″There is no more effective way to support an economy in a downturn than providing help to the hard-pressed unemployed, who spend any money they receive as quickly as they receive it,” Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, said in an email.
7 states approved to offer extra $300 weekly unemployment benefits https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/18/7-s...r-extra-300-weekly-unemployment-benefits.html Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, New Mexico and Utah were the first states to be approved for an extra $300 a week in federal unemployment benefits. South Dakota is the lone state so far to decline the assistance, created by President Donald Trump in a recent executive measure. The assistance may last just three weeks in some states. First movers would likely get more, experts said. (More at above url)
A summary why nearly all the societies in Asia are now open for business, school, sports, nightlife and other activities while the West faces rapidly rising COVID cases. The only thing still in place in Asia are strict border restrictions and incoming quarantines -- that have proven to being very effective. This is a lesson on the correct way to address COVID rapidly and re-open your society. The West is being left behind as it squanders Covid-19 lessons from Asia-Pacific https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/12/europe/coronavirus-asia-pacific-west-intl/index.html While the Asia-Pacific region treads water until a coronavirus vaccine is found, the West's biggest economies are drowning as a second wave firmly establishes itself in Europe. Europe is now reporting more daily infections than the United States, Brazil, or India -- the countries that have been driving the global case count for months -- as public apathy grows towards coronavirus guidelines. Several countries are seeing infection rates spiral again after a summer lull that saw measures to contain the virus and travel restrictions relaxed. In the United Kingdom, for example, questions are being asked about whether Prime Minister Boris Johnson's decision to lift the country's lockdown in June was premature. Northern England's current high rates of Covid-19 are down to the fact that infections "never dropped as far in the summer as they did in the south," Jonathan Van-Tam, Britain's deputy chief medical officer, told a press conference on Monday. It is just the latest problem to beset Britain's slapdash pandemic response. There are now more patients in hospital with Covid-19 in England than there were in March, when a nationwide lockdown was imposed, according to Johnson and health officials France and the Netherlands broke their own records over the weekend, reporting the highest numbers of confirmed Covid-19 cases since the start of the pandemic. In the United States, there were more new positive cases in the White House on October 2 than in the whole of Taiwan, after President Donald Trump became the second G7 leader (after Johnson) to test positive for Covid-19. Despite his illness, Trump has continued to downplay the severity of the virus andpotentially endanger the health of those around him, holding a campaign rally on Monday. Seven months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic, life is closer to normal in the Asia-Pacific region thanks to the basic lessons of epidemiology: clear communication, quarantines, border controls, aggressive testing and contact tracing, Kenji Shibuya, the Director of the Institute for Population Health at King's College London, told CNN. Nightclubs remain open in Taiwan, which also held its first full capacity arena show in August. Thousands were pictured visiting the Great Wall of China last week, months after an estimated 20,000 people packed into a New Zealand stadium for a rugby match. European countries with successful pandemic responses, like Germany, have taken this approach. But experts say Spain, the US and the UK are seeing cases skyrocket, and cracks appear in the political and public consensus, after they opted to prematurely re-open their economies without heeding those rules. Spain's government declared a state of emergency on Friday in the country's worst-hit Madrid region, in order to override regional leaders' objections to the restrictions. In the UK, Johnson's muddled messaging and a lack of transparency in decision-making have drawn criticism from across the political spectrum. But instead of taking stock of their failures and looking at a sustainable way forward, an Anglo-American narrative has grown, suggesting it is too late to try to emulate Asia-Pacific nations, said Dr. Tim Colbourn, a global health epidemiology and evaluation lecturer at University College London. Libertarian think-pieces, open letters and politicians across the Atlantic have advocated -- with little scientific merit -- for governments to "give up restrictions and let it [Covid-19] spread" for the sake of the economy, Colbourn said. Thousands of revelers gathered at an open air water park in the Chinese city of Wuhan, ground zero of the pandemic, for an electronic music festival in August. This is a maddening idea to the vast majority of health professionals and scientists, who point to Covid-19's high fatality rate and its long-term effects on survivors. "When countries [like the US and UK] experience declining life expectancy, it really should be a red flag," said Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Deteriorating health in populations has electoral consequences, McKee told CNN -- adding that historically, those factors caused "populism and then you get state failure." Classic epidemiology Resurgences of Covid-19 in the Asia-Pacific region look a lot different to what is happening in the West. New Zealand pretty much eradicated community transmission within its borders after a minor outbreak in August, during which the virus' spread never rose beyond 19 new infections a day. Border controls have been effective, says Shibuya. Singapore, Hong Kong and New Zealand have largely kept their borders closed to visitors, with returning citizens and work permit holders being quarantined at home or at designated facilities. The same is true in Vietnam, which remains closed to most international travelers and, like many countries in the region, has encouraged citizens to holiday within its borders. The lower-middle income country has taken a proactive approach to the outbreak, bringing infections down to the single digits in October, little more than two months after authorities evacuated 80,000 local tourists from the resort city of Da Nang after three residents tested positive for the virus. By contrast, the European Union resumed inter-regional tourism in June, even though many European countries were slow to require visitors to undergo routine testing on arrival. The United Nations' tourism agency, the UNWTO, found that "Europe is the region in which more destinations (81%) have eased travel restrictions" while only 28% of destinations in the Asia-Pacific region had eased border controls by September 1, according to its analysis of travel restrictions. Taiwan and South Korea, which had the world's second highest number of cases in February, kept a handle on outbreaks without blunt instruments like lockdowns thanks to their gold standard test and tracing systems, and a transparent communication strategy that has kept the public on side. The UK deploys conventional contact-tracing methods, which identify cases and track down the people they met after they became infectious, says McKee. Meanwhile, Asian countries like South Korea have relied on what is known as backwards tracing, which attempts to identify the event, place or source of an infection. "Was it the churches in Germany, our packing plants or a nightclub in Korea?" Mckee said, adding that instead of focusing on the source of infection, the UK has "hit whole communities with a hammer" of localized lockdowns without consulting local leaders. He says such measures are appropriate "if you don't have intelligence" on the source of an outbreak, but adds: "The UK should not be in that position at this stage." Even the economic situation looks less stark. The IMF forecasts that the economy in the Asia-Pacific region will contract by 0.2% this year, while those in US and Western Europe are expected to sink by 5.9% and 7.3% respectively. Cultural tropes Asia-Pacific's response has been shaped by the 2003 SARS outbreak. Trauma from that period meant many Asian countries were better prepared and better resourced to act decisively at start of the pandemic with public approval. But a common, and orientalist, refrain has emerged from the Western commentariat that more draconian measures and -- arguably sensible -- rules on mask wearing would be impossible to mandate on freedom-loving Anglo-Americans. Countries like Norway and the Netherlands recommend masks in indoor public spaces, but do not mandate it. Swedish authorities have actively discouraged the use of masks, despite the high number of Covid-19 deaths in care homes, As well as resorting to lazy cultural tropes, such as Trump's immediate racialization of the outbreak by calling coronavirus the "China virus," American and British leaders have also repeatedly undermined guidance and best practice. Though he has since changed tack, in March Johnson said he shook hands "with everybody" during a visit to a hospital treating confirmed Covid-19 patients, on the same day the government's Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies advocated against the practice. Trump has turned masks into a hyper-partisan issue, routinely mocking Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden for wearing a face covering. Communication strategies are an underestimated "non-pharmaceutical intervention" which are not only useful in the short term -- by encouraging measures like mask usage -- but have long-term uses as well, says Heidi Tworek, an associate professor of international history and public policy at the University of British Columbia, who authored a report on democratic communications during the pandemic. The report analyzed three democratic jurisdictions in the Asia-Pacific region -- Taiwan, New Zealand, and South Korea -- and found that cohesive messages from those governments were useful in forestalling "compliance fatigue" and laid the foundation for vaccine uptake. "They also matter for cultivating trust among citizens and their governments -- trust that is critical for the future stability of democratic institutions," the report stated. Winning trust That trust can easily be lost. A study in The Lancet found that when Johnson's chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, broke lockdown rules but faced no consequences, it undermined the public's faith in the government's ability to handle the pandemic. The opposite happened in New Zealand, where David Clark, its Health Minister, was demoted in April 2020 after twice breaking the country's Covid-19 regulations. He resigned in July and goodwill for the government has remained. New Zealand and South Korea adopted a "division-of-labour approach to communicating political and scientific information," the report noted. Public health officials would first deliver the science. The message would be humanized and reinforced with meaning by politicians like New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern or South Korea's President Moon Jae-on in televised addresses or Facebook lives, Tworek said. Misinformation and conspiracies were tackled in South Korea and Taiwan via high quality information being pushed out on multiple channels, Tworek added. To engage the public, the Taiwanese government worked with local comedians to create memes for their "humor over rumor" strategy. It included the use of a cartoon "spokesdog," a Shiba Inu called Zongchai, to help communicate its policies. One meme showed that the 1.5 meter indoor social distancing policy equated to the length of three Shiba Inu, while the outdoor social distancing policy was two Shiba Inu. Masks were distributed to Taiwanese households at the start of the pandemic -- many of them in a shade of pink. After hearing that male students were being bullied for wearing pink masks at schools, officials wore pink face coverings at their daily briefing. "It is fantastic because it's not just about countering disinformation, it is about countering stigma and prejudice," Tworek said. "This is not rocket science. These are basic tenets of health and risk communications [in order to] establish trust." Have an upcoming election in the pandemic? Asian democracies also have a solution to that. South Korea saw its highest turnout in April's poll as voters wore masks and gloves, polling booths were disinfected, and people spaced out as they queued to vote. In the US, officials are turning large venues and sports centers into polling stations in order to accommodate social distancing concerns in November's poll. New Zealand and Hong Kong postponed elections over the summer, citing coronavirus fears. While the main New Zealand opposition party backed the move, some pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong claimed the government was using the pandemic as an excuse to avoid potential losses in a crucial election. America's largest roadblock remains its President, who has repeatedly called into question the integrity of the democratic process by undermining the safest way to hand in a ballot in a pandemic: Mail-in voting. As Trump continues to downplay the threat of the virus, another 20,000 Covid-19 deaths are "inevitable" by the end of the month, former director of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Dr. Tom Frieden, told CNN this weekend. Unlike the Asia-Pacific region, the West appears to be well on its way to a tragic winter. (More at above url inluding charts and pictures in the article)
Let's take a look at why Germany has been so successful in addressing COVID-19... The 4 simple reasons Germany is managing Covid-19 better than its neighbors Coronavirus is surging in Europe — but less so in Germany. Here’s why. https://www.vox.com/21495327/covid-19-germany-coronavirus-cases-deaths?ICID=ref_fark Germany gets a lot of favorable Covid-19 press — and for good reason. Its daily new cases per million people have been persistently lower than any of its Western European neighbors, and its death rate, from the beginning of the outbreak, has been among the lowest in Western Europe: currently 0.15 deaths per million people, compared to France’s 1.15 and Spain’s 2.19. Even as coronavirus cases surge across the continent — the week prior to October 11 saw the largest increase since the beginning of the pandemic — Germany’s latest wave is still small relative to other countries in the region. So what exactly is Germany getting right? What’s often cited is an effective deployment of technology, such as a contact tracing app, to fight the pandemic. There’s the frequently praised mass testing program, which rivals South Korea’s, and the oversupply of ICU beds — controversial before the coronavirus, now lauded. It also helps that Angela Merkel has a doctorate in quantum chemistry and heads a country that treats scientists, like the Berlin-based virologist and podcaster Christian Drosten, like superstars. Yet this is far from the whole story of Germany’s relative success. Over the past few weeks, I talked to doctors, health officials, and researchers in Germany— including some of the country’s first Covid-19 responders — and elsewhere to get a deeper perspective on why Germany has had better-than-average pandemic performance in Europe. I heard, again and again, four explanations for the country’s coronavirus success. They had nothing to do with tech, Merkel, or hospital beds. And they’ve been largely overlooked. Let’s call them the L’s: luck, learning, local responses, and listening. While the pandemic certainly isn’t over, and Germany is facing a pivotal moment with a record number of new infections, these factors may be the reason Germany bends the curve quickly once again. The power of luck Günter Fröschl, a tropical medicine doctor at Munich University, has been leading Germany’s longest-running Covid-19 testing unit. He’s been at it so long, he swabbed four of the first five coronavirus patients in late January. At that time, his fiancée — another infectious disease specialist — happened to be working in Brescia, Italy, ground zero of Europe’s deadliest Covid-19 outbreak. The two were on the phone every day comparing notes, and Fröschl concluded the only reason the paths of the two countries diverged so widely early on in the pandemic was something both countries had no control over. “We had a lot of luck in Germany,” Fröschl says. The first known Covid-19 cases in Germany originated in a Munich-area auto parts firm called Webasto. There, an employee from China — who tested positive for the virus after returning home — infected several others during a visit to Munich. When she notified her German counterparts of her positive test result, the company informed its staff, including one employee who, despite not having serious symptoms, sought out a test. “The patient came to us and said, ‘I had a common cold for a few days. I’m feeling fine — but we did have a Chinese colleague coming to visit us who tested positive,’” Fröschl recalls. The fact that this patient came forward meant public health officials were able to identify, trace, and isolate other cases, and instead of a large and silent outbreak early on in the pandemic, health authorities stopped the virus from spreading further at that point. There was another element of luck involved: The Bundeswehr Institute of Microbiology in Munich is home to a biosafety level 3 lab — the kind that deals with highly infectious and deadly agents that can spread through inhalation, like SARS-CoV-2. When China released the genetic sequence of the new coronavirus in January, Fröschl’s colleagues at the institute got ready with coronavirus PCR tests. That meant the test was available in Munich when the first patients showed up there, and Fröschl was able to use it to quickly diagnose the first cases. “The index patient was meeting this unique situation in Europe,” Fröschl says. “That is luck. It’s not that we were so smart.” It wasn’t just Munich that had tests ready. In Berlin, scientists created the test kit the World Health Organization and many countries ended up using even before China released the sequence of the virus. But Fröschl points out that if that first patient had shown up in a less prepared part of the country, the outcome may have been different — perhaps something more like what happened in Italy, where cases went undetected for weeks and then overwhelmed the health system. “I’m always emphasizing,” Fröschl says, “we were just lucky.” The power of learning Of course, the key to Germany’s coronavirus management isn’t only about luck. It’s also about learning and acting quickly on new knowledge. After the Webasto cluster came under control, Fröschl and his colleagues got to work applying what they learned from the experience — establishing protocols for diagnosing, isolating, and treating Covid-19 patients safely. This meant that by the end of February, when travelers started returning from Austria, Italy, and other countries with outbreaks, they were ready. The Webasto outbreak gave doctors and public health officials “extremely valuable” experience dealing with the virus. “Everything was in place,” Fröschl says. “We had experience of how to treat people and remain calm.” here was also learning from other countries. “We tried to take the strategy of South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan — all good examples of how a quick and fast response can reduce the number of positive cases,” said Nicolai Savaskan, the chief medical officer of a local health department in Berlin.One part of that fast response: Germany’s mass testing program. While Germany was quick to lock down, it also scaled up testing from the start of the pandemic, and then repeatedly adapted the program to respond to changes in the epidemic dynamics. In anticipation of a rise in cases following summer travel, for example, labs across the country scaled up their supply. You can see the result of this in the country’s test positive — or cases divided by tests — rate. This metric tells you whether a country’s testing capacity is rising in step with the demand for testing and growth in real cases. Since the beginning of May, relatively early in the pandemic, Germany’s test positive rate has held steady even though cases have increased, while the rate started to rise in July and August in other European countries currently experiencing the worst outbreaks, including France, Spain, and the UK. “There have been ups and downs in Germany’s [outbreak], but the difference is they managed to scale up testing,” said Edouard Mathieu, the Paris-based data manager of Oxford University’s Our World in Data project. From May to the present, Germany went from around 60,000 tests per day to a staggering 160,000. And even now, Germany is again adapting its testing approach: adding a new rapid, antigen-testing strategy that will launch this week, the Wall Street Journal reported, to increase capacity as cases rise going into winter. This also helps explain why outbreaks in the country — or even screw-ups like failing to notify positive cases quickly — haven’t spun out of control yet, as we’ve seen in other countries. “They are testing more people every time they find a case, which means they haven’t lost touch with the epidemic,” Mathieu said. It also means they didn’t waste their early lockdown: They used it to build robust systems that will likely help them control the current uptick, too. The power of local responses Germany, a federal country made up of 16 states with some 400 municipal health departments, ran a localized coronavirus response. Though this has sometimes led to a confusing array of policies, it’s also meant municipal governments could act quickly and tailor pandemic policies to the needs and challenges facing local populations across 16 federal states with 400-plus counties. And this may be another reason for Germany’s success compared to neighbors with more centralized systems such as France, Spain, and the UK. “The decentralized [approach to] managing the pandemic was maybe a good way to deal with a quickly changing situation,” said Berlin’s Savaskan. He explained that while local health authorities have to report cases to Germany’s national public health agency, the Robert Koch Institute (RKI), they could each tailor their pandemic responses to meet local needs in their region and react quickly whenever problems arose. So, for example, while the RKI recommended a 14-day quarantine after contact with an infected person, in Berlin, health authorities decided that was too long to be acceptable for the population and that a seven-day quarantine with a coronavirus test at that point would do. “We could adapt what was recommended by RKI and then implement ... [to] locally fit the needs of the people,” Savaskan said. Similarly, early on in the pandemic, in March, Berlin decided to shut down bars, dance halls, and nightclubs ahead of other regions, since they were local sources of contagion. When they reopened in June, municipal health authorities were in constant contact with the industry to encourage them to cooperate in contact tracing. “We have a rate of contact tracing higher than 90 percent,” Savaskan said, meaning nearly all the contacts of infected people are being identified and followed up with. When we talked at the end of September, Savaskan was heading to meet the health minister in Berlin. Outbreaks in bars and nightclub settings were on the rise again, and politicians wanted to engage local health departments on how to get the situation under control. By October 10, a midnight curfew for bars and clubs went into effect. “The narrative so far in Germany concerning the public health departments is that people trust in them — they believe that when they give very detailed information about their life, this is taken very seriously. And I think this is the major impact of the success of the German response,” Savaskan said. It’s also allowed authorities to identify and stop chains of infection at an early stage. The power of listening to scientists There’s one other L that sets Germany apart. It’s the most straightforward of them all — but it’s certainly not being done in many countries, particularly the US. From the moment the coronavirus arrived in Germany, German authorities have been good about listening to scientists, says Clemens-Martin Wendtner, a Munich-based internal medicine doctor. Wendtner would know: He was also part of Germany’s coronavirus front line, overseeing the treatment of the country’s first patients in Munich. He, too, didn’t mention Angela Merkel when I asked him how he explains how Germany managed to control the coronavirus. Instead, he said local politicians did something that now seems like a foreign concept in America: They listened to scientists. Since February, Wendtner has been texting new findings and insights to the health minister in Bavaria — the German state that’s home to Munich — every week. And during the first weeks of the pandemic, before heading to the hospital, he’d join a 9 am briefing in the office of the health ministry to share his data there, too. “Every [piece of] information we had from the hospital, they also had from the political decision side,” he said. So that’s why Germany instituted a mandatory mask policy in public spaces in the spring and shut down schools. That’s why Jens Spahn, the federal minister of health, retracted the idea of Covid-19 immunity passports after listening to scientists. “He used the direct approach, just calling me here in my office,” Wendtner said. As the science evolved and leaders listened to scientists, the policies keep changing. Recently, the Bavarian government decided to invest 50 million euros in hepafilters that deactivate infectious aerosols for use in classrooms across the state. “It’s not reasonable to open the window in Bavaria every 20 minutes” in winter, Wendtner said. So as temperatures drop, filters might help keep schools open at a time when we know the coronavirus can spread through aerosols, especially in poorly ventilated rooms. Of course, science hasn’t been free of politics in Germany. And in the race to find a successor for Merkel, state politicians have certainly used the pandemic to increase their profile. But the big picture, Wendtner says, is that the public trusted German politicians “because they didn’t lie in the beginning and [they] built up trust,” following science, not denying it.
And where is Sweden on that graph right now. They would be down there next to Germany with the second best rate. I just looked it up on that site. Why were they left out. The media loved to compare Sweden when it was doing poorly a few months ago?
Let's take a look at what happens in a country when coronavirus is brought firmly under control -- the Chinese economy surged in the last quarter, showing a fast rebound. The Chinese economy surged 4.9 percent in the July-to-September quarter compared with the same months last year, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on Monday. The robust performance brings China nearly back up to the roughly 6 percent pace of growth that it was reporting before the pandemic. With Covid-19 Under Control, China’s Economy Surges Ahead Exports jumped and local governments engaged in a binge of debt-fueled construction projects. Even consumer spending is finally recovering. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/18/business/china-economy-covid.html As most of the world still struggles with the coronavirus pandemic, China is showing once again that a fast economic rebound is possible when the virus is brought firmly under control. The Chinese economy surged 4.9 percent in the July-to-September quarter compared with the same months last year, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics announced on Monday. The robust performance brings China almost back up to the roughly 6 percent pace of growth that it was reporting before the pandemic. Many of the world’s major economies have climbed quickly out of the depths of a contraction last spring, when shutdowns caused output to fall steeply. But China is the first to report growth that significantly surpasses where it was at this time last year. The United States and other nations are expected to report a third-quarter surge too, but they are still behind or just catching up to pre-pandemic levels. China’s lead could widen further in the months to come. It has almost no local transmission of the virus now, while the United States and Europe face another accelerating wave of cases. The vigorous expansion of the Chinese economy means that it is set to dominate global growth — accounting for at least 30 percent of the world’s economic growth this year and in the years to come, Justin Lin Yifu, a cabinet adviser and honorary dean of the National School of Development at Peking University, said at a recent government news conference in Beijing. Chinese companies are making up a greater share of the world’s exports, manufacturing consumer electronics, personal protection equipment and other goods in high demand during the pandemic. At the same time, China is now buying more iron ore from Brazil, more corn and pork from the United States and more palm oil from Malaysia. That has partly reversed a nosedive in commodity prices last spring and softened the impact of the pandemic on some industries. Still, China’s recovery has done less to help the rest of the world than in the past because its imports have not increased nearly as much as its exports. This pattern has created jobs in China but placed a brake on growth elsewhere. China’s economic recovery has also been dependent for months on huge investments in highways, high-speed train lines and other infrastructure. And in recent weeks, the country has seen the beginning of a recovery in domestic consumption. The affluent and people living in export-oriented coastal provinces were the first to start spending money again. But activity is resuming now even in places like Wuhan, the central Chinese city where the new coronavirus first emerged. “You’ve had to line up to get into many restaurants in Wuhan, and for Wuhan restaurants that are popular on the internet, the wait is two or three hours,” said Lei Yanqiu, a Wuhan resident in her early 30s. George Zhong, a resident of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province in western China, said that he had made trips to three provinces in the past two months and has been actively shopping when he is home. “I spend no less than in previous years,” Mr. Zhong said. China’s economic growth in the past three months came in slightly below economists’ forecasts of 5.2 percent to 5.5 percent. But the performance was still strong enough that stock markets in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong rose in early trading on Monday. The country’s broadening recovery could also be seen in economic statistics just for September, which were also released on Monday. Retail sales climbed 3.3 percent last month from a year ago, while industrial production was up 6.9 percent. China’s model for restoring growth may be effective, but may not be appealing to other countries. Determined to keep local transmission of the virus at or near zero, China has resorted to comprehensive cellphone tracking of its population, weeks long lockdowns of neighborhoods and cities and costly mass testing in response to even the smallest outbreaks. China’s rebound also comes with some weaknesses, particularly a jump in overall debt this year by an amount equal to as much as a third of the economy’s overall output. Much of the extra debt is either borrowing by local governments and state-owned enterprises to pay for new infrastructure, or mortgages taken out by households and companies to pay for apartments and new buildings. The government is aware of the risk of letting debt accumulate quickly. But reining in new credit would hurt real estate activity, a sector that represents up to a quarter of the economy. Another risk to China’s recovery is its heavy dependence on exports. The surge in exports in the past three months, along with lower prices for imports of commodities, accounted for a sizable chunk of economic growth. Exports still represent over 17 percent of China’s economy, more than double the proportion that they make up in the American economy. China’s leaders recognize that the country’s exports are increasingly vulnerable to geopolitical tensions, including the Trump administration’s moves to unwind trade relations between the United States and China. Shifts in global demand might also threaten exports, as the pandemic batters overseas economies. Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has increasingly emphasized self-reliance, a strategy that calls for expanding service industries and innovation in manufacturing, as well as enabling residents to spend more. “We need to make consumers the mainstay,” said Qiu Baoxing, a cabinet adviser who is a former vice minister of housing, at the news conference in Beijing. “By focusing on domestic circulation, we are actually enhancing our own resilience.” But empowering consumers has long been a challenge in China. Under ordinary circumstances, most Chinese are compelled to save for education, health care and retirement because of a weak social safety net. The economic slowdown, and the pandemic, have meant lost jobs, compounding the problem, particularly for low earners and rural residents. Beijing’s approach to helping ordinary Chinese during the slowdown has been to provide companies with tax rebates and large loans from state-owned banks, so that businesses would not need to lay off workers. But some economists argue that Beijing should instead be handing out coupons or checks to more directly assist the country’s poorer citizens. Millions of Chinese migrant workers endured at least a month or two of unemployment in the spring as factories were slow to reopen after the epidemic. Young Chinese found themselves dipping into their savings to eat or taking on second jobs to make up for slashed wages. But Chinese government economists are wary of providing direct payments to consumers. They say that the government’s priorities are investment-driven growth and measures to improve productivity and quality of life, such as digging new sewerage systems or adding elevators to three million older apartment towers that lack them. “We’ve seen a lot of suggestions to increase consumption, but the crux is to enrich people first,” said Yao Jingyuan, a former chief economist of the National Bureau of Statistics who is now a policy researcher for the cabinet. Western governments have experimented with providing extra-large unemployment checks, one-time payments and even subsidized meals at restaurants. These payments have been aimed at helping families sustain a minimum standard of living through the pandemic — which in turn has fueled demand for imports from China. The widening of the trade surplus — in which the increase in exports exceeded the growth in imports — represented 0.6 percentage points of the 4.9 percent economic growth, an official said on Monday. Consumption and investment in China accounted for the rest. “On the whole, China’s economy was primarily driven by domestic demand,” Liu Aihua, a spokeswoman for the National Bureau of Statistics, said at a news conference in Beijing. But Michael Pettis, a finance professor at Peking University, said that as people in other countries supported by government subsidies continue to turn to China for products during the pandemic, “we’re going to see a resurgence of trade conflict, and not just U.S.-China, but global.”