- Respiratory illnesses are surging in NYC and nationwide, CDC warns — here are the states with the highest rates New York Post
- Health officials across US warning families of rising cases of COVID, flu & RSV WQAD News 8
- Covid and flu are rising, and RSV in some places, driving more ER visits The Washington Post
- 11 states have ‘high’ or ‘very high’ respiratory illness: Map shows where sickness is spreading KFOR Oklahoma City
- CDC: 15 states see ‘high,’ ‘very high’ levels of respiratory illness; is yours? WFTV Orlando
Tag Archives: surging
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez just blew up the internet by describing their ‘pretty normal’ typical day amid surging billionaire backlash – Fortune
- Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez just blew up the internet by describing their ‘pretty normal’ typical day amid surging billionaire backlash Fortune
- Lauren Sanchez offers up more info on how Jeff Bezos proposal went down Fox Business
- Jeff Bezos’ fiancée insists ‘our lives are pretty normal’ in glowing piece about $200K dresses, trips to space Fox News
- All the Celebs at Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos’ Starry Engagement Party PEOPLE
- Kim Kardashian and Lauren Sanchez Paid $200K Each for 1 Dress Us Weekly
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Why Wall Street’s obsession with a company you probably never heard of is sending stocks surging – CNN
- Why Wall Street’s obsession with a company you probably never heard of is sending stocks surging CNN
- 1 Supercharged Growth Stock That’s a Shoo-in to Join Apple and Microsoft in the $2 Trillion Club by 2028 The Motley Fool
- A Bull Market Is Coming: 2 Red-Hot AI Growth Stocks to Buy Hand Over Fist Before They Soar 40% to 85% The Motley Fool
- 3 Stocks That Can Turn $10,000 Into $50,000 by 2025 The Motley Fool
- Prediction: 3 Unstoppable Stocks Set to Join Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia in the $1 Trillion Club by 2030 The Motley Fool
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Biden Harris Administration Announces Nearly $1B in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Airport Funding Awarded to Meet Surging Air Travel Demand | US Department of Transportation – Department of Transportation
- Biden Harris Administration Announces Nearly $1B in Bipartisan Infrastructure Law Airport Funding Awarded to Meet Surging Air Travel Demand | US Department of Transportation Department of Transportation
- U.S. awards nearly $1 billion to airports in infrastructure grants Reuters
- Salt Lake City airport expansion project gets cut of $1B in federal infrastructure funds KSL.com
- Memphis airport receives federal funding for expanded capacity Commercial Appeal
- ORF to receive over $5 million for airport infrastructure 13News Now
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Super Bowl gambling surging as states legalize it? You bet – The Associated Press – en Español
- Super Bowl gambling surging as states legalize it? You bet The Associated Press – en Español
- Super Bowl 2023: Chiefs vs. Eagles breakdown by position. Which team has the edge? Yahoo Sports
- Super Bowl 2023: 20 percent of American adults expected to bet on Chiefs vs. Eagles, according to survey CBS Sports
- Super Bowl Betting to Attract 50.4M US Adults, $16B in Wagers Casino.Org News
- The EA Madden game which has predicted the correct Super Bowl winner with almost 70% accuracy just placed its bets on this year’s game Yahoo Finance
- View Full Coverage on Google News
Why gas prices are surging this month
New York
CNN
—
Normally, prices at the gas pump drift lower during the dead of winter as lousy weather keeps Americans off the roads. But something unusual is happening this year: Gas prices are rocketing higher.
The national average for regular gas jumped to $3.51 a gallon on Friday, according to AAA. Although that’s a far cry from the record of $5.02 a gallon last June, gas prices have increased by 12 cents in the past week and 41 cents in the past month.
All told, the national average has climbed by more than 9% since the end of last year – the biggest increase to start a year since 2009, according to Bespoke Investment Group.
AAA says some states have experienced much bigger gains over the past month, including Colorado (98 cents), Georgia (70 cents), Delaware (62 cents), Ohio (60 cents) and Florida (59 cents).
The unusual wintertime jump in gas price is drawing eye rolls from American drivers already grappling with high prices at the supermarket. It also threatens to undermine improvements in the inflation crisis that gripped the economy much of last year.
So, why are gas prices jumping?
It’s not because of demand, which remains weak, even for this time of the year.
Instead, the problem is supply.
The extreme weather in much of the United States near the end of last year caused a series of outages at the refineries that produce the gasoline, jet fuel and diesel that keep the economy humming.
For example, Colorado’s sole refinery, the Suncor refinery outside of Denver, was disrupted by freezing temperatures. When the refinery tried to restart, it suffered a fire and equipment got damaged.
Suncor has indicated that refinery – which Lipow Oil Associates says represents 17% of the Rocky Mountain region’s refinery capacity – could be offline for at least weeks.
That helps explain why gas prices in Colorado have surged by nearly $1 a gallon over the past month.
Refineries elsewhere have been sidelined by extreme weather as well. US refineries are operating at just 86% of capacity, down from the mid-90% range at the start of December, according to Bespoke.
Beyond the refinery problems, oil prices have crept higher, helping to drive prices at the pump northward.
Since tumbling to $71.02 a barrel on December 9, US oil prices have jumped about 16%, to around $82.30 on Friday. That increase has been driven in part by expectations of higher worldwide demand as China relaxes its Covid-19 policies.
At the same time, the oil markets are no longer receiving massive injections of emergency oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The Biden administration has shifted from releasing unprecedented amounts of oil from that stockpile to beginning the process of refilling it.
The good news is that some of the refinery problems may prove to be temporary, meaning supply should catch up with demand.
The bad news is some experts are warning gas prices may keep going higher anyway.
Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, expects the national average will hit $3.65 a gallon heading into the spring.
Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy, worries the typical springtime jump in prices will be pulled forward.
“Instead of $4 a gallon happening in May, it could happen as early as March,” De Haan told CNN. “There is more upside risk than downside risk.”
A return of $4 gas would be painful to drivers and could dent consumer confidence. Moreover, pain at the pump would complicate the inflation picture as the Federal Reserve debates whether to slow its interest rate hiking campaign.
The Cleveland Fed’s Inflation Nowcasting model is now pointing to a 0.6% month-over-month increase for the Consumer Price Index for January. If that holds true, it would represent a significant acceleration compared with the 0.1% drop in prices between November and December.
COVID keeps surging, but life is returning to normal everywhere you look. When will the pandemic really be over?
COVID is never going away. But the pandemic will inevitably end at some point. Right?
For many, it already has, with masks, social distancing, and frequent handwashing relegated to a traumatic past they’re unwilling to revisit.
This week the Biden administration extended the U.S. public health emergency for another 90 days, though U.S. Department of Health and Human Services officials recently warned states that the emergency status may soon come to an end. World Health Organization officials, too, continue to express optimism that the global health emergency may draw to a close this year. A committee meeting on the matter is set for Jan. 27.
Are we—or are we not—still in a pandemic, three years in? There aren’t consensus definitions for the terms “pandemic” and “endemic,” which loosely refer to a disease outbreak affecting the world, and a particular area like a country, respectively. Given the lack of agreement, it’s impossible to definitively say if the pandemic is ongoing. Personal opinions vary, and shades of gray abound.
At what point will we all agree? Will we ever?
“Unfortunately, ‘pandemic’ is really more of a political and sociological term than a scientific one,” Dr. Jay Varma, chief medical adviser at the New York-based think tank Kroll Institute, told Fortune. A 20-year veteran of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Varma was the principal architect for New York City’s COVID-19 pandemic response before joining the institute in March.
A pandemic tends to transform into an epidemic—at least in the court of public opinion—“when society or government reaches a point where it’s willing to accept a certain number of deaths each day,” Varma said.
“It’s certainly not scientists who decide that. Those in public health would say that’s not acceptable.”
Dr. Michael Merson, visiting professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health, echoed Varma’s comments, telling Fortune that the general public has accepted that the pandemic is over—at the expense of mass casualties.
Conditions are better than they were in the early days of 2020, he concedes. COVID, however, “is still causing—to me—an unacceptable amount of deaths,” he said, adding that society’s acceptance of the body count—hundreds of thousands annually in the U.S. alone—is “disturbing.”
Not now, of all times
Of all times to declare the pandemic over, now is not it, many public health experts contend. The reason: the recent unshackling of China from years of “zero COVID” restrictions. The reopening appears to have occurred without much, or any, planning, leaving the majority of China’s 1.4 billion residents vulnerable to illness, hospitalization, death, and long COVID—simultaneously.
The reopening serves as a wildcard for the world, too, putting it at risk of potentially dangerous new variants that are statistically more likely to occur there, given ultra-high levels of transmission. Chinese New Year gatherings on Jan. 22 are likely to further fuel transmission. What’s more, the Chinese government is allowing residents to travel internationally again.
China aside, levels of potentially daunting COVID variant XBB.1.5, dubbed “Kraken,” are surging in the U.S. They played a role in a recent rise in hospitalizations in the Northeast—a trend that could play out in the rest of the country, as the virus expands westward. Other countries could eventually find themselves in a similar situation.
XBB.1.5’s rise “is just a reminder that as much as he would like this pandemic to be over, it’s not,” Varma said. “The virus isn’t behaving as if it wants this pandemic to be over.”
Still, it may be time to end emergency declarations, Dr. Georges Benjamin, head of the American Public Health Association, a 150-year-old organization of public health professionals that seeks to promote health and health equity in the U.S., told Fortune.
“It’s got to go away at some point,” he said on Tuesday about the U.S. federal health emergency. “And I think we’re quickly approaching that point.”
“The policymakers don’t want to fund it anymore; people don’t want to pay attention to it anymore,” he said. “It’s a human behavior thing. If everything is an emergency, nothing is.”
But declaring an end to the emergency doesn’t mean the pandemic’s over, Benjamin cautioned.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “We’re not in a public health emergency and we still have an HIV/AIDS pandemic.”
How to exit the pandemic
There are a few generally accepted paths out of pandemic status, Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, professor of health policy and management at the City University of New York School of Public Health, told Fortune.
One of them: when the level of COVID infections drops sufficiently worldwide. The virus could settle into a pattern of true seasonality, similar to what is seen with RSV and the flu, in which cases are virtually nonexistent in the summer and spike in the winter. Or COVID levels could decline—somewhat—to a prolonged “high plateau,” with a relatively elevated level of cases occurring throughout the year.
A transition to the later scenario could be underway now, Lee contends. Peaks in cases aren’t as high as they were in early pandemic days. Nor are valleys between spikes as low as they were—painting a potential picture of an endemic COVID future with consistently elevated levels of viral transmission.
A seasonal pattern would be preferable, Lee says.
“We don’t want to have higher-than-high plateaus or constant levels throughout the year,” he said. “That’s a lot more difficult to manage than something seasonal.”
A glorified cold or flu?
With the U.S. still in the grips of a “tripledemic” of COVID, RSV and the flu, public health officials are warning those with symptoms like fever and malaise to not assume they have the flu, and to test for COVID. It’s virtually impossible to distinguish the two based on symptoms right now, experts say.
It’s a reality fueling office water-cooler debates about the continued legitimacy of the pandemic. How can COVID still be of pandemic status if it’s indistinguishable from the flu or, for some, a cold?
It’s a fair question, but one with a simple answer: Cold viruses rarely kill—and the flu doesn’t kill nearly as often as COVID.
“Psychologically, I’m afraid the public is accepting our current situation as the pandemic being over, despite the fact that we have 250,000, 300,000 deaths a year—far more than we have with the flu,” said Merson, from New York University.
Last season, the flu killed an estimated 5,000 Americans, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It was a mild flu year, to be sure, thanks to pandemic precautions. But annual flu death tolls routinely number in the tens of thousands—not hundreds of thousands, like COVID deaths. Since the pandemic began, COVID has killed nearly 1.1 million Americans. The flu has killed less than 50,000.
While the public and many public health experts continue to be at odds on the pandemic’s status, Lee says things are looking up—at the moment.
In 2020, many public health experts predicted that the pandemic would last around 2.5-3 years, he says—about the length of the 1918 flu pandemic and other outbreaks, like the Japanese smallpox epidemic of 735-737, the Black Death, and the Italian plague of 1629-1631.
“We’re roughly on schedule, plus or minus—more plus—compared to what we originally anticipated,” Lee said. “This suggests that 2023 may be the big transition year. We’re seeing the right trends.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
More from Fortune:
Air India slammed for ‘systemic failure’ after unruly male passenger flying business class urinated on a woman traveling from New York
Meghan Markle’s real sin that the British public can’t forgive–and Americans can’t understand
‘It just doesn’t work.’ The world’s best restaurant is shutting down as its owner calls the modern fine dining model ‘unsustainable’
Bob Iger just put his foot down and told Disney employees to come back into the office
China reportedly delays key economic meeting amid signs of surging infections
SHANGHAI/HONG KONG, Dec 13 (Reuters) – Chinese leaders have reportedly delayed a key economic policy meeting amid growing signs that COVID-19 infections are surging nearly a week after Beijing jettisoned some of the world’s toughest restrictions.
President Xi Jinping and other Politburo members and senior government figures had been expected to attend the closed-door Central Economic Work Conference, most likely this week, to chart a policy course for the embattled Chinese economy in 2023.
A Bloomberg News report on Tuesday night, citing people familiar with the matter, said the meeting had been delayed and there was no timetable for rescheduling.
The delay comes as authorities continue to overturn the previously resolute “zero-COVID” policy championed by Xi.
Long queues are appearing outside fever clinics in a worrying sign that a wave of infections is building, even though official tallies of new cases have dropped in recent weeks as authorities reduce testing.
And companies in China, from e-commerce giant JD.com to cosmetics brand Sephora, are rushing to minimise the impact of surging infections – doling out test kits, encouraging more work from home and, in some cases, procuring truckloads of medicine.
The signs come as China attempts to swiftly align with a world that has largely reopened, following unprecedented protests last month in China three years into the pandemic.
The protests were the strongest show of public defiance during Xi’s decade-old presidency and come amid growth figures for China’s $17 trillion economy that were some of the worst in 50 years.
Despite rising infections, people in China cheered the withdrawal on Tuesday of a state-mandated app used to track whether they had travelled to COVID-stricken areas.
As authorities deactivated the “itinerary code” app at midnight on Monday, China’s four telecoms firms said they would delete users’ data associated with the app.
“Goodbye itinerary code, I hope to never see you again,” said a post on social media platform Weibo, where people cheered the demise of an app that critics feared could be used for mass surveillance.
“The hand that stretched out to exert power during the epidemic should now be pulled back,” wrote another user.
And in a further sign of policy easing, Chinese healthcare company 111.inc has started selling Pfizer’s Paxlovid for COVID-19 treatment in China via its app – medicine previously only available in some hospitals.
It sold out just over half an hour after the listing was reported by local media, according to the platform’s customer service.
For all the relief over last week’s decision to begin overturning the government’s zero-COVID policy, there are fears that China may now pay a price.
[1/11] People wearing face masks walk on a street, as coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreaks continue in Shanghai, China, December 13, 2022. REUTERS/Aly Song
Infections are expected to rise further during the Chinese New Year holiday next month, when people travel across the country to be with their families, – a risk for a 1.4 billion population that lacks “herd immunity” and has relatively low vaccination rates among the elderly, according to some analysts.
The moves made last week to unwind the COVID curbs included dropping mandatory testing prior to many public activities and reining in quarantine.
HONG KONG RELAXES
Beijing’s envoy to the United States on Monday said he believes China’s COVID-19 measures will be further relaxed in the near future and international travel to the country will also become easier.
China has all but shut its borders to international travel since the pandemic first erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in later 2019. International flights are still at a fraction of pre-pandemic levels and arrivals face eight days in quarantine.
Financial hub Hong Kong, which already has less stringent border controls than mainland China, on Tuesday said it would drop a requirement for incoming travellers to avoid bars and restaurants in the three days after arrival.
Hong Kong will also scrap its mobility-tracking app governing access to restaurants and venues such as gyms, clubs and salons, Chief Executive John Lee said.
While the lifting of controls is seen as brightening the prospects for global growth longer term, analysts say Chinese businesses will struggle in the weeks ahead, as a wave of infections creates staff shortages and makes consumers wary.
Analysts say the decline in reported new cases could reflect the dropping of testing requirements rather than the actual situation on the ground.
“The rapid surge of infections in big cities might be only the beginning of a massive wave of COVID infections,” said Ting Lu, Chief China Economist at Nomura.
“We reckon that the incoming migration around the Chinese New Year holiday in late January could bring about an unprecedented spread of COVID.”
Experts say China’s fragile healthcare system could be quickly overwhelmed if those fears are realised.
In Beijing, empty seats on commuter trains and deserted restaurants highlight some people’s caution.
“Maybe other people are afraid or are worried about kids’ and grandparents’ health. It’s a personal choice,” Gao Lin, a 33-year-old financier, told Reuters.
China stocks (.CSI300) edged lower on Tuesday as a recent rebound triggered by reopening hopes gave way to concerns about spreading infections. The yuan currency was little changed, but it is already set for its worst year since 1994, when China unified the official and market exchange rates.
Reporting by Bernard Orr in Beijing, Brenda Goh and Shen Yiming in Shanghai and Farah Master in Hong Kong; Writing by John Geddie and Greg Torode; Editing by Simon Cameron-Moore and Nick Macfie
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
How Elon Musk’s Twitter Faces Mountain of Debt, Falling Revenue and Surging Costs
To make the deal work, Mr. Musk has been trying to add subscription revenue and reassure advertisers about the platform’s future. Twitter was losing money before Mr. Musk bought the company, and the deal added a debt burden that requires fresh sources of cash.
It is tough to determine the state of the company. Twitter no longer has to file regular financial reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which are crucial tools for determining a company’s financial health.
Analysts and academics have been able to piece together a picture of the company from information Mr. Musk has offered as well as details of the deal and the company’s last regulatory filings. Bankruptcy could be one result. Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, could also raise new funds, or buy back debt from lenders, giving Twitter a buffer to turn around its business.
Here is a look at their assessments of Twitter’s financial situation and prospects.
Twitter Finances, Pre-Musk
Twitter is and was a popular tool for politicians, celebrities and journalists. But as a business, it was stagnating.
It hasn’t booked an annual profit since 2019, and posted a loss in eight years of the past decade. The company’s net loss narrowed in 2021, to $221.4 million from $1.14 billion the previous year.
Twitter has struggled to attract new users and increase revenue, which came in at about $5.1 billion last year. In its last quarterly filing as a public company, for the period ended June 30, revenue was $1.18 billion, down slightly year-over-year.
Nearly 90% of its revenue last year came from advertising, and it traditionally has been the company’s main source of revenue. In 2021, Twitter took in $4.51 billion from advertisers, and $572 million from licensing data and other services.
The company had more than $2 billion in cash and less than $600 million in net debt before the takeover talks—very little debt for a company in the S&P 500 index. But that cash position was down 35% from a year earlier as of June 30, filings show, and Mr. Musk paid for Twitter by taking on $13 billion in debt. He paid for the rest in equity, some contributed by multiple investors.
Twitter had a market capitalization of $37.48 billion in March, the month before Mr. Musk agreed to buy it, S&P data showed. Social-media stocks have slumped sharply since then. But now, according to
Jeffrey Davies,
a former credit analyst and founder of data provider Enersection LLC, “This thing’s probably not worth more than what the debt stack is, quite frankly, unless you put a lot of option value just on Elon.” Mr. Musk last month said he and investors were overpaying for the company in the short term.
Revenue Under Musk
Mr. Musk said earlier this month that Twitter had suffered “a massive drop in revenue” and was losing $4 million a day. It isn’t clear if that reflects the broader downturn in the digital ad market or the pause in advertising by several companies since Mr. Musk bought the business.
Some companies, including burrito chain
Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc.,
cereal maker
General Mills Inc.
and airline
United Airlines Holdings Inc.,
have paused their ad spending on Twitter over uncertainty around where the company is headed. The departure of several top executives from its ad department have soured relationships, The Wall Street Journal has reported.
The exodus of advertisers poses a threat for a company so reliant on that revenue stream. “As an online ad company, you’re flirting with disaster,” said
Aswath Damodaran,
a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Deal negotiations for long-term contracts that usually begin at the end of the year haven’t taken place yet or have been put on hold. Those deals comprise more than 30% of Twitter’s U.S. ad revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported.
Revenue will likely remain under pressure until advertisers fully grasp the new business model, potentially leading many of them to return to the platform, said
Brent Thill,
a senior analyst at Jefferies Group LLC, a financial-services firm. “Those advertisers will come back if they feel that the users are there and there’s an ability to monetize their advertisement,” Mr. Thill said.
But that could take time. Mr. Thill said it could take months for advertisers to get clarity. “It’s an enigma,” he said.
Market-research firm Insider Intelligence Inc. recently cut its annual ad-revenue revenue outlook for Twitter by nearly 40% through 2024.
Mr. Musk wants the company to lean more on subscriptions and depend less on digital advertising. He said last Tuesday that the company’s upgraded subscription service, costing $7.99 a month, would launch Nov. 29.
A walkway at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. The company has aggressively cut staff to reduce expenses.
Photo:
George nikitin/Shutterstock
Reducing Costs
The company has moved quickly to slash costs, including cutting its staff by half. Salaries and other compensation make up a large chunk of overall expenses. The company had 7,500 full-time employees at the end of 2021, up from 5,500 a year earlier, filings show.
The layoffs of roughly 3,700 people could save the company roughly $860 million a year, if the employees that are leaving made an average of about $233,000 annually—the company’s most recently disclosed median pay figure. The estimated savings would represent about 15% of Twitter’s $5.57 billion in costs and expenses last year. Its costs and expenses climbed 51% from the previous year, as hiring drove up its payroll.
More employees left the company last week, rejecting Mr. Musk’s demand that they commit to working “long hours at high intensity” to stay.
Debt Mountain
Before Mr. Musk’s acquisition, net debt totaled $596.5 million as of June 30, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence, a data provider. That compares with a negative balance of $2.18 billion the prior-year period, indicating a cash surplus.
Twitter paid $23.3 million in interest expense in the quarter ended June 30, according to a filing.
Now, the company will have to pay at least $9 billion in interest to banks and hedge funds over the next seven to eight years, when the $13 billion in debt matures, according to a review of Twitter’s loans by Mr. Davies, the former credit analyst.
The interest payments are substantial for a company that reported $6.3 billion in total operating cash flow over the past eight years, he said.
What’s more, the company’s debt stack now includes floating-rate debt, meaning that interest costs are set to rise as the Federal Reserve continues to increase interest rates. Twitter’s debt was entirely fixed rate before the deal.
Twitter’s credit ratings, which were below investment grade before the transaction with Mr. Musk, have deteriorated further.
Moody’s
Investors Service on Oct. 31 downgraded Twitter’s rating to B1 from Ba2, a two-notch drop, and S&P Global Ratings on Nov. 1 downgraded it to B- from BB+, a five-notch drop.
If Twitter files for bankruptcy, Elon Musk’s $27 billion investment would likely be wiped out.
Photo:
Susan Walsh/Associated Press
Financial Prospects
Twitter’s financial challenges could result in the company filing for bankruptcy, raising equity or buying back some debt from its lenders, analysts and academics said.
If Twitter files for bankruptcy, as Mr. Musk warned was possible in an all-hands meeting earlier this month, his $27 billion investment would likely be wiped out because equity holders are the last to be paid when a company restructures.
Buying back debt from lenders at a steep discount would help the company reduce its debt load and interest costs as well as its valuation, which would be beneficial in the long run, Mr. Davies said.
“I don’t think they can issue any more debt,” Mr. Davies said. “It’s a really, really tough structure.”
The company could also replace some of the debt with equity, both from Mr. Musk and from outside investors, said
David Kass,
a finance professor at the University of Maryland’s
Robert H. Smith
School of Business. For that, Mr. Musk would need to persuade potential investors that he has a viable long-term business plan, he said. Replacing debt could enable the company to generate cash. Mr. Musk has said some of his latest
Tesla Inc.
stock sale, yielding almost $4 billion in cash, was because of Twitter.
If successful, the company could generate positive free cash flow in two or three years, which it could use to pay down the residual debt and eventually go public again, Mr. Kass said. “The prospect of an eventual IPO within three to five years would be a very attractive enticement for large funds,” he said.
—Theo Francis and Jennifer Williams-Alvarez contributed to this article.
Write to Mark Maurer at mark.maurer@wsj.com
Copyright ©2022 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8
Surging RSV hits children’s hospitals across the US
Children’s hospitals across the country are dealing with a surge in cases of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), stressing health care services and millions of parents with ailing children.
RSV is a common and generally mild illness, but millions of children are being exposed later in life because of the coronavirus pandemic. Babies walled off during the pandemic didn’t get RSV, and now children born just before or during the pandemic are getting it in droves.
“We had RSV last year, but it wasn’t to the level this year, partially because we were still doing some of the mitigation efforts around masking and people were still staying away,” said Jason Newland, a pediatric infectious diseases specialist at Washington University in St. Louis.
“We’re seeing older patients that are being admitted with RSV because they’ve just never seen it before,” he said. “And your first illness is usually the worst and it’s leading to some more people being hospitalized.”
The crowded hospitals are also a concern because the nation is expecting a difficult flu season and rising cases of COVID-19 as temperatures get colder and people spend more time indoors.
Newland said St. Louis Children’s Hospital has seen “super high” RSV admissions in the past two to three weeks, levels he has not seen in the six years he has been at that location.
Providers in other states have reported similarly high admissions. Caroline Njau, senior vice president of patient care services and chief nursing officer at Children’s Minnesota, said this year’s RSV surge far outpaces what she has seen in at least the past six years.
“The cases continue to rise and we have not seen a peak yet,” said Njau. “And RSV itself makes up about two-thirds of the respiratory viral illnesses that we’re seeing.”
Publicly available data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) indicates a strong presence of RSV in the Midwest, with states like Minnesota, Nebraska, Missouri and Wisconsin among the top ten states in terms of positivity rates. This data, however, is incomplete, with about a quarter of states not reporting any case data.
The CDC on Friday said in a briefing that RSV cases are rising in 8 out of the 10 regions that states are divided into under the Department of Health and Human Services. The southeast and south-central regions of the U.S. are seeing decreases in cases, including states like Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia and Texas.
Andrew Pavia, chief of the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at the University of Utah, noted that RSV cases moved in a wave from the southeast to the northwest this year, a reversal for the virus that has usually been observed from west to east across the U.S.
Although RSV is a very common pathogen, Pavia said it is “considerably more complicated” in terms of how it transmits.
“We don’t really understand why. It doesn’t follow strict weather patterns. It doesn’t follow strict people movement,” said Pavia. “But what you can say with some certainty is that once it starts to accelerate rapidly in a region, it will go up for eight to 12 weeks, or it will have an eight- to 12-week outbreak.”
Pavia noted that it could be a good thing that the virus is not reaching equal levels of severity across the entire U.S.
“There are regions in which the pediatric health care system is really overwhelmed and there are no ICU beds for children throughout the entire region. And that’s happening right now in the Midwest where people are reaching across two or three states to find an ICU bed,” he said.
The health care providers who spoke with The Hill agreed that this recent RSV surge has highlighted issues within the U.S. pediatric health care system, both old and new.
Newland said there are concerns that staffing at children’s hospitals may not be enough, which could lead to situations where some services like non-emergency surgeries are delayed, similar to what occurred during the hardest parts of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Pavia noted that pediatric health systems have lost many staff members in the past three years and the remaining workers are dealing with burnout.
Another issue that providers are citing is the lack of capacity at children’s hospitals. Stephen Dolter, division chief of pediatric hospital medicine at Children’s Hospital & Medical Center in Nebraska, said his primary concern during this viral surge was running out of space.
“We’ll stretch however we can to get them into the hospital, whether that’s repurposing hospital space playrooms into treatment patient rooms, or repurposing our emergency department into an inpatient unit,” said Dolter.
There are no vaccines for RSV, though Pfizer announced promising results from a maternal vaccine earlier this week. Monoclonal antibodies are sometimes used as a mostly preventative measure for children who are at a high risk of developing severe illness. The providers who spoke with The Hill said they have so far not had any issue procuring and maintaining a sufficient supply of monoclonal antibodies.
Health experts and providers say it is critical that parents recognize the signs that a child should go to the hospital for care if they do contract a respiratory infection. RSV symptoms usually manifest about two to eight days after exposure to the virus and the symptoms will typically last about a week on average.
Njau from Minnesota Children’s advised that parents look out for signs that their child is struggling to breathe easily. If breathing has become difficult, then an infant will start taking short, quick breaths and may be grunting as they breathe. A child’s ribcage going inward when they inhale is also an indicator that they are working too hard to breathe.
A child’s skin may also take on a blue or purple tint if they are not getting enough oxygen. In children with darker skin tones, a lack of oxygen can manifest in a similar change in coloring in their lips, gums and around their eyes. Njau said parents should also look out for signs that their child is dehydrated or has lost their appetite.
“Fortunately, almost all children recover from the infection on their own, but for those especially those who might have been born premature [and] have other co-morbidities [it] can have a significant impact in the respiratory system. And that’s why it’s really important for them to seek care,” Njau said.