Tag: COVID-19 pandemic

The economy isn’t going back to February 2020. Fundamental shifts have occurred.

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A new era has arrived of greater worker power, higher housing costs and very different ways of doing business

The U.S. economy is emerging from the coronavirus pandemic with considerable speed but markedly transformed, as businesses and consumers struggle to adapt to a new landscape with higher prices, fewer workers, new innovations and a range of inconveniences.

In late February 2020, the unemployment rate was 3.5 percent, inflation was tame, wages were rising and American companies were attempting to recover from a multiyear trade war.

The pandemic disrupted everything, damaging some parts of the economy much more than others. But a mass vaccination effort and the virus’s steady retreat this year has allowed many businesses and communities to reopen. Continue reading.

A Year After George Floyd: Pressure to Add Police Amid Rising Crime

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Los Angeles, like other cities across the nation, is facing a rise in gun violence. And the police budget is growing.

LOS ANGELES — Helen Jones grew up in Watts in a time of gang wars and a crack epidemic, when the police used battering rams to knock down the walls of suspected drug houses and Black people were routinely profiled or beaten by street cops.

Then and now, her life has been shaped by violence: Last spring, after the city shut down to contain the coronavirus pandemic, her nephew was shot dead in his home; the year before, her brother was shot in the back on a South Los Angeles street and lived; and in 2009, her son died in a downtown jail in what the authorities called a suicide but she believes was a murder by sheriff’s deputies.

Last year, Ms. Jones’s demands for fewer police officers and more investment in communities like hers became the demands of a movement — after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis shook the country, inspired the largest mass demonstrations for civil rights in generations and pushed police reform to the forefront of the national agenda. Continue reading.

People gave up on flu pandemic measures a century ago when they tired of them – and paid a price

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Picture the United States struggling to deal with a deadly pandemic.

State and local officials enact a slate of social-distancing measures, gathering bans, closure orders and mask mandates in an effort to stem the tide of cases and deaths.

The public responds with widespread compliance mixed with more than a hint of grumbling, pushback and even outright defiance. As the days turn into weeks turn into months, the strictures become harder to tolerate. Continue reading.