We Need a Shadow Government Republican rule in the US is a horror show. We get incoherent ramblings from our president on injecting bleach into our veins, calls for the states to file for bankruptcy from the Senate majority leader, a veto of modest IMF support for developing countries hammered financially by the virus, and […]
Heads up for tomorrow! Tomorrow morning I have a very long post quoting about 20 medical articles at length, explaining (what we think we know so far about) the whole biochemistry of how the novel coronavirus attacks the body. By the time you finish reading it, you will understand a lot about why the disease […]
The WHO warns that it is not proven that we acquire immunity to Sars Cov2. If we don’t we are pretty much doomed. However, I don’t see how people could recover without developing immunity or develope immunity without memory with human immune systems. Here, as often, the burden of proof is placed on the optimistic […]
I missed this when it first came out: We think that the debate regarding extreme social distancing has a clear verdict — it is imperative that we should engage in this social distancing (shelter in place for all but essential workers) at least for the foreseeable short-term, but for reasons that both sides have missed. Our […]
The House yesterday approved the Payroll Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act. The PPP part of the law quite literally just increases the amount of money allocated to the program. That’s it. The law does almost nothing to fix the serious defects of the program in the original CARES act. This is remarkable because […]
The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021 “Flattening the curve” was not such an appetizing option either, because it meant that *everybody* got infected with the disease during the period of flattening, and so the death toll would still be horrifying, perhaps 1% to 3%. It also meant that the […]
Abbreviated Coronavirus dashboard for April 23: New York accounts for ALL of the US’s progress No big changes today, and since a picture is worth 1000 words, let me let the graphs speak pretty much for themselves. 1. Daily infections for the US as a whole continue to look like they are trending slightly down […]
Rates of testing, positive tests, and new infections by State So that I don’t lose them, I wanted to publish both the rates of testing (and positive tests) by State, as well as the (Rt) or rate of new infections for each. Both of these are as of last week. Here is the rate of […]
Where Are People Dying Most Intensively Now of SARS-Cov-2? I am putting this up because I have been hearing seeing people making claims about this that do not agree with what I have just seen at Statista for today, the 50th anniversary of the first Earth Day, for deaths per million according to the pandemic […]
Matt Yglesias has a good piece up explaining why “opening” the economy now won’t save the economy. The reason is that people will continue to avoid contact with others until the epidemic is brought under control. Simply allowing restaurants, theaters, and workplaces to open will not change this basic fact. Indeed, airlines are still open […]