"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.