As pandemic restrictions increase demand from China and suppress American ports, logistics.
Americans stuck in their homes have set off a surge of orders from factories in China, much of it carried across the Pacific in containers — the metal boxes that move goods in towering stacks atop enormous vessels. As households in the United States have filled bedrooms with office furniture and basements with treadmills, the demand for shipping has outstripped the availability of containers in Asia, yielding shortages there just as the boxes pile up at American ports. …
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lars Mikael Jensen, head of Global Ocean Network at A.P. Moller-Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company. “All the links in the supply chain are stretched. The ships, the trucks, the warehouses.” …
Containers that carried millions of masks to countries in Africa and South America early in the pandemic remain there, empty and uncollected, because shipping carriers have concentrated their vessels on their most popular routes — those linking North America and Europe to Asia.
New York Times
The political response shipped masks to Africa and TV sets to the fat, old Western populations
Covid-19 death rates 10 times higher in countries where most adults are overweight, report finds
The team examined mortality data from Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and the World Health Organization (WHO) and found that of 2.5 million Covid-19 deaths reported by the end of February, 2.2 million were in countries where more than half the population is overweight. …
Vietnam had one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 death rates, with 0.04 deaths occurring per 100,000 people. The country’s overweight population comes in at 18.3%. Other countries on the low death rate list with similar patterns include Japan, Thailand and South Korea. …
n the US, where 152.49 deaths were recorded per 100,000 people, 67.9% of the adult population is overweight, according to the report.
CNN