TheChek News Flow

The property arm of the Spanish billionaire founder of Zara has been accused of using bullying tactics by retailers in another sign of the tensions brewing with landlords in the pandemic.

High street chains have complained that Pontegadea, the investment vehicle of Amancio Ortega, 84, has demanded some of the harshest terms and been least flexible in accepting rent reductions in the wake of coronavirus.

In an effort to prevent more retail casualties the government has put forward a code of conduct that encourages landlords to support businesses if they can and retailers to pay their rent in full if they are able to do so. It has also temporarily banned winding-up orders.

However, one retail chain said Pontegadea, which has a €15.2 billion

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Researchers say new studies and anecdotal reports suggest kids are more vulnerable to the virus than initially suspected

Children might be more vulnerable to Covid-19 than once believed, with new research suggesting that they are able to contract and spread the virus, especially if they don’t take precautions such as wearing a mask.

Several studies and reports published in recent weeks found coronavirus infections among children of all ages at places ranging from schools to camps to homes. Other research suggested that kids, especially older ones, can be a driving force behind transmission. And some researchers found children carry high levels of Covid-19’s genetic material in their upper respiratory tract, which doesn’t mean they are transmitting the virus but that they potentially could.

Most of the studies have limitations, and more research is needed, experts say. Yet the new studies, together with reports of outbreaks among children at some schools overseas and a summer camp in Georgia, have persuaded many researchers that children aren’t as immune to Covid-19 as initially thought.

“Are they susceptible to catching the virus? Absolutely. Are they able to transmit the virus? Absolutely,” said Joelle Simpson, interim chief of emergency medicine at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C.

The change in thinking comes as schools prepare to begin a new year, including some still deciding whether it would be safe for children to return to classrooms. President Trump and some members of his administration have urged schools to reopen.

Some schools in the U.S. can likely safely reopen, researchers say, but the new findings suggest the facilities should proceed carefully. And, they added, schools should wait until community transmission is under control. They also should take steps that can reduce the risks for students and staff, such as widespread masking and frequent cleaning, along with social distancing and good ventilation, experts recommend.

A number of schools overseas have reopened with little incident after taking stringent precautionary steps. Without such actions, researchers warn, schools reopening in the U.S. could experience outbreaks like those that hit facilities in Israel and France.

“Our schools are little mini microcosms of our cities that they’re in—what’s happening in cities is what’s going to happen in schools,” said Tina Hartert, a professor of medicine at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, who is leading a study, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, exploring the infection rate in children and people they live with across nearly 2,000 households in the U.S.

“Until there is definitive data one way or the other, we have reason to believe from decades of data from other respiratory viruses that children are very good transmitters,” Dr. Hartert said. “There isn’t a lot of reason to believe that that wouldn’t be the case with this virus.”

About 97,000 new Covid-19 cases among children were reported in the two weeks ending July 30, a 40% increase from the total number of cases before the period began, according to a report published last month by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Children’s Hospital Association. More than seven out of 10 of the new cases among children were from states in the South and West.

The definition of a child varied by state, and in a couple of cases, state-level data wasn’t complete. Still, the report found that since the onset of the pandemic until July 30, nearly 340,000 children have tested positive for Covid-19, or 8.8% of all reported cases.

Several factors contributed to the initial thinking that children were less affected by Covid-19. The virus might not have spread among many children during the early months, in part because schools were closed, playgrounds were locked up and kids were at home.

In addition, Covid-19 cases in children appear to become serious less frequently than in adults.

In the U.S., 45 children under the age of 15 years have died from Covid-19, compared with nearly 25,000 deaths of people between the ages of 45 to 64, according to the latest data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Its data also show far lower rates of hospitalization among children.

Meanwhile, other studies, including one published in June in the journal Pediatrics, found infected children under 18 years old in China tend to exhibit only mild or moderate symptoms, or no symptoms at all.

Yet the latest research indicates children may be carriers just as much as adults. Even when experiencing only a mild or moderate case, children under the age of five might have anywhere between 10 to 100 times as much of Covid-19’s genetic material, viral RNA, in their upper respiratory tracts as older children and adults, according to a study published last month in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.

The study didn’t show children were able to transmit the virus. Yet researchers say the findings suggest children are likely capable of spreading the coronavirus.

“Our estimates of [how kids] spread the virus may have been a bit inaccurate earlier on,” Children’s National Hospital’s Dr. Simpson said. “And as certain states have loosened restrictions and kids have been able to congregate, it’s showing that it does spread, and we do have to factor in the prevalence of the virus in the pediatric population.”

She and a team of researchers published a study this month in the journal Pediatrics finding a nearly 21% positive Covid-19 test rate among 1,000 children and young adults with mild symptoms who were tested at an exclusively pediatric testing site this spring.

Other reports and studies point to children as transmitters. At the overnight summer camp in Georgia, 260, or 76%, of campers, staff members and trainees whose test results were available were infected by Covid-19 shortly after arriving in June, according to a report released recently by the CDC. Most of the cases, 231, were in people age 17 or younger.

The camp required all attendees to provide documentation of a negative Covid-19 test no more than 12 days before arriving, and staff were required to wear cloth masks, the report said. Yet campers weren’t required to wear masks, and windows and doors weren’t opened for increased ventilation. Campers also participated in daily vigorous singing and cheering.

Researchers warned against reading too much into a single, anecdotal case. An overnight camp where children share cabins isn’t the same as a school, the researchers said, and several U.S. day cares, camps and summer schools stayed open this summer without incident.

In a study out of South Korea, researchers attempted to trace the contacts of roughly 5,700 people, including about 150 kids ages 19 and younger, who had the first identified or documented cases of Covid-19. The researchers found that children between 10 and 19 years old transmitted the virus within their own households at the same rate as adults of certain ages.

Children under the age of 10 didn’t spread the virus as much, according to the study, which the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases posted last month.

The findings might have been skewed by a small number of children and their contacts in the study, and it might have missed asymptomatic cases, researchers said.

“My take-home point from all of these studies is that I think there is a continuum—I don’t think children biologically change dramatically at age 10,” said William Raszka, a professor of pediatrics at the Larner College of Medicine at the University of Vermont. “I think that the older [kids] are, the more likely it is that [they] are going to act like an adult and transmit like an adult.”

Researchers who examined an outbreak in an Israeli school for older children shortly after it reopened in May said two known coronavirus cases ultimately led to 153 students and 25 staff members—13.2% and 16.6%, respectively—testing positive for the virus. And the virus spread outside the school, to 87 close contacts.

Many who were infected didn’t report symptoms, the researchers said in an article published in July in the European scientific journal Eurosurveillance. The virus’s spread might also have been exacerbated by crowded classrooms, as well as a heat wave that prompted continuous use of air-conditioning and a three-day exemption from face masks for children.

TikTok’s parent has been looking for a way to keep the video-sharing service alive in U.S. after Trump administration declared the app a national security threat

Several investment and technology firms are exploring a potential deal for the U.S. operations of TikTok, which is facing a Trump administration ban, but they each would have to surmount hurdles at least as high as the Chinese social-media platform’s main suitor, Microsoft Corp.

Twitter Inc. has had preliminary talks about a potential combination with TikTok in the U.S., The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday. It is unclear whether Twitter will pursue a deal, which would face significant challenges and almost certainly need help from other investors, given Twitter’s size.

TikTok’s parent, Beijing-based ByteDance Ltd., has been scrambling to find a way to keep its popular video-sharing service alive in the U.S. after the Trump administration declared the app a national security threat because of its Chinese ownership. Several investment firms with ties to Twitter or ByteDance also could play a role in any transaction involving Twitter or Microsoft, people familiar with the talks say.

Among them is venture-capital giant Sequoia Capital, whose China-based affiliate first invested in Bytedance in 2014. Today Sequoia funds hold just over 10%, according to a person familiar with the investment, a stake worth more than $10 billion based on recent secondary trades of Bytedance shares. At that value, the investment would rank among the most successful venture capital deals of all time.

Doug Leone, Sequoia’s global managing partner, in recent weeks has been pressing contacts in the administration, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, to craft a solution that would enable TikTok to keep operating in the U.S., according to people familiar with those discussions. Mr. Leone has been among the few Silicon Valley leaders who openly back Donald Trump, and has contributed to his reelection campaign.

ByteDance’s shareholders have a lot at stake, given the importance of TikTok for the Chinese parent, which investors have valued at $100 billion or more this year. Other investors include private-equity firm General Atlantic and Japanese investment giant SoftBank Group Corp., for which ByteDance has been a bright spot at a time when several of its other investments have faltered. SoftBank itself would like to throw its hat in the ring as a possible TikTok suitor, according to a person familiar with its thinking, but as a foreign company remains a long shot for consideration. General Atlantic and SoftBank declined to comment.

Some of ByteDance’s investors had earlier prepared a bid that valued all of TikTok at more than $30 billion, according to one person briefed on the bid. It couldn’t be learned whether those other investors are currently involved in potential bids for the U.S. operations.

Microsoft has been negotiating for weeks with ByteDance, and is considered the front-runner for any possible deal for TikTok. Microsoft said on Aug. 2 that it was pursuing a deal for TikTok’s operations in the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand, and that it planned to conclude talks by Sept. 15.

Microsoft said in that statement that it might invite other U.S. investors to participate in a TikTok deal on a minority basis. The software giant doesn’t need the financial help. Its market value is more than $1.6 trillion and it reported more than $136 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June. It isn’t clear what the valuation of TikTok’s operations in the U.S. and those other three countries would be, but estimates run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Microsoft declined to comment on why it might want to involve other investors. Mark Moerdler, an analyst at Bernstein Research, said Microsoft might want to give existing U.S. investors in ByteDance a way into the deal, but that bringing others on board also could add more complexity to an already tricky transaction.

While TikTok isn’t profitable, its wildly popular video-sharing format has won it more than 100 million U.S. users, making it a potentially valuable asset for many tech companies. But even if they wanted to be involved in a TikTok bid, some other tech giants could have a harder time than Microsoft. Apple Inc., Amazon.com Inc., Google-parent Alphabet Inc., and Facebook Inc. all are currently the subjects of antitrust investigations by U.S. regulators and Congress, and their chief executives were hauled in front of the House Judiciary Committee last month to face bipartisan anger over their competitive practices. Microsoft has largely avoided such scrutiny.

Because it is much smaller, Twitter has reasoned that it would be unlikely to face the same level of antitrust scrutiny as Microsoft or other potential bidders, said people familiar with the discussions.

Still, Twitter is seen as a long-shot bidder, and would almost certainly need help from other investors if it does buy TikTok’s U.S. operations. The company has far less financial firepower than other major tech players. Twitter started making a consistent profit in the past couple of years, but reported a $1.23 billion loss in the latest quarter. Twitter reported $7.8 billion in cash and short-term investments as of June.

But Twitter does have high-powered investors such as private-equity firm Silver Lake, which in March invested $1 billion in the messaging platform and has made a series of other big investments to shore up major tech brands during the coronavirus crisis.

Discussions remain fluid and all potential suitors for TikTok face potential complications stemming from the role of Mr. Trump, who has several times jolted participants with statements or actions. While the president and his aides had been threatening for weeks to ban TikTok, his executive order on Thursday, which would bar people in the U.S. from transactions with ByteDance 45 days from the date of the order, took participants by surprise, people close to the situation said.

Twitter has recently had separate run-ins with the White House. Mr. Trump is Twitter’s most high-profile user, but he has lately criticized the company for labeling or restricting some of his posts that it says violate its policies. Such actions have fueled the president’s claim that Silicon Valley tech firms are biased against him, which the companies have denied. Twitter has said the posts in question violated its policies.

Sequoia’s lobbying effort with the administration kicked into high gear last month after Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the U.S. might ban Chinese social media apps including TikTok, a comment that came a week after India banned TikTok and dozens of other Chinese apps.

Mr. Leone told associates that he would reach out to Messrs. Mnuchin and Kushner to see what it would take to save TikTok. General Atlantic Chief Executive William Ford has also lobbied for the company, said a person familiar with his efforts.

At first, Bytedance and its investors proposed spinning off TikTok, shifting votes to American investors, but maintaining existing economic ownership, said one person familiar with the negotiations. After the White House said the ownership structure also needed to change, the company and investors floated the possibility of including an American operational partner, said this person. The White House said that could work. Bytedance CEO Yiming Zhang reached out to Microsoft, a company where he worked briefly and whose culture he liked, to discuss a possible deal.

The economic hit of the coronavirus pandemic is emerging as particularly bad for millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, who as a group hadn’t recovered from the experience of entering the workforce during the previous financial crisis.

For this cohort, already indebted and a step behind on the career ladder, this second pummeling could keep them from accruing the wealth of older generations.

Jaclyn Jimenez put herself through college working for her father’s manufacturing company, but couldn’t find anything comparable when she graduated amid the economic slump of 2008. Even though she lowered her sights, she was turned down for roles from office assistant to drugstore worker. As credit-card debt piled up, she took a job selling wedding gowns at a bridal salon, then leveraged that experience to land a sales position at Nordstrom. She was finally gaining traction, she says, having worked her way up to manager.

Then the pandemic struck the nation in February, sending the economy into a tailspin. She lost her job, and Ms. Jimenez has now joined the 4.8 million millennials who the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis says lost work since the new coronavirus triggered a recession. The group had more losses than the two previous generations.

“It’s been difficult to struggle so much and think that you’re getting somewhere, and you’re moving forward, and you finally see a glimmer of hope, and then this all hit,” said the 34-year-old Orange, Calif., resident. “Am I ever going to have an opportunity to have what my parents had?”

The 12.5% unemployment rate among millennials is higher than that of Generation X (born between 1965 and 1980), and baby boomers (1946 to 1964), according to May figures from the Pew Research Center.

One reason is that some of the hardest hit industries, including leisure and hospitality, have a younger workforce.

Millennials have found it fundamentally more difficult to start a career and achieve the financial independence that allowed previous generations to get married, buy a home and have children. Even the most educated millennials are employed at lower rates than older college graduates, research shows, and millennials’ tendency to work at lower-paying firms has caused them to lag behind in earnings.

“It’s a sign that something has broken in the way the economy is working,” said Jesse Rothstein, professor of public policy and economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former chief economist at the Labor Department during the Obama administration. “It’s gotten harder and harder for people to find their footholds.”

As a result, the millennial generation has less wealth than their predecessors had at the same age, and about one-quarter of millennial households have more debt than assets, according to the St. Louis Fed.

About one in six were unable to cover a $400 emergency expense before the pandemic started; that share is about one in eight among all Americans, the bank found.

Millennials are now at risk of falling further behind because they entered the pandemic in a weaker position than older Americans.

Caitlin Robles, 35, said she felt lucky to get a job maintaining a website for Sacred Heart University when she graduated from there in 2007 with a business management degree. But with $67,000 in student loans, she needed a second job to pay for them and cover $650 a month in rent to live with two friends in Milford, Conn. Ms. Robles eventually got a second job working the front desk at a Massage Envy wellness franchise 15 hours a week. She planned to work there just long enough to make a dent in her debt.

Instead, she’s still working there nine years later and doubled her hours to pay the rising interest rates on her student loans and knee-surgery bills. Even after being promoted at both jobs, to associate director of web content at the university and to assistant manager at the spa, the $70,000 to $80,000 she earned a year wasn’t enough to pay down all her debt. She skipped a family vacation to save money. Her 70-hour workweeks left little time for dating.

To improve her credit score and lower her interest rates, Ms. Robles last year borrowed $30,000 from her 403(b) retirement account to pay off her student loans. She planned to pay off that loan in five years and start saving so she could buy a home when she turned 40.

That plan got derailed in March when Massage Envy shut down because of the pandemic, leaving Ms. Robles without a second income for three months. Since her location reopened in June, she has worked only seven hours a week because the company cut its hours and services. To conserve cash, Ms. Robles deferred payments on her retirement loan. Now she doesn’t know when she’ll be able to buy a home.

“I don’t want to work this way for the rest of my life,” Ms. Robles said. “I thought I had that figured out. And I don’t think I do now.”

Economists are most concerned that millennials’ scars from starting their careers amid the last recession never went away. Millennials on average missed out on more than $25,000 in pay, or 13% of their total earnings, during the decade that ended in 2017 as a result of the rising unemployment rate that started in 2007, according to an analysis published last year by Census Bureau economist Kevin Rinz.

That was a greater share than Gen X, which had their earnings reduced 9% over that time, and baby boomers, which didn’t get 7%. That’s mainly because millennials were less likely to work for high-paying employers than older Americans.

Although younger workers’ employment rates recovered more quickly than those of older workers, millennials’ earnings didn’t bounce back, Mr. Rinz found.

Demographers say that financial instability is prompting some millennials, who are aged 24 to 39 this year, to cohabit instead of wed, and to delay or forgo childbearing. Millennials helped push down the marriage rate to its lowest level on record in 2018, and drove the general fertility rate to an all-time low the following year.

“Exposure to something like this twice in the early part of your career,” Mr. Rinz said, “could certainly have important and negative long-term effects on people’s finances, on their work prospects and all sorts of other family outcomes as well.”

Millennials’ early headwinds mirror those of the G.I. Generation, born between 1901 to 1924, said Neil Howe. The economist and demographer coined the phrase “millennial generation” in 1991 with co-author William Strauss. The G.I. Generation was first hit by recessions that followed the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918, and then the stock market crash of 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression. They recovered economic ground later in life thanks to a sharp rise in schooling and a booming post-World War II economy.

Michael Rafidi, a 35-year-old chef, spent more than a decade working at top eateries in Philadelphia, Washington and San Francisco while dreaming of opening his own restaurant. In 2016, he started raising more than $1 million to develop an upscale Levantine restaurant that drew on his Palestinian heritage with dishes like smoked lamb and sumac carrots. He named it Albi (“my heart” in Arabic) and opened its doors in Washington’s hip Navy Yard on Feb. 20.

“I didn’t think twice about the timing being wrong,” Mr. Rafidi said. “D.C. is going in the right direction with restaurants. The dining scene is incredible. Everything was aligning perfectly.”

For the first few days, Albi was so popular that it was hard to get a table. Three weeks later, the pandemic forced Mr. Rafidi to shut down and switch to a limited takeout menu. He secured a Paycheck Protection Program loan. He said it isn’t enough to replace the lost revenue from operating at just over a third of his original capacity.

“I’m worried,” said Mr. Rafidi, who is relying on outdoor seating, a few inside tables and a newly added cafe serving pastries and coffee. “I put everything on the line these last couple of years to do this.”

Millennials with a bachelor’s degree have about four times as much wealth as their peers who lack that diploma, according to Ana H. Kent, a policy analyst at the St. Louis Fed. Yet the most educated millennials lag behind older college graduates in the job market.

Berkeley’s Prof. Rothstein studied employment rates among recent college graduates and identified what he calls a dramatic structural break for the group that entered the workforce around 2005. He found that each successive year’s group of college graduates has had lower employment rates relative to older workers in the same labor market than those before them.

Prof. Rothstein concluded that adverse early conditions permanently reduce college graduates’ employment prospects. That adds to a body of research showing that starting your career in a bad economy often carries a long-term penalty.

What surprised him was that when employment rates rose significantly following the 2007-09 recession for those already in the workforce, new entrants didn’t share in this improvement, he found in a paper he released last month.

Even college graduates who started their careers in 2015, and enjoyed several subsequent years of a strong labor market, were less likely to work.

For example, 24-year-old college graduates had an employment rate of 79.8% in 2015. Had the age-24 employment rate improved at the same rate as for older workers from 2009 to 2015, their employment rate would have been 81.6%, Prof. Rothstein found.

“It’s a finding that I don’t have a great explanation for,” he said. “I would have thought that the people who finished college in 2017, 2018 would be doing pretty well. But you don’t see that.”

Seeking to mitigate that penalty is Ankur Jain, an entrepreneur who founded the venture fund Kairos, which builds businesses that help make life more affordable for young adults. Last month, Kairos started to place thousands of young adults in home health-care jobs through CareAcademy and Care.com and pay for them to earn the necessary certification.

Although home health jobs typically pay low wages, Mr. Jain said the program will include a path toward becoming a licensed practical nurse, which pays more and can act as a springboard for a career in health care. “What we need to do is find ways to get people back on their feet,” said Mr. Jain, chief executive of Kairos.

Millennials have some advantages as they face a second severe recession. A larger percentage have college degrees than previous generations, which could pay dividends over time. They will also help fill gaps in the workforce as the large baby boomer cohort retires. The young workers behind them, members of Generation Z, who this year are 23 and younger, have even higher rates of unemployment and less experience to buffer them from the economic fallout of the pandemic.

Ms. Jimenez, the former Nordstrom employee, paid her way through college at California State University, Fullerton, with the roughly $45,000 a year she earned helping run her father’s printed circuit boards design and fabrication business. She expected she would at least match that salary soon after graduating with a business degree in 2008.

But as she sent out resumes during the crisis, no one wanted to hire her. Even office manager or executive-assistant jobs required five years of experience that she didn’t have. As her father’s business took a turn for the worse, she started applying for hourly positions at CVS and Disneyland. They didn’t bite either.

Desperate for a paycheck, Ms. Jimenez took a few shifts a week at a bridal shop in Orange, where her mother worked. She was barely getting by when the bank foreclosed on her parents’ home, where she lived with her younger sister. Ms. Jimenez moved into an apartment with both of her sisters and a niece and leaned on her credit cards.

“That really locked me into being permanently behind,” she said.

By 2013, she was still struggling to get traction. She parlayed her bridal-salon experience into a job selling wedding dresses at Nordstrom in Brea, Calif., for $12 an hour plus commission. She made about $22,000 a year. Although she was grateful for the steady paycheck, her inability to find a professional job felt defeating, she said. “This is not where I thought I would end up.”

Still, she stuck with the upscale retail chain because it offered a path for advancement. Over the next six years, she moved up little by little, first to an interim wedding suite manager, then to an assistant manager in a few other departments. Last year, she clinched a job as service experience manager at the chain’s Riverside location, which paid $56,000 a year plus a $4,300 bonus.

Ms. Jimenez grew more optimistic about her career. She started thinking about one day becoming a Nordstrom regional manager, or even a director. With her bonus, she set her sights on whittling down the $12,000 of credit card debt she had accumulated during years of scraping by.

“I was finally on the track of basically almost becoming an adult because honestly I have never felt that way,” said Ms. Jimenez. “Then Covid hit.”

Nordstrom told workers in May that it would permanently close the Riverside store as part of a broader retrenchment. That put Ms. Jimenez out of a job in early July. Now she feels like “it’s 2008 all over again.”

Ms. Jimenez got $7,000 of severance that will help her pay the $700 a month she spends to live with her younger sister, a friend and the friend’s 7-year-old daughter. She is considering going back to school to earn an advanced degree in psychology so she can eventually become a therapist.

Recently a friend offered to help her get a job as a front office administrator at a dermatology practice in Newport Beach. It would pay about $15 to $17 an hour. She hasn’t decided whether to pursue it.

“I do feel like I’m starting back at square one,” she said.