The Associated Press is reporting that a Department of Homeland Security report has asserted that the Chinese authorities deliberately downplayed how contagious and severe SARS-CoV-2 was in early to mid-January so that they could hoard the supplies needed to deal with the disease:

WASHINGTON (AP) — U.S. officials believe China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak — and how contagious the disease is — to stock up on medical supplies needed to respond to it, intelligence documents show.

Chinese leaders “intentionally concealed the severity” of the pandemic from the world in early January, according to a four-page Department of Homeland Security intelligence report dated May 1 and obtained by The Associated Press. The revelation comes as the Trump administration has intensified its criticism of China, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo saying Sunday that that country was responsible for the spread of disease and must be held accountable.

and

Not classified but marked “for official use only,” the DHS analysis states that, while downplaying the severity of the coronavirus, China increased imports and decreased exports of medical supplies. It attempted to cover up doing so by “denying there were export restrictions and obfuscating and delaying provision of its trade data,” the analysis states.

The report also says China held off informing the World Health Organization that the coronavirus “was a contagion” for much of January so it could order medical supplies from abroad — and that its imports of face masks and surgical gowns and gloves increased sharply.

Those conclusions are based on the 95% probability that China’s changes in imports and export behavior were not within normal range, according to the report.

On the one hand I think we need to reserve judgment a bit. A report of a report of a conclusion based on indirect evidence and motive is not exactly a “smoking gun”. On the other I think that the Chinese authorities are guilty of capital crimes at enormous scale and need to be held accountable for their malfeasance.

I think the only practical way to accomplish that is through ostracization and enlisting the support of other countries to do the same. We just need to rally the support of the other major economies. Perhaps the Trump Administration can rise to the occasion but persuasion and rallying the reluctant to their cause has not exactly been among their strong suits.

Yesterday I looked my high school up on Wikipedia for the very first time. I don’t think I learned much that I didn’t already believe (other than that Sacagewea’s son graduated from my high school). I did learn that the son of a family friend who was a few years ahead of me was now a professor of business ethics at Harvard.

We are all the products of the sum of our experiences plus our genetics plus a bit of chance and innate temperament. Attending my high school was certainly a formative experience for me. I attended on full scholarship—my dad would have accepted nothing else. He was skeptical about my siblings’ or my attending anything but a public high school. Both he and my mom had graduated from public high schools, after all. All of my siblings attended the local public high school and they received good high school educations.

My high school is routinely rated one of the top 20 high schools in the country. Most of the others are well-known eastern prep schools. Entrance was based on competitive examination. Going from eighth grade to my high school was a bit like attending a good, small college immediately. Most of my high school teachers had post-graduate degrees, generally doctorates. Some had more than one. My junior and senior year English teacher had doctorates in theology and comparative literature. My Russian teacher for four years had doctorates in Russian and Italian. By the time I graduated I had the equivalent of two years’ worth of college English, two years’ worth of college Russian, two years’ worth of college Latin, a year’s worth of college math.

I was actually disappointed when I went to college. Not only was the highly-ranked college I attended tremendously easier and less rigorous than my high school but I missed the high quality of my peers. It’s not that my college peers weren’t smart. It was more that not all of them were exceptional.

This morning on my walk with Kara (about 3 miles) I saw several Chicago police officers, standing together, not observing social distancing and not wearing facemasks despite the statewide directives. Although I was sorely tempted I did not take their pictures and did not remonstrate them.

If public employees are not going to observe the rules, how can they expect others to do so?

It had not occurred to me until hearing this collaboration that there was a remarkable continuity from the folk rock groups of the 60s like the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield, swamp rock groups like Credence Clearwater Revival, and pop rock groups like the Dooby Brothers.

The City of Chicago is dependent for revenue on service revenue (water and sewer charges, airline fees—$3.82 billion), local taxes (mostly sales tax—$1.83 billion), property taxes ($1.45 billion), non-tax revenue (fees and fines—$1.12 billion), and grants from the federal and Illinois state governments. All of these sources have largely dried up during the “stay at home” directive. When people can’t pay their rents, landlords aren’t likely to pay their taxes, either.

Can Chicago borrow? Its credit rating is already circling the drain and that will only drive it lower.

Chicago is still spending. It has budgeted $65 million for its emergency response and it continues to pay many city workers and the pensions of retired city employees. What happens when it runs out of money?

Even though outbreaks of COVID-19 in the Global South have been mild relative to those in Europe and the United States, the repercussions of the tactics used in coping with the pandemic in the developed world will have severe consequences in poorer countries, as this article by Daniel Moss at Bloomberg points out:

The Covid-19 pandemic is exposing deep flaws in the economic model that both encourages and exploits migrant labor. Too many rich countries are dependent on low-cost workers, and too many poor communities are over-reliant on the money sent home for food, shelter and education.

Remittances to low and middle income countries will drop by a fifth this year to $445 billion, according to a recent World Bank report. That’s the worst slide in decades and a sharp turnaround from last year’s increase to a record $554 billion, which exceeded foreign direct investment in these destinations. The lender forecasts a slide of 22% in South Asia, where funds are largely bound for India and Pakistan. The Philippines, which gets 10% of its gross domestic product from such payments, could see a decline of 13%.

The situation for the migrant workers themselves is pretty awful:

The pandemic is producing a triple-whammy for migrants: They can’t work, they can’t go home (with airlines grounded) and they stand a greater risk of infection by staying put in their densely packed urban quarters. The bulk of Singapore’s recent surge in cases comes from dormitories built for 200,000-plus foreign laborers. In the Middle East, long a source of remittances for many parts of Asia, living conditions have been criticized as substandard.

A 10% decline in GDP YoY is serious and a 20% decline is desperate in countries where people struggle simply to survive.

The situation with migrant workers in the U. S. is complicated, like everything else here. Millions of legal agricultural workers, deemed “essential”, continue to work, generally without social distancing or any forms of protective gear, frequently living together in close quarters. When H-1B workers are laid off, if they are not hired by another eligible company within 60 days, they lose their legal status.

The millions of migrant workers here illegally are now largely without work or pay and ineligible for social services. I expect many of them to return to their countries of origin, in some cases taking SARS-CoV-2 with them.

I don’t think that Illinois legislator Dan McConchie has the right end of the stick in his criticism of governors exceeding their powers this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal:

As governors across the country destroy their states’ economies in the name of public health, there is shockingly little oversight of their actions.

In my state of Illinois, Gov. J.B. Pritzker has locked down the state, closing swaths of commerce and limiting the movement of citizens in response to Covid-19. These actions have been challenged in court by my colleague, state Rep. Darren Bailey, and a judge initially agreed to a temporary restraining order on the governor’s emergency measure, but only as they apply to Mr. Bailey. The rest of the state remains under lockdown by the governor’s orders, which continue without oversight.

Normally, the three coequal branches of government impose checks and balances to ensure accountability. Power is divided to allow recourse if one branch grows too intrusive or authoritarian. And while many people have sued governors in recent weeks to demand judicial redress, the judicial branch is reactive in nature, usually declining to disrupt legally plausible actions during a crisis. The legislative branch is a far better source of timely restraint.

His problem is not with the governor but with the legislature and the judiciary. In Illinois the governor’s emergency powers are defined and restrained by 20 ILCS 3305/7:

Sec. 7. Emergency Powers of the Governor. In the event of a disaster, as defined in Section 4, the Governor may, by proclamation declare that a disaster exists. Upon such proclamation, the Governor shall have and may exercise for a period not to exceed 30 days the following emergency powers; provided, however, that the lapse of the emergency powers shall not, as regards any act or acts occurring or committed within the 30-day period, deprive any person, firm, corporation, political subdivision, or body politic of any right or rights to compensation or reimbursement which he, she, it, or they may have under the provisions of this Act…

I agree that the governor must conform with the provisions of the law but the issue doesn’t end there. The judiciary needs to articulate the law and the legislature needs to be willing to amend the law or to ensure that it is enforced. I see a mutual longing for despotism among all three branches.

I see it as largely a partisan issue. If Republican Bruce Rauner were still governor, he’d’ve already been shut down by the legislature.

However, I agree with this:

Here in Illinois, some of Gov. Pritzker’s limits on commerce can hardly be defended as “based in science.” Even under his latest Executive Order released Thursday, I can visit Target to buy furniture, Walmart to buy clothing or my grocery store to buy flowers. But I can’t go inside a furniture store, a clothing store or a florist, even though those stores could easily adopt the same safety measures required of the retail outlets permitted to stay open.

Oh, they’re based in science all right. Political science and sociology. Keeping Target and Walmart opened prevents people from rebelling against the lockdown and enabling those stores to continue business as usual is easier to administer than forcing them to close non-essential departments. They’re open for the same reasons that non-emergent city services continue.

Government at all levels is providing enormous subsidies to big businesses while putting small businesses out of business. Half of all Americans work for small businesses. Don’t be surprised if, when the lockdowns end, there’s nothing for people working for those businesses to return to.

More than five weeks ago I wrote a post taking note of an effort to test systematically a number of drugs that had already received FDA approval for other uses but that there was reason to believe might be effective in treating COVID-19. There has been been a follow-up report at The Conversation from that group of researchers:

Our multidisciplinary team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, called the QCRG, identified 69 existing drugs and compounds with potential to treat COVID-19. A month ago, we began shipping boxes of these drugs off to Institut Pasteur in Paris and Mount Sinai in New York to see if they do in fact fight the coronavirus.

In the last four weeks, we have tested 47 of these drugs and compounds in the lab against live coronavirus. I’m happy to report we’ve identified some strong treatment leads and identified two separate mechanisms for how these drugs affect SARS-CoV-2 infection. Our findings were published on April 30 in the journal Nature.

In summary their in vitro studies have shown some success. Two groups of drugs have been at least a little successful, one group that interfered with what’s called “translation”, the ability of the virus to make previously healthy cells start making viral RNA, the other that interfered with the virus’s ability to infect cells. They also found two other interesting results. The first result was that hydroxychloroquine does interfere with the virus’s ability to infect cells but does not do so very effectively. The second was that a common ingredient in cough syrup, dextromethorphan, actually facilitates the operation of the virus. They don’t have enough evidence to say that dextromethorphan should be avoided but it’s interesting.

Dr. Krogan concludes:

The next step is to test these drugs in human trials. We have already started this process and through these trials researchers will examine important factors such as dosage, toxicity and potential beneficial or harmful interactions within the context of COVID-19.

Their study is proceeding slowly and painstakingly which is, indeed, the way that science works. Under the circumstances it’s frustrating but it’s actually exciting that their approach to looking for a treatment for COVID-19 has worked at all.

I mentioned some of my assumptions in my last post. Here’s another one. The pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968 are still in progress, just at lowered intensity. My assumption is that the same will be true of COVID-19. In a column at Bloomberg Narayana Kocherlakota, formerly a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, urges policymakers to plan for that possibility:

So far, the response to the coronavirus pandemic has operated on the assumption that the worst will be over within a year or so. But what if the malaise lasts much longer? It’s a scenario that policy makers must recognize and prepare for.

Breathless media constantly repeat that a vaccine might be widely available by next spring. But even spring of 2023 would be the fastest in medical history, and there’s no guarantee of that. Maybe antibodies will turn out to confer little or no protection from infection, as is true for some viruses. In that case, developing a vaccine would be a lot harder, and the concept of “herd immunity” would be meaningless. Almost everyone would remain susceptible, whether or not they’d had it in the past.

So a very long battle with Covid-19 seems entirely possible – while it seems nearly impossible that the U.S. and much of the world can follow New Zealand’s lead and almost eliminate the disease. A longer-term crisis would have very different implications for the economy. Sectors that are expected to bounce back – such as tourism – could be out for good. Sectors that have seen a boost – such as streaming services – could be permanent winners.

I guess I also assume that not everybody is equally susceptible to the virus and not simply because of differences in age or pre-existing conditions. Just because they’re less susceptible for one reason or another.

I think that even if COVID-19 is not seasonal and has a higher case mortality rate than the seasonal flu, it’s something we need to get used to. I don’t think that political leaders can get their minds around that. They’d better start doing so quickly.