European Union leaders early on Tuesday stepped up to confront one of the gravest challenges in the bloc’s history, agreeing to a landmark spending package to rescue their economies from the ravages of the pandemic.
The 750 billion euro ($857 billion) stimulus agreement, spearheaded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, sent a strong signal of solidarity even as it exposed deep new fault lines in a bloc reshaped by Britain’s exit.
The deal was notable for its firsts: Countries will raise large sums by selling bonds collectively, rather than individually; and much of that money will be handed out to member nations hit hardest by the pandemic as grants, not loans.
“Europe has shown it is able to break new ground in a special situation. Exceptional situations require exceptional measures,” Ms. Merkel said in a news conference at dawn. “A very special construct of 27 countries of different backgrounds is actually able to act together, and it has proven it.”
The talks were defined by shifting roles among members now jostling to make their voices heard and for leadership in the absence of Britain, which had often played the part of the thrifty contrarian, fastidious about rules, in past summits.
This time, Ms. Merkel, who holds the E.U.’s rotating presidency, put her finger on the scale on behalf of hard-hit southern countries and did battle with the nations she once championed, the northern members that have been less affected by the virus and are wary of the vast sums being thrown around.
Economists predict a recession in Europe far worse than anything since World War II. France, Italy and Spain, the bloc’s second-, third- and fourth-largest economies, are expected to suffer the most, clocking in contractions of around 10 percent this year.
Greece and other smaller economies that are still recovering from the last recession will also be badly affected by the downturn.
The package now goes to the European Parliament for ratification, where it is expected to face a serious challenge on the grounds that it does not tackle concerns about how Poland and Hungary’s governments violate the bloc’s standards for democracy and the rule of law.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will announce a sweeping new $775 billion investment in caregiving programs on Tuesday, with a series of proposals covering care for small children, older adults and family members with disabilities. …
BRUSSELS — After four days and nights of wrangling, exhausted European Union leaders finally clinched a deal on an unprecedented 1.8 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund early Tuesday, after one of their longest summits ever.
The 27 leaders grudgingly committed to a costly, massive aid package for those hit hardest by COVID-19, which has already killed 135,000 people within the bloc alone.
With masks and hygienic gel everywhere at the summit, the leaders were constantly reminded of the potent medical and economic threat the virus poses.
“Extraordinary events, and this is the pandemic that has reached us all, also require extraordinary new methods,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
To confront the biggest recession in its history, the EU will establish a 750 billion-euro coronavirus fund, partly based on common borrowing, to be sent as loans and grants to the hardest-hit countries. That is in addition to the agreement on the seven-year, 1 trillion-euro EU budget that leaders had been haggling over for months even before the pandemic.
“The consequences will be historic,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. “We have created a possibility of taking up loans together, of setting up a recovery fund in the spirit of solidarity,” a sense of sharing debt that would have been unthinkable not so long ago.
Merkel added: “We have laid the financial foundations for the EU for the next seven years and came up with a response to this arguably biggest crisis of the European Union.”
Despite Macron and Merkel negotiating as the closest of partners, the traditionally powerful Franco-German alliance struggled for days to get the quarreling nations in line. But, even walking out of a negotiating session in protest together over the weekend, the two leaders bided their time and played their cards right in the end.
“When Germany and France stand together, they can’t do everything. But if they don’t stand together, nothing is possible,” said Macron, challenging anyone in the world who criticized the days of infighting to think of a comparable joint endeavor.
“There are 27 of us around the table and we managed to come up with a joint budget. What other political area in the world is capable of that? None other,” Macron said.
At first, Merkel and Macron wanted the grants to total 500 billion euros, but the so-called “frugals” — five wealthy northern nations led by the Netherlands — wanted a cut in such spending and strict economic reform conditions imposed. The figure was brought down to 390 billion euros, while the five nations also got guarantees on reforms.
“There is no such thing as perfection, but we have managed to make progress,” Macron said.
The summit, at the urn-shaped Europa center, laid bare how nations’ narrow self-interests trumped the obvious common good for all to stand together and face a common adversary.
Rarely had a summit been as ill-tempered as this one, and it was the longest since a five-day summit in Nice, France, in 2000, when safeguarding national interests in institutional reforms was a stumbling block.
“There were extremely tense moments,” Macron said.
Still, considering every EU leader had the right of veto on the whole package, the joint commitment to invest and spend such funds was hailed as a success. …
What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Trump
“Slow the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.
By Paul Krugman
We’re now at the stage of the Covid-19 pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies are trying to suppress information about the coronavirus’s spread — because, of course, they are. True to form, however, they’re far behind the curve. From a political point of view (which is all they care about), their disinformation efforts are too little, too late.
Where we are: In just a few days millions of Americans are going to see a drastic fall in their incomes, as enhanced unemployment benefits expire. This calls for urgent action; but avoiding economic calamity was always going to be hard, because Republicans in general have balked at providing the aid workers idled by the pandemic need.
But now it turns out that there’s another obstacle to action: An intra-G.O.P. dispute over funding for testing and tracing of infected individuals. Even Senate Republicans support increased testing, which is desperately needed given our current situation: Surging cases have created a testing backlog, and test results are taking so long to come back that they’re effectively useless.
But Trump officials are opposed to any new money for testing. They’re barely even trying to offer excuses for their opposition, since Trump himself explained the strategy a month ago at his Tulsa rally: When you expand testing, he declared, “you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
In other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt Trump.
Nobody should be surprised that the Trump team is trying to suppress bad news about the pandemic. This was completely predictable given the Law of Obama Projection: Every right-wing conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans wanted to do themselves, and would do once they had the power.
Remember, for example, wild claims about an imminent military takeover of Texas, lent credence by senior Republicans? Now we have unidentified Department of Homeland Security agents in unmarked vehicles seizing people off the streets of Portland, Ore. Remember claims that the government was secretly constructing concentration camps? Thousands of migrants are now immured in detention centers, often under horrifying conditions.
And the current war on Covid-19 testing was prefigured by constant claims that the Obama administration was suppressing bad economic news. “Inflation truthers” insisted that the feds were hiding the runaway inflation that right-wingers predicted, but that never arrived. Unemployment truthers — including, notably, one Donald Trump — declared that official job numbers showing a steadily improving economy were fake, and that unemployment was actually much higher than reported.
It was inevitable, then, that the Trumpists would do what they falsely accused Obama of doing, and try to hide bad pandemic numbers. Efforts to hold down testing are only part of the story.
The Trump administration recently ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sending it to a private contractor instead. As a result, hospitalization data, a key pandemic indicator, disappeared from the C.D.C. website before being reinstated after a widespread outcry.
And some Republican-controlled states, notably Georgia, have for months been massaging coronavirus data, presenting it in misleading ways that understate the problem.
The puzzle is why the latest attack on testing came so late. Pro tip: If you’re trying to conceal bad epidemiological news, you should start the cover-up before everyone realizes that the pandemic is spiraling out of control.
A fascinating New York Times post-mortem * on Trump’s failed coronavirus response helps us understand what happened. And I do mean mortem: Americans are dying of Covid-19 at a rate eight times that in Canada, 10 times that in Europe.
The Times account makes it clear that the Trump team never seriously considered trying to deal with the pandemic’s reality. It also makes it clear, however, that officials convinced themselves back in April that they were getting away with this abdication of responsibility, that the coronavirus was going away.
And by the time they realized that the virus wasn’t playing along with their political games, it was too late to hide the truth.
At this point it’s not even clear what purpose obstructing testing is supposed to serve. The attempt to engineer an economic boom before the election has already failed, as reopened states are reversing course. And Trump has already squandered all credibility on the coronavirus; even if the numbers on reported cases suddenly started to look much better, who besides his hard-core supporters would believe them?
So this doesn’t look like a political strategy as much as an attempt to soothe the boss’s fragile ego. Trump keeps insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.
And if this cripples America’s pandemic response, making a test-trace-isolate strategy impossible, well, actually dealing with the virus was never part of the plan.
Chinese mainland reports 11 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland confirmed 11 COVID-19 cases Monday, of which 8 were domestically transmitted in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the National Health commission (NHC).
The other 3 new COVID-19 cases were from overseas, with 2 confirmed in Shanghai and 1 in Sichuan Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered, according to NHC.
China’s phase 2 trial finds COVID-19 vaccine safe, inducing immune response — The Lancet
“The phase 2 trial adds further evidence on safety and immunogenicity in a large population than the phase 1 trial. This is an important step in evaluating this early-stage experimental vaccine and phase 3 trials are now underway.”
LONDON — A phase 2 trial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate conducted in China has found that the vaccine is safe and induces an immune response, according to a new study * published Monday in medical journal The Lancet.
The results provide data from a wider group of participants than the phase 1 trial, which was published in May. Phase 1 trial involved 108 healthy adults and it demonstrated promising results.
“The phase 2 trial adds further evidence on safety and immunogenicity in a large population than the phase 1 trial. This is an important step in evaluating this early-stage experimental vaccine and phase 3 trials are now underway,” said Professor Fengcai Zhu from Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China.
According to The Lancet, the trial of the Ad5 vectored COVID-19 vaccine candidate was conducted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan with 508 participants taking part. Approximately two thirds of participants were aged 18-44 years, with a quarter aged 45-54 years, and 13 percent aged 55 years or older.
Since elderly individuals face a high risk of serious illness and even death associated with COVID-19 infection, they are an important target population for a COVID-19 vaccine, said Professor Wei Chen from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in Beijing, China.
“It is possible that an additional dose may be needed in order to induce a stronger immune response in the elderly population, but further research is underway to evaluate this,” Chen said.
To battle against COVID-19, scientists around the world are racing against time to accelerate the development of new treatments and vaccines. China has pledged that its COVID-19 vaccine will be made a global public good when it’s available.
Meanwhile, Britain is also seeing progress in the development of another vaccine candidate. A separate study ** published Monday in The Lancet reveals the results of the phase 1/2 trial of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. It indicates no early safety concerns and produces strong immune response.
According to the Oxford University, the trial involves more than 1000 healthy adult volunteers. The vaccine provoked a T cell response (white blood cells that can attack cells infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus) within 14 days of vaccination, and an antibody response within 28 days.
Despite the promising findings, it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way, scientists involved in this study said.
The counter-narrative began almost instantly. After the U.S. count of Covid-19 cases began an inexorable rise in June, the White House sought to assure Americans that the increase was, basically, an illusion, created by an increase in testing for the novel coronavirus.
In a June 15 tweet, President Trump said testing “makes us look bad.” At his campaign rally in Tulsa five days later, he said he had asked his “people” to “slow the testing down, please.” At a White House press conference last week, he told reporters, “When you test, you create cases.”
And in an interview with Fox News that aired Sunday, Trump could not have been clearer: “Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.” Basically, the president was arguing that the U.S. had just as many new cases in June and July as it did in May but, with fewer tests being done in May, they weren’t being detected; with more testing now, they are.
A new STAT analysis of testing data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, however, shows with simple-to-understand numbers why Trump’s claim is wrong. In only seven states was the rise in reported cases from mid-May to mid-July driven primarily by increased testing. In the other 26 states — among the 33 that saw cases increase during that period — the case count rose because there was actually more disease.
Related: How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.
May had brought signs of hope that the U.S. had gotten its Covid-19 outbreak under control, with about 20,000 new cases reported per day after April highs closer to 30,000. But by late June, the daily count climbed to about 40,000, and now it’s at about 70,000. The STAT analysis shows that spread of the virus, far more than testing, explains that increase.
Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts have disputed the White House claims for weeks, citing rising hospitalization numbers and deaths. It’s hard to argue that extremely sick people, let alone dead people, had been obscured by low levels of testing but suddenly revealed by higher levels.
Without a doubt, many cases of Covid-19 in March, April, and May weren’t picked up. In late June, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told reporters that as many as 90% of cases had been missed; that is, although there were 2.3 million confirmed cases in the U.S. then, some 20 million people had probably been infected. But that reasoning applies today, too: Despite months of government claims to the contrary, not everyone who wants, or should have, a test is getting one.
Simple math belies the “it’s just because of more testing” claim — with some fascinating exceptions.
Using data from Covid Tracking, STAT looked at the number of people tested and the number who tested positive for the disease (cases) in every state and Washington, D.C. We did that for three dates: in mid-May, mid-June, and mid-July. (Due to reporting anomalies, the dates selected sometimes differed by a day or two between states.)
For each date, we calculated the number of cases found per 1,000 tests — a measure of the disease’s prevalence. For example, in Florida on May 13, that rate was 32. On June 13 it was 75. On July 13 it was 193. On May 13, Florida tested 15,159 people; on July 13, it tested 65,567. So indeed, the number of tests has increased.
But the number of cases per thousand, which is independent of the number of tests, has skyrocketed. On May 13, Florida recorded 479 cases; on July 13, it found 12,624. If the prevalence of Covid-19 were the same in July as in May, Florida would have found only 2,098 cases. In other words, 10,526 of the July 13 cases are not due to increased testing, but, instead, to the increased prevalence of disease. …
Five months into the coronavirus pandemic, people in Massachusetts and across the country are often waiting up to a week or more to learn the results of their COVID-19 tests, seriously endangering efforts to contain and control future infections.
The delays are largely being driven by a backlog at some of the nation’s largest laboratories, which process many of the tests from Massachusetts community health centers and businesses. The labs are struggling to keep up with demand caused by surging coronavirus cases in Southern and Western states.
Plentiful and timely lab results are crucial to quickly contain clusters of COVID-19 and to prevent them from mushrooming into larger outbreaks, health experts said Monday. People who are awaiting test results may not always isolate themselves and unknowingly spread more infections.
“If we don’t get test results back in a time frame that enables [isolating infected people and tracing their contacts], it almost becomes pointless to do the test in the first place,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.
The growing delays take on increased urgency as many schools and colleges plan to reopen in the coming weeks and are relying on aggressive, regular testing of students and staff. Added to this perfect storm — the approaching flu season is likely to further strain the system as people with flu-like symptoms seek COVID-19 tests to rule out that infection.
“I think demand for tests is going to remain high and increase if anything through the fall,” said Dr. David Hamer, an infectious disease expert at Boston University and a physician at Boston Medical Center.
North Carolina-based LabCorp, and New Jersey’s Quest Diagnostics, two of the largest labs nationally processing COVID-19 tests, each said in statements that they have significantly increased capacity since the pandemic’s early days months ago and continue expansion efforts. But they said those increases have not nearly stayed ahead of the recent and fast growing demand.
And even though Quest opened a lab in Marlborough, Mass., in March as part of its effort to expand capacity, it’s not necessarily shortening waiting times here because that lab is also processing tests from across the country, the company said. It acknowledged that the wait for results, both in Massachusetts and nationwide, are averaging at least one week for patients who are not hospitalized or who are health care workers suspected of being infected. Late Monday, the company reported that average turnaround times nationally have worsened, and that a “small subset of patients may experience wait times of up to two weeks.”
Hoping to ease backlogs, federal regulators on Saturday authorized Quest to start pooling its testing samples nationwide, allowing up to four samples to be tested in one batch rather than running each test individually.
If a pool is negative, none of the four individuals is infected with COVID-19. If a pool is positive, it means one or more of the individuals in that pool may be infected. At that point, each of the samples in that pool will be separated out and tested again individually, and infected people will be identified.
Because the samples are pooled, it is expected that fewer tests are run overall, meaning fewer testing supplies are used and more tests can be run at the same time allowing patients to receive their results more quickly in most cases, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
But many local public health officers in Massachusetts have yet to see an improvement in turnaround times, said Sigalle Reiss, president of the Massachusetts Health Officers Association and Norwood’s health director.
“We’re definitely still having a problem,” Reiss said.
“Most of the test results, knock on wood, will be negative because the positivity rate is so low right now in Massachusetts,” she said. “But the anxiety of waiting is just adding to people’s fear right now. With schools reopening, if we don’t have quick turn-around on testing, the system doesn’t work.”
Earlier in the pandemic, the Massachusetts health department reported daily output from many of the labs across the state. But it stopped doing that months ago, and does not include turnaround times in the data it reports daily. Nor did it include any mention of turnaround times in a recent report to federal regulators about plans to expand testing capacity in Massachusetts.
The state health department said in a statement Monday that the current statewide average for turnaround times in Massachusetts in July is 2.2 days and that the state is monitoring the situation. There can be significant variation within that average, though, because it includes both the generally faster facilities that have internal testing capacity and those that rely on backed-up national diagnostic companies.
Some states require tourists to furnish negative COVID-19 tests and some businesses seek regular testing of employees, further contributing to the backlog. Nuzzo, of Johns Hopkins, said policy makers should consider giving priority to people who have COVID-19 symptoms, need to be hospitalized or treated, or have spent time in places where infections rates are high — testing restrictions that were widely used in the earliest days of the pandemic when shortages of tests and related supplies were acute.
“We just need to think through nationally what is the optimal strategy for testing, particularly given that I don’t think our resources are going to ever be fully unconstrained,” she said. ”It’s a bit unrealistic for me to think that everyone can be tested every day . . . and there are going to be some bottlenecks, which is why we really need national answers.”
One bright spot for Massachusetts is that many of its medical and research institutions are better-off than their counterparts in other states that did not ramp up internal test processing capacity in the spring, said Hamer, the BU infectious disease specialist.
But those institutions do not typically process tests for employers and other organizations, so are unlikely to ease their load, he said.
One notable exception is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which has negotiated testing contracts with several colleges and universities to process thousands of tests daily.
The Broad recently expanded its daily capacity to 35,000 tests and can turn them around in less than 24 hours, a spokesman said in a statement last week. The lab has the ability to ramp up to 100,000 daily if needed, the spokesman said, but declined to comment further on its new college testing program.
The Broad, which opened its testing lab in March, has so far not processed more than about 8,000 tests in a day, according to the website where it posts its daily output.
Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said it is well past time for leaders to rethink the nation’s COVID-19 testing system. The current system, which relies on diagnostic tests sent to a lab for processing, was never designed to handle the massive load it now faces.
“We are trying to insert a square peg in a round hole,” Mina said.
Instead, he said, it’s time for leaders to invest time and resources in advancing inexpensive tests consumers can take and process at home, not unlike the finger-prick blood tests diabetics use to keep their sugar levels intact.
“We have the technology, the money, and know-how,” Mina said, “And we have the biggest problem compared to other countries.”
… Pool testing isn’t meant to verify whether or not a person has Covid-19, the way an individual diagnostic test does.
Rather, it’s part of a broader disease surveillance strategy, one that allows for regular screening of people who are not experiencing Covid-19 symptoms. Testing asymptomatic people is important because a large portion of people with the coronavirus either show no symptoms or take a few days to start feeling sick, but they can still spread the virus.
Take a warehouse with 100 employees. Every so often (experts are still weighing how frequently this testing should occur), the company could test the staff, and instead of running 100 separate analyses, it could group 10 samples into a pool and only run 10 analyses.
“You could test everyone as they walk into the door,” said Paul Sax, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has written about the challenges of returning to work during the pandemic.
If one of those pools came back positive, those 10 employees could be retested individually to see who was infected and could remain out of work in the interim. The 90 other employees, in the pools that tested negative, wouldn’t need to be retested. The goal would be to try to detect a case before the person potentially spread the coronavirus to others. Scientists are increasingly finding that such large-scale superspreading events at workplaces, restaurants and bars, and places of worship are driving a large amount of transmission. …
The number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States is anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The findings suggest that large numbers of people who did not have symptoms or did not seek medical care may have kept the virus circulating in their communities. The study is the largest of its kind to date, although a subset of the data was released last month.
“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”
The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior coronavirus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA. They also released data from later times for eight sites to the C.D.C.’s website on Tuesday.
The results also indicate that in vast swaths of the country, the virus has touched only a small fraction of the population. In Utah, for example, just over 1 percent of people had been exposed to the virus by early June. The rate was 2.2 percent for Minneapolis-St. Paul as of June 5, 3.6 percent for the Philadelphia metropolitan region as of May 30. It was 1 percent for the San Francisco Bay Area as of April 30. …
Looking to public healthcare systems, compare the workings of the Dominican Republic and Cuban systems, while considering that since 1970 per capita GDP growth in the Dominican Republic has been faster than in any country in the Western Hemisphere, let alone not being constrained by continual United States sanctions as has the Cuban system.
Failing to understand how robust the growth of the Cuban economy has been for decades, no matter the singular US sanctions, suggests a problem development specialists have in understanding what growth amounts to.
[ What I keep coming up with is not a simple leadership failure, but an institutional failure. Were the experience of the epidemic to conclude right now, the evidence of an institutional healthcare system failure would be profound. ]
The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior coronavirus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
The true extent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is unknown. The 3.4 million confirmed cases reported (as of July 15, 2020) likely represent only a fraction of all the infections that have occurred in the US thus far. Limited laboratory capacity and restrictive testing guidelines early in the epidemic resulted in large numbers of undetected incident infections. Approximately 40% of all SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) infections are thought to be asymptomatic, and active surveillance for infections without symptoms is limited even now, nearly 5 months after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Seattle and Chicago. The true cumulative incidence of infection—a basic but critically important measurement—remains uncertain at a time when communities nationwide are struggling to navigate an ongoing, unprecedented public health emergency, and while apprehensions about the near-term and long-term trajectories of the epidemic loom large. …
I must admit, I have been very positive towards Jay Powell’s work as Fed Chair.
IMMACULATE DECEPTION
July 20, 2020 by Edward J. Kane
“How and Why Bankers Still Enjoy a Global Rescue Network
During the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, Fed officials began to tell outsiders more and more about what members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) were thinking in setting operative interest-rate and price-level targets. My new INET Working Paper is adapted from a chapter in a book I am now writing. It treats the flood of selected policymaking information released by the committee after each meeting as misleading patter meant to distract the committee’s audience from observing the hard-to-defend cumulative effects Fed policies have had on the distribution of income and wealth. As in stage magic, lobbying activity that determines how differently FOMC policies actually impact the rich, the poor, and the middle classes still takes place behind an informational curtain.
Today, as during the Great Financial Crisis, the Fed’s policy strategy has been to prevent open insolvencies at US megabanks by making subsidized loans to US megabanks’ insolvent foreign counterparties (and to the foreign taxpayers that would otherwise have been asked to rescue them). At the same time, Fed leaders have resisted a broad-based bailout of insolvent US homeowners and landlords. During the GFC, they stood by as US banks foreclosed on all but a few privileged categories of distressed mortgage borrowers. Although households are receiving some help in the current go-around, forbearance is not forgiveness. Unpaid rents and mortgage payments are still mounting up.
The overwrought praise that Wall Street and the media subsequently heaped on Treasury and Federal Reserve leaders for being willing to punish lower-income households to get the rich through the Great Financial Crisis established a nasty precedent that is guiding monetary policy today. This unspoken precedent is “Bankers and Brokers first.”
A precedent is a previous event or action that sets a standard or guide for how one or one’s successors should (and therefore probably would) act in similar circumstances in the future. The 2008 troika of Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson congratulated themselves for having the “courage” to put the interests of foreign bankers and major US financial institutions (including a few of its automobile makers — think the airlines and tourism industry today) ahead of ordinary US citizens. The victory laps that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are taking this week for passing Dodd-Frank not only celebrate this approach, but provide opportunities for them to claim that they rescued rich and poor alike from complete and utter ruin [see, e.g., Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson (2018)].
This portrait of distributional neutrality is propaganda of a high order. Current and former Fed and Treasury officials cannot fail to understand that, in accepting so much adulation, they have cemented a series of dangerous precedents. If public-service norms were more evenly balanced, instead of simply accepting praise, they might feel an obligation to identify the downside of following their lead in the future.
Aggressively devising creative, nontransparent, and arguably extralegal ways to transfer massive amounts of US taxpayer resources to wealthy stakeholders in zombie megabanks around the world is a dangerously elitist strategy. An important fourth crisis manager was left out of the celebration: former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. This was in large part because she was only a woman and because in Bair (2019) she dared to argue that, if future crisis managers were to distribute rescue costs in the ways the troika did, they were bound to encounter the kind of angry protest movements we are seeing today.
With a wink and a smile, bankers, regulators, and politicians assured us all in 2010 that a few carefully crafted words in the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) could and would prevent generous anti-egalitarian taxpayer support from becoming available to the financial industry in the next crisis. Contrary to centuries of experience in the banking industry, the Dodd-Frank Act asks us to believe that governments can prevent crises by merely asking banks to post more (and possibly better) capital on their balance sheets. My research establishes that accounting-based requirements lose force the longer they are in place. This is because accountants take it as a challenge to circumvent them and in fact do this better and better the longer a particular rule stays in force.
In the decade since the DFA was enacted megabank lobbyists have sped up the natural rate of capital-requirement decay by convincing regulators of the need to “custom tailor” accounting formulas to the special circumstances of different categories of banks. Each nick and tuck that regulatory tailors devise in the way capital requirements are calculated open new and often unintended loopholes for other classes of financial institution to exploit.
Loopholes are part of any regulatory system. To make them hard for the public to see, bankers prefer that regulatory benefits be distributed in implicit ways. By that, I mean access to these benefits is based on understandings about how regulators should and will react in crisis circumstances. In the Covid crisis, the bogus restraints celebrated in the DFA have—as my 2012 paper predicted—simply lost their teeth. Bank examiners and accountants were directed to soften loss recognition and the Fed went on to devise (at last count) 14 openly discriminatory lending programs aimed at preserving particular classes of financial contracts and interests.
Confidence in the availability and sustainability of implicit safety-net support creates powerful incentives for megabankers to pry themselves loose from the bite of capital requirements and other regulatory restraints over time. This is the central message of my research career. I have asked readers to picture the mix of endless opposition and circumvention that financial rulemaking and enforcement entails as a dialectical process. After each crisis, sponsors of tougher capital requirements and other elaborate rules claim to have found ways to force bankers and their creditors to stay strong enough to absorb losses more or less as they occur. But sponsors seldom acknowledge that corporate-level restraints are bound to fail eventually. Placing accounting and other kinds of restraints on banker behavior fail because they do not directly attack either bankers’ appetite for tail risk or regulators’ incentives to forbear when times get tough.
Experience teaches us that corporate-level reforms do not and cannot hold their effectiveness over time. Rules beget regulation-induced innovations and these burden-reducing innovations become more and more successful over time. The difficulty governments face in devising and enforcing appropriate punishments for individual bankers that knowingly exploit safety-net protections converts national and regional safety nets into what amounts to a global Protection Racket operated by —and for the benefit of— thieving megabankers. My new paper explains how governments could make this racket far less profitable if for some unlikely reason politicians might conclude that toughening fraud laws would be a good thing.”
… President Trump, in pushing a law-and-order message for his re-election campaign, has embraced a dark vision of Portland as a lawless place filled with people who “hate our country.” His administration’s crackdown has brought armed officers from a wide variety of federal agencies to the streets, where they have been firing tear gas and pulling protesters into unmarked vans.
The president’s portrayal of Portland and the crackdown he has unleashed have infuriated protesters who see Mr. Trump as trying to use the city’s unrest as political theater during an election year. They say he is forcing a federal police presence on a city that doesn’t want it — a city with such a rich tradition of protest that an aide to another Republican president, George Bush, reportedly referred to it as Little Beirut.
While the protests have consumed parts of downtown at nighttime, much of the city has been left untouched. By day, boaters putter up the Willamette River while joggers run down the trail alongside it. On Monday evening, large groups of diners were eating on outdoor patios a few blocks away from the county’s Justice Center, where protesters were amassing for the night.
To the protesters, the president’s unusual deployment of federal power has provided yet more compelling evidence that their fears about rising fascism in the United States are justified.
In the Portland area, activists aligned with the loosely-organized group known as antifa have long denounced police militarization and a punishing criminal justice system, and have clashed with the police in recent years. The protests of the last seven weeks developed a near-nightly cycle of conflict between protesters and local police, with officers reacting to objects being thrown by protesters and protesters expressing alarm by the use of tear gas that impacted peaceful people. …
The strife on the streets escalated with the arrival of federal forces, which have relied heavily on tear gas, munitions fired from paintball-style guns and batons. …
On Tuesday morning, dozens of agents moved around the streets and at times threw people to the ground to detain them. As federal officers appeared to try detaining one person, others in the crowd rushed to free the person.
The Portland authorities have cited ongoing troubles with the protesters, and on Tuesday the police said a jewelry store had been looted.
The nightly protests have also alarmed businesses in downtown, who were first hit with widespread looting in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on Memorial Day and have struggled to navigate the weeks since. …
While the numbers dwindled over the subsequent weeks and Gov. Kate Brown expressed a belief that things were beginning to cool off, the crowds have surged back in recent days, with protesters chanting “Feds go home” and focusing much of their ire on the federal courthouse building.
The demonstrations have continued to have a strong component of calls for racial justice, including on Monday night, when thousands chanted “Black Lives Matter” and young Black activists led the predominantly white crowd in speeches and song. …
WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to deploy federal law enforcement to Chicago and threatened on Monday to send agents to other major cities — all controlled by Democrats.
Governors and other officials reacted angrily to the president’s move, calling it an election-year ploy as they squared off over crime, civil liberties and local control that has spread from Portland, Ore., across the country.
With camouflage-clad agents already sweeping through the streets of Portland, more units were poised to head to Chicago, and Mr. Trump suggested that he would follow suit in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and other urban centers. Governors and other officials compared his actions to authoritarianism and vowed to pursue legislation or lawsuits to stop him.
The president cast the confrontation in overtly political terms as he seeks an issue that would gain traction with voters at a time when many of his own supporters have soured on his leadership amid a deadly pandemic and economic collapse. Trailing badly in the polls with just over 100 days until the election in November, Mr. Trump assailed the “liberal Democrats” …
Approximately 40% of all SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) infections are thought to be asymptomatic, and active surveillance for infections without symptoms is limited even now, nearly 5 months after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Seattle and Chicago….
[ China was monitoring asymptomatic infections from March, systematically screening for and reporting asymptomatic cases, both domestic and imported, daily since April 1. After infection clusters came under control in Wuhan, all the residents of the city were tested with attention to the prevalence of asymptomatic cases. *
* Interestingly and unfortunately this testing was criticized in the New York Times. ]
Supposing the need of the Federal Reserve was to stabilize and lower bond yields to support the suddenly recession mired economy, as far as I can tell Fed policy has been excellent. Simply look to classes of bond yields and find how uniform the movement has been to lower yields.
Fed policy is a debt based ponzi. As Marx said, where capital lies, a state is not far behind. Suppression of yields has little to do with the fed. Follow liquidity.
The Trump campaign is spending millions on ads that promote a dark and exaggerated portrayal of Democratic-led cities, a tactic that reinforces his “law and order’’ campaign message.
As President Trump deploys federal agents to Portland, Ore., and threatens to dispatch more to other cities, his re-election campaign is spending millions of dollars on several ominous television ads that promote fear and dovetail with his political message of “law and order.”
The influx of agents in Portland has led to scenes of confrontations and chaos that Mr. Trump and his White House aides have pointed to as they try to burnish a false narrative about Democratic elected officials allowing dangerous protesters to create widespread bedlam.
The Trump campaign is driving home that message with a new ad that tries to tie its dark portrayal of Democratic-led cities to Mr. Trump’s main rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — with exaggerated images intended to persuade viewers that lawless anarchy would prevail if Mr. Biden won the presidency. The ad simulates a break-in at the home of an older woman and ends with her being attacked while she waits on hold for a 911 call, as shadowy, dark intruders flicker in the background. …
The president has said he might next deploy federal agents to Chicago, and has listed other cities where similar enforcement could take place, including New York but also Philadelphia and Detroit, urban centers in two battleground states. White House officials said the deployments had grown out of meetings among administration officials after protests in Washington, D.C., in late May and early June. …
An interview with the man who has an important message for you, if he can get it out.
… Let’s get to the news. Our numbers are surging. And you’ve just told The Atlantic that we’ve got to do a reset, which, of course, makes perfect sense. But given the reluctance of some governors, businesses and citizens to abide by the basic rules of social distancing and mask wearing, is it possible to get this pandemic under control without a federal response?
It would be better if things were a little more uniform. It just seems that unfortunately, in some sectors, there’s this feeling that there’s opening the country on one end of the spectrum, and public health measures that suppress things and lock them down on the other.
They should not be opposing forces. The guidelines that we put out a couple of months ago, those should be followed and appreciated as the vehicle to open the country, as opposed to the obstacle to opening the country.
You said it would be nicer if some things were more uniform. Like what?
The fundamentals. Wear a mask. Avoid crowds. Close the bars. Bars are the hot spots — —
But Americans have already been told this, right? And we still don’t do those things. If you were an executive for the day, what lever would you pull?
But Jennifer, would you want me to say something that’s directly contrary to what the president is doing? That’s not helpful. Then all of a sudden you don’t hear from me for a while.
I definitely don’t want anyone weaponizing anything you’re saying.
I’ve just been doing this for so long, and I’m trying to do my best to get the message across without being overtly at odds, OK? The only thing I can do is to get out there with whatever notoriety or recognition I have and say, these are the four or five things. Please pay attention to them. And if we do that, I feel confident that we’ll turn this around.
What I’ve been trying to do is appeal to the younger generation. If you look at the age average of the new cases that are going on in the South, it’s about 10 to 15 years younger than what we previously saw.
So it’s clear what’s going on. Young people are saying to themselves: “Wait a minute. I’m young, I’m healthy. The chances of my getting seriously ill are very low. And in fact, it is about a 20 to 40 percent likelihood that I won’t have any symptoms at all. So why should I bother?”
What they’re missing is something fundamental: By getting infected themselves — even if they never get a symptom — they are part of the propagation of a pandemic. They are fueling the pandemic. We have to keep hammering that home, because, as much as they do that, they’re completely relinquishing their societal responsibility. …
…The Atlantic: How much worse do you expect the pandemic to get? How do we get back to a better place?
Fauci: By pushing a reset button, I don’t mean everybody locking down again. We’ve got to call a time-out and say, “If you’re going to open, we’ve got to get everybody on the same team.” I’m not going to name any states—that’s not helpful—but some states did, in fact, prematurely jump over some checkpoints.
Even though we are in the middle of a setback now—you can’t deny that; look at the numbers, you’re dealing with 40,000 to 60,000 infections in a day—it doesn’t mean we’re going to be defeated. But states that are in trouble right now, if those states pause and say, “Okay, we’re going to do it right, everyone wear a mask, bars closed, no congregating in crowds, keep your distance, protect the vulnerable”—if we do that for a few weeks in a row, I’ll guarantee you those numbers will come down. …
New study show immunity drops quickly in mild COVID-19 cases
WASHINGTON — A study published on Tuesday shows that in people with mild COVID-19 cases, their antibodies against the coronavirus drop sharply over the first three months after infection.
A research team at the University of California, Los Angeles, did an in-depth study of 34 people who had recovered from mild COVID-19 infections. They tested their blood two or three times over three months.
The researchers found a rapid drop in antibodies – the immune system proteins that help stop viruses from infecting cells in the body. On average, the antibody levels fell by half every 73 days, according to the study * published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The findings raise concern that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may not be long lasting in persons with mild illness, who compose the majority of persons with COVID-19, said the study.
Further studies will be needed to define a quantitative protection threshold and rate of decline of antiviral antibodies beyond 90 days, according to the study.
Debt Worries: The New York Times Columnist Has Not Heard of a Country Called “Japan”
By DEAN BAKER
Ruchir Sharma had a New York Times column * today telling readers that Germany will likely emerge from the pandemic as the world’s leading economic power. Part of his story is based on Germany’s robust pandemic stimulus package, which he puts at 47 percent of GDP. (This is somewhat misleading since it includes the nominal value of government loan guarantees, but it is robust stimulus by any measure.) Germany has also successfully used work-sharing and other mechanisms to minimize unemployment.
While these points are well-taken and areas where Germany provides an excellent model, Sharma’s main reason for predicting Germany’s ascendancy is its relatively low debt levels. It is difficult to see why debt levels should be a major impediment to the United States or China, or other countries that print their own currencies. The current interest rate on long-term government bonds in the United States is 0.6 percent, which is higher than the negative 0.5 percent rate on German bonds, but it is difficult to see how it would be a major impediment to future growth. When the United States had budget surpluses at the end of the 1990s, the rate on 10-year Treasury bonds was near 5.0 percent.
If we want to look at everyone’s debt basket case, Japan is currently paying 0.03 percent interest on its 10-year Treasury bonds. Again, this is higher than Germany’s rate, but the interest burden is hardly a major strain on Japan’s economy, even with its debt to GDP ratio of 250 percent.
New York Times Can’t Find Out About Chinese Coronavirus Vaccines
By DEAN BAKER
That seems to be the case since an article * discussing leading vaccine candidates around the world failed to mention two Chinese candidates that are already in Phase III testing. One of the vaccines, developed by the company Sinovac, is beginning testing in Bangladesh and Brazil. The other vaccine was developed by Sinopharm, and is about to begin stage three testing in Abu Dhabi.
It is difficult to understand how an article focused on leading vaccine candidates would exclude two of the vaccines that are furthest advanced in the testing process.
Chinese mainland reports 14 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland confirmed 14 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday, of which 9 were domestically transmitted in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the National Health Commission (NHC). The other 5 cases were from overseas, with 2 confirmed in Shanghai, 1 in Guangdong Province and 1 in Yunnan Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered, according to the NHC.
NEW YORK (AP) — The global tally of people infected with the coronavirus neared 15 million Wednesday, while in the worst-hit pandemic hot spot of the United States, President Donald Trump warned the pandemic would “get worse before it gets better.”
With 409,000 cases, John’s Hopkins University data showed Wednesday that California now has about 1,200 more cases than New York.
However, New York’s 72,302 deaths are by far the highest total in the country and nine times more than California’s tally, and its rate of confirmed infections of about 2,100 per 100,000 people is twice California’s rate.
U.S. government data published Tuesday found that reported and confirmed coronavirus cases vastly underestimate the true number of infections, echoing results from a smaller study last month. The United States also has had consistent testing failures that experts say contribute to an undercount of the actual virus rate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study says true COVID-19 rates were more than 10 times higher than reported cases in most U.S. regions from late March to early May. It is based on COVID-19 antibody tests performed on routine blood samples in 16,000 people in 10 U.S. regions.
With COVID-19 set to pass another shocking milestone, Trump delivered his first virus briefing after a three-month hiatus, offering a shifted message Tuesday, including professing a newfound respect for the protective face masks he has seldom worn.
It came as polls have shown Trump lagging behind Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of November’s election, and as the count of virus fatalities in the U.S. passes 140,000.
Even so, the president worked in jabs at the news media and Democrats, and repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
The early evening show at the White House came as the next stage of the federal government’s response to the pandemic was being crafted on Capitol Hill.
The price tag for the next COVID-19 aid package could quickly swell above $1 trillion as White House officials negotiate with Congress over money to reopen schools, prop up small businesses, boost virus testing and keep cash flowing to Americans.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised a new round of direct payments to earners below a certain income level, similar to the $1,200 checks sent in the spring. President Donald Trump insists on a payroll tax holiday for workers. And Democrats want billions to outfit schools and shore up local governments.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and acting chief of staff Mark Meadows spent Tuesday on Capitol Hill, meeting separately with McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others trying to broker a compromise between the GOP’s emerging $1 trillion proposal with the House’s more sweeping $3 trillion bill.
The proposed virus aid package would be the fifth, following the $2.2 trillion bill passed in March, the largest U.S. intervention of its kind. The jobless rate has remained in double digits, higher than in the last decade’s Great Recession, and a federal eviction moratorium on millions of rental units approved in the last bill is about to expire. ….
Do All New York Times Readers Know How Much $857 Billion Is to the European Union?
By Dean Baker
Let me go out on a limb and speculate that the vast majority have no clue. This is why it would have been helpful to put the size of the European Union pandemic relief package in some context in this article * on the negotiations.
The current GDP for the European Union is a bit over $18 trillion, which means that the rescue package would be roughly 4.5 percent of its GDP. This figure likely overstates the economic impact, since not all the money will be spent in a single year. It is also worth mentioning that most, if not all, EU countries have their own rescue packages, so this is far from the full sum that the EU is spending to offset the impact of the pandemic on their economies.
The most technologically advanced part of the world. “If you try to get a test now in San Francisco, it can take up to twelve days sometimes longer even to get in and get the test let alone get your results." https://t.co/Ri4HDnA0Sg
The most technologically advanced part of the world. “If you try to get a test now in San Francisco, it can take up to twelve days sometimes longer even to get in and get the test let alone get your results.”
COVID-19 testing in California hits bump in road
If the ability for widespread testing for COVID-19 is a gauge of when life can eventually begin to return to normal, then the latest signs show that we have a problem.
With 409,000 cases, John’s Hopkins University data showed Wednesday that California now has about 1,200 more cases than New York.
However, New York’s 72,302 deaths are by far the highest total in the country and nine times more than California’s tally, and its rate of confirmed infections of about 2,100 per 100,000 people is twice California’s rate.
Covid-19 death rates have been much higher in NY (& MA)
than in CA (also TX & FL so far), suggesting that more
elderly have been victims in those higher-rate states.
The institutional difference in these healthcare systems needs to be recognized and understood, no matter the prejudice fostered against the Cuban system. The Dominican Republic after all has been the fastest growing country in the Americas in GDP per capita since 1970.
… Six months since the coronavirus crisis was first detected in the United States, the Northeast stands in sharp contrast with the rest of the nation.
Along the East Coast, from Delaware through Maine, new case reports remain well below their April peak. As of Wednesday, six of the country’s 11 states with flat or falling case levels are in that Northeastern corridor.
“It’s acting like Europe,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said of the Northeastern United States.
Like Europe, the Northeast suffered a devastating wave of illnesses and deaths in March and April, and state leaders responded, after some hesitation, with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts. Residents have largely followed rules and been surprisingly supportive of tough measures, even at the cost of economic pain.
Dr. Jha said the difference in regional trajectories was so pronounced that, by the time flu season rolls around in the late fall, “I would not be surprised if what we have is two countries, one which is neck-deep in coronavirus, its hospitals overwhelmed, and another part of the country that is struggling a little, but largely doing OK with their economy.”
It is also true that the Northeast remains the corner of America that has suffered most from the virus.
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have reported the country’s most deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, with more than 61,000 combined. And the economic wounds from prolonged shutdowns are deep: Massachusetts’s unemployment rate in June climbed to 17.4 percent, the worst in the country, according to federal data released on Friday.
But polls, so far, suggest that voters in the Northeast are prepared to tolerate prolonged economic pain in order to stop the spread of the virus. Governors from the states that were hit early in the pandemic have sustained the highest approval ratings in the country.
And in May, when a poll by Suffolk University Political Research Center asked Massachusetts residents how long they could endure the hardships of a shutdown, 38 percent of those surveyed answered “indefinitely.”
“This isn’t an economic policy, this is life or death,” said David Paleologos, the center’s director. “That is at the core of why people are saying, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’”
The crisis has drawn out key regional differences in how Americans view the role of government in their lives, said Wendy J. Schiller, chair of the political science department at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The Northeast, she said, with its 400-year tradition of localized, participatory government, has been less affected by decades of antigovernment rhetoric.
Four months ago, all of the New England governors were scrambling to contain the spread of the virus. They had hesitated to impose shutdowns in early March, when many in the public health community were urging immediate action, Dr. Jha said.
“It took longer than it should,” he said.
But the responses were aggressive. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, decided after a late-night phone call with Jim Yong Kim, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health, to budget $55 million for contact-tracing programs that would recruit and train a corps of 1,900 newly minted public health workers. The program was up and running within weeks.
“I certainly felt under the gun — and I know many of my colleagues did — to make decisions with less than perfect information,” Mr. Baker said.
By this month, tracers were able to reach 90 percent of contacts within 24 hours. New cases had fallen so steeply that the corps was reduced to 500.
There was a similar scramble to acquire personal protective equipment, which included chartering six flights from China to carry shipments of masks. In early April, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, transported a million N95 masks from China to Boston Logan International Airport on a team plane.
“There’s all kinds of things that happened over this period of time that were unusual decisions and risky ones, but for most of us, we felt we were doing what we had to do,” said Mr. Baker, whose job approval ratings rose to 81 percent in late June, according to a Suffolk University poll.
In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, took a stern approach beginning in late March, at one point ordering State Police to stop cars entering the state from New York to enforce quarantine requirements. She regularly warns that expanding freedoms will be curtailed if residents fail to observe social distancing rules.
It has been a transformational political moment for Ms. Raimondo, lifting her approval ratings to 81 percent in late April, at the height of the pandemic, from just 35 percent in January. Her signature admonition — “knock it off” — became so popular that a gift shop in Providence printed it on T-shirts.
Mr. Baker said the high level of compliance with quarantine measures was natural, given how badly the region was battered in the spring.
“Like everybody else, I know people who have been directly affected by this thing,” he said. “I’ve had very close friends almost die. I’ve had good friends who have lost family members because of it. I went 100-odd days without seeing my father because he’s 92 years old and in an assisted living facility.”
It is not certain what the months ahead will hold for the region. A new surge of cases in the South and the West has spread across other states, and as of this week, cases were rising in 41 states. Among states where cases were slightly rising in recent days were Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Dr. Jha said he was optimistic that Northeastern states could maintain control over the virus’s spread through the summer, reopening gradually while closely monitoring shifts in the data. “I think they’re watching what’s happening in the South and they’re horrified,” he said.
Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, sounded cautious. She said officials in her state were “exhaling, but safely, with masks.”
“The last few weeks, in particular, have felt good, but we’re not out of the woods,” she said.
The coming months will bring new waves of difficulty as well, as the economic impact of the spring shutdowns ripples outward, unemployment benefits expire and an expected flood of evictions begins.
Of all the difficult decisions that she faced this year, Ms. Mills said, none has been more “gut-wrenching” than her first stay-at-home order.
“Nobody wants to be the governor who puts the kibosh on graduations, weddings, beach parties, bars,” she said. “Nobody wants to be the governor the tourist industry rails against. Nobody wants to be that governor.”
America, we’ve lost our way. As a nation, and as individuals, we’ve been thrown off course by an endless barrage of shocking words and divisive deeds from the president who is supposed to lead us.
Watching each new step in the wrong direction over the past three and a half years, we shuddered and told ourselves that America could never stray further from the path our Founders intended. As bad as each outrage from President Trump was, we thought this was it, that things could never get worse. Until they did.
Like many who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him, I tried to give this president a chance, with the hope he might rise to the occasion and keep us, however shakily, on the right path. Those hopes were quickly dashed, not only by his words, but especially by his policies, positions, and outright deceptions.
There’s been no saving grace left by a rising stock market or any other bragging points he may have earned or fallen into. Nothing he’s done is protecting us from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic — over 141,000 American souls have already been lost to it, and the surge continues — or from the pain and anger in divided communities, the bloated government finances, or the eager adversaries emboldened by our global retreat.
Haven’t we all had enough? Aren’t we sick and tired of losing our way? I know I am. And, as a life-long Republican, I find it’s been enough to override my sturdiest political attitudes and party loyalties for as long as this crisis lasts.
While there are many issues on which my Democratic friends and I do not see eye to eye, my love for America allows me to put those differences aside for now. I look forward to working with anyone who shares this same, singular concern: America’s soul will be irreversibly eroded under four more years of our current “leadership.”
Americans must find our way again. Just as we can no longer tolerate the path we are on, we must also reject the temptation to protest one man’s divisive and mean-spirited acts with division and meanness of our own. We must choose another path, the path of unity.
Healing the nation after nearly four exhausting years of systematic splintering of the American spirit requires us to remember those values that have always united us. These are ideals we have sometimes fallen short of, but never — until now — threatened to abandon: the America of freedom, equality, opportunity, the rule of law that protects democracy. The America that still believes in common decency.
A nation confident in its justice and rooted in decency and respect for one another rallies to stand up against tyranny wherever it sees it. A unified nation, one that holds all our cultures and lifestyles in equal value and affords us all the same protections and opportunities, weaves together our differences to build a shield against oppression.
The first three words of the Constitution, the most transformative political document the world has ever known, are, “We the people.” All of this must start with us, “we the people,” right now. Do we want to heal America? It takes more than a post on our social media feed.
Let’s start in our community — or our street. Ask your neighbors if they think America could be more unified, peaceful, and, well, nice. Volunteer for a cause you value. Practice your faith — or just be kind. Vote according to America’s guiding principles and know it matters. Believe that America is a force for good and help make sure that’s not just a slogan, but reality.
The wild ride we’ve all been on since January 2017 doesn’t need to be our path going forward. There is a better path, but it requires something more from each of us. It is the way of democracy and the eternal vigilance demanded of those who seek to enjoy its benefits. Those benefits — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — were purchased by the blood and sweat of the women and men of all colors who came before us. Respecting their sacrifices means leaving some space for the differences between us, even as we come together as Americans to fight to ensure that that space can continue to exist.
I’ve had enough of the path we’re on, a path I know will not end well. I am tired of worrying about America’s tomorrow. It’s time to come together and reject division, anger, indulgence, and isolation. It’s time to get back to practicing the ideals that have brought us so far.
Now, more than ever, Americans must reject those forces that seek to divide us and, instead, unite as one people, with the individual freedoms to fulfill America’s promise to pursue all of our own varied, beautiful dreams, now and tomorrow.
John Kasich expected to speak at Democratic National Convention for Joe Biden
via @usatoday – July 20
WASHINGTON — Former Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, is expected to speak on behalf of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at next month’s Democratic National Convention, the Associated Press reported Monday.
The party’s invitation comes as other high-profile anti-Trump Republicans are likely to become more active in support of Biden leading up to the election, according to the AP. The AP cited “a person with direct knowledge” of Kasich’s plans “who insisted on anonymity to discuss strategy.” …
A Kasich endorsement of Biden could help strengthen the former vice president’s bona fides among moderate swing voters, a key voting bloc that polling shows Biden is winning over Trump. It could also boost Biden’s efforts in Ohio, a state that Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016 but has turned competitive as the coronavirus pandemic takes a toll on the president’s polling. …
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
Chinese health authority said Thursday that the Chinese mainland registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, including 3 cases from overseas and 19 domestically transmitted.
Of the 19 domestically-transmitted cases, 18 were reported in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the remaining was in Liaoning Province.
Of the 3 cases from overseas, 1 was reported in Shanghai, 1 in Guangdong Province and 1 in Shaanxi Province, said the National Health Commission.
No deaths related to the disease or new suspected COVID-19 cases were reported Wednesday, while 15 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Beijing recorded no new domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases on Wednesday for the 17th day in a row. The total number of cases, since the Xinfadi market outbreak was discovered on June 11, stands at 335, the municipal health commission said on Thursday.
Eight more patients recovered on Wednesday, taking the total number of recoveries to 256 in the local cluster.
Eight asymptomatic patients are under medical observation in the Chinese capital, and no new asymptomatic cases have been reported.
9-Day Waits for Test Results Threaten N.Y.C.’s Ability to Contain Virus
“Honestly, I don’t even really see the point in getting tested,” said one New Yorker who has waited nearly two weeks, with still no results.
By Joseph Goldstein and Jesse McKinley
EU Agrees to $857 Billion Stimulus to Fight Coronavirus Recession
NY Times – July 21
The package includes steps to help less wealthy countries, such as selling collective debt and giving much of the money as grants.
The deal sent a strong signal of solidarity even as it exposed deep new fault lines in a bloc reshaped by Britain’s exit.
Joe Biden will announce a $775 billion investment to go toward working parents and caregivers.
The European Union agrees to a groundbreaking stimulus package to fight the pandemic recession
European Union leaders early on Tuesday stepped up to confront one of the gravest challenges in the bloc’s history, agreeing to a landmark spending package to rescue their economies from the ravages of the pandemic.
The 750 billion euro ($857 billion) stimulus agreement, spearheaded by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Emmanuel Macron of France, sent a strong signal of solidarity even as it exposed deep new fault lines in a bloc reshaped by Britain’s exit.
The deal was notable for its firsts: Countries will raise large sums by selling bonds collectively, rather than individually; and much of that money will be handed out to member nations hit hardest by the pandemic as grants, not loans.
“Europe has shown it is able to break new ground in a special situation. Exceptional situations require exceptional measures,” Ms. Merkel said in a news conference at dawn. “A very special construct of 27 countries of different backgrounds is actually able to act together, and it has proven it.”
The talks were defined by shifting roles among members now jostling to make their voices heard and for leadership in the absence of Britain, which had often played the part of the thrifty contrarian, fastidious about rules, in past summits.
This time, Ms. Merkel, who holds the E.U.’s rotating presidency, put her finger on the scale on behalf of hard-hit southern countries and did battle with the nations she once championed, the northern members that have been less affected by the virus and are wary of the vast sums being thrown around.
Economists predict a recession in Europe far worse than anything since World War II. France, Italy and Spain, the bloc’s second-, third- and fourth-largest economies, are expected to suffer the most, clocking in contractions of around 10 percent this year.
Greece and other smaller economies that are still recovering from the last recession will also be badly affected by the downturn.
The package now goes to the European Parliament for ratification, where it is expected to face a serious challenge on the grounds that it does not tackle concerns about how Poland and Hungary’s governments violate the bloc’s standards for democracy and the rule of law.
Joe Biden plans to call for $775 billion to go toward working parents and caregivers
Joseph R. Biden Jr. will announce a sweeping new $775 billion investment in caregiving programs on Tuesday, with a series of proposals covering care for small children, older adults and family members with disabilities. …
EU leaders finally clinch deal for unprecedented $2.1 trillion budget and coronavirus recovery fund
AP via @BostonGlobe – July 21
BRUSSELS — After four days and nights of wrangling, exhausted European Union leaders finally clinched a deal on an unprecedented 1.8 trillion-euro ($2.1 trillion) budget and coronavirus recovery fund early Tuesday, after one of their longest summits ever.
The 27 leaders grudgingly committed to a costly, massive aid package for those hit hardest by COVID-19, which has already killed 135,000 people within the bloc alone.
With masks and hygienic gel everywhere at the summit, the leaders were constantly reminded of the potent medical and economic threat the virus poses.
“Extraordinary events, and this is the pandemic that has reached us all, also require extraordinary new methods,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.
To confront the biggest recession in its history, the EU will establish a 750 billion-euro coronavirus fund, partly based on common borrowing, to be sent as loans and grants to the hardest-hit countries. That is in addition to the agreement on the seven-year, 1 trillion-euro EU budget that leaders had been haggling over for months even before the pandemic.
“The consequences will be historic,” French President Emmanuel Macron said. “We have created a possibility of taking up loans together, of setting up a recovery fund in the spirit of solidarity,” a sense of sharing debt that would have been unthinkable not so long ago.
Merkel added: “We have laid the financial foundations for the EU for the next seven years and came up with a response to this arguably biggest crisis of the European Union.”
Despite Macron and Merkel negotiating as the closest of partners, the traditionally powerful Franco-German alliance struggled for days to get the quarreling nations in line. But, even walking out of a negotiating session in protest together over the weekend, the two leaders bided their time and played their cards right in the end.
“When Germany and France stand together, they can’t do everything. But if they don’t stand together, nothing is possible,” said Macron, challenging anyone in the world who criticized the days of infighting to think of a comparable joint endeavor.
“There are 27 of us around the table and we managed to come up with a joint budget. What other political area in the world is capable of that? None other,” Macron said.
At first, Merkel and Macron wanted the grants to total 500 billion euros, but the so-called “frugals” — five wealthy northern nations led by the Netherlands — wanted a cut in such spending and strict economic reform conditions imposed. The figure was brought down to 390 billion euros, while the five nations also got guarantees on reforms.
“There is no such thing as perfection, but we have managed to make progress,” Macron said.
The summit, at the urn-shaped Europa center, laid bare how nations’ narrow self-interests trumped the obvious common good for all to stand together and face a common adversary.
Rarely had a summit been as ill-tempered as this one, and it was the longest since a five-day summit in Nice, France, in 2000, when safeguarding national interests in institutional reforms was a stumbling block.
“There were extremely tense moments,” Macron said.
Still, considering every EU leader had the right of veto on the whole package, the joint commitment to invest and spend such funds was hailed as a success. …
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/20/opinion/trump-coronavirus-testing.html
July 20, 2020
What You Don’t Know Can’t Hurt Trump
“Slow the testing down,” he said, and it’s happening.
By Paul Krugman
We’re now at the stage of the Covid-19 pandemic where Donald Trump and his allies are trying to suppress information about the coronavirus’s spread — because, of course, they are. True to form, however, they’re far behind the curve. From a political point of view (which is all they care about), their disinformation efforts are too little, too late.
Where we are: In just a few days millions of Americans are going to see a drastic fall in their incomes, as enhanced unemployment benefits expire. This calls for urgent action; but avoiding economic calamity was always going to be hard, because Republicans in general have balked at providing the aid workers idled by the pandemic need.
But now it turns out that there’s another obstacle to action: An intra-G.O.P. dispute over funding for testing and tracing of infected individuals. Even Senate Republicans support increased testing, which is desperately needed given our current situation: Surging cases have created a testing backlog, and test results are taking so long to come back that they’re effectively useless.
But Trump officials are opposed to any new money for testing. They’re barely even trying to offer excuses for their opposition, since Trump himself explained the strategy a month ago at his Tulsa rally: When you expand testing, he declared, “you’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please.’”
In other words, what you don’t know can’t hurt Trump.
Nobody should be surprised that the Trump team is trying to suppress bad news about the pandemic. This was completely predictable given the Law of Obama Projection: Every right-wing conspiracy theory about President Barack Obama was an indication of what Republicans wanted to do themselves, and would do once they had the power.
Remember, for example, wild claims about an imminent military takeover of Texas, lent credence by senior Republicans? Now we have unidentified Department of Homeland Security agents in unmarked vehicles seizing people off the streets of Portland, Ore. Remember claims that the government was secretly constructing concentration camps? Thousands of migrants are now immured in detention centers, often under horrifying conditions.
And the current war on Covid-19 testing was prefigured by constant claims that the Obama administration was suppressing bad economic news. “Inflation truthers” insisted that the feds were hiding the runaway inflation that right-wingers predicted, but that never arrived. Unemployment truthers — including, notably, one Donald Trump — declared that official job numbers showing a steadily improving economy were fake, and that unemployment was actually much higher than reported.
It was inevitable, then, that the Trumpists would do what they falsely accused Obama of doing, and try to hide bad pandemic numbers. Efforts to hold down testing are only part of the story.
The Trump administration recently ordered hospitals to stop reporting Covid-19 data to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sending it to a private contractor instead. As a result, hospitalization data, a key pandemic indicator, disappeared from the C.D.C. website before being reinstated after a widespread outcry.
And some Republican-controlled states, notably Georgia, have for months been massaging coronavirus data, presenting it in misleading ways that understate the problem.
The puzzle is why the latest attack on testing came so late. Pro tip: If you’re trying to conceal bad epidemiological news, you should start the cover-up before everyone realizes that the pandemic is spiraling out of control.
A fascinating New York Times post-mortem * on Trump’s failed coronavirus response helps us understand what happened. And I do mean mortem: Americans are dying of Covid-19 at a rate eight times that in Canada, 10 times that in Europe.
The Times account makes it clear that the Trump team never seriously considered trying to deal with the pandemic’s reality. It also makes it clear, however, that officials convinced themselves back in April that they were getting away with this abdication of responsibility, that the coronavirus was going away.
And by the time they realized that the virus wasn’t playing along with their political games, it was too late to hide the truth.
At this point it’s not even clear what purpose obstructing testing is supposed to serve. The attempt to engineer an economic boom before the election has already failed, as reopened states are reversing course. And Trump has already squandered all credibility on the coronavirus; even if the numbers on reported cases suddenly started to look much better, who besides his hard-core supporters would believe them?
So this doesn’t look like a political strategy as much as an attempt to soothe the boss’s fragile ego. Trump keeps insisting, falsely, that the only reason we’re seeing so many cases is too much testing, so his aides are trying to mollify him by holding testing down.
And if this cripples America’s pandemic response, making a test-trace-isolate strategy impossible, well, actually dealing with the virus was never part of the plan.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/18/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-response-failure-leadership.html
July 20, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,961,429)
Deaths ( 143,834)
India
Cases ( 1,154,917)
Deaths ( 28,099)
Mexico
Cases ( 344,224)
Deaths ( 39,184)
UK
Cases ( 295,372)
Deaths ( 45,312)
Germany
Cases ( 203,487)
Deaths ( 9,173)
Canada
Cases ( 111,124)
Deaths ( 8,858)
China
Cases ( 83,682)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Sweden
Cases ( 78,048)
Deaths ( 5,639)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-21/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-8-in-Xinjiang-SiB9wDPB7y/index.html
July 21, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 11 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland confirmed 11 COVID-19 cases Monday, of which 8 were domestically transmitted in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the National Health commission (NHC).
The other 3 new COVID-19 cases were from overseas, with 2 confirmed in Shanghai and 1 in Sichuan Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered, according to NHC.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-21/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-8-in-Xinjiang-SiB9wDPB7y/img/c45ccf02927f4dc196df7ee1f4e56784/c45ccf02927f4dc196df7ee1f4e56784.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-21/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-8-in-Xinjiang-SiB9wDPB7y/img/6b1742f9305245deaa11a00fd21416d1/6b1742f9305245deaa11a00fd21416d1.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-21/Chinese-mainland-reports-11-new-COVID-19-cases-8-in-Xinjiang-SiB9wDPB7y/img/e2823938a5fe473a8c2305d0574da0c7/e2823938a5fe473a8c2305d0574da0c7.jpeg
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/21/c_139227319.htm
July 21, 2020
China’s phase 2 trial finds COVID-19 vaccine safe, inducing immune response — The Lancet
“The phase 2 trial adds further evidence on safety and immunogenicity in a large population than the phase 1 trial. This is an important step in evaluating this early-stage experimental vaccine and phase 3 trials are now underway.”
LONDON — A phase 2 trial of a COVID-19 vaccine candidate conducted in China has found that the vaccine is safe and induces an immune response, according to a new study * published Monday in medical journal The Lancet.
The results provide data from a wider group of participants than the phase 1 trial, which was published in May. Phase 1 trial involved 108 healthy adults and it demonstrated promising results.
“The phase 2 trial adds further evidence on safety and immunogenicity in a large population than the phase 1 trial. This is an important step in evaluating this early-stage experimental vaccine and phase 3 trials are now underway,” said Professor Fengcai Zhu from Jiangsu Provincial Center for Disease Control and Prevention, China.
According to The Lancet, the trial of the Ad5 vectored COVID-19 vaccine candidate was conducted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan with 508 participants taking part. Approximately two thirds of participants were aged 18-44 years, with a quarter aged 45-54 years, and 13 percent aged 55 years or older.
Since elderly individuals face a high risk of serious illness and even death associated with COVID-19 infection, they are an important target population for a COVID-19 vaccine, said Professor Wei Chen from the Beijing Institute of Biotechnology in Beijing, China.
“It is possible that an additional dose may be needed in order to induce a stronger immune response in the elderly population, but further research is underway to evaluate this,” Chen said.
To battle against COVID-19, scientists around the world are racing against time to accelerate the development of new treatments and vaccines. China has pledged that its COVID-19 vaccine will be made a global public good when it’s available.
Meanwhile, Britain is also seeing progress in the development of another vaccine candidate. A separate study ** published Monday in The Lancet reveals the results of the phase 1/2 trial of the Oxford coronavirus vaccine ChAdOx1 nCoV-19. It indicates no early safety concerns and produces strong immune response.
According to the Oxford University, the trial involves more than 1000 healthy adult volunteers. The vaccine provoked a T cell response (white blood cells that can attack cells infected with the SARS-CoV-2 virus) within 14 days of vaccination, and an antibody response within 28 days.
Despite the promising findings, it is still too soon to know if this is enough to offer protection and larger trials are under way, scientists involved in this study said.
* https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31605-6/fulltext
** https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)31604-4/fulltext
Trump said more Covid-19 testing ‘creates more cases.’ We did the math
via @statnews – July 20
The counter-narrative began almost instantly. After the U.S. count of Covid-19 cases began an inexorable rise in June, the White House sought to assure Americans that the increase was, basically, an illusion, created by an increase in testing for the novel coronavirus.
In a June 15 tweet, President Trump said testing “makes us look bad.” At his campaign rally in Tulsa five days later, he said he had asked his “people” to “slow the testing down, please.” At a White House press conference last week, he told reporters, “When you test, you create cases.”
And in an interview with Fox News that aired Sunday, Trump could not have been clearer: “Cases are up because we have the best testing in the world and we have the most testing.” Basically, the president was arguing that the U.S. had just as many new cases in June and July as it did in May but, with fewer tests being done in May, they weren’t being detected; with more testing now, they are.
A new STAT analysis of testing data for all 50 states and the District of Columbia, however, shows with simple-to-understand numbers why Trump’s claim is wrong. In only seven states was the rise in reported cases from mid-May to mid-July driven primarily by increased testing. In the other 26 states — among the 33 that saw cases increase during that period — the case count rose because there was actually more disease.
Related: How to fix the Covid-19 dumpster fire in the U.S.
May had brought signs of hope that the U.S. had gotten its Covid-19 outbreak under control, with about 20,000 new cases reported per day after April highs closer to 30,000. But by late June, the daily count climbed to about 40,000, and now it’s at about 70,000. The STAT analysis shows that spread of the virus, far more than testing, explains that increase.
Epidemiologists and infectious disease experts have disputed the White House claims for weeks, citing rising hospitalization numbers and deaths. It’s hard to argue that extremely sick people, let alone dead people, had been obscured by low levels of testing but suddenly revealed by higher levels.
Without a doubt, many cases of Covid-19 in March, April, and May weren’t picked up. In late June, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield told reporters that as many as 90% of cases had been missed; that is, although there were 2.3 million confirmed cases in the U.S. then, some 20 million people had probably been infected. But that reasoning applies today, too: Despite months of government claims to the contrary, not everyone who wants, or should have, a test is getting one.
Simple math belies the “it’s just because of more testing” claim — with some fascinating exceptions.
Using data from Covid Tracking, STAT looked at the number of people tested and the number who tested positive for the disease (cases) in every state and Washington, D.C. We did that for three dates: in mid-May, mid-June, and mid-July. (Due to reporting anomalies, the dates selected sometimes differed by a day or two between states.)
For each date, we calculated the number of cases found per 1,000 tests — a measure of the disease’s prevalence. For example, in Florida on May 13, that rate was 32. On June 13 it was 75. On July 13 it was 193. On May 13, Florida tested 15,159 people; on July 13, it tested 65,567. So indeed, the number of tests has increased.
But the number of cases per thousand, which is independent of the number of tests, has skyrocketed. On May 13, Florida recorded 479 cases; on July 13, it found 12,624. If the prevalence of Covid-19 were the same in July as in May, Florida would have found only 2,098 cases. In other words, 10,526 of the July 13 cases are not due to increased testing, but, instead, to the increased prevalence of disease. …
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,979,457)
Deaths ( 144,218)
Testing delays are hurting the effort to contain COVID-19
via @BostonGlobe – July 21
Five months into the coronavirus pandemic, people in Massachusetts and across the country are often waiting up to a week or more to learn the results of their COVID-19 tests, seriously endangering efforts to contain and control future infections.
The delays are largely being driven by a backlog at some of the nation’s largest laboratories, which process many of the tests from Massachusetts community health centers and businesses. The labs are struggling to keep up with demand caused by surging coronavirus cases in Southern and Western states.
Plentiful and timely lab results are crucial to quickly contain clusters of COVID-19 and to prevent them from mushrooming into larger outbreaks, health experts said Monday. People who are awaiting test results may not always isolate themselves and unknowingly spread more infections.
“If we don’t get test results back in a time frame that enables [isolating infected people and tracing their contacts], it almost becomes pointless to do the test in the first place,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University.
The growing delays take on increased urgency as many schools and colleges plan to reopen in the coming weeks and are relying on aggressive, regular testing of students and staff. Added to this perfect storm — the approaching flu season is likely to further strain the system as people with flu-like symptoms seek COVID-19 tests to rule out that infection.
“I think demand for tests is going to remain high and increase if anything through the fall,” said Dr. David Hamer, an infectious disease expert at Boston University and a physician at Boston Medical Center.
North Carolina-based LabCorp, and New Jersey’s Quest Diagnostics, two of the largest labs nationally processing COVID-19 tests, each said in statements that they have significantly increased capacity since the pandemic’s early days months ago and continue expansion efforts. But they said those increases have not nearly stayed ahead of the recent and fast growing demand.
And even though Quest opened a lab in Marlborough, Mass., in March as part of its effort to expand capacity, it’s not necessarily shortening waiting times here because that lab is also processing tests from across the country, the company said. It acknowledged that the wait for results, both in Massachusetts and nationwide, are averaging at least one week for patients who are not hospitalized or who are health care workers suspected of being infected. Late Monday, the company reported that average turnaround times nationally have worsened, and that a “small subset of patients may experience wait times of up to two weeks.”
Hoping to ease backlogs, federal regulators on Saturday authorized Quest to start pooling its testing samples nationwide, allowing up to four samples to be tested in one batch rather than running each test individually.
If a pool is negative, none of the four individuals is infected with COVID-19. If a pool is positive, it means one or more of the individuals in that pool may be infected. At that point, each of the samples in that pool will be separated out and tested again individually, and infected people will be identified.
Because the samples are pooled, it is expected that fewer tests are run overall, meaning fewer testing supplies are used and more tests can be run at the same time allowing patients to receive their results more quickly in most cases, according to the Food and Drug Administration.
But many local public health officers in Massachusetts have yet to see an improvement in turnaround times, said Sigalle Reiss, president of the Massachusetts Health Officers Association and Norwood’s health director.
“We’re definitely still having a problem,” Reiss said.
“Most of the test results, knock on wood, will be negative because the positivity rate is so low right now in Massachusetts,” she said. “But the anxiety of waiting is just adding to people’s fear right now. With schools reopening, if we don’t have quick turn-around on testing, the system doesn’t work.”
Earlier in the pandemic, the Massachusetts health department reported daily output from many of the labs across the state. But it stopped doing that months ago, and does not include turnaround times in the data it reports daily. Nor did it include any mention of turnaround times in a recent report to federal regulators about plans to expand testing capacity in Massachusetts.
The state health department said in a statement Monday that the current statewide average for turnaround times in Massachusetts in July is 2.2 days and that the state is monitoring the situation. There can be significant variation within that average, though, because it includes both the generally faster facilities that have internal testing capacity and those that rely on backed-up national diagnostic companies.
Some states require tourists to furnish negative COVID-19 tests and some businesses seek regular testing of employees, further contributing to the backlog. Nuzzo, of Johns Hopkins, said policy makers should consider giving priority to people who have COVID-19 symptoms, need to be hospitalized or treated, or have spent time in places where infections rates are high — testing restrictions that were widely used in the earliest days of the pandemic when shortages of tests and related supplies were acute.
“We just need to think through nationally what is the optimal strategy for testing, particularly given that I don’t think our resources are going to ever be fully unconstrained,” she said. ”It’s a bit unrealistic for me to think that everyone can be tested every day . . . and there are going to be some bottlenecks, which is why we really need national answers.”
One bright spot for Massachusetts is that many of its medical and research institutions are better-off than their counterparts in other states that did not ramp up internal test processing capacity in the spring, said Hamer, the BU infectious disease specialist.
But those institutions do not typically process tests for employers and other organizations, so are unlikely to ease their load, he said.
One notable exception is the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, which has negotiated testing contracts with several colleges and universities to process thousands of tests daily.
The Broad recently expanded its daily capacity to 35,000 tests and can turn them around in less than 24 hours, a spokesman said in a statement last week. The lab has the ability to ramp up to 100,000 daily if needed, the spokesman said, but declined to comment further on its new college testing program.
The Broad, which opened its testing lab in March, has so far not processed more than about 8,000 tests in a day, according to the website where it posts its daily output.
Dr. Michael Mina, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said it is well past time for leaders to rethink the nation’s COVID-19 testing system. The current system, which relies on diagnostic tests sent to a lab for processing, was never designed to handle the massive load it now faces.
“We are trying to insert a square peg in a round hole,” Mina said.
Instead, he said, it’s time for leaders to invest time and resources in advancing inexpensive tests consumers can take and process at home, not unlike the finger-prick blood tests diabetics use to keep their sugar levels intact.
“We have the technology, the money, and know-how,” Mina said, “And we have the biggest problem compared to other countries.”
‘pool testing’
via @statnews – June 26
… Pool testing isn’t meant to verify whether or not a person has Covid-19, the way an individual diagnostic test does.
Rather, it’s part of a broader disease surveillance strategy, one that allows for regular screening of people who are not experiencing Covid-19 symptoms. Testing asymptomatic people is important because a large portion of people with the coronavirus either show no symptoms or take a few days to start feeling sick, but they can still spread the virus.
Take a warehouse with 100 employees. Every so often (experts are still weighing how frequently this testing should occur), the company could test the staff, and instead of running 100 separate analyses, it could group 10 samples into a pool and only run 10 analyses.
“You could test everyone as they walk into the door,” said Paul Sax, an infectious disease specialist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has written about the challenges of returning to work during the pandemic.
If one of those pools came back positive, those 10 employees could be retested individually to see who was infected and could remain out of work in the interim. The 90 other employees, in the pools that tested negative, wouldn’t need to be retested. The goal would be to try to detect a case before the person potentially spread the coronavirus to others. Scientists are increasingly finding that such large-scale superspreading events at workplaces, restaurants and bars, and places of worship are driving a large amount of transmission. …
CDC.says the number of people infected ‘far exceeds the number of reported cases’ in parts of the US
NY Times – July 21
The number of people infected with the coronavirus in different parts of the United States is anywhere from two to 13 times higher than the reported rates for those regions, according to data released Tuesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The findings suggest that large numbers of people who did not have symptoms or did not seek medical care may have kept the virus circulating in their communities. The study is the largest of its kind to date, although a subset of the data was released last month.
“These data continue to show that the number of people who have been infected with the virus that causes Covid-19 far exceeds the number of reported cases,” Dr. Fiona Havers, the C.D.C. researcher who led the study, said in an email. “Many of these people likely had no symptoms or mild illness and may have had no idea that they were infected.”
The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior coronavirus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA. They also released data from later times for eight sites to the C.D.C.’s website on Tuesday.
The results also indicate that in vast swaths of the country, the virus has touched only a small fraction of the population. In Utah, for example, just over 1 percent of people had been exposed to the virus by early June. The rate was 2.2 percent for Minneapolis-St. Paul as of June 5, 3.6 percent for the Philadelphia metropolitan region as of May 30. It was 1 percent for the San Francisco Bay Area as of April 30. …
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,986,643)
Deaths ( 144,332)
Looking to public healthcare systems, compare the workings of the Dominican Republic and Cuban systems, while considering that since 1970 per capita GDP growth in the Dominican Republic has been faster than in any country in the Western Hemisphere, let alone not being constrained by continual United States sanctions as has the Cuban system.
Failing to understand how robust the growth of the Cuban economy has been for decades, no matter the singular US sanctions, suggests a problem development specialists have in understanding what growth amounts to.
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 54,797)
Deaths ( 999)
Deaths per million ( 92)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,449)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=rXte
January 15, 2018
Life Expectancy at Birth for Cuba and Dominican Republic, 1980-2018
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=qYXB
January 30, 2018
Infant Mortality Rate for Cuba and Dominican Republic, 1980-2018
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 3,994,894)
Deaths ( 144,505)
[ What I keep coming up with is not a simple leadership failure, but an institutional failure. Were the experience of the epidemic to conclude right now, the evidence of an institutional healthcare system failure would be profound. ]
The researchers analyzed samples from people who had routine clinical tests, or were inpatients at hospitals, in 10 cities and states for evidence of prior coronavirus infection. The team released early data for six of the sites in June, and for all 10 locations Tuesday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
Seroprevalence of Antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in 10 Sites in the United States, 2020
via @JAMAInternalMed part of @JAMANetwork
editorial: Serosurveillance and the COVID-19 Epidemic in the US
Undetected, Uncertain, and Out of Control
The true extent of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic in the US is unknown. The 3.4 million confirmed cases reported (as of July 15, 2020) likely represent only a fraction of all the infections that have occurred in the US thus far. Limited laboratory capacity and restrictive testing guidelines early in the epidemic resulted in large numbers of undetected incident infections. Approximately 40% of all SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) infections are thought to be asymptomatic, and active surveillance for infections without symptoms is limited even now, nearly 5 months after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Seattle and Chicago. The true cumulative incidence of infection—a basic but critically important measurement—remains uncertain at a time when communities nationwide are struggling to navigate an ongoing, unprecedented public health emergency, and while apprehensions about the near-term and long-term trajectories of the epidemic loom large. …
I must admit, I have been very positive towards Jay Powell’s work as Fed Chair.
IMMACULATE DECEPTION
July 20, 2020 by Edward J. Kane
“How and Why Bankers Still Enjoy a Global Rescue Network
During the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis, Fed officials began to tell outsiders more and more about what members of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) were thinking in setting operative interest-rate and price-level targets. My new INET Working Paper is adapted from a chapter in a book I am now writing. It treats the flood of selected policymaking information released by the committee after each meeting as misleading patter meant to distract the committee’s audience from observing the hard-to-defend cumulative effects Fed policies have had on the distribution of income and wealth. As in stage magic, lobbying activity that determines how differently FOMC policies actually impact the rich, the poor, and the middle classes still takes place behind an informational curtain.
Today, as during the Great Financial Crisis, the Fed’s policy strategy has been to prevent open insolvencies at US megabanks by making subsidized loans to US megabanks’ insolvent foreign counterparties (and to the foreign taxpayers that would otherwise have been asked to rescue them). At the same time, Fed leaders have resisted a broad-based bailout of insolvent US homeowners and landlords. During the GFC, they stood by as US banks foreclosed on all but a few privileged categories of distressed mortgage borrowers. Although households are receiving some help in the current go-around, forbearance is not forgiveness. Unpaid rents and mortgage payments are still mounting up.
The overwrought praise that Wall Street and the media subsequently heaped on Treasury and Federal Reserve leaders for being willing to punish lower-income households to get the rich through the Great Financial Crisis established a nasty precedent that is guiding monetary policy today. This unspoken precedent is “Bankers and Brokers first.”
A precedent is a previous event or action that sets a standard or guide for how one or one’s successors should (and therefore probably would) act in similar circumstances in the future. The 2008 troika of Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson congratulated themselves for having the “courage” to put the interests of foreign bankers and major US financial institutions (including a few of its automobile makers — think the airlines and tourism industry today) ahead of ordinary US citizens. The victory laps that Barney Frank and Chris Dodd are taking this week for passing Dodd-Frank not only celebrate this approach, but provide opportunities for them to claim that they rescued rich and poor alike from complete and utter ruin [see, e.g., Bernanke, Geithner, and Paulson (2018)].
This portrait of distributional neutrality is propaganda of a high order. Current and former Fed and Treasury officials cannot fail to understand that, in accepting so much adulation, they have cemented a series of dangerous precedents. If public-service norms were more evenly balanced, instead of simply accepting praise, they might feel an obligation to identify the downside of following their lead in the future.
Aggressively devising creative, nontransparent, and arguably extralegal ways to transfer massive amounts of US taxpayer resources to wealthy stakeholders in zombie megabanks around the world is a dangerously elitist strategy. An important fourth crisis manager was left out of the celebration: former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair. This was in large part because she was only a woman and because in Bair (2019) she dared to argue that, if future crisis managers were to distribute rescue costs in the ways the troika did, they were bound to encounter the kind of angry protest movements we are seeing today.
With a wink and a smile, bankers, regulators, and politicians assured us all in 2010 that a few carefully crafted words in the Dodd-Frank Act (DFA) could and would prevent generous anti-egalitarian taxpayer support from becoming available to the financial industry in the next crisis. Contrary to centuries of experience in the banking industry, the Dodd-Frank Act asks us to believe that governments can prevent crises by merely asking banks to post more (and possibly better) capital on their balance sheets. My research establishes that accounting-based requirements lose force the longer they are in place. This is because accountants take it as a challenge to circumvent them and in fact do this better and better the longer a particular rule stays in force.
In the decade since the DFA was enacted megabank lobbyists have sped up the natural rate of capital-requirement decay by convincing regulators of the need to “custom tailor” accounting formulas to the special circumstances of different categories of banks. Each nick and tuck that regulatory tailors devise in the way capital requirements are calculated open new and often unintended loopholes for other classes of financial institution to exploit.
Loopholes are part of any regulatory system. To make them hard for the public to see, bankers prefer that regulatory benefits be distributed in implicit ways. By that, I mean access to these benefits is based on understandings about how regulators should and will react in crisis circumstances. In the Covid crisis, the bogus restraints celebrated in the DFA have—as my 2012 paper predicted—simply lost their teeth. Bank examiners and accountants were directed to soften loss recognition and the Fed went on to devise (at last count) 14 openly discriminatory lending programs aimed at preserving particular classes of financial contracts and interests.
Confidence in the availability and sustainability of implicit safety-net support creates powerful incentives for megabankers to pry themselves loose from the bite of capital requirements and other regulatory restraints over time. This is the central message of my research career. I have asked readers to picture the mix of endless opposition and circumvention that financial rulemaking and enforcement entails as a dialectical process. After each crisis, sponsors of tougher capital requirements and other elaborate rules claim to have found ways to force bankers and their creditors to stay strong enough to absorb losses more or less as they occur. But sponsors seldom acknowledge that corporate-level restraints are bound to fail eventually. Placing accounting and other kinds of restraints on banker behavior fail because they do not directly attack either bankers’ appetite for tail risk or regulators’ incentives to forbear when times get tough.
Experience teaches us that corporate-level reforms do not and cannot hold their effectiveness over time. Rules beget regulation-induced innovations and these burden-reducing innovations become more and more successful over time. The difficulty governments face in devising and enforcing appropriate punishments for individual bankers that knowingly exploit safety-net protections converts national and regional safety nets into what amounts to a global Protection Racket operated by —and for the benefit of— thieving megabankers. My new paper explains how governments could make this racket far less profitable if for some unlikely reason politicians might conclude that toughening fraud laws would be a good thing.”
Chaotic Scenes in Portland as Backlash to Federal Deployment Grows
… President Trump, in pushing a law-and-order message for his re-election campaign, has embraced a dark vision of Portland as a lawless place filled with people who “hate our country.” His administration’s crackdown has brought armed officers from a wide variety of federal agencies to the streets, where they have been firing tear gas and pulling protesters into unmarked vans.
The president’s portrayal of Portland and the crackdown he has unleashed have infuriated protesters who see Mr. Trump as trying to use the city’s unrest as political theater during an election year. They say he is forcing a federal police presence on a city that doesn’t want it — a city with such a rich tradition of protest that an aide to another Republican president, George Bush, reportedly referred to it as Little Beirut.
While the protests have consumed parts of downtown at nighttime, much of the city has been left untouched. By day, boaters putter up the Willamette River while joggers run down the trail alongside it. On Monday evening, large groups of diners were eating on outdoor patios a few blocks away from the county’s Justice Center, where protesters were amassing for the night.
To the protesters, the president’s unusual deployment of federal power has provided yet more compelling evidence that their fears about rising fascism in the United States are justified.
In the Portland area, activists aligned with the loosely-organized group known as antifa have long denounced police militarization and a punishing criminal justice system, and have clashed with the police in recent years. The protests of the last seven weeks developed a near-nightly cycle of conflict between protesters and local police, with officers reacting to objects being thrown by protesters and protesters expressing alarm by the use of tear gas that impacted peaceful people. …
The strife on the streets escalated with the arrival of federal forces, which have relied heavily on tear gas, munitions fired from paintball-style guns and batons. …
On Tuesday morning, dozens of agents moved around the streets and at times threw people to the ground to detain them. As federal officers appeared to try detaining one person, others in the crowd rushed to free the person.
The Portland authorities have cited ongoing troubles with the protesters, and on Tuesday the police said a jewelry store had been looted.
The nightly protests have also alarmed businesses in downtown, who were first hit with widespread looting in the aftermath of Mr. Floyd’s death in Minneapolis on Memorial Day and have struggled to navigate the weeks since. …
While the numbers dwindled over the subsequent weeks and Gov. Kate Brown expressed a belief that things were beginning to cool off, the crowds have surged back in recent days, with protesters chanting “Feds go home” and focusing much of their ire on the federal courthouse building.
The demonstrations have continued to have a strong component of calls for racial justice, including on Monday night, when thousands chanted “Black Lives Matter” and young Black activists led the predominantly white crowd in speeches and song. …
Trump Threatens to Send Federal Law Enforcement Forces to More Cities
NY Times – July 21
WASHINGTON — President Trump plans to deploy federal law enforcement to Chicago and threatened on Monday to send agents to other major cities — all controlled by Democrats.
Governors and other officials reacted angrily to the president’s move, calling it an election-year ploy as they squared off over crime, civil liberties and local control that has spread from Portland, Ore., across the country.
With camouflage-clad agents already sweeping through the streets of Portland, more units were poised to head to Chicago, and Mr. Trump suggested that he would follow suit in New York, Philadelphia, Detroit and other urban centers. Governors and other officials compared his actions to authoritarianism and vowed to pursue legislation or lawsuits to stop him.
The president cast the confrontation in overtly political terms as he seeks an issue that would gain traction with voters at a time when many of his own supporters have soured on his leadership amid a deadly pandemic and economic collapse. Trailing badly in the polls with just over 100 days until the election in November, Mr. Trump assailed the “liberal Democrats” …
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2768835
Approximately 40% of all SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) infections are thought to be asymptomatic, and active surveillance for infections without symptoms is limited even now, nearly 5 months after the first COVID-19 cases were reported in Seattle and Chicago….
[ China was monitoring asymptomatic infections from March, systematically screening for and reporting asymptomatic cases, both domestic and imported, daily since April 1. After infection clusters came under control in Wuhan, all the residents of the city were tested with attention to the prevalence of asymptomatic cases. *
* Interestingly and unfortunately this testing was criticized in the New York Times. ]
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,003,467)
Deaths ( 144,655)
Israel had gained control of the coronavirus, then under political pressure the government precipitously opened business and schools:
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 54,042)
Deaths ( 425)
Deaths per million ( 46)
———————————–
July 4, 2020
Coronavirus
Israel
Cases ( 29,170)
Deaths ( 330)
Deaths per million ( 36)
Supposing the need of the Federal Reserve was to stabilize and lower bond yields to support the suddenly recession mired economy, as far as I can tell Fed policy has been excellent. Simply look to classes of bond yields and find how uniform the movement has been to lower yields.
Fed policy is a debt based ponzi. As Marx said, where capital lies, a state is not far behind. Suppression of yields has little to do with the fed. Follow liquidity.
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,028,547)
Deaths ( 144,950)
As Trump Pushes Into Portland, His Campaign Ads Turn Darker
NY Times – July 21
The Trump campaign is spending millions on ads that promote a dark and exaggerated portrayal of Democratic-led cities, a tactic that reinforces his “law and order’’ campaign message.
As President Trump deploys federal agents to Portland, Ore., and threatens to dispatch more to other cities, his re-election campaign is spending millions of dollars on several ominous television ads that promote fear and dovetail with his political message of “law and order.”
The influx of agents in Portland has led to scenes of confrontations and chaos that Mr. Trump and his White House aides have pointed to as they try to burnish a false narrative about Democratic elected officials allowing dangerous protesters to create widespread bedlam.
The Trump campaign is driving home that message with a new ad that tries to tie its dark portrayal of Democratic-led cities to Mr. Trump’s main rival, Joseph R. Biden Jr. — with exaggerated images intended to persuade viewers that lawless anarchy would prevail if Mr. Biden won the presidency. The ad simulates a break-in at the home of an older woman and ends with her being attacked while she waits on hold for a 911 call, as shadowy, dark intruders flicker in the background. …
The president has said he might next deploy federal agents to Chicago, and has listed other cities where similar enforcement could take place, including New York but also Philadelphia and Detroit, urban centers in two battleground states. White House officials said the deployments had grown out of meetings among administration officials after protests in Washington, D.C., in late May and early June. …
Anthony Fauci: His Inbox Isn’t Pretty
NY Times – July 21
An interview with the man who has an important message for you, if he can get it out.
… Let’s get to the news. Our numbers are surging. And you’ve just told The Atlantic that we’ve got to do a reset, which, of course, makes perfect sense. But given the reluctance of some governors, businesses and citizens to abide by the basic rules of social distancing and mask wearing, is it possible to get this pandemic under control without a federal response?
It would be better if things were a little more uniform. It just seems that unfortunately, in some sectors, there’s this feeling that there’s opening the country on one end of the spectrum, and public health measures that suppress things and lock them down on the other.
They should not be opposing forces. The guidelines that we put out a couple of months ago, those should be followed and appreciated as the vehicle to open the country, as opposed to the obstacle to opening the country.
You said it would be nicer if some things were more uniform. Like what?
The fundamentals. Wear a mask. Avoid crowds. Close the bars. Bars are the hot spots — —
But Americans have already been told this, right? And we still don’t do those things. If you were an executive for the day, what lever would you pull?
But Jennifer, would you want me to say something that’s directly contrary to what the president is doing? That’s not helpful. Then all of a sudden you don’t hear from me for a while.
I definitely don’t want anyone weaponizing anything you’re saying.
I’ve just been doing this for so long, and I’m trying to do my best to get the message across without being overtly at odds, OK? The only thing I can do is to get out there with whatever notoriety or recognition I have and say, these are the four or five things. Please pay attention to them. And if we do that, I feel confident that we’ll turn this around.
What I’ve been trying to do is appeal to the younger generation. If you look at the age average of the new cases that are going on in the South, it’s about 10 to 15 years younger than what we previously saw.
So it’s clear what’s going on. Young people are saying to themselves: “Wait a minute. I’m young, I’m healthy. The chances of my getting seriously ill are very low. And in fact, it is about a 20 to 40 percent likelihood that I won’t have any symptoms at all. So why should I bother?”
What they’re missing is something fundamental: By getting infected themselves — even if they never get a symptom — they are part of the propagation of a pandemic. They are fueling the pandemic. We have to keep hammering that home, because, as much as they do that, they’re completely relinquishing their societal responsibility. …
Anthony Fauci
tells @TheAtlantic – July 15
…The Atlantic: How much worse do you expect the pandemic to get? How do we get back to a better place?
Fauci: By pushing a reset button, I don’t mean everybody locking down again. We’ve got to call a time-out and say, “If you’re going to open, we’ve got to get everybody on the same team.” I’m not going to name any states—that’s not helpful—but some states did, in fact, prematurely jump over some checkpoints.
Even though we are in the middle of a setback now—you can’t deny that; look at the numbers, you’re dealing with 40,000 to 60,000 infections in a day—it doesn’t mean we’re going to be defeated. But states that are in trouble right now, if those states pause and say, “Okay, we’re going to do it right, everyone wear a mask, bars closed, no congregating in crowds, keep your distance, protect the vulnerable”—if we do that for a few weeks in a row, I’ll guarantee you those numbers will come down. …
July 21, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,028,569)
Deaths ( 144,953)
India
Cases ( 1,194,085)
Deaths ( 28,771)
Mexico
Cases ( 349,396)
Deaths ( 39,485)
UK
Cases ( 295,817)
Deaths ( 45,422)
Germany
Cases ( 203,890)
Deaths ( 9,180)
Canada
Cases ( 111,697)
Deaths ( 8,862)
China
Cases ( 83,693)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Sweden
Cases ( 78,166)
Deaths ( 5,646)
http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-07/22/c_139230831.htm
July 22, 2020
New study show immunity drops quickly in mild COVID-19 cases
WASHINGTON — A study published on Tuesday shows that in people with mild COVID-19 cases, their antibodies against the coronavirus drop sharply over the first three months after infection.
A research team at the University of California, Los Angeles, did an in-depth study of 34 people who had recovered from mild COVID-19 infections. They tested their blood two or three times over three months.
The researchers found a rapid drop in antibodies – the immune system proteins that help stop viruses from infecting cells in the body. On average, the antibody levels fell by half every 73 days, according to the study * published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
The findings raise concern that humoral immunity against SARS-CoV-2 may not be long lasting in persons with mild illness, who compose the majority of persons with COVID-19, said the study.
Further studies will be needed to define a quantitative protection threshold and rate of decline of antiviral antibodies beyond 90 days, according to the study.
* https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2025179
https://cepr.net/debt-worries-the-nyts-oped-page-has-not-heard-of-a-country-called-japan/
July 20, 2020
Debt Worries: The New York Times Columnist Has Not Heard of a Country Called “Japan”
By DEAN BAKER
Ruchir Sharma had a New York Times column * today telling readers that Germany will likely emerge from the pandemic as the world’s leading economic power. Part of his story is based on Germany’s robust pandemic stimulus package, which he puts at 47 percent of GDP. (This is somewhat misleading since it includes the nominal value of government loan guarantees, but it is robust stimulus by any measure.) Germany has also successfully used work-sharing and other mechanisms to minimize unemployment.
While these points are well-taken and areas where Germany provides an excellent model, Sharma’s main reason for predicting Germany’s ascendancy is its relatively low debt levels. It is difficult to see why debt levels should be a major impediment to the United States or China, or other countries that print their own currencies. The current interest rate on long-term government bonds in the United States is 0.6 percent, which is higher than the negative 0.5 percent rate on German bonds, but it is difficult to see how it would be a major impediment to future growth. When the United States had budget surpluses at the end of the 1990s, the rate on 10-year Treasury bonds was near 5.0 percent.
If we want to look at everyone’s debt basket case, Japan is currently paying 0.03 percent interest on its 10-year Treasury bonds. Again, this is higher than Germany’s rate, but the interest burden is hardly a major strain on Japan’s economy, even with its debt to GDP ratio of 250 percent.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/opinion/coronavirus-germany-economy.html
https://cepr.net/new-york-times-cant-find-out-about-chinese-coronavirus-vaccines/
July 21, 2020
New York Times Can’t Find Out About Chinese Coronavirus Vaccines
By DEAN BAKER
That seems to be the case since an article * discussing leading vaccine candidates around the world failed to mention two Chinese candidates that are already in Phase III testing. One of the vaccines, developed by the company Sinovac, is beginning testing in Bangladesh and Brazil. The other vaccine was developed by Sinopharm, and is about to begin stage three testing in Abu Dhabi.
It is difficult to understand how an article focused on leading vaccine candidates would exclude two of the vaccines that are furthest advanced in the testing process.
* https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/07/21/world/europe/21reuters-health-coronavirus-vaccine.html
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-22/Chinese-mainland-reports-14-new-COVID-19-cases-9-in-Xinjiang-SkdIDZ5qLK/index.html
July 22, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 14 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
The Chinese mainland confirmed 14 new COVID-19 cases Tuesday, of which 9 were domestically transmitted in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, according to the National Health Commission (NHC). The other 5 cases were from overseas, with 2 confirmed in Shanghai, 1 in Guangdong Province and 1 in Yunnan Province.
No deaths related to the disease were registered, according to the NHC.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-22/Chinese-mainland-reports-14-new-COVID-19-cases-9-in-Xinjiang-SkdIDZ5qLK/img/7af2125a9fad4f3f82061946c6f0886a/7af2125a9fad4f3f82061946c6f0886a.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-22/Chinese-mainland-reports-14-new-COVID-19-cases-9-in-Xinjiang-SkdIDZ5qLK/img/10cbd624b3e44306a445bcdb30967ed9/10cbd624b3e44306a445bcdb30967ed9.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-22/Chinese-mainland-reports-14-new-COVID-19-cases-9-in-Xinjiang-SkdIDZ5qLK/img/dfac736ce9c547e4a10dbde795ac6e03/dfac736ce9c547e4a10dbde795ac6e03.jpeg
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,043,633)
Deaths ( 145,195)
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,049,153)
Deaths ( 145,276)
CA surpasses NY in confirmed COVID-19 cases
AP via @BostonGlobe – July 22
NEW YORK (AP) — The global tally of people infected with the coronavirus neared 15 million Wednesday, while in the worst-hit pandemic hot spot of the United States, President Donald Trump warned the pandemic would “get worse before it gets better.”
With 409,000 cases, John’s Hopkins University data showed Wednesday that California now has about 1,200 more cases than New York.
However, New York’s 72,302 deaths are by far the highest total in the country and nine times more than California’s tally, and its rate of confirmed infections of about 2,100 per 100,000 people is twice California’s rate.
U.S. government data published Tuesday found that reported and confirmed coronavirus cases vastly underestimate the true number of infections, echoing results from a smaller study last month. The United States also has had consistent testing failures that experts say contribute to an undercount of the actual virus rate.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study says true COVID-19 rates were more than 10 times higher than reported cases in most U.S. regions from late March to early May. It is based on COVID-19 antibody tests performed on routine blood samples in 16,000 people in 10 U.S. regions.
With COVID-19 set to pass another shocking milestone, Trump delivered his first virus briefing after a three-month hiatus, offering a shifted message Tuesday, including professing a newfound respect for the protective face masks he has seldom worn.
It came as polls have shown Trump lagging behind Democratic rival Joe Biden ahead of November’s election, and as the count of virus fatalities in the U.S. passes 140,000.
Even so, the president worked in jabs at the news media and Democrats, and repeatedly referred to COVID-19 as the “China virus.”
The early evening show at the White House came as the next stage of the federal government’s response to the pandemic was being crafted on Capitol Hill.
The price tag for the next COVID-19 aid package could quickly swell above $1 trillion as White House officials negotiate with Congress over money to reopen schools, prop up small businesses, boost virus testing and keep cash flowing to Americans.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised a new round of direct payments to earners below a certain income level, similar to the $1,200 checks sent in the spring. President Donald Trump insists on a payroll tax holiday for workers. And Democrats want billions to outfit schools and shore up local governments.
Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and acting chief of staff Mark Meadows spent Tuesday on Capitol Hill, meeting separately with McConnell, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others trying to broker a compromise between the GOP’s emerging $1 trillion proposal with the House’s more sweeping $3 trillion bill.
The proposed virus aid package would be the fifth, following the $2.2 trillion bill passed in March, the largest U.S. intervention of its kind. The jobless rate has remained in double digits, higher than in the last decade’s Great Recession, and a federal eviction moratorium on millions of rental units approved in the last bill is about to expire. ….
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,062,859)
Deaths ( 145,414)
https://cepr.net/do-all-new-york-times-readers-know-how-much-857-billion-is-to-the-european-union/
July 22, 2020
Do All New York Times Readers Know How Much $857 Billion Is to the European Union?
By Dean Baker
Let me go out on a limb and speculate that the vast majority have no clue. This is why it would have been helpful to put the size of the European Union pandemic relief package in some context in this article * on the negotiations.
The current GDP for the European Union is a bit over $18 trillion, which means that the rescue package would be roughly 4.5 percent of its GDP. This figure likely overstates the economic impact, since not all the money will be spent in a single year. It is also worth mentioning that most, if not all, EU countries have their own rescue packages, so this is far from the full sum that the EU is spending to offset the impact of the pandemic on their economies.
* https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/21/world/europe/european-union-coronavirus-aid.html
Branko Milanovic @BrankoMilan
The most technologically advanced part of the world. “If you try to get a test now in San Francisco, it can take up to twelve days sometimes longer even to get in and get the test let alone get your results.”
https://www.ktvu.com/news/covid-19-testing-in-california-hits-bump-in-road
COVID-19 testing in California hits bump in road
If the ability for widespread testing for COVID-19 is a gauge of when life can eventually begin to return to normal, then the latest signs show that we have a problem.
3:23 PM · Jul 22, 2020
With 409,000 cases, John’s Hopkins University data showed Wednesday that California now has about 1,200 more cases than New York.
However, New York’s 72,302 deaths are by far the highest total in the country and nine times more than California’s tally, and its rate of confirmed infections of about 2,100 per 100,000 people is twice California’s rate.
Covid-19 death rates have been much higher in NY (& MA)
than in CA (also TX & FL so far), suggesting that more
elderly have been victims in those higher-rate states.
The institutional difference in these healthcare systems needs to be recognized and understood, no matter the prejudice fostered against the Cuban system. The Dominican Republic after all has been the fastest growing country in the Americas in GDP per capita since 1970.
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
Dominican Republic
Cases ( 56,043)
Deaths ( 1,005)
Deaths per million ( 93)
Cuba
Cases ( 2,462)
Deaths ( 87)
Deaths per million ( 8)
US Northeast, Pummeled in the Spring, Now Stands Out in Virus Control
NY Times – July 22
… Six months since the coronavirus crisis was first detected in the United States, the Northeast stands in sharp contrast with the rest of the nation.
Along the East Coast, from Delaware through Maine, new case reports remain well below their April peak. As of Wednesday, six of the country’s 11 states with flat or falling case levels are in that Northeastern corridor.
“It’s acting like Europe,” Dr. Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said of the Northeastern United States.
Like Europe, the Northeast suffered a devastating wave of illnesses and deaths in March and April, and state leaders responded, after some hesitation, with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts. Residents have largely followed rules and been surprisingly supportive of tough measures, even at the cost of economic pain.
Dr. Jha said the difference in regional trajectories was so pronounced that, by the time flu season rolls around in the late fall, “I would not be surprised if what we have is two countries, one which is neck-deep in coronavirus, its hospitals overwhelmed, and another part of the country that is struggling a little, but largely doing OK with their economy.”
It is also true that the Northeast remains the corner of America that has suffered most from the virus.
New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island have reported the country’s most deaths per capita over the course of the pandemic, with more than 61,000 combined. And the economic wounds from prolonged shutdowns are deep: Massachusetts’s unemployment rate in June climbed to 17.4 percent, the worst in the country, according to federal data released on Friday.
But polls, so far, suggest that voters in the Northeast are prepared to tolerate prolonged economic pain in order to stop the spread of the virus. Governors from the states that were hit early in the pandemic have sustained the highest approval ratings in the country.
And in May, when a poll by Suffolk University Political Research Center asked Massachusetts residents how long they could endure the hardships of a shutdown, 38 percent of those surveyed answered “indefinitely.”
“This isn’t an economic policy, this is life or death,” said David Paleologos, the center’s director. “That is at the core of why people are saying, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’”
The crisis has drawn out key regional differences in how Americans view the role of government in their lives, said Wendy J. Schiller, chair of the political science department at Brown University in Providence, R.I. The Northeast, she said, with its 400-year tradition of localized, participatory government, has been less affected by decades of antigovernment rhetoric.
Four months ago, all of the New England governors were scrambling to contain the spread of the virus. They had hesitated to impose shutdowns in early March, when many in the public health community were urging immediate action, Dr. Jha said.
“It took longer than it should,” he said.
But the responses were aggressive. Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of Massachusetts, decided after a late-night phone call with Jim Yong Kim, co-founder of the nonprofit Partners in Health, to budget $55 million for contact-tracing programs that would recruit and train a corps of 1,900 newly minted public health workers. The program was up and running within weeks.
“I certainly felt under the gun — and I know many of my colleagues did — to make decisions with less than perfect information,” Mr. Baker said.
By this month, tracers were able to reach 90 percent of contacts within 24 hours. New cases had fallen so steeply that the corps was reduced to 500.
There was a similar scramble to acquire personal protective equipment, which included chartering six flights from China to carry shipments of masks. In early April, Robert Kraft, the owner of the New England Patriots, transported a million N95 masks from China to Boston Logan International Airport on a team plane.
“There’s all kinds of things that happened over this period of time that were unusual decisions and risky ones, but for most of us, we felt we were doing what we had to do,” said Mr. Baker, whose job approval ratings rose to 81 percent in late June, according to a Suffolk University poll.
In Rhode Island, Gov. Gina Raimondo, a Democrat, took a stern approach beginning in late March, at one point ordering State Police to stop cars entering the state from New York to enforce quarantine requirements. She regularly warns that expanding freedoms will be curtailed if residents fail to observe social distancing rules.
It has been a transformational political moment for Ms. Raimondo, lifting her approval ratings to 81 percent in late April, at the height of the pandemic, from just 35 percent in January. Her signature admonition — “knock it off” — became so popular that a gift shop in Providence printed it on T-shirts.
Mr. Baker said the high level of compliance with quarantine measures was natural, given how badly the region was battered in the spring.
“Like everybody else, I know people who have been directly affected by this thing,” he said. “I’ve had very close friends almost die. I’ve had good friends who have lost family members because of it. I went 100-odd days without seeing my father because he’s 92 years old and in an assisted living facility.”
It is not certain what the months ahead will hold for the region. A new surge of cases in the South and the West has spread across other states, and as of this week, cases were rising in 41 states. Among states where cases were slightly rising in recent days were Rhode Island and Massachusetts.
Dr. Jha said he was optimistic that Northeastern states could maintain control over the virus’s spread through the summer, reopening gradually while closely monitoring shifts in the data. “I think they’re watching what’s happening in the South and they’re horrified,” he said.
Gov. Janet Mills of Maine, a Democrat, sounded cautious. She said officials in her state were “exhaling, but safely, with masks.”
“The last few weeks, in particular, have felt good, but we’re not out of the woods,” she said.
The coming months will bring new waves of difficulty as well, as the economic impact of the spring shutdowns ripples outward, unemployment benefits expire and an expected flood of evictions begins.
Of all the difficult decisions that she faced this year, Ms. Mills said, none has been more “gut-wrenching” than her first stay-at-home order.
“Nobody wants to be the governor who puts the kibosh on graduations, weddings, beach parties, bars,” she said. “Nobody wants to be the governor the tourist industry rails against. Nobody wants to be that governor.”
Enough is enough. There’s a better path forward for America
via @BostonGlobe – John Kasich – July 22
America, we’ve lost our way. As a nation, and as individuals, we’ve been thrown off course by an endless barrage of shocking words and divisive deeds from the president who is supposed to lead us.
Watching each new step in the wrong direction over the past three and a half years, we shuddered and told ourselves that America could never stray further from the path our Founders intended. As bad as each outrage from President Trump was, we thought this was it, that things could never get worse. Until they did.
Like many who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for him, I tried to give this president a chance, with the hope he might rise to the occasion and keep us, however shakily, on the right path. Those hopes were quickly dashed, not only by his words, but especially by his policies, positions, and outright deceptions.
There’s been no saving grace left by a rising stock market or any other bragging points he may have earned or fallen into. Nothing he’s done is protecting us from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic — over 141,000 American souls have already been lost to it, and the surge continues — or from the pain and anger in divided communities, the bloated government finances, or the eager adversaries emboldened by our global retreat.
Haven’t we all had enough? Aren’t we sick and tired of losing our way? I know I am. And, as a life-long Republican, I find it’s been enough to override my sturdiest political attitudes and party loyalties for as long as this crisis lasts.
While there are many issues on which my Democratic friends and I do not see eye to eye, my love for America allows me to put those differences aside for now. I look forward to working with anyone who shares this same, singular concern: America’s soul will be irreversibly eroded under four more years of our current “leadership.”
Americans must find our way again. Just as we can no longer tolerate the path we are on, we must also reject the temptation to protest one man’s divisive and mean-spirited acts with division and meanness of our own. We must choose another path, the path of unity.
Healing the nation after nearly four exhausting years of systematic splintering of the American spirit requires us to remember those values that have always united us. These are ideals we have sometimes fallen short of, but never — until now — threatened to abandon: the America of freedom, equality, opportunity, the rule of law that protects democracy. The America that still believes in common decency.
A nation confident in its justice and rooted in decency and respect for one another rallies to stand up against tyranny wherever it sees it. A unified nation, one that holds all our cultures and lifestyles in equal value and affords us all the same protections and opportunities, weaves together our differences to build a shield against oppression.
The first three words of the Constitution, the most transformative political document the world has ever known, are, “We the people.” All of this must start with us, “we the people,” right now. Do we want to heal America? It takes more than a post on our social media feed.
Let’s start in our community — or our street. Ask your neighbors if they think America could be more unified, peaceful, and, well, nice. Volunteer for a cause you value. Practice your faith — or just be kind. Vote according to America’s guiding principles and know it matters. Believe that America is a force for good and help make sure that’s not just a slogan, but reality.
The wild ride we’ve all been on since January 2017 doesn’t need to be our path going forward. There is a better path, but it requires something more from each of us. It is the way of democracy and the eternal vigilance demanded of those who seek to enjoy its benefits. Those benefits — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — were purchased by the blood and sweat of the women and men of all colors who came before us. Respecting their sacrifices means leaving some space for the differences between us, even as we come together as Americans to fight to ensure that that space can continue to exist.
I’ve had enough of the path we’re on, a path I know will not end well. I am tired of worrying about America’s tomorrow. It’s time to come together and reject division, anger, indulgence, and isolation. It’s time to get back to practicing the ideals that have brought us so far.
Now, more than ever, Americans must reject those forces that seek to divide us and, instead, unite as one people, with the individual freedoms to fulfill America’s promise to pursue all of our own varied, beautiful dreams, now and tomorrow.
John Kasich expected to speak at Democratic National Convention for Joe Biden
John Kasich expected to speak at Democratic National Convention for Joe Biden
via @usatoday – July 20
WASHINGTON — Former Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich, an outspoken critic of President Donald Trump, is expected to speak on behalf of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden at next month’s Democratic National Convention, the Associated Press reported Monday.
The party’s invitation comes as other high-profile anti-Trump Republicans are likely to become more active in support of Biden leading up to the election, according to the AP. The AP cited “a person with direct knowledge” of Kasich’s plans “who insisted on anonymity to discuss strategy.” …
A Kasich endorsement of Biden could help strengthen the former vice president’s bona fides among moderate swing voters, a key voting bloc that polling shows Biden is winning over Trump. It could also boost Biden’s efforts in Ohio, a state that Trump won by 8 percentage points in 2016 but has turned competitive as the coronavirus pandemic takes a toll on the president’s polling. …
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,090,493)
Deaths ( 145,981)
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,100,875)
Deaths ( 146,183)
India
Cases ( 1,239,684)
Deaths ( 29,890)
Mexico
Cases ( 356,255)
Deaths ( 40,400)
UK
Cases ( 296,377)
Deaths ( 45,501)
Germany
Cases ( 204,470)
Deaths ( 9,182)
Canada
Cases ( 112,206)
Deaths ( 8,870)
China
Cases ( 83,707)
Deaths ( 4,634)
Sweden
Cases ( 78,504)
Deaths ( 5,667)
July 22, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,100,875)
Deaths ( 146,183)
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-23/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-18-in-Xinjiang-SlU6AAKroQ/index.html
July 23, 2020
Chinese mainland reports 22 new COVID-19 cases, no new deaths
Chinese health authority said Thursday that the Chinese mainland registered 22 new confirmed COVID-19 cases on Wednesday, including 3 cases from overseas and 19 domestically transmitted.
Of the 19 domestically-transmitted cases, 18 were reported in northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, the remaining was in Liaoning Province.
Of the 3 cases from overseas, 1 was reported in Shanghai, 1 in Guangdong Province and 1 in Shaanxi Province, said the National Health Commission.
No deaths related to the disease or new suspected COVID-19 cases were reported Wednesday, while 15 COVID-19 patients were discharged from hospitals.
Chinese mainland new locally transmitted cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-23/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-18-in-Xinjiang-SlU6AAKroQ/img/000cc3173c2e4bbe96ca127f84fb6084/000cc3173c2e4bbe96ca127f84fb6084.jpeg
Chinese mainland new imported cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-23/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-18-in-Xinjiang-SlU6AAKroQ/img/4df4fca202dd4edb9f7560c2cb3068fe/4df4fca202dd4edb9f7560c2cb3068fe.jpeg
Chinese mainland new asymptomatic cases
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-23/Chinese-mainland-reports-22-new-COVID-19-cases-18-in-Xinjiang-SlU6AAKroQ/img/7afac062dd284b79b4028f0f2db7420e/7afac062dd284b79b4028f0f2db7420e.jpeg
https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-23/Beijing-reports-no-new-COVID-19-cases-for-17-straight-days-SlSMQQHGgg/index.html
July 23, 2020
Beijing reports 0 new COVID-19 cases
Beijing recorded no new domestically transmitted COVID-19 cases on Wednesday for the 17th day in a row. The total number of cases, since the Xinfadi market outbreak was discovered on June 11, stands at 335, the municipal health commission said on Thursday.
Eight more patients recovered on Wednesday, taking the total number of recoveries to 256 in the local cluster.
Eight asymptomatic patients are under medical observation in the Chinese capital, and no new asymptomatic cases have been reported.
[ https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EcUAiKXVAAApdzB?format=jpg&name=4096×4096 ]
July 23, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,120,033)
Deaths ( 146,533)
July 23, 2020
Coronavirus
US
Cases ( 4,143,733)
Deaths ( 146,807)
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/nyregion/coronavirus-testing-nyc.html
July 23, 2020
9-Day Waits for Test Results Threaten N.Y.C.’s Ability to Contain Virus
“Honestly, I don’t even really see the point in getting tested,” said one New Yorker who has waited nearly two weeks, with still no results.
By Joseph Goldstein and Jesse McKinley
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/23/opinion/us-italy-coronavirus.html
July 23, 2020
Why Can’t Trump’s America Be Like Italy?
On the coronavirus, the “sick man of Europe” puts us to shame.
By Paul Krugman