In my opinion the single thing that the present members of Congress could do if they genuinely wish to effect change is resign. In the 116^th Congress 120 House members and 41 Senate members are over the age of 65. And those are preponderantly members of the Silent Generation, born prior to 1946. As I’ve pointed out before of the present Congressional Democratic leadership only one is a Baby Boomer. The rest are all members of the Silent Generation.

Most of those seats are “safe”—the resignations would result in little change in the party balance in the Congress. But it would almost necessarily result in a Congress with a different racial, ethnic, and gender composition than the present one and not just, obviously, a different age composition and different attitudes.

Following up on a discussion in comments, the following table lists, on a county by county basis, the mortality due to COVID-19 for the New York City Metropolitan Statistical Area as of yesterday, June 13, 2020 (from Worldometer):

So I was wrong. The population of the NYC MSA includes roughly 6% of the U. S. population but accounts for a third of the deaths due to COVID-19 rather than the half that I claimed.

The material of my claim remains true. That mortality is still wildly disproportionate to that in the rest of the country. The policy responses to COVID-19 have been largely conditioned to the situation in New York, probably because of its importance to the national media. A disproportionate number of the national opinion makers live there.

That the other states and MSAs are “catching up” remains an unproven and probably unprovable extrapolation. What the actual science confirms is that there is little relationship between the timing of statewide lockdowns and the number of cases of COVID-19 or mortality due to the disease. If there were California, the first state to impose a statewide lockdown, would have anticipated New York’s experience rather than following it. Furthermore, the claim that the failure of effectiveness of statewide lockdowns is due to non-compliance is circular. I would be interested in actual statistical proof of it but that statewide lockdowns did not halt SARS-CoV-2 in its tracks two months ago does not constitute that evidence.

I don’t know why COVID-19 has hit New York so hard. I would speculate that it is due to some combination of long-term bad public policy at the state and local levels, a bungled initial response by state and local political leaders there, the conditions of life there, and bad luck.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal do not seem to not seem to be overly concerned about CHAZ, the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone”, a few blocks of Seattle presently occupied by “demonstrators”:

The founding of any new nation is worthy of note, and so it is with the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, several blocks of Seattle that have been seized by protesters, Occupy Wall Street types and assorted opportunists. Now it’s up to the citizens of the CHAZ, adapting Federalist No. 1, to decide the important question: whether anarchies of men are capable or not of establishing good government.

This week the Seattle police withdrew from their East Precinct in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, after threats that it would be torched. The cops removed barricades and began “decreasing our footprint,” Chief Carmen Best said, as the protesters had requested. Ms. Best called it “an exercise in trust and de-escalation.” But human nature abhors a vacuum, and CHAZ revolutionaries soon declared their autonomy.

They conclude:

President Trump denounced all this in tweets, but for once he should let it speak for itself. The good progressives of Washington allowed the CHAZ to rise, and now they can decide whether to invade the enclave or let it become a new republic, if they can keep it. The city of Seattle says it has “arranged for garbage cans and portable toilets to be placed in the vicinity for use by demonstrators.” Let’s see how progressive this paradise looks in a month.

which strikes me as about right. As usual I don’t know what President Trump is thinking. I am reminded of Napoleon’s advice: don’t interrupt your opponent when he is making a mistake. An article at USA Today by Ryan Miller describes the scene:

News reports describe the occupied area as peaceful and safe. The words “Black Lives Matter” were painted on East Pine Street. Free food has been handed out at a “No Cop Co-op.” Speakers, poets and other performers share ideas and art.

A sign on the abandoned police precinct reads that the building is “property of the Seattle people.” The Seattle Times reported that some protesters hope to turn the building into a community center.

A community garden has also been planted in Cal Anderson Park. “We’re forced to build new plots because people are giving us so many plants,” Marcus Henderson, who was working in the gardens, told the Seattle Times.

Francis Vann, a 15-year-old high school freshman, told the newspaper that the movement happening inside the area is being driven by young people.

“A lot of times, the older people criticize the young people for how we choose to show our grief,” Vann said. “It kind of takes a lot to stir up emotions with the young people, but once we’re mad, we’re mad. And we’re mad. It’s the young people’s energy that’s out here and the old people’s wisdom that’s keeping us out here.”

I know nothing about the relevant area of Seattle and am disinclined to comment on other people’s problems.

I can only tell you that if, for example, the Austin neighborhood were to declare autonomy, the City of Chicago of which it had formerly been a part should do two things:

1. It should disconnect the water, sewers, and electricity for street lights and traffic lights.
2. It should wish them the best of luck.

Such a move would substantially lower the homicide rate of the balance of the city and probably improve that balance’s on-time high school graduation rate.

This morning the Wall Street Journal is looking closely at a second wave of COVID-19 cases both in editorial and opinion pieces. Peggy Noonan warns of a second wave of COVID-19, either following the reopenings and mass demonstrations of the last two weeks or in the fall:

It had been assumed the summer would offer a respite, and that seems likely in many places, maybe most. New York, hard hit early on, is experiencing a decline in cases. Coronavirus doesn’t like sunlight, fresh air or warm temperatures. It prefers coolness and poor ventilation in enclosed places, meatpacking plants being the most famous example.

Flus and colds tend to recede in the summer and return in the fall and winter. The 1918 influenza epidemic hit America hard in the spring, but its second, deadlier wave came in October.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitchtold the Journal of the American Medical Association that he thinks warmer weather is likely to reduce transmission rates by about 20%: “That’s only enough to slow it down, but not enough to stop it.”

Anthony Fauci can be distressingly deft when speaking on issues that touch on the political, but one never doubts he’s being forthcoming when he speaks of disease. This week he told a biotech conference that Covid-19 has been his “worst nightmare”—a highly infectious new virus that typically attacks the respiratory system, with no clear treatment and no cure. “In a period of four months it has devastated the world,” he said. “And it isn’t over yet.”

She continues:

If you expect the worst on coronavirus you’ll think personal caution and carefulness are absolutely essential this summer, and a hard time is coming late this fall and winter.

Which gets us to the governors, who again will be galvanized.

Merriam-Webster defines “galvanize” as

1. 1. to subject to the action of an electric current especially for the purpose of stimulating physiologically
      // galvanize a muscle
   2. to stimulate or excite as if by an electric shock
      // an issue that would galvanize public opinion
2. to coat (iron or steel) with zinc
   // especially : to immerse in molten zinc to produce a coating of zinc-iron alloy

Now I think that in general we would be much the better off if governors were galvanized in the sense of 1a or, even better, 2 but I suspect that Ms. Noonan means 1b, something that should concern us all. She explains why we should be concerned:

They were right to take strong action early on in the crisis. There is no doubt that the lockdowns saved many, many lives and allowed hospitals to hold their ground.

At least in Illinois that might have been true for about the first three weeks. After that Ms. Noonan’s second explanation sounds a lot more likely:

Then they got carried away. They received too much adulation, enjoyed the role of savior too much, and the lockdowns became longer. Told we were grateful someone was taking responsibility, they became micromanagers of human life. Briefings became self-aggrandizing and Castroesque in length.

Illinois’s governor is on record as saying that he won’t allow the state to reopen completely until there’s a vaccine and the number of new cases per day has been driven to zero which is to say possibly never. Presently, the percentage of positive tests for COVID-19 is at 4% with a larger number of tests being made nearly every day. My question today is the same one I asked over a month ago and to which I have never received a response. I can tell you the cost of Illinois’s lockdown. What is the benefit of 50% excess ICU bed and ventilator capacity over 30% excess ICU bed and ventilator capacity? Illinois hasn’t gone below either figure and, at least in Chicago, the only real threat to ICU bed capacity is due to gunshot wounds.

Ms. Noonan continues:

There will be exactly zero appetite this fall for daily news conferences in which governors announce the phased, Stage 2 openings of certain sectors that meet certain metrics that some midlevel health-department guy seems to have pulled out of his ear. That was the past three months.

What’s the plan if things turn difficult? People won’t want and may not accept a second lockdown, even in the face of a more lethal iteration of the virus. They will likely in a crisis accept increased calls for voluntary social distancing, mask directives, bans on big events, not that we have big events. But—what else?

The governors gained great stature and authority in March and April and began to lose it in May, as did some in the medical and scientific establishments, who became inconsistent in their advice regarding safety and crowds. What early on seemed nonideological came, inevitably, to look like activism.

You can only squander the credit you’ve earned once.

Meanwhile, the editors of the Wall Street Journal have some warnings of their own:

Democrats cite a spike in cases in Florida, Arizona and Texas as evidence of a virus resurgence. But more testing, especially in vulnerable communities, is naturally turning up more cases. Cases in Texas have increased by about a third in the last two weeks, but so have tests. About a quarter of the new cases are in counties with large prisons and meatpacking plants that were never forced to shut down.

Tests have increased by about 37% in Florida in two weeks, but confirmed cases have risen 28%. Cases were rising at a faster clip during the last two weeks of April (47%) when much of the state remained locked down. Now restaurants, malls, barbershops and gyms are open if they follow social-distancing guidelines.

In Arizona, cases have increased by 73% in the last two weeks though tests have increased by just 53%. But a quarter of all cases in the state are on Indian reservations, which have especially high-risk populations. The rate of diabetes is twice as high among Native Americans as whites and the rate of obesity is 50% higher.

Liberals and the media demanded more testing before states could reopen, yet now are criticizing states because more testing has turned up more cases. Keep in mind that New York has reported about the same number of new cases in the last two weeks as Florida, though it ramped up testing earlier so the relative increase appears less significant.

A more important metric is hospitalizations. In Arizona the weekly rolling average for new Covid-19 hospitalizations has been flat for a month. Emergency-room visits for Covid-19 have spiked this week, but the number of ER beds in use hasn’t changed since late April. Hospitals in Arizona (and California) have reported an increase in cases from U.S. citizens and green-card holders returning from Mexico where hospitals are overwhelmed. But with 22% of ICU beds and 62% of ventilators available, Arizona hospitals should have capacity to manage an increase in patients as it reopens.

Texas has also recently reported an uptick in Covid-19 hospitalizations, mostly in the Houston and Austin areas. Current Covid-19 hospitalizations are up about 20% since the state began to reopen, but Gov. Greg Abbott says hospitals aren’t overwhelmed and much of the increase is tied to nursing homes. The number of currently hospitalized patients per capita is still about 80% higher in New York City than in Texas. Mr. Abbott started reopening six weeks ago while Mr. Cuomo began letting manufacturing and construction resume in the Big Apple this week.

concluding:

More infections are inevitable as states reopen, and there will be much trial and error. States need to be vigilant for outbreaks and protect high-risk areas and the vulnerable. But the costs of shutting down the economy are so great, in damage to lives and livelihoods, that there is no alternative to opening for the broader public good.

Good managers must be able to make difficult non-absolutist decisions in the absence of complete information. Good managers are scarce in the private sector. It’s too bad there are even fewer in the public sector.

In his Washington Post column George Will explains why Americans should be optimistic:

Decades of growth have propelled China’s rise from an almost entirely peasant society, to one that still has an enormous peasantry. This growth, which was more rapid than can be continued, pulled China’s per capita gross domestic product to $9,770, 72ndin the world, slightly better than Mexico’s, still behind Russia’s, one-fourth that of neighboring Japan and one-third that of South Korea, and about 15 percent of the United States’ $62,887. The bitter fruit of China’s “one-child policy,” from 1980 until 2016, is an aging population that will become gray before it becomes rich. Last year, China’s birthrate fell to 1.05 percent, a record low (the U.S. rate is 1.73), and China is projected to be among 55 nations with fewer people in 2050 than today. By 2030, Chinese deaths might exceed births. Today, China’s working-age population is 70 percent of the total population; it is projected to plunge to 57 percent by 2040, when there will be barely two workers to support every retiree.

Importantly, there is nothing whatever the Chinese can do to remedy that now. Even if present trends were to reverse, something of which there is no sign, it would take fully two decades before China’s working age population started to grow again. He continues:

In a March review for the Financial Times of two books on China’s economy, Geoff Dyer, the paper’s former Beijing bureau chief, noted that China cannot become “the first authoritarian regime to enter the exclusive club of high-income countries” unless it avoids “the ‘middle-income trap,’ where it can no longer compete on cheap manufacturing but does not yet have the skills or technology to sustain more advanced industries.”

Then there are socialism’s inevitable irrationalities: State-owned banks favoring state-owned industries is one reason China’s debt burden is more than triple the size of China’s GDP. Writing in Foreign Affairs (“China’s Coming Upheaval”), Minxin Pei of Claremont McKenna College says inefficient state-owned enterprises “control nearly $30 trillion in assets and consume roughly 80 percent of the country’s available bank credit, but they contribute only between 23 and 28 percent of GDP.” Posters in glistening, modern Shanghai depict rays of light flowing from Chinese President Xi Jinping’s head, but he urges followers to fill their heads with the pre-modern musings of Stalin, Lenin and Mao, a recipe for economic sclerosis.

The U.S. trajectory is different. Also writing in Foreign Affairs (“The Comeback Nation: U.S. Economic Supremacy Has Repeatedly Proved Declinists Wrong”), Morgan Stanley’s Ruchir Sharma notes that in 2010, after the weakest decade of U.S. growth since World War II, the nation had a full decade without a recession for the first time since at least 1850, when record-keeping began, and the U.S. share of global GDP expanded from 23 percent to 25 percent, back to where it was in 1980, before China’s ascent began.

In the 2010s, the U.S. stock market rose 250 percent, almost quadruple the average gains of other national stock markets. (China’s rose 70 percent.) “By 2019,” Sharma writes, “the United States accounted for 56 percent of global stock market capitalization, up from 42 percent in 2010. The value of the U.S. stock market, relative to all others, was at a 100-year high.” Today, “seven of the world’s 10 largest companies by total stock market value are American, up from three in 2010.” Globally, 75 percent of loans to individuals and companies are denominated in dollars, up from 60 percent before the 2008 crisis.

Although technology investments, partly the result of a culture of innovation fueled by great research universities, have been crucial, Sharma says, “the more important U.S. advantage has been a relatively high population growth rate: babies and immigrants, not Stanford and Google.” Sharma adds: “The most important driver of any economy is the working-age population, which is still growing in the United States but started shrinking in China five years ago.”

I don’t believe that’s the right metric. A better one would be working age population with net positive income. Said another way the United States cannot remain an egalitarian largely middle class country while continuing to import large numbers of uneducated non-English speakers and providing expensive social services. Something’s got to give.

Mr. Will then recapitulates his leitmotif:

Donald Trump says a Biden presidency would mean “China will own the United States.” Trump’s reelection would entrench his misunderstanding of both nations.

I was misled into reading that column. I expected to read Mr. Will’s advice to Joe Biden. What I encountered instead was more evidence of his disdain for Donald Trump.

I’ll open the issue to the floor. What should President Biden’s policy with respect to China be, what is it likely to be, and what can it be? My concern about a Biden China policy is that it could be so firmly rooted in the 1990s that it is irrelevant to the 2020s and that President Biden will be caught between the Scylla of the ptofessional diplomatic bureaucracy and the Charybdis of the vast bulk of his constituents, trying to steer a course through increasingly dangerous waters.

A story that’s big in Chicago is now being reported in the national news. Here’s the report from ABC 7 Chicago:

CHICAGO (WLS) — Chicago police officers seen on video inside Congressman Bobby Rush’s office on the South Side has sparked an internal investigation into the incident.

Surveillance pictures from inside Congressman Bobby Rush’s campaign office at 54th Street and Wentworth Avenue, which had been looted earlier, show more than a dozen Chicago police officers lounging in the office for hours, sleeping, popping popcorn, all while looting was going on throughout the city.

“They even had the unmitigated gall to make coffee for themselves and to pop popcorn, my popcorn, in my microwave while looters were tearing apart businesses. Within their sight and within their reach,” Rush said.

Needless to say Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot is distressed:

She offered an apology on behalf of the city, saying those officers have done incredible harm, including confirming the perception that many have on the South Side that police simply did not care that minority communities were being looted.

“It is a personal embarrassment to me,” Lightfoot said.

The Fraternal Order of Police has fired back a response:

Meanwhile, Chicago police union leader, John Catanzara, tells the I-Team officers were deployed to Congressman Bobby Rush’s campaign office after a request for protection from Rush’s staffers. Catanzara says the officers were told to make themselves at home.

I doubt we’ve heard the last of this story. If the official records suport the officers’ story, the mayor and Rep. Rush may be left with egg on their faces. Or the cellphone records. Or it may be another strike against the CPD.

That Mayor Lightfoot chose to air the matter publicly before trying to resolve it internally may actually become the story and it’s too early to tell whether that’s good or bad. Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass remarks:

Mayor Lori Lightfoot is now praising U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush for that gift of a video that helps her kick the Chicago police union in the teeth.

I still don’t think she’ll ever forgive Rush for that despicable slur during her 2019 mayoral campaign. Anyone voting for Lightfoot for mayor, Rush said, would have on their hands “the blood of the next young black man or black woman who is killed by the police.”

But Rush knows how to make amends. He threw her a life preserver just when she needed one. And she unwrapped it for the media on Thursday:

It was that video showing Chicago police lounging, sleeping and eating popcorn inside a Rush office on the South Side. It’s coming out just as Lightfoot was shrinking under criticism for being unprepared for the chaos and looting that broke out of the massive George Floyd protests.

It was a perfect gift. It gave her an opportunity to direct anger away from City Hall toward a new enemy — the Chicago Police Department and its rank-and-file union, the Fraternal Order of Police.

“There will be a reckoning with the FOP,” Lightfoot said. “And I think that moment is now.”

She wants police officers to be licensed. If she gets that into law, it might make things easier for City Hall to get rid of cops it doesn’t like. This could give her some cover when Black Lives Matter demands that Democrats who run the big cities begin defunding the police.

I don’t know what licensing police officers would accomplish that can’t be accomplished through better management other than taking a hot potato out of the mayor’s hands and handing it to the state.

Mr. Kass concludes:

I wish Lightfoot had thoroughly investigated this one before she torched the cops at a news conference. But under pressure she needed to focus attention away from City Hall.

And she trusted Bobby Rush.

We’ll see what emerges from this matter. So far I have been unimpressed by Mayor Lightfoot’s political acumen.

There’s a lengthy feature at the Wall Street Journal, analyzing the reasons why the New York City metro area has by far the highest prevalence and mortality due to COVID-19 of anywhere else in the world:

The virus has hit New York harder than any other state, cutting through its densely populated urban neighborhoods and devastating the economy. New York state’s death toll of 30,575 accounted for 7% of the world’s deaths and 27% of American deaths as of June 11, according to Johns Hopkins University data.

The Wall Street Journal talked to nearly 90 front-line doctors, nurses, health-care workers, hospital administrators and government officials, and reviewed emails, legal documents and memos, to analyze what went wrong. Among the missteps they identify:
• Improper patient transfers. Some patients were too sick to have been transferred between hospitals. Squabbling between the Cuomo and de Blasio administrations contributed to an uncoordinated effort.

• Insufficient isolation protocols. Hospitals often mixed infected patients with the uninfected early on, and the virus spread to non-Covid-19 units.

• Inadequate staff planning. Hospitals added hundreds of intensive-care beds but not always enough trained staff, leading to improper treatments and overlooked patients dying alone.

• Mixed messages. State, city government and hospital officials kept shifting guidelines about when exposed and ill front-line workers should return to work.

• Overreliance on government sources for key equipment. Hospitals turned to the state and federal government for hundreds of ventilators, but many were faulty or inadequate.

• Procurement-planning gaps. While leaders focused attention on procuring ventilators, hospitals didn’t always provide for adequate supplies of critical resources including oxygen, vital-signs monitors and dialysis machines.

• Incomplete staff-protection policies. Many hospitals provided staff with insufficient protective equipment and testing.

The article is well worth reading in full. I don’t know whether the article is gated but you may be able to find an ungated copy. I suspect the article will be much discussed.

The numbers are really quite clear. An area with 5% of the U. S. population is responsible for nearly 50% of the cases and deaths. Less New York the outbreak in the U. S. more closely resembles that of Germany than Italy’s or Spain’s. Since New York looms so large in opinion formation and mass communications, New York’s experience has colored the entire U. S. view of the disease.

IMO the entire problem can be summed up in one word: mismatch. New Yorkers demand a much larger response from government at all levels than they are willing to pay for and political leaders of a completely different stamp than they are willing to elect.

Is New York a microcosm of the entire country or unique, sui generis? I incline towards the latter view and think the numbers speak for themselves but YMMV.

The relationship between blood type, susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2, and the virulence of COVID-19 keeps cropping up. The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe:

23andMe on Monday published a potentially significant finding that people with the blood type O were on average 14% less likely than other blood types (A, B, AB) to get Covid and 19% less likely to be hospitalized after accounting for age, sex, comorbidities, ethnicity and body mass. Among exposed individuals, O blood types were 19% less likely to test positive. There appeared to be little difference in susceptibility among other blood types.

This preliminary finding comes from 23andMe’s analysis of 750,000 people who agreed to let their DNA be used for Covid research. Participants were also asked whether they’ve experienced cold or flu-like symptoms, been diagnosed or treated for Covid and hospitalized for the illness.

23andMe notes its finding is supported by a new pre-publication study comparing 8,582,968 gene variants from 1,610 patients in Spain and Italy who needed oxygen or mechanical ventilation. Variations at only two chromosome locations showed a significant correlation with Covid severity. One encoded blood type, A-positive, had a 45% higher risk of respiratory failure while Os had a 35% lower risk.

Studies have previously found links between blood types and infectious and chronic diseases. For instance, Os appear to have lower risk for cardiovascular disease and heart attacks. The blood type gene is located in a stretch of DNA that regulates inflammation and blood clotting, which play a significant role in Covid-19.

The authors of the European study note that variation at the chromosome location for blood type has been associated with blood-clotting factors and interleukin-6, an inflammatory protein involved in cytokine storms that attack the respiratory system.

Perhaps it should also be noted that countries with higher proportions of people with non-A blood types, e.g. Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and much of the global south where the prevalence of Type O tends to be much higher, so far have escaped the worst outbreaks. Should this blood type hypothesis prove to be true, could it not be the case that a population with blood types other than A might not blunt the effects of the so-called superspreader events?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal take note of a problem I mentioned early on:

Remember the furor in 2011 when Republican governors tried to reform collective bargaining for government workers? Well, what do you know, suddenly Democrats say public-union labor agreements are frustrating police reform. We’re delighted to hear it—if they’re serious.

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Sunday said police collective bargaining and arbitration have prevented the city from holding officers accountable for misconduct. Derek Chauvin, the officer charged with killing George Floyd, had at least 17 misconduct complaints against him in 18 years. His personnel file provides little detail about how these complaints were handled. But it appears he was disciplined only once—after a woman said he pulled her from a car and frisked her for exceeding the speed limit by 10 miles per hour. He received a letter of reprimand.

Minneapolis’s Office of Police Conduct Review has received 2,600 misconduct complaints since 2012. Only 12 have resulted in discipline, and the most severe punishment was a 40-hour suspension. “Unless we are willing to tackle the elephant in the room—which is the police union—there won’t be a culture shift in the department,” Mr. Frey said.

Jason Van Dyke, the Chicago officer convicted of murdering 17-year-old Laquan McDonald in 2014, had been the subject of 20 complaints—ranking in the top 4% of Chicago’s police department—including 10 that alleged excessive use of force.

A jury awarded a man $350,000 after finding Mr. Van Dyke employed excessive force during a traffic stop. Yet Mr. Van Dyke was never disciplined. A task force on police reform after the McDonald murder found that “collective bargaining agreements create unnecessary barriers to identifying and addressing police misconduct” and “essentially turned the code of silence into official policy.”

It’s not just police officers’ unions that pose a problem although that police officers wield the power of life and death makes the problem particularly urgent. Teachers’ union rules make change difficult, prevent best practices from being rewarded, and ensure that the worst teachers will be rewarded right along with the best.