Cases: For the third day in a row, Pasadena health officials on Thursday detected a single new COVID-19 case in the city.
It had been two weeks since the city reported a fatality, according to Pasadena Public Health Department data.
In total, the city has recorded 11,317 infections and 349 deaths.
Over the prior week, an average of 1.9 Pasadenans contracted the virus daily, according to city data.
The Los Angeles County Department of Public Health reported 249 infections and eight deaths on Thursday, bringing the county’s pandemic totals to 1,247,032 COVID-19 cases and 24,428 fatalities.
Additionally, 223 patients were being treated for the virus county-wide, with 22% of them being treated in intensive care units, officials said
“Although there is concern that overall vaccination numbers are slowing, the County is seeing some gratifying increases in vaccination in younger age groups,” the L.A County Department of Public Health said in a written statement. “Nearly one-third of 12 to 15-year-olds have received at least one vaccine, as have nearly half of 16 to 17-year-olds.”
L.A. County Director of Public Health Dr. Barbara Ferrer said she’d like to see thoe figures climb even faster.
“Given how much protection vaccinations provide, it will be important to improve the rates of vaccination among young and middle-aged adults, many of whom are part of our essential workforce and who may be participating in more activities now that we are fully reopened,” Ferrer said.
“The most effective strategy to reduce the likelihood that outbreaks will arise due to large numbers of unvaccinated people exposed at worksites or gathering at events, is closing vaccination coverage gaps,” she said.
“We urge everyone, especially those who are not or cannot be vaccinated against COVID-19, to continue to exercise caution and good judgment as physical distancing requirements and capacity limitations are removed,” Ferrer added. “This includes always wearing a mask when indoors at workplaces, public settings, and businesses. If you are unvaccinated and will have sustained close contact with others whose vaccination status is not known or they are unvaccinated, consider using a respirator to protect yourself more effectively from the virus.”
At the state level, authorities announced 829 new infections and 31 deaths on Thursday, raising the overall totals to 3,699,455 cases of COVID-19 and 62,565 fatalities.
The state’s average positivity rate over the prior week was recorded at 0.9%, according to the California Department of Public Health Data.
As of Thursday, L.A. County accounted for 34% of California’s COVID-19 infections and 39% of the state’s deaths.
Los Angeles County businesses whisked away many coronavirus restrictions Tuesday and many residents shed their long-required masks for rolling around town.
But officials warned, amid the celebrations, that people shouldn’t toss those masks in the garbage just yet.
Department of Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer said that unvaccinated people should continue to wear face coverings as statewide capacity and physical distancing restrictions are lifted, noting that many people in the county still are not vaccinated.
As of Tuesday, 5.4 million county residents, representing 66% of the eligible population, had received at least one dose of vaccine. About 4.66 million, or 56% of eligible residents, were fully vaccinated.
Los Angeles County reported six new COVID-19 deaths on Tuesday, along with 210 new infections.
To date, the county has recorded 24,416 deaths and 1,246,619 infections during the pandemic.
According to state figures, there were 216 people hospitalized in the county due to COVID-19 as of Tuesday, down from 218 on Monday. There were 49 people in intensive care, up from 43 a day earlier.
Mandatory face mask requirements, along with social distancing, will remain in place in L.A. County courthouses despite changes in state and county public health COVID-19 guidelines that went into effect today, the presiding judge of the county’s court system announced.
Presiding Judge Eric C. Taylor said workplaces have to continue to comply with Cal/OSHA COVID-19 Prevention Emergency Temporary Standards.
Vaccines: From the LA Times: Businesses see ease and risk in digital vaccine records-Many are worried that asking for proof of vaccination could scare off customers. By Carly Olson, Andrea Chang and Hugo Martín
Since California’s full reopening on June 15, employees of Rustic Canyon Family restaurants have been asking diners if they’ve received the COVID-19 vaccine. Those who say they’ve been fully vaccinated are told they don’t have to wear a mask inside any of the 10 restaurants owned by the Santa Monica group, which include Cassia and Birdie G’s. Those who say they haven’t been jabbed must keep masks on while not eating or drinking.
But a new statewide system unveiled on Friday could mean the end of this kind of unverified self-reporting. By enabling residents to obtain digital versions of their vaccine cards, the new tool could make it easier for businesses to ask customers for proof of vaccination — if they choose to do so. Up until now, few have, fearful of alienating customers. With state officials taking pains to note that the new digital documents, which include scannable QR codes, are not so-called vaccine passports, it’s unclear whether a technological solution will do much to alter that status quo.
Rustic Canyon Family plans to keep asking customers to “self-attest” their vaccination status rather than seeking digital proof, said Joel Dixon, the group’s president. He noted that the state didn’t make proof of vaccination a requirement for customers and, given the staffing strains that restaurants are already under, having employees check each diner’s QR code or vaccine card “isn’t realistic from an operational perspective.”
Away from the customer-facing side of operations, it’s a different story. In March, Rustic Canyon Family implemented a mandatory COVID-19 vaccine policy for all 400 or so of its employees, who have until July 1 to show proof of vaccination unless they have a medical or religious exemption. Before Friday, employees could bring their physical cards or show a digital copy; the new QR codes will now be another acceptable form of proof, Dixon said.
Chris Cole, president of Roncelli Plastics Inc, a contract manufacturer in Monrovia, said that digital vaccine verification may be helpful once his plant begins having more visitors on site again for in-person meetings, which have largely been put on hold for the last 15 months.
Internally, Cole is already keeping records of his employees’ vaccination status. “I don’t see it having a big impact when it comes to our employees,” he said.
One subset of businesses that may be more directly affected are venues that host large gatherings. Los Angeles County health protocols require proof of vaccination or a negative coronavirus test for entry to indoor events with over 5,000 people and outdoor gatherings, like sports games, with at least 10,000 in attendance.
The Los Angeles Convention Center is hosting several gatherings of 5,000 or fewer people over the next few months and not requiring documentation from attendees. But once the center hosts larger gatherings, probably in the fall, convention officials plan to accept digital vaccination proof, said Ellen Schwartz, general manager of the center. She added that the pandemic protocols for the convention come from the county Department of Public Health, not the state, and she feels comfortable with the requirements imposed on the facility so far.
As of June 15, visitors to Staples Center are required to be vaccinated or have a negative test result within 72 hours of attending an event but are allowed to self-attest that they meet such guidelines before entering the arena. The arena requires all visitors to wear a mask or a face covering, regardless of their vaccination or negative test status, spokesperson Cara Vanderhook said. Asked if the protocol guidelines were sufficient, she said only that it is Staples Center’s policy to “follow all state and county guidelines and protocols as directed along with the NBA guidelines for current games.”
Dodger Stadium relies on fans to self-report their vaccination status and act accordingly. Vaccinated and unvaccinated fans can now sit next to one another during games, but unvaccinated fans are recommended under county health protocols to wear a mask or an appropriate face covering, except when eating or drinking, Dodgers spokesperson Jon Chapper said. But the Dodgers are not requiring or asking guests to verify their vaccination records, he said.
At the Disneyland Resort, parkgoers who are fully vaccinated are not required to wear a mask; Disney doesn’t request proof of vaccination. Instead, visitors have to attest they are in compliance when buying a ticket. The state’s new digital record system won’t change Disney’s policy, a spokesperson said.
For small businesses that don’t have to worry about capacity rules, the upside of being able to ask for digital proof of vaccination is less obvious than the potential pitfalls.
Economy: Retail sales fell in May, dragged down by a decline in auto sales and a shift by Americans to spend more on vacations and other services instead of goods. Total sales dropped a seasonally adjusted 1.3% in May from the month before, the U.S. Commerce Department said Tuesday. Wall Street analysts expected a smaller decline of 0.5%.
Economists predicted retail sales to drop in May because of the lack of cars available for sale due to a worldwide shortage of chips, which are needed to power in-car screens and other features. Sales at auto dealerships fell 3.7% last month, the government said. Another reason for the decrease: More Americans are vaccinated and want to head out more, they are spending more of their money on haircuts, trips and other services that are not included in Tuesday’s report. Last month, sales fell at furniture, electronics and home building stores.
That switch will also likely help reduce the supply shortages that have plagued some parts of the economy and pushed up inflation. There are signs this is already happening: With car prices rising, auto sales have slowed. Vehicle sales soared in the pandemic, which means fewer people need new cars. And according to a separate government report Tuesday, automakers ramped up production in May, after it fell in two of the previous three months.
The number of Americans applying for unemployment benefits rose last week for the first time since April despite widespread evidence that the economy and the job market are rebounding steadily from the pandemic recession.
The Labor Department said Thursday that jobless claims rose 37,000 from the week before to 412,000. As the job market has strengthened, the number of weekly applications for unemployment aid has fallen for most of the year. The number of jobless claims generally reflects the pace of layoffs.
Weekly applications for unemployment aid had dropped for six straight weeks, and economists had expected another dip last week. Still, the report showed the the fourweek average of claims, which smooths out week-to-week ups and downs, fell by 8,000 last week to 395,000 — the lowest four-week average since the pandemic slammed the economy in March 2020.
From the LA Times: Reopening of California fuels job growth- Employers added over 100,000 positions in May, but experts say full recovery is far off. By Margot Roosevelt
California has added jobs at a torrid rate since the beginning of the year, but the state’s economy has a long way to go before it recovers its pre-pandemic prosperity. May was the fourth month that Golden State payrolls grew by more than 100,000 positions — a faster post-recession rate than in any previous recovery. Employment grew to 16.35 million jobs, but just 51.8% of the 2.7 million lost in March and April 2020 had returned as of last month, state officials reported Friday.
The Golden State’s jobless rate fell slightly last month, to 7.9% from a revised 8% in April. It was a vast improvement from a 16% peak in April 2020, but that rate was considerably higher than the pre-pandemic rate of 4.3% in February 2020.
Unemployment in Los Angeles County, which is still suffering from the loss of international tourism and the slow recovery of entertainment industry jobs, was stagnant at 11.1% in May, the same as in April.
Nationwide, unemployment stood at 5.8% in May, and the U.S. had recovered 66% of the jobs it lost during the pandemic.
Still, many economists are optimistic that with expanding vaccinations and the lifting of restrictions on California businesses this week, the labor market will accelerate. “We are emerging from the scourge of COVID-19,” said Lynn Reaser, an economist at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego. “With California’s economy fully open as of June 15, job prospects for the rest of the year are very strong.”
In May, California’s leisure and hospitality industry added the most workers — 62,300 — with gains in restaurants, bars and hotels, as well as entertainment and recreation businesses. But the hard-hit sector is still down more than 517,000 payroll jobs since the pandemic hit.
Education and health services added 16,500 workers. Information gained 11,200 jobs, mainly in motion picture and sound recording companies.
Construction lost 1,600 jobs, more than any other sector, mainly due to losses in commercial building. But lumber prices, a lack of buildable land and labor shortages could be weighing on residential payrolls too, Anderson said.
Regionally, Northern California’s technology-rich economy continued to outshine the rest of the state. May unemployment was 4.6% in San Mateo County, 4.7% in Santa Clara County and 5.1% in San Francisco. Joblessness was at 5.9% in Orange County, 7.2% in Riverside County and 7.3% in San Bernardino County. About 48% of California residents are fully vaccinated. After falling in the spring, inoculation rates have risen with expanded neighborhood distribution and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Vax for the Win” program offering cash, vacations and event tickets to the newly vaccinated. The lifting of many COVID-related restrictions on physical distancing and capacity at businesses, along with new rules allowing vaccinated workers and customers to go unmasked, is expected to further buoy the economy.
Still, many small businesses have closed and, overall, small-business revenues are down 28.7% since the start of the pandemic.
One indication that California’s recovery is still lagging behind came as the state this week reported a jump in workers filing for first-time unemployment.
Last week’s 68,600 new claimants represented more than 17% of U.S. filings, although the state accounts for 11.7% of the nation’s civilian labor force. That compares with about 44,000 a week in the two months before the pandemic.
As businesses seek to bring back workers, UCLA economists warned in a forecast this month that the recovery will be more uneven than in previous recessions, given how abruptly and drastically it devastated the economy. Job postings in the state have returned to pre-pandemic levels, according to Opportunity Insights, a Harvard University research group. Still, 1.49 million.
State unemployment insurance, along with a federal $300 weekly supplement, has enabled many Californians with lingering health concerns and child-care responsibilities to delay rejoining the workforce.
With the pandemic waning, Californians who receive jobless benefits will have to show next month that they are looking for work, a requirement the state waived last year when COVID-19 kept people indoors. May’s employment data are based on two federal surveys taken in the second week of the month. Payroll job numbers are based on a survey of 80,000 California businesses. The unemployment rate comes from a separate survey of 5,100 households.
From the New York Times: Millions of workers have voluntarily left their jobs recently, one of the most striking elements of the newly blazing-hot job market. According to the Labor Department, nearly four million people quit their jobs in April, the most on record, pushing the rate to 2.7 percent of those employed. The rate was particularly high in the leisure and hospitality industry, where competition for workers has been especially fierce. But the number of those quitting registered across the board.
Economists believe that one reason more workers are quitting is simply a backlog: By some estimates, more than five million fewer people quit last year than would otherwise be expected, as some workers, riding out the labor market’s convulsions, stuck with jobs they may have wanted to leave anyway. (And the millions of involuntary job losses during the pandemic surely accounted for some of the reduction in quitting.) Now that the economy is regaining its footing, workers may suddenly be feeling more emboldened to heed their impulses.
But another factor may be the speed with which the economy has reawakened. As the pandemic has receded and the great reopening has swept across the country, businesses that had gone into hibernation or curtailed their work force during the pandemic have raced to hire employees to meet the surging demand.
At the same time, many people remain reluctant to return to work because of lingering fears of the virus, child care or elder care challenges, still-generous unemployment benefits, low wages or other reasons.
The Fed: The economy is changing so fast that just making sense of it is no easy task. Within a few months, the United States has gone from no jobs and depressed prices to widespread labor shortages and uncomfortably high inflation.
In this most unusual recovery, the signals that economic policymakers use to inform their decisions are going haywire. What is one to make, for example, of the combination of strong growth in jobs and wages paired with millions of working-age people who seem to have no interest in returning to the workforce? It’s easy to imagine Jerome Powell, the Federal Reserve chair, as a pilot in unfamiliar territory with malfunctioning gauges. He’s doing what you’d want a pilot to do in those circumstances: looking to the horizon.
A recurring theme Wednesday, as he spoke to the news media after a Fed policy meeting, was his focus on the things that haven’t changed about the economy, the lessons learned in the expansion of the 2010s. He is resisting the urge to conclude that the pandemic fundamentally changed the most important dynamics.
To Powell’s mind, these are those lessons: American workers are capable of great things. The labor market can run hotter for longer than a lot of economists once assumed, with widely beneficial results. There are many powerful structural forces that will keep inflation in check. And for those reasons, the Fed should move cautiously in raising interest rates, rather than risk choking off a full economic recovery too soon.
His is a profoundly optimistic view of the coming years. He does not see the labor shortages of 2021 as evidence of lasting scars to the potential of American workers but rather as a reflection of the difficulty of reopening large sectors of the economy and reallocating labor after a pandemic. And he was dismissive of the possibility that spikes in both wages and prices would turn into a lasting 1970s-style spiral.
Inflation: From the New York Times: Lumber prices soared over the past year, frustrating would-be pandemic do-it-yourselfers, jacking up the costs of new homes and serving as a compelling talking point in the debate over whether government stimulus efforts risked the return of 1970s-style inflation.
The housing-and-renovation boom drove insatiable demand for lumber, even as the pandemic idled mills that had already been slowed by an anemic construction sector since the 2008 financial crisis. Lumber futures surged to unprecedented heights, peaking at more than $1,600 per thousand board feet in early May.
But since then, the prices of those same plywood sheets and pressure-treated planks have tumbled, as mills restarted or ramped up production and some customers put off their purchases until prices came down. It’s a dance of supply and demand that has reassured many experts and the Federal Reserve in their belief that painful price spikes for everything from airline tickets to used cars will abate as the economy gets back to normal.
Lumber prices in the futures market, for example, are down more than 45 percent from their peak, slipping below $1,000 for the first time in months. That’s still high — between 2009 and 2019, prices averaged less than $400 per thousand board feet — but the sell-off has been gaining momentum over the last few weeks. The price has fallen in 11 of the last 12 trading sessions, including a 0.5 percent drop to settle at $900.80 on Friday, according to FactSet data.
The Federal Reserve has created trillions of new dollars since the coronavirus hit and kept interest rates at rock-bottom levels. At the same time, the federal government is running record deficits, driven by spending on relief measures like stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and small-business relief efforts in a bid to hasten the recovery from the pandemic.
Recent economic indicators have given credence to the idea that all that easy money will trigger inflation: In May, the Consumer Price Index, a broad measure of the costs of typical items that Americans buy, rose 5 percent compared from a year earlier — the fastest pace in 13 years.
But runaway inflation of the kind seen in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s is a psychological process as much as an economic one. When inflationary expectations take hold, people become convinced that prices are on a never-ending escalator. They rush to buy now, at any price, and increases become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Instead, the lumber market’s behavior is a sign of consumer sanity, said Kristina Hooper, chief global market strategist at the investment management firm Invesco.
Officials at the Fed, who have long argued that any price rise would be temporary, view the situation in much the same way.
More: The Biden administration is moving to end exemptions that allowed technology developed with U.S. government research funding to be exported for manufacturing overseas, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said in an interview.
The change affects billions of dollars of grant money allocated by the Energy Department and is the latest effort to boost the country’s competitiveness with China. It primarily blocks small companies and nonprofits—largely universities and their spinoff businesses— from exceptions that allowed them to outsource manufacturing of technology developed with federal help, according to the department.
The department is making the change as part of President Biden’s supply-chain initiative, a strategy announced last week for boosting domestic manufacturing across high-tech industries. Those include semiconductors, rare-earth elements and large-capacity batteries used in electric vehicles, all industries in which Energy Department grants often feed key research and development.