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Day: 17 March 2020

Monaco steps up lockdown

by: Cassandra Tanti
17/03/2020

In his address to Monaco on Tuesday night, Prince Albert announced that the Principality has entered “a phase of virus lockdown” with the introduction of new containment measures starting at midnight, lasting “until further notice”.

Monaco’s Head of State thanked health workers for their service during the Covid-19 outbreak as well as the National Council and various authorities. However, to contain the spread of the novel coronavirus, he said that the Principality would introduce new stricter measures as of Wednesday 18th March.

To outline exactly what those measures are, Minister of the Interior Patrice Cellario will give a live address on Wednesday 18th March at 10.30am, to be broadcast on the government’s Facebook page. You can access it by clicking here.

Monaco’s response to the Covid-19 health crisis is expected to be similar to France. French President Emmanuel Macron said on Monday evening that measures unprecedented in peacetime were needed as the number of infected people doubled every three days and deaths spiralled higher. He told the French people they are only allowed outside their houses for essential trips, such as to buy food and medicines, for a period of two weeks.

An additional 100,000 police and army personnel were brought in to enforce the ban.

To understand more about the lockdown, read our story here:
France’s lockdown explained

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Photo: Prince Albert addressing the citizens of Monaco on Tuesday evening 

AS Monaco Esports players in eEuro2020

by: Stephanie Horsman
17/03/2020

Two AS Monaco Esports players, and current reigning title holders of the eFootball Pro title, Lofti Derradji and Walid Rachid “Usmakabyle” Tebane, have made their debuts with the French eFoot Team participating in the eEuro 2020.
As lockdown puts the kibosh on sporting events all over Europe, the eEuro 2020 football matches are just hitting their stride. The eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer qualifying rounds started last week and are continuing into this week.
eFootball Pro Evolution Soccer 2020 (eFootball PES 2020) is a soccer simulation video game developed by Konami that can be played on Windows, PalyStation 4, Xbox One, Android and iOS devices. The 2020 version features a name change from last year, adding ‘eFootball’ to the title. This change symbolises a push in the online gaming space with the emphasis on eFootball Pro tournaments.
55 nations are represented, and the French eFoot Team has been put in Group J along with Armenia, Belgium, Croatia, Cyprus and Czech Republic. Each team competes in a double-legged match. At the end of 10 games, the team ranked first in each group is automatically qualified for the finals, which will be played in London on 9th and 10th July.
Each division’s runner up will be drawn into 2 new groups of 5 teams. Each group will play in a double round robin, where countries will play each other as both “home” and “away” during separate match days. These matchups consist of a “best of two” series where teams must win the most games to reach the next phase.
Winning grants a National Team three points, drawing grants one point and losing grants zero points.
In order to qualify, players must be a national for the country they want to participate with and be 16 years of age or older. Much like live football, there are strict codes of conduct and the league has a zero-tolerance policy against abusive or violent behaviour.
21-year-old Lofti, as he is known, joined AS Monaco Esports in the 2017-2018 season. The talented gamer won the title of Champion of France on PES in 2019.
Usmakabyle is a triple world champ. He is a fierce competitor, and has been involved in several international tournaments, making him a valuable asset to AS Monaco Esports.
All of Monaco and France wish these players the best of luck and are giving sport hungry fans something to look forward to in the coming weeks.
 
 

The power of intelligence

by: Michael Topley
17/03/2020

We are at the start of a new technological age, which is being driven by the increasing power and cognification of artificial intelligence (AI), a powerful technology that has the potential to transform our world quickly and decisively.
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Everything we have achieved as a civilisation is the product of our intelligence, and if we are able to augment our intelligence with artificial intelligence, we will be better placed to address some of our greatest challenges.
AI is a technology that is already having a profound impact on many business models, creating incredible return potential and some of the greatest barriers-to-entry ever seen for those companies that are able to embrace it. While there will be many great opportunities borne from AI, it might also cause creative destruction to some traditional business models. High street retail has been an early victim of this technological transition, as the power of individually targeted ecommerce continues to drive footfall away from physical stores. Transport is also seeing the beginning of this disruption, where the brand value of the world’s largest car manufacturers becomes a lot less certain in an era of ‘autonomous taxis’.
For many, the future vision of AI is often defined by the action movies of the 1980s. However, a super-smart, humanoid T-1000 that will threaten our job security is unlikely to be the path that AI follows. Instead, AI will likely be closer to our experience of the internet – an ever-present, unobservable power that we can tap into to make things smarter. The power of network effects will likely drive AI into a handful of key providers – namely the tech giants – who will see their respective AIs become increasingly powerful and useful, as more users access them and feed them data. AI is seen as a core pillar of future growth for companies such as Amazon and Microsoft, who are increasingly providing artificial cognification to their customers by, for example, ensuring customer service optimisation and predicting what products are most likely to sell.
Over the coming years, AI will drive change across all aspects of our lives, from healthcare, to energy efficiency to how we feed ourselves. When DeepMind’s AlphaZero achieved a superhuman level of play for the game ‘Go’ within 24 hours in 2017, it did so solely through self-play and without any access to historic data from human games. Left to its own reinforced learning, it was possible to see the program self-learn strategies that humans had developed centuries before. After beating all human players, the program continued to learn and developed new alien strategies that no human had yet considered – improving human understanding in the process. This is the power of AI. Not in its threat of replacing humans, but in its ability to do things humans cannot, and this provides exciting opportunities for both investors and the planet.
One of the fastest moving areas of AI development is in deep learning neural networks. These deep networks attempt to mimic the actions of neurons in the brain, which are able to unconsciously, instantly and astoundingly interpret the world around us; such as reading someone’s handwriting or the expression on a face. Visual recognition is extremely difficult to do, however deep learning neural networks are increasingly able to use these principles to take unstructured data and interpret it more effectively than humans. This may be in Facebook recognising your friends in a photo, in the identification of a tumour in a mammogram, or in reducing the energy footprint of a data centre.
Perhaps one of the most exciting areas in which AI can enable tangible benefits is in healthcare. Back in May last year, Grail, a healthcare company based in Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, was granted Breakthrough Status by the US Food and Drug Administration for its early detection, multi-cancer blood test. The test detects very early stage cancers by combining high-intensity genomic sequencing of a patient’s blood with artificial intelligence algorithms and large data sets in the cloud. Data from their clinical research programme showed that the test was able to detect a strong signal for 12 deadly early-stage cancer types. This impressive technology, which can boast the investment backing of tech heavyweights such as Amazon, Tencent and Bill Gates, is only achievable thanks to recent advances in AI. If the company is successful in developing a widely-used, low cost, early stage multi-cancer detection test, this will have profound implications for many traditional business models within the healthcare industry and the economy as a whole.
In the US, healthcare spending accounts for roughly 21% of personal consumption expenditure, with around $80bn being spent each year on the treatment of cancer. The potential deflationary impact of a sub-$1,000 gene-sequenced blood test to identify cancer at an early stage, when it is a lot cheaper to treat, will be significant to both the industry, monetary and fiscal policy, and society.
Looking at the bigger picture, there is an extraordinary opportunity for AI to help address some of the greatest sustainability challenges we face as a planet. As an example, if we were able to predict the shape of a protein from its DNA code – an incredibly difficult task – it would pave the way for faster drug discovery and gene editing, improved material design, or the faster transition away from traditional agriculture. In fact, modern food companies – such as Impossible Foods – are already using genetically engineered micro-organisms to make specific proteins at a very low environmental and economic cost through a process called ‘precision fermentation’. With a greater understanding of protein structure, it will be possible to produce more nutritious and better tasting products, disturbing in certain way the incumbent agricultural ecosystem.
Using AI to produce more efficient superconductor materials also provides huge opportunities in how we generate and store energy. This is already being used to improve the performance of the lithium batteries, used in electric cars and our mobile devices. However, its potential to advance technologies such as nuclear fusion could enable cheap and abundant clean energy, which would in turn provide additional benefits to society.
While there are many great opportunities borne from AI, it will also cause disruption to many traditional business models. Outdated is the traditional investment delineation of value versus growth. What differentiates businesses in the modern world is those business models that can adopt and embrace these technological advancements, and those that cannot.
Many businesses are already using AI to extend their market leadership and strengthen their barriers to entry. Adobe’s Photoshop is using AI to predict the missing background behind an object that is removed from a photo, leaving users more time to focus on the creative content. Microsoft is using AI to improve accessibility for people with disabilities through speech, text and image recognition tools. Medtronic, a world leader in medical devices, is using AI in its ground-breaking closed loop artificial pancreas to effectively predict blood glucose levels and automatically administer insulin to users throughout the day. Visa is using neural networks to proactively assess six billion daily events to identify emerging security threats in its network.
The Artificial Intelligence revolution has started and it will define the business models of the future. PWC sizes AI’s potential contribution to the global economy by 2030 at $15.7T. From an investment perspective, it will be increasingly important to assess the opportunities and vulnerabilities of business models to these advancements. This highlights the growing importance of active portfolio management and stock selection at this inflection point for humanity. But if we – humans – are successful in unlocking the full power of intelligence, the opportunities that lie ahead are extraordinary.
 
By Michael Topley, Head of Sustainable Portfolio Management, Barclays Private Bank
 
 
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Compensation for childcare during the crisis

by: Stephanie Horsman
17/03/2020

As school closures force parents to stay home to mind their children, the government has set out to explain how families will be compensated for these unplanned work stoppages.

Parents of children under the age of 16, or 18 in the case of a child with disabilities, may be be compensated despite not physically being at work. The steps put in place by the government offer several solutions for the situation.  

Those families affiliated with the Social Services Compensation Fund or the State Medical Service must first assess with their employer the possibility of working remotely during the period of closures. If the employer refuses, they must offer a valid reason.  

For those whose job must be done on-site, the parent may apply for paid sick leave, so long as the child’s other parent is not currently taking unemployment benefits, either permanently or temporarily. 

Only one parent may excuse themselves from work full time, but the option of splitting the day between the two parents is available.

If a family is not covered by the Social Services Compensation Fund or the State Medical Service, the parents must go to their Monegasque insurance provider to make arrangements.

In either case, a certain protocol is being advised. Employees are asked to contact employers and discuss the most preferable way of working remotely. If a solution can be found, the specific procedures on how to make it happen are to be found at https://www.gouv.mc/Action-Gouvernementale/Coronavirus-Covid-2019 and https://service-public-entreprises.gouv.mc/Emploi-et-social/Reglementation-du-travail/COVID19-Travail-a-distance/COVID19-Procedure-de-travail-a-distance

If a remote working situation cannot be done, the employer must declare a work stoppage and the home maintenance of the affected employees using forms provided by CCSS or SPME.

All compensation for lost days will be on the basis of the declarations made in the forms. The form covers issues such as a daily allowance and the maintenance of wages guaranteed by the employer from the first day of cessation, without application of the waiting period.

The CCSS and SPME will pay under the following conditions:

– Only parents of children under the age of 16 on the day of the start of the cessation are affected by the scheme. The age limit is set for children under 18 for parents of children with disabilities who are cared for in a specialised establishment, the closure of which would occur.

– The parent must be affiliated with a Monegasque social security organisation.

– Only one parent (or holder of parental authority) may be issued a work stoppage. In this regard, the employee must provide his employer with a sworn statement certifying that he is the only one to request a work stoppage in this context.

– The work stoppage can be shared between the parents. It is possible to split it by filling in a request for each of the stop periods. 

– The company must not be in a position to put the employee concerned into teleworking during this period: work stoppage must be the only possible solution.

The declaration made by the employer does not trigger automatic compensation for the employees concerned. This is done after verification by the CCSS / SPME and the Labour Directorate of the elements transmitted.

This is the form you need to take to Social Services Compensation Fund or the State Medical Benefits Service:
 
Formulaire maitien domicile fermeture écoles
Photo: Pixabay
 
 

Senior care during lockdown

by: Stephanie Horsman
17/03/2020

Seniors are more likely to feel the effects of social isolation during this confinement period. Small things can be done to help ease their fear and worry. Meanwhile, the council has extended its home meal service for the elderly. 

As the most vulnerable sector of the population when it comes to the coronavirus, the elderly are in a precarious position. They are being advised to not venture out at all, yet they still require basics such as food and medicines. As many seniors have no one to turn to, the public is being asked to keep a special eye on neighbours who may need extra help during this time.

If an elderly person lives next door, check in every couple of days and ask if assistance is needed. Offering to buy groceries, pick up medications or just have a chat could make all the difference for an elderly person who is afraid and alone in these uncertain times.  

Of course, standard hygiene practices should be carried out at each visit. Though it may seem less-than-hospitable, wearing gloves and masks as well as staying two metres from them is the best way to ensure that visitors do not infect their aged neighbours.

The psychological benefits of these visits far outweighs the way they are conducted and are a necessary lifeline for many who have no other way to connect with the outside world.

Secours Populaire, an association devoted to acting against poverty, exclusion and isolation of the region’s most vulnerable citizens, is also calling on volunteers to help, providing the volunteer is not already in contact with fragile people in their own homes. For those who still wish to help, but cannot be out and about, there are hotlines set up that are earmarked for listening and talking to seniors.

The Little Brothers of the Poor, who are responsible for these lines, have stated that the number of callers has jumped by 50% since 13th March, underlining the distress some of our older population is feeling.

For more information or to volunteer, contact the Little Brothers of the Poor at pfdp.nice@petitsfreresdespauvres.fr or on 0800.47.47.88 from 3pm to 8pm. Secours Populaire can be contacted on 04.92.00.24.24.


Meanwhile, the Monaco City Council has extended its home meal delivery service to all residents over the age of 70 and to frail people.
The number to contact for this service is 93 15 22 99 from Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 6:00pm. The meal trays consist of a starter, a main dish, cheese, dessert and bread and cost €9 for lunch and €15 for lunch and dinner.
 
Photo: Pixabay
 

France’s lockdown explained

by: Cassandra Tanti
17/03/2020

French President Emmanuel Macron has ordered everyone in France to stay indoors, declaring “war” on the new coronavirus. 

Macron announced in a televised address on Monday 17th March that the country is “ramping up measures to limit travel and contact between people in France from midday Tuesday 17th March for at least 15 days. Any gatherings outdoors or family gatherings is not allowed. Walks in parks are not allowed, you must limit your contact. This is applicable across France. Only take transport if you absolutely have to, don’t shake hands, don’t go and meet with other people, do teleworking when absolutely possible. Anybody who will not apply by those guidelines will be punished.”

Following the announcement, the government released guidelines for the public to follow. Here, we try to answer some questions you may have surrounding the lockdown and provide you with access to the necessary forms to leave your homes.

Can I leave my house?
Yes – but the government will ask everyone to stay indoors unless they have to go to work when telework is not possible, to make essential purchases in authorised local shops, to travel to a health professional, or to take care of children or to help vulnerable people with the strict condition of respecting social distancing.

Anyone who does go outdoors must carry with them a completed form specifying their reasons for doing so. You can download it here.

There is also a digital version. Simply copy the link below in the web browser on your phone, fill out the details and create a digital copy. We are not sure if it works in Monaco yet, we will keep you informed.
https://vik.io/sortie…

Am I banned from going to work?
Both the Monegasque and French governments are requesting teleworking be applied when possible.
Employees whose work genuinely cannot be done remotely are still permitted to travel to work.

Will I be financially covered?
France will mobilise €45 billion in crisis measures to help its companies, a large part of which includes the deferral of all tax payments and payroll charges that companies were due to pay this month and the cancellation of such payments for firms at risk of collapse.
It comes in addition to €300 billion in government loan guarantees that President Macron announced on Monday night.

“No company, of any size, will be allowed to go bankrupt,” Macron vowed.
Monaco’s Minister of Finance and Economy Jean Castellini announced on Monday afternoon that the government is applying the same offensive measures to the economy that it is applying to the health of citizens, freeing up €50 million euros in the budget for companies who find themselves in financial difficulty. 

It means that anyone not able to work in Monaco and France because of the crisis can claim benefits (generally 70% of their salary after tax), and their job will be held open for them when things return to normal. Employers are barred from firing employees during this period.

Can I use public transport including taxis?
Yes, services continue to run, albeit it at a significantly reduced capacity.
If people are crossing the borders for travel, or travelling outside of their local area, they may be stopped by police and asked to state their reasons for travel.

Monaco’s bus service CAM is no longer allowing tickets to be purchased from the driver on board buses, requesting that passengers purchase tickets from automatic distribution points before boarding.
“Ascent / descent will only be available by the doors located in the middle and at the rear of the bus. Ascent / descent through the front door will not be possible,” according the CAM website.
The boat bus will also stop service from Wednesday 18th March until further notice.

Crossing borders
As of noon Tuesday 17th March, all external borders of the European Union and the Schengen area were closed. All travel between non-EU countries and the EU is suspended for 30 days.
French and Monegasque citizens are able to return to their home countries.
The border between France and Monaco remains open.

Will we run out of food?
No. Governments are doing all they can to ensure food supplies remain unaffected by the lockdown. In Italy, union and industrial leaders reached an agreement to keep factories running on Saturday, and the same will occur in France.

How will the restrictions be enforced?
An additional 100,000 police and army personnel have been deployed to enforce the lockdown in France. People in the streets will be asked to produce a form specifying their purpose for leaving the house. See above for access to the digital and printable form. People found breaking the quarantine face a fine of €38 to €135. Fines will not apply in Monaco.

Police will not be on every corner checking paperwork, however, so authorities are still relying on citizens to show civil responsibility and self-quarantine.

Can we still order takeaway?
Yes, restaurants are still allowed to provide meals for home deliveries and popular services like Uber Eats and Deliveroo are still operating.

The Monaco City Council has extended its home meal delivery service to all residents over the age of 70 and to frail people.

The number to contact for this service is 93 15 22 99 from Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 6:00pm. The meal trays consist of a starter, a main dish, cheese, dessert and bread and cost €9 for lunch and €15 for lunch and dinner.

Will I receive my mail?
Yes, La Poste says the majority of mail will be delivered and most post offices will remain open, however you can expect a drop of about 20% in postal services.

Can I go to the park with the kids?
No. Gatherings of any sort, particularly in parks, is prohibited.

Can I take the dog out for a walk?
Yes, but once the “essentials” are done, people are expected to return home.

Will the lockdown work?
Hopefully, yes. Two weeks after the first 10 towns in northern Italy were declared a “red zone” and put under lockdown, there had been no new infections. This then served as a model to tighten measures across the country and the rest of Europe.

As this is a constantly evolving situation, we aim to keep you updated as regularly as possible. Please follow Monaco Life on Facebook for immediate updates: https://www.facebook.com/monacolife.net