| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | With help from Myah Ward COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN — Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi checked into a Milan hospital last week after testing positive for Covid. Returning vacationers, like the 83-year-old Berlusconi who spent the summer on the island of Sardinia, have been linked to a resurgence of cases in the country. Italy is now recording more than 1,000 new Covid cases a day, for the first time since May. Still, the country is a long way from the spring, when it was the global Covid epicenter — recording thousands of cases and hundreds of deaths a day. Lockdowns have ended and schools are set to reopen, but the pandemic’s lasting scars remain. Your host checked back in with Silvia Sciorilli-Borrelli, a Milan-based journalist now with the Financial Times, over WhatsApp about how Italians are trying to resume normal life and why she thinks the pandemic has revealed that the country isn’t a place for young people or women. This conversation has been edited.
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| Does fear play a role in how people socialize and travel? Especially after the spring? Yes and no. There’s a large part of the population that is being extra cautious. Old people and teachers, for example. Some of them have asked not to return to school this year for health reasons. Others, including younger people, are behaving normally. The pandemic has become heavily politicized here, too, with some opposition parties saying the virus is no longer lethal and the government’s restrictions are tanking the economy. But cases are rising, right? Silvio Berlusconi’s illness, I think, will change the public’s perception of the current risk and lethality of the virus. It’s ironic his personal doctor, Alberto Zangrillo, was the one going on television to say the virus has mutated and was no longer lethal. He became a symbol for all those who wanted to argue Covid was some kind of invention. And now he’s having to put out statements to update on Berlusconi’s health, and it doesn’t look pretty. How do things look economically? In the U.S., the divide between high- and low-income people has been exacerbated. Definitely that. And also the divide between young and old people. Younger people mainly work on fixed term contracts; many of those were not renewed. Older people have permanent ones and the government put a ban on redundancies until at least November. The younger population is the part that is struggling the most to build careers and become independent from their families. As for women, well, with schools closed how is anyone expected to return to the office if they can’t afford a babysitter? The fact universities and schools have been closed for so long has also put extra pressure on young families and young people. They feel forgotten, not cared for. I think the pandemic is strengthening the idea this isn’t a country for young people or women, really. What about schools? What is the plan for reopening and trying to relieve some of this burden? Schools are reopening next week with very strict guidelines (face masks compulsory, social distancing, desks at least 2m apart, school buses cannot run at capacity, if one pupil is Covid positive the whole class must quarantine), but there’s a lot of uncertainty and mistrust. Both toward the health authorities and toward the govt’s ability to come up with a sensible plan. The govt scrambled in the past couple of weeks when they knew this was coming for the past 6 months. How are businesses responding? I’ve heard that wine windows developed during the Plague are making a comeback. I think businesses and entrepreneurs have proven to be resilient and proactive. Instead of complaints and sitting on their hands they’ve tried their best to bounce back. I’ve been to several restaurants. There’s a form you have to fill out w/ your personal details before you enter in any public venue, so they can track you if someone else tests positive. They all put up plastic shields between tables or moved them outside — menus online with QR codes, staff wearing face masks at all times, customers can take them off only when seated. No more than one family at a time in an elevator. Entrance and exit clearly separated. You’d never imagine Italians to abide by these rules. But they do? Yes. Everywhere. Including Southern Italy. Which is known to be lax on the respect of rules and law. That doesn’t fit the stereotype of an Italian! I should send you a picture from Naples. I had to stand in line outside at a cafe on the highway because there was one other person inside the premises. It was so hot and the lady inside shouted at us to stand in line outside and wear our masks and shut up. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Recently finished Domenico Starnone’s Trick, lovely insight into childhood in Italy. The 4-year old Mario bears a lot of similarities to my toddler. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
| | SLOW WALKING FAST TESTS — The Trump administration’s efforts to scale up rapid coronavirus testing in nursing homes is running into hurdles — just as the White House moves to a new pandemic strategy that stresses shielding the most vulnerable, health care reporter Rachel Roubein writes. Machines that process rapid tests are sitting idle in some nursing homes because of confusion and fears the results are less accurate than widely used lab-based tests. Other nursing homes worry about being able to quickly obtain more of the fast-turnaround tests. And conflicts between state and federal regulations over which tests can be used on nursing home staff are complicating the situation. These problems have emerged even as the Trump administration is pushing with increasing urgency to scale up and speed up testing of nursing home workers. The administration this week mandated regular testing of staff, who can unwittingly carry the virus into the homes. By mid-September, the administration will have sent machines that can do on-the-spot testing to nearly all of the country’s 15,000 nursing homes, completing an effort that began two months earlier. Infections appear to be yet again on the rise in the facilities, which have been linked to more than 51,000 coronavirus deaths, or over a quarter of the nation’s overall death toll. Some nursing homes also said they’re unsure when they’ll be able to buy more supply for rapid tests. It could be weeks, they have been told.
| | FREEZE IT — AstraZeneca has paused clinical trials of its coronavirus vaccine to review safety data while it investigates a “single event” of illness among a person enrolled in one of its studies, health care reporter Zachary Brennan writes. “This is a routine action which has to happen whenever there is a potentially unexplained illness in one of the trials, while it is investigated, ensuring we maintain the integrity of the trials,” the company said in a statement today. “In large trials illnesses will happen by chance but must be independently reviewed to check this carefully. We are working to expedite the review of the single event to minimize any potential impact on the trial timeline.” AstraZeneca did not offer any detail on the “single event,” but STAT reported today that a participant in the company's U.K. trial developed a “suspected serious adverse reaction.” It is not clear whether AstraZeneca or a regulator paused the trial.
| | Is your child heading back to school? If so, Nightly wants to hear from them. Parents and students can send us a short, 1-3 minute voice memo recording to audio@politico.com by Friday, Sept. 11. Please include (1) names, (2) hometown, and (3) the answer to this prompt: Describe the first day of school this year, whether it was remote or in-person. (Anecdotes are encouraged!) Please try to record in a quiet area and hold the phone as if you were talking to someone, but about 1-2 inches from your face. We're accepting submissions from students (and parents of students) from kindergarten through 12th grade. If your student is a minor, parents/guardians, please acknowledge somewhere in the email that you are giving POLITICO permission to use the audio for our podcasts or audio production if we choose to do so. (We can also use the student’s first name only if privacy is a concern.) We’ll use select submissions next week in Nightly.
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Boaters show their support for President Donald Trump during a parade down the Intracoastal Waterway to just off the shore of Mar-a-Lago on Labor Day in West Palm Beach, Fla. | Getty Images | | | EASY RIDERS, RAGING VIRUS — Almost a fifth of the Covid cases in the U.S. in the last month — or 19 percent of the country’s 1.4 million new cases from Aug. 2 to Sept. 2 — are linked to a motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D., according to a new report from Germany’s IZA Institute of Labor Economics. The 10-day-long motorcycle rally drew more than 400,000 people to the small city of 7,000 in August, writes Nightly’s Myah Ward. The research team, from several institutions and with support from San Diego State’s Center for Health Economics and Policy Studies, has examined events like Trump’s Tulsa rally and the Black Lives Matter protests that did not lead to an uptick in cases, said Andrew Friedson, a health economist at the University of Colorado Denver and one of the report’s authors. During the Tulsa rally and the George Floyd protests, the potential increase in viral spread was offset by increased social distancing among the people who didn’t attend the rally or the protests, Friedson said. By looking at cellphone data, the researchers found that the number of hours cell phones were inside of homes shot up during these events. But with Sturgis, the opposite happened. Cellphone data showed that activity at restaurants, bars, hotels and shops in South Dakota’s Meade County, where the rally took place, rose by up to 90 percent. And the time people spent at home also declined. In Sturgis, not only were gathering guidelines ignored, Friedson said, but it appears people didn’t wear masks or social distance. After the event, Covid-19 cases rose in Meade County. But it’s not South Dakota that’s facing the biggest costs. “South Dakota reaped some large economic benefits, and the health costs are largely exported,” Friedson said. “Most of the cases that we’re estimating are showing up in places other than South Dakota — the vast majority.”
| | POWRÓT DO SZKOŁY — Poland was relatively lucky throughout the pandemic. Now it’s embarking on an experiment that has parents and teachers holding their breath — restarting live instruction for all of the country’s 4.5 million school children. Under the new format for the school year, Poland’s education ministry lets schools switch to a hybrid live-virtual system or go fully online only when a coronavirus infection has been confirmed, Wojciech Kość writes. To date, this has happened in just a tiny fraction of schools, according to the ministry. The school year began on Sept. 1, and after a week almost all of the nation’s kindergartens and schools were open, the ministry reported. Only 35 schools had switched to hybrid teaching and 45 had moved online. As for guidance within schools, children are supposed to disinfect hands frequently and keep their distance from each other. There is no requirement to wear masks, although directors have the freedom to impose such a measure for pupils moving inside the building. Education Minister Dariusz Piontkowski insisted that Poland’s approach is similar to that of other European countries, but there are differences. For example, Germany is opening schools on staggered schedules, with kids grouped into small cohorts, an idea that has also taken hold in Norway and Denmark. In Belgium, all students 12 and older must wear masks. France is also imposing a mask rule on children above primary grades. RED LIGHT, GREEN LIGHT — From Sept. 15, prostitution will be allowed again in the German states of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, which contain the big cities of Bremen and Hamburg, ending months of forced shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic, Laurenz Gehrke writes. In order to track possible infections, however, sex workers will be obliged to keep contact lists and work by appointment, Hamburg’s Social Affairs Minister Melanie Leonhard said today, German media reported. Leonhard added that she believed the move would remove the legal basis for pending lawsuits against the ban on prostitution. Last week, Europe’s largest brothel, in Cologne, filed for bankruptcy after five months of forced closure.
| | ‘WHATEVER IT TAKES’ — Trump denied today that his campaign was in dire financial straits but pledged he would contribute “whatever it takes” from his personal fortune to ensure the success of his reelection effort. “If I have to, I would,” Trump said of donating to his own campaign. “But we’re doing very well. We needed to spend more money up front because of the pandemic and the statements being made by Democrats, which were, again, disinformation.”
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6 The legal limit at which police can disperse people from gathering in the U.K. starting Monday, in response to a sharp increase in coronavirus cases, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is set to announce . The U.K. has seen a swift rise in the daily number of cases since the weekend, with a further 2,420 cases reported today. |
| | | FRESHMEN IN THE FAMILY ROOM — Executive health care editor Joanne Kenen emails us: My son baked big, delicious chocolate cookies the other night. I took care to answer questions (“Mom, do we have vanilla?”) from afar. It is definitely not cool to have your mom in your Zoom frame during Virtual Freshman Orientation community baking hour. Ilan has been home since his overseas gap year was abruptly and painfully terminated in March. He’s not happy about it, but he’s resilient. (Admittedly, I’m biased.) He managed to get a paying summer job doing election-year research for a USC professor. He took two college summer school classes, knocking off his language requirement. But he’s had enough of his childhood bedroom — and the living room, family room, kitchen, dining room and sunporch for that matter. With tangible relief, he began packing for college in August, preparing for his two weeks of New York State-imposed quarantine before moving into his socially-distanced dorm room for his socially-distanced first year. Then, kaboom, the dorms were closed. His classes would all be virtual. He’s back in his room. School began this morning: freshman writing seminar at 8:40 a.m., followed by a poli-sci lecture at 10 a.m. on voting in 2020. Philosophy starts on Wednesday. He’ll be OK. But my heart breaks for him. He had fun making those cookies, and playing Orientation Jeopardy. We live just outside Washington, and a bunch of incoming Columbia first years from the area organized a masked, safe gathering on the National Mall the other night; he came home happier, lighter, than I’d seen him in months. Outgoing and intellectually curious, he is connecting with new online friends as well as can be under these circumstances. But I remember my freshman orientation week with astonishing clarity. Some of the people I met that week are still among those who matter most to me all these many years later. So my wish for my son is that many years from now, he will look back at these terrible times, and say to a dear old friend, “Remember when we met baking cookies over Zoom? They were really good. My mom ate two.” Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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