I wonder when the Powers-That-Be will realize that the increasingly lengthy lockdowns will accelerate the period at which the Social Security Trust Fund will run out of money and SSRI payments will be paid from the smaller revenues alone?

Understandably, the Social Security actuaries have passed on predicting what the effects of the lockdowns will be on the trust funds but without taking that into account the Social Security Retirement Trust Fund has enough money to pay the full promised amounts until 2034. That will certainly be hastened by so many people being out of work and that will be permanent. Even if the economy bounces back rapidly which increasingly looks as though it will not happen, the trust funds won’t.

I’m grateful to a regular commenter for drawing our attention to an article in Quillette by Jonathan Kay. Its initially compelling argument is driven by data provided by the company Moovit who eponymous app provides realtime information on transit much as Waze does for highway traffic. It is used by enough people that I believe it is a reasonable gauge of ridership. You can see Moovit’s data for yourself here.

What the data seem to show is that there have been sharp drop-offs in public transit ridership, the point of inflection in ridership in Seattle was on March 5, and in most other U. S. cities around March 10. These drop-offs precede lockdown order and so are not a consequence of them. Here’s the basic conclusion of the piece:

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at this kind of data in recent weeks, and trying to tease out the policy ramifications. One of the trends that’s jumped out is that lockdown orders have tended to ratify public behaviour as much as prescribe or circumscribe it. Seattle residents essentially began imposing a lockdown on themselves before their government did, because the city had become one of the country’s leading early COVID-19 hotspots. Likewise, most Swedes didn’t need their government to tell them to stay home. Like everyone else, they get their news from the globalized data dump and anxiety mill known as social media. They all saw what was happening in Italy and elsewhere.

He also articulates something I’ve been saying here since early on in the crisis:

The skeptics who argue that lockdowns “don’t work” usually will support this claim by ticking off nations or regions that have succeeded in fighting off serious COVID-19 outbreaks without imposing harsh government restrictions. But when you parse the actual data, what you find is that these tend to be high-trust, high-education, high-information societies—such as in Scandinavia and East Asia—where official lockdowns haven’t been necessary precisely because a critical mass of people have effectively locked themselves down on their own.

but gets beyond the data here:

If spring-breakers in Miami were as conscientious and disciplined as, say, most office workers in Stockholm or Tokyo, the state’s governor wouldn’t have had to clear the beaches. But they’re not, so he did. Such spectacles tell us a lot about college students, but not much about lockdowns.

That has been analyzed. College students returning from spring break did not trigger an up-tick in new cases of COVID-19 as you might expect. Clearly, there’s more going on in the spread of the virus than simple proximity. That’s why I’ve kept harping on things like temperature and angle of the sun. As far as we know to date there has been no major outbreak of COVID-19 anywhere south of 23°N and that includes Brazil and the much-publicized Ecuador. Clearly, Ecuador’s health care system was already teetering on the brink and even a small increase in the number of cases requiring urgent care was enough to tip it over the edge. One might claim that you can’t trust the figures being released in Brazil or Ecuador but that cuts both ways. If the statistics from those places are phony, you ignore them rather than assuming the opposite and my claim remains true.

The author goes on to make this prudent observation:

The crowdsourced aspect of lockdowns is bad news and good news. It’s bad news because getting all of society’s actors on the same page will take many months. And so, as state-level data already show, we won’t be able to get our economies up and running on anything like the speedy timeline that most self-styled lockdown opponents are seeking. But it’s also good news, because a slower, crowdsourced form of lockdown lifting will be subject to a whole slew of negative feedback mechanisms among ordinary people and employers, such that localized outbreaks naturally lead to corrections. And so we can avoid the problem, depicted in Ferguson’s graphs, by which sudden quantum shifts in centralized policy yield behavioural spikes whose catastrophic effects set off an endless wave of epidemiological boom and bust.

but arrives at this dour conclusion:

Little of this self-imposed “lockdown-lite” is going to change in coming weeks and months, regardless of what government does, even as the masks come off and the floor dots start to fade. The changes we’ve made are sociologically sticky and, in some cases, literally hard-bolted into our public architecture.

I’m not so sure. I think that lockdown fatigue is starting to set in and, unless there is a significant surge in new cases, people are likely to relax over time.

I see no obvious straight line relationship between lockdowns and declines in COVID-19 cases. If there were, Illinois’s and Chicago’s experiences would be different than they have been. Proclaiming that they have not effective because Chicagoans aren’t compliant enough is just another way of saying that the measures as implemented are not effective. That’s one of the weaknesses of the piece. There were, in fact, precipitating events that prompted the decline in public transit ridership. The mayor of Seattle proclaimed a state of emergency on March 3 and the point of inflection in ridership took place on March 5. That can hardly have been a coincidence. I haven’t researched it but I suspect that Seattle major news outlets were deluged with reports about COVID-19 that moved people to lock themselves down.

Over the centuries cities and towns or even whole societies have found themselves in the grip of mass manias. There is a real disease that has real consequences and has resulted in real deaths.

In the United States half of all of the diagnosed cases and half of all of the deaths appear to have occurred in the New York metropolitan area. Outside the New York area the situation is different. In more than half of the states the prevalence of the disease is around 1 in a thousand and the morbidity is on the order of 1 in a 100,000.

I don’t know what the right policy is and, more importantly, I don’t even know if there is a right policy. I agree with the basic message of the linked article: the people’s behavior will tell us what the policy will be.

On my much-reduced in number trips to the grocery store I always take note of the status of the paper products and cleaning supplies aisles. Toilet paper, paper towels, and facial tissue remain in short supply as do bleach, disinfectant, and hand sanitizer. The explanations that have been proffered for these shortages include panic-buying, hoarding by profiteers, and a transition from the use of these products divided between places of work and home to at home only.

I think that last explanation is largely balderdash. For one thing most places of business in the U. S. don’t rely on commercial sources for TP; they buy the same products from the same places as home shoppers do.

The products I do see on the shelves are mostly off brands I’ve never heard of before.

I suspect that supply chain disruption is a major component of the shortages. Protestations of manufacturers to the contrary notwithstanding I believe that even the supply chain for the ingredients used in humble TP is very long indeed with wood pulp coming from Brazil, the components of bleach and scents and softening agents coming from China inter alia.

The graphic above and all of the statistics on which I rely are taken from the website of the Illinois Department of Public Health.

As you can see there has essentially been no change in the utilization of hospital beds, ICU beds, or ventilators by COVID-19 patients in more than a month. The number of new cases diagnosed per day has been flat for weeks. In the last couple of days there has been an uptick in new cases diagnosed. IMO that’s more due to an uptick in the number of tests being performed than it is to any actual surge in the number of cases.

Our governor and mayor claim that they’re making their decisions based on science and the numbers but I do not see how you can look at those numbers and conclude that what they’re doing is working. I think that one of two things (and likely both) must be true. Either the level of compliance with the directives is too low to be effective or the plan has been fundamentally flawed from the outset.

Let’s assume that the directives to stay at home, observe social distancing, and wear face masks could be effective in reducing the spread of SARS-CoV-2 if there were greater compliance. My proposal would be to increase enforcement. That should include public employees. It should include police officers. Tickets with stiff penalties should be issued. Elected officials should be prepared for pushback when members of minorities are disproportionately affected by enforcement efforts.

Fewer workers should be deemed essential. The city should stop non-emergent tree-trimming or other non-emergency services. In-person shopping for groceries or at the pharmacy should be suspended—delivery only. Fopd processing plants should be performing elementary screening activities on their workers to prevent the spread of the virus within the plants, e.g. taking temperatures, sending people with symptoms home. UPS, FedEx, and other shipping companies should only be allowed to deliver food and pharmaceuticals. If you can’t open the store, you can’t deliver the product.

Those would be good faith attempts at making the measures already in place more effective rather than just being willing to extend the same ineffective measures into the indefinite future.

I’m not even going to bother to link to Melinda Gates’s Washington Post op-ed. She thinks more money needs to be spent which is facile and that there needs to be a nationally coordinated plan for dealing with COVID-19 which is worse. Short of declaring martial law the federal government does not have the authority to compel state and local governments to do anything.

IMO one of our gravest problems is that the legislatures of the various states are mostly sitting on their hands, content to let the states’ governors do the heavy lifting and, coincidentally, bear the political costs.

Under our system of government legislators represent the people. It is vital for the state legislatures to act since it represents the assent of the people to the measures being taken and, further, motivates the legislators themselves to advocate the policies to the people of their districts. The present passive-aggressive stance being taken is actually impeding the responses.

We need to stop thinking of ourselves as consumers of government policy and start thinking of ourselves as producers of the policy.

I do think that there are things that should be done and should have been done from Washington. I’ve mentioned some of them before. They involve powers that the Congress has granted to the president. That I don’t think the Congress should have delegated those powers to the president is an issue for another time.

It is vitally important that the Congress exercise its authority in acting in response to COVID-19 for the reasons I have outlined. Idleness is reprehensible.

In their op-ed in the Wall Street Journal John S. Baker Jr. and Robert T. Miller don’t like the idea of bankruptcy for states at all:

With tax revenue crashing and expenditures soaring, states face severe financial problems. Illinois has already requested a federal bailout of its pension system, and last month Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell suggested that Congress should enact legislation allowing states to go bankrupt.

Thankfully, Mr. McConnell appears to have dropped the idea. Allowing states to declare bankruptcy would fundamentally contradict the federal structure of our constitution. In that structure, the states are self-governing entities. But as anyone who’s endured the bankruptcy process knows, bankruptcy protection means the bankruptcy court is in charge. Federal bankruptcy protection would greatly constrain a state’s sovereignty, or power to govern itself, which the Constitution guarantees.

But if states are free to govern themselves, they’re also free to make poor choices. Decades of fiscal mismanagement left some states in a precarious financial position before the pandemic. Before Congress grants hundreds of billions of dollars to states—a step Mr. McConnell now says he’d entertain in exchange for legislation guaranteeing liability protection for businesses—it should consider an alternative grounded in prudence and reflection on American history.

but I find their proposed alternative cold comfort:

Covid-19 isn’t the states’ fault. But the states least able to weather its financial consequences got that way through decades of profligate spending and confiscatory taxation. Borrowing and timely repayment, not default or bankruptcy, is the best way for states to deal with the current crisis while getting their financial affairs in order. The essence of sovereignty is self-government, which entails a measure of responsibility.

Illinois is teetering on the brink of a completely inability to borrow at any rate of interest and there is no realistic prospect of the state’s corrupt, incompetent, do-nothing legislature taking the steps necessary to mend Illinois’s fiscal house. Gov. Pritzker’s preferred solution, a graduated income tax, requires ratification by direct popular vote (because the legislature is too cowardly to enact it on its own). What would it accomplish, anyway, other than encouraging rich people to leave Illinois?

I proposed solutions yesterday. Understandably, those will not be put in place voluntarily because elected officials don’t want to commit political seppuku.

The shooting spree which has been going on for the last several weeks in Chicago continues. The Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Five people were killed and nine more were wounded Thursday in shootings across Chicago.

A 16-year-old boy was killed Thursday morning in Ashburn on the Southwest Side by a man who said he was firing back at another shooter.

The boy was a passenger in a vehicle when someone shot him in the head about 10:35 a.m. in the 3900 block of West 83rd Street, Chicago police said. A female driver took him to Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, where he died.

The shootings are primarily taking place in a handful of neighborhoods (Garfield Park, Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park) on the South and West Sides of Chicago. Thursday’s death toll follows a Wednesday in which nine people were shot, three fatally, mostly in the same neighborhoods.

I don’t know whether it’s boredom, the release of prisoners from Cook County, or not letting a crisis go to waste but Chicago is on track to near the high body count in 2017 after two years of declines.

Maybe the reason for the difference in the outcomes of COVID-19 in China, South Korea, and Japan isn’t as much due to difference in their responses but in differences between the virus they’re fighting and the one we are. From the Jerusalem Post:

A coronavirus study by several researchers at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was invented, claims that a new strain of the novel COVID-19 is more contagious than the original form of the virus.
The study, which has yet to be peer-reviewed, looked at 14 mutations in the “spike protein,” which mediates the infection of human cells and is therein targeted by most attempted vaccines for the virus. Of those mutations, one stood out, according to the study, for spreading much more aggressively than the original strain of the virus.

That same mutation was originally seen spreading in Europe, after which it spread to the rest of the world. That is currently the most common strain. This was found through a computational analysis of thousands of coronavirus sequences found around the world by the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The report claimed that people who catch this strain are at an increased risk of catching the illness a second time, which is why the authors felt that an early warning was necessary so that vaccines and drugs that are in development may be effective against the mutated strain, according to the LA Times.

Because of the rate at which this new strain is spreading, it is possible that it is more infectious than the previous strains of the virus. The reason is not yet known.

That could also explain the tremendous differences between what’s happening in New York and in the Pacific Northwest. Earlier genetic studies suggested that the strain of the virus in New York originated in Europe while that in the Pacific Northwest was closer to the original strain that began in China.

Different effects from different strains could also explain some of the wildly varying symptoms that are being reported.

I have been following the statistics reported at the site of the Illinois Department of Public Health on a daily or nearly daily basis. What I am seeing there may not comport with anything else you’ve read.

What I see is that the number of diagnosed cases has been going up by roughly 2,100 every day for the last two weeks. Over the last month the utilization of hospital beds, ICU beds, and ventilators by COVID-19 patients has been roughly flat. Increases in utilizations of all three are mostly due to increased utilization by non-COVID-19 patients.