Bhinneka News Online: Wednesday Morning Briefing: Italy’s coronavirus deaths head for wartime levels

What you need to know about the coronavirus today

Italy’s deaths head for wartime levels
An adviser to Italy’s health ministry has called for restrictions to be drastically tightened to avoid a “national tragedy” after the national statistics bureau said deaths this year would be the highest since World War Two.

“We are in a war situation, people don’t realize it but the last time we had this many deaths, bombs were dropping on our cities during the war,” public health professor Walter Ricciardi told the television channel la7 on Tuesday evening.

Ricciardi, the adviser to Health Minister Roberto Speranza, said the government, which is considering tightening restrictions over the Christmas and New Year holidays, should lock down the main cities completely.

U.S. immunization rollout expands
The United States expanded its rollout of the newly approved COVID-19 vaccine to hundreds of additional distribution centers, inoculating thousands more healthcare workers in a mass immunization expected to reach the general public in the coming months.

Distribution of the vaccine developed by Pfizer and German partner BioNTech began on Monday, three days after it won U.S. emergency-use authorization.

Political leaders and medical authorities have launched a two-pronged media blitz avowing the safety of the vaccines while urging Americans to remain diligent about social distancing and mask-wearing until inoculations become widely available.

Seoul runs out of critical care beds
South Korea reported a record daily rise in cases and the prime minister issued an urgent call for more hospital beds to cope with the country’s worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic.

Hospitals were at breaking point with only three critical care beds available in greater Seoul, an area with a population of almost 26 million people, officials said.

“The top priority is securing more hospital beds,” Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun told a government meeting.

Japan PM under fire over year-end dinners
Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga has drawn criticism for joining year-end get-togethers after begging the public to avoid parties as the country grapples with record numbers of cases.

Suga became prime minister in September but he has not enjoyed much of a honeymoon as public frustration grows with rising infections.

Despite warning the public to shun big gatherings, Suga has attended several over the past week, stirring criticism on social media and from politicians, including from allies in his coalition.

‘Easter can be the new Christmas’
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government thinks people should make their own decision about meeting up for Christmas, but given the risk some may want to wait for Easter to gather with their family, a British minister said.

“How much do they want to bring members of their broader family together at Christmas or whether they think on this occasion let’s just keep it small and we can meet up in the Spring - Easter can be the new Christmas for some people,” Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick told Sky.

After imposing the most onerous restrictions in British peacetime history, Johnson is keen to avoid becoming the prime minister who canceled Christmas, even though the UK has the sixth worst official COVID-19 death toll in the world.

Track the global spread here.

Breakingviews - Corona Capital: Smokes, Banks, Toasters
British American Tobacco makes a late entry in the Covid-19 vaccine race, and the kitchen-appliance boom gives Japanese posh toaster maker Balmuda a smoking IPO. Catch up with the latest financial insights.

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U.S.

As more women fill America’s jails, medical tragedies mount. The female population in U.S. jails has risen as the male population has declined. Many women enter jails suffering mental health crises and addictions, and sometimes pregnant. Yet local lockups are ill-equipped to handle this growing population pool.

On an earnings call two months ago, SolarWinds Chief Executive Kevin Thompson touted how far the company had gone during his 11 years at the helm. There was not a database or an IT deployment model out there to which his Austin, Texas-based company did not provide some level of monitoring or management, he told analysts on the Oct. 27 call. “We don’t think anyone else in the market is really even close in terms of the breadth of coverage we have,” he said. “We manage everyone’s network gear.” Now that dominance has become a liability.

“Boneheads.” “Pathetic.” An “enemy” of the United States. President Donald Trump was often vicious in his critique of the U.S. Federal Reserve, bashing the central bank governors’ monetary policy decisions with tweets and verbal barbs, while trying to stack its board with cronies. In the end, the guard-rails mostly held.

Joe Biden will not shy away from using President Donald Trump’s weapon of choice - sanctions - as he seeks to reshape America’s foreign policy, according to people familiar with his thinking. But when Biden takes office on Jan. 20, he is expected to quickly begin recalibrating Trump’s blunt-force approach while taking time to deliberate before making any major changes with top sanctions targets like Iran and China, the sources said.

The functioning of the $20 trillion U.S. Treasury market is set to come under intense scrutiny by President-elect Joe Biden’s regulators, after seizing-up amid rising pandemic fears in March and threatening the stability of the broader financial system. A review of what went wrong and measures to boost the market’s resilience could be among the first regulatory challenges for incoming Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, according to half a dozen regulatory and industry sources.

Business

Look at the big picture in money market reform, says regulator

Any reform of the $7 trillion money market funds sector should “tread carefully” and look at the broader financial system and not only the funds themselves, a global regulator said.

3 min read

As Fed meeting looms, investors brace for higher Treasury yields in 2021

Investors are betting that longer-dated Treasury yields are headed higher in the near term, reflecting expectations that the Federal Reserve is unlikely at its meeting on Wednesday to reconfigure its purchases to tamp down a rise in longer-dated yields.

4 min read

Amazon urges judge to set aside $10 billion cloud contract award to Microsoft

Amazon.com urged a U.S. judge to toss out the Pentagon’s $10 billion JEDI cloud computing contract award after the Defense Department said in September a court-ordered re-evaluation had determined Microsoft’s proposal still represented the best value for the government.

3 min read