The thrill is gone: Tulsa Trump rally cheap seats empty as Tulsa county adds 627 COVID-19 cases in the last 7 days

Where is ED-209 when we need him? "You're not wearing a mask. You have 20 seconds to comply."

As usual Rush Limbaugh is full of it: He says Lincoln ran an anti-slavery campaign for the presidency

The Republicans of 1860 pledged not to interfere with slavery in the states, but opposed its expansion into the territories. Lincoln's moderation on the issue upset abolitionists.

I check in for 5 minutes just to see what he's on about, and he gets something wrong. Every. Damn. Time.

Update with chapter and verse:

"The Republican Party was actually founded in opposition to slavery, and Abraham Lincoln was the Republican Party’s president. He ran on an anti-slavery agenda, including some other things. The Civil War was waged under his leadership and presidency, and 500,000 Americans lost their lives (mostly white) to end slavery".

Here.

Rush also gets the casualties wrong. Admittedly there is variation in estimates, but 500,000 isn't one of them.

"For 110 years, the numbers stood as gospel: 618,222 men died in the Civil War, 360,222 from the North and 258,000 from the South — by far the greatest toll of any war in American history.

But new research shows that the numbers were far too low.

By combing through newly digitized census data from the 19th century, J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York, has recalculated the death toll and increased it by more than 20 percent — to 750,000".

More.

LOL Bigelow: Refreshing anytime, in the igloo, at the luau, or even after the dance

Cheap widely available steroid confirmed to reduce COVID-19 deaths by 33% among patients on ventilators

Scientists hail dexamethasone as ‘major breakthrough’ in treating coronavirus

"Results of trials announced on Tuesday showed dexamethasone, which is used to reduce inflammation in other diseases, reduced death rates by around a third among the most severely ill Covid-19 patients admitted to hospital".

COVID-19 in the USA is not under control in half the states, with the moving average of daily new cases at record levels in 13 states, including the most populated states of California, Texas and Florida

Redistribution is old, but it's new again

The best thing about this Media Matters attack on Glenn Beck from 2010 is the line it draws from King through Sharpton to BLM

Beck distorts King's legacy while blaming Sharpton for having “perverted” it

'In fact, Sharpton accurately reflected the sentiments of King, who advocated for the “radical redistribution of economic power.” ...

'[A]uthor Nick Kotz writes that during a 1968 trip to Mississippi, King stated: “It didn't cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters” and "[i]t didn't cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote." However, he concluded that “now, we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars -- and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”'

King was a commie from the beginning. Beck just wants to pretend otherwise, like many Republican squishes do. It's whitey pretending things aren't that bad.

Sharpton, like King, is a true believer, if not nearly as intelligent: “the dream was not to put one black family in the White House. The dream was to make everything equal in everybody's house.”

Now the thugs of Black Lives Matter make this the number one demand for economic justice:

"Redistribution of wealth through a 'progressive restructuring of tax codes at the local, state, and federal levels.'"

They are out in your streets trying to make that happen.

What are you going to do about it?

 

Conservatism would keep military base names, Senate Republicans cave to Crockagawea by voice vote

Spineless, useless cowards, except for a couple:

"Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, and Cotton didn't support the amendment".

More.

Buh bye NASCAR

Remember this hysteria about Trump, before there even was anything to be hysterical about?

March 2016, here.

Yet more hysteria brings down Columbus monuments

Story.

Counterprotesters lose jobs because they shouted George Floyd should have complied with the police

Re-enacting the knee on the neck didn't help.

#MeToo hysteria has been replaced by #RacismReckoning hysteria.

Story and video here.

Hysterical Americans, hysterical military

Here:

THE NAVY ON TUESDAY announced it would prohibit the Confederate battle flag from all its military installations, following the lead of the Marine Corps which last week began implementing a ban on its troops displaying the flag in any form. ...

The top officer for the Marine Corps, which is a part of the Navy Department, issued an order in April to all Marines that would prohibit on its bases any rendering of the Confederate battle flag, including on T-shirts, mugs or bumper stickers.

"Anything that divides us, anything that threatens team cohesion, must be addressed head-on," Berger wrote in a message to all Marines at that time.

In a statement last week detailing that order, now in effect, Berger said, "Current events are a stark reminder that it is not enough for us to remove symbols that cause division – rather, we also must strive to eliminate division itself." ...

The Army on Monday broke from its prior hard line and said it would consider renaming 10 bases currently named for Confederate generals, including Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort A.P. Hill in Virginia. ...

Gen. Charles Brown, the incoming Air Force chief of staff, said in an emotional video message earlier this week, "I'm thinking about how full I am with emotion ...

The crime and justice data you don't want to hear

Here:

"If a certain group is committing more crimes, more violent crimes, and law enforcement's having to come into more contact with them, that number is going to be higher. Who in the world in their right mind would think that our shootings should be right along the U.S. Census lines? That's insanity.

"All of the research says we're shooting African-Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed."

Yates expressed displeasure with the largely peaceful protests that have been taking place in big cities and small towns all over the country since Floyd's killing on May 25.

"The officer was arrested the next day. They were prosecuted, they were fired. What are you doing? What do you mean, 'justice?' Justice at this point has been done," Yates said. "Well, then it turned into systematic racism, systematic police brutality.

In Michigan at least, there was no spike in COVID-19 cases due to Memorial Day

The New York Times data for Michigan at us-covid-tracker dot com is anomalous. It adds "probable cases" data starting Jun 5 which the State of Michigan COVID-19 Dashboard does not.

Michigan's data shows no up-trend to cases at all, and in fact shows new daily cases trending lower over the period.

"The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported 284 new cases of COVID-19 Monday, bringing the total to 58,525 [both data points are for Fri 6/5/20]. The state also started reporting probable cases; there are 4,928 cases that are not confirmed yet."

More. 

Biden is crushing Trump in Michigan in latest EPIC-MRA poll by 12 points +/-4

The bad news is exactly two weeks after Fri May 22, the kickoff to the Memorial Day holiday weekend, new daily COVID-19 cases are making records in 9 states and Puerto Rico

Michigan had an astounding 4,529 new daily cases added on Fri Jun 5, 2020.

US COVID-19 deaths now total 110,028 in the Johns Hopkins University data

So, 10 days after hitting 100,000 instead of 9 days going from 90k to 100k deaths. Stay-at-home orders slowed down the rate at which deaths piled up.

What in the SAM HELL is this? 4,529 new COVID-19 cases on Fri Jun 5 in Michigan, 250 new deaths!

Climate Update for KGRR May 2020

Climate Update for KGRR May 2020

Max temp 90, Mean 86

Min temp 26, Mean 32

Av temp 56.7, Mean 57.9

Rain 4.22, Mean 3.48

Snow trace, Mean 0.2

HDD 298, Mean 252, Season 6240, Mean 6651, anomaly -411, season to date 6.17% milder than mean and currently ranks only 18th in the list of mildest winters

CDD 50, Mean 39, Season 50, Mean 45

American Shit Show and Antifa

The right wing wants everything opened up right now, yesterday even, no masks, no restrictions.

They are fools.

The left wing wants gradual opening with social distancing, masks, etc., except in protests. By all means go ahead and protest, they say, because it is more important! Many in the medical community have made the mistake of taking this position.

They are hypocrites.

George W. Bush used to maintain, probably still does, that the Muslim fundamentalists who attacked us on 9/11 attacked us because of our freedoms. They never succeeded for the most part. They managed to make us a surveillance society, it is true, and increasingly a security state, but life has been pretty much normal because we took the battle over there, at enormous expense to ourselves and everyone involved. 

Islamic fundamentalism has been no match for freedom. It doesn't really know how to exploit freedom to destroy it, being at its root itself unfree. It has had to resort to a kind of Fabianism instead, exploiting Western openess to emigrate to Western countries and reproduce there in the hope of eventually outnumbering us. They risk assimilating in the process, however.

But really to destroy freedom outright you need freedom to the max . . . you need anarchy!

In other words, you need a virus! The virus is totally free! It spreads just like that, and you can hardly stop it. Just look at how we have tried.

The virus has been everything Antifa only wished it could be. And Antifa has nothing on it. One look at Antifa and people recoil. Hell, Antifa recoils at itself. It disguises itself and skulks around in packs, and runs home to mommy after its violent stunts.

But the virus is totally free. It's everywhere, it's invisible and it's everything Antifa only wishes it could be. For the virus there are already no borders, no walls, no USA at all. It goes wherever it likes, whenever it likes, and doesn't need a disguise, because it looks just like you, just like me.

The only thing more powerful than an anarchic virus is a self-ordered host, a person who chooses not to be a victim or a spreader, a person fully in control of himself, who can say no to himself.

Such a person is truly the most free person there is. The virus stops there, and only there.

Rush Limbaugh the idiot: Sweden Proves the Lockdown Was Unnecessary

"RUSH: This guy, Neil Ferguson's predictions at the outset said 90,000 people in Sweden would die because they weren't gonna lock down, and 4,000 people died."

Rush Limbaugh's standard of expert opinion is always the guy who gets it wrong the worst.

That's called cherry picking, which is what idiots do.

Let's try to do it the right way.

Sweden deaths to date (no lockdown): 4,542 (18th in the world).

Deaths among fellow Nordics to date (with lockdowns):

Norway: 237
Finland: 321
Denmark: 580.

Sweden also has nearly 41,000 cases and rising. Daily new cases there are near record highs. Sweden is still feeding the beast. The other Nordics have 75% fewer total cases and even fewer than that. The other Nordics are doing enormously better than Sweden.

19 times better, 14 times better, 8 times better.

Rush can pretend this is over all he wants. This isn't over by a longshot, there or anywhere else, until new cases come down and fall to zero.

Sweden's fatality rate is more than twice as high as America's at 11%+. Expect 4,000 more deaths in Sweden at the minimum.

Dumb ass Rush Limbaugh says "coronavirus has vanished as an issue"

New cases in the last week: 150,557

Average new cases daily in the last week: 21,508

Expected new cases in the next 30 days at current level of spread: 645,240

Total current active cases: 1.138 million

Deaths expected from current active cases at 5.7%: 64,866

Deaths expected from projected new cases added in next month: 36,778

In other words, add another 102,000 deaths to the current 105,000 . . . and then add some more, and some more, and some more. 

Rioting is just a temporary little diversion from this United States of Shit Show under Trump.

Hey Rush Limbaugh, you dumb ass, they will never prove the cop intended to kill Floyd, who died of cardiopulmonary arrest while under the influence of fentanyl

Maybe you've heard of it?

You are an irresponsible jerk trying to queer the jury so that cop can't get a fair trial.

You are not on the side of law and order.

 

Rush Limbaugh yesterday turned his program into a shit show, called for George Floyd cop to be charged with first degree murder

Mr. COVID IS JUST A COLD DON'T SHUT THE COUNTRY OVER IT intervenes in a local police case and uses his damn microphone to enlist the whole country in calling for the cop to be charged with first degree murder.

Mr. Virtue Signaling, I say. Mr. I'm gonna die soon better burnish my reputation.

Now the medical examiner says Floyd died of cardiopulmonary arrest and was intoxicated with fentanyl.

And during the program Rush said if what happened to Floyd had happened to a white man we probably never would have heard about it.

Well, it did happen to a white man, and we didn't hear about it until now, not because no one cared, but because the case was deliberately kept from the public.

But as usual Rush flaps those gums before looking into anything too deeply. He's a lazy ass. Always has been. Just like Trump.

 

Hillary in 1996 wanted to bring the superpredators to heel

Nine days after hitting the 90,000 threshold, Johns Hopkins shows over 100,000 COVID-19 deaths in the US

The addition of 10,000 deaths in nine days instead of seven, six and five previously shows how the stay-at-home policy in the US has slowed down the spread of infection and therefore the rate at which deaths have been adding to the total.

Using the convenient data shown at The Straits Times, there are still 1,153,566 active cases in the US after subtracting deaths and recoveries from total cases. At the case fatality rate of 5.8% we can expect 66,907 additional deaths within 4-6 weeks.

Adding more cases, however, will obviously mean adding more deaths beyond the current projection of about 167,000 deaths.

LOL, Michigan's rapacious utility Consumers Energy delays roll-out of new Summer Peak Rate program due to COVID-19

 

Due to COVID-19, Peak Pricing has Been Delayed Until 2021:

Given the economic challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, we are delaying the implementation of the summer peak pricing period until 2021.

While you will still see this rate code (1001) on your bill, we will not be moving forward with the peak pricing for this summer as initially communicated. You will instead have a flat rate for electricity throughout the remainder of 2020.

The Summer Peak Rate includes a peak period from June 1 through September 30. The peak period consists of “on-peak” and “off-peak” rate prices:

• “On-peak” rate price – From 2 to 7 p.m., Monday through Friday, your electricity rate will cost about 1.5 times higher than the “off-peak” rate price.
• “Off-peak” rate price – customers will pay a lower rate price for electricity used outside of on-peak times. This is the same rate you would pay October through May.

Trump will lose because he is alienating millions of people like this guy with incessant calls to reopen before it is safe

"Lehner, who now considers himself an independent, says he is frightened by the president's lack of leadership and maturity amid the nation's health and economic crisis. Several people in his gated community in Delray Beach, Florida, have gotten sick; at least one has died. He worries about his own health - he has an autoimmune disease - and also about his adult children, including a daughter who has gone back to work and a son whose pay has been cut. He plans to vote for Joe Biden in November."

More.

Trump took a big hit in April, now again in May, in Rasmussen's Trump Approval Index, net negative in double digits

Polls by both PEW of nearly 11,000 adults at the beginning of May and AP-NORC of 1,000+ in mid May both indicate 48% to 54% consensus that restrictions imposed by state authorities to prevent spread of COVID-19 have been/are "about right". The balance of opinion is split between "too harsh" and "not harsh enough".

Trump signed on to federal stay-at-home recommendations in mid March but began to argue against them within a week and hasn't let up since.

Meanwhile PEW found that 68% of all adults worried that states would re-open too soon and religious whites expressing falling support for Trump's crisis response.

Trump has a base of strong support at about a third of America.

Trump's greatest US economy ever suddenly has 25 million people on insured unemployment compensation

Somebody must have been asleep at the switch for something that bad to happen so quickly.

Who was that?

Projecting US deaths from COVID-19 to Nov 19, 2020 using optimistic assumptions

Daily US deaths from COVID-19 fell from 27,279 on 4/20 to 20,951 on 5/19, or 23.2% under circumstances of stay-at-home orders in many US states.

The following projection assumes, incorrectly but optimistically, that those orders would remain in place indefinitely, or at least the behaviors from them, and that case growth would continue to fall monthly at the same rate. 

Opening up the country as we are about to will eventually stop the decline trend and increase case counts and therefore death totals, but that's a problem for another day.

Assume that by 6/19 cases per day would fall to 16,090

by 7/19 to 12,357

by 8/19 to 9,490

by 9/19 to 7,288

by 10/19 to 5,597

Assume a simple average daily case addition per period of 18,520.5

14.223.5

10,923.5

8,389

6,442.5

each @30 days

Total cases added by 11/19: 1,754,970 @ 6% case fatality rate =  +105,298 deaths

plus 1.09 million existing cases @ 6% case fatality rate = +65,400 deaths

plus already existing deaths per Johns Hopkins = +92,149 deaths

Total deaths actual and baked in the cake by 11/19 = 262,847

Lots of variables could change the outcome, including improved treatment techniques in ICUs, ramped up use of new drugs like remdesivir, earlier diagnosis of patients through testing, earlier quarantining of the infected, stepped up contact tracing, more mask wearing in public, more social distancing, etc. The country seems quite divided about some of these, however, and many might throw caution to the wind while others do not. Much will depend on the character of local communities. In 1918 St. Louis turned out much differently than Philadelphia.

So as of right now, all things being equal, the much ridiculed original IHME estimate of 240,000 deaths looks more and more plausible with each passing day, even if the "by when" date isn't early August anymore.

USA hits 90,312 deaths from COVID-19 in John Hopkins University data, cases climb to 1,500,753

Here's the recent timeline of fatalities:

50k 4/24/20

60k 4/29

70k 5/5

80k 5/11

90k 5/18

We've gone from adding 10k dead every 5 days to every 6 days and to now 7 days. 

Safe to say we'll be at 100k dead in about a week, approximately May 25 or shortly thereafter.

If you subtract recoveries and fatalities from total cases, there remain roughly 1.09 million active cases as of right now. Keep that in mind for a moment in the context of stay-at-home orders more or less strictly applied around the country.

At the current case fatality rate of 5.95%, that means about 65k more deaths are baked in the cake as of right now, for a total of 155,000 deaths. This would be roughly by July 15.

I will be glad to be wrong and see the number fall, but I can't see why it should given the circumstances. Perhaps there will be improvement at the clinical care stage based on experiences to date. Hard to say.

One thing which might help is seeking help earlier. People have been afraid to go in to hospitals because they don't want to end up on a ventilator. There is evidence that seeking treatment earlier improves your odds.

That said, there is going to be disease spread picking up the pace as states re-open. The curve of infection has flattened precisely because of semi-quarantining of much of the population. Take that away and off we go again.

Ending stay-at-home will give new life to the epidemic in the US, and therefore to the death toll.

This isn't over by a long shot.

Meanwhile the secular bear market in stocks since August 2000 rolls on in April 2020

Return in the last 19.6 years lags the previous period of equal length by 75%, and lags long term return before that by 52%. 

April 2020 Climate Update for KGRR, Grand Rapids, Michigan

April 2020 Climate Update for KGRR

Max temp 75, Mean 79

Min temp 24, Mean 22

Av temp 44.2, Mean 46.5

Precip 4.09, Mean 3.31

Snow 2.2, Mean 2.4

HDD 617, Mean 553

HDD to date 5942, Mean to date 6399

Using Heating Degree Days, a deficit of 457 HDD from the mean to date indicates that this winter has been 7.14% milder through April than the mean winter through April.

May has already racked up enough HDD, however, to take this winter season out of the running to make the list of top ten warmest winters on record. 

Grand total foreign holdings of US Treasury securities in May, 2000-2019

Demand slowed from 2013 as stocks once again got a bid (permanent adoption of Bush tax cuts by Obama and Boehner removed uncertainty), but a flight to safety reappeared in 2019 and 2020. Total was still $6.8 trillion in Mar 2020 even after a big drop from Feb amid currency turmoil, the latest report.

The bid for bonds shows the global economy was already weak last year.

The only thing Trump has accomplished at "warp speed" is ruining the US economy because he ignored a deadly virus until it was too late

Trump, the supposed savior of US manufacturing, has presided over the utter collapse of manufacturing capacity utilization to a level in April 2020 never experienced in the post-war. The president could lawfully and easily order this unused capacity to make masks which would in fact protect everyone, and other PPE for hospital workers and care-givers to protect our front line workers, but he has not. Were he serious about re-opening the country, he would have made this JOB 2 on Feb 1, after JOB 1, which was hard-stopping all passenger air travel, the primary vector for the pandemic. Trump didn't do JOB 1, either.

Industrial production generally has imploded to levels never seen since 1919. The so-called America first president has done nothing in three years to make America strong enough to prevent this from happening. Remember Ann Coulter said long ago already that Trump was a lazy ignoramus. 

Motor vehicle production annualized has tanked 11 million units in just two months to fewer than 72,000 annualized. That's the typical monthly sales figure for a single popular car. 

Oh, I've forgotten unemployment, which also is unprecedented, though understated, at 14.7%. It's actually closer to 20%. North of 33 million not-seasonally-adjusted have made first time claims for unemployment from March 19th inclusive.

Trump's numbers are truly great, as in "you great oaf!"

Yes the government has "bailed out" the workers and the businesses, but with a Rube Goldberg machine which has been completely unfair in its results, picking winners by virtue of their established access to bankers or savvy state systems of unemployment administration. Bank or live somewhere not up to speed? Dats tuff, Anwar. You're a loser anyway.

Meanwhile coronavirus infections are set to soar again because our president is throwing a tantrum to open the country but hasn't made it safe to do so. He's had two months for that but has produced BUPKIS. If you want people to go back to work, they need masks. Where are the masks? Oh well, you were on your last legs anyway.

How anyone can vote to re-elect this level of horrific incompetence and reptilian danger is beyond me.

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.