Money:
Phase 2 of the LA County Economic Opportunity Grant (EOG) Program is taking applications. Phase 1 has been extended and is for microbusinesses located in the County of Los Angeles that have been hardest hit in the pandemic. These grants are funded in part through the California Office of the Small Business Advocate. Phase 2 is for larger businesses and nonprofits. Click here for more information on each.
The info session and office hour calendar which are good resources to help with questions and the application process. There are sessions nearly every day in March and April in English and Spanish to help businesses apply for $20,000 grants. The offer still stands for the DEO team to provide a special train the trainer session for this group as well. If you’re interested, please let me know.
WomensNet Amber Grants – WomensNet gives away at least $30,000 every month in Amber Grant money. In recognition of the diversity of businesses owned by women, they’ve also expanded grant-giving to include “Marketing Grants,” “Business Category Grants,” as well as two “$25,000 Year End Grants.” These have rolling deadlines and multiple grant application opportunities
Sign up for Verizon Small Business Digital Ready, complete any combination of two courses, coaching events, and community events. Not only will you be eligible to apply for a $10k grant (applications due May 12, 2023) but you’ll benefit from free access to business courses, live coaching sessions led by industry experts, and insightful resources. Register Here [+]
Cases:
Pasadena saw 7 new cases of COVID on Friday, March 31st. There were no new fatalities reported.
LA County reported 1,269 new cases of COVID on Tuesday, March 28th (which includes Pasadena and Long Beach). The County reported five new fatalities on Tuesday.
Health Orders:
Pasadena’s Interim Health Officer Dr. Eric G. Handler on Wednesday issued updated health officer orders related to COVID-19 vaccination requirements for healthcare workers and masking requirements in healthcare facilities. The new requirements cover vaccination and masking.
All healthcare workers must be up to date with COVID-19 vaccinations by completing a COVID-19 primary series and receiving the most recent booster dose within 15 days of becoming eligible as recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Under the new orders, health care facility personnel are required to wear a well-fitted mask when providing patient care or working in patient care areas within all indoor healthcare settings such as hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, clinics, and hospice facilities.
The Pasadena Public Health Department (PPHD) strongly recommends patients, clients, and visitors to health care settings wear a mask. Patients, clients, and visitors are required to wear a mask when the health care facility is in outbreak status or there is evidence of high community transmission levels, as defined by the CDC, within Los Angeles County.
How Safe Are We? (From the LA Times:) How immune are we? It’s unsettled. Health officials have not agreed on what it means to be protected from COVID-19, but testing offers insights. By Melissa Healy
The pandemic’s formal end in the U.S. on May 11 marks neither victory nor peace: It’s a cessation of hostilities with a dangerous virus that is still very much with us. To maintain such an uneasy truce, Americans will have to stay protected enough to prevent humanity’s viral foe from staging a breakout in our shaky accord.
Providing that assurance, in turn, assumes that scientists and public health officials all agree on what it means to be “protected enough,” and that they can tell whether people are meeting that mark.
On both counts, the nation’s readiness to monitor this armistice falls short.
The trouble is no one has a clear fix on the extent of Americans’ immunity to the virus that causes COVID-19. And beneath that lies a more fundamental problem: Scientists and public health officials still have not settled on what it means to be immune or adopted a common yardstick for measuring it.
There are some reassuring trends. Hospitalizations for COVID-19 have plummeted, and weekly deaths from COVID-19 have fallen 90% from their most recent peak just over a year ago. But that’s just “a snapshot in time,” said Dr. Cody Meissner, a Dartmouth College pediatric infectious disease physician who’s on the FDA’s advisory panel for vaccines. The coronavirus’ knack for surprises makes scientists wish they understood COVID-19 immunity well enough to anticipate its next move.
Scientists have one measure of immunity that’s backed by decades of research: counting antibodies. It’s easy and inexpensive to do with lab tests that are readily available.
Toting up the immune proteins that form in the wake of vaccination or infection is one way to assess how quickly a person could be expected to block or clear an infection. The more antibodies, the more thorough their protections.
For insights into the nation’s immunity as a whole, scientists measure coronavirus antibodies in large groups of people, such as patients who had blood drawn for routine laboratory tests or volunteers who made donations to blood banks.
These seroprevalence surveys have shown that by June 2022, 94% of American adults — and roughly as many children — had been vaccinated, infected or both.
For a while, officials hoped high levels of antibodies would drive the virus out of circulation altogether. Once enough Americans were vaccinated, the reasoning went, antibodies would block so many infections that the coronavirus would just die out for lack of new victims to infect.
But as the pandemic unfolded, hopes of reaching this state of “herd immunity” were dashed.
All virus-specific antibodies “decay” with time, leaving behind a template to make more when needed. But that renewal process takes time, and the Delta and Omicron variants proved adept at establishing infections before the body’s defenses were in place.
Over time, it became clear that antibodies alone weren’t telling the whole story of Americans’ immunity. People who’d been vaccinated or previously infected were coming down with COVID-19. But they weren’t becoming severely ill or dying at nearly the same rate as people who had no immune protection. Some other process was at work.
That unseen mechanism was what scientists call cellular immunity, and its foot soldiers are T cells. Cellular immunity is widely credited with staving off the worst ravages of COVID-19. Even for some whose weakened immune systems mounted an anemic antibody response to vaccination, cellular immunity can kick in robustly and protect against death.
As new mutations helped the coronavirus evade antibodies, T-cell responses seemed to remain strong in the face of new variants, including the many varieties of Omicron.
There’s also encouraging evidence that this cellular immunity is long-lasting. Scientists have confirmed strong T-cell responses a year after SARS-CoV-2 infection and at least six months after vaccination.
What’s more, patients who were infected with the SARS-CoV coronavirus — a close relative to the pandemic virus that was responsible for the 2003 outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome — have shown signs of T-cell immunity 17 years later. All this has made University of Pennsylvania vaccine expert Dr. Paul Offit question the value of repeated booster shots as a means of maintaining Americans’ protection against COVID-19.
Evidence has mounted that most Americans’ immunity now relies more on T cells than it does on propping up antibody levels, Offit said. As a result, the U.S. government’s strategy of repeated vaccine booster shots is probably unnecessary for all except patients with weakened immune systems, he added. Offit acknowledged that each jab increases antibody levels. But it’s not clear that those additional antibodies reduce the likelihood of severe illness or death, which by now should be the definition of “protected,” he said.
Meissner goes further. At a recent meeting called by the FDA to consider vaccine strategies going forward, Offit, Meissner and others challenged the agency to make clear what the shots are meant to accomplish, and what metric it will use to judge them.
Unfortunately, the status of a person’s cellular immunity is more difficult to capture and quantify. There are tests that measure these immune cells, but they’re neither cheap nor simple to perform.
The denizens of the cellular immune system are a diverse lot whose functions shift with time and circumstances. Key details about how this complex system responds to the coronavirus still elude scientists, Meissner said.
There are tests that capture cellular immunity, but they’re very expensive to run. Most require a large volume of a person’s blood, special chemical reagents and complex manipulation to produce results. Many demand highly skilled lab workers or extensive computational resources to yield useful data.
As a result, they’re used sparingly in the treatment of patients. And they’re never used to test broad populations.
If a lab test were able to measure cellular immunity as easily as antibodies, “that would spread like wildfire, because everyone is searching for one,” Meissner said.
The Economy:
Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 2.6 percent in the fourth quarter of 2022, after increasing 3.2 percent in the third quarter. The increase in the fourth quarter primarily reflected increases in inventory investment and consumer spending that were partly offset by a decrease in housing investment.
Profits decreased 2.0 percent in the fourth quarter after decreasing less than 0.1 percent in the third quarter.
Private goods-producing industries increased 4.0 percent, private services-producing industries increased 2.3 percent, and government increased 2.1 percent. Overall, 17 of 22 industry groups contributed to the fourth-quarter increase in real GDP.
Annual percentage growth rate of GDP at market prices based on constant local currency. Aggregates are based on constant 2010 U.S. dollars. GDP is the sum of gross value added by all resident producers in the economy plus any product taxes and minus any subsidies not included in the value of the products. It is calculated without making deductions for depreciation of fabricated assets or for depletion and degradation of natural resources.
- U.S. gdp growth rate for 2021 was 5.95%, a 8.71% increase from 2020.
- U.S. gdp growth rate for 2020 was -2.77%, a 5.06% decline from 2019.
- U.S. gdp growth rate for 2019 was 2.29%, a 0.65% decline from 2018.
- U.S. gdp growth rate for 2018 was 2.95%, a 0.7% increase from 2017.
From Bloomberg: Deposits at U.S. lenders posted the biggest decline in nearly a year during the week when multiple bank failures triggered the latest bout of global financial turmoil.
Bank deposits fell by $98.4 billion to $17.5 trillion in the week ended March 15, according to data released Friday by the Federal Reserve.
So-called “other” deposits, which exclude accounts with maturity dates such as certificates of deposit, declined by $78.2 billion to $15.7 trillion. Compared with a year ago, these more liquid deposits such as savings and checking accounts have declined by 6.1%, the most in data dating back to the early 1970s.
Bank credit, on a seasonally adjusted basis, rose $73.5 billion to $17.6 trillion. Total assets, which includes vault cash, as well as balances due from depository institutions and the Fed, jumped $430.5 billion to $23.2 trillion, marking the largest gain since the immediate aftermath of the pandemic.
Total liabilities surged more than $412 billion to $21.1 trillion. Commercial and industrial lending — considered a gauge of economic activity — rose $20 billion to $2.83 trillion. Institutions had already been seeing a steady outflow of deposits that was driven by more attractive rates elsewhere.
From the Financial Times: German inflation fell less than expected in March despite a steep drop in energy costs, curbing hopes of a rapid easing in wider price pressures across the eurozone.
Eurozone inflation falls sharply to 6.9% as energy costs recede. Eurozone inflation has fallen sharply to its lowest level for a year after a decline in energy costs.
It is not pandemic related (strictly speaking) but from the New York Times: Global warming is expected to affect economic growth, and how a slump could hinder efforts to fight warming. It’s a kind of vicious circle.
It’s important to note that growth has a downside. Unrestrained consumption is a major factor behind climate change. And growth policies aren’t the only levers that governments can use to raise people up.
But, overall, economic growth has been a key driver of rising standards of living for decades, ensuring that each generation was better off than the one before. That pattern may now be broken.
The big picture
World Bank economists are mainly concerned about disasters fueled by climate change.
In addition to human suffering, they calculated that, in the past two decades, disasters caused a significant decline in countries’ abilities to expand their economies.
Extreme weather events destroy infrastructure, which means governments are forced to spend money rebuilding rather than investing. And investment is the main tool governments have to stimulate economies.
On average, a major disaster reduces a country’s growth potential by 0.1 percentage point for the year in which it happened, according to the bank. That might not seem like a lot, but it is, experts told me. Consider the fact that global growth runs just above 2 percent a year in general.
Medium-term effects vary widely. They depend on both the size of the disaster and how vulnerable countries are. Some countries may survive almost unscathed, while others may lose up to 10 percent of gross domestic product.
But, as the world warms and climate disasters become more common, they will weigh a lot more on the economy, especially for small, vulnerable countries.
The sad thing is that this hurts “the weakest part of the global economy,” said Ugo Panizza, a professor of international economics at the Graduate Institute, a higher education institution in Geneva.
This means climate change is yet another factor that widens the gap of economic power between countries.