Archives for February 2021

Tourney director on planning Slam in pandemic: ‘relentless’

MELBOURNE, Australia (AP) — It could have been canceled at any minute. It still could.

Australian Open tournament director Craig Tiley was always working on the assumption there’d be a massive hit financially for staging the year’s first tennis major during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Organizers have spent 80 million Australian dollars (US$62 million) in cash reserves, built up over 10 years, and taken out a loan to get the season’s first major started.

Regardless of the obstacles, Tiley always remained focused on a sweet spot, an angle that made it different.

Tiley told The Associated Press that he was not only committed to holding the tournament at its usual time of year (it was pushed back three weeks due to scheduling issues), he wanted to do something no Grand Slam managed to do in the pandemic last year: have sizeable crowds.

“That’s the angle we chose because we thought there’s an opportunity to … showcase the sport and have the players play in front of fans,” Tiley said, looking fatigued and wearing a mask while sitting in a conference room beside his office underneath Rod Laver Arena.

The U.S. Open had no crowds on site and the French Open was limited to 1,000 per day. For its first five days, the Australian Open averaged just under 20,000 spectators per day.

“Momentum was building really nicely for us,” Tiley said, “until — boom — we got the change.”

The “change” was a five-day hard lockdown from Saturday imposed by the state of Victoria to try to quash an outbreak of COVID-19 cases linked to Melbourne’s hotel quarantine system. The tournament suddenly went from pre-pandemic near-normalcy to empty stands and silence.

Tiley’s staff had a contingency plan ready in the event of a sudden lockdown, so it leapt swiftly into action. Despite assurances he’s had from authorities that the tournament will be able to finish — and fans may also return in a few days — nothing is guaranteed.

“Tomorrow, the government could say we have 10 new cases … and we want you to shut the site down,” he said in a weekend interview. “We have a plan for that. But that’s not what we expect.”

For Tiley, it’s been that kind of year.

Planning a Grand Slam tournament in the middle of a pandemic was a logistical nightmare that involved flying 1,200 people — hundreds of players and their teams — to Australia from all over the world and arranging hotel quarantine for all of them in a country that had all but eliminated COVID-19.

Yet, despite the enormous costs and challenges, canceling the Australian Open this year was only briefly considered and then immediately taken off the table, Tiley said.

“It felt like we were drinking from a firehose every single day, gasping for air,” he said. “It’s just relentless.”

Paul McNamee, who was Australian Open tournament director before Tiley took over in 2006, described it as “six to eight months of torture.”

McNamee said the biggest challenge he faced in the job was a flood on center court the night before a women’s singles final — a minor setback compared with dealing with a pandemic.

“You could have imagined it would have been easier in Paris or New York. Over there, it’s acceptable if there’s some outbreak. It’s a manageable situation in terms of PR anyway,” he said. “Here, there’s one case, it’s catastrophic.”

The strict isolation regulations in Australia inevitably led to a number of complaints from players, which Tiley said verged on “aggressive” at times.

Among those most upset were the 72 players forced into hard lockdown for 14 days after passengers on their charter flights to Australia tested positive for COVID-19. Because they were unable to leave their hotel rooms for two weeks, some players said they felt physically unprepared to play a Grand Slam.

Tennys Sandgren was one vocal critic. After his first-round loss to Alex de Minaur, he said, “I’ve never walked on to a court in a Grand Slam knowing that I’m probably not going to be able to win.”

No. 1 Novak Djokovic sent Tiley a letter last month suggesting ways to ease quarantine restrictions on players, including allowing them to stay in houses with private tennis courts. Djokovic later said in a statement his intentions were “misconstrued as being selfish, difficult and ungrateful.”

Tiley said he had more than 60 phone calls with the players over those two weeks in quarantine, spending 4 1/2 hours a day personally listening to their concerns.

“The people who had the biggest complaints were ironically some who are still in the Australian Open and their complaints were they didn’t have enough time to prepare,” he said, without mentioning any names, almost halfway through the tournament. “So it’s hard for me to reconcile that being a reason.”

He was disappointed by the complaints because as far as he was concerned, the tournament was doing the best it could given the circumstances.

“We’re offering A$86 million (US$66.7 million) in prize money. We haven’t reduced the prize money at all in the middle of the pandemic when everyone’s taking pay cuts,” he said. “We funded planes, we’re paying for all their expenses.”

But Tiley did emphasize these complaints came from a handful of players and that far more showed their appreciation and support.

Grigor Dimitrov summed this up after his fourth-round win over Dominic Thiem on Sunday.

“We have to be very thankful for being able to play a tournament in the middle of a pandemic and to pull that through in such a tough and delicate moment of where we’re at right now,” he said. “I think it’s amazing.”

Financially, the sacrifices this year will put a tight squeeze on the tournament for years to come.

“We’re still going to be starting from zero for the most part,” said Tiley, a former player, coach and sports executive in South Africa, the U.S. and Australia.

But, he added, it has forced his team to come up with creative ways to diversify their revenue streams.

“I’m pretty confident in our skills to find ways to make money and it can’t just be through the event.”

Tiley has trained his sights on the 2022 Australian Open, planning already in case the world is still gripped by a pandemic.

But if he’s learned anything from the past year, it’s how to manage things one problem at a time.

“Because it’s so relentless, you need to take a step back, take a deep breath, figure out a plan and do it in a much calmer, more considered way,” he said. “That’s really worked.”

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No longer an outlier: New York ends commercial surrogacy ban

NEW YORK (AP) — To become a father of two daughters, New York state Sen. Brad Hoylman and his husband made cross-country trips to California, where the girls were born through surrogacy arrangements.

At the time, New York was one of a handful of states outlawing commercial surrogacy. Now, it’s about to become legal after years of activism by Hoylman and a host of allies who finally overcame tenacious political opposition.

Instead of being a national outlier, New York will become a leader, according to experts on surrogacy . They say the new law, passed in April and taking effect on Monday, has a surrogates’ bill of rights providing the nation’s strongest protections for women serving as surrogates.

Among the provisions: the right to independent legal representation, a guarantee of comprehensive medical coverage, and the right to make their own health care decisions, including whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy.

“We went to California because it had the best laws,” Hoylman said. “Now New York has the best law. We think it’s a model for other states.”

The new law allows gestational surrogacy on a commercial basis, involving a surrogate who is not genetically related to the embryo. An egg is removed from the intended mother, fertilized with sperm and then transferred to a surrogate — in contrast to so-called traditional surrogacy that involves an egg from the surrogate. The gestational option is welcomed by many LGBTQ people who want to be parents, as well as by couples struggling with infertility.

With the change in New York, surrogacy advocates say only Louisiana and Michigan have laws explicitly prohibiting paid gestational surrogacy. Nebraska has no explicit ban, but a statute there says paid surrogacy contracts are unenforceable.

Hoylman, who was the surrogacy bill’s lead sponsor in the New York Senate, and his husband, filmmaker David Sigal, made about 10 trips to California between them to help oversee the arrangements that led to the births of their daughters, Silvia, now 10, and Lucy, 3.

Gestational surrogacy routinely costs between $100,000 and $150,000. Hoylman declined to estimate the total costs incurred by him and Sigal but said, “It was worth every penny.”

Among the standard costs are fees for lawyers and the surrogacy agency, the cost of in vitro fertilization, plus compensation and health insurance for the surrogate. Compensation rates vary widely — generally $25,000 to $50,000.

The first bill seeking to repeal the New York ban was introduced by Assemblywoman Amy Paulin in 2012, the year Hoylman was elected to the Senate. It floundered for years in the face of staunch opposition by the Roman Catholic Church and some feminists, who argued that paid surrogacy led to the exploitation of women.

“Under this bill, women in economic need become commercialized vessels for rent, and the fetuses they carry become the property of others,” renowned feminist Gloria Steinem wrote to lawmakers in 2019.

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who earlier in his tenure pushed hard to legalize same-sex marriage, argued in response that the surrogacy ban was “based in fear, not love” and was especially harmful to same-sex couples.

A leading surrogacy expert in California, Parham Zar, says gay couples and single men have constituted about half of his clientele in 20 years as managing director of the Egg Donor & Surrogacy Institute in Beverly Hills.

The institute has overseen more than 1,200 surrogacy births during that period, according to Zar, and he now plans to open an office in New York City.

Zar says he advises clients to be braced for at least $100,000 in costs for a gestational surrogacy.

The bills can be higher. Andrew Kabatchnick, an accountant from White Plains, New York, says he and his wife, occupational therapist Leah Marx, have spent $250,000 to $300,000 on two gestational surrogacy births. Their 2-year-old daughter, Sophie, was brought to term by a surrogate in Alabama; a second baby is due in June via a surrogate in Arkansas.

Kabatchnick says it was “an easy decision” to have a second child, though he acknowledges the costs could be burdensome for many couples.

Kabatchnick and Marx have been clients of attorney Vicki Ferrara, founder and legal director of Worldwide Surrogacy in Fairfield, Connecticut.

She is impressed by New York’s new law, saying it “brings surrogacy into a new realm of ethics that we haven’t seen in other states.”

For example, she said, ethical surrogacy practices that are optional in some states will now be statutorily required in New York. And no out-of-state surrogacy agency can operate in New York without obtaining a state license, thereby becoming obligated to follow the new regulations.

Ferrara hopes New York will push for careful screening of surrogates and intended parents before any contracts are signed.

“We’re asking people who don’t know each other to come together to bring a baby into the world,” she said. “We need to have both the intended parents and the surrogate protected so the baby is brought into a situation that is really positive.”

This story has been updated to delete a reference to foreigners potentially benefiting from the new law. At least one intended parent must be U.S. citizen or permanent resident.

Insider Q&A: Pfizer exec talks ramping up vaccine supply

With coronavirus still spreading globally, Pfizer Inc. and the other makers of COVID-19 vaccines are under pressure to rapidly make more.

Mike McDermott heads that effort at Pfizer, where he’s been president of global supply since 2019. He previously served in other operations management positions in his 30-year career at Pfizer.

The COVID-19 vaccine from Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech was the first to get the green light, from Britain in early December, followed by the United States, Europe and other countries.

Pfizer makes the vaccine’s main component, a piece of genetic code called messenger RNA or mRNA for short. It uses other companies called contract manufacturers to make the vaccine’s protective shell and to fill, inspect and package vials.

The Associated Press spoke with McDermott recently about addressing this production challenge. The conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Q: After developing your vaccine so quickly, how is Pfizer approaching the need to make billions of doses in record time?

A: There is a dire need to vaccinate more people quickly. We are expanding our capacity to make more vaccine as quickly as possible. We are making process improvements, adding more manufacturing lines within the Pfizer and BioNTech facilities, expanding use of contract manufacturers and adding more suppliers.

Q: What are those process improvements?

A: These involve getting more productivity from our existing lines. We look at reducing wait times when changing over between batches, doubling of our batch size, increasing yields per batch. We’re reducing cycle times, from the start of manufacturing to shipping.

Q: What else are you doing inside your Kalamazoo, Michigan, factory?

A: We went from one production line to four lines and from one shift to three shifts. We are expanding everywhere possible. We haven’t taken a day off since October.

Q: With new variants of the virus emerging, can Pfizer quickly update its vaccine to block those versions?

A: Our mRNA platform technology is the perfect science to be able to make modifications quickly. In essence there would be no changes to the manufacturing network. That altered genetic material would come into the system – and production would begin immediately on a new vaccine version.

Q: Recently Pfizer hiked its production forecast for this year from about 1.3 billion doses to about 2 billion. Are you sure you can do that?

A: Right now, we can potentially deliver approximately 2 billion doses of the COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2021. We are confident in this commitment, but of course are constantly looking for ways to make and distribute more doses faster.

Czechs re-declare state of emergency to keep restrictions

PRAGUE (AP) — The Czech government on Sunday re-declared a state of emergency for next two weeks to tackle the coronavirus pandemic in one of the European Union’s hardest-hit nations.

The decision comes in defiance of the lower house of Parliament, which has refused the minority government’s request to extend the powerful tool that gives the Cabinet the extra powers needed to impose nationwide restrictions and limit people’s travel and rights.

The Czech Republic, a nation of 10.7 million, has had more than 1 million confirmed cases, with 18,143 deaths. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, its rate of 915 new confirmed cases per 100,000 people in the past two weeks is the second worst per capita in the 27-nation EU after Portugal.

The country has also been facing a surge of a fast-spreading coronavirus variant first found in Britain that scientists now say is more deadly than the original virus. The Czech Republic’s three hardest-hit counties, on the border with Germany and Poland, are under a complete lockdown. The number of new cases per 100,000 inhabitants in last seven days there is higher than 1,100.

Despite the dire situation, some lawyers and politicians, including Milos Vystrcil, the Senate speaker, say the government’s move violates the country’s Constitution. The government denies that, saying its legal advisers support such a solution.

“I’m really glad that common sense has won,” Prime Minister Andrej Babis said.

The current state of emergency would have expired on Sunday. The government could use other legal options to reimpose some coronavirus restrictions but not all of them.

Without the state of emergency, bars, restaurants and cafes could reopen Monday, service businesses could resume, the nighttime curfew would end and a ban on more than two people gathering in public would be cancelled.

“We can’t afford that to happen,” Babis said.

The government warned that the restrictions are needed to keep the country’s outbreak from getting worse and causing the health system to collapse. Sunday’s move comes at the request of the leaders of all 14 Czech regions, who say they do have not enough powers to fight the pandemic.

“I’d like to thank the governors, who understand that it’s of the utmost importance for us to do the maximum to protect the lives of our citizens,” Babis said.

The governors also requested changes in the government’s approach to the pandemic, including a mass testing of employees financed by the state, a gradual return of children to schools in March and new legislation that would define the state’s responsibilities in fighting the pandemic.

Babis also said his government will meet the opposition on Tuesday to discuss further steps. The lower house still has a right to dismiss the government’s step.

Germany on Sunday implemented tight border controls on its frontiers with the Czech Republic and Austria’s Tyrol province in an effort to stem the spread of more contagious coronavirus variants.

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Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Average new US virus cases below 100K for 1st time in months

ATLANTA (AP) — Average daily new coronavirus cases in the United States dipped below 100,000 in recent days for the first time in months, but experts cautioned Sunday that infections remain high and precautions to slow the pandemic must remain in place.

The seven-day rolling average of new infections was well above 200,000 for much of December and went to roughly 250,000 in January, according to data kept by Johns Hopkins University, as the pandemic came roaring back after it had been tamed in some places over the summer.

That average dropped below 100,000 on Friday for the first time since Nov. 4. It stayed below 100,000 on Saturday.

“We are still at about 100,000 cases a day. We are still at around 1,500 to 3,500 deaths per day. The cases are more than two-and-a-half-fold times what we saw over the summer,” Dr. Rochelle Walensky, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “It’s encouraging to see these trends coming down, but they’re coming down from an extraordinarily high place.”

On Saturday, the seven-day rolling average for deaths was around 2,500. That number peaked at more than 3,300 earlier in the winter, according to Johns Hopkins.

The U.S. saw a spike of more than 5,400 deaths reported Friday — nearly half from Ohio, where authorities said earlier in the week that they planned to add deaths to the state’s tally over the course of a few days after discovering as many as 4,000 unreported COVID-19 fatalities.

Walensky added that new variants, including one first detected in the United Kingdom that appears to be more transmissible and has already been recorded in more than 30 states, will likely lead to more cases and more deaths.

“All of it is really wraps up into we can’t let our guard down,” she said. “We have to continue wearing masks. We have to continue with our current mitigation measures. And we have to continue getting vaccinated as soon as that vaccine is available to us.”

The U.S. has recorded more than 27.5 million virus cases and more than 484,000 deaths, according to the Johns Hopkins data.

With parents and political leaders eager to have children around the country back in school for in-person learning, it is important that people continue to observe precautions, Walensky said.

“We need to all take responsibility to decrease that community spread, including mask wearing so that we can get our kids and our society back,” she said.

The CDC released guidance on Friday outlining mitigation strategies necessary to reopen schools or to keep them open.

Some teachers have expressed concern about returning to the classroom without having been vaccinated, but the guidelines do not say that’s necessary. Dr. Anthony Fauci said on ABC’s “This Week” that it would be “optimal” if teachers were vaccinated but that other measures laid out in the 24-page document can lessen their risk.

“Practically speaking, when you balance the benefit of getting the children back to school with the fact that the risks are being mitigated, if you follow the recommendations and these new guidelines from the CDC, hopefully, I think that will alleviate the concerns on both sides,” he said.

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Follow all of AP’s pandemic coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-pandemic, https://apnews.com/hub/coronavirus-vaccine and https://apnews.com/UnderstandingtheOutbreak

Archives for February 2021

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