COVID-19 Monitor

Last Updated:October 15, 2020

Navigator Sight is an AI-powered news service for decision makers to stay abreast of the issues that matter most. As readers engage with a story, our machine learning algorithm improves. View updates here or sign up below to receive them in your inbox.

Get Notifications

Receive email updates. Subscribe now.

Browse:

Latest All Posts Topics

Canadian Business Economic Impact Global Response Leadership

Navigator Sight

Build your own monitor: Each Sight monitor can be customized to your organisation’s needs and continually improves through proprietary machine learning.

Get In Touch:

(416) 642-6440 info@navltd.com

All Posts

Walmart surpasses eBay in U.S. e-commerce for the first time, Amazon still tops: eMarketer (Market Watch) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Economic Impact

Walmart Inc. has surpassed eBay Inc. in share of U.S. e-commerce sales for the first time, according to May 2020 data provided by eMarketer, though Amazon.com Inc. remains number one by a large margin.
Both outcomes are the result of the coronavirus, which forced stores to close and consumers to social distance, shifting shopping activity to necessities and other categories in line with spending more time at home.
“Compared to pre-pandemic sales for the period, online transactions were $52 billion higher than expected for the period, with e-commerce levels tracking higher than shopping holiday levels on Black Friday and Cyber Monday,” according to the Adobe report.

In Canada’s COVID-19 capital, younger students return to class in ‘bubbles’ (Reuters) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Canadian Business, Global Response

Quebec’s elementary and younger high school students will be divided into smaller subgroups, or “bubbles,” and no longer switch classes when they return to school this fall, education officials in the Canadian province hit hardest by the coronavirus outbreak said on Tuesday.
China’s capital, Beijing, said it is closing schools amid a fresh outbreak.
Only British Columbia has reopened both elementary and high schools, though students are attending on a rotating basis, while Manitoba and Prince Edward Island have both resumed some in-person classes on a limited basis.

U.S. bank profits plunge 70% on coronavirus loss provisioning (Reuters) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Economic Impact

U.S. bank profits fell by 69.6% to $18.5 billion in the first quarter of 2020 from the year prior as banks felt the economic impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic, according to data from a banking regulator.
The new report, the first government survey of the industry since the pandemic shut down large parts of the economy, shows banks set aside $38.8 billion to cover potential loan losses in the future, up nearly 280% from the year prior.
The amount of loans banks charged off as delinquent was up nearly 15%, driven by an 87% increase in charge-offs for commercial and industrial loans.

Covid-detecting ‘smart rings’ to be trialled by staff at Las Vegas resort (FT) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Global Response

A prominent Las Vegas casino operator is embarking on a novel strategy to fight coronavirus among its staff, giving them wearable “smart rings” that can detect infection before symptoms occur.
It will be the first big US company to deploy such pre-symptomatic virus detection devices internally.
The rollout comes as researchers are turning increasingly to wearable technologies to track the spread of the pandemic in real time, often before symptoms appear.

Covid-19 has prompted boom for TV news, dip in media trust worldwide and surge in misinformation (Press Gazette) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Global Response

In the UK, just over half (55%) of respondents to this year’s Digital News Report said they used TV as a source of news in January, compared to more than three-quarters (77%) for online, including social media.
Among the under-35s surveyed in April, more than half (57%) said they had used TV as a source of news in the last week – a rise of 25 percentage points on January – compared to 61% for social media, up 9%.
The report said: “Overall our April 2020 survey found the news media were considered to have done a good job in helping ordinary people understand the extent of the crisis (60%), and also in making clear what people can do personally to mitigate the impact (65%).”
Across the six countries surveyed for the report in April, 59% of respondents rated news organisations as trustworthy on Covid-19, on a par with national governments and behind scientists, doctors, and health organisations.

The great balancing act: Managing the coming $30 trillion deficit while restoring economic growth (McKinsey) Published on: June 16, 2020 | Category: Economic Impact

The dual imperative of our time is to save lives and safeguard livelihoods—and governments around the world are pulling out all the stops to do so.
As a result, government deficits worldwide could reach $9 trillion to $11 trillion in 2020, and a cumulative total of as much as $30 trillion by 2023.
There is already concern that many countries will struggle to meet their commitments to creditors, sparking a debt crisis that would compound the economic crisis unleashed by COVID-19.

Coronavirus Breaches Chinese Capital, Rattling Officials (NY Times) Published on: June 15, 2020 | Category: Global Response

The authorities in Beijing placed a swath of the city under lockdown on Monday and tested tens of thousands of people as they rushed to contain a new coronavirus outbreak that marked an unnerving breach in China’s capital.
Until now, the efforts appeared to have protected the capital against the virus after it emerged late last year in Wuhan, a city in central China.
While the dozens of new cases in Beijing seem slight compared to the hundreds and even thousands of infections reported daily in other countries, the fresh outbreak has jolted China, prompting the government to fire local officials and reinstate some recently relaxed restrictions.

COVID-19: Poll says Canadians fatigued, less concerned about virus protocols (Vancouver Sun) Published on: June 15, 2020 | Category: Canadian Business, Global Response

Just 36 per cent of respondents say they’re staying away from public spaces as much as they were during the early days of the pandemic, while 56 per cent are still physically distancing.
The poll also found that 31 per cent of Canadians reported feeling fatigued in recent weeks and 28 per cent say they are anxious, with the majority of those being under the age of 55.
Just under half of Canadians (41 per cent) still believe the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic is yet to come, while the rest believe Canada has survived the lowest point of the health crisis.

Risk sentiment rides the waves with some central bank help (FT) Published on: June 15, 2020 | Category: Economic Impact, Global Response

Global investor sentiment was challenged by signs of another Covid-19 wave on Monday, before Wall Street was bolstered by an announcement on corporate bond purchases from the US Federal Reserve.
The catalyst for the rebound was the Fed announcing that it would purchase corporate bonds to create a portfolio that reflects “a broad, diversified market index of US corporate bonds”.
The latest demonstration of seemingly unlimited central bank support drowned out the worrying news over the weekend that Beijing had experienced a jump in coronavirus infections.

At A Time Of Great Need, Public Health Lacks ‘Lobbying Muscle’ (Kaiser Health News) Published on: June 15, 2020 | Category: Economic Impact, Global Response

“We don’t have millions of dollars to spend on billboards, and we can’t call in a hundred people to stand up at a hearing and say ‘I didn’t get sick because of public health measures” said Kat DeBurgh, executive director of the Health Officers Association of California.
Health officials say the additional $150 million they’re requesting would help them hire public health nurses and disease investigators, fund public health labs and purchase protective gear.
County health directors say chronic underfunding has forced them to make difficult decisions to curtail spending and cut programs like public health labs — 11 of 40 have shuttered in the past two decades.

Newer Posts Older Posts