Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Heads up for tomorrow!

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 […]

Does recovering from Covid 19 cause immunity to new infection by Sars Cov2 ?

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 […]

Real options and social distancing

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 […]

Quick take on the Payroll Protection Program and Health Care Enhancement Act

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 […]

Jobless claims still point to over 20,000,000 lost jobs in April, 15%+ unemployment rate

Jobless claims still point to over 20,000,000 lost jobs in April, 15%+ unemployment rate As I’ve written in the past few weeks, the number of initial jobless claims correlates roughly with the number of net new jobs added or subtracted in any given month. Normally there is too much noise for it to be of […]

The actual US coronavirus trajectory: “flattening the curve” at least until 2021

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

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 […]

Remdesivir 6

Bad news from China. There was not a statistically significant benefit for patients with severe Covid 19 in the large Chinese controlled trial of Remdesivir for patients with severe Covid 19. The death rate was actually a tiny bit higher in the treated group. New data on Gilead’s remdesivir, released by accident, show no benefit […]