old version of Luna were supposedly sent new versions of the coin in advance of the relaunch, but numerous commenters on the company’s Twitter page complained otherwise. Our best wishes to the #LUNAtic community.
Read it at Watcher News
China’s economic activity plummets as Covid lockdowns hit growth
China’s economic activity contracted sharply in April as a wave of lockdowns across the country posed the most significant challenge to its growth prospects since Covid-19 emerged over two years ago.
Retail sales, the country’s main gauge of consumer activity which had already entered contraction in March, slumped 11.1 per cent year on year, compared with forecasts of a 6.6 per cent fall from economists polled by Bloomberg.
Industrial production, which underpinned China’s rapid economic recovery from the initial Covid shock in early 2020 and was expected to rise slightly despite the recent restrictions, dropped 2.9 per cent.
The data are the most striking sign of the rising economic toll from China’s approach to coronavirus, which it has sought to quash through citywide lockdowns, mass testing and quarantine centres. The elimination of infections is a priority for President Xi Jinping ahead of his bid for a third term in power this year.
The zero-Covid strategy had largely contained the virus over the past two years but authorities have escalated their implementation of the strategy dramatically in 2022 following an outbreak of the highly infectious Omicron variant, mainly centred around Shanghai, which was locked down in late March.
Dozens of cities and hundreds of millions of people across China have been placed under full or partial lockdowns as part of a policy that is expected to have deep ramifications for global supply chains.
China’s economy was already been under pressure from a liquidity crisis across its highly leveraged real estate developers and a wider property slowdown as home sales collapsed.
Over the weekend, the government effectively cut mortgage base rates for new lending to first-time buyers from 4.6 per cent to 4.4 per cent, the latest in a series of easing measures intended to support one of the country’s most important economic drivers.
“The government faces mounting pressure to launch new stimulus to stabilise the economy,” said Zhiwei Zhang, chief economist at Pinpoint Asset Management, adding that the mortgage rate cut was “one step in that direction”.
But “the effectiveness of these policies depends on how the government will ‘fine-tune’ the zero-tolerance policy against the Omicron crisis”, he said.
Asia markets reversed early gains on Monday to trade lower following the data release. China’s CSI 300 of Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed stocks opened 0.7 higher but fell 0.8 per cent after the data release, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 1.1 per cent before dropping 0.4 per cent.
Last week, authorities said citizens would not be able to leave the country for “non-essential” reasons and introduced more severe measures in Shanghai almost seven weeks after a citywide lockdown was introduced. A city official said on Monday that authorities aimed to broadly reopen Shanghai from June 1.
China’s gross domestic product rose 4.8 per cent year on year in the first quarter. The government has targeted growth of 5.5 per cent for the year, its lowest official target in three decades. Economists have already slashed growth forecasts for the second quarter.
Analysts at Australian bank ANZ maintained a 5 per cent growth target for 2022 on the basis that stimulus will “offset the loss of economic activity in the past two months”. But they were “pessimistic about China’s medium-term outlook” given expectations that supportive measures will be unwound next year.
“The impact of Shanghai’s lockdown is far-reaching,” they wrote. “Economic and technological linkage with the rest of the world is at risk”.
The surveyed unemployment rate was 6.1 per cent in April, its highest level since February 2020.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Creery in Hong Kong
Attendance plummets at LA covid vaccination events
Nurse Angel Ho-king sways her head to the sound of salsa music as she waits for people willing to roll up their sleeves to get a shot. Ho-king is part of a four-person crew staffing a covid-19 vaccine table at a health fair in Rampart Village, a predominantly immigrant neighborhood about 10 minutes from Dodger Stadium.
In three hours on a recent Saturday, Ho-king and Brenda Rodriguez, a medical assistant, vaccinated 16 people — far fewer than they had anticipated. Nearly everyone who showed up at the fair, organized by Saban Community Clinic, was an adult seeking a booster shot or a young child getting a first dose (children ages 5 to 11 became eligible for a vaccine late last year).
As covid infections have declined so too has interest in covid vaccines — even though the shots are highly effective at preventing serious illness and death from the virus.
In California’s most-populous county, where more than 1.7 million people have not received even one dose, vaccination events have turned desolate. About 46,000 county residents got their first dose in March, a 79% decline from January, according to the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health.
Those who remain unvaccinated are harder to convince, telling health care workers and vaccination coordinators that they don’t feel a sense of urgency.
According to a January survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, about 1 in 10 California adults said they definitely won’t get vaccinated, which has remained consistent since January 2021, and 86% of unvaccinated adults said the omicron variant wasn’t enough to persuade them. Employers and businesses are dropping or rolling back vaccination mandates. And although proof of vaccination once offered perks like allowing people to go maskless indoors, face coverings are generally no longer required in California.
At a recent vaccination drive coordinated by an immigrant advocacy group in Palmdale, near Lancaster in northern LA County, only two people showed up over four hours, both for second doses. As of April 1, 25% of Palmdale residents ages 5 and up were unvaccinated, compared with 17% of county residents, according to county data.
Jorge Perez, Salva Organization’s vaccine coordinator, spent a week promoting the event with his team, going door to door, visiting local businesses, and publicizing it on social media. At previous vaccine drives, “we got 42 people, then 20, then four,” said a disappointed Perez. “Now two.”
Perez reduced the number of staffers at vaccination events from five to two in February as the numbers started to dwindle.
Much work remains to be done to combat vaccine misinformation, especially given the spread of BA.2, an omicron subvariant that is highly transmissible, said Dr. Richard Seidman, chief medical officer for L.A. Care, a public Medicaid insurance plan that serves county residents. The number of covid cases and hospitalizations had been declining since February, but the county is again seeing a bump in cases, according to data released this week.
People have various reasons for remaining unvaccinated, Seidman said. “For some, it’s distrust of the government or health care providers in general,” he said. “Some are more cautious and want to take a wait-and-see approach. Others simply don’t believe the science.”
A study published April 11 by JAMA Internal Medicine shows just how entrenched views are. Many people who refused to get vaccinated early on said they were waiting for the shots to get full approval from the FDA. But when the agency’s first full approval of a covid vaccine came in August 2021, the study concluded, it did little to change people’s minds and “had little immediate impact on vaccination intentions.”
In California, unvaccinated people were nearly 14 times as likely to die from covid as people who had been fully vaccinated and received a booster dose, according to state data from March 7-13.
Perez said people getting their first shots now are doing so mainly because they feel obligated — to meet a work requirement, for example, or enter places such as restaurants, bars, and gyms that require proof of vaccination.
That was the case for Modesto Araizas, one of the two people who showed up at the Palmdale vaccine event. Despite contracting covid twice, missing work, and having a hard time breathing, he didn’t get vaccinated until he needed proof of vaccination to eat at his favorite seafood restaurant.
“I haven’t been scared,” said Araizas, 46. “I take vitamins, eat healthy food, and I work out.”
Until recently, the federal government reimbursed doctors, hospitals, and other providers for tests, treatments, and vaccines for uninsured people. But the Health Resources and Services Administration stopped accepting reimbursement claims for tests and treatments March 22, and for vaccinations April 5.
Many uninsured people now will likely need to pay out-of-pocket for tests and other services.
Perez is hoping people might become more open to vaccines if covid tests become too expensive for them. No one will want to keep paying for tests when they can just get a shot, he reasoned.
Nurse Roxanna Segovia works at a pop-up vaccine and testing clinic in front of South LA Cafe in South Central LA. She recently spent 45 minutes trying to persuade a man who had visited the clinic regularly for free tests to get vaccinated.
“He gave me all the reasons he has not been vaccinated, like his civil rights were being violated and Bible verses,” Segovia said. “His job requires it now, and he said he was losing money by missing work waiting for test results. If he continued this way, he wouldn’t be able to feed his family, but even so, he still wasn’t sure if he was making the right choice.”
At the end of their conversation, he got the shot.
This story was produced by KHN, which publishes California Healthline, an editorially independent service of the California Health Care Foundation.
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This article was reprinted from khn.org with permission from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. Kaiser Health News, an editorially independent news service, is a program of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonpartisan health care policy research organization unaffiliated with Kaiser Permanente. |