For the world economy, a grim slog tempered by new hopes

Nearly a year into a pandemic that has ravaged the global economy like no time since the Great Depression, the only clear pathway toward improved fortunes is containing the virus itself.

With the United States suffering its most rampant transmission yet and with major nations in Europe again under lockdown, prospects remain grim for a meaningful worldwide recovery before the middle of next year and far longer in some economies. Substantial job growth could take longer still.

A significant hope has emerged this month in the form of three vaccine candidates, easing fears that humanity could be subject to years of intermittent, wealth-destroying lockdowns. But significant hurdles remain before vaccines restore any semblance of normalcy. More tests must be conducted and vast supplies manufactured. The world must navigate the complexities of distributing a lifesaving medicine amid a surge of nationalism.

The very concept of normalcy now seems open to question. Even after the coronavirus is tamed into something familiar and manageable like the flu, will people habituated to keeping their distance from others return to restaurants, shopping malls and entertainment venues in the same numbers? With videoconferencing established as a replacement for business travel, will companies shell out as much as before to put them on airplanes and in hotels?

Calculating the prospects for a vigorous economic recovery entails wrestling with questions of human nature. The Depression imprinted a generation with a tendency toward thriftiness and an aversion to risk. If frugality endures this time, that would have profound and enduring economic consequences; consumer spending typically makes up two-thirds of economic activity in countries like the United States and Britain.

“If you’re a business, you might be a bit more wary about taking on staff again,” said Ben May, a global economist at Oxford Economics in London. “You might make do with overtime for a while. Households might behave more cautiously. If that’s the case, you run the risk of economic scarring further down the line.”

Long-term damage on top of the recent economic devastation would add to the inequality that has been a central feature of recent decades, as people with greater education, advanced skills and access to stock and real estate markets harvested the winnings of expansion, while others struggled.

The pandemic has made the world more so. It has concentrated its lethal force on blue-collar workers, for whom human interaction is a necessity, striking people who labor in warehouses, slaughterhouses and front-line medical facilities. Professionals able to work from home have maintained their safety along with their incomes.

The industries that face the greatest challenges in recovering — airlines, hotels, restaurants and retail — are major employers of lower-skilled workers and especially women.

At a time when companies are under pressure to make their workforces more diverse, the likelihood that many people will continue working from home threatens to impede entry and promotion for women and minorities. Breaking into established ranks and altering culture is not a process best conducted over Zoom.

That could limit economic dynamism. “Growing inequality is terrible for economies because consumption is reduced,” said Ian Goldin, a professor of globalization and development at Oxford University and author of “Terra Incognita: 100 Maps to Survive the Next 100 Years.” “A smaller share of your economy is able to buy your goods and services.”

What has been challenged most directly is the popular notion that the world economy could simply endure a deep freeze to contain the pandemic and then revive, almost as if nothing had happened. The idea was that public largesse could support workers and keep businesses alive during the short, sharp downturn required to choke off the virus, before commercial life recovered.

This sort of thinking was the basis for forecasts of a so-called V-shaped recovery: The astonishing collapse of major economies in the first half of the year was supposed to be followed by an equally astonishing revival.

But the global economy does not come with an on-off switch. After marked improvement in the late summer, the surge of virus cases has destroyed the hopeful scenario. The strains of the catastrophe — from failed businesses and elevated joblessness to disrupted education — appear likely to endure, potentially for years.

When the novel coronavirus first captured attention in China early this year, it prompted grave worries about a global shock. China was the world’s second-largest economy and a voracious purchaser of goods and services, from raw materials like soybeans and iron ore to the latest gadgets from Apple. Its factories produced electronics and apparel, chemicals and construction supplies, auto parts and appliances. Disruption in China was certain to ripple outward.

The threat intensified as the virus spread to Europe, shutting down commercial life in Italy’s industrial heartland and then spreading to factories across the continent. As the pandemic assailed Europe and then North and South America, governments ordered businesses closed to halt the virus. The economic unraveling proved more intense than the global financial crisis of a dozen years earlier.

World leaders drew on the playbook from that episode, unleashing trillions of dollars of credit via central banks and direct government spending. European nations effectively nationalized payrolls to prevent layoffs. The United States delivered expanded unemployment benefits. All of this eased fears of a cascading run of bankruptcies and a potential financial crisis.

After initially covering up the epidemic, China mobilized aggressively to contain it. Its factories roared back to life, and its 1.4 billion people resumed spending, making China a rare engine of growth in the world economy.

In Europe, the apparent containment of the virus in the summer months along with the lifting of government restrictions prompted people to emerge from their bunkers, taking holidays, going out to eat and generating optimism for a recovery.

Between July and September, most major economies expanded dramatically. The United States grew more than 7% compared with the previous quarter and Germany by more than 8%. The United Kingdom expanded by nearly 16% and France by a whopping 18%. Such performances were embraced by some as proof that economies would snap back as soon as the virus was gone.

Conditions appeared ripe for robust spending. Unlike in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, when households were contending with crippling debts — especially in the United States — many households in large economies are this time flush with cash, given the enforced savings regimen of the lockdowns.

“You have a lot of pent-up money,” said Kjersti Haugland, chief economist at DNB Markets, an investment bank in Oslo, Norway. “This is definitely a scenario for a rebound.”

Yet the exuberance of the summer also appears to have rendered the populace vulnerable. The French thronged cafes, and Britons returned to the pubs. Americans disdained masks as a supposed affront to civil liberties. The virus commenced spreading, triggering a new round of lockdowns that have destroyed hopes of recovery this year.

Most economists assume that Europe will register a contraction over the last quarter of the year. Britain’s economy is expected to shrink by more than 11% this year, according to Oxford Economics, and will struggle to mount a full recovery before 2022. Among the worst-performing major economies is India; its economy contracted 7.5% in the three months that ended in September compared with a year earlier, government figures showed Friday.

The world economy will contract by 4.4% this year, the International Monetary Fund forecast in its most recent assessment. World trade is on track to fall by as much as 9% this year, according to an assessment from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.

Next year, the world economy is expected to grow by 5.2%, according to the IMF, but that would still leave it only 0.6% larger than in 2019. Joblessness would remain elevated. Poor countries would continue to suffer a drop in earnings sent home by migrant workers. Malnutrition would climb.

In the United States, the defeat of President Donald Trump by Joe Biden has yielded optimism that a sustained and serious attack on the pandemic will now be waged. But the prospect that the incoming administration will be constrained by Republican control of the Senate — pending a pair of runoff elections in Georgia — reduces the likelihood that the government will agree on a robust package of spending measures to stimulate the economy.

Questions about next year center on how soon vaccines reach the bloodstream of the masses. The three candidates so far, from Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca, have produced a credible vision of an end to the agony. But the economic pain has become so intense that its effects may linger.

The infusions of relief from central banks have propped up solid and flimsy companies alike. Many of the weak will eventually succumb, especially as aid is withdrawn, costing jobs. The pandemic has accelerated a pushback against globalization that may inspire multinational companies to make more goods in their home markets while cutting costs through automation — limiting job and wage growth.

Poor and developing countries went into the pandemic facing alarming levels of debt. Promised aid from international institutions like the IMF and the World Bank have proved disappointing. Private creditors have withheld debt relief.

Some argue that the pandemic should be the impetus for new economic models that create jobs through a transition to green energy while spreading the gains more equitably.

“What I’m allergic to at the moment is the notion of going back, bouncing back,” Goldin said. “It’s business as usual that got us to where we are.”

-The New York Times-

Chess (yes, chess) is now a streaming obsession

On a recent afternoon, thousands of noncombatants watched from the sidelines as their general ordered his troops across the battlefield and became locked in a fierce duel with the enemy.

At one point, he berated himself for a tactical misstep that could have cost his side the high-stakes conflict. Then he smiled and began outmaneuvering his foe.

“I can’t lose,” Hikaru Nakamura, 32, said to the exultant onlookers. Victory seemed close as members of the opposing army were vanquished one by one. “I win again — there you go, guys. Wow.”

Nakamura gave himself just a moment’s respite, then plunged into another fray. Pawns, knights, bishops and even kings fell before him as the chess grandmaster demolished a slate of online challengers, all while narrating the tide of the battle to tens of thousands of fans watching him stream live on Twitch, the Amazon-owned site where people usually broadcast themselves playing video games like Fortnite and Call of Duty.

The coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home orders have crowned a host of unlikely winners catering to bored audiences. But watching livestreams of chess games? Could one of the world’s oldest and most cerebral games really rebrand itself as a lively enough pastime to capture the interest of the masses on Twitch?

Turns out, it already has.

Since the pandemic began, viewership of live chess games has soared. From March through August, people watched 41.2 million hours of chess on Twitch, four times as many hours as in the previous six months, according to analytics website SullyGnome. In June, an amateur chess tournament called PogChamps was briefly the top-viewed stream on Twitch, with 63,000 people watching at once, SullyGnome said. And popular Twitch gamers like Félix Lengyel (better known to his 3.3 million followers as “xQcOW”) have also recently started streaming chess.

That collision of the chess audience and the general gamer audience has created a “giant chess bonfire,” said Marcus Graham, Twitch’s head of creator development.

The popularity of online chess has partly been fueled by Nakamura. Last month, one of the world’s top professional video game teams, Team SoloMid, beat several esports rivals to sign him to a six-figure contract so it could pair him with advertisers and merchandise. Nakamura was one of the first chess players to join an esports team, just a week after a different group signed a Canadian player, Qiyu Zhou.

Though Nakamura began streaming chess consistently on his Twitch channel, GMHikaru, in 2018, nearly all of his 528,000 followers have come aboard since the pandemic began. And as his popularity has skyrocketed, media attention has increased — including a cameo as himself on the television drama “Billions” in May.

“It’s just amazing to see the level of support and the love that I’ve seen from the Twitch community,” Nakamura said. He added that the most appealing part of playing and streaming chess was simply “the fact that I’m so good at it.”

It helps that he has an unimpeachable chess pedigree. In 1998, at age 10, he became the youngest player in the United States to be named a master, a title earned through strong performances. Five years later, he became the youngest U.S. player to graduate to grandmaster, the highest title. He has since won five national championships.

On his Twitch channel, Nakamura, who lives in Los Angeles, rarely stops talking. His stream of commentary and chatter, even as he directs his pieces with the precision of an orchestra conductor, is one of the main reasons fans have flocked to him.

“He draws people because he’s so good, but also, there are other top players on Twitch that are not as engaging as he is, not as funny, not as in tune with the sort of Twitch culture,” said Brandon Benton, 34, a postdoctoral physics researcher at Cornell University who watches Nakamura stream. He’s a “down-to-earth memer and jokester.”

If you’re picturing a chess match as a drawn-out slog — well, you’re not wrong. A classical game without time limits can last five hours. But many online battles, including nearly all the games that Nakamura streams, are blitz chess. Each player has just a few minutes to complete all of his or her moves, leading to an aggressive, risky style of play that fans say is exhilarating to watch.

A player’s timer stops only when it is the other person’s turn to move a piece, so planning ahead and making quick calls is vital to managing the clock. The climax often comes when mere seconds remain and the combatants exchange a rapid flurry of moves.

In a recent stream, Nakamura had fewer pieces left than his opponent and just 20 seconds remaining. But 41 moves later, he was grinning after pulling off an improbable checkmate that involved charging a pawn across the board and hatching it into a queen. It had taken him just 16 seconds.

“More than anything, it’s the ability to play extremely high-level chess and win while I seemingly am not focused on the game and talking to my chat,” Nakamura said of his ability to draw a large audience, which he usually retains as he plays 20 or more games in one sitting. “At least at blitz chess, I’m probably the best or second-best player ever, in the entire history, at least online.”

If Nakamura is as good as he says — and he is, judging from his numerous titles, various international awards and 288 victories in 302 streamed matches — then it makes sense that chess fans are tuning in. If Serena Williams and Usain Bolt showed off their unique abilities every day on a livestream, wouldn’t you watch?

Still, chess, to put it kindly, is not quite as visually stimulating as a tennis match or a 100-meter dash. So what else is part of the secret?

Many devotees at “Naka’s PogUniversity” — the name of Nakamura’s community on Discord, a voice and text chat application — said they had been sucked in after rediscovering chess in the past few months while stuck inside. Many had dabbled in the game as children.

“When I was growing up, high-level chess was secreted behind closed doors, played by the privileged, moneyed people in society,” said Clayton Chan, 43, from Tustin, California. “Realizing that I could see chess being played at the highest levels and seeing the players on Twitch communicate their thoughts with the community really resonated with me.”

Noah Olsen, 24, who lives in Washington, D.C., said he enjoyed how interactive Nakamura was with his fans. The grandmaster sometimes invites his subscribers to play against him on the stream, and he will start with fewer pieces as a handicap or play blindfolded.

“It’s definitely a lot of fun to know you’re going up against a chess mind the caliber of Hikaru,” Olsen said. “But the 10,000 people watching while he dismantles you is a little nerve-racking.”

In Murcia, Spain, Anthony Nicolaou, 16, recently discovered Nakamura’s channel. That inspired him to rededicate himself to a longtime goal: to beat his father at chess.

“The most important thing I learned from him is that it’s OK to be bad,” he said of watching Nakamura. “I realized you can still learn and improve without feeling like an idiot.”

Nakamura has become a coach for streamers, too. He ranges from supportive to exasperated with the shortcomings of his protégés. Fans love when he loses his mind at a poorly thought-out move.

“He makes all sorts of faces,” Benton of Cornell said.

The chess fever sweeping Twitch has been a boon for those who make money streaming the games. Eric Hansen, 28, a grandmaster who streams on the Twitch channel ChessBrah, said he could make six figures a year on the platform through sales of merchandise, ad sponsorships and subscriber contributions.

Nakamura said all the attention was a victory for chess.

“I’ve seen a lot of booms and busts,” he said. But this time, “I don’t actually see it tailing off now. I think the future’s extremely bright.”


Copyright:
c.2020 The New York Times Company

What’s a Palantir? Tech industry’s next big IPO

About a month before he became president, Donald Trump met with the leaders of the country’s top technology companies at Trump Tower in Manhattan.

The meeting included the chief executives of Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft and other household names like Tesla and Oracle. And then there was Alex Karp, chief executive of a company, called Palantir Technologies, that few outside Silicon Valley and government circles had heard of.

Palantir, the only privately held company represented in the room, had become a major player among government contractors. And, indicative of its growing prominence, one of its founders, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, had supported Trump during the 2016 election and had helped set up the meeting.

Now, as Palantir prepares to go public in what could be the largest stock market listing of a tech startup since Uber last year, many are wondering: What exactly does this influential but little-known company do?

Offering software — and, crucially, teams of engineers that customize the software — Palantir helps organizations make sense of vast amounts of data. It helps gather information from various sources like internet traffic and cellphone records and analyzes that information. It puts those disparate pieces together into something that makes sense to its users, like a visual display.

But it can take plenty of engineers and plenty of time to make Palantir’s technology work the way customers need it to. And that mix of technology and human muscle may lead to some confusion on Wall Street about how to value the company. Is Palantir a software company, which is traditionally a very profitable business, or is it a less-profitable consulting firm? Or is it both?

“For investors, it is a bit of a Rubik’s Cube,” said Daniel Ives, managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities.

Palantir, which was founded in 2003, has long described its technology as ideal for tracking terrorists, often embracing an unconfirmed rumor that it helped locate Osama bin Laden. The name Palantir is a nod to spherical objects used in the “Lord of the Rings” books to see other parts of fictional Middle-earth.

Funded in part by In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, the company built its flagship software technology, Gotham, with an eye toward use inside the CIA.

Palantir’s technologies can also help track the spread of the coronavirus, as it is now doing for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. And they can help find immigrants living in the country without legal permission, which is how Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under orders from the White House, is using these technologies, according to recently released federal documents.

The company is deeply wedded to its work inside the government. Although some Palantir employees have protested its work with ICE and other parts of the government, it has not backed off.

In a letter to potential investors, included in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission Tuesday, Karp pointedly jabbed at fellow Silicon Valley companies and said he was proud of Palantir’s work with federal agencies.

“Our company was founded in Silicon Valley. But we seem to share fewer and fewer of the technology sector’s values and commitments,” he wrote. He added that “software projects with our nation’s defense and intelligence agencies, whose missions are to keep us safe, have become controversial, while companies built on advertising dollars are commonplace.”

The New York Times

How Apple’s 30 percent app store cut became a boon and a headache

OAKLAND, California — Twelve years ago, Apple introduced the App Store, a peculiar online marketplace for the year-old iPhone. It had 500 offerings. Apple told app makers it would take a 30 percent cut of their sales, and few complained.

Today, the App Store is one of the world’s largest centers of commerce, facilitating half a trillion dollars in sales last year alone. And Apple still takes 30 percent of many apps’ sales.

That commission has proved hugely consequential for Apple. It has been the primary driver of growth in recent years for a company that has nearly $275 billion in annual sales. And it has created some of Apple’s biggest headaches, drawing antitrust scrutiny, fury from app makers and lawsuits from consumers and partners.

The headaches intensified this week when Epic Games, the maker of “Fortnite,” arguably the world’s most popular video game, sued both Apple and Google, accusing the companies of breaking antitrust laws by forcing app makers to pay their 30 percent fees. The lawsuits followed Apple and Google’s removal of “Fortnite” from their app stores because Epic encouraged users to pay it directly, rather than through Apple or Google, to avoid their fees.

“I think we’re realizing that 30% is way too much,” said Phillip Shoemaker, a former senior App Store executive, who left Apple in 2016. Credit card companies charge roughly 3 percent to process payments. “It should be closer to that,” he said.

That is the rising sentiment among app developers, consumers and regulators. Apple and Google, which together are worth more than $3 trillion, make the software that backs virtually all of the world’s smartphones. That dominance has allowed them to keep their commissions high.

But now that the tech giants’ smartphones have become the only way other businesses reach millions of people, those businesses are increasingly pleading: Do you really need a third of my sales?

“There are very few companies out there that have a 30 percent profit margin,” said Andy Yen, the chief executive of ProtonMail, an email service. “The only way we can support this fee is by passing that cost on to customers.” ProtonMail charges 30 percent less for subscriptions purchased on its website, but when the company advertised that to its iPhone users, Apple restricted its app.

Likewise, Spotify increased its monthly subscription to $13 from $10 in 2014 to account for Apple’s fee. A year later, Apple introduced a competing music service — priced at $10. To compete, Spotify opted out of Apple’s payment system, enabling it to avoid the commission. Now customers can still use Spotify’s app, but they must subscribe on Spotify’s website. Yet Apple bars Spotify from saying that in its iPhone app.

“Either we lose because we have to pay them a 30 percent tax just to operate and raise our prices for consumers as a result, or we lose because it becomes much more expensive to convert users from free to premium,” Horacio Gutierrez, Spotify’s chief legal officer, told reporters in June after European regulators opened an antitrust investigation into Apple based on Spotify’s complaint.

Even consumers have spoken up. An enormous class-action lawsuit accuses Apple of breaking antitrust laws to enforce its commission, inflating app prices for iPhone users. The Supreme Court ruled last year the lawsuit could proceed.

On Friday, Facebook chimed in, complaining that Apple is collecting 30 percent of sales on its new live-events service, where people can sell expert talks, fitness classes and cooking tutorials on Facebook’s app. Facebook said it wanted to process the payments itself so it could pass on 100 percent of the sales to the small businesses selling the talks and classes, but Apple declined.

Apple argues that it has actually cut software developers a break. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, suggested to Congress last month that when software was still sold in brick-and-mortar stores, 50 percent to 70 percent of the retail price went to middlemen.

“In the more than a decade since the App Store debuted, we have never raised the commission or added a single fee,” he told lawmakers. “The App Store evolves with the times, and every change we have made has been in the direction of providing a better experience for our users and a compelling business opportunity for developers.”

For Google, the stakes are lower. It allows people to download apps from outside its Android app store, meaning app makers like Epic have ample ways to still reach consumers using Android devices. And Google’s vast online advertising business makes its app store a much smaller portion of its overall business.

Over the past year, Apple has collected $19 billion of the $63.4 billion in sales of digital goods and services on iPhone and iPad apps, according to Sensor Tower, an app analytics firm. Google collected $10 billion of the $33.8 billion in similar spending on its app store, Sensor Tower said.

Before Cook’s testimony to Congress, at a House hearing focused on the power of Big Tech, Apple commissioned a study that showed its cut was in line with what many other platforms charged for similar distribution, including the app stores from Google, Microsoft and Samsung, and the game stores from Nintendo, Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s Xbox.

Amazon’s Twitch gaming platform collects 50 percent, according to the study. By comparison, Amazon, eBay and Walmart charge 6 percent to 17 percent for sales of goods on their websites, the study said.

What the study didn’t note: Apple popularized the 30 percent cut.

It applied that rate on any purchases of an app in 2008, and then a year later on any transactions inside of apps for digital goods and services, such as a virtual currency in a game or a subscription to a music, TV or dating app. Apple does not take a cut of apps’ sales of advertising or physicals goods, and thus most apps don’t pay a fee.

Epic made $1.8 billion on “Fortnite” last year, in large part by selling digital currency that players need to buy new features inside the game. The game itself is free.

On Thursday, Epic started its confrontation with the tech giants by allowing “Fortnite” users to pay it directly in its iPhone and Android apps, rather than via Apple or Google’s payment systems.

Epic also offered a 20 percent discount on all purchases that used its payment system. That meant that if Apple and Google charged a 10 percent commission, their price would be about the same as the one Epic was offering its customers.

Jai Chulani, one Apple executive, said in an email to colleagues that he worried that if Apple charged 30 percent of the first year of a subscription “we may be leaving money on the table.”

Eddy Cue, one of Apple’s most senior executives, responded with a better idea: “For recurring subscriptions, we should ask for 40 percent.”

The New York Times Company

US man used COVID-19 relief money to buy a Lamborghini, prosecutors say

A Texas man this week became the second person in less than 2 weeks to be accused by federal prosecutors of using COVID-19 relief money to buy a Lamborghini.

The man, Lee Price III, 29, of Houston, received more than $1.6 million under the federal Paycheck Protection Program after he submitted 5 applications in May and June with fraudulent information to numerous banks claiming to employ dozens of people, prosecutors in Houston said Tuesday.

In response to 2 of those applications, a pair of banks that officials did not identify deposited money into bank accounts controlled by Price, according to a criminal complaint filed in the Southern District of Texas.

With that money, Price went on a lavish spending spree, according to the complaint. On June 26 — the day Price received $937,500 in response to 1 request — he purchased a $14,000 Rolex watch, the complaint stated. The next day, it said, he bought a 2019 Lamborghini Urus for $233,337.60.

And over the next 3 days, he spent more than $700 at a liquor store, around $2,000 at a strip club and more than $2,500 at 2 Houston nightclubs, according to the complaint.

In response to another application, Price received $752,452, the prosecutors said. That money went toward the purchase of a 2020 Ford F-350 pickup truck and the lease for a luxury apartment in midtown Houston, the prosecutors said.

Price was arrested Tuesday and charged with wire fraud, bank fraud, making false statements to financial institutions and engaging in prohibited monetary transactions, the prosecutors said.

A person who answered a telephone number listed for Price immediately hung up Tuesday night. A federal public defender was assigned to represent Price, according to court records. An email message sent to the public defender’s office Tuesday night was not immediately returned.

Last week, prosecutors in Florida arrested and charged David Hines of Miami with three felonies, accusing him of having used COVID-19 relief money to buy a blue Lamborghini Huracán, the authorities said.

Hines’ lawyer, Chad Piotrowski, said in a statement that his client was “a legitimate business owner who, like millions of Americans, suffered financially during the pandemic” and “is anxious to tell his side of the story when the time comes.”

-Azi Paybarah, The New York Times-

'It's emotional whiplash’: California is once again at the center of the virus crisis

(Closing a Second Time)

LOS ANGELES — When everything shut down in March as the coronavirus took off in California, Canter’s Deli, a mainstay in the Fairfax District of Los Angeles, laid off dozens of employees.

A few months later, it called them back to work. By then, the state appeared to have emerged from the initial virus crisis in much better shape than other parts of the country.

But now California’s caseload is exploding, with rising deaths and hospitalizations. As quickly as things had opened up, they have shut down again.

"To have to call those people up so many times, starting March 15, to say, ‘I’m sorry, we have to lay you off, we have to furlough you,’” said Jacqueline Canter, 59, among the third generation of her family to run the restaurant. “Then call them back: ‘Oh, guess what, we’re opening again, come back.’ Then call them back: ‘Guess what, you don’t have a job anymore.’ It’s just a devastating experience for me.

“It’s an emotional roller coaster,” she added. “It’s emotional whiplash.”

If America is now experiencing a sense of national déjà vu, with coronavirus deaths rising and hospitalizations at a level similar to the spring peak, that feeling is perhaps nowhere more intense than in California.

In the Northeast, the crisis that was so acute this spring in places like New York and Connecticut has now abated and shifted to the Sun Belt, where states like Texas and Florida had managed at first to escape the worst of the virus. But California is now in the unwelcome position of having found itself at the center of the pandemic twice over.

California was the first state to issue a stay-at-home order this spring, helping to control an early outbreak. But after a reopening that some health officials warned was too fast, cases surged, leading to a new statewide mask mandate and the closure of bars and indoor dining again. With more than 420,000 known cases, California has surpassed New York to have the most recorded cases of any state, and it set a single-day record Wednesday with more than 12,100 new cases and 155 new deaths.

And as California struggles once again to contain the virus, the multitude of challenges playing out across America has collided in every corner of the state, as if it were a microcosm of the country itself.

Gov. Gavin Newsom is wrestling with how to convey a consistent message while dealing with local officials who have resisted both new shutdowns and enforcing a mandatory mask order. Some rural areas of the state remain relatively unscathed with low case counts, while cases in Los Angeles are skyrocketing. The city’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, has warned that a new stay-at-home order could come down in the coming days.

In many parts of San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Los Angeles, people do not leave home without a mask. In Huntington Beach and across Orange County, residents have openly defied mask orders and protested against them.

In Los Angeles and San Diego, classrooms will be empty this fall, after public school officials decided they were unwilling to risk in-person instruction. But in Orange County, a recommendation by the Board of Education that children return to school without masks became political fodder for debate, even as the governor announced that most California schools would not be able to teach in person.

The contradictions span the state, creating a sense of regional dissonance. In Imperial County, on the southern border with Mexico, hospitals have been so overwhelmed with virus cases that patients have had to be airlifted elsewhere. But in the northernmost tip, the virus has yet to hit Modoc County, an agricultural community of around 9,000, where there were zero known cases as of Thursday.

“It’s a small town,” said Cynthia Peña, owner of Java Doc, a coffee shop in Alturas, California, where seasonal fires were the most pressing issue for local officials. “Everyone is pretty much social distancing; we already know a cow’s length.” Still, she has shut down her dining room and asked her employees to wear masks when customers arrive at the drive-thru window.

In recent weeks, Newsom has walked a fine line between justifying the state’s reopening and imploring Californians to stay home and refrain from gathering. He has pleaded with residents to wear masks and chided them for allowing their children to hug their cousins or grandparents.

He has repeatedly pointed out that conditions across a huge state are varied, saying, “None of us live in the aggregate; it’s a very different picture you can paint depending on where you live in the state.”

It is in some ways California’s sprawling nature, with 40 million residents spread across urban downtowns and rural areas, liberal strongholds and conservative alcoves, that has aggravated the feeling of back and forth. What applies in one area may not feel necessary in another, even as residents live under statewide orders. And the sense of confusion is often made worse by conflicting political messages from local leaders, the governor and the White House.

“It’s very hard to go backwards,” said Jonathan Fielding, a professor of health policy and management at UCLA and former public health director for Los Angeles County, who worried that a lack of consistent messaging had allowed many Californians to choose which message they wanted to hear at various points in the pandemic.

“When people have been isolated and in some cases lost a job and are hearing all of these different things, what is the message?” he said. “What is the message when you are hearing, basically, a cacophony?”

In Los Angeles — which has seen the most cases in California and where hospitals are filling up — parts of the city feel under siege, and in other areas, there is little palpable sense of the severity of the situation. Unlike in New York City during the height of the outbreak, most Angelenos have not had to absorb the piercing wail of ambulance sirens at all hours, a sound that came to define the pandemic there.

California’s numbers are in part a reflection of its vast population, about double that of New York state, and testing is far more available now than in the spring. Antibody tests suggest that far more people than previously reported were infected in New York City at its peak. But because Los Angeles is so less dense than New York City, there are parts of Los Angeles where the reality of the virus at this stage of the pandemic can go unnoticed.

“It feels as normal as it always did,” said Michael Lee, the owner of a hair salon, Bang Bang LA, in the Los Feliz neighborhood.

For Lee, the past several months have been turbulent in the extreme. He was set to open his business just as the pandemic gained a hold in the country, forcing shutdowns.

“We opened March 19 and got shut down March 20,” he said.

Lee, who rents space to other hair stylists, did not collect any rent for the first months of the shutdown. Now he is charging tenants just 35% of their rent “just to keep the doors open for when we can go back to work.”

He was allowed to open for about five weeks beginning in early June, but many of his clients stayed away, saying they feared another coronavirus wave. “They were right, I guess,” he said.

The salon shut down again last week, and Lee has been spending his time cleaning it, touching up the paint on the walls and researching business loans to help him stay afloat. “I’ve just been watching the numbers every day, hoping to see them start dropping,” he said.

For essential workers, many of whom are people of color who have faced the risk of the virus on a daily basis for months, the latest upticks were especially worrisome.

“It’s scary,” said Christina Lockyer-White, a nursing assistant at a nursing home in Kern County, who watched as dozens of patients and fellow employees fell ill in April. “Nobody should have to go through or see what I experienced.”

As cases rise, Lockyer-White, who said she tested negative this spring, once again worries about contracting the virus and taking it home to her son. “You always wonder if a second wave can come back, because you hear that they can,” Lockyer-White said Thursday during a break from a shift at the nursing home. “It’s always, make sure you don’t let your guard down.”


-The New York Times Company-

Boom time for 'death planning'

One day in April, as the coronavirus ravaged New York City, 24-year-old Isabelle Rodriguez composed a tweet she would send from the grave.

She wasn’t dying. She wasn’t even sick. In fact, her risk of contracting COVID-19 had been reduced after she was furloughed from her job at a Manhattan bookseller and retreated to her rural hometown, Callahan, Florida. But when she came across the poem “Lady Lazarus,” by Sylvia Plath, Rodriguez knew she had found the perfect words to mark her digital legacy:

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Rodriguez logged on to Cake, a free service that catalogs users’ end-of-life wishes, instructions and documents, and specified that she wanted the verse sent from her Twitter account after her death. “Any of my friends know I’m obsessed with Sylvia Plath,” Rodriguez said. “That was the best way to put my personality out there one last time.”

Through Cake, Rodriguez also filled out a “trusted decision maker” form, appointing her younger sister to call the shots should she end up incapacitated. She was still debating other important details: Did she want to be buried or cremated? If the latter, would her ashes be scattered, pressurized into a diamond, composted into tree food? Also, how much would it annoy the guests at her funeral if she requested that her favorite album, “Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix,” be played on loop?

Rodriguez conceded that it might seem a little weird to be considering all of this in her mid-20s. On the other hand, young people around the world were getting incredibly sick, incredibly fast.

End-of-life decisions can be overwhelming, but making those choices when she was healthy gave her more control. Knowing that she’d ease the burden on her family if the worst happened also gave her peace of mind. “It would be easier for people around me to know what I want,” she said.

Before the pandemic, end-of-life startups — companies that help clients plan funerals, dispose of remains and process grief — had experienced steady to moderate growth. Their founders were mostly women who hoped a mix of technology, customization and fresh thinking could take on the fusty and predominantly male funeral and estate-planning industries.

Still, selling death to people in their 20s and 30s wasn’t easy. Cake’s team sometimes received emails from young adults, wondering if the site wasn’t a tad morbid. Since COVID-19, this has changed. Millennials are newly anxious about their mortality, increasingly comfortable talking about it and more likely to be grieving or know someone who is.

“The stigma and taboos around talking about death have been way reduced,” Cake’s co-founder Suelin Chen, 38, said. This has driven conversation across social media, spurred interest in deathfluencers (they will discuss how funeral homes are responding to the coronavirus but also whether your pet will eat your eyeballs) and increased traffic to end-of-life platforms. From February to June, people signed up with Cake at five times the normal rate.

Another new company, Lantern, which calls itself “the single source of guidance for navigating life before and after a death,” saw a 123% increase in users, most of them under 45.

Lantern’s tone is soothing and earnest, but not everyone takes that tack. Cake skews playful. It features a tombstone generator and suggestions like “Viking funeral” and “shoot my ashes into outer space.” New Narrative, an event-planning company for funerals and memorials, introduces itself with a wink: “We’re not your grandma’s funeral (… unless it’s your grandma’s funeral).”

It’s a tricky opportunity for these startups to navigate. “When you have a brand that’s directly interfacing with people in the throes of loss and grief, you have to walk a fine line,” said Liz Eddy, 30, Lantern’s co-founder and chief executive.

All these founders stress they’re not trying to capitalize on the coronavirus. But this hasn’t stopped anyone from pivoting hard toward COVID-19. The companies have created new forums and content on how to plan for death, honor the newly dead and grieve virtually. They have initiatives with major health care providers to disseminate their products more widely and formed new partnerships with influencers. The startups have even begun to coordinate with one another, sharing tips in a cross-company Slack channel called “Death & Co.”

They are all hoping the pandemic will be the event that turns end-of-life planning — from designing a funeral to writing a will and final tweet — into a common part of adulthood.

The Obituary Game

In 2012, a friend invited Chen and her fiancé to dinner and suggested they play an unusual party game: Write and share their own obituaries. “It’ll be fun!” the friend said. “They do it at Stanford Business School.”

At first, Chen was delighted by the exercise: Both she and her fiancé wrote, in the imagined past tense, about a music album they hoped to one day record. But when Chen started reading what she had written about her career, she was seized with panic and started bawling at the table.

“I just lost it,” she recalled. “It was confusing to me, because I loved my job. I was happy in the most obvious ways, but there was part of me …” She wasn’t sure how to describe the upswell of emotion.

Around this time, Chen was advising health care companies in commercial strategy. While interviewing last-line cancer physicians, she would constantly run a calculation in the back of her head: “If this treatment extends life by three months, how much money is it worth?” And yet she’d wonder: But at what quality of life? The system of prolonging life at all costs seemed out of whack.

Chen had also recently lost her grandfather, who died at 95 after a long period of suffering. He lived in Taiwan, where death in very old age is treated as a celebration, Chen said. And yet there had been a lot of family conflict around the experience.

Amid the pain and relief of her grandfather’s being at rest and the joyful commemoration of his life, Chen understood that she needed a new path. She didn’t yet know what it would be, but a few years later she met Mark Zhang, a palliative care physician and technologist, at an MIT health care “hackathon.” The pair won first place at the event and went on to found Cake. The platform now includes resources and templates to help users write their obituaries along with guidance for how to get them published.

The venture-backed company makes money through partnerships and will eventually add fee-based services. The pandemic has been especially busy. Cake’s services, for example, soon will be integrated into the website of the British bank RBS/NatWest.

In April, Chen learned that Partners HealthCare, a large health care system in Massachusetts, was recommending Cake to all its members. Ariadne Labs, run out of the Harvard School of Public Health and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, also came calling. They wanted help distributing their end-of-life conversation guide beyond a relatively small audience of doctors and patients. They also wanted real-time feedback from a young and healthy audience like Cake’s.

Cake also teamed up with Providence Health System, a network of 51 hospitals and 1,000 clinics in seven states, to share Cake’s “trusted decision maker” form, the document specifying an individual’s medical preferences if the person becomes incapacitated. Through Cake, individuals could submit the form to their doctor without needing a notary and two nonfamily witnesses, which are often required but difficult to get under quarantine.

The next step is offering premium services, tailored to different types of users. “Are you here because you just lost someone, or because you just had a kid, or have an aging parent, or because a celebrity just died and you had an existential crisis?” Chen said. “We’re trying to automate based on what we know about the person.”

The Pandemic Hits

In April, Chen learned that her head of product’s grandfather had died from COVID-19. She had heard of people texting and messaging their condolences, but even email seemed inappropriate, overly impersonal. Unsure of what to do, she turned to Cake. Following an article from the site, Chen shipped her colleague soup, rolls and cookies with a note: If and when you’re ready, I’d love to hear more about your grandfather.

“In the modern age, the norms around supporting people who are grieving are not super clear,” Chen said. “It used to be that you belonged to a religious community or lived in a small town, but now we’re far away from where we grew up. We’re more secular.”

During the pandemic, condolence-related traffic on Cake doubled. To address the need, the company started a forum where users can crowdsource their questions and concerns.

Lantern provides its own grief and condolence content, including a “pandemic-proof” guide to “inclusively addressing grief at work.” In recent months, more people are grieving on the job, where the emotional distress for people of color over high Black and Latino rates of coronavirus infection is compounded by anguish over police brutality.

“Especially during COVID, it’s how can you incorporate the grieving process into 9-to-5 and day-to-day work?” said Alica Forneret, 31, who runs grief workshops and just started a namesake consulting agency to help companies address this question. “Employers, managers and HR need to understand there’s an extra burden on people of color and especially Black people when they sit down at their computer in the morning and are expected to engage and perform.”

For Forneret and other millennial founders, preparing for death and navigating grief during the pandemic has become a form of self-care. That has created new opportunities and partnerships. When Eddy pitched funders, she situated Lantern’s end-of-life services as an untapped market in the $4.5 trillion global wellness industry.

“We’ve been called a niche market,” she said. “But death and dying is possibly the least niche market out there.”

Corporations are rethinking the wellness programs they’re offering employees, Eddy said. They’re no longer just gym memberships and kombucha on tap. Studies have found that being able to talk about your mortality makes you a happier person and improves your relationships. The thinking, for employers perhaps, is that access to end-of-life services can make people happier (and more productive) at work.

This market potential is also why Near, a startup that connects users with grief and end-of-life support services, like death doulas and art, sound, music and massage therapists, recently decided to seek investment. The company also moved its debut from September to June and is expanding its offerings to even more unconventional end-care providers like end-of-life photographers.

“Before COVID, we were looking at being a smaller platform. We’d be able to keep up with need through bootstrapping,” a Near co-founder, Christy Knutson, 36, said. “But the demand is far greater.”

This spring, a beauty writer and skin-care company chief executive, Charlotte Palermino, approached Lantern about co-hosting an Instagram Live. She had been watching her friends “panic post” death rates and was feeling increasingly anxious.

“I know people who got really sick, were suddenly on ventilators in their 30s,” Palermino, 33, said. She received such an overwhelming response from her followers that in June, she filmed a similar video for her Generation Z audience on TikTok.

Death & Co.

In May, a large senior care company asked Eddy about a partnership. Eddy, who declined to identify the company, was intrigued but skeptical. In search of guidance, she did something that would normally be unexpected. She reached out to Chen at Cake, Lantern’s closest competitor.

Chen wasn’t surprised to hear from Eddy. In fact, she said, this kind of collaboration is frequent among end-of-life chief executives. “There’s a lot of texting and calling all the time: who are the good investors, the partners, give me the lowdown on these people,” she said.

The most common means of communication among end-of-life founders — and where Eddy went to reach Chen — is the cheekily titled Death & Co. channel on Slack. It was born in December during End Well, a conference about improving the culture, products and policy around end of life.

After one of the sessions, a handful of female founders gathered for an impromptu happy hour. They bonded over the rarity of having so many women running companies in the same industry, all them, in one way or another, trying to challenge the corporate, predominantly male funeral industry.

They discussed the difficulties of securing funding as women and the challenges of trying to make a distinctly unsexy product accessible and affordable. Chen said a male founder had told her: “No one thinks about death. I don’t. I’m immortal.” Eddy said another had told her that he thought she’d be more successful if she created the “Tesla” of end-of-life services.

The women decided to start a WhatsApp group, which one of them named “Death Chicks.” A couple of months later, with more people wanting to join, including a handful of men, Eddy moved everything to Slack and renamed it Death & Co. For some months, the group was largely dormant. That changed in March.

“At the beginning of coronavirus, we came together and said this can all be reimagined with alternative, more modern solutions,” said Christina Andreola, 31, the founder of New Narrative, who joined the Slack channel in March. “My colleagues were asking: How can we team up to be competitive?”

The channel has around 70 members. They have worked together on a white paper about the funeral industry and COVID-19, raised funds for personal protective equipment for funeral directors and created short video guides for health care workers to talk about end-of-life options with their patients. Eterneva, a company that turns ashes into diamond jewelry, used the group to start a series of Instagram Lives about collective grief. LifeWeb360, which creates multimedia memorial scrapbooks, teamed up with New Narrative to create resource guides for planning virtual memorials.

The women have also freely shared connections and leads. Knutson of Near joined Death & Co. in March. She used the group to meet end-of-life photographers, a small and elusive set, and expand her provider list of death doulas, caregivers who help dying individuals navigate the end-of-life process.

“Overnight I walked into a virtual room with loads of smart, driven leaders who are building things that it would have taken me months if not years to hear about otherwise,” she said.

Not everyone is finding what he or she needs at Death & Co. Forneret, one of the few Black members, left after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May. She said that the channel had done a lot of good for the industry and that she worked closely with Eddy and other members. But at this moment, she wants to align herself with other founders of color, she said.

In mid-June, Forneret participated in a Zoom panel featuring five Black entrepreneurs. The topic: how to have a “good death” in a racist society. The event was organized by Alua Arthur, 42, who runs a death doula training company, Going With Grace.

Arthur serves as an adviser to Cake and Near and has become a de facto spokeswoman for Black-owned death care businesses, especially in the last couple of months. She has become exhausted in this role and said end-of-life startups should be working harder to reach communities of color, which are largely underserved in the industry.

Even so, all of these founders share a mission: to democratize end-of-life planning and care. Arthur said the searchable database and broad collection of providers on Near were a step in the right direction.

Trust and Will, a company that bills itself as Turbo Tax for estate planning, charges a small fraction of what most lawyers do. Eterneva, the company that turns your loved one’s body into bling, just rolled out financing. Cake’s and Lantern’s basic preplanning services are free. Given that the average cost of a funeral in 2019 was $7,640, this kind of foresight could reduce the cost of dying. Because maybe you don’t want to languish on a ventilator or need a fancy coffin.

At the very least, when we can personalize our deaths the way we do our weddings and our wardrobes, we can feel a little more control over life’s greatest uncertainty. It’s something of a silver lining to this very scary moment.

“We’re never going back to the way it was,” Chen said. “That’s a positive thing — to accept the reality that we’re not immortal.”

-Jennifer Miller, The New York Times-

For owners of century-old businesses, shutting down brings a special pain

Harrell’s Department Store has stood sentry over Wright Street in Burgaw, North Carolina, for the past 117 years. It has served the town’s 4,000 residents with everything they’ve needed, like baby shoes and horse collars in the original wooden building, or church hats and appliances in the two-story red brick building constructed in 1924.

Harrell’s has been the backdrop to several famous late-1990s and early-2000s movies, including “I Know What You Did Last Summer” and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.” It has survived changing fashions — it once sold long johns — world wars, the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis, and floods.

But it couldn’t survive the coronavirus. Vernon Harrell, the company’s fourth-generation owner, recently announced he was closing the business his great-grandfather started.

“It’s been very difficult,” said Harrell, 65, who started working in the store when he was 13. “I did not want to be the one who brought it to an end.”

The pandemic has devastated many of the country’s small-business owners; nearly a quarter of companies closed either temporarily or permanently in March and April, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research. But for firms that have been part of their communities for 100 years or more, there’s more at stake than livelihood — there’s legacy and, in some cases, generations of family ties.

Since March, the pandemic has claimed at least a half-dozen businesses in or near the century club. For example, the Boston Hotel Buckminster, which opened in 1897, closed its doors; Ritz Barbecue, which opened in a small shed in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in 1927, served its last ribs and ice cream last month; Hickory Grove Greenhouses, just north of Allentown, decided to close after 103 years; and Michigan Maple Block Co., a wood products company in northern Michigan, is shuttering its manufacturing plant and laying off 56 workers after 139 years.

“These firms can die a good death or a bad death; nothing lasts forever,” said Dennis Jaffe, a sociologist who works with family companies and recently published the book “Borrowed From Your Grandchildren: The Evolution of 100-Year Family Enterprises.” “It’s sad and there is grieving, but there is also a legacy.”

Harrell was struggling to keep the department store going even before the coronavirus hit. Changing consumer tastes and competition from big-box stores such as Home Depot were cutting into his revenue. He had already given up selling flooring materials and floor coverings — something Harrell’s had sold from the beginning — because he couldn’t be competitive. But he was also trying to modernize: Harrell started a website and put the store on social media, and he considered adding a bar to the store to give customers another reason to shop.

“If COVID hadn’t hit, I would have kept going even though I would have struggled,” Harrell said. “It was the loss of the income for the two months that really just crippled me.”

One challenge facing family businesses is that there often isn’t anyone who wants to take over — especially during an economic downturn. Harrell’s adult sons live six hours away in Asheville, North Carolina, and aren’t interested in re-imagining retail for a post-COVID world. Neither are his nieces and nephews.

“There isn’t the next generation with the passion to take the business through a crisis,” said Jennifer Pendergast, executive director of the Center for Family Enterprises at Northwestern University. “This is going to be hard for a while. Is there someone who wants to take that on?”

For business owners trying to chart the future — whether they’re the fifth generation or the second — Pendergast recommends that they find someone who can be their “truth teller,” who will look at the numbers and the emotions of continuing. If the math doesn’t work and the business isn’t viable, there’s no point in keeping it alive. But if it is, then she encourages owners to ask themselves if the work is still meaningful to the family.

“Obligation cannot be the reason to continue,” she said. “Long term, that is not sustainable.”

Amy Hyman feels that obligation daily as she tries to guide Lake Steam Baths in Denver into its 94th year in business.

Like Harrell, she never expected to find herself at the helm of a legacy business. She was happy with her job tending the bar where she met her husband, Hannon. The Russian and Turkish bathhouse was the domain of her mother-in-law, Gertie.

“She was 5-foot-nothing,” Hyman said. “This little Jewish lady running around telling everyone what to do. That’s my fondest memory of this place — not ever knowing that I would be her someday, in a sense.”

When Gertie died in 2006, Hannon took over — with some input from Hyman. Women had never been allowed in the baths. But Hyman persuaded Hannon to let her test a ladies’ night one Sunday a month so that women could enjoy the hot saunas and whirlpools, and get a massage.

She continued bartending and raising her daughter and son while Hannon ran the business. But when he died in 2015, at age 59, Hyman found herself in charge because no other family members were available.

“Never did I ever believe that I would be running the business by myself,” Hyman said. “My two kids were 14 and 10 when Hannon passed, and every year I kept saying, ‘I’m going to sell this place and live life.’ But I can’t. The community is amazing.”

She doubled down on the business that Hannon’s grandparents opened in 1927. She paid off the $400,000 mortgage on the 11,000-square-foot building and parking lot, and began upgrading, spending more than $40,000 on a new boiler, sauna oven and steam machine. She also added more ladies’ nights and expanded the food menu.

The results started showing last year: Hyman said she turned a profit and was on track for 2020 to be her best year. She was preparing to invest in another sauna oven and thinking about how to grow. She employed nine people and had expanded to 36 massage therapists to meet demand.

But the investments also taxed her cash reserves and left her vulnerable when Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, closed businesses in late March to stop the spread of the coronavirus. Her revenue went to zero, and she had to lay off her staff.

“I just keep teetering constantly and just fighting myself: Keep the business, don’t keep the business,” Hyman said. “If I need to let it go, I know the Lake Steam community will forgive me and understand.”

-Amy Haimerl, The New York Times-

Coronavirus surge is killing America’s small businesses

On the last Friday of June, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas said that bars across the state would have to shut down a second time because coronavirus cases were skyrocketing, Mick Larkin decided he had had enough.

No matter that Larkin, an owner of a karaoke club in Wichita Falls, Texas, had just paid $1,000 for perishable goods and protective equipment in anticipation of the weekend rush. No matter that the frozen margarita machine was full, that 175 plastic syringes with booze-infused Jell-O were in place, or that there were masks for staff members and hand sanitizer for guests.

That day, June 26, Larkin and his partner dumped what they had just bought into the trash and decided to close their club, Krank It Karaoke, for good.

“We did everything we were supposed to do,” Larkin said. “When he shut us down again, and after I put out all that money to meet their rules, I just said, ‘I can’t keep doing this.’ ”

It was harrowing enough for small businesses — the bars, dental care practices, small law firms, day care centers and other storefronts that dot the streets and corners of every US town and city — to have to shut down after state officials imposed lockdowns in March to contain the pandemic.

But the resurgence of the virus, especially in states such as Texas, Florida and California that had begun to reopen, has introduced a far darker reality for many small businesses: Their temporary closures might become permanent.

Nearly 66,000 businesses have folded since March 1, according to data from Yelp, which provides a platform for local businesses to advertise their services and has been tracking announcements of closings posted on its site. From June 15-29, the most recent period for which data is available, businesses were closing permanently at a higher rate than in the previous three months, Yelp found. During the same period, permanent closures increased by 3 percent overall, accounting for roughly 14 percent of total closures since March.

Researchers at Harvard believe the rates of business closures are likely to be even higher. They estimated that nearly 110,000 small businesses across the country had decided to shut down permanently between early March and early May, based on data collected in weekly surveys by Alignable, a social media network for small-business owners.

Christopher Stanton, an associate professor at Harvard Business School who was one of the researchers, said it was difficult to accurately gauge how many small businesses were closing because, once they shut their doors for good, the owners were hard to reach. He added that it could take up to a year before government officials knew the true toll the pandemic was taking on small businesses.

At the moment, 39 states continue to record growing numbers of new cases daily.

It is not clear how many of the businesses Yelp is tracking count as “small” — defined by the Small Business Administration as those with 500 or fewer employees. But the company found that, among the tracked businesses — which include restaurants, retailers and other independent, consumer-facing operations — retail businesses, led by beauty supply stores, have been closing at the highest rate since the pandemic began. Restaurants are the next hardest-hit group.

Small businesses account for 44 percent of all US economic activity, according to the SBA, and closures on such an immense scale could devastate the country’s economic growth. If they were grouped together, small businesses would be among the country’s biggest employers, said Satyam Khanna, a resident fellow at the Institute for Corporate Governance and Finance at New York University School of Law who has written about the effects of the pandemic on small businesses.

So when small businesses close en masse, an entire sector of the economy suffers, Khanna said. There is lower cash flow, higher debt and more unemployment. “That leads to a big drag on the eventual recovery,” he said. “Because they are such an important source of jobs, losing them the way we are losing them now is going to make things far worse than they otherwise need to be.”

Because small businesses depend heavily on foot traffic and operate on thin margins, they are especially vulnerable to the ripple effects of a widespread shutdown.

For nearly two decades, Rich Tokheim and his wife sold sports memorabilia — hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs and other trinkets — to fans in Omaha, Nebraska, at their store, The Dugout. Since 2011, The Dugout has occupied prime real estate across the street from the city’s 24,000-seat baseball stadium, which usually hosts the College World Series each spring.

The 2020 World Series was canceled in March. In the weeks that came after, other sporting events were scrapped — starting with college sports and extending to professional leagues that have struggled to relaunch their activities.

Tokheim, 58, watched his business fall off with growing unease, but it was only after a friendly chat with a retired college athletic director in May that the gravity of his situation hit home. He was already worried about the state of the virus in Nebraska and whether there was enough tracking. Then the athletic director predicted that if college football was canceled for the year, it would be the end of Division I sports as a whole.

“That really put me in overdrive,” Tokheim said. He negotiated an early exit on his store lease and announced a clearance sale at the store. The Dugout closed for good June 30.

The government’s Paycheck Protection Program, rolled out in April and administered by the SBA, earmarked $660 billion of aid for small businesses but stipulated that a loan would be forgiven only if most of it was used to pay employee wages for eight weeks. The rules were later relaxed, but in a sign of how many small-business owners did not feel confident that they would be on steady ground by the time repayment was due, roughly $130 billion of aid money remained untapped when the program ended in June.

Even for those who took a PPP loan, survival is no guarantee. Nick Muscari, a 38-year-old restaurateur in Lubbock, Texas, received one. His restaurant, Nick’s Sports Grill and Lounge, had been the culmination of Muscari’s life’s work — his years of toil as a waiter, pizza cook and manager at restaurants and bars beginning in his teenage years. Three years ago, he bought out the two partners who helped him start the restaurant in 2010. He considered it a crowning achievement, but to do so, he had to borrow money. He still owes a bank $80,000.

Muscari tried to ride out the spring lockdown that temporarily shuttered his restaurant with the help of the PPP money. But when the state’s second closure order took effect June 26, he decided to close for good.

“It had been in the back of our minds, just like, you know, if this happens again, can we make it?” Muscari said. “We were following all the rules, and people were spread out. We never had anybody catch the virus in our establishment.”

Muscari, with the business closed and its 30 employees jobless, has nothing left but his house and his car. He also expects his landlord to try to sue him for the eight years’ worth of rent he is contracted to pay on his defunct restaurant’s space.

Many small businesses are also finding it onerous keep up with constantly changing local guidelines, while others are deciding that no matter what their local officials say, it just is not safe to keep going.

Gabriel Gordon, owner of a tiny but popular barbecue restaurant in Seal Beach, California, decided to close permanently after studying the restaurant’s layout. He had determined that the kitchen would never be safe for multiple staff members to occupy at once while the virus was still active in the area.

“It’s essentially two hallways that are 11 feet wide,” Gordon said, describing the shape of the restaurant, Beachwood BBQ. “There are food trucks that are larger than my kitchen.”

Whatever the specific reasons may be for each closure, Justin Norman, Yelp’s vice president of data science, said that the federal government should offer small businesses more help. Norman said Yelp was concerned about the effects of small-business closures, especially those owned by people of color, on society. Yelp, however, also has a financial interest in maintaining a robust small business environment, because it relies heavily on advertising by businesses on its platform.

“The time is right now to inject more capital, or we may lose them forever,” Norman said. “It’s going to make our economies worse; it’s going to make our communities worse.”

-The New York Times Company-