We're not going to have 100,000 dead of COVID-19 in the US "by the end of summer": It'll be by the end of May

Here's the latest US data from The Straits Times in Singapore:

+2,810 new cases

1,067,382 confirmed cases

147,480 recovered

61,849 deaths

The mortality rate is 5.79%.

The active cases is 858,053.

So, an additional 49,681 deaths within the next four weeks or so, or about 1,602 per day for the 31 days of May.

That's 111,530 total deaths by then.

And after that, who knows?

But probably a lot more deaths than 111,530 because our fools insist on opening up the country instead of quarantining the infected and tracing their contacts and testing, testing, testing.

It's the only way.

And Americans need N95 masks by the billions to get back to anything like normal work and school.

USA hits 60,853 COVID-19 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data, mortality rate rises to 5.86%

That's double what flu kills on an average basis in one season, but in just three months. The mortality rate is nearly 59x worse than for flu, and that but for stay-at-home orders.

Donald Trump's 15-cases-going-to-zero now total:

Sad to listen to Mark Steyn give know-nothings the golden EIB microphone today to blanket the country with bilge

We had a lawyer call in from Michigan, where I live, to complain about the governor's tyranny, failing to mention the 1905 Supreme Court precedent her lawyer cites which permits her actions to protect the citizenry. The lawyer must have gone to the same school as convicted Trump lawyer Michael Cohen.

Then we had a caller from Georgia tell us coronavirus infections are much more widespread according to results from several states using antibody tests, never mentioning that all of these antibody tests are unreliable and NONE of them are approved by the FDA.

That caller also said everything was improving in Sweden when the truth is quite the opposite. Sweden embarked on herd immunity early and is now reaping the whirlwind with 2,355 deaths and a mortality rate of 12%, more than twice that of the United States.

But yeah, let Georgia be Sweden.

I guess the Rush Limbaugh supporters in Georgia must know coronavirus will ravage the black enclaves of Atlanta, decreasing the surplus population.

Massachusetts' coronavirus deaths are catching up to Michigan's deaths

How the US acquired so much gold in the first place

Immediately following passage of the [Gold Reserve] Act [of January 30, 1934], the President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed the statutory price of gold from $20.67 per troy ounce to $35. This price change incentivized gold miners globally to expand production and foreigners to export their gold to the United States, while simultaneously by devaluing the U.S. dollar it reduced deflation. The increase in gold reserves due to the price change resulted in a large accumulation of gold in the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury, much of which was stored in the United States Bullion Depository at Fort Knox and other locations. The increase in gold reserves increased the money supply, lowering real interest rates which in turn increased investment in durable goods.

Coronavirus data update for Sun Apr 26, 2020

Johns Hopkins reports right now 5,184,635 tests completed in the US with 940,797 confirmed cases of infection.

That's an infection rate of 18.1%, after stay-at-home has been observed more or less nationwide since mid-March. Average flu infection in the US, without stay-at-home, is 8%. So imagine how bad this could have been, and still might be.

Reports of infection rates as high as 31.5% in Chelsea, MA, are problematic. These are antibody tests, and so far have high false positive rates, meaning all the positives could be false, test populations which are much too small, and test populations which are not representative. People on the streets right now and people in grocery stores right now are not representative of the whole population. What's more, the antibodies detected by these tests could well be for non-COVID-19 coronaviruses, which means you've learned nothing about exposure to SARS-CoV-2.

There have been 54,001 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data right now, for a mortality rate of 5.74%.

Flu mortality averages 0.1%.

Therefore we are dealing with something at least 2.3 times more infectious than flu, and 57 times more deadly.

Global data indicates as of 0730 hours a mortality rate of 6.98%. Test data is too uneven globally to draw firm general conclusions. Mortality data from places like Iran at 6.31%, China at 5.53% and Russia at 0.92% just looks like lies in comparison to open, free societies, as follows.

The European big five, Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the UK have an average mortality rate of 11%, 1.9 times worse than for the US. Germany remains a standout with mortality of only 3.75%, however, which is 35% lower than in the US. Belgium has the most liberal counts of deaths, and so a very high mortality rate of 15.38%.

Norway is at 2.68%, Sweden 12.06% (oops, they followed herd immunity, and are now paying the price), Finland 4.15%, and Denmark 4.84%.

Switzerland 5.56% and Austria 3.56% really stand out relative to Hungary at 10.88%.

Canada reports in at 5.6% with Mexico at 9.43%.

Japan and South Korea come in at 2.72% and 2.26% respectively.

It's obvious to me right now that if America wants to return to some sense of normalcy after this debacle has been allowed to reach the stage that it has, the only plausible way forward is to ramp up testing for the disease massively, and provide masks to the general population which protect it while in public. Instead our president and lawmakers have been busy with other things, like bailing out businesses. They are not serious people, anymore than the people they represent, a minority of which is clamoring for herd immunity, and therefore massive casualties.

The pro-life anti-abortion party is infected with a pro-death coronavirus party. The real division in the Republican Party between the actual conservatives and the libertarian ideologues has been laid bare by SARS-CoV-2. The former want to save you, as do many liberals. The latter believe only in survival of the fittest.  

The idea that immunity will be built up for this disease in the US population so that this will be over once and for all strikes me as completely speculative at this point.

America has to prepare to live with this disease indefinitely.  

More winning from Trump: USA tops for coronavirus deaths and first to reach 50,000, twice as many as nearest competitor Italy

Whoopee!

USA coronavirus mortality rate vs. South Korea and Taiwan 4/23/20

USA             5.66%
South Korea 2.24%
Taiwan         1.40%

Remember how on Feb 24 Rush Limbaugh said there was nothing unusual about the coronavirus?

Here.

But now on Apr 21 this virus has become the complete opposite of the common cold and is quite unusual in Rush's estimation, really bad even, and so bad in fact it's a Chicom conspiracy to destroy the rest of the world.

"All I believe, the theory is that they saw how bad it was and they decided, we’re not gonna suffer this alone". 

Rush Limbaugh is a complete joke.

LOL: Federal Reserve Board recession model today predicts odds of recession at 0.6%

Here.

Climate Update for KGRR March 2020

Climate Update for KGRR March 2020

Max Temp 63, Mean 66

Min Temp 17, Mean 7

Av Temp 38.6 Mean 34.1

Precip 3.27 Mean 2.46

Snow 2.8 Mean 9.0

HDD 808 Mean 954

HDD YTD 5325 Mean HDD YTD 5846

Using Heating Degree Days, the winter season in Grand Rapids, MI, year-to-date has been 8.9% milder than the mean.

As always, my mean data is from the beginning of the record, which in most cases means 1892. There are lacunae for some months in the earliest years.

COVID-19 has become the leading cause of death in the USA, ahead of heart disease and cancer

Why do Drudge's "bombshell" stories always seem to end up coming from titty-rags?

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/coronavirus-began-months-earlier-not-21882132

The referenced study isn't even peer-reviewed yet, either.

"Coronavirus began months earlier and not in Wuhan, bombshell UK report claims"

 

Different faces, same materialist evil

Announces "stay at home" Mar 16, "cure worse than the disease" by Mar 22

Closes Hubei Prov. Jan 23, "actions taken to contain the virus are harming the economy" Feb 3

Laugh of the Day: Limbaugh and Hannity in flames as advertiser Ruth's Chris Steak House gets $20 million bailout from Trump in four days while Main Street waits and waits and waits

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The company, which operates or franchises 159 restaurants, had a profit of $42 million on revenue of $468 million last year.

The owner of the high-end Ruth’s Chris Steak House chain is among the first public companies to disclose it has received a government-backed loan to keep people on its payroll.

Ruth’s Hospitality Group Inc., a company with more than 5,000 workers, received $20 million in forgivable loans on April 7, according to a securities filing. That is four days after the Small Business Administration opened the application window on its $350 billion Payroll Protection Program.

Many small-business owners are still waiting for their banks to process an application or hear back about whether they qualify or will receive financial assistance from the PPP fund. The SBA says 1.1 million applications have been approved for loans worth $263 billion as of Tuesday afternoon. The average loan size is about $239,000 so far, the SBA says. Banks say only small portions of approved loans have been disbursed to businesses. ...

The loans were intended for businesses with fewer than 500 employees, but language in the $2 trillion stimulus bill allows restaurants and hotel chains to participate regardless of how many people they employ.

The maximum PPP loan is $10 million. Ruth’s said two of its subsidiaries each received $10 million SBA loans from JPMorgan Chase & Co. and would use the proceeds primarily for payroll costs. ... As of Dec. 29, Ruth’s employed 5,740 people, of whom 5,216 were hourly staff.

"Hey Melania! Watch me drive this country right into the ditch!"

We now know from TSA data that an average of 2 million air passengers traveled daily in the first 10 days of March 2020 when they should have been grounded due to coronavirus

The average for the same days in 2019 was 2.3 million per day, so while air travel was indeed down, it wasn't down very significantly, only about 13%. Obviously only a minority of the population acted prudently by refraining from air travel.  

You can see from the graph how air passenger travel did not start to decline in earnest until after Mar 13 when Trump declared a national emergency. People simply abandoned air travel after that, out of fear.

Think what might have been had Trump only done it sooner.

Air passenger travel throughout February and March ensured that every corner of America would be deeply penetrated by China novel coronavirus 2019 because millions of people helped spread it everyday, everywhere.

We today have over 500,000 cases and over 20,000 dead in a matter of just weeks with the American economy also on its knees, all because Trump ignored pandemic warnings from his own administration as late as Jan 30.

So in exchange for letting a privileged minority of well-heeled jet-setters continue to travel at the beginning of the epidemic, the rest of us can't even go to church tomorrow for Easter services.

Let that sink in.

Sad doesn't even begin to describe it.

On the morning of March 10, Michigan had zero cases of infection from China novel coronavirus 2019

Tonight, April 10, we have  22,646 cases and 1,280 deaths, and we're afraid even to go grocery shopping.

They are limiting entry at Sam's Club to 300 at a time, and customers there today are wearing homemade masks.

They finally had toilet paper. And chicken. Still no butter, though.

Happy Easter.

Joe Biden should run on "Make America Great Again"

heh heh

Has anyone on the right discussed how Trump and his Fed chair are destroying free market capitalism?

Of course not. When the right does it, it's OK, see. When the left does it, it's socialism or some damn thing. These suck ups say nothing except, "China, baaaaaaaad! America, goooooooood!"

The Fed is now buying EVERYTHING in sight in order to backstop EVERYONE. Today we learned it would buy in the municipal bond market, the commercial mortgage backed securities market, the might as well be junk bond market, and CLOs. That's not free market capitalism.

The Fed balance sheet is already past $6 trillion this week. Remember when it wasn't even a trillion back in 2007? Of course you don't. Remember when Bernanke promised to "normalize" it when the last crisis was over? Of course you don't. Guess who is promising the same thing again? Same Fed chair, different name. Jerry Powell. 

Fed Is Seizing Control of the Entire U.S. Bond Market

It's bad enough the Fed has been long buying agency mortgage backed securities and Treasury securities.

Eventually it will buy stocks, too, now that it is buying anything and everything in the bond markets.

This is all bullshit. If you believe in capitalism, then you believe in bankruptcy. Nobody believes in that anymore, least of all Donald Trump. Otherwise he'd do something about it.

So America declares itself officially dead today, as it literally dies from a virus it willingly invited in.

How fitting. 

Liberalism's mental disorder gets its death wish.

Trump has been net positive in the Rasmussen Reports Trump Approval Index for just two days in 2020 so far

+1 on Feb 25

+1 on Jan 16

Here.

England is paying a heavy price for the seven weeks it wasted at the beginning of the outbreak as it unwisely flirted with herd immunity, which is what numbskulls like Rush Limbaugh want in the US

65,077 confirmed cases

7,978 deaths

Mortality rate 12.26%, nearly 3.5x worse than in the US

We'd have over 57,000 dead already at that rate.

LOL: It's been "wuhan virus numbers" in Singapore at the Straits Times since the beginning of this outbreak, but the Brits gotta apologize

https://www.straitstimes.com/multimedia/graphics/2020/02/wuhan-virus-numbers/index.html?shell

British scientific journal Nature has apologised for associating Covid-19 with China in its reporting, saying that early coverage of the global health crisis by itself and other media had led to racist attacks on people of Asian descent around the world.

More here.

South Koreans remain the safest from coronavirus, followed by the Germans, Americans . . . not so much

Just as Trump said in 2016, George W. Bush didn't keep us safe on 9/11, but now the tables are turned with 14,809 dead and counting because Trump let a deadly virus in on aircraft

Michigan is now third for cases and deaths from China novel coronavirus 2019

China's phony case/death counts recede into the rear view mirror as free and open Western societies' case/death counts reveal the true virulence and danger of China novel coronavirus 2019

Here's the 2020 herd immunity paraprosdokian I thought I would never hear but did

We have to infect the entire population with the coronavirus in order to save it from the COVID-19 disease.

A few voices are actually saying this right now, mostly on "conservative" talk radio. You know who I mean.

England was going to pursue this policy until they realized just how many people would have to die.

Consider what this would mean in the US.

Let's take the South Korean mortality rate, which right now is 1.7% after 6 weeks with no new cases reported today (the US is currently at 2.7% after 4 weeks). Say half the population gets exposed because we give up, go back to work and carry on: 165 million get exposed @ 1.7% means 2.8 million deaths.

Mark Levin was poo-poohing such a catastrophe on his show tonight, like it's not even a possibility, as he rattled off the deaths annually from our wars, heart disease, cancer, etc.

He's wrong. They're all wrong. America is a wide open sitting duck for this disease, which spreads like a cold but kills like the flu. We have the most cases in the world already, by far, 276,965. Flu doesn't spread the way coronavirus does. Not everyone gets the flu. 30 million flu cases is typical, with 30,000 deaths, that's it, in a completely free and open society. But everyone gets a cold. Everyone. And that's the problem. A high morbidity rate.

Fortunately 3/4 of those surveyed think stopping this coronavirus is job one, not saving the economy.

Yes, this will be catastrophic for the economy. It already is. But we've had economic catastrophe before and we know how to rebuild.

The important thing right now is for the government to rescue people, not companies, and buy us some time so that the people actually saving us in the hospitals aren't overwhelmed and succumb. Without Americans there will be no America.

Conserve that. 

Remember George Bush in 2008?

Yeah, George Bush: We have abandoned free market principles in order to save the free market system.

Good times 2008 are here again in 2020. Not.

The S&P 500 closed tonight at 2,488.65

That's down only 23% year to date.

Pretty remarkable, that. I mean, look at these first time claims for unemployment over the last two weeks: 8.7 million not-seasonally-adjusted, 9.9 million seasonally-adjusted.

The market in the past has often risen on bad jobs numbers, but this is ridiculous. It's a total disconnect. These are apocalyptic numbers, yet the market is holding on just 23% down.

There's trillion$ of aid in the pipeline to bail out businesses and individuals, but how long can that last? And to what effect? At some point the laws of supply and demand and inflation will have their say, and it isn't going to be pretty, especially if a 4th bill is passed in the Congress, which now seems likely. Had economics ever been susceptible of replacement by passing bills, we would have done it long ago and enjoyed prosperity without work all this time!

Yeah, right.  

The coronavirus infection is a momentous turning point for America. 

Bank Failure Friday: Second bank failure of 2020

The First State Bank, based in Barboursville, West Virginia, failed today, costing the FDIC Deposit Insurance Fund $46.8 million.

The FDIC insures deposits at the nation's banks and savings associations, 5,177 as of December 31, 2019.