Washington state National Guardsmen take part in a training session to support contact tracing efforts to help slow the spread of Covid, Tumwater, Washington, May 20, 2020.
Jason Redmond | Reuters

In a bid to speed up the vaccine roll-out, states are enlisting their National Guards.
More than 20,000 members of the National Guard are engaged in the vaccination mission, with at least nine states using the guard to put needles into residents’ arms. At least 22 other states have activated units to help with logistics and administrative tasks connected with vaccinations.

As the crisis steepens, more states are likely to turn to the military.

Serious challenges

However, those hoping the guard will be able to help with a major speedup may be disappointed.
The National Guard operates independently in all 50 states, three territories and the District of Columbia. In most cases, it is activated by the governor. Overall, the nation’s 54 guard units have 450,000 service members at their disposal. During the early days of Covid in the U.S., almost 50,000 were deployed to help with testing, but most of those deployments have ended.
Despite the capabilities and expertise in a variety of areas, the guard generally isn’t assigned a lead role. Instead, guard units are mostly prepared to supplement existing resources in state and county health departments.
“The power of the military is logistics,” said military analyst Emma Moore, who has studied the National Guard extensively for the Center for a New American Security. “The guard will be able to add to state and local health facilities and take some of the burden off of the civilian medical infrastructure.”

Milan Torres reconstitutes a dose of Covid-19 vaccine at the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., December 14, 2020.
Manuel Balce Ceneta | Reuters

The obstacles

In Maryland, Gov. Larry Hogan recognized the frustration with the slow start of the vaccination effort. 
“While none of us are thrilled with the pace of this rollout over the first couple of weeks, I can assure you that it is improving every day,” he said Tuesday. 
To help, the Maryland National Guard was activated last week. Despite the pandemic’s frightening rise and the desperate need for shots, only 150 guard members received call-up orders. In most cases the people who are trained and ready for this kind of work hold civilian jobs in the medical sector as well, so state officials are wary of taking them out of their civilian jobs, where they’re also battling the once-in-a-century health crisis. 
Those 150 Maryland guard members have been divided into 14 teams. Some are responsible for giving the shots to civilians, others help local and state health departments in other capacities, like setting up and maintaining sites and establishing social distancing protocols at shot centers and making sure lines don’t get overcrowded with people awaiting an injection.
“Moving faster is going to be complicated for a lot of these National Guard units because of many complicating factors, including civilian careers, family responsibilities and getting orders from the civilian chain of command, who also needs to find funding,” Moore said.
In Michigan, 59 guard teams are in the field working on vaccinations, totaling 369 members. 
Michigan was one of the first to deploy the guard for the vaccination mission. So far the Michigan National Guard has administered more than 8,000 shots, but it has a limited capacity to ramp up deployments. Even with that early help, only 1.4% of the state has been vaccinated.
Another factor slowing National Guard call-ups in some states is the politicization of the pandemic which has led some governors to hold back fearing backlash for involving the military in a crisis that some people haven’t fully bought into.

Members of the National Guard stand guard near the Kenosha, Wisconsin, county courthouse on January 5, 2021, after the prosecutor announced no charges would be filed in the wounding of Jacob Blake, a Black man left paralyzed in an August 2020 police shooting.
Daniel Acker | Reuters

Deployment after deployment

It’s been a terribly busy year for the National Guard. On Wednesday, members were brought in to Washington to help secure the Capitol during the deadly riot by supporters of President Donald Trump.
 “We’ve had storms, civil disturbances and Covid-related missions for months” said Wayne Hall, spokesman for the National Guard Bureau, which serves as a liaison between the federal government and the 54 National Guard Units. 
“It’s really up each governor how to use the National Guard, governors set the priorities, there’s no federal mandate, each state has its own priorities,” he said. More

“The Spirit of the Rose,” a rare purple-pink diamond mined in Russia, was sold at a Sotheby’s auction for nearly $27 million. A picture taken at a press preview on November 6, 2020.
Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

The largest purple-pink diamond ever to be auctioned has been sold in Geneva, Switzerland for 24,393,000 Swiss francs ($26,700,871). 
The purple-pink diamond, called “The Spirit of the Rose,” was sold to an anonymous buyer, bidding over the phone at the Sotheby’s auction on Tuesday.  It weighs 14.8 carats but was cut from a larger rough diamond that weighed 27.8 carats, which was discovered in Yakutia, northeast Russia in 2017. 

The rough diamond was said to be the largest pink crystal to have ever been mined in Russia and was named “Nijinksy” after the legendary Russian-Polish ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky. “The Spirit of the Rose” was the name given to the cut diamond, after the last ballet Nijinsky performed on stage. 
It took a year for Russian cutting masters to form the end diamond, giving it an oval shape to ensure it would be the maximum size. 
Pink diamonds were first discovered in India in the 17th century and their color is thought to be the result of a distortion in the “crystal lattice,” or its atomic arrangement. This is “created by intense heat and great pressure after the stone’s formation in the earth,” according to an explanation on Sotheby’s website. 
“This distortion displaces many carbon atoms from their normal positions and alters the qualities of light reflected by the diamond — resulting in us observing the stone as pink,” the auction house explained. 
Pink diamonds differ from other colored diamonds as there are no chemical trace elements present in its formation. For example, the presence of nitrogen forms yellow diamonds, while boron creates blue diamonds. 

Only 1% of pink diamonds are said to be larger than 10 carats and just 4% are graded “fancy vivid.” 
The “CTF Pink Star,” weighing 59.6 carats, holds the current record for the price paid for a pink diamond at auction, at $71.2 million, which was sold in Hong Kong in April 2017. 
“The Grand Table,” which was shown to a French merchant and adventurer in India in the 17th century, is considered to be largest pink diamond recorded to date, at over 200 carats. More

Peathegee Inc | Tetra images | Getty Images

You have just a few weeks to tap the money you’ve been saving for medical needs — or risk losing it.
Health-care flexible spending accounts, which your employer may offer, allow you to store pretax dollars in a special account. In 2020 and 2021, you can contribute up to $2,750.

These funds are free of tax and you can take tax-free distributions, provided the money is for qualified medical expenses, including dental care, acupuncture and prescription eyeglasses.
Of course, nothing good lasts forever.
While you can tap the money as early as Jan. 1, you generally have until the end of the year to use the funds or else you forfeit your remaining balance.
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The IRS gives employers the option of allowing workers to roll over some of the money into the following year  — up to $550 for 2020 — or providing them up to 2½ months after the plan year ends to spend leftover funds.

Companies aren’t required to give you either choice.
To make things a little more interesting in light of Covid-19, there are also a few special rules the IRS added this year for FSA holders who haven’t been spending down their accounts as quickly as they’d like.

More time to spend down

When Americans hunkered down in their homes this spring, health-care FSA holders likely put off trips to the doctor and the dentist.
The funds they rolled into 2020 from 2019 were going unused, and they stood to lose the money.
Some employers were already offering FSA savers some flexibility due to the pandemic, including stopping deferrals into the accounts, said Ed Zollars, CPA and partner at Thomas, Zollars & Lynch in Phoenix and an instructor at Kaplan Financial Education.
In turn, the IRS released guidance in May, allowing employers to update their plans and provide an extended period for workers to use untapped health-care FSA funds from 2019.
Those individuals can have until the end of this year to spend down those amounts.

This relief also applies to money tied up in dependent care FSAs — accounts where you can save up to $5,000 per year to offset the cost of care for kids under age 13.
The IRS also allowed employers to give workers the chance to modify or make elections into both types of FSAs mid-year. That means those workers could tweak their contribution amounts.
Now, for the catch: This is optional for employers.
“If the plan decides to allow it, you can spend the money down through the end of the year,” said Zollars.
“Even if the IRS gives relief, the employer may not decide to adopt it,” he said. “They don’t have to.”

Pandemic uncertainty into 2021

FatCamera | E+ | Getty Images

Here’s another hiccup: The May guidance from the IRS applies to 2019 balances being carried over and used in 2020. But there’s no word on whether the taxman will allow plans the option to carry forward 2020 FSA balances into next year.
“As we get to the end of December, that’s when the IRS will be expected to address again that there are people stuck with money in 2020 and they couldn’t cut the contributions off early enough,” said Zollars.
The stakes are even higher for dependent care FSAs, as another Covid-19 wave toward the end of the year could leave parents with big balances that go unused.
“It’s clear that if things got bad, and we went through shutdowns, you might have unspent childcare funds,” said Zollars.
“Maybe your kid is going to childcare now, but come January the hospitals fill up, things lock down and you can’t spend the money,” he said.

A guidepost for open enrollment

Portra | DigitalVision | Getty Images

Normally, you might look to your prior year’s spending patterns as you decide how much money to save in your health-care or dependent care FSA during benefit enrollment season.
This fall, talk to your human resources department and consider how your employer handled the IRS guidance from May.
Did your company allow workers the flexibility to adjust their FSA contributions in the middle of the year? Were workers allowed more time to spend down leftover amounts from 2019?
If not, it might be worth adjusting the amount you’ll defer to these accounts in 2021.
“If your employer did not adopt these rules and you’re stuck with the deferral, assume they will do the same thing next year if the issue arises,” said Zollars. “You have to take it into account when you make your decision.” More

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