Notations On Our World (Special Friday Edition): Out & About on the eve of #MemorialWeekEnd2020

On the Road in Irvine, California 

  

California is gradually reopening--Our team was on the road this week assessing the openings as we stopped at a McDonald's'--The McDonald's team member noted how hours were increasing which she felt pretty good about--and we agree.

Freeway billboards remind us all here in Southern California on the fight ahead.    On this eve of this #MemorialDay2020 here in the United States, we hereby present a snapshot of the challenging week there was as the dispute between the United States and China escalated, China held its' delayed Annual "Two Sessions" at the National Peoples' Congress, developments continued to occur on the development of a Vaccine--yet the number of afflicated in the United States continued  to increase.   This is as other challenges loom in the horizon. 

We leave you with a snapshot of the challenges courtesy the Washington Times on the 2020 Elections, on China, on developments on the vaccine front courtesy Abundance Insider along with the on-going daily developments (as of Thursday ) Courtesy the Washington Post.  We also note this on consumer spending trends courtesy the team at the Visual Capitalist along with a vision of the future courtesy the Economist. 

We close by wishing all our Muslim Brothers and Sisters around the World an #EidMubarak as we salute all the fallen as America remembers on this Memorial Day Week-End:

Trump team hears echoes of 2016 victory emanating from China New polling suggests President Trump can use China this year to generate the kind of populist energy that helped propel him to victory in 2020. China has become a key battleground issue for the 2020 election as supporters of Trump hope a hardening in public opinion offers a populist route to victory that mirrors their 2016 playbook. Read the full story here. Economy What Xi knew: pressure builds on China’s leader | Free to read President faces scrutiny over early management of the pandemic as Beijing contemplates resetting economic targets MAY 21, 2020 by Tom Mitchell in Singapore Economy Liberty Global forms alliance to create UK electric car charging network Telecoms group teams up with government-backed fund to roll out on-street charging points MAY 20, 2020 by Nic Fildes Volvo CEO: Pandemic will rapidly accelerate shift to electric cars. What it is: Volvo CEO Håkan Samuelsson anticipates the demand for electric vehicles (EVs) will be stronger than ever post-pandemic. Speaking at a recent Financial Times global digital conference, Samuelsson emphasized that auto industry government subsidies should be channeled towards new technologies, particularly in the EV realm, instead of perpetuating fossil fuel dependency. Volvo plans to release a fully electric car each year until 2025 to meet its goal of having EVs represent 50% of global sales. In the midst of COVID-19 disruptions to showroom sales, we will experience a shift towards automotive e-commerce. Volvo is paving the road towards online vehicle orders with its XC40 Recharge, the auto manufacturer’s first mass-produced EV. With a $1,000 initial deposit, drivers can reserve the 402-horsepower EV, capable of traveling over 200 miles on a single charge. Why it’s important: The automotive industry has been hit hard by COVID-19, with an estimated loss of $5.7 billion due to disruptions in the automotive supply chain. The pandemic has forced many manufacturing facilities — including those of Fiat Chrysler, Ford, and PSA Group — to shut down. Meanwhile, reduced foot traffic into showrooms, alongside a massive shift to remote work, has not helped the industry either. As car ownership declines, we may see a shift towards subscription services that allow for flexible semi-ownership at lower costs. In urban settings with limited vehicle storage space, this trend will only accelerate. For those who do purchase vehicles, dealership showrooms will be replaced by VR experiences and remote delivery. The auto industry is not turning back.   Breaking News     May 21, 2020 Senate Approves Ratcliffe As Nation's Top Spy // Katie Bo Williams The Senate voted along party lines to confirm President Donald Trump’s pick for national intelligence director on Thursday, making former Texas prosecutor John Ratcliffe easily the most controversial appointee to be confirmed to the post in its 15-year history.  Read full article » Sorrento finds a coronavirus antibody that blocks viral infection 100% in preclinical lab experiments. What it is: Sorrento Therapeutics has demonstrated complete inhibition of the virus causing COVID-19 after four days of incubation with antibody STI-1499. Standing out among billions of screened antibody candidates, STI-1499 binds to the spike proteins on the virus and prevents it from interacting with healthy human cell target receptors. In addition to developing this antibody into a treatment that can be tested in humans, the Sorrento team is also creating an antibody “cocktail” called COVID-SHIELD, consisting of multiple effective antibodies. More antibodies increase the likelihood that the virus can be defeated even as it mutates between transmissions. Why it’s important: It remains unclear how quickly the SARS-CoV-2 virus can mutate. Many coronaviruses like the common cold can mutate rapidly, making it difficult to create sustained treatments. Sorrento’s approach of an antibody cocktail is therefore likely to be the most long-lasting treatment for this type of virus. While the treatment has yet to be tested in humans, Sorrento’s team is working to expedite development and ramp up production capacity in hopes of producing one million doses immediately following FDA approval. Researchers release data sets to train coronavirus chatbots. What it is: Researchers from UC Davis, UC San Diego, and Carnegie Mellon University have published a proposal of AI chatbots that can advise patients with coronavirus symptoms. Starting with Google’s Transformer architecture, OpenAI’s GPT language model, and another encoder-decoder architecture, the researchers were able to create AI bots that showed promising results for medical consultations. Models used to build prototype chatbots were trained with datasets containing English and Chinese patient-doctor conversations about the novel coronavirus. Why it’s important: As patients and medical practitioners make the shift to telehealth consultations, many virtual providers have become overwhelmed by a rapid influx of patients (Frost and Sullivan research suggests that telehealth consultations grew by 50 percent in March). In order to alleviate the bottleneck, researchers indicate that AI chatbots can provide adequate consultations in the absence of human doctors or to supplement in-person consultation. The researchers write: “In this work, we make the first attempt to develop dialogue systems that can provide medical consultations about [the coronavirus]. Experimental results show that these trained models are promising in generating clinically meaningful and linguistically high-quality consultations.” Not-so-slow burn The world’s energy system must be transformed completely It has been changed before, but never as fast or fully as must happen now Related → The Economist’s coverage of the coronavirus Flying blind Donald Trump abandons the Open Skies treatyAmerica’s departure from another arms-control accord is a blow to its allies Important developments in the pandemic.    The latest On Wednesday, Montgomery, Ala., Mayor Steven Reed announced his city was facing a crisis: the hospitals were out of ICU beds. “Right now, if you’re from Montgomery, and you need an ICU bed, you’re in trouble … our health-care system has been maxed out.” Reed said. The news came as a research team warned that a second wave of coronavirus infections was likely in the South — Dallas, Houston, southeast Florida, the entire state of Alabama — where reopening has happened rapidly, and other counties with cases on the rise. Sweeping measures to prevent the spread were announced on March 15 — a federal warning against large gatherings, health screenings at airports, states of emergency declared by governors and mayors. But what if they had been announced just a week before? A new study from Columbia University has the possible answer: If social distancing had been in place seven days earlier, the United States could have prevented 36,000 deaths through early May. Months into the pandemic, physicians keep learning new things about covid-19 and the way it attacks our bodies. The severe, Kawasaki-like inflammatory condition that doctors have recently reported in children appears to also affect young adults. More reason for concern: teens and young adults have more of an “overwhelming” response involving the heart and multiple organs, an NYU doctor told The Post. Ahead of President Trump’s trip this afternoon to a Ford manufacturing plant in Ypsilanti, Mich., the state’s attorney general implored him to wear a face mask on his tour, citing a “legal responsibility” — and said Trump would be asked not to return if he does not do so. Trump appears to have not worn a mask on the tour, though he told reporters he did wear one in another area “where they preferred it." The president said he “didn’t want to give the press the pleasure of seeing it.” As Trump has urged communities to reopen and cheered on order-defying protesters, places such as Ypsilanti are struggling to contain the virus. Nearly one in 100 residents has tested positive or is presumed positive, but the area didn't get a testing site until early May, after local leaders fought for one. The city's mayor was not invited to the president's event, but she had a message for him: “I would let him know that his dishonesty cost lives,” Lois E. Allen-Richardson said. The pandemic is dramatically changing the way we will shop. Retailers that have spent years encouraging customers to linger. Not anymore. Gone are the days of trying on makeup or playing with toys in the aisles. The focus now is on making shopping faster, easier and safer. This is what you can expect when you head to a reopened store. Other important news The White House and Republican lawmakers want to begin rolling back expanded benefits for the unemployed, as 2.4 million more people filed jobless claims last week. Three decades before this pandemic, Anthony Fauci took heat from AIDS protesters. (Look back at some incredible photos.) Trump’s promise of ‘Warp Speed’ is fueling the anti-vaccine movement in fertile corners of the web. Reopening guidance for churches is delayed after the White House and CDC disagree. Expanding AmeriCorps could turn new grads into an army of contact tracers. It just needs funding.