COVID-2019 in America, effect on politics and economy

[Albany Rifles]

Virginia lock down until June 10, that graph is going to dip further by then.

No we ain't.....https://www.wric.com/news/virginia-n...ening-process/

[tbm3fan]

several points.

in the biggest cluster in the US -- the NYC cluster -- antibody tests show that roughly 20% of the NYC population have been infected.

so even in one of the highest population density areas in the US, where the virus hit hardest, we're still nowhere close to herd immunity.

also, the newest research shows even the folks who survive, including the young and the fit, will often have serious issues with their hearts, lungs, and kidneys afterwards.

Yes, besides the long term effects that are quite possible, since they have been following long term effects from the 2008 SARS cases. Now there is this new inflammatory syndrome affecting young children. Inflammation can be a dangerous thing when it gets out of control in the human body and cause lots of unintended damage. Taken 3 lives in New York according to the Times. It is one thing to gloss over the fact that the people who died are the old and infirmed but it is another if young healthy children. Want to scare the population? Then start taking their children with a mysterious illness.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/h...-new-york.html

[Albany Rifles]

And a bad plan is better than no plan. At the very least, you learn what doesn't work.

And always have a contingency to fix your mistakes. Someone should tell Trump that vocing your denials is not a contingency.

Colonel, and when planning how much explosives is needed to blow up an obstacle when you do the computation in the equation P = Plenty.

[tbm3fan]

You're describing those who has been hospitalized. For the mass majority who had not been hospitalized, they are fine.

I'm not so sure about that and wouldn't bet the farm on it...yet. While many were not hospitalized no one knows how bad off they were before recovery at home. Most people ended up in the hospital when their breathing and O2 saturation levels were crashing. Testing showed my O2 level at 98%, there is no 100%, but I could be at 85% and never know it or that my lungs were already affected and possibly damaged. Doctors say get into the hospital when you hit 92% yet no one does as no one knows. Given that, we will not know how those who recovered at home, until several years have passed and the long term effects can start to show themselves in decreased lung function, and so forth. It is still very, very early.

I'm healthy and I saw someone in my office who said we are all going to get it anyway. I said better you than me cause I don't feel like rolling the dice to see whether I am affected or unaffected 10 years later when 76. He paused a bit with a look in his face. My mother had polio as a young child and all she ended up with was a slight decrease in strength concerning her left thumb. Others were not so lucky.

[Officer of Engineers]

I'm not so sure about that and wouldn't bet the farm on it...yet.

I will take the military assessement. Those in the military who had recovered from COVID-19. Are they combat effective? Yes. That's good enough for me.

[astralis]

https://www.vox.com/2020/5/13/212552...kdown-liberate

We don’t have a president, or a plan
60 days into the coronavirus crisis, the White House does not have a plan, a framework, a philosophy, or a goal.

By Ezra Klein
May 13, 2020, 8:00am EDT

Here’s the truth: Lockdown is economically ruinous, and we can’t sustain it from now until a vaccine. And you don’t have to take it from me. “You can’t be in lockdown for 18 months,” says Dr. Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “We’ll destroy society as we know it, and we don’t know what we’ll accomplish with it.”

But this is also the truth: Reopening without a way to control the coronavirus will be lethal to both human life and economic growth, as an escalating death toll will force states back into lockdown. “We can’t just let the virus go,” Osterholm says. “Lots of people will die and it’ll shut down our health system, not just for Covid patients, but for anyone with a health problem.”

“What we need,” Osterholm continues, “is a plan.”

It is shocking. More than 60 days after President Trump declared a national emergency over the novel coronavirus, there is still no clear national plan for what comes next. “The lockdown is not meant to be a permanent state of affairs; it’s intended to be a giant pause button that buys you time to get ready for the next phase,” Jeremy Konyndyk, of the Center for Global Development think tank, says.

But the Trump administration wasted the pause. Over the past two months, the US should have built the testing, contact tracing, and quarantine infrastructure necessary to safely end lockdown and transition back to normalcy — as many of our peer countries did. Instead, Trump has substituted showmanship for action, playing the president on TV but refusing to do the actual job. He has both dominated the airwaves and abdicated his duties. As a result, America’s progress against the coronavirus has stalled, even as the lockdown has driven the economy into crisis.

I am more sympathetic than some to the protesters, and others, who want to see states reopen, who believe the cost of lockdown overwhelms the apparent benefits. The economic agony is real, and they have been given no way to imagine its end, no clear understanding of the purpose behind their sacrifice. But the awful choice they feel we face — between endless lockdown or reckless reopening — needs to be understood for what it is: the failure of our political leaders to create a safer, middle path.

“What we want to avoid in the reopening process is creating the conditions that led to us having to stay home in the first place,” writes Caitlin Rivers, of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. That was the Trump administration’s job — either they needed to do it, or they needed to support and empower the states to do it.

They have failed. It is the most profound and complete failure of presidential leadership in modern history.

We are used to policy debates revolving around whether the administration has chosen the right or wrong plan. You could imagine that being the case here.

There are, at this point, a slew of reopening plans from think tanks and academics, economists and epidemiologists, liberals and conservatives. They differ in important, controversial ways. There are proposals that go all-in on mass testing. There are others that imagine a vast architecture of digital surveillance. Some rely on states, others emphasize the federal role. And within the plans, details worth debating abound: What level of risk is acceptable? How should recommendations vary between dense cities and rural areas? Who counts as an essential worker? How do we prevent mass unemployment? What is technologically possible?

The Trump administration could have chosen any of these plans or produced its own. But it didn’t. The closest it has come is a set of guidelines for states to consult when reopening. You can read them yourself at the White House’s “Opening America” landing page. The guidelines are not quite a plan, but they are at least a framework: They call for states to reopen when caseloads have fallen for 14 days, when hospitals can test all health care workers continuously, when contact tracing architecture is up and running.

President Trump, however, shows neither familiarity with, nor support for, his own guidelines. He routinely calls on states to reopen though they have not met the criteria his administration suggests. For instance, his series of tweets calling on right-wing protesters to “LIBERATE!” Michigan, Virginia, and Minnesota from stay-at-home orders contradicted his own administration’s guidance and created a distraction for state officials trying to manage a crisis.

Americans don’t have a functional president, but we have someone playing a dysfunctional president on TV, and he’s keeping other leaders from successfully doing their jobs.

Some of Trump’s allies have tried to frame the president’s policy response — or lack thereof — as a principled commitment to small-government conservatism. “He has given pride of place to federalism and private enterprise—lauding the patriotism and proficiency of our fantastic governors and mayors, our incredible business leaders and genius companies,” wrote Hudson’s Christopher DeMuth in the Wall Street Journal.

This is creative but unconvincing. Harvard’s Safra Center for Ethics has put together a detailed road map advocating for a federalist approach and showing how one might work. If states are to take the lead, they argue, the federal government has to support them in three ways: coordinate the supply chain so states don’t end up in a ruinous bidding war against each other, issue the debt necessary to backstop state and local spending as revenues collapse, and deploy the federal government’s vast scientific resources to ensure the best available evidence is being processed and disseminated to the states quickly and clearly.

But none of that is happening now. Instead, the authors write, “today disharmony reigns, as states compete for the supplies and personnel necessary to meet the exigencies of the moment.” Diplomatically, they omit any discussion of the president’s repeated efforts to foment political unrest against the governors he dislikes.

Trump’s approach to state needs has been transactional, not philosophical. He has been explicit in his belief that his administration should only engage with the governors that have been sufficiently politically supportive of him. At a press conference, Trump said he told Vice President Mike Pence, “don’t call the governor of Washington. You’re wasting your time with him. Don’t call the woman in Michigan.’” In this, as in so much else, the Trump administration is maneuvering around the president’s grudges and impulses.

States, too, are having to maneuver around the Trump administration to secure their response. In a remarkable admission, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, told the Washington Post that after purchasing 500,000 tests from South Korea, he made sure the plane bearing the tests landed under the protection of state troopers because he feared the federal government would take for itself the tests he had fought to procure. The move reportedly enraged Trump, who “saw Maryland’s deal with South Korea as a bid to embarrass the president.”

To state the obvious: This is not a president who believes in federalism.

It is, in truth, incoherence all the way down. And I do mean all the way.

As my colleague Matthew Yglesias has argued, the White House — and thus the country — has not even chosen a goal. The Trump administration has never decided whether the aim is “mitigation,” in which we slow the virus’s spread so the health system doesn’t get overwhelmed, or “suppression,” in which we try to eradicate the virus so as to save lives. It is possible, as Thomas Friedman writes, that the US is actually pursuing neither goal — instead, officials are following Sweden’s laissez-faire approach to the virus, and Trump “just hasn’t told the country or his coronavirus task force or maybe even himself.”

This, then, is the state of things: The White House does not have a plan, it does not have a framework, it does not have a philosophy, and it does not have a goal. That is not because these things are impossible. At this point, there are dozens of plans floating around and dozens of governments offering models it could choose from. Germany’s response has been a success, and I’m sure officials would share the lessons they’ve learned. In South Korea, professional baseball is restarting, and in Taiwan, there have been about a dozen new Covid-19 cases in the month of May so far.

It is not that the president is doing the wrong thing — he is doing basically nothing. But he has combined a substantive passivity with a showman’s desire to dominate the narrative and a political street fighter’s obsession with settling scores, so he is making the job of governors and mayors harder, neither giving them what they need to beat the virus nor leaving them to make their own decisions free from his interference and criticism.

The result, as David Wallace-Wells writes at New York magazine, is that “the country has accomplished essentially none of the necessary preparatory work required to safely begin to reopen and return to some semblance of normal life.”

Americans have made tremendous sacrifices to buy their government time, and that time has been wasted. That is why we are left with an increasingly polarized, and polarizing, debate between endless lockdowns and reckless reopening: The government has failed to do what functional governments in other countries have done and create a better option.

“It’s like the Lewis Carroll line, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there,’” Osterholm says. “Well, I don’t know where we’re going.”

[Officer of Engineers]

What I said about a bad plan is better than no plan.

[Gun Grape]

I will take the military assessement. Those in the military who had recovered from COVID-19. Are they combat effective? Yes. That's good enough for me.

Having been hospitalized for Covid19 is a disqualifying condition for enlistment. Not hospitalized requires extra test/screening.

Having a disqualifying condition doesn't always bar someone from enlistment but it does require a waiver.

Like asthma. A history of it is disqualifying condition. But if you have not had an attack after the age of 12 and can get a couple of doctors to state that you will not have an attack as a adult, you may get a waiver,
If you have an attack after you join you don't get disability from it when discharged and there is no obligation for the military to treat you since it is pre-existing condition.

Coral dust, like in Okinawa Japan is known to trigger asthma attacks. Marine receives a general discharge/Good of service because they cannot deploy worldwide.


(I'm rambling aren't I. I'll stop now)

[DOR]

Breaking the Budget

Regardless of which political party controls which parts of government, COVID-19 has decimated America's government budget. This isn't a time for blame, but rather for first understanding the magnitude of the devastation, and second recognizing that the data we have available today is only the tip of the iceberg.

You may want to buckle up, because it is going to be a very rough, very scary ride.

In the first quarter of 2020, US federal receipts rose 8.3%, while spending rose 6.8%, and the budget deficit increased by 3.9%.

Add April to the year-to-date figures and revenues fell 18.3%, spending rose 45.8% and the deficit blew out by 430.7%.

The deficit in just four months of 2020 is larger than it was for the entire year of 2019.

There were three years when the 12 month total was larger than these four months: 2009, 2010, and 2011. But, if we are counting fiscal years, which start October 1st, then 2020 has already set a new, annual record.

$1.48 trillion dollars worth of red ink, in just seven months.

Because the government is allowing more time for households to file and pay their personal taxes, revenues in April – the single most important month on the federal budget calendar – were down 54.8%. The total income in the first seven months of the fiscal year was down $443 billion over the same 2018/19 period (-21.7%).

Spending, however, rose $373 billion (+14.5%), requiring an additional $1.66 trillion be added to the federal debt.

The gory details are here:
https://www.fiscal.treasury.gov/repo...s/current.html

[Ironduke]

So far this year, confirmed COVID-19 fatalities in New York City are 23,340 out of a total population of 8,398,748 (source).

At least 0.28% out of everybody in New York City has died this year from COVID-19.

If the figure that suggests 20% of NYC's population has been infected with COVID-19 is accurate, that would mean there's a minimum fatality rate of 1.4%.

[TopHatter]

“Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? We do more testing,” Trump said following a tour of a medical supply distributor in Allentown, Pennsylvania. “When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing, we would have very few cases.”

He claimed that the media “don’t want to write” this “common sense” explanation for the U.S. case count
________

I've been calling him a special-needs toddler, but it turns out that I've been giving him too much credit: He's actually an infant..... only infants believe that if you don’t see something, then it doesn’t exist.

Man I wish we still had some Trump followers here on the WAB with the balls to try and defend him.

[snapper]

So no pregnancy test = no children! Genius but how did we survive before pregnancy tests?

[astralis]

so the most worrying thing about this is that it's not just him. people around Trump-- I think the press mentioned Kushner-- are pressing him to do LESS testing because less testing means fewer confirmed cases!

christ.

[astralis]

here's the White House Council of Economic Advisers COVID modeling from the beginning of LAST week.



can't wait-- by tomorrow we're going to have zero deaths from COVID!

so great to hear that Kevin Hassett, noted epidemiologist and author of Dow 36,000 (1999), has been so on point again.

[Double Edge]

i for one would be very, very happy to have the German death rate in the US in exchange for whatever data that may or may not have been gained.

They've been able to keep their elders safer.

If you can figure out how to do that your death rates will slow considerably. Just look at the deaths in Virginia from long term care facilities.

How do you stop that happening in more states ?

It happened in Washington in March and they managed to stem the problem. This should have served as a warning for all states.

As the lockdowns start to unwind across the country it becomes more urgent.