Trump certainly does seem to be betting it all on the 3rd quarter, doesn't he? CW, I would wager you did not fail to notice that all those hundreds of billions of dollars of CARES Act PPP "loans" include a number of requirements that must be satisfied if the borrower/employer desires to participate, including that the loan funds must be used to retain at least 90% of employees at full pay and benefits until September 30, 2020. So what do you want to bet that at the end of the 3rd quarter, a hefty chunk of airline/restaurant/hotel/etc. employees start getting laid off? Seems highly likely to me.

But, Dan, is that an assumption (control of the virus) that you can realistically make - in the short term or even medium term, say through the end of this year?

Not if the virus isn't under control.

If you close your eyes and put the pedal to the metal, is your car under control? Sure, no sane person would drive that way, because you very quickly wind up dead if you do, and take a bunch of other people with you. But with the virus, 97% of us would survive. That's the premise: we control the virus, and set it for maximum casualties. It would mean we do go to the restaurant, the gym, the movie, the mosh pit, and so on. Some of us have decided to be the change they want to see, by going to rallies without masks or distancing, to demand exactly this course of action.

… and the US becomes more and more isolated.

Ok, tourism to the US from the sane world would completely stop. Likewise, no one would send their kids here to go to college. But trade would continue. A ship can take long enough that any cases would have been diagnosed before the cargo arrives.

Indeed!

Did you take a look at that link I posted about the Justice Department and voting rights?

- Attempted to get Ukraine government to say it was investigating Joe Biden or risk losing military aid needed in its war with Russia. (Which led to Trump being impeached)

Do you think that it is somehow possible that similar attempts could be behind the Reade accusations (which I know are false!) or would that be too paranoid?

I do not know if there is a way to double check the numbers in the Jobs Reports, unemployment numbers, etc, but Trump has shown a willingness to alter reports that do not paint him in a positive light (See William Barr’s Summation of the Mueller Report); and given the stakes behind his re-election campaign, we should be skeptical of any reports the federal government puts out between now and November 3. Trump must get re-elected to avoid going to jail... that has got to be in the back of his mind at all times.

And let’s look at what all Trump has done to aid in his re-election bid to date:

- Attempted to get Ukraine government to say it was investigating Joe Biden or risk losing military aid needed in its war with Russia. (Which led to Trump being impeached)

- Allowed the Federal Elections Commission to go for months without enough commissioners to have the quorum needed to pass any official findings. Finally, just before the election, a Trump supporter is getting pushed through the Senate to fill that roll.

- Once it became clear that many states are pushing for mail in ballots for November’s elections, Trump got rid of the old Post Master General and put in that role a Trump supporter that has no experience in running such an agency.

- Trump has forced the CDC to shelve the data they sent the White House on what is needed before we should re-open the country. Trump wants the CDC to put out more “suggestions” and less “requirements” for what must happen to reopen our country.

- Trump is trying to get states to not release or report numbers of COVID related dates. He has been questioning the official death totals the CDC has been reporting, saying he thinks that they are too high. Dr. Fauci today told the Senate that the official numbers are far lower than what the reality is! Lack of testing has made it impossible to get an accurate count.

There are many more, I am sure, but these are enough to recognize that we have to be on alert to the ways that Trump could mess with the upcoming election. He is a man without any conscious when it comes to harming others as long as he benefits.

The way I look at it, we can't talk about the health crisis and economic crisis as separate issues - they are one and the same.

Short answer: yes.

But I think it's more about whether we flail around with ambivalence and half-measures, or whether we settle on some response, any response, as long as it's coherent.

If we decide that we are willing to accept a much more thorough shut-down for three weeks, followed by a rigorous system of distancing, testing, and contact-tracing, we could go back to work at nearly full efficiency, and have our additional death toll (i.e. from people who catch it thereafter) be as low as the rest of the world. If we decide to accept a death toll of ten million, we could go back to work tomorrow. It would be criminally insane, but we could do it, and the economic damage would be very limited.

But if we keep on having an incoherent mish-mash of denial, misdirected effort, and too-little-too-late, we could have a death toll over a million and a Second Great Depression. If a stitch in time saves nine, then we're on track to need find out that nine stitches almost in time would have saved eighty-one.

Oh, I see. You're talking about economic models.

Well, if you can't get this virus under control, then that is going to have a very negative impact on economic recovery.

That the range of possible trajectories for the economy is very wide. We may have a Second Great Depression, that exceeds the first by as much as WWII exceeded "the war to end all ears". Or we may have an economic boomlet driven by pent-up demand, where immediate output almost replaces the economic activity being lost now, and the forced discovery that various work can be done from home provides some long-term economic benefit.

No.

Whatever testing capacity the US has appears to be being squandered - or, at the very least, the people who should and need to be tested most (health workers, symptomatic people and people who have been in contact with positive cases) are not being prioritized by a national strategy for rational testing.

i am wary of anything that comes from bill gates if it is even tangentially related to education. gates is one of the "edupreneurs" most closely linked to the attempted demolition of the nation's public school systems.

JL

https://www.gatesnotes.com/Health/Seattle-Coronavirus-Assessment-Network?WT.mc_id=20200512100000_SCAN_BG-EM_&WT.tsrc=BGEM

In one form or another, I expect Gates to be a part of the Biden administration, assuming we will be so fortunate as to see Biden win the presidential election in convincing fashion.

If we just let the plague run its course, the fraction of the population infected would be at least 1-1/r0, probably between 50 and 60%. Some percentage of infected people would die, maybe 2% of the infected people, or about 1% of the whole population, somewhere on the order of three million people.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. But, I think it provides a great opportunity for me to share what Dr. Ryan, executive director of the Health Emergencies Programme at WHO said yesterday at the regular WHO press briefing.

What follows is mostly a direct quote with some paraphrasing and taken from my own transcription of Dr. Ryan's remarks. And, since there has never been anything remotely resembling a word limit at this excellent blog, here goes …

Herd immunity is a term taken sometimes from veterinary epidemiology where people are concerned in animal husbandry with the overall health of the herd and an individual animal in that sense doesn't matter from the perspective of the brutal economics of that situation and those decisions.

But human populations are not herds and as such the concept of herd immunity is generally reserved for calculating how many people would need to be vaccinated in a population in order to generate that same effect.

So, we need to be really careful when we use terms in this way around natural infections in humans because it can lead to a very brutal arithmetic which does not put people and life and suffering at the center of that equation.

What also is concerning in this 'herd immunity' narrative, is that there was an assumption, as this disease spread around the world, that we are really just seeing the severe cases and the difficult cases and that sero-epidemiologic studies will show that most of the people in any given population have been infected and this will all be over and we can get back to normal business.

However, the preliminary results of sero-epi studies are showing just the opposite.

These studies are showing that the proportion of people with significant clinical illness is actually a much higher proportion of all those who have been infected because the number of people infected in the total population is probably much lower than we expected. (Studies as of today have shown up to only 14% or so of a general population have been infected, for example) Which means we have a very long way to go. It means, as the WHO DG, Dr. Tedros, has been saying for months, this is a serious disease, this is public enemy number one; we have been saying that over and over and over and over again.

And, we really do need now to step back and recalculate this as a mild illness and understand the serious nature of this outbreak. Let's not repeat these same mistakes - not taking this seriously, not putting in place the necessary measures. We have a second chance now, as a society in countries around the world, to put in place the necessary public health interventions; to put in place the necessary community support; to support our vulnerable populations be they in long term care facilities or in refugee camps. No one is safe unless everyone is safe.

When we look at the epidemics around the world we see that in some countries over half of the cases have occurred in LTC facilities or workers there. We need to look at these hot spots, at these really, really terrible situations in which we either haven't properly shielded people in those situations or protected them.

The idea that maybe countries that had lax measures or that haven't done anything will all of a sudden magically reach some herd immunity - and, so what if we lose a few old and vulnerable people along the way - is a really dangerous, dangerous calculation and I believe most member states are not willing to do that arithmetic.

Responsible member states will look at all their population; they value every member of their society and will try to do everything possible to protect health while at the same time, obviously, protecting society and economies and other things - we need to get our priorities right as we enter the next phase of this fight.

I guess my point in comparing that with the strategies to protect against COVID-19 really should have been to say that cars and COVID are the same in that way. In both cases, we try to do everything possible to prevent death.

So, why should we do nothing - or at lease, why shouldn't we do everything possible - to prevent death in a health emergency?

What was your point, Dan?

Let's break your comment down, Dan.

For example, more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes in the US, and no one ever thought it was a reason not to have everyone commute by car.

Of course, not. But, we haven't yet found a way to prevent car crashes that cause death and injury. So, we just have to accept the outcomes of driving, careless or otherwise.

In the case of COVID-19, however, we do have a strategy that works to prevent death. And, it's not even rocket science. Unfortunately, countries like the US have not availed themselves of these life-saving heath strategies at a time when it would have been most effective and efficient at putting the country ahead of and in control of this novel coronavirus.

Hopefully, important lessons have been learned by the US government and its citizens so that when the next health crisis emerges the country will be well prepared to solve the problem without imperiling the economy.

If we unanimously decided that a century worth of car-crash deaths (or whatever), whenever a plague comes along once a century or so, is an acceptable level of slaughter, and lifted all restrictions, I think the economy would pick up almost where it left off.

First off, unanimously? That was just a little joke, right?

The funny thing about viruses that jump the species barrier to infect humans, if left to their own devices, is that they are quite capable of causing enough damage to health and health systems so as to render a workforce unable to engage to the point where the economy could pick up where it left off.

dsws wrote:

I think the economy would recover fairly quickly, if the plague were resolved. It wouldn't even have to be over, necessarily: it would still count as resolved if we had a consensus that we were going to just accept it the way we accept various other causes of death. For example, more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes in the US, and no one ever thought it was a reason not to have everyone commute by car.

Comparing "acceptable" coronavirus deaths to "acceptable" auto accident fatalties doesn't work. People can voluntarily NOT drive a car, and if they do drive they have the right to drive defensively to minimize their chances of a mishap.

Coronavirus doesn't give one the right to opt out like that. You catch it involuntarily and even if it's mortality rate is only 1% that's a whole lot worse odds than driving (as one doesn't have a whole 1% chance of dying in an auto accident every time one gets in the car.

For example, more than 32,000 people are killed and 2 million are injured each year from motor vehicle crashes in the US, and no one ever thought it was a reason not to have everyone commute by car.

Hopefully, important lessons have been learned by the US government and its citizens so that when the next health crisis emerges the country will be well prepared to solve the problem without imperiling the economy.

Is that an acceptable strategy and outcome, in your opinion?

that certainly seems to be donald's preferred outcome.

If we just let the plague run its course, the fraction of the population infected would be at least 1-1/r0, probably between 50 and 60%. Some percentage of infected people would die, maybe 2% of the infected people, or about 1% of the whole population, somewhere on the order of three million people.

Not sure what this means but, I would bet that it ain't good …

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-regarding-section-201-voting-rights-act

1) Many people will still be leery of going to restaurants and bars and theaters and flying to vacation spots.

2) And as far as the businesses they do patronize, they will have a lot less money to spend there.

3) Many consumers will have realized they don't need to eat as much meat or buy so many fancy clothes.

4) Many businesses have learned to operate with people working from home. As a result, many of those businesses will have realized they don't need to maintain so much office space, to the detriment of commercial real estate and also to the detriment of businesses such as coffeeshops and restaurants that serve commercial areas.

In short, the old economy won't come roaring back because it won't be the same economy any more; the model will have changed.

Heh. I think I'll watch it tonight, again. Just because.

Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.
~lily tomlin

https://youtu.be/CoxRmwaLBOQ

He's fleein' the press conference! He's fleein' the press conference!!

Oh, my God, that's just too funny. Ahem.

Ironically, while Trump may be this novel coronavirus's best friend, the virus won't be doing him any favours on the economic front if he keeps thinking magically. So much for loyalty! :)

Well, I think he's trying to get people to look optimistically forward to 2021 NOW! And, he trying to make people think that they know when they vote that Trump is the one working towards that outcome.

And, did you notice that Trump quickly warned that the Democrats, if they get elected in November, will raise taxes and prevent that great economic recovery!

Now, if he were to start listening to the WHO, in general and to today's WHO presser, in particular, then he would know how to work toward a recovering economy.