an outspoken and influential fund manager who was chief investment officer of Guggenheim Partners, died Wednesday of a heart attack.
Mr. Minerd, 63 years old and a committed weightlifter known to bench press more than 400 pounds, died during his daily workout, the firm said.
Mr. Minerd joined Guggenheim shortly after the firm was founded in 1998.
Guggenheim Chief Executive
Mark Walter
credited him with designing the organization, systems and procedures that helped Guggenheim rise from a startup to a manager of more than $218 billion in total assets and 900 employees.
Mr. Minerd served as the public face of Guggenheim. In that role, he was among Wall Street’s more prominent personalities, making frequent appearances on television and maintaining an active presence on social media to discuss markets and investments, often in blunt terms.
“That sound you hear is the Fed breaking something,” he wrote in October in a message to clients, warning that the central bank’s campaign to raise interest rates was causing dislocations in fixed-income and foreign-exchange markets.
Mr. Minerd was a member of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Investor Advisory Committee on Financial Markets and an adviser to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Mr. Minerd is survived by his husband Eloy Mendez.
“As an asset manager, I’ve come to view conventional wisdom as the surest path to investment underperformance,” Mr. Minerd wrote in a biographical summary.
Mr. Minerd grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied economics at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He also took courses at the University of Chicago and described himself as a monetarist.
He worked as a dealer in currencies, bonds and structured securities at Merrill Lynch,
Morgan Stanley
and CS First Boston in the 1980s and 1990s.
At age 37, feeling burned out, he left Wall Street and moved to Los Angeles. “I walked away from extremely large offers on Wall Street,” he told Bloomberg in 2017. “I realized this wasn’t a dress rehearsal for life, this was it.” After joining what became Guggenheim Partners, he worked in a Santa Monica, Calif., office overlooking the ocean.
Newsletter Sign-up
What’s News
Catch up on the headlines, understand the news and make better decisions, free in your inbox every day.
Mr. Minerd was a conservative willing to embrace some ideas from the left and seek middle ground.
In a 2020 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he took aim at elite universities, including the University of Pennsylvania. “These schools have huge endowments, and why are they not focusing their endowment on advancing a cause of essentially free education or at least education that provides complete support for people below certain income levels?” he asked. Mr. Minerd said he wouldn’t make donations going to “bricks and mortar and making the place look better when people who would be qualified to come there can’t afford to do it. And, of course, if we had more equal access to education, it would help address some of the issues around race and poverty.”
Referring to his bulky bodybuilder’s physique, he once told a Wall Street Journal reporter that when people asked about “key man” risk at Guggenheim and wondered what would happen if Mr. Minerd was hit by a truck, his staff members would respond, “Do you mean what would happen to the truck?”
One of his favorite charities was Union Rescue Mission, which provides food, shelter, training and other services to homeless people in Los Angeles County.
Andy Bales,
chief executive of Union Rescue Mission, recalled meeting Mr. Minerd around 2008, when the mission was in poor financial shape and in danger of having to sell one of its sites. “He told me that God was tapping him on the shoulder, telling him to do more for others,” the Rev. Bales said. Mr. Minerd ended up donating more than $5 million to the mission to allow it to expand services.
Mr. Minerd was often seen with a rescue dog he called Grace, who accompanied him to the office and on trips.
His work schedule was punishing. “He was up early for East Coast customers and went late for his West Coast customers,” the Rev. Bales said.
Write to Charley Grant at charles.grant@wsj.com and James R. Hagerty at bob.hagerty@wsj.com
President Joe Biden announces a federal student loan relief plan that includes forgiving up to $20,000 for some borrowers and extending the payment freeze at the White House on Aug. 24.
Photo:
Bonnie Cash – Pool via CNP/Zuma Press
Well, he did it. Waving his baronial wand, President Biden on Wednesday canceled student debt for some 40 million borrowers on no authority but his own. This is easily the worst domestic decision of his Presidency and makes chumps of Congress and every American who repaid loans or didn’t go to college.
The President who never says no to the left did their bidding again with this act of executive law-making, er, breaking. The government will cancel $10,000 for borrowers making less than $125,000 a year and $20,000 for those who received Pell grants. The Administration estimates that about 27 million will be eligible for up to $20,000 in forgiveness, and some 20 million will see their balances erased.
But there’s much more. Mr. Biden is also extending loan forbearance for another four months even as unemployment among college grads is at a near record low 2%. Congress’s Cares Act deferred payments and waived interest through September 2020, but
Donald Trump
and Joe Biden have extended the pause for what will now be nearly three years.
The Administration is claiming, again, that this will be the last extension and is needed to help borrowers prepare to resume payments. But even if the Administration lets the forbearance end in December, about half of borrowers won’t have to make payments since their debt will be canceled.
Most of the rest will only make de minimis payments because Mr. Biden is also sweetening the income-based repayment plans that Barack
Obama
expanded by fiat. Borrowers currently pay only up to 10% of discretionary income each month and can discharge their remaining debt after 20 years (10 if they work in “public service”).
Democrats said these plans would reduce defaults. They haven’t. Federal student debt has ballooned because many borrowers don’t make enough to cover interest and principal payments, so their balances expand. Student debt has nearly doubled since 2011 to $1.6 trillion, though the number of borrowers has increased by only 18%.
Now Mr. Biden is cutting undergrad payments to a mere 5% of discretionary income. The government will also cover unpaid monthly interest for borrowers so their balances won’t grow even if they aren’t paying a penny. This will mask the cost to taxpayers of the Administration’s rolling loan write-off. Student-loan debt won’t appear to swell even as it does. What a fabulous accounting trick.
The Penn Wharton Budget Model estimates that canceling $10,000 for borrowers earning up to $125,000 will cost about $300 billion. The Pell grant addition could increase this by as much as $270 billion. The four-month freeze on payments will cost $20 billion on top of the roughly $115 billion it already has.
The payment plan revisions could eventually add hundreds of billions of dollars more. An analysis commissioned by the Trump Education Department estimated that taxpayers would lose $435 billion on federal student loans, largely because borrowers in these payment plans on average were expected to repay only half of their balances. Now they will repay even less.
Worse than the cost is the moral hazard and awful precedent this sets. Those who will pay for this write-off are the tens of millions of Americans who didn’t go to college, or repaid their debt, or skimped and saved to pay for college, or chose lower-cost schools to avoid a debt trap. This is a college graduate bailout paid for by plumbers and
FedEx
drivers.
Colleges will also capitalize by raising tuition to capture the write-off windfall. A White House fact sheet hilariously says that colleges will “have an obligation to keep prices reasonable and ensure borrowers get value for their investments, not debt they cannot afford.” Only a fool could believe colleges will do this.
***
It’s important to appreciate that there has never been an executive action of this costly magnitude in peacetime. Not Mr. Obama’s immigration amnesties, not his Clean Power Plan, not Mr. Trump’s border-wall fund diversion. Nothing comes close to this half-trillion-dollar or more executive coup.
Congress authorized none of Mr. Biden’s loan relief and appropriated no funds for it. Progressives say the Higher Education Act of 1965 lets the Education Secretary “compromise” (i.e., modify) student debt. But the Federal Claims Collection Act of 1966 sets very limited terms and strict procedures for such “compromise.”
Even Mr. Biden said in December 2020 it was “pretty questionable” whether he had authority to cancel debt this way. The Supreme Court recently underscored in West Virginia v. EPAthat Congress must provide clear authorization to agencies taking action on major questions. Canceling so much debt is beyond major to a mega-ultra-super question.
With the cancellation precedent, progressives will return to this vote-buying exercise every election year. The only antidote will be if Democrats conclude this gambit boomeranged politically by mobilizing an opposition coalition of Americans who are tired of being played for saps by progressives. The test arrives in November.
Journal Editorial Report: It insults the millions who paid their loans back (05/01/22). Images: Getty Images for We The 45 Million Composite: Mark Kelly
California universities are turning dormitory lounges into bedrooms, putting students in hotel rooms, and leasing entire apartment buildings to deal with a housing shortage that recently led to a judge ordering UC Berkeley to freeze its on-campus enrollment.
The state’s public higher learning institutions have added tens of thousands fewer beds than students in recent years, as a problem across the state—a lack of affordable homes caused in large part by restraints on construction—hits college towns particularly hard.
Spurred by a national outcry over the Berkeley decision, California legislators have proposed measures to delay its impact or spur more construction at colleges. On Monday, Democratic Gov.
Gavin Newsom
signed a measure passed unanimously by the state legislature that will render the judge’s decision unenforceable and give Berkeley and other public colleges and universities 18 months to address challenges to campus population growth before a judge can enforce any changes.
State Sen.
Scott Wiener
has introduced a broader proposal that would exempt many student housing projects from environmental review under the California Environmental Quality Act, known as CEQA, which was at the heart of the Berkeley suit.
“We are making it so hard for the next generation of students to access this education because of the lack of housing,” Mr. Wiener, a Democrat, said.
McKenzie Carling in August of 2020. She says UC Berkeley is her dream school.
Photo:
Sara Carling
UC Berkeley, the crown jewel of California’s public higher education system, had been preparing to cut its on-campus enrollment by at least 2,500 students this fall, after the state’s highest court overruled its request to reverse an enrollment cap instituted by a trial judge. The University said Monday that under the law signed by Mr. Newsom, it will instead proceed with its original admissions plan, offering spots to more than 15,000 incoming freshmen and 4,500 transfers for in-person enrollment this year.
Mr. Wiener will still push to pass his proposal, while Republicans in the Democratic-controlled legislature have called for more sweeping CEQA reform.
In their lawsuit, local groups have accused the university of violating CEQA by admitting more students than it had projected without fully considering negative impacts on traffic, noise and housing availability.
Both sides agree there aren’t enough homes for the students who are already there.
Signed into law in 1970 by then-Gov.
Ronald Reagan,
CEQA requires local governments to study the potential environmental impacts of building projects before approving them. Over the years, the law has been wielded by groups that oppose developments for numerous reasons, going far beyond its original intent, according to housing advocates.
California has added 3.2 times more people than housing units over the past 10 years, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California. Its median home price of $765,580 is more than twice the national average, and the state has the second-lowest homeownership rate in the nation behind New York.
“The student housing affordability crisis is essentially the broader California housing affordability crisis turned up to 11,” said M. Nolan Gray, an urban-planning researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
UC Berkeley had been preparing to cut its on-campus enrollment by at least 2,500 students this fall.
Photo:
Stephen Reiss/The Wall Street Journal
Since 2015, UC campuses have added 21,700 beds while enrollment grew by about 43,000, according to a report last year by the state’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office. More than 16,000 California college students at UC and California State University campuses were wait-listed for university-provided housing last fall.
Those who find housing they can afford off-campus often crowd into small apartments or face long commutes to classes. Rachel Forgash, a Ph.D. student at UCLA, said she spends about half of her $2,580 monthly stipend to split a 600-square-foot apartment and commute an hour to campus. “I feel extremely stressed perpetually about housing,” she said.
McKenzie Carling, who is waiting to find out if she has been accepted to UC Berkeley, said she worries that the court fight will hurt her chances of attending what she says is her dream school.
“I don’t think they’re thinking of the kids who’ve had to work through a pandemic, whose graduations were in cars, whose blood, sweat and tears were in Zoom meetings,” said Ms. Carling, 19, who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with her mother and shares a room with her 18-year-old brother in Rocklin, outside Sacramento.
Phil Bokovoy says university officials have expanded enrollment too quickly without considering the impact on affordable housing.
Photo:
Stephen Reiss/The Wall Street Journal
Many Berkeley residents and city leaders are alumni of the university who now find themselves at odds over whether to give priority to expanding educational access or maintain the look and feel of a low-rise city full of single-family homes. “The most obvious and important thing you can do is build dense student housing right next to campus,” said City Councilmember Rigel Robinson, a 2018 graduate who supports increased construction.
Phil Bokovoy, a local resident who is leading the lawsuit against UC Berkeley, said university officials have expanded enrollment too quickly without considering the impact on residents and students looking for an affordable place to live.
In the fall of 2001, the median rent for a studio apartment for new leases was $900, according to data from the city of Berkeley. Last fall, it was nearly $1,800.
“They’ve created a housing crisis that makes it almost impossible for low-income students in any greater numbers to come to Berkeley,” said Mr. Bokovoy, who received a master’s degree from the university in 1989. He said the bill Mr. Newsom signed doesn’t address the underlying issue.
UC Santa Cruz says lawsuits from local residents stalled a 3,000-bed student housing development approved by university officials years ago.
Photo:
Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal
He said he would like UC Berkeley to follow the path of UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz, which have said they would provide housing to accommodate any increase in on-campus student enrollment.
UC Santa Cruz has struggled to make good on that pledge. Cynthia Larive, the school’s chancellor, told state legislators in November that lawsuits from local residents stalled a 3,000-bed student housing development approved by university officials nearly three years ago.
“We can’t move forward even though students need housing now,” Ms. Larive said in an interview.
In the interim, UC Santa Cruz has increased capacity by placing as many as six students in converted lounges, and has rented dozens of hotel rooms to provide overflow housing for some graduate students.
UC Santa Cruz student Louise Edwards says she has slept in her car.
Photo:
Clara Mokri for The Wall Street Journal
Louise Edwards often studied and slept in her car alongside her dog, Thelma, while she attended community college in the Bay Area.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
What steps should states take to accommodate affordable student housing? Join the conversation below.
The 53-year-old was admitted to UC Santa Cruz last year, but has struggled to find a reliable place to live with her Section 8 housing voucher. She signed a lease on a one-bedroom unit 9 miles from campus last fall for $2,216 a month—the maximum she could afford with her voucher—but now her landlord is trying to sell the property, she said.
She is hoping to live closer to campus because of rising gas prices, but hasn’t found anything yet. She opted to enroll in online classes next quarter because of the uncertainty.
“The only thing I know how to do is go into a shelter,” Ms. Edwards said of her options when she loses her current dwelling. “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
Tuition at America’s public universities has nearly tripled since 1990. With President Biden looking to ease the burden for some students, experts explain how federal financial aid programs can actually contribute to rising costs. Photo: Storyblocks
Write to Christine Mai-Duc at christine.maiduc@wsj.com
The hunt for Omicron is being hampered by local Covid-19 tracking efforts that have atrophied in much of the U.S. over the course of the pandemic.
Fifteen states report new Covid-19 cases seven days a week, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Johns Hopkins University data. Other states report less often—generally three-to-five times a week. Last year, 46 states reported these Covid-19 figures every day.
Daily reported Covid-19 cases in the U.S.
Note: For all 50 states and D.C., U.S. territories and cruises. Last updated
Source: Johns Hopkins Center for Systems Science and Engineering
Officials in Florida began reporting new Covid-19 data on the state health department website tracking the virus just once a week in June. Over the summer, public-health departments in some states said the change in frequency came as vaccination rates increased and Covid-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths fell.
The reduction in daily data reporting, among other issues, can make real-time Covid-19 information and trends harder to determine. Without a nationwide strategy, the U.S. was at a disadvantage tracking the disease compared with other countries, said
Chris Beyrer,
Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
“What you want to do is use current, accurate, timely data to make policy decisions,” he said. “We are always having to cobble together data sets out of 50 states, plus the territories, multiple insurance systems.”
A cyberattack interrupted Covid-19 data reporting at the Maryland Department of Health this month, disrupting information on new cases and deaths from the virus for more than two weeks. The department restored most of the figures on Monday. The update showed an increase of 89% for the state’s seven-day average testing-positivity rate, from 5.43% on Dec. 3 to 10.27% on Dec. 19.
Cars lined up at a drive-through Covid-19 testing site in Miami on Friday.
Photo:
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan
said Monday that he has tested positive for Covid-19. He urged people to get vaccinated or boosted against the disease.
With less real-time reporting and piecemeal testing programs, policy makers are reacting to Covid-19 rather than proactively working to contain it, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The departure of many public-health officials from the field due to burnout has also limited data-collection efforts. The National Association of County and City Health Officials, a Washington, D.C.-based organization representing nearly 3,000 local public-health departments, said at least 300 public-health department leaders have left their posts since the pandemic began.
“There was a time when all states, all areas, were mostly doing real-time testing and real-time reporting,” Dr. Sethi said. “But we’ve kind of backed away from that in a lot of places.”
As the U.S. and other countries fight Omicron, scientists in South Africa are starting to get a clearer picture. WSJ visited a leading lab studying the coronavirus strain, which appears to partially evade vaccines, is more infectious, and might cause milder symptoms. Photo: Waldo Swiegers/Bloomberg
Meanwhile, long lines for Covid-19 testing and delays for results from more-accurate PCR tests are making it harder to track the virus or for people to know whether they might be at risk of spreading it.
In parts of the country where Covid-19 cases are surging, particularly in the Northeast, demand for tests has emptied store shelves and led to hourslong long lines at community testing sites.
Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc.’s
test-booking website was offline for some time on Monday morning. A spokeswoman said the company is working to assess the supply of appointments in places where even a few days ago such slots were widely available. “Everything changed this weekend,” she said.
A
CVS Health Corp.
spokesman said appointments are readily available in much of the country, while acknowledging the chain might not have testing slots available until the weekend or later in parts of the country. In much of the country, including parts of the Midwest, CVS and Walgreens had open testing appointments and at-home tests were in stock.
A line for Covid-19 testing in Manhattan on Sunday.
Photo:
Thalia Juarez for The Wall Street Journal
In Houston, Emma Johnson, 28 years old, and her fiancé both came down with Covid-19 one week before she was scheduled to receive her
Moderna Inc.
booster shot. Her fiancé tested negative three times with a rapid test before receiving the results of a positive PCR test. Ms. Johnson’s at-home tests came back positive.
She soon felt sicker than she said she could recall feeling anytime in the past decade. She wanted to report her test results to the state but couldn’t find a way to do it. After she informed her employer that she had Covid-19, the company closed her office and postponed a holiday party. She had been in New York City just a few days before, sharing drinks and flashing her vaccination card. At the time, NYC’s data dashboard showed that Omicron was barely present in the city.
“We’re underreporting. The data is getting really messed up,” she said.
SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS
Is your state doing enough Covid-19 testing? Join the conversation below.
Yale New Haven Hospital in Connecticut is doing rapid sequencing of viral samples in partnership with a clinical-research laboratory. While New York City’s data showed about 3% of cases were likely caused by Omicron for the week ended Dec. 4, Yale’s analysis of samples collected in Connecticut showed that over the past week, between 46% and 79% of cases were likely caused by Omicron.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data show Omicron comprised some 3% of samples nationally through Dec. 11. More recent data is expected on Tuesday.
“With Covid things can go so fast,” said Thomas Balcezak, chief clinical officer of Yale New Haven Hospital. “Why are we behind? We just don’t have the infrastructure.”
—Anthony DeBarros and Sharon Terlep contributed to this article.
Write to Julie Wernau at Julie.Wernau@wsj.com and Jennifer Calfas at Jennifer.Calfas@wsj.com
In the first big test of Covid- 19 vaccines during a Covid-19 surge, places with higher vaccination rates are dodging the worst outcomes so far, while cases and hospitalizations surge in less-vaccinated areas.
There are more tests yet to come, including when cold weather forces people in the well-vaccinated Northeast back indoors. But as the highly contagious Delta strain tears through the country, the trends thus far suggest vaccines can turn Covid-19 into a less dangerous, more manageable disease.
“Vaccines definitely make a difference,” said David Dowdy, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows sharp geographic divides in vaccination and hospitalization levels, with every state that has an above-average vaccine rate showing below-average hospitalizations, including in well-vaccinated New England. In the South, meanwhile, fewer people are vaccinated on average and hospitalization rates are climbing faster.
The Delta-driven surge is unlike its predecessors in the U.S. because the variant spreads more easily and because it is confronting a partially vaccinated population. The U.S. needed an extra month to reach President Biden’s goal of getting 70% of adults at least one shot by July 4. While vaccination rates are picking up, most states remain behind that mark.
Sarah Mahalchick and her future husband talked on one of their first dates about wanting to adopt. There were lots of children out there who needed parents, they told each other from the start.
But when they were ready to expand their family, they opted for fertility treatments, including in vitro fertilization. It seemed to make sense: Ms. Mahalchick’s employer would pay for a large chunk of the treatments through her health insurance; it offered almost no help on adoption.
Fertility benefits are becoming almost trendy at blue-chip companies, with more firms offering to help with the costs of IVF and egg freezing. But in many cases, companies that offer fertility benefits give no financial assistance to employees who want to adopt, and when they do their adoption benefits are often much less generous.
Estimates on how many companies offer fertility or adoption benefits are fuzzy. Most employers give neither. But the gap is clear.
The Society for Human Resource Management estimates that as of 2018, 27% of employers offered some form of infertility coverage and 11% offered adoption assistance. FertilityIQ, a website that offers courses and other information on family building, regularly scours benefit disclosures from thousands of employers. In a report released Saturday, it calculates that only one in five companies that offer fertility coverage also offer adoption assistance.
PORTO ALEGRE, Brazil—Brazil is in the throes of a battle against the new Covid-19 variant from the Amazon that threatens to send shock waves across the globe.
Home to less than 3% of the world’s population, Brazil currently accounts for almost a third of the daily global deaths from Covid-19, driven by the new variant. More than 300,000 have died, and daily deaths now top 3,000, a toll suffered only by the far more populous U.S.
“We’re in the trenches here, fighting a war,” said Andréia Cruz, a 42-year-old emergency-ward nurse in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. In the past three weeks alone, the surrounding state of Rio Grande do Sul has seen nearly 5,000 people die from Covid-19, more than in the final three months of last year.
The spread of the virus in Brazil threatens to turn this country of 213 million into a global public-health hazard. The so-called P.1 strain, present in more than 20 countries and identified in New York last week, is up to 2.2 times more contagious and as much as 61% more able to reinfect people than previous versions of the coronavirus, according to a recent study.
The P.1 is now responsible for the majority of new infections in Brazil, with many doctors here saying they are seeing more young and otherwise healthy patients falling ill. About 30% of people dying from Covid-19 are now under 60, compared with an average of about 26% during Brazil’s previous peak between June and August, according to official figures analyzed by The Wall Street Journal.
The record-fast creation of Covid-19 vaccines was a triumph. So why is it taking so long to vaccinate Americans?
The answer starts with tens of millions of Covid-19 vaccine doses that sat unused in medical freezers across the U.S. in the early weeks of the rollout.
In the launch, the federal government set aside far more doses for nursing homes than the facilities needed. A fragmented chain of communication between federal authorities dispatching doses and the local sites ultimately injecting them left the vaccinators in the dark about how many patients they could schedule. Worried about limited supplies, some hospitals and health departments held back doses to make sure they had enough to administer second shots for staff or to meet appointments, creating a bottleneck to the outflow.
Vaccinations are now picking up. But early stumbles might extend the pandemic, and leave more people without protection. Health officials say the new coronavirus variants that appear to spread more easily make the distribution of vaccines more urgent.
The Trump administration invested heavily in rapid vaccine development, but it left the last mile of getting shots into arms to states and localities. That approach resulted in multiple, sometimes contradictory systems, and failed to ensure local sites had information about vaccine shipments that they needed to quickly administer shots.
Scientists are settling on a road map that can help critical sectors of the economy safely conduct business, from meatpacking plants to financial services, despite the pandemic’s continued spread.
After nearly a year of study, the lessons include: Mask-wearing, worker pods and good air flow are much more important than surface cleaning, temperature checks and plexiglass barriers in places like offices and restaurants. And more public-health experts now advocate wide use of cheap, rapid tests to detect cases quickly, in part because many scientists now think more than 50% of infections are transmitted by people without symptoms.
The playbook comes after months of investigations on how the coronavirus spreads and affects the body. Scientists combined that with knowledge gained from years of experience managing occupational-health hazards in high-risk workplaces, such as factories and chemical plants, where tiny airborne pollutants can build up and cause harm. They say different types of workplaces—taking into account the types of interactions workers have—need slightly different protocols.
The safety measures have taken on new urgency in recent weeks as new infections, hospitalizations and deaths rise across the U.S. and Europe, and potentially more-transmissible variants of the virus spread around the globe. This phase of the pandemic is prompting a new wave of stay-at-home orders, closures and travel restrictions, important first steps to curbing contagion. Infection-prevention specialists say known strategies for stemming spread should continue to work against the new variants, but that increased adherence is even more important.
Vaccines are rolling out, but slowly, and access will be limited mostly to high-priority groups for some time.
“We have to still deal with ‘the right now.’ We’ve zeroed in on this set of controls that we know work,” said
Joseph Allen,
director of the Healthy Buildings Program at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Over the past year, the lack of consistent and cohesive messaging among scientists and lawmakers has seeded confusion over what makes up risky behavior, what activities should be avoided and why. That is beginning to change as consensus builds and scientists better understand the virus.
In the U.S., scientists at first advised people against wearing masks, in part because of shortages, while the idea of stay-at-home orders received severe pushback from some lawmakers. Early in the pandemic, testing was limited to people with symptoms, also partly due to shortages. That advice has shifted, but a year later, sufficient testing remains a critical issue.
London’s Regent Street was nearly empty last week.
Photo:
May James/SOPA Images /Zuma Press
Countries such as New Zealand and others in Asia adhered to a combination of basic mitigation strategies from the start—particularly masking, large-scale testing and lockdowns that broke transmission chains. They have tended to fare better than those that didn’t.
In one of his first moves, President
Biden
signed executive orders to require masks be worn on federal property and at airports and other transportation hubs. The administration said it is focusing on increasing the availability of vaccines, and also stressed the importance of widely available testing, which still lags in low-income and minority communities.
The current scientific playbook follows from two of the biggest research insights since the start of the pandemic. First, individuals who aren’t showing symptoms can transmit the virus. Infectious-disease experts worry most about this silent spread and say it is the reason the pandemic has been so hard to contain. While visibly sick people can pass on the virus, data cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimate that 40% to 45% of those infected never develop symptoms at all. With the new viral variants that can transmit more readily, the potential for silent spread is even higher, infectious-disease experts said.
Secondly, researchers now know that tiny airborne particles known as aerosols play a role in the spread of Covid-19. These can linger in the air and travel beyond 6 feet.
An early hallmark of the pandemic response focused on the risk of transmission through large respiratory droplets that typically travel a few feet and then fall to the ground. Businesses rushed to buy plexiglass barriers, creating shortages.
The barriers can be good at preventing larger virus-containing droplets from landing on and infecting healthy individuals. They may offer some protection in shielding workers who have brief face-to-face interactions with many people throughout the workday, such as cashiers and receptionists, some occupational-health experts said.
Yet in settings like offices, restaurants or gyms, the role of the barriers is murkier, because activities like talking loudly and breathing deeply create aerosols that can waft on air currents and get around shields.
A Los Angeles Apparel employee added plexiglass to sewing stations in July.
Photo:
Sarah Reingewirtz/Orange County Register/Zuma Press
Outdoor diners at Eat At Joe’s restaurant in Redondo Beach, Calif., in December.
Photo:
patrick t. fallon/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
A gym in Milan in October.
Photo:
DANIEL DAL ZENNARO/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock
Also, installing such barriers could affect airflow throughout the space, environmental-health experts said. It is possible they could limit proper ventilation, making things worse, they said.
“There seems to be an assumption that particles are going to get stopped by the barriers, which is simply not true,” said
Lisa Brosseau,
an industrial hygienist and research consultant for the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. Airborne particles ferrying the virus “really distribute all over the place.”
The emphasis on intense surface cleaning has diminished as scientists have come to understand that indirect transmission through contaminated surfaces doesn’t play as critical a role in the spread of Covid-19 as they thought in the early days of the pandemic. In September, the CDC published sanitation guidelines for offices, workplaces, homes and schools that said that, for most surfaces, normal, routine cleaning should suffice, and that frequently touched objects, such as light switches and doorknobs, should be cleaned and disinfected.
“Sanitation is important in general always,” said
Deborah Roy,
president of the American Society of Safety Professionals. “The idea is we went overboard at the beginning because of the amount of unknowns. Now, we’re in a situation where we have more information.”
Temperature checks have become less popular among some employers because scientists now know that not all Covid-19 patients get fevers. One large study published online in November in the New England Journal of Medicine showed only 13% of Covid-19 patients reported a fever during the course of their illness.
Scientists now understand that brief encounters with an infected person can lead to spread, according to an October case study—an advance from earlier, when the rule of thumb was to avoid close contact for 15 consecutive minutes or longer. The report urged people to consider not just time and proximity in defining close contact with a Covid case, but also ventilation, crowding and a person’s likelihood of generating aerosols. Following the report, the CDC changed its definition of close contact to a total of 15 minutes or more over a 24-hour period.
A flight attendant showed an air filter on LATAM airlines in Bogota in August.
Photo:
juan barreto/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images
Fresh air and effective filters indoors are important because they can remove virus particles before they have time to infect.
Masks offer a similar benefit, by lowering the amount of particles that infected individuals emit. Some scientists say there could be a benefit to doubling up on masks, as a second layer may improve both filtration and fit, so long as the masks are worn correctly.
A study published in October found that in countries where mask wearing was the norm or where governments put in place mask mandates, coronavirus mortality rates grew much more slowly than in countries without such measures. This fall, the CDC said that masks also offer some personal protection by reducing a wearer’s exposure to infected particles.
As the weather gets colder and people head indoors, the risk of catching Covid-19 is rising. WSJ explains why air ventilation and filtration are one of our biggest defenses against the coronavirus this winter. Illustration: Nick Collingwood/WSJ
The combination of airborne particles and personal interactions, even among people who don’t feel ill, can turn wedding receptions, plane rides and choir practices into superspreading, potentially deadly events.
“For Covid, those two factors—asymptomatic spread and aerosolization—is what made mask-wearing so essential,” said
Megan Ranney,
emergency physician and assistant dean at Brown University.
Lessons can be gleaned from an outbreak at a Canadian spin studio last fall. The operators of the SPINCO studio in Hamilton, Ontario, had many public-health measures in place, including limiting the number of bikes in each class and screening staff and attendees with a questionnaire about topics including symptoms and travel. Rooms were sanitized within 30 minutes of a completed class, and towels were laundered, according to a statement provided last fall by
Elizabeth Richardson,
medical officer of health for the city of Hamilton.
Masks were also required before and after workout classes, Dr. Richardson said.
In total, 54 people who attended workouts over a span of several classes became infected. Another 31 cases were tied to the outbreak after spin-class attendees who contracted the virus then passed it on. The spin studio temporarily shut down following the outbreak and later reopened. It is currently not offering classes due to local regulations that mandated the closure of all gyms and fitness centers amid rising Covid-19 cases in the area.
In a November statement following the outbreak,
Michelle August,
founder of SPINCO, said that the company has “always put safety first and [has] exceeded all recommended guidelines from public health throughout” the pandemic. She said SPINCO has also strengthened and heightened its Covid-19 mitigation measures. SPINCO’s website currently says face masks are mandated throughout workouts in the company’s Hamilton location.
It also says that SPINCO is installing air purifiers in all of its studios that filter air in the rooms every 17 to 21 minutes. Airborne transmission experts recommend that building managers pump in clean, fresh air between three to six times an hour and that they install filters that are proven to effectively trap and remove a substantial number of virus-carrying particles.
To film a stage play of “A Christmas Carol” in November, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis upgraded its air filters and increased the rate at which the ventilation system pumps in outside air, said
Brooke Hajinian,
the Guthrie’s general manager. Management staggered arrival times, and a compliance officer made sure everyone socially distanced, wore their masks properly and washed their hands.
The theater divided staff into pods depending on how close they must get to the lone actor on stage, who portrayed Charles Dickens and didn’t wear a mask while performing, according to Ms. Hajinian. Those working nearest the stage underwent testing three times a week and wore N95 masks at all times, she said, while cleaning and security crews, who didn’t interact with the stage crews, wore cloth masks and didn’t undergo testing.
Actor Nathaniel Fuller performed in ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.
Photo:
Kaitlin Schlick
Ms. Hajinian said she monitored the staff’s testing results and symptoms. “Any symptom is not a failure of this plan,” she said. Catching a case “and isolating it—that’s what success looks like for us,” she said. There were no cases, she said.
Scientists say multilayered safety efforts are needed because no single prevention method is 100% effective.
One of the largest studies of asymptomatic transmission to date showed that frequent testing was essential in identifying infections among a group of nearly 2,000 Marine recruits required to socially distance and wear masks except while eating and sleeping.
The study looked at cases identified with lab-based tests that search out and amplify the genetic material of the virus, but those tests aren’t as easily scaled as so-called rapid antigen tests, which search for viral proteins.
Results from lab-based tests can sometimes take days, while results from rapid tests are usually available in less than an hour. As a result, some epidemiologists have been advocating for widespread use of antigen tests to prevent outbreaks, because they are cheaper and don’t require high-tech laboratory equipment to run, meaning they can be deployed in a broader range of settings.
The shift toward using frequent, inexpensive and rapid tests on the same people multiple times a week to screen entire populations—instead of one-time tests on individuals who have symptoms—will be important to efficiently break transmission chains, epidemiologists said.
“Unless we’re doing really broad, frequent screening of the people at large, we’re completely missing the vast majority” of infections, said
Michael Mina,
an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “We have to change how we’re doing this.”
A Covid-19 testing site at the Alemany Farmers Market in San Francisco in November.
Photo:
David Paul Morris/Bloomberg News
While rapid tests tend to be less sensitive than lab-based tests, Dr. Mina said the data suggest they have high sensitivity when people are most likely to be infectious.
Other infectious-disease experts have touted contact tracing to identify and bust clusters of infection. But they say the strategy works best when cases aren’t surging, as they are now. When transmission rates are too high, limiting gatherings, travel and crowding are more effective at denting spread, said
Abraar Karan,
a global-health physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
In places without big surges, a high-tech approach is becoming increasingly useful: genetic epidemiology, or tracking tiny changes in viral genomes to map out transmission chains. As the coronavirus replicates and moves from person to person, its genes change slightly. Sometimes, those tiny changes are unusual, and they can be particularly useful in mapping transmission events, according to
Justin O’Grady,
an infectious disease expert at the Quadram Institute in the U.K.
By sifting through the differences among more than 1,000 viral genomes, Dr. O’Grady and his collaborators found that a particular viral variant was moving through multiple nursing homes in the U.K., among patients and staff, but not among the wider community. The unpublished data suggested that transmission was facilitated by the movement of staff from one facility to another, Dr. O’Grady said. The team relayed the findings to government authorities and advised them to restrict staff moving among facilities during the pandemic.
“Sometimes genomic epidemiology is able to find hidden transmission links that traditional epidemiology would struggle to find,” Dr. O’Grady said. “We can’t stop transmission, but when we find a superspreader event…we can bring in the right prevention methods to stop it from spreading further.”
A London ad urged safety measures last week.
Photo:
Dinendra Haria/London News Pictures /Zuma Press
—Betsy McKay contributed to this article.
Write to Daniela Hernandez at daniela.hernandez@wsj.com, Sarah Toy at sarah.toy@wsj.com and Caitlin McCabe at caitlin.mccabe@wsj.com
