Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day twenty four since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic. Today, Germany has been seen as having a model government response to the pandemic. Some have compared it to countries like Italy, where the virus spread like wildfire after governments took too long to act, but that comparison may be unfair and Germany's fate may be about to change. But first, here's what happened today.
How Speaker Nancy Pelosi scaled back her ambitions for Congress's next coronavirus stimulus package. She wants to focus on making more direct payments to individual and expanding loans to businesses. On CNN today, she said she still cared about infrastructure, but would possibly leave that and other democratic priorities for a later bill. Pelosi said the three and fifty billion dollars in the last stimulus meant to keep small business
afloat for two months won't be enough. She also said people would need an extension of the expanded unemployment benefits after data showed an unprecedented wave of new unemployment claims in the last two weeks. So I'd like to go right back and say, let's look at that bill, let's update it for what with some other things that we need, and again put money in the pockets of the American people, another direct payment extending we had unemployment at six months
in our bill, it's four. Let's take it to six for the unemployment so that people have that confidence. US employment plunged last month, offering a first look at the devastation the coronavirus pandemic has already been on trek on the once strong labor market. Pay Rolls fell seven and one thousand from the prior month, according to the Labor Department. That data mainly covers the early part of March, before widespread shutdowns forced firms to lay off millions more workers.
The jobless rate jumped to four point four, the highest since. Economists say it will surge above ten in the coming months. The US is expected to suggest Americans consider wearing face coverings in public. That's a shift from what health officials had previously recommended. Along with some other countries, US authorities had discouraged anyone outside of hospitals from wearing masks, but
more and more officials are reconsidering that guidance. Doctor Anthony Faucci, the top infectious disease expert in the US, said on Fox News Friday that asks can help when people are unable to keep six feet of distance from each other with certain necessities of life, going out to get food, while going to a pharmacy to get your medications, that
you may inadvertently come into closer contact. Because of that, and because of some recent information that the virus can actually be spread even when people just speak, as opposed to coughing and sneezing, the better part of valor is that when you're out and you can't maintain that six foot distance, to wear some sort of facial covering. In Europe, Spain reported the first decline in new coronavirus fatalities in four days, while the UK had its deadliest day yet.
Germany's Angela Merkel ended her self quarantine, while UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson still has symptoms and will continue to self isolate. The city state of Singapore will shutter schools and most workplaces, shifting away from an approach that limited interruptions to daily life and commerce. That's after confirmed cases of local transmission and unlinked infections in the country rose
in recent weeks. Now to today's main story, Italy has been among the hardest hit countries by the pandemic, an outbreak epicenter. Italy's cases are at nearly one twenty thousand, with over fourteen thousand deaths as of Friday, April three. In recent weeks, Italy's mortality rate from coronavirus had reached as high as nine point five it sobering evidence of
how deadly the virus can be. And yet just to the north, Germany seemed like it was escaping the worst of the outbreak by enacting widespread testing and taking the virus serious lee Earlier, with few cases and until recently a mortality rate that hovered under one percent, Germany appeared to be a model of how to successfully navigate the crisis. Of course, the US now has more than double Italy's cases, and experts predict the country will see hundreds of thousands
of deaths before the pandemic subsides. Many have wondered whether the US could have escaped in Italy like fate if it followed measures similar to Germany, But now there's some doubt about whether Germany is really a COVID nineteen success story compared to Italy's cautionary tale. Over the last week, Germany's mortality rate from the virus has crept higher, a troubling indicator that the country may not have evaded serious
trouble yet. To understand how the virus is affecting different European countries, I recently spoke with Bloomberg's Naomi Kreski from my makeshift home studio in Toronto. Naomi is in Germany, where you can hear the sounds of family life in the background, from under a blanket in Canada to under a blanket in Germany. Naomi, thank you for joining us.
What I really wanted to dig in here is about these what looked like very startling differences among countries in terms of cases and of course death rates in Europe. I think the major examples have been Italy versus Germany. Why do you think the death rates in Germany and Italy are are so different? To some extent In Germany, what we're seeing here is the effect of broad, broad testing that the German government has done. They are now
testing some fifty thousand people a day for coronavirus. They're they're going out and they're testing people who are not that sick, people who are not showing up at the hospital because they're very ill. Um they're following sort of chains of disease and by finding the people who have been in contact with people who were sick with coronavirus and testing them if they show any symptoms at all.
And so partly as a result of that, you have an age curve in Germany that just looks totally different than the age curve of people who have the virus in Italy or also in Spain, which is another place in Europe that has had a tremendous number of people die from coronavirus. You raised two really important points there, and that it is a testing question and there is at least a demographic and age demographic to consider there. So I'm wondering, is this explained at all by how
generations lived together actually in Germany versus Italy. Yeah, that's a super interesting question. So they're actually some academics who have already started looking at at this and trying to find some correlations, and they're just correlations at this point. We don't know for sure, but what we can say is that more than of Italians between the ages of thirty and forty nine, so sort of prime time to be traveling, picking up the virus from somewhere out, you know,
meeting people UM getting germs. More than of these people live with their parents, and that is more than double the rate for Germans in that same age bracket. So a pair of economists from Bond University actually looked at this and found a correlation between generations living under one roof and case fatality for coronavirus. What what are if any lessons we can take from the Germany and Italy examples, Well,
sort of a twofold lesson UM. On the one hand, Um the the economists who are looking at this, and they suggested that in countries where this kind of multi generational living is common, so in Europe that would be places like Greece or bulk Area, Poland Serbia, places where families often share a house or share an apartment, that these countries should move swiftly to protect the elderly. Some countries have spoken about school closures as one way to
do this. If you can prevent um children from passing it among themselves and then taking it home and passing it to their to to their older relatives. The second thing to to maybe look at in this context is um for countries where elderly people are not living together
with their families. UM. But this is one reason why nursing homes, for example in in the US have closed down their visiting hours, have said that families can't come and visit older frail p bowl and are you know, taking people's temperature at the door when they come in and testing workers on a day to day basis just this effort to try to prevent the virus from sort
of being unleashed among this really frail population. Early on it looked like Germany was really going to escape this thing, and and Italy was almost immediately hit hard and became
one of these epicenters of the global outbreak. How has that perception perhaps changed in the last week, UM, Is it's still that we're looking to Germany to say, Okay, there are a model that we can imitate in some way to hopefully tamp down the curve, and what can we avoid doing using Italy as perhaps a warning example?
Is that still the case? From the beginning, public health authorities in Germany warned that the death rate here would also rise, and part of that has to do with as time goes by, younger people, people who are more healthy who have the virus. Unfortunately, as time goes by, the weeks go on, they can tip over to a point where they are also sick enough to also pass away. And we've seen that start to happen in Germany in the last week or so, the first deaths of really
young people as well. Um, although one should say the vast majority, um more than of deaths in Germany are still people ages seventy and over. And and the other thing that we're seeing happen in Germany now in the past week is that the death rate is creeping up. And part of that is that the virus has now popped up in some senior living facilities, in some nursing homes, and they are seeing a high mortality of people who
have gotten the virus in those facilities. So it sounds like, you know, we we may have once looked to Germany to say, what can we emulate around the world to maybe avoid the hardest elements of this crisis, But it may just simply be they were maybe a little delayed and maybe facing the same issues as as everyone else.
I think we'll really see in the next week or two, whether it was purely an issue of delay or whether there is a deeper thing that we can learn um And so often you learn what you can learn after it's already too late to learn it right. But you know, we'll see how high the death rate does creep and whether it was just an issue of delay or whether they were able to sidesteps some of these really high death rates that we've seen. That's it for the Prognosis
Daily Edition. For more on the coronavirus crisis from a hundred and twenty bureaus around the world, visit Blueberg dot com slash coronavirus. If you appreciate the podcast, please take a moment to rate us and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify to help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily Edition is hosted by me Laura Carlson. The show is produced by Me Topher Foreheads, Jordan Gaspoure and Magnus Henriksson. Additional reporting by Naomi Kresky.
Original music by Leo Sidrin. Our editors are Francesca Levi and Rick Shine. Francesco Levi is Bloomberg's head of Podcasts. Thanks for listening,