September 2 coronavirus news

Ford is looking to cut 1,400 white collar jobs in a cost-savings move.

The automaker sent out letters to employees Wednesday, saying that salaried staff eligible for retirement would be getting early retirement offers next week. Those who take the offer by Oct. 23 would be leaving the company by the end of the year.

The auto industry has been hit hard by the economic downturn associated with the Covid-19 pandemic. Car sales are down significantly as millions of US workers have lost their jobs, and millions more are working from home and not in need of a new car to get to and from work.

Ford posted a 50% drop in revenue in the second quarter, and it would have lost $1.9 billion in the period without a paper gain from its investment in Argo AI, a separate company working on self-driving car technology in which Ford and Volkswagen have a joint stake.

The company has 30,000 salaried US staff and 56,000 US hourly factory workers. It had 190,000 employees worldwide at the start of the year. It has not had any layoffs of hourly workers this year, unlike rival General Motors, in response to the drop in sales from the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ford said its cost-cutting move is part of a five-year, $11 billion restructuring that was first announced two years ago. Most of the job cuts from that effort is expected to be focused on less profitable overseas operations.

Ford's stock was flat Wednesday morning.

The first confirmed case of Covid-19 has been reported at Moria refugee camp on the Greek island of Lesbos, Oxfam and the Greek Council for Refugees (GCR) said Wednesday.

The Greek Ministry of Migration and Asylum also said in a statement on Wednesday that the patient is a 40-year-old Somali refugee. The Ministry said he “returned illegally to Moria, where he had been staying in a tent outside the existing fence, despite being issued an exit decision” and leaving the camp on July 17. He is currently being treated at the hospital of Mytilene, Lesbos.

The entire Moria camp has now been placed under quarantine for 14 days, the Ministry added. A team from Greece’s Public Health Organization is going to Moria to track down the patient’s contacts, the statement said.

She warned “without immediate and drastic intervention, this will turn into a devastating health crisis that could cause the deaths of hundreds of already weakened people”.

At the end of August, Moria camp had close to 12,000 people – about 40% of them children – living in a space built for fewer than 3,000 people, the charity said.

“There are up to 160 people using the same dirty toilet and over 500 people per every shower. In some parts of the camp, 325 people share one tap and there is no soap. 15 to 20 people can live in a single shipping container, or in tents or makeshift shelters,” the statement added.

She called for everyone in Moria to be tested for the coronavirus, and for positive cases to be isolated immediately in proper facilities. "The Greek government and its EU partners need to take immediate action and transfer everyone out of the ‘hotspot’ to suitable accommodation on the Greek mainland and in other EU member states," Kafkoutsou urged.

Greece has so far registered 10,524 coronavirus cases and 271 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

Public trust around coronavirus vaccines is dropping quickly, according to Dr. Seema Yasmin, a former CDC disease detective, who is tracking this in real time.

“I have concerns about how the trials for vaccines are being communicated,” she said about her observations from her work on misinformation and disinformation particularly around vaccines.

In a recent interview, Dr. Anthony Fauci said a Covid-19 vaccine could be available earlier than expected if ongoing clinical trials produce overwhelmingly positive results. Dr. Yasmin agrees, however, she points out that it will not lead to widespread usage if there is no public trust.

“My concern is that dropping credibility in science and scientists, in the FDA, which already this year has fast tracked two emergency use authorizations and very questionably,” she added.

Some background: Three Covid-19 vaccine candidates are in large-scale US trials. British drugmaker AstraZeneca said Monday it has started Phase 3 trials of its experimental coronavirus vaccine in the US, becoming the third company to start late-stage trials of a vaccine to prevent Covid-19.

The vaccine, developed in partnership with Oxford University, has the backing of the US federal government. Rivals Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTec already have Phase 3 trials under way, also with federal government funding.

The World Health Organization cautioned countries Monday against rushing to develop coronavirus vaccines and advised taking great care in granting emergency use authorization — a quicker route to getting a vaccine in wide use than full approval, which can take many months.

With reporting from CNN's Andrea Kane

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Some voters who cast their ballot for Donald Trump in 2016 say the coronavirus pandemic has influenced their decision to vote for Joe Biden in November.

Lori McCammon said Trump “has not taken one ounce of responsibility” for the Covid-19 pandemic. 

“From day one, we should’ve a national mandate on wearing masks. We could’ve had this thing under control in six weeks if he had just done his job,” McCammon said on CNN’s “New Day.”

But L.A. Key, a Trump voter, thinks the President has done an “amazing job” responding to the virus and said that she doesn’t believe that 180,000 Americans have died of Covid-19.

Voter Michele Morrow, a nurse, said the pandemic is Trump’s “greatest achievement,” citing his implementation of travel restrictions in February.

Trump has said that he “closed the border” from China and Europe. But according to a CNN fact check, that is misleading: 

Both policies contained multiple exemptions, including for US citizens and permanent residents; the Europe policy exempted entire countries. Only foreign nationals who had been in China, Europe's Schengen area, the UK or Ireland within the past 14 days were outright banned from entering the US. 

Watch more:

Wall Street opened higher today after starting the month off with records from both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite.

Investors are hopeful Congress will agree to a new stimulus package soon after Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said yesterday "a bipartisan agreement still should be reached." 

Even a disappointing ADP employment report wasn't enough to taint the mood. Economists had predicted 950,000 new jobs in the private payrolls report for August, but ADP reported just 428,000 jobs were added last month.

The government's monthly jobs report is out this Friday. The ADP and government jobs numbers have differed widely throughout the pandemic, although many economists agree that the rebound is slowing down.

 Here is where things stood at opening:

Three unnamed soccer players with European Cup finalists Paris Saint-Germain have tested positive for Covid-19, the club announced on Wednesday.

It comes after the club announced on Monday that two unnamed players tested positive for Covid-19 and had subsequently gone into quarantine.

The defending French champions are set to open their 2020-21 Ligue 1 campaign away at RC Lens on Sept. 10 before facing Olympique de Marseille at home at the Parc des Princes in Paris three days later, on Sept. 13.

PSG only finished the 2019-2020 season on Aug. 23, losing to German champions Bayern Munich 1-0 in the Champions League final, the biggest club match in world soccer. Some of soccer's biggest stars, including Brazil's Neymar and France's Kylian Mbappé, play for the Qatari-owned club.

AMC said that 70% of its theaters — or 420 total — will be open by this weekend, including the first AMC theater in San Diego, California.

AMC announced Thursday that it will reopen more than 140 theaters this week. This move comes right before "Tenet" comes out in the US this Labor Day weekend — one of the first big movies to hit theaters since the pandemic began. The Christopher Nolan film had a big international debut last weekend. The film was originally set to open in July, but was delayed because of “continued uncertainty.”

Major theater chains are attempting to reopen during the pandemic, but it’s difficult to entice audiences to return to theaters without a new major blockbuster to sell tickets.

Some background: AMC first reopened more than 100 theaters in the US on August 20. AMC CEO Adam Aron said in a statement that "the first two weekends of operations have exceeded our expectations in terms of guests returning to the movies." Aron added that the company will continue to reopen theaters in a way that is both "responsible and welcoming.”

The world's largest movie theater chain says it expects to make more announcements about additional theater reopenings in California, New Jersey and other areas of the country in the coming weeks.

A White House coronavirus task force report sent to officials in Iowa this week warns of dire new case increases across rural and urban areas of the state and calls for a mask mandate, the closure of bars and a plan from universities as the pandemic intensifies in the Midwest.

CNN has obtained the nine-page Aug. 30 report for the state, first reported by the Des Moines Register, from the Iowa Department of Public Health. The task force releases state-by-state reports each week to governors' offices, and has so far declined to make them publicly available.

The report says that Iowa is in the task force-defined "red zone" and warns that the state has the highest rate of cases in the US, which increased by 77.4% from the previous week.

The report offers recommendations to Iowa, including:

The three counties with the highest numbers of cases also have large student populations, including Iowa State University in Story County and the University of Iowa in Johnson County, as well as Polk County, which contains Iowa's largest metro area, Des Moines.

The report comes less than two weeks before Iowa State University will welcome crowds to its stadium for its season opener football game. Though social distancing will be observed, a letter from the school's athletic director estimated "there will be approximately 25,000 fans at the first game." The task force report suggests red zone counties should limit gatherings to 10 or fewer people.

Here is a look at how the percentage of new positive tests have grown over time in the state, according to data from the Covid Tracking Project:

The ADP employment report released today was worse than expected, as just 428,000 jobs were added last month. Economists had predicted 950,000 new jobs in the private payrolls report for August.

The report showed that large companies had the strongest job gains with the leisure and hospitality sector adding 129,000, the most of any. The spring lockdown decimated the industry as hotels and restaurants shut their doors while flights were grounded.

What this means: For those watching these figures as an indicator for Friday's government jobs report, disappointment could be on the horizon. Economists expect 1.4 million jobs to be added to the economy in August, bringing the unemployment rate to 9.8%. It would be the first time since April that the jobless rate is below the peak of the Great Recession.

July's job data showed the US labor market’s third straight month of solid improvement from the depths of the pandemic. However millions of Americans who lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic remain unemployed.

Economists are worried that the tepid recovery in the US job market could run out of steam this fall should coronavirus cases surge again just as federal stimulus money runs out. The world's top developed economies are all officially in a recession. What happens next is far from certain.