Category Archives: Yahoo

The original TB12 isnt as impressed with the current TB12 as most everyone else is.

Appearing Thursday on 97.3 the Fan in Pittsburgh, Terry Bradshaw rattled off various quarterbacks whom Bradshaw regards as more talented than Tom Brady.

I dont think hes the greatest quarterback of all time, Bradshaw said, via the New York Post. Its hard to say. He may be the best quarterback weve had in the last 30 years. Is he better than [Roger] Staubach? No. Is he better than Dan Fouts? No. Dan Marino? No. Im talking talent-wise when youre putting all of it together.

Does he have more Super Bowls than anybody? Yes. Therefore, hes the best. I absolutely have no problem saying it. If youve got the most Super Bowls, you can be in there, but I dont put anybody as the greatest of all time. . . . Is he better than Montana? Not in my opinion. Is he better than Drew Brees? Yeah, maybe.

Bradshaw also isnt impressed with the drama surrounding Brady after 20 seasons in New England.

Im a little bit tired of all this soap opera going on between him and Belichick,Bradshaw said. Look, he left because he wanted to prove something, and he wants to prove to everyone that he can win without Bill Belichick.

The comments continue a recent trend by Bradshaw, who believes Brady wants to show he was more important to the Patriots success than Belichick. As both men move forward without the other, the performances of the Patriots and Buccaneers will be compared as closely as any two teams, in any sport.

Terry Bradshaw doesnt think Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time originally appeared on Pro Football Talk

Excerpt from:

Terry Bradshaw doesnt think Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time - Yahoo Sports

In his 2014 book The Loudest Voice in the Room, journalist Gabriel Sherman reported that top Fox News executives meet every morning to strategize about how the network can angle its daily coverage to advance the Republican Partys political agenda.

After first downplaying the threat of the coronavirus, then accusing Democrats of overhyping it to hurt President Trump, then claiming the cure of shutting down the economy could be worse than the disease, Fox News hosts now seem to be following a new set of marching orders when discussing the deadly pathogen: questioning whether all that many people are really dying from it.

Like each of its predecessors, Foxs latest pandemic talking point that the coronavirus death toll could be exaggerated because it includes individuals who had other health issues in addition to COVID-19 doesnt stand up to scrutiny.

Weve made it very clear, every time Ive been up here, about the comorbidities, Dr. Deborah Birx, the U.S. coronavirus response coordinator, said Wednesday during the White House coronavirus task force press briefing. This has been known from the beginning. So those individuals will have an underlying condition, but that underlying condition did not cause their acute death when its related to a COVID infection.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nations top infectious disease expert, also made a point to weigh in, cautioning against such conspiracy theories.

They are nothing but distractions, Fauci said. Let somebody write a book about it later on. But not now.

Yet that didnt stop former Fox News host Brit Hume from appearing on Tucker Carlsons show Tuesday to speculate that the overall U.S. death toll by Thursday,more than 14,800 and rising may be inflated.

There are lots of people who are asymptomatic who may have other terrible diseases, Hume said. And if everybody is being automatically classified, if theyre found to have COVID-19, as a COVID-19 death, were going to get a very large number of deaths that way, and were probably not going to have an accurate count of what the real death total is.

Story continues

Carlson agreed, adding that there may be reasons people seek an inaccurate death count and that when journalists work with numbers, there sometimes is an agenda.

As if on cue, Fox anchor Harris Faulkner joined the chorus Wednesday even though she is a member of the networks news division, not an opinion host like Carlson or an analyst like Hume.

The federal government now is classifying all COVID-19 patient deaths as such, regardless of whether any other underlying health issues were a factor, Faulkner said before playing a clip of Birx confirming that if someone dies with COVID-19, we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.

How many of those people had other health risks at play, though, and maybe it wasnt in fact COVID-19 that caused their death? Faulkner asked.

Despite the furrowed brows on Fox, however, Faulkners question isnt all that hard to answer. According to actual experts, if theres any problem with the COVID-19 death count, its not that its too high.

Its that its too low.

The first thing to note is that despite all the innuendo on Fox, there is nothing unusual about the way the media or the government is counting coronavirus deaths. In any crisis whether its a pandemic or a hurricane people with preexisting conditions will die. The standard for attributing such deaths to the current crisis is determining whether those people would have died when they did even if the current crisis had never happened.

When it comes to the coronavirus, the data is clear: COVID-19 is much more likely to kill you if your system has already been compromised by some other ailment, such as asthma, HIV, diabetes mellitus, chronic lung disease or cardiovascular disease. But that doesnt mean patients with those health problems would have died this week (or last week, or next month) no matter what. The vast majority of them probably wouldnt have. COVID-19 was the catalyst the reason they died now and not later.

Given the potentially large number of asymptomatic cases circulating in the population, its possible, as Hume suggested, that some number of people who never got sick from the coronavirus but tested positive and then died from a different underlying cause are being mistakenly counted as COVID-19 deaths. But that number is likely to be vanishingly small, for one simple reason: People who dont feel sick arent getting tested.

Much larger is the number of people who arent getting tested even though they have experienced symptoms. And thats why, contra Fox News, experts say the coronavirus death toll is almost certainly an undercount. As Birx noted, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention counts only deaths in which the presence of the coronavirus is confirmed by a test. But as the New York Times reported Sunday, inconsistent protocols, limited resources and a patchwork of decision making from one state or county to the next have made it impossible to test every likely coronavirus death. Victims with flulike symptoms in February and early March werent tested. Victims in rural areas, where coroners say they dont have the tools they need to detect the disease, still arent being tested. Victims who die at home or in overburdened nursing homes arent being tested.

Meanwhile, postmortem testing by medical examiners varies widely across the country, and some officials say testing the dead is a misuse of scarce resources that could be used on the living, the Washington Post reported over the weekend. In addition, some people who have the virus test negative, experts say.

You cant rely on just the laboratory-confirmed cases, Marc-Alain Widdowson, an epidemiologist who left the CDC last year and now serves as director of the Institute of Tropical Medicine Antwerp in Belgium, told the Post. Youre never going to apply the test on everybody who is ill and everybody who dies. So without doubt its a truism the number of deaths are underestimated globally.

When adjudicating debates over the data, its worth checking both sides sources. In the case of the Times, the Post and other mainstream news outlets, these sources include hospital officials, doctors, public health experts and medical examiners. Fox News sources, on the other hand, appear to be right-wing media figures such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin. People die on this planet every day, Limbaugh said during anApril 2 segmenton the massive speculation that virus patients may actually be dying because of other things; Levin has suggested that heart failure, heart disease, a heart attack may account for an inflated and extraordinarily misleading number of reported COVID-19 fatalities.

I have suspected this for weeks, Levin crowed Tuesday on Twitter.

Yet when Faulkner asked her panel Wednesday whether comorbidities were inflating the overall COVID-19 death count, Fox News medical contributor Dr. Janette Nesheiwat said, I dont think its going to be a huge discrepancy in the data in the end.

A day earlier, even Trump himself described the death count as very, very accurate.

When you say death counts, I think theyre pretty accurate on the death counts, Trump said. The death counts, I think, they are very, very accurate.

Cover thumbnail photo: Alex Brandon/AP, Roy Rochlin/Getty Images

_____

Click here for the latest coronavirus news and updates. According to experts, people over 60 and those who are immunocompromised continue to be the most at risk. If you have questions, please refer to the CDCs and WHOs resource guides.

Read more:

Go here to see the original:

Fox News says the coronavirus death toll is inflated. Experts say the opposite. - Yahoo News

JPMorgan Chase (JPM) CEO Jamie Dimon says there should have been a pandemic playbook to tackle the COVID-19 crisis, and the lack of preparation is part of a larger set of problems facing the country.

As a nation, we were clearly not equipped for this global pandemic, and the consequences have been devastating, Dimon wrote in his firms widely-read annual letter to JPMorgan shareholders.

The outspoken bank CEO went on to provide a laundry list of flaws in the U.S. beyond the lack of preparedness for the pandemic, from education to infrastructure, which he argues can be fixed in a non-partisan manner.

Dimon wrote: Our inner city schools dont graduate half of their students and dont give our children an education that leads to a livelihood; our healthcare system is increasingly costly with many of our citizens lacking any access; and nutrition and personal health arent even being taught at many schools. Obesity has become a national scourge. We have a litigation and regulatory system that cripples small businesses with red tape and bureaucracy; ineffective infrastructure planning and investment; and huge waste and inefficiency at both the state and federal levels. We have failed to put proper immigration policies in place; our social safety nets are poorly designed; and the share of wages for the bottom 30% of Americans has effectively been going down.

We need to acknowledge these problems and the damage they have done if we are ever going to fix them, he said.

[See Also: Mark Cuban: Capitalism will lift us up from where we are]

If theres a silver lining to the current coronavirus crisis, its forcing us to work together and improving civility and remind us that we live on one planet.

I am hoping that civility, humanity, empathy and the goal of improving America will break through. We have the resources to emerge from this crisis as a stronger country, Dimon added.

He went on to sing Americas praises as the most prosperous nation the world has ever seen built on plentiful natural resources; friendly neighboring countries; and rights and values including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and freedom of speech, religion and enterprise.

Jamie Dimon, Chairman & CEO of JP Morgan Chase & Co, speaks during the Bloomberg Global Business Forum in New York on September 25, 2019. (KENA BETANCUR/AFP via Getty Images)

These gifts have led to the most dynamic economy the world has ever seen one that nurtures vibrant businesses large and small, exceptional universities, and a welcoming environment for innovation, science and technology, he wrote. America was an idea borne on principles, not based upon historical relationships and tribal politics. It has and will continue to be a beacon of hope for the world and a magnet for the worlds best and brightest.

All said, the 64-year-old executive remains hopeful that this crisis can bring people together to recognize our shared responsibility, acting in a way that reflects the best of all of us.

As we have seen in past crises of this magnitude, there will come a time when we will look back and it will be clear how we at all levels of society, government, business, healthcare systems, and civic and humanitarian organizations could have been and will be better prepared to face emergencies of this scale. While the inclination of some will be to finger-point and look for blame, I hope we can avoid that. I also hope we can avoid people using times of crisis to argue for what they already believe. We need to demand more of ourselves and our leaders if we want to prevent or mitigate these disasters.

According to Dimon, attacking these problems would help the country prepare for these catastrophic events and create better economic outcomes for everyone and strengthen Americas role in the world.

Story continues

Read this article:

JPMorgans Dimon: 'There should have been a pandemic playbook' - Yahoo News

The Federal Reserve said it will temporarily ease its regulatory pressure on Wells Fargo to allow the massive lender to underwrite emergency small business loans under the Paycheck Protection Program.

The Fed announced Wednesday that it will allow Wells Fargo to exceed the asset cap that the central bank had imposed on the bank in 2018 after revelations that the company had opened millions of accounts in customers names without their permission.

Wells Fargo was barred from growing its balance sheet until it could prove to regulators that it had cleaned up its act. Two CEO changes later, the bank is still working through those efforts.

But the asset cap forced the company to quickly close its PPP application process over the weekend. The bank said its participation in the program would be limited to $10 billion because any lending in excess of that risked surpassing the Feds asset cap.

The Fed will now allow the San Francisco-based bank to exclude any PPP loans from any calculation of its asset growth. The Fed also said it would allow Wells Fargo to exclude any loans made under the forthcoming Main Street Business Lending Program, which the central bank has yet to set up.

Customer, some wearing face masks, line up outside a Wells Fargo branch in the Atwater Village neighborhood of Los Angeles on Friday, April 3, 2020, during the coronavirus outbreak. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Wells Fargo said it would re-open its PPP website for applications beginning Wednesday afternoon.

In a statement, Wells Fargo CEO Charlie Scharf said the order does not, and should not, in any way relieve us of our obligations under the consent order and committed to meeting the requirements under the Feds 2018 order.

While the asset cap does not specifically restrict Wells Fargos participation in this program, this action by the Federal Reserve will enable Wells Fargo to provide additional relief for our customers and communities, Scharf said.

The PPP cap hobbled the largest small business lender in the country. Wells Fargo has about 3 million small business clients and claims it loaned more money to small businesses than any other bank, based on data between 2002 and 2017.

The Fed had received calls to ease the asset cap on Wells Fargo as the logistical challenges with administering the $349 billion in PPP loans continued. Former Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Sheila Bair tweeted Monday that the Fed needed to be given latitude.

The Fed said nothing else about the February 2018 enforcement order is changed by the temporary tweak.

The Board continues to hold the company accountable for successfully addressing the widespread breakdowns that resulted in harm to consumers identified as part of that action and for completing the requirements of the agreement, the Fed said in a statement.

The Fed added that any benefits made from Wells Fargos PPP or Main Street Lending Program loans will be forfeited to the U.S. Treasury or to non-profits supporting small businesses.

Story updated at 1:15 p.m. ET on April 8 to include comment from Wells Fargo.

Brian Cheung is a reporter covering the Fed, economics, and banking for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter@bcheungz.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

Follow Yahoo Finance onTwitter,Facebook,Instagram,Flipboard,SmartNews,LinkedIn,YouTube, andreddit.

Read this article:

Federal Reserve to temporarily lift asset cap on Wells Fargo to spur emergency small business lending - Yahoo Finance

It may seem counterintuitive to watch big companies stepping up and hiring thousands of people as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on consumer demand in the United States.

But the numbers of companies opening their checkbooks is growing, in large part because it has to if critical business such as bringing food to supermarkets and delivering fast-food to homes is to be done during increasing quarantine situations. One of the latest mass hiring announcements comes from food and beverage giant PepsiCo (PEP).

The company said it will hire 6,000 full-time, full benefit workers across the U.S. in coming months. That adds to PepsiCos 90,000 strong workforce supporting its North American food and beverage businesses.

It [the hirings] will take pressure off the system and help relieve some of the much needed work that these individuals on the front-lines of our business are doing, explained PepsiCo North American Foods CEO Steven Williams on Yahoo Finances The First Trade. Williams also sought to reassure the public on food availability amid an explosion of photos on social media showing empty shelves of steak, chicken and pasta.

The U.S. food chain is incredible there is no shortage of supply in most food categories. Our sites are running 24/7, Williams, a 23-year veteran of PepsiCo, said.

PepsiCo isnt alone in the hiring push.

(Photo by Will Lester/MediaNews Group/Inland Valley Daily Bulletin via Getty Images)

Papa Johns said Monday its looking to hire 20,000 workers as its business experiences a pick-up with people ordering from home and sit-down eateries closed by state governments.

The industry is changing dramatically right now, where a lot of my peers that run dine-in restaurants are being asked to close their dining rooms and I feel really bad for them from a business standpoint. But from a community standpoint I feel its our responsibility that has more of a delivery model to pick up the slack and make sure the communities we live and work in have the food they need to get through this situation, Papa Johns CEO Rob Lynch said on The First Trade days before the hiring news became public.

Papa Johns rival Dominos Pizza is hiring 10,000 extra workers.

Meanwhile, CVS Health is looking to add 50,000 full-time and part-time workers to meed an influx of those sickened by coronavirus.

Despite the hirings, the U.S. jobs market is expected to take a severe hit in coming months from coronavirus aftershocks. Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis President James Bullard issued one of the more dire forecasts yet, predicting the U.S. jobless rate may soar to 30%.

Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and co-anchor of The First Trade at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.

Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance

Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, SmartNews, LinkedIn, YouTube, and reddit.

Read the rest here:

Why PepsiCo is hiring 6,000 full-time US workers during the coronavirus pandemic - Yahoo Money

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) seems to think that if given the choice, Americans 70 and over would be willing to risk getting coronavirus and possibly dying if it means stores re-open and the economy rebounds.

On Fox News Monday night, Patrick lamented not being asked how he would balance protecting some of the people most at-risk for contracting coronavirus adults 65 and over while keeping businesses up and running. "No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?" he said. "If that's the exchange, I'm all in."

The 69-year-old kept going, saying that "those of us who are 70 plus, we'll take care of ourselves, but don't sacrifice the country." This declaration "doesn't make me noble or brave or anything like that," Patrick said, "I just think there's lots of grandparents out there like me ... what we all care about and what we love more than anything are those children and I want to live smart and see through this, but I don't want the whole country to be sacrificed, and that's what I see."

Host Tucker Carlson asked Patrick for clarification, wanting to make sure he really was saying that "this disease could take your life, but that's not the scariest thing to you, there's something that would be worse than dying." Patrick paused, possibly realizing that he just volunteered as tribute in The Hunger Games: Coronavirus Edition, then responded, "Yeah." Watch the video below.

More stories from theweek.comTrump, whose hotel business is losing millions, says 'I'll be the oversight' of $500 billion coronavirus 'slush fund'People are dying after self-medicating with unproven COVID-19 drug promoted by TrumpTrump suggests he might soon prioritize the economy over public health

Read more:

Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick thinks grandparents should be willing to sacrifice their lives to save the economy - Yahoo News

An Italian doctor treating patients at the center of the worst coronavirus outbreak in Europe has issued a stark warning to other countries yet to be hit by the full force of the pandemic: lock down.

"We know what happens," Dr. Emanuela Catenacci told British broadcaster Sky News as she took a break from treating patients in an intensive care ward in Cremona Hospital in Lombardy. "Don't think it is happening here and it can't happen everywhere else ... because it will."

The death toll in Italy jumped by 793 to 4,825 on Saturday, by far the largest daily rise in absolute terms since the contagion emerged in the country a month ago. Last week, the number of those killed in Italy's outbreak surpassed those who died in China, where the disease emerged late last year.

While Lombardy, the center of the Italian outbreak, has been under lockdown for weeks, the central government has been criticized for not having acted quickly or forcefully enough to stem the outbreak. On Saturday, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte described the crisis as the worst the country has faced since the end of World War II.

In the hospital in Cremona, east of Milan, Dr. Leonor Tamayo told Sky News, which, like NBC News, is owned by Comcast Corp., that the staff was being overwhelmed by a "tsunami" of patients.

The hospital has run out of space to store bodies and has been forced to keep them in a nearby church.

Story continues

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Comparing the outbreak to a "war," she said: "We are here 12 hours a day. Only, we are going home for a few hours and come back here for the work, because we are here for the patients."

As they struggled to cope with a huge number of patients, doctors said they are trying to dispel the myth that only the elderly are dying from coronavirus-related illnesses.

"Fifty percent of our patients in the intensive care unit, which are the most severe patients, are over 65 years old," Dr. Antonio Pensenti, the head of the intensive care crisis unit in the northern region of Lombardy, said Saturday. "But that means that the other 50 percent of our patients are younger than 65."

Pensenti said his team was treating "quite a few" patients ages 20 to 30, who were in a "severe" condition like the older patients, although he added that the younger patients were "usually healthier and survived more."

Download the NBC News app for full coverage and alerts about the coronavirus outbreak

Taking further restrictive measures to stem the outbreak, Attilio Fontana, governor of Italy's Lombardy region, signed a new order Saturday imposing even more stringent restrictions on residents, banning outdoor exercise and implementing temperature checks at supermarkets and pharmacies.

Pharmacies, supermarkets, banks and public transport will continue to operate.

After the announcement, national Finance Minister Roberto Gualtieri wrote on his social media accounts that it was "a necessary decision" that could "save human lives."

On Sunday, the Russian military will start sending medical assistance to help Italy battle the coronavirus after receiving an order from President Vladimir Putin, Russia's Defense Ministry said in a statement, according to Reuters.

Putin spoke to Conte on Saturday, the Kremlin said in a statement, adding that Putin had offered his support and help in the form of mobile disinfection vehicles and specialists to aid the worst-hit Italian regions.

Visit link:

Act now, Italian doctor at center of outbreak warns the world - Yahoo News

A health worker checks a patient's temperature at a COVID-19 screening station at Watts Health Center. (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times)

Michael Levitt, a Nobel laureate and Stanford biophysicist, began analyzing the number of COVID-19 cases worldwide in January and correctly calculated that China would get through the worst of its coronavirus outbreak long before many health experts had predicted.

Now he foresees a similar outcome in the United States and the rest of the world.

While many epidemiologists are warning of months, or even years, of massive social disruption and millions of deaths, Levitt says the data simply don't support such a dire scenario especially in areas where reasonable social distancing measures are in place.

"What we need is to control the panic," he said. In the grand scheme, "we're going to be fine."

Here's what Levitt noticed in China: On Jan. 31, the country had 46 new deaths due to the novel coronavirus, compared with 42 new deaths the day before.

Although the number of daily deaths had increased, the rate of that increase had begun to ease off. In his view, the fact that new cases were being identified at a slower rate was more telling than the number of new cases itself. It was an early sign that the trajectory of the outbreak had shifted.

Think of the outbreak as a car racing down an open highway, he said. Although the car is still gaining speed, it's not accelerating as rapidly as before.

This suggests that the rate of increase in the number of deaths will slow down even more over the next week, Levitt wrote in a report he sent to friends Feb. 1 that was widely shared on Chinese social media. And soon, he predicted, the number of deaths would be decreasing every day.

Three weeks later, Levitt told the China Daily News that the virus' rate of growth had peaked. He predicted that the total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in China would end up around 80,000, with about 3,250 deaths.

This forecast turned out to be remarkably accurate: As of March 16, China had counted a total of 80,298 cases and 3,245 deaths in a nation of nearly 1.4 billion people where roughly 10 million die every year. The number of newly diagnosed patients has dropped to around 25 a day, with no cases of community spread reported since Wednesday.

Story continues

Now Levitt, who received the 2013 Nobel Prize in chemistry for developing complex models of chemical systems, is seeing similar turning points in other nations, even those that did not instill the draconian isolation measures that China did.

He analyzed data from 78 countries that reported more than 50 newcases of COVID-19 every day and sees "signs of recovery" in many of them. He's not focusing on the total number ofcases in a country, but on the number of new cases identified every day and, especially, on the change in that number from one day to the next.

"Numbers are still noisy, but there are clear signs of slowed growth."

In South Korea, for example, newly confirmed cases are being added to the country's total each day, but the daily tally has dropped in recent weeks, remaining below 200. That suggests the outbreak there may be winding down.

In Iran, the number of newly confirmed COVID-19 cases per day remained relatively flat last week, going from 1,053 last Monday to 1,028 on Sunday. Although that's still a lot of new cases, Levitt said, the pattern suggests the outbreak there "is past the halfway mark."

Italy, on the other hand, looks like it's still on the upswing. In that country, the number of newly confirmed cases increased on most days this past week.

In places that have managed to recover from an initial outbreak, officials must still contend with the fact that the coronavirus may return. China is now fighting to stop new waves of infection coming in from places where the virus is spreading out of control. Other countries are bound to face the same problem.

Levitt acknowledges that his figures are messy and that the official case counts in many areas are too low because testing is spotty. But even with incomplete data, "a consistent decline means there's some factor at work that is not just noise in the numbers," he said.

In other words, as long as the reasons for the inaccurate case counts remain the same, it's still useful to compare them from one day to the next.

The trajectory of deaths backs up his findings, he said, since it follows the same basic trends as the new confirmed cases. So do data from outbreaks in confined environments, such as the one on the Diamond Princess cruise ship. Out of 3,711 people on board, 712 were infected, and eight died.

This unintended experiment in coronavirus spread will help researchers estimate the number of fatalities that would occur in a fully infected population, Levitt said. For instance, the Diamond Princess data allowed him to estimate that being exposed to the new coronavirus doubles a person's risk of dying in the next two months. Most people have an extremely low risk of death in a two-month period, so that risk remains extremely low even when doubled.

Nicholas Reich, a biostatistician at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said the analysis was thought-provoking, if nothing else.

"Time will tell if Levitt's predictions are correct," Reich said. "I do think that having a wide diversity of experts bringing their perspectives to the table will help decision-makers navigate the very tricky decisions they will be facing in the upcoming weeks and months."

Levitt said he's in sync with those calling for strong measures to fight the outbreak. The social-distancing mandates are critical particularly the ban on large gatherings because the virus is so new that the population has no immunity to it, and a vaccine is still many months away. "This is not the time to go out drinking with your buddies," he said.

Getting vaccinated against the flu is important, too, because a coronavirus outbreak that strikes in the middle of a flu epidemic is much more likely to overwhelm hospitals and increases the odds that the coronavirus goes undetected. This was probably a factor in Italy, a country with a strong anti-vaccine movement, he said.

But he also blames the media for causing unnecessary panic by focusing on the relentless increase in the cumulative number of cases and spotlighting celebrities who contract the virus. By contrast, the flu has sickened 36 million Americans since September and killed an estimated 22,000, according to the CDC, but those deaths are largely unreported.

Levitt fears the public health measures that have shut down large swaths of the economy could cause their own health catastrophe, as lost jobs lead to poverty and hopelessness. Time and again, researchers have seen that suicide rates go up when the economy spirals down.

The virus can grow exponentially only when it is undetected and no one is acting to control it, Levitt said. That's what happened in South Korea last month, when it ripped through a closed-off cult that refused to report the illness.

"People need to be considered heroes for announcing they have this virus," he said.

The goal needs to be better early detection not just through testing but perhaps with body-temperature surveillance, which China is implementing and immediate social isolation.

While the COVID-19 fatality rate appears to be significantly higher than that of the flu, Levitt says it is, quite simply put, "not the end of the world."

"The real situation is not as nearly as terrible as they make it out to be," he said.

Dr. Loren Miller, a physician and infectious diseases researcher at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, said it's premature to draw any conclusions either rosy or bleak about the course the pandemic will take.

"There's a lot of uncertainty right now," he said. "In China they nipped it in the bud in the nick of time. In the U.S. we might have, or we might not have. We just don't know."

Continue reading here:

Why this Nobel laureate predicts a quicker coronavirus recovery: 'We're going to be fine' - Yahoo News

WASHINGTON Surgeon General Jerome Adams warned Monday that the coronavirus outbreak will worsen this week and said people across the country are not taking the threat seriously enough.

"I want America to understand this week, it's going to get bad," Adams said in an interview on the "TODAY" show.

The disease is spreading, he said, because many people especially young people are not abiding by guidance to stay at home and practice social distancing.

"Right now, there are not enough people out there who are taking this seriously," he said.

Full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

Adams said young people are flocking to the beaches in California and people are still heading to the National Mall in Washington to view the cherry blossom trees that bloom each year. He warned that young people need to understand that they can contract COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, and that they can be hospitalized and potentially die from it.

"Everyone needs to act as if they have the virus right now. So, test or no test, we need you to understand you could be spreading it to someone else. Or you could be getting it from someone else. Stay at home," he said.

Asked about growing pressure for President Donald Trump to use the Defense Production Act to force companies to mass produce critical supplies, Adams suggested that it's not necessary at this point.

Download the NBC News app for full coverage of the coronavirus outbreak

"Here's the thing that people don't understand. You don't need to compel someone to do something they are already doing," he said, adding that the administration is already working with companies like Honeywell and Hanes that are already producing large quantities of needed items.

"The other important point is that we're not going to ventilator our way out of this problem. We're not going to treat our way out of this problem," he said. "The way you stop the spread of an infectious disease like this is with mitigation measures and preventing people from getting it in the first place."

Go here to read the rest:

'This week, it's going to get bad': Surgeon general says people need to take coronavirus seriously - Yahoo News

This is not the best time to check on your 401(k) account. The global coronavirus crisis has upended businesses and despite some drastic government action, the stock market is in shambles. After you reset your password to restore access, you will see nothing but very bad news.

The S&P 500 index (^GSPC) is down a coronary-inducing 31% off its February highs. That means if youre young and your 401(k) mostly has stocks (lets say you own S&P 500 index funds), youre probably down around 30%.

Read more: 401(k) plans and how they work

As you get older, financial advisers typically advise transitioning out of more volatile and risky assets like stocks and into the safety of bonds. For a retirement account like an IRA or a 401(k), younger people are very stock-heavy sometimes 100% invested in stocks, because they have a long way to go until theyll need the money and the market will have enough time to correct and move higher, which they almost always do.

If you have a five- or 10- or 15-year horizon, this is probably a blip in the road, said Great Hill Capital Chairman Thomas Hayes on Yahoo Finances The Ticker. You probably want to hang tight. If youre adding every single month, thats a good thing youre buying less expensively for the long-term.

For people at retirement age, the numbers are different its often 55% stocks and 45% bonds, but theres no hard allocation for everyone.

Some people also add real estate and cash to the asset allocation pie chart. (Getty Creative)

The point is, everyone usually chooses an asset allocation thats appropriate for their age, though many people do it via a target-date fund, which does it automatically. (You just give them your money, and they follow a glide path that unloads stock exposure slowly until you die.)

If you dont have a target date fund, its not automatic. Which brings us to probably the one reason you might want to peep your 401(k) if youre a long way from using it. The stock markets craziness could have completely thrown off your allocations. It might be time to rebalance.

One of the things that we like to do in these periods of dislocation is rebalance, said Hayes.

If youre trying to have your money 75% stocks and 25% bonds, but the stocks just got hammered 30%, you might be left with just 68% in stockswhich may not be where you want to be.

If youre looking long term, Hayes said, fixing your allocation when stocks fall means buying them inexpensively for the long term.

You may want to check in with your financial adviser and say does this make sense to rebalance some of the portfolio, Hayes said.

Rebalancing can be just as easy as exchanging one stock index fund for a bond index fund or selling a fund for cash. Most financial services platforms have a handy tool that can show you what your current allocations are.

Conversely, if your stocks are doing really well, your portfolio might hold 85% stocks, and need to swap a few of them out for bonds to get back to your target allocation.

Rebalancing, however, can be especially important for people close to retirement or in itpeople who will need to draw on their investments. Because stocks are more volatile, not planning properly and having a suboptimal asset allocation could mean being forced to sell when the market is low.

If youre coming up on retirement, definitely have a conversation with your financial adviser and have some things in safer positions so that you can have access to the income in the short term in the next 12, 24 some-odd months, Hayes said.

-

Ethan Wolff-Mannis a writer at Yahoo Finance focusing on consumer issues, personal finance, retail, airlines, and more. Follow him on Twitter@ewolffmann.

Follow Yahoo Finance onTwitter,Facebook,Instagram,Flipboard,LinkedIn,YouTube, andreddit.

See original here:

The one reason you might want to check your 401(k) - Yahoo Money