Tag Archives: pandemic

Comment on this story Comment Google is famous for its cafeterias, which serve its legions of programmers and product managers everything from vegan poke to gourmet tacos — free. But the cooks and servers behind those meals are generally contractors who work for other companies, and do not get the generous perks and benefits reserved for Google employees. So over the past few years, thousands of them have unionized, securing higher wages, retirement benefits and free platinum health care… Source link

The U.S. economy added 528,000 jobs in July, more than double the number economists had expected. This staggering increase in employment completes a milestone for the U.S. economy: Pre-pandemic employment is now fully restored. In February 2020, the last month before the COVID-19 pandemic tipped the U.S. economy into recession, there were 152.504 million people employed in the U.S. As of July 2022, 152.536 million people in the U.S. were working. And despite the labor market contraction during… Source link

Elon Musk at the 2022 Met Gala.Andrew Kelly/Reuters Elon Musk said Covid-19 lockdowns “tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard.” Working from home didn’t make workers less productive, three economists told Insider. The only constraint on productivity was when workers had children at home they needed to look after. Elon Musk is not a fan of remote work. In the early hours of Wednesday, Musk commented on a tweet which appeared to show an email from himself to Tesla… Source link

The shock of the war in Ukraine and China’s zero-COVID policy continues to signal that the pandemic supply chain woes are far from being done. “We have a huge supply shock with what’s going on with the war,” Citi Global Head of Public Sector Group Julie Monaco told Yahoo Finance (video above) at the 2022 World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. “So that exasperated things. … We have to remind people all the time: This pandemic is not over. Certainly in China, it’s very disruptive… Source link

This week, COVID czar Dr. Anthony Fauci took the medical community aback when he announced that the U.S. is “out of the pandemic phase.” He said it as the U.S. neared its millionth COVID death, and cases are once again on the rise. “We are certainly, right now, out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci told PBS News Hour’s Judy Woodruff on Tuesday. “We don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We… Source link

Public discussion of “herd immunity” often treats it like an on-off switch: When the U.S. reaches herd immunity, the crisis will be over; until then, the country has little immunity from Covid-19. But that’s not right. Herd immunity is more like a light dimmer. The more people develop immunity — either from having been infected or from being vaccinated — the less easily the virus will spread. Nearly 30 percent of Americans have now had the virus, according to Youyang Gu, a data… Source link

Construction on Google’s expanding campus in Kirkland (Google photo) The pandemic may have disrupted hiring patterns in tech, and pushed some workers out of coastal metro areas. But Google still is growing fast in Washington state, according to a new economic analysis released by the search giant today. According to the report, Google now employs more than 7,200 full time workers in Washington state, most of whom are based in engineering centers in Seattle and… Source link

Splurging on a night out at a restaurant is coming back in fashion for some, according to a new survey from Evercore ISI. The survey found a COVID-era record 74% of people say they are comfortable eating at a restaurant, above the prior high of 70% last summer. “We believe much of this increase is due to the recent 94% reduction in COVID cases in the U.S. Importantly, COVID fatigue also seems to be impacting comfort levels — comfort is higher than at any point in time since the start of the… Source link

COVID-19 cases may be declining globally, but the world is far from out of the pandemic woods. The U.K., for example, is seeing a surge from the Omicron sub-variant, which has also been reported in New York, causing health experts to be wary of rollbacks in COVID-prevention strategies nationally. It’s why a group of top public experts, including former advisers on President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 transition team, have created a new roadmap with recommendations for the government and private… Source link

The pandemic has been transformational for many businesses, but few can boast near-global domination the way Pfizer (PFE) can. The Pfizer/BioNTech (BNTX) vaccine accounts for 70% of all doses in the U.S. and E.U., as of February 5, according to CEO Albert Bourla Tuesday. He added that the vaccine and other Pfizer medicines reached 1.4 billion patients in 2021, or about one in six people on Earth. As a result, the company saw a 92% increase in operational revenue growth in 2021 alone, of which… Source link