Beyond parody: Delusional Rush Limbaugh says red states are paying for all this emergency spending

Here:

"The red states are gonna create capital and money to transfer to pay these people their stupid welfare costs (and whatever else they’re using to bleed this country dry), while their population sits home, doesn’t work, waits for the federal check to show up — and they sit around and they trash the supposedly reckless red states. I cannot tell you how this irritates me".

No one is "paying" for anything. It's all borrowed. And Limbaugh's personal portfolio is probably buying a bunch of it, as is every portfolio out there, from individual investors to institutional, to sovereigns, etc. The entire world craves the safety and security of US Treasury securities and can hardly get enough of them, but Limbaugh thinks Republican states are carrying the whole world on their shoulders.

Even as Limbaugh was yammering away spouting stupid, 10-year Treasury securities were flying out the door at record low rates at auction:

"The U.S. Treasury held an auction for $32 billion of 10-year notes in Tuesday afternoon, selling them at a record low yield of 0.70%". 

Federal debt has soared from $23.5 trillion on March 16th to $25.1 trillion on May 11th, and it'll keep soaring.

The Federal Reserve Bank's balance sheet has soared from $4.1 trillion on February 26th to $6.7 trillion on May 6th, and it will keep soaring.

And they are just getting started:

"The central bank had previously balked at direct aid to nonfinancial businesses, but is set to finance trillions in relief across nearly every sector of the economy amid a historic downturn".

Meanwhile Federal Reserve lending operations at ultra-low rates continue to keep businesses alive which should have died long ago. They were doing it before Trump came along, did it with Trump's assent after his election, and will keep doing it.

The Trump administration has signed off on this gargantuan repudiation of free market capitalism, but Rush Limbaugh thinks it's all paid for by Joe Sixpack.

Trump marks the end of Republicanism's "fiscal conservative" brand for at least a generation, and that's what really irritates Rush Limbaugh. He's hitched his wagon to a wayward horse and now it's in the ditch along with the rest of the country.

Stupid is as stupid does.

Don't catch a "cold" down there in that puddle.

We live in a culture of death, which makes it an anti-culture, where a meaningless conservatism has sat still for millions upon millions of abortion deaths, and will sit still now for deaths from COVID-19

USA hits 80,239 COVID-19 deaths, 1,345,307 cases, according to Johns Hopkins data, mortality rate rises to 5.96%

Mr. 15-cases-going-to-zero:

Two months ago, on the morning of March 10, Michigan still had zero cases of SARS-CoV-2

Today, May 10, Michigan has 46,756 cases and 4,526 deaths.

The case fatality rate of 9.68% is the highest in the nation.

In my county of Kent, barely 21% of the cases are Caucasian. By far Hispanic or Latino people have the most infections at over 35%, with African Americans having fewer cases than whites at 19.5%. Asians have fewer than 8% of total infections.

Frankly when I began posting about this in late January after following the news in China quietly for a few weeks prior to that I never imagined we'd be in this situation.

I felt certain America's health care system was too robust to let it happen.

Boy was I wrong. 

15% of those tested in the US have turned up positive so far, and of those 5.9% have died. Mind you, the average flu season in the US sees 8% of the population estimated to have been infected, with just 0.1% dying.

South Korea, on which I had hung my hopes as the proper comparison, has had just 1.6% test positive so far, with just 2.3% dying.

It's infection rate came way down from the 4.7% which obtained in early March because it employed extensive testing, quarantining (using phone apps to track, and gps wrist bracelets where necessary for scofflaws) and contact tracing. In other words, South Korea acted like Big Brother if you are an American libertarian.

South Korea's mortality rate came up dramatically from the 0.6% which obtained in early March, but of course it was still early in the outbreak. Needless to say, America's current rate of death at 5.9% is still 156% higher than South Korea's, despite the massive rise from 0.6%.

Cases in South Korea stubbornly remain below 11,000 in a country of 52 million (.02/million) because it determined to stop the spread.

In the USA we have .4/million and climbing (1900% more) because we are not a serious country.

We are a country filled with and run by childish people whose disregard for the health care system resembles nothing so much as the disobedient child's interminable disregard for a parent who never disciplines it.

Guess what? SARS-CoV-2 is coming for you. The beating will continue until morale improves.

Case positivity rates for SARS-CoV-2 in countries with 1+million tests and in US states with the most tests

Ranked by most tests performed:

USA 15.1%

Germany 6.2%

Italy 8.7%

Spain 10.6%

UK 12.5%

France 12.8%

WHO says epidemic control is predicated on the case positivity rate falling to 10% and lower.

New York 29.8%

California 7.3%

Florida 7.6%
Texas 7.9%
Illinois 18.3%
New Jersey 45.6%
Pennsylvania 20.5%
Michigan 16.6%
Georgia 13.8%
Colorado 19.3%

It's the libertarian crazies among us who are clueless and spoiled, not the cooks, servers and dishwashers

"In other words, if they’re farming or working in a mine, they’re doing so by choice. This should be remembered the next time some spoiled or clueless American politician, economic thinker or worker yearns for a return of the jobs of the past. ... Increased devastation in the U.S. born of lockdowns will be cruel, and if not arrested through a cessation of lockdowns, will reduce Americans to work they previously wouldn’t have been caught dead doing".

-- John Tamny

How does 200,000 COVID-19 deaths by the 4th of July sound to you?

Trump did not keep us safe.

Trump will never understand how he could have stopped this outcome even after failing repeatedly from Feb 1.  Which means we're in for much worse after July 4th unless someone gets through to him.

Sad.

Chart.

Michigan falls to fourth for COVID-19 deaths, replaced in third by Massachusetts

This is the Reuters data.

NY Times is now behind a registration/pay wall.

The case mortality rate for the US has climbed to 5.96%.

New York's is 7.788%.

New Jersey's is 6.48%.

Massachusetts' is 6.13%.

Michigan's is 9.43% (worst in the nation).

USA hits 70,115 COVID-19 deaths according to Johns Hopkins data just six days after hitting 60,000, mortality rate rises to 5.88%

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

1,192,119

COVID-19 in Australia: How did they succeed?

COVID-19 in Australia

cases 6801

deaths 95

case-fatality rate 1.4%

tests 633,107

test-case rate 1.07%

WHO indicates that it is essential to get the test-case rate below 10% in order to control any epidemic. Australia's rate of 1.07% shows that they've done that admirably well. By contrast, the USA's rate is still in the double digits at 16.5%. America didn't test for weeks and weeks at the critical beginning of the pandemic because of a faulty test, and still isn't testing nearly enough. Losing that early jump on the outbreak has put America way behind.

Australia has already tested 2.5% of its population. The US is still at 2.1%.

But other things need to be done, too, to control the virus and Australia has done them, whereas America looks ready to give up on most of them:

Australia’s response to the pandemic has largely centred on shutting its borders, limiting public gatherings and conducting large-scale testing and contact tracing.

Travelling overseas is banned, foreigners aren’t allowed to enter the country, and Australians who return from other countries are kept in mandatory quarantine at specially designated hotels for two weeks.

Social gatherings of more than two people are also forbidden and leaving the house is permitted only for essential reasons like buying food and exercising. ...

When someone tests positive, their close contacts are tracked down and ordered to self-isolate for two weeks.

The main reason for Australia’s success is probably its strict travel restrictions, says Adam Kamradt-Scott at the University of Sydney. About 70 per cent of Australians who have tested positive for covid-19 picked it up while they were overseas, making it important to stem this flow, he says, and being an island nation has made it easier for Australia to rapidly shut its borders.

Social distancing, testing and contact tracing have added to the success of travel bans, says Kamradt-Scott. Plus, there may be cultural factors that have limited the spread of the virus, like the fact that most Australians choose to live in separate dwellings rather than apartment buildings and older people who require care tend to live in care homes rather than with their families, he says.

Unlike many other countries, Australia has kept schools open, but they don’t appear to have been drivers of virus spread so far, says Kathryn Snow at the University of Melbourne.

Despite these successes, Australia has also committed some major blunders. For example, it allowed 2700 passengers to disembark from the Ruby Princess cruise ship on 19 March, even though many were showing covid-19-like symptoms. More than 600 cases have now been linked back to the ship. Some Australians have also ignored social distancing recommendations and crammed into beaches and parks. 

Australia has taken a big hit to GDP just like the US because it basically shut down business to help cope with the spread.

But Australia is in much better shape than we are in America because it is controlling the virus whereas in America the virus is still controlling us.

South Korea today has 0.0002 confirmed coronavirus cases per million population, America has 0.0033, 16.5x as many

South Korea's first coronavirus infection was reported on the same day as America's first infection, but South Korea practiced strict quarantine of infected people, contact tracing, widespread testing, mask-wearing and social distancing, without locking down its economy.

America did only the social distancing part after it was already too late, and then a hodge-podge of lockdowns with that.

As a result, South Korea has almost 11,000 confirmed cases today, but America has almost 1.1 million, 100x as many.

As for deaths, South Korea has 0.0000047 per million, the US 0.0001935 per million, 41x as many.

Year over year in 1Q2020, South Korean GDP actually grew by 1.3% vs. just 0.3% for GDP in the United States (BEA Table 6), 4.3x better.

South Korea has had far fewer cases of the disease, far fewer deaths and a much better economic outcome than in the United States because it wisely understood that what it had to do wasn't an existential threat to liberty.

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.

An anniversary of sorts, more of a milestone I guess

Real GDP growth since 2007 lags the Great Depression era by 42% and the post-war by 52%

And Trump thinks this is the greatest economy ever.

Climate update for KGRR February 2020

Climate Update for KGRR February 2020

Max Temp 51, Mean 50

Min Temp 4, Mean -2

Av Temp 27.5, Mean 24.5

Rain 1.2, Mean 1.79

Snow 15.9, Mean 13.2

HDD 1081, Mean 1136

HDD to date 4517, Mean to date 4892

By heating degree days the winter has been milder than the mean winter in Grand Rapids, Michigan, by 7.7%.

  

How Wuhan/Hubei deaths from coronavirus might have been 27,000 or 33,000 not 3,177

From the story here:

Urns are reportedly being distributed at a rate of 500 a day at the mortuary until the Tomb Sweeping Day holiday, which falls on April 4 this year.

Wuhan has seven other mortuaries. If they are all sticking to the same schedule, this adds up to more than 40,000 urns being distributed in the city over the next 10 days.

Already on Jan 26 there was evidence, quickly removed, that China deaths from coronavirus had reached 81% of the official figure as of Mar 28. Remember that the closing of Hubei Province didn't occur until Jan 23, so on Jan 26 there was still chaos in China as authorities scrambled to secure the actual as well as the information environments.

Based on widely discussed figures, if one assumes Wuhan's 11 million population normally experiences a death rate of 0.7%, then 77,000 residents die annually from all causes under normal conditions. This yields 211 deaths per day on average and 6,417 deaths per month, or 12,833 over the two-month epidemic. Call it 13,000. 40k-13k = 27k dead from COVID-19.

The problem is that it was asserted that as many as 5 million residents of Wuhan had already departed the city for Chinese New Year of the Rat celebrations ahead of the Jan 23 closing of the city. These remained outside Wuhan during the epidemic because they were not permitted to return. If you leave 6 million in the city, the normal mortality rate of 0.7% yields 42,000 deaths annualized, or 3,500 a month. So there would have been just 7,000 deaths normally over the two-month period of the epidemic from non-epidemic causes. 40k-7k = 33k dead from COVID-19.  

But we'll probably never really know.

China drops to third in world coronavirus cases behind US and Italy: China's numbers look less credible by the day

MI moves up to 4th in COVID-19 rankings thanks to high-density Detroit metro, but no place compares with NY

I am so sick of all this winning, Donald Trump

Welcome to hell, courtesy of "just a cold"

Hospitals across U.S. consider universal do-not-resuscitate orders for coronavirus patients:

The conversations are driven by the realization that the risk to staff amid dwindling stores of protective equipment - such as masks, gowns and gloves - may be too great to justify the conventional response when a patient "codes," and their heart or breathing stops.

Trump The Libertarian to America: We have to get back to work and infect the whole country in order to save it

“Our country wasn’t built to be shut down. This is not a country that was built for this".

“America will again and soon be open for business. Very soon. A lot sooner than three or four months that somebody was suggesting.”

'Trump very strongly hinted that he planned to ease federal guidance on social distancing at the end of his administration’s “15 Days to Slow the Spread” initiative, which ends next Monday, despite an expected explosion of reported cases as tests for coronavirus become more widely available.'

'Trump began broadcasting his growing impatience with public health measures meant to combat the pandemic — even as public health officials have offered contradictory forecasts — on Twitter over the weekend, a shift that continued throughout the day on Monday.'

Read the whole thing here.

We've gone from 0 cases here in Michigan on Mar 10 to 1,324 on Mar 23, putting us 5th in the nation

Our mortality rate is 1.2%, 12x worse than for influenza.

A week ago I expected the nation would have only 25,000 cases by now at a 5x rate. We have 41,701 and 537 deaths, for a mortality rate of 1.28%.

Increased testing is occurring.

Michigan is staying at home to prevent spread.

Every day you stay at home increases the chances someone hospitalized for COVID-19 will survive.

You do your part just by doing nothing, at home. 

Gramps, born in 1926, says this is worse than 2008

Dad will be 94 this year if the coronavirus doesn't get him first.

He's been through a lot, seen it all. Darmouth graduate. Served in the US Navy from World War II to Vietnam, retired as a captain.

He was just a little kid during the Great Depression, didn't really know any better. But he's watched America become a lot better since then, and now it suddenly isn't.

Things may end for Dad the way they began, with Great Depression II.

Long war on terror, coronavirus, economic meltdown.

We've had war, plague and depression before in this country, sometimes in rapid succession. WWI ended with a whimper as the Spanish Flu pandemic killed tens of millions, followed quickly by the depression of 1920. That one was very deep and severe, but ended quickly because the government . . . did nothing.

Free market economies, if left to be free, quickly recover from catastrophes because debt overhangs are allowed to clear through bankruptcy. Bankruptcy is the cure.

But we can't stomach that, same as we haven't been able to say No to our children. Self-esteem and all that.

So, expect the suffering and disorder to continue.

Sad. 

Why coronavirus spread in the USA

Because instead of issuing a travel stop on Feb 1, Trump let everyone keep flying hither and yon, except for Chinese nationals.

Do you know how many that is?

On average 1.75 million people move through America's nine busiest airports EVERY DAY, as of the first half of 2019.

And the planes still fly to this day.

Things on my list I couldn't get at Sam's Club today due to coronavirus panic shopping

butter

bacon

lettuce

Got everything else I wanted, though. 19 items.

Interesting that I wasn't permitted to buy two bags of mandarin oranges or two bags of frozen flounder, only one of each, but I was permitted to buy two 1.75 liter bottles of vodka and two bags of bagels.

Politically speaking about coronavirus . . .

The virus and the economic problems themselves have basically drowned out the Democrat race for the presidency. Trump is front and center in all of it, dominating the news cycle.

The news is very bad for Trump, but the focus is on him and the problems, not the Democrats.

Neither Biden nor Sanders have much going for them personality wise or policy wise. Their voices sound frail and small in the face of these enormous challenges.

Trump is clearly in his element . . . for now.

But wealth destruction, massive unemployment and death now stalk him politically as much as they do the rest of us in reality. It's not going to help him to insist he knew this was a pandemic all along as he did yesterday when he's on camera denying it was not long ago. Besides, if he already knew, he should have taken drastic action like canceling jet travel on Feb 1. Instead he simply canceled the jet travel of a few Chinese nationals. Had he been knowledgeable, he would have known too that all those travelers by jet from China had asymptomatic spreaders in their midst. That's in part why we have an explosion of cases everywhere. They also came from other hotspots on jets to America. Trump bungled this badly and allowed the pandemic to come here.

Anecdotally people in my orbit are heeding the call to stay home. Commuter trains into Chicago are nearly empty, says a close friend. Road traffic is very light on workdays here in Michigan. Work orders have dried up and employees are on-call, if they haven't been furloughed outright. Work-from-home for the $40k or less crowd is estimated to be possible for just 17% of all individual wage earners in the US. Higher earners have more opportunity for that, but it will probably not last long for some as the economy nose dives. Many will soon be underwater, if they aren't already. This is going to cost an enormous sum and do tremendous damage to the people and the economy.

And to think it was mostly preventable with a little common sense, something neither party seems capable of providing.

This is a catastrophe, a pathetic display of human incompetence.    

America is truly great again: Trump has the best stock market losses, I mean, they are YUGE! Top shelf stuff!

Top 20 daily percentage losses Dow Jones Industrial Average

Top 20 daily percentage losses S&P 500

West Virginia still has no cases: Boomers say it's the moonshine, zoomers say it's the meth, I say it's because they don't fly and no one flies there, at least on purpose

Still waitin' for Trump to lockdown the country, eh?

US coronavirus cases are exploding, up 4.4x in 7 days, current mortality rate is 1.92%, 19.2x worse than for influenza

The real reason Trump & Co. didn't want you to panic

To avoid the Federal Reserve Bank having to intervene to rescue the economy, that's why. But, too late.

The Fed dropped its benchmark interest rate to 0% this afternoon and will restart QE with $700 billion in Treasury and mortgage security purchases. It knows tomorrow is going to be rough.

The reason isn't to boost the stock market, though there is no doubt they hope that would be a happy by-product of their action.

Because economic activity has dived with all the cancellation going on in order to stop the virus from spreading, there is extreme pressure on overnight funding markets which businesses use to fund their operations. Their income has tanked but they still have bills to pay. Borrowing in the funding markets is critical for the survival of far too many companies. The addition of so many more entities having to go to the funding markets than is usual, and in larger quantity, under these new and dire circumstances means money markets will not have enough liquidity to meet these new demands. So, the Fed will step in to keep things well lubricated.

That's it.

This could have been avoided if Trump had simply shutdown the country on Feb 1 like Xi Jinping shutdown Hubei on Jan 23. China is over the hump on the epidemic there because it acted early to contain the infection. We are just getting started, and unfortunately we are looking more like Italy than South Korea. The virus was still capable of being isolated here on Feb 1. Since then it has spread everywhere because we foolishly permitted travelers to come and go, creating hot zones everywhere. Now it's payback time.

This is going to be really ugly unless Trump acts immediately to do what Fauci wants, which is a 14-day shutdown. People need to shelter in place for a few weeks.

You won't care about an economy in flames if you can't breathe because a killer pneumonia has you gasping for breath.

Death rate from COVID-19 remains a catastrophe in Italy, China and Iran less so if you can believe them, USA France and Spain form another group, South Korea Switzerland and Germany all are under 1%

The USA is, unfortunately, not looking more like South Korea.

If the USA gets 30 million COVID-19 cases, a mortality rate of 2.15% translates into 645,000 deaths, 21.5 times the number who die from flu in an average year with 30 million influenza cases (mortality rate of 0.1%).

Coronavirus spread in the US and in Michigan

On Tuesday morning there were still 0 cases in my state of Michigan. Late Tuesday there were two. Yesterday we found out there were 12, and this morning we wake up to 25, according to this NYT map.

News broke yesterday that 3 of the cases were right here in my own county of Kent, 2 women and a man, all over 60, all three travelers to international hot spots. Gee what a shock.

At least one of these cases had been up and down a main shopping drag where I do some of my shopping. He or she went to the gym, a pizza joint, a steakhouse, and two (!) submarine sandwich shops between March 6-8. How pedestrian the tastes of these jet-setters.

Trump is criticized by Democrats because of his Feb 1 travel restrictions on China.

I fault him for not going far enough. He has brought Wuhan into my backyard because of what he has not done and easily could have done.

Trump should have shut down all travel on Feb 1, especially by air, to protect America from the spread of this disease and its impact, which has been enormous. Every plane was a missile. Every passenger was a warhead, and now they are all going off all over the place. 

Local and state governments are scrambling to shut down everything they can, disrupting the lives of millions because Trump couldn't bring himself to disrupt the privilege of a class of jet-setting globalists, elites and wannabes, among whom the disease is spreading, according to the headlines and in fact. Trump himself may come down with it because of this.

I carry no brief for the Chicoms, but Xi Jinping is the great man Trump only wishes he could be because he did what he had to do to protect his country from the virus by locking down Hubei Province. Who cares what the motivation was, whether it was saving face, saving the power and privilege of the communist party, saving his economy, or some other more broadly understood conception of patriotism. In the end Xi Jinping understood what he had to do to survive and prevail before it was too late for China. It took him about one month. We are going on two months, have an Emergency declaration as of yesterday, but you are still free to move about the country, spreading the disease.

There were just over 1000 cases in the US on Wednesday. This morning over 2000, which will be 4000 in a few days, then 8000, then 16000, and so on. The time for locking down travel is long past, but locking it down even now would help. 

University of Washington researchers are finding 7-9% positivity results for coronavirus in their daily testing of sample lots approximating 1000. If that turns out to be the morbidity rate and this virus spreads like the common cold, our country could easily have 30 million SARS-CoV-2 infections, 20% of which will be serious. Those 6 million serious cases will overwhelm our healthcare infrastructure, and many will die because of that. There will simply be too many people to treat effectively.

All for muh freedom.

What Dr. Anthony Fauci really said today, contrary to Rush Limbaugh: Many, many millions could die

When pressed by lawmakers for an estimate of eventual fatalities in the U.S., Fauci said it will be “totally dependent upon how we respond to it.”

“I can’t give you a number,” he said. “I can’t give you a realistic number until we put into the factor of how we respond. If we’re complacent and don’t do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions.”

Read.

Rush Limbaugh's ignorance is invincible

He doesn't grasp that a disease 10x more deadly than flu (0.1% vs. 1% in his example) means 10x more deaths.

If flu normally kills 30,000 in an average year in the US (30 million infections times 0.1%), that means 300,000 deaths (30 million infections times 1%).

But hey, no big deal to Rush Limbaugh, because 300,000 dead isn't the old higher estimate of 3% (30 million infections times 3% = 900,000 deaths).

Incredible.

Trump's 15 coronavirus cases going to zero now number 1,015 through 3/10/20

Monday situation summary 3/9/20

The CDC basically urged people 60 and over to become hermits at home to avoid infection with SARS-CoV-2. High blood pressure appears to be the one thing most who die of the virus have in common.

The COVID-19 outbreak in Italy is killing off parents and grandparents at an alarming level because the healthcare system, though quite advanced up north, is overwhelmed by the disease outbreak. Reports say many patients die in hospital untreated, just as in China in the early days of the epidemic there, because of inadequate infrastructure and doctors for so many patients. The quarantine has been extended now to the entire country. That is not being done to make Donald Trump look bad. 

Stock market losses today were sizable. The decline in the S&P 500 made the top 20 list for daily percentage losses. The stock market is a confidence game, and valuation has grown to outrageous levels and stayed there for a couple of years already, so it has been vulnerable to a confidence shock. People just didn't believe it was. The virus hysteria is undercutting that confidence. 

The price of oil plunged as OPEC failed to agree to production cuts. Expect big trouble for the economy as a result, which was already in decline, which is why OPEC wanted the cuts. Declining demand. Max von Sydow died to mark the occasion. Hint: He played Joubert.

People are afraid to fly and some flights are nearly empty. It's a good thing, too, because a study from China is out indicating infected persons can infect others in enclosed, air conditioned spaces like buses, even after they've disembarked. One person infected 11 this way. This also happened in Japan you will recall, where a bus driver was infected by tourists from Wuhan on his bus.

US cases of COVID-19 soared to 654 from the 15 President Trump said back in February were headed to zero. Can't make this go away with the Power of Positive Thinking.

The full time jobs deficit in Feb 2020 in the US is enormous, in the many millions

There is reason to think this epidemic might result in just 100,000 deaths or so in the US at the very worst

And probably a lot fewer.

The US is too robust compared with places like China and Iran to descend into their chaos, but South Korea's can-do spirit in the face of this epidemic reminds me of nothing so much as Yankee ingenuity. If the bureaucracy in the US can be tamed, we may well have an experience similar to South Korea's.