New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has imposed a lockdown unlike anything in the U.S.
As of Friday, the nation of 4.8 million people had 1,456 confirmed cases and only 17 deaths trib.al/izkPzPh
New Zealanders aren’t allowed to drive except in emergencies and can only be out of the house for an hour a day, to get exercise or to buy essentials.
This one-hour limit is enforced by the police trib.al/0joDceO
At the pharmacy, only one person is allowed in at a time, and clerks retrieve the goods so customers never touch anything until they return home.
The wait to get in a grocery store is around an hour. If you don’t have a mask and gloves, you won't get in trib.al/0joDceO
🇳🇿In New Zealand...
🚫Every restaurant is closed.
🚫There’s no take-out.
🚫There are no deliveries.
🚫E-commerce has been halted.
Food-processing companies still operate, but virtually every other form of blue-collar work is shut down trib.al/0joDceO
Citizens are surviving financially with emergency checks from the government.
Essential workers in New Zealand are truly essential. Although there are Covid-19 clusters — a church; a rest home; a wedding party — workplaces have largely been virus-free trib.al/0joDceO
🇺🇸Compare that with the U.S.:
✅Pork plants remain open.
✅Navy shipbuilders are still running.
✅Boeing is making employees come in.
Many "essential businesses" continue to run as if nothing were amiss trib.al/0joDceO
📦For FedEx and UPS, it's business as normal...
Except that Covid-19 cases keep popping up. In Houston alone at least 25 package workers have come down with the virus, as well as 19 people who work for Amazon trib.al/0joDceO
At Amazon headquarters in Seattle, the white-collar employees are working from home.
But hundreds of thousands of blue-collar employees working in the company’s enormous warehouses are still going to work every day trib.al/0joDceO
Is Amazon shipping essential goods? Of course.
You can get toilet paper and paper towels from Amazon. But it’s also still selling everything else, much of which is not essential at all trib.al/0joDceO
The U.S. has categorized a ridiculous number of businesses that are “essential.” But at what cost?
Thousands of other workers are putting themselves on the line for no good reason other than their bosses are demanding it trib.al/0joDceO
Following New Zealand’s lead would mean white-collar workers in the U.S. would have to make some small sacrifices.
But if we return to what essential truly means, we may also save lives trib.al/0joDceO
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Today you can be identified by an array of digital representations of your face via technology applications, which will soon scan the faces of U.S. citizens who want to manage their taxes online with the Internal Revenue Service trib.al/cZHOMM8
On the surface, these services are simple, but the number of companies processing faceprints is also growing.
This raises some hard questions about how we want to be identified — and even classified — in the future trib.al/qoArEiC
A way to imagine today’s complex web of facial recognition vendors is to think of the Internet as being like The National Portrait Gallery in London.
The public portraits freely on display are like the billions of photos people post on social media trib.al/qoArEiC
If TikTok videos are an indicator of what’s trending, the beauty trend known as “slugging” has gone mainstream.
Over 100 million viewers have watched clips describing the practice, which involves going to bed at night with your face slathered in Vaseline trib.al/DFjxRAH
The chemist Robert Augustus Chesebrough is pleased to see that another generation has rediscovered the wonder-working powers of Vaseline, his beloved invention.
This gelatinous substance has been a staple in a range of beauty treatments trib.al/G7wBxcC
Vaseline’s story begins with the discovery of crude oil deposits in Pennsylvania in 1859.
Among those drawn to the fields was Chesebrough, a chemist from Brooklyn who worked in kerosene refining trib.al/G7wBxcC
At as little as $5 apiece, rapid antigen tests have become the frontline tool for governments and institutions to quickly check whether a person may be infected with Covid-19 trib.al/i1474MK
The process is simple: Stick the provided cotton swab up each nostril until you meet resistance, twirl it a few times, and swirl the tip in a small tube of liquid before putting a few drops onto a test strip.
It’s taken time for governments to accept rapid antigen Covid tests in full.
Their reticence is understandable because RATs aren’t as sensitive as RT-PCR tests, meaning that a positive case may not always be picked up trib.al/1rtTK2t
We’re already fighting the next global health emergency: Growing antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
Common ailments such as UTIs and sepsis are increasingly able to tough out the drugs developed against them. Some develop into superbugs that defy treatment trib.al/Z4TUOmz
Antimicrobials is the catch-all term for the many antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals and other drugs that prevent infections in:
Pathogens naturally develop resistance to antimicrobials as they evolve, but thanks to an overuse of antibiotics and other conditions, the speed of such resistance has become a major global health issue trib.al/Z4TUOmz
During each recession for the last 40 years, a sizable number of men — more than women — have left the labor force and not come back
So far, this has been true for the Covid pandemic , despite rising wages and the best job market in decades trib.al/2Ql0F7u
The male prime-age labor force participation rate — the share of men aged 25 to 54 who are either working or looking for work — has fallen over the years from 96% in 1970 to about 89% in 2020 before the pandemic trib.al/gi8P7HM
Less-educated men are the most likely to drop out of the workforce.
The rate of prime-age male high school graduates in the labor force is still 1.37 percentage points lower than before Covid. Only 84% of men without college degrees are in the labor force trib.al/gi8P7HM