covid

Insurance

All the countries UK holidaymakers can visit now without quarantine or Covid certificate

By Gertrude Aziz 3 days ago

The list of countries that Britons can travel to without having to quarantine for 14 days on return is sadly diminishing week by week.

The latest to go is the Portuguese mainland. As of 12 September, England and Northern Ireland followed Scotland and Wales in removing the country from the travel corridors list.

Other removals included Hungary, Réunion and French Polynesia.

France, Malta and the Netherlands were removed from the exemption list in the middle of August, alongside Monaco, Switzerland, Turks & Caicos and Aruba.

They joined Andorra, Belgium and the Bahamas, as well as Spain, Serbia and Luxembourg.

All of these destinations were previously given the green light for travel, but have been removed after reporting spikes in coronavirus cases.

To confuse things further, holidaymakers have to check two different government lists: the Department for Transport’s travel corridors list (so you don’t have to quarantine

Business

Off the road since March, Miami-Dade’s scooter business awaits a COVID reprieve

By Gertrude Aziz 1 week ago

In a Little Haiti warehouse, a good chunk of Miami’s once bustling scooter fleet sits in the dark, its pink wheels collecting dust.

Diego Perelmuter’s job is to tend to the hundreds of scooters Lyft dumped here on March 18, when Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez used emergency powers to order a halt to all bike and scooter rentals as a way to slow the spread of COVID-19.

It was the fifth of 83 emergency orders Gimenez would sign over six months, making scooter rentals one of the first industries to close in Miami-Dade. Unlike restaurants, malls, massage studios, barbershops, hotels, gyms, casinos and tattoo parlors, scooter rentals remain banned in Miami-Dade.

“Miami was one of our best performing markets,” said Perelmuter, an Aventura resident and Lyft’s operations manager for the area. The warehouse used to be be bustling with vans unloading dead scooters needing charges and loading powered ones ready

Finance

Cities after COVID & GM’s Electric Vehicle Push

By Gertrude Aziz 1 week ago

Welcome to the Capital Note, a newsletter about finance and economics. On the menu today: work from home, GM’s investment in Nikola, and a look at the Vegas-Wall Street pipeline.

Cities in the Post-COVID Era

With Labor Day now past, it will be interesting to see whether there will be a mass return to the office (at least here in New York City, wandering around Midtown late last week, things didn’t — whatever the Daily Mail might claim — look post-apocalyptic, but it was still more than a little forlorn).

Writing for the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, Mark Mills takes a look at the debate over working from home — a concept he broadens out to working from anywhere (WFA), and, I think, gives some comfort to those of us still living in the city.

Mills starts by examining some of the survey data used as evidence that

Insurance

Workers Reveal Disney Is Covering Up Its COVID Cases

By Gertrude Aziz 2 weeks ago

Matt Stroshane/Walt Disney World Resort via Getty Images

In early July, the Walt Disney Company reopened parts of two amusement parks: Disney World near Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California. The former reopened to house the tightly controlled 13-week experiment known as the NBA Bubble, in which staff, players, coaches, and personnel adhered to strict social distancing guidelines and isolation requirements, paired with regular on-site testing. The latter welcomed back its workers with less grandeur, opening up a sprawling outdoor shopping district called Downtown Disney, with a select staff of several hundred.

Though they reopened within days of each other, the two parks worked with wildly different resources. Unlike the Bubble, the Downtown Disney district had no on-site testing. In a letter to the unions in June, Disney Labor Relations Director Bill Pace called testing “not viable” and prone to “false negatives,” in spite of the fact that it

Personal

US to shun world effort to develop vaccine; Here’s who should get first vaccinations; Fauci debunks COVID theories

By Gertrude Aziz 2 weeks ago

A Trump administration official said Tuesday that the U.S. will go it alone in developing a coronavirus vaccine, shunning the worldwide cooperative effort.

And the reopening efforts in the U.S. continue. California’s latest plan drew scrutiny, Florida’s governor vowed no more lockdowns, and New York City delayed in-school learning Tuesday, one day after the nation reached 6 million confirmed cases of coronavirus.

A new month could bring new hope to Californians who suffered through their deadliest COVID-19 month in August. The state reported 3,707 deaths connected to COVID-19 in the last month, up 18% over July. But infection and hospitalization rates have been in decline in recent weeks, and average daily deaths also began dropping, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis.

In Iowa, the nation’s latest hot spot, Iowa State University is planning to have around 25,000 fans at its home opener Sept. 12. White House coronavirus experts have

Finance

California inks deal for new system after COVID data backlog

By Gertrude Aziz 2 weeks ago

LOS ANGELES (AP) — About a month after California disclosed its COVID-19 tracking system had produced inaccurate case numbers, state officials awarded a $15 million contract Tuesday to a software company to design a successor capable of collecting greater amounts of more detailed data on the spread of the virus.

Health and Human Services Secretary Mark Ghaly said in an online briefing that the current system was not designed to handle the work that came with the outbreak in California, which has more cases than any other state.

The replacement, to be developed by OptumInsight Inc., will be “built to really handle that high volume of test results, both negatives and positives,” he said.

Paired with a recently announced expansion in testing, the state intends to collect more data, packed with greater detail. That should allow officials to gather a greater range of demographic information, that in turn will allow

Money

Locked out by COVID, refugees’ lives on hold

By Gertrude Aziz 3 weeks ago

By Edward McAllister

DAKAR (Reuters) – When Michelle Alfaro left her office at the United Nations in Geneva on March 13, her job finding homes for the world’s most vulnerable refugees was under control.

Four days later, the new coronavirus had knocked it into chaos. Governments across the world announced border closures, lockdowns and flight cancellations. The United Nations was forced to suspend the programme.

“Everything collapsed that week,” said Alfaro, who manages resettlements for the U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR.

Millions of people have been thrown into limbo by the new coronavirus. Those Alfaro works with had been promised escape from war, violence, conflict or persecution. After submitting to a review process that can take years, and winning a chance to make new lives in countries such as the United States and Canada, thousands suddenly learned – often by phone – their flights would no longer take off.

Ubah Mohamed

Business

When Covid Upends Your Small Business

By Gertrude Aziz 3 weeks ago

(Bloomberg Opinion) — On March 16, Lisa Eskenazi Boyer was working up a sweat with her students one last time at her bustling Queens, New York, fitness studio. Covid-19 lockdown orders were about to take effect, and Simply Fit Astoria — along with all other local gyms — would have to close its doors later that night. She never expected it to be for good.

When Eskenazi, 37, first started Simply Fit, “boutique gyms” weren’t yet part of New York City lingo. It was 2009, the height of a different crisis. It took a costly renovation, which Eskenazi describes as “the price of a house,” to convert a Byzantine woodworking factory into a sleek studio outfitted with spin bikes, lockers and other equipment for its heart-pumping classes.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo allowed upstate gyms to reopen this week; gyms in New York City are expected to follow in early

Finance

under-25s fear Covid jobs squeeze

By Gertrude Aziz 3 weeks ago

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His bank balance was in the red, but Eóin Forker was determined to make it in the music industry. It was the summer of 2019, and Forker, who is 22 and from Armagh, secured an internship with a small record label. For £1,300 a month, he worked 30-40 hours a week meeting artists, running errands and attending studio sessions, all while living in London, one of the most expensive cities in the world.

“I have no degree behind me,” Forker says, explaining his decision to take a job that paid so little, “so I thought, I would rather take this chance and get something better out of it.” Because he didn’t have the deposit for a house-share, Forker stayed in backpacker hostels, which afforded him no privacy. His youthful ebullience began to coarsen into something more jaded. “I would