I don’t know that I have mentioned my own status during the “stay at home” directive. My wife and I have been “sheltering in place” since March 16 (before the statewide directive was issued). During that period we have been quite rigorous about using masks when shopping for groceries or other necessaries. Under normal conditions I am a daily shopper. I have limited my shopping expeditions to once every three or four days. I only shop at my beloved Happy Foods to the greatest degree possible. It’s small but the people who shop there are careful and courteous and most have been wearing face masks for weeks.

I’m walking so much, getting so much exercise, and eating so healthfully I’m probably healthier than at any time in the last 40 years.

I’m skeptical that anything that is being done is more than theater but theater is important, too. I’m in full compliance with the directives because I believe it’s important to set a good example for others and contrariwise I wouldn’t want to encourage anybody to do anything that might harm themselves.

It frustrates me to see so many people who clearly don’t give a damn, especially city employees who should know better. Why are they toying with my life and health and prolonging the risks to my livelihood?

I am going on my eighth week of “sheltering in place”; the state has officially had a “stay at home” directive in place since March 22; on Friday a facemask directive was added to that. Based on the statistics provided by the Illinois Department of Health, there are no actual signs of the number of new cases diagnosed daily peaking. The number of new cases diagnosed yesterday was greater than a week before which was greater than the week before that which was greater than the week before that. The number of cases or new cases is not doubling every six days but they weren’t doubling every six days a month ago, either.

Some of that stands to reason. The number of cases diagnosed is positively correlated with the number of tests conducted. More tests—more cases. I see no signs that the number of ICU beds or ventilators in use are being stressed. In Chicago the increases in the use of both are due to more use for non-COVID-19 cases, at least some of which I attribute to the shooting spree going on in a few South Side neighborhoods.

Politically, it’s easier for the governor to double down on his present policy that it would be to acknowledge defeat. Keep the state shut down long enough and there will surely be some improvement. Any improvement, whether produced by the measures in place or not, will allow the governor to declare victory. Or else the state will run out of money.

In a pitch for more, faster antigen testing, Scott Gottlieb presents a status report on the campaign against SARS-CoV-2 in an op-ed at the Wall Street Journal which I will take the liberty of quoting in full:

The Covid-19 epidemic continues to expand in some 20 states. The number of new cases in New York City is slowing, but the picture is different elsewhere in the nation. America has hovered around 30,000 new daily infections and 2,000 deaths for almost a month. Yet the number of days it takes for infections to double has improved, from less than a week in hot spots to almost a month nationally. This represents progress.

But everyone thought we’d be in a better place after weeks of sheltering in place and bringing the economy to a near standstill. Mitigation hasn’t failed; social distancing and other measures have slowed the spread. But the halt hasn’t brought the number of new cases and deaths down as much as expected or stopped the epidemic from expanding.

Officials face intense pressure to reopen, and the reality is stark: Continuing spread at something near current levels may become the cruel “new normal.” Hospitals and public-health systems will have to contend with persistent disease and death.

Higher rates of spread may be limited to some areas; a majority of states have more than 250 new cases of Covid-19 every day. But as states begin to open up their economies and Americans return to traveling, the disease will continue to expand. We need to prepare to deal with such a grim future, which will require a persistent posture of prevention and treatment.

That means doubling down on screening and isolating sick people to slow the spread as much as possible, which will save lives and prevent health-care systems from being overwhelmed. That means channeling resources into places where outbreaks are prone to happen: nursing homes and shop floors, and among disadvantaged communities that lack access to testing and can’t practice social distancing easily.

Technology and a well-equipped and competent medical and public-health workforce will be essential. This includes better drugs. On Friday the Food and Drug Administration authorized the use of remdesivir by Gilead Sciences. This drug is the first antiviral medicine that blocks SARS-CoV-2 replication. It isn’t a cure, but it will help patients at highest risk of bad outcomes, especially when deployed early in the course of the disease. More treatments are likely to follow, including antibody drugs that bind and block the virus. These should be available this fall if progress continues apace.

A number of vaccines, meanwhile, are on track to clear early FDA safety trials by fall, and tens of millions of doses could be ready to use in studies that test for efficacy. These doses can be used in large trials that will establish whether the vaccine is safe and effective for mass inoculation, trials that can be conducted in cities suffering from outbreaks.

But the public also needs better diagnostic tests to make screening for Covid-19 inexpensive and routine. This is where medical progress has been slow. Testing so far has relied on detecting the nucleic acids of the virus’s genetic material. These platforms are reliable and were initially easy to expand. The U.S. medical system is now screening more than 1.5 million people a week. But these platforms can only run so many tests each day, and issues like transporting samples are precluding quick turnarounds.

What’s needed now is the equivalent of the rapid flu and strep tests available in a doctor’s office. These tests look for antigens that the pathogen produces, which betray its presence in blood and saliva. Antigen tests are less precise than polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests, but they enable fast and widespread testing. The government needs to rush development of these technologies and work with manufacturers to increase capacity.

More-precise platforms like PCR will still have an important role. They’ll be used by big commercial labs that can run them at the scale needed to improve cost and efficiency. They’ll also serve as a reference standard and be used for mass screening by pooling many patients’ samples—say, in a workplace—and testing them all at once to see if anyone in the group is infected.

If the virus continues to spread, the economy won’t snap back. Many Americans will be scared to go out, and with good reason. Summer may provide some reprieve, but the virus could return aggressively in the fall. Activity can resume in parts of the country where risk is low, but there is still much disease and death in the days to come.

Dealing with this new reality will require screening to identify new cases and isolate infections. That will depend on better testing technologies that aren’t yet available—but can be achieved. The sooner the better for the health of Americans and the economy.

I think there needs to be more introspection about why the measures put into place since March have failed to live up to their advance publicity as illustrated in this sentence:

But everyone thought we’d be in a better place after weeks of sheltering in place and bringing the economy to a near standstill.

Even in the limited successes I see a lot of post hoc propter hoc reasoning being advanced. Is the slow decline in the number of new cases being reported in the NYC metropolitan area because of the measures that have been put in place, because of other changes, or because the disease is running its course?

I found Alabama representative Bradley Byrne’s Wall Street Journal op-ed sadly amusing:

For nearly two months, my staff and I have been fielding calls from the people of southwest Alabama—small-business owners, bankers, seniors and many others. The government’s response to coronavirus is affecting their livelihoods, and their congressman may be the only voice they have in Washington. But when the lights are turned off in the committee rooms and on the floor of the House, who’s watching out for them? Who’s holding Washington accountable?

More important than the flawed message Congress’s absence sends to the American people—that their representatives value personal protection over their constituents’ interests—is the reality. When nobody is around, it is easier to make backroom deals, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi is taking advantage. She has consolidated the power of the institution in her person. Without lawmakers there to speak up for their districts and influence the legislative process, Mrs. Pelosi has made herself the sole voice and negotiator for the House, as it passes massive funding and regulatory bills.

Allow me to elucidate. When Rep. Byrne began his tenure in the House, Paul Ryan was House Speaker. Ryan was an unusually weak Speaker. The awesome power of the Speaker of the House he’s describing is the norm; Ryan was the exception. Speaker Pelosi is doing the same things she was doing during the last period during which she held the Speaker’s gavel.

Welcome to the House of Representatives, Mr. Byrne.

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?