There is a bumper crop of plans for ending the COVID-19 pandemic. To my eye they all share one defect: they wouldn’t actually end the pandemic. Take, for example, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s op-ed in the New York Times:

Americans stayed at home and sacrificed for months to flatten the curve and prevent the spread of the coronavirus. That gave us time to take the steps needed to address the pandemic — but President Trump squandered it, refusing to issue national stay-at-home guidelines, failing to set up a national testing operation and fumbling production of personal protective equipment. Now, Congress must again act as this continues to spiral out of control.

Those who frame the debate as one of health versus economics are missing the point. It is not possible to fix the economy without first containing the virus. We need a bold, ambitious legislative response that does four things: brings the virus under control; gets our schools, child care centers, businesses, and state and local governments the resources they need; addresses the burdens on communities of color; and supports struggling families who don’t know when the next paycheck will come.

Here’s what the next federal response must include:

Start with funding the robust public health measures we know will work to address this crisis: ramped-up testing, a national contact-tracing program and supply-chain investments to resolve medical supply shortages. Without these measures, we will not be able to adequately reopen safely, more people will die and there will be no economic recovery.

I’m not opposed to any of those things. I just don’t think they’ll produce the results the senator thinks they will.

For one thing there’s too much cargo cult thinking. The line of thinking goes something like this. Because South Korea and Japan did contact tracing and South Korea and Japan have had among the very best results in dealing with their outbreaks, therefore you need contact tracing to have good results. Leaving aside the thousands of differences between South Korea or Japan and the United States a key step is being omitted: mandatory isolation. I don’t believe that any form of isolation, voluntary or mandatory, would be effective in the U. S. We can’t even get people to wear facemasks voluntarily. I don’t believe that even if we paid people to be isolated it would be effective. And mandatory isolation is completely out of the question. If you don’t believe it picture this scenario. Thousands or tens of thousands of people in mandatory isolation, the majority of whom are black or Hispanics. The headlines practically write themselves.

Testing has a similar problem. There is presently no identifiable relationship between testing per se and getting control over the virus. If you don’t believe me, just look at the testing rates per million population compared with the cases per million or deaths per million. If there’s a correlation, it’s a positive one (you test more people because more people have the virus). The basic question is never asked: testing to what end? I think we’re doing far too much diagnostic testing as it is with not nearly enough systematic epidemiological testing in an effort to identify where resources were most needed.

My views are so unpopular as to not even be worth airing. I think that we just must assume that no cure or vaccine or even an effective treatment will be developed and shoulder the risks of going on with life, doing what we can to mitigate them as best as we are able.

I recently read one of the most foolish things I have ever encountered, characterizing the situation in Portland as months of “largely non-violent” demonstrations. Demonstrations are either violent or non-violent. By the standard the author is laying down the First World War, famously characterized as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of terror”, was largely non-violent.

Remember that “demonstration” I wrote about earlier? NBC Chicago reports there was a lot more to it:

Following a violent protest at which 49 Chicago police officers were injured Friday night, the city’s police superintendent has ordered all officers to wear riot gear at similar large gatherings.

What started as a peaceful demonstration led to several clashes between police and individuals who were protesting the presence of the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park.

Approximately one dozen individuals were arrested, and at least 20 complaints were filed with the city’s Civilian Office of Police Accountability, some alleging excessive force, unnecessary use of pepper spray and denial of counsel.

Chicago police released video Monday that appears to show protesters jabbing officers with PVC pipe from a banner and throwing items such as rocks, fireworks and frozen water bottles.

I think I would claim that pre-sharpened PVC and certainly fireworks constituted Class II weapons, those who employed them against the police are guilty of several felonies, and anyone who knew that the pre-sharpened PVC and fireworks would be brought to the event, for example through social media, is guilty of conspiracy to commit armed violence. That was no peaceful protest.

In a post at RealClearPolitics members of The 50-State Survey Consortium Team remark on the results of a 50 state poll they have taken to measure the public’s trust of various institutions:

The latest wave of our ongoing 50-state survey, conducted June 12-28 by the COVID-19 Consortium for Understanding the Public’s Policy Preferences Across States, finds an average decline of almost 10 percentage points since April in public approval of their governors’ handling of the COVID outbreak. Only in five states — Hawaii, Michigan, New Jersey, South Dakota and Vermont — have governors’ approval ratings increased over this period.

These declines track similar movement in public support for President Trump’s handling of the pandemic. The average 8.2-point decline since April for the president is all the more significant given his far lower starting point. Back in April, 64% of the public, on average, approved of their state governor’s handling of the pandemic. The corresponding figure for Trump was 42%.

To some extent, these patterns likely result from growing public frustration with the resurgence of the pandemic and resulting return to (recommended or required) behavioral restrictions in an increasing number of states, combined with continuing widespread economic hardships.

We see similar downward trends in public trust across all 14 institutions we asked about, including public ones (the CDC, Congress, White House, police, city government, state government) and private (banks, social media and pharmaceutical companies, news media), as well as public health experts (hospitals and doctors, scientists and researchers) and political leaders (Trump, Biden). The largest losses of faith were reserved for the public institutions responsible for public safety and the nation’s pandemic response, such as the police (-14 points), Congress and state governments (-9 points each), and the White House (-11 points). Even though our questions measure trust in institutions to handle COVID-19, some of this change likely also reflects the impact of anti-police-brutality protests that swept the country this spring and summer.

The overall results are depicted in the graph above. A few things are apparent to me. First, publicity works just not necessarily to the benefit of those crafting the publicity. Approval of state and local governments remains high although approval of Congress, the White House, the media, VP Biden, President Trump, and above all, social media is heading into the cellar.

The larger message is that public trust is being eroded in general.

I think this is a step in the right direction. A new rare earths processing plant has opened in Colorado, reports National Defense:

A new pilot plant that will process rare earth elements necessary for many critical U.S. military weapons systems opened in June, as part of an effort to end China’s monopoly on the important resources.

The pilot plant is a joint venture between USA Rare Earth and Texas Mineral Resources Corp. The two companies previously funded a project on Round Top mountain in Hudspeth County, Texas, which features 16 of the 17 rare earth elements.

“Our objective is to set up a domestic U.S. supply chain without the materials ever leaving the United States,” said Pini Althaus, CEO of USA Rare Earth.

The elements are necessary for the creation of a number of weapons systems including the Lockheed Martin-made F-35 joint strike fighter, Tomahawk cruise missiles and other munitions.

Contrary to what you might infer from the name rare earths aren’t rare at all. They’re actually rather common and the U. S. was the leading producer until environmental concerns drove the whole industry away. You would think that China’s restriction of rare earth exports a decade ago would have taught us a valuable lesson then but apparently not. Will the supply chain interruptions caused by China’s lockdowns be enough? We can only hope.

Now if we were talking cobalt there would be an even thornier question. The top producers of cobalt are the Democratic Republic of Congo, Russia, Australia, Philippines, and Cuba while the countries with the largest proven reserves are the DRC, Australia, and Cuba. It’s more than a coincidence that China is grabbing as much power as it can in Congo.

I see that George Friedman is as skeptical of the “Thucydides trap” hypothesis of U. S.-China relations as I am and for similar reasons:

The most important thing to understand about China is that its domestic market cannot financially absorb the product of China’s industrial plant. Yes, China has grown, but its growth has made it a hostage to its foreign customers. Nearly 20 percent of China’s gross domestic product is generated from exports, 5 percent of which are bought by its largest customer, the United States. Anything that could reduce China’s economy for the long term by about 20 percent is a desperate vulnerability. COVID-19 has hurt and will continue to hurt many countries. But for China, if international trade collapsed, internal declines in consumption would come on top of the loss of foreign markets.

China faces a non-military threat from the United States, which relies on exports to China for about half of 1 percent of its GDP. If the U.S. simply bought fewer Chinese products, Washington would damage China without firing a shot. If China is a rising power, it is rising on a very slippery slope without recourse to warfare.

continuing

It’s true that China is a rising power, but as I said, it’s rising from the Maoist era. It has a significant military, but that military’s hands are tied until China eliminates its existential vulnerability: dependence on exports. Under these circumstances, the idea of initiating a war is farfetched. More than perhaps any country in the world, China cannot risk a breakdown in the global trading system. Doing so might hurt the U.S. but not existentially.

The United States has no interest in a war in the Western Pacific. Its current situation is satisfactory, and nothing is to be gained from initiating a conflict. The United States is not giving up the Pacific – it fought wars in Korea and Vietnam as well as World War II to keep it. The U.S. can’t invade mainland China or conquer it. It cannot expose its forces to massive Chinese ground forces. In this sense China is secure. China’s fear is maritime – isolation from world markets. And that possibility is there.

There is of course evidence of advanced Chinese systems being prepared and claims that the U.S. is losing its relative share of power. But this is one of the great defects of military analysis: counting the hardware. In the U.S. military, I have noted people rolling their eyes when they hear about the superweapons being produced. The closer you are to weapons development, the more you are aware of its shortcomings. Wars are won by experienced staff, brave and motivated forces, and factories that don’t screw up. Engineering is part of war but not its essence. The question for any military is not what equipment it has but how long it takes to jury-rig the breakdown. Technology matters, of course, but it is only decisive in the hands of those with deep experience of the battle to be fought. China lacks that. For all its hardware and technology, it has not fought a naval battle since 1895 (which it lost). China has no tradition of naval warfare to compare to its experience on land. And tradition and lessons passed down from generation to generation of admirals are extremely valuable. The United States has been in combat frequently, launching aircraft against land targets, conducting active anti-submarine searches and coordinating air defense systems for large fleets in combat conditions.

If you’re wondering why that piece now, you may not be aware of it but Taiwan just completed a live fire war game of a Chinese invasion. Taiwan won, natch.

But it does raise another crucial point. The best role for the U. S. in keeping the peace in the Western Pacific is providing negative reciprocity. Not just Taiwan but Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam all must be aware that they have the primary responsible for their own defense. While the U. S. may backstop them we can’t be the primary guarantors of their independence.

This morning I listened to the encomiums of Rep. John Lewis on CBS’s Sunday Morning. Although I remember the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s vividly, they made an interesting contrast with today’s protests, cf. for example, this report by Alice Yin from the Chicago Tribune:

At least 1,000 people swarmed the Christopher Columbus statue in Grant Park on Friday evening in a failed attempt to topple it after a march turned tense and chaotic when some people began throwing fireworks and cans at the police, who in turn struck members of the crowd with batons.

Following a rally in support of Black and Indigenous people, hundreds of protesters marched south on Columbus Drive shortly after 7 p.m. Then a person shouted that some Chicago police units, whom they had been trying to separate the crowd from by using bike-wielding citizen “marshals,” had left to protect the statue of the controversial historical figure.

Protests in which cans, bottles, or explosives are used and in which people are destroying or attempting to destroy property including public property are not non-violent. The moment the first rock is thrown or when people start actively rather than passively resisting police a threshold has been crossed. Those who set out to protest non-violently have been coopted into a riot. The media is dissimulating when they characterize a protest in which some of those protesting are non-violent but some are violent as non-violent and they are dishonoring the non-violent protesters of the civil rights era. They are on the wrong side.

At the New York Times Apoorva Mandavilli reports on a South Korean study which I fear is sure to pour fuel on the ideological fire over reopening public schools in the fall:

A large new study from South Korea offers an answer: Children younger than 10 transmit to others much less often than adults do, but the risk is not zero. And those between the ages of 10 and 19 can spread the virus at least as well as adults do.

The findings suggest that as schools reopen, communities will see clusters of infection take root that include children of all ages, several experts cautioned.

“I fear that there has been this sense that kids just won’t get infected or don’t get infected in the same way as adults and that, therefore, they’re almost like a bubbled population,” said Michael Osterholm, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Minnesota.

“There will be transmission,” Dr. Osterholm said. “What we have to do is accept that now and include that in our plans.”

From farther down in the report:

The study is more worrisome for children in middle and high school. This group was even more likely to infect others than adults were, the study found. But some experts said that finding may be a fluke or may stem from the children’s behaviors.

These older children are frequently as big as adults, and yet may have some of the same unhygienic habits as young children do. They may also have been more likely than the younger children to socialize with their peers within the high-rise complexes in South Korea.

Some of the limitations of the study are stated more clearly in a Bloomberg story repeated at the Japan Times:

The South Korean study suggests that older children may be particularly contagious, although the researchers point out that household contacts could have contracted the virus elsewhere. Still, given the high rates of infection within families, the study called for more research to understand how to limit the spread of the virus at home.

The Trump Administration has taken the position that public schools should re-open in the fall; teachers’ unions across the country have taken an equally doctrinaire position only remote learning should be proceed. Hence my remarks about “fuel for the fire”. This issue will be a political hot potato, sad from my point of view for a variety of reasons.

The first thing that should be considered is that precisely the same argument could be made for hospitals as is being made for schools. For many students schools are not luxuries but necessities if the pupils are to learn and develop as they should. But for some students they are completely dispensable or even impediments. The “one size fits all” approach favored by bureaucrats because it’s easier to administer needs to be abandoned in favor of a more individualized and empirical approach.

If, during the lockdowns, schools have not been gathering statistics on participation and progress, they have been remiss. At this point districts should be able to assess which students do well with remote learning and which do not.

Again, look to the hospitals. I have heard physicians and nurses say that they feel safer in COVID-19 wards than they do going to the grocery store. If reopening schools in the fall at least for the students who need in-person learning requires that every teacher be fitted with an N95 respirator and trained in its use, then that’s what needs to happen.

One final observation. There is a correlation between closeness and intimacy of contact and transmissibility of disease. That’s why every time I walk my dog and see people jogging or riding their bicycles wearing facemasks, I think “I bet they don’t wear them at home”. While I suppose it’s possible to contract SARS-CoV-2 out of doors from a passing strangers with whom you’re maintaining a substantial distance, the risk of that is a lot lower than contracting the disease from your family members in the home. Despite actual studies suggesting the effectiveness of facemasks in the home, I strongly suspect that their use in that environment is lower than on biking trails.

Here are Illinois Gov. J. B. Pritzker’s reactions on hearing of the fines levied against ComEd:

CHICAGO — Gov. J.B. Pritzker said Friday that Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan “must resign” if allegations of corruption are true against the fellow Democrat long considered the state’s most powerful lawmaker.

Federal prosecutors said electric utility ComEd has agreed to pay $200 million to resolve a federal criminal investigation into a long-running bribery scheme that implicates Madigan. They say the company has admitted that from 2011 to 2019 it arranged jobs, subcontracted work and monetary payments related to those jobs “for various associates of a high-level elected official for the state of Illinois.”

“The speaker has a lot that he needs to answer for, to authorities, to investigators, and most importantly, to the people of Illinois,” Pritzker said during a stop in suburban Chicago.

Mr. Madigan, of course, denies any wrongdoing. Keep in mind the advice of the late Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Dan Rostenkowski: “Never take a bribe. Just hand ’em your business card”. Also bear in mind that we have Gov. Pritzker on tape (from before he was governor) engaging in a transparently corrupt discussion with his predecessor in the job, Rod Blagojevich. He’s not a naïf.

Death or resignation are about the only ways that Mr. Madigan could be pried out of his job. Mere conviction on charges of corruption probably wouldn’t do it.

More here from the Tribune:

At a news conference, U.S. Attorney John Lausch said the filing “speaks volumes about the nature of the very stubborn public corruption problem we have here in Illinois.”

“The admitted facts detail a nearly decade long corruption scheme involving top management at a large public utility, leaders of state government, consultants and several others inside and outside of government. In two words, it’s not good,” he added.

“The company admitted that it arranged for jobs and vendor subcontracts for Public Official A’s political allies and workers even in instances where those people performed little or no work that they were purportedly hired by ComEd to perform,” the U.S. Attorney’s office said in a statement.

In a criminal filing, prosecutors say Public Official A was the House speaker, which is Madigan. The veteran 13th Ward politician’s associates received $1.32 million from 2011-2019, prosecutors said.