At Vox.com German Lopez thrashes like a fish on a gaff producing reasons that Georgia’s early reopening did not produce the surge in new cases of COVID-19 that some had predicted including:

1. It’s too early

   Unless the statements about incubation periods are completely wrong after a month that doesn’t seem particularly likely.

2. There might be some data manipulation

   He produces no evidence that has actually taken place. It might take place is about as much as one can say.

3. People are staying home anyway

   I wonder how one would go about quantifying that?

4. Masks, good hygiene, and other behavioral changes may make a difference

   Again, I wonder how one would go about quantifying that.

before lurching uncontrollably onto the obvious explanation:

5. Maybe luck, or something else we don’t fully understand, is playing a role

I can think of any number of other possible reasons, presumably subsumed within that category. How about this one? Not everyone is equally susceptible to the virus and the most susceptible contracted it early.

I wouldn’t be surprised if all of the above were not factors in one degree or another but the fact remains that the feared surge has not happened. As we learn more about SARS-Cov-2 it will be interesting to see if we become better able to evaluate to what degree each of those factors actually explains what is happening.

It’s interesting to see the potential haemotological effects and impact of COVID-19 being studied. From Bloomberg:

“We’ve been continuing to collect data on stroke patients and we’ve learned a lot more about the way Covid-19 is causing clots in other parts of the body,” says Johanna Fifi, a neuroendovascular surgeon at Mount Sinai Health System and an author of that article. The clots are also found in the lungs and kidneys. “Clotting seems to be a very prominent feature of this disease,” she says.

“This is causing more thrombosis than any other virus,” says Pascal Jabbour, a physician at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. “We’ve never seen that before.” Jabbour has also been collecting data on stroke patients and has found that Covid-19 positive cases are not only younger, but are also less likely to survive after the usual surgical treatment to remove clots. The mortality rate is about 43%, as opposed to about 5% in typical cases.

Schulman says evidence is growing that Covid-19 is affecting blood vessels in people with no obvious symptoms of stroke or blood clots. People with severe Covid-19 have an off-the-charts elevated blood marker, called D-dimer, which is associated with blood clots. Levels of about 500 signal a serious clot risk, but patients with severe Covid-19, he says, “show the highest numbers most of us have ever seen.” The D-dimer tests only measure levels up to 22,000 — and many patients are clearly beyond that.

It would be particularly interesting to know if there are other factors that impel this response or if these clotting effects are present in all patients with COVID-19.

I also agree with law prof Barry Latzer’s assessment, from his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, which I have taken the liberty of quoting in full:

Though thousands of demonstrators have taken to the streets of cities across the nation to express their outrage over the death of George Floyd, many hundreds have engaged in mob violence and looting. Mr. Floyd’s tragic death is, for them, a pretext for hooliganism.

We’ve seen this before, back in the bad old days of the late 1960s, when rioting became a near-everyday occurrence. Economists William J. Collins and Robert A. Margotallied an extraordinary 752 riots between 1964 and 1971. These disturbances involved 15,835 incidents of arson and caused 228 deaths, 12,741 injuries and 69,099 arrests. By an objective measure of severity, 130 of the 752 riots were considered “major,” 37 were labeled “massive” in their destructiveness.

At the time, black radicals and some white leftists saw the riots purely as political protest. Tom Hayden, the well-known New Left leader, described the violence as “a new stage in the development of Negro protest against racism, and as a logical outgrowth of the failure of the whole society to support racial equality.”

This analysis ignored the observations of witnesses on the scene. Thousands of rioters in the 1960s and early 1970s engaged in a joyful hooliganism—looting and destroying of property with wild abandon—that had no apparent political meaning. In the Detroit riot of July 1967, one of the era’s most lethal (43 people died in four nightmarish days of turmoil), the early stage of the riot was described by historian Sidney Fine as “a carnival atmosphere,” in which, as reported by a black minister eyewitness, participants exhibited “a gleefulness in throwing stuff and getting stuff out of the buildings.” A young black rioter told a newspaper reporter that he “really enjoyed” himself.

Analysts of urban rioting have identified a “Roman holiday” stage in which youths, in “a state of angry intoxication, taunt the police, burn stores with Molotov cocktails, and set the stage for looting.” This behavior is less political protest than, in Edward Banfield’s epigram of the day, “rioting mainly for fun and profit.” We are seeing some of the same looting and burning today, often treated by the media as mere exuberant protest.

Analyses of the riots that pinned blame on white bias and black victimization buttressed the protest theory. Such explanations received official sanction in the report of the influential National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders established by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967, and headed by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner. The Kerner Report famously declared that “white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” While not explicitly calling the riots a justified revolt by the victims of white racism, the Kerner Report certainly gave that impression.

Today we have the Black Lives Matter movement, which claims that police racism is the heart of the problem and calls for “defunding” police departments. Its apologists ignore the pressing need to protect black lives in communities where armed violent criminals daily threaten law-abiding residents.

A seeming oddity of the disturbances of the late ’60s and early ’70s is that they failed to materialize in many cities. An analysis of 673 municipalities with populations over 25,000 found that 75% of them experienced no riots. Even within riot-torn cities it is estimated that 85% or more of the black population took no part in them. Although they’ve gotten little or no media coverage I expect we will see comparable enclaves of tranquility today.

One possible explanation for why some cities explode with violence and others don’t is contagion theory: the tendency of people to do what their friends are doing. Once the rocks and bottles start flying in a neighborhood, it becomes tempting to join in. Youths, who played a major role in the turbulence, are particularly susceptible to peer influence. Consequently, when teenagers and young men begin rampaging, the situation often quickly escalates. No one wants to miss the party. As more young people join in, what begins as a manageable event can rapidly spiral out of control.

Closely related to the contagion theory is the threshold—or, more popularly, the “tipping point”—hypothesis. Once a certain number of rioters have become engaged, this view holds, those who had preferred to stay on the sidelines will be motivated to jump in. While imitation plays its part here too, the size of the event in itself becomes the crucial determinant of the ultimate magnitude of the riot.

Of course, a peaceful situation can quickly descend into mayhem in the presence of provocateurs. Back in the ’60s, a new generation of young black militants, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, traveled around the country making incendiary speeches, unabashedly endorsing black revolution. Today we have antifa and various anarchist groups using social media and encrypted messages to organize the violence effectively but anonymously.

Certainly, there are those who honestly believe that America’s police are racist and in need of fundamental reforms. They are mistaken, but they should have ample opportunity to express their views peacefully. There should be no confusing such protesters, however, with looters, arsonists and those who would kill police officers. They deserve a different name: criminals.

I don’t believe there’s any practical way of preventing a massive angry demonstration from changing into a riot with dizzying speed. All it takes is one “influencer” shouting “Let’s start looting!” Set aside “free speech zones” for demonstrations far away from tempting targets and be willing to enforce order. Even that won’t be enough.

I think the editors of the Wall Street Journal have this about right:

Former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis’s denunciation of President Trump on Wednesday isn’t surprising, but it still looks like an important political moment. Mr. Trump’s polarizing and hyper-personal governance is catching up with him, as we and so many others warned.

Mr. Mattis, the former four-star Marine General, is a man of accomplishment and dedication to country. He made the decision to join Mr. Trump’s Administration despite the misgivings he must have had about the President’s foreign-policy views. He served loyally until he resigned on Dec. 20, 2018 after Mr. Trump’s abrupt decision to withdraw troops from the Syrian border with Turkey after a telephone call with Turkey’s President.

But as he so often has, Mr. Trump couldn’t resist kicking Mr. Mattis as he was going out the door. His initial tweets were supportive, but within two days he was criticizing Mr. Mattis for not helping enough to dun allies for more cash for U.S. foreign deployments. “General Mattis did not see this as a problem. I DO, and it is being fixed!” he tweeted.

He told a cabinet meeting that “I wish him well. I hope he does well. But, as you know, President Obama fired him and essentially so did I.” Mr. Mattis said in his resignation letter he’d stay until Feb. 28, but Mr. Trump ordered him out on Jan. 1.

In his statement to the Atlantic, Mr. Mattis denounced in particular Mr. Trump’s threat this week to order the military to restore order amid riots in U.S. cities. He said this threatens the Constitution, which is overwrought given that George H.W. Bush and other Presidents have done this. Mr. Mattis also undersold the significant harm that riots have done in many cities (see nearby).

But the general’s real motivation here is to tell the public that Mr. Trump lacks the character to be President and should be defeated in November. “Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us,” Mr. Mattis said. “We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership.”

There is a reason that presidents of the last 60 or more years have followed one of two paradigms: either they have been micro-managers like Clinton or Carter, “policy wonks” attempting to run every detail of the federal government themselves, or staff managers like Eisenhower or Reagan who appointed good subordinates, established the objectives, let the subordinates work out the details for themselves, and supported them. The reason is that those approaches can be made to work. What President Trump has been doing cannot, particularly when so much of the appointed and permanent civil bureaucracy disagrees with you or even despises you.

There’s an ongoing debate about whether SARS-CoV-2 is becoming milder. At Bloomberg Max Nisen says that the preponderance of the evidence suggests it is not. However

If the virus isn’t shifting into a milder form, what else can explain why it doesn’t seem as bad in some places? The fact is, many other things could be at work. The virus may well appear weaker in areas on the other side of a peak because expanded testing and surveillance are catching people earlier in the course of their illness, as opposed to months ago when most were only tested if they got sick enough to brave a packed hospital. Clinicians also know more about how to treat people, and are no longer as overwhelmed.

A solid portion of those most vulnerable due to a weakened immune system or other factors have likely already been infected, especially in hard-hit areas in Italy. Those that haven’t are better protected by public health measures, a lower level of community spread, possible temporary seasonal effects, and at least some degree of acquired immunity in the population.

That last explanation sounds pretty credible to me. Another possibility is that the first cohort of people who contracted the disease were already pretty sick for other reasons. Now even those with serious cases of COVID-19 are stronger and healthier. Also, I suspect that the 1,001st case you treat doesn’t look nearly as bad as the first one did.

Today I have seen two dramatically conflicting political interpretations of events. In one interpretation the demonstrations and subsequent rioting and looting will benefit Democrats in November because of Trump’s racist, fascist response as exemplified by the “Battle of Lafayette Square”, culminating in Gen. James Mattis’s rebuke of President Trump. In this view such events always hurt incumbents and that is supported to some degree by the decline in Trump’s approval numbers.

The other interpretation is that Democrats are misreading the analogy to 1968 and the events of the last week will hurt Democrats in November due to the inability of Democratic mayors and governors to prevent the destruction being wrought on their cities. The notion here is that Nixon won in 1968 and again in 1972 in good measure due to a “law and order” stance that President Trump appears to be trying to emulate. Also note that despite everything that has transpired, according to the RCP Average of Polls, Trump’s approval rating is still one point higher than it was in October of 2019.

I think it’s quite possible that neither and both are right. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if the November election were an anti-incumbent election. Most general elections tend to return 85% or more of incumbents to office. Could this time really be different and in which direction.

Also November is still a long time away. Who will be injured more by the events of the last several weeks may depend on what is remembered 5 months from now.

I thought I’d pass along this assessment from Robert Samuelson at the Washington Post:

The CBO responded to a request by Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) to compare its latest forecast with those prepared in January. The loss was a stunning $7.9 trillion over an 11-year period, with the figures adjusted to eliminate inflation. The main causes were the coronavirus and related lockdown, which caused a surge of joblessness.

That actually sounds light to me. $8 trillion over 11 years in a $21 trillion economy is not nearly as devastating as current conditions feel. He continues:

That’s about 3 percent of cumulative loss to gross domestic product over the same period, says the CBO. There may be more to come. Employment, car sales and housing starts could all take a hit when the CBO recalculates other changes since January. In particular, it hasn’t re-estimated changes in productivity — overall efficiency, which could result in significantly faster or slower economic growth.

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics believes that the CBO’s forecast may be too optimistic. “I don’t think the economy will ever fully get back to the GDP growth rate [before the pandemic], which CBO expects by the end of this decade,” he said in an email. He cited many factors that could slow growth: “diminished globalization — including less trade, immigration and foreign investment — and a much more precarious [budget] situation.”

The one word of advice that I can give is that we need to choose more wisely. Security demands that we bring supply chains closer to home. While that alone won’t satisfy the proponents of a “Green New Deal”, it would certainly be better from an environmental perspective than the status quo ante. And I think it would be much better for all parties to be more tightly interconnected with Canada, Mexico, and other Western Hemisphere countries than our present dependence on China.

At the Wall Street Journal Heather Mac Donald challenges the notion that the underlying problem is systemic police racism:

This charge of systemic police bias was wrong during the Obama years and remains so today. However sickening the video of Floyd’s arrest, it isn’t representative of the 375 million annual contacts that police officers have with civilians. A solid body of evidence finds no structural bias in the criminal-justice system with regard to arrests, prosecution or sentencing. Crime and suspect behavior, not race, determine most police actions.

In 2019 police officers fatally shot 1,004 people, most of whom were armed or otherwise dangerous. African-Americans were about a quarter of those killed by cops last year (235), a ratio that has remained stable since 2015. That share of black victims is less than what the black crime rate would predict, since police shootings are a function of how often officers encounter armed and violent suspects. In 2018, the latest year for which such data have been published, African-Americans made up 53% of known homicide offenders in the U.S. and commit about 60% of robberies, though they are 13% of the population.

The police fatally shot nine unarmed blacks and 19 unarmed whites in 2019, according to a Washington Post database, down from 38 and 32, respectively, in 2015. The Post defines “unarmed” broadly to include such cases as a suspect in Newark, N.J., who had a loaded handgun in his car during a police chase. In 2018 there were 7,407 black homicide victims. Assuming a comparable number of victims last year, those nine unarmed black victims of police shootings represent 0.1% of all African-Americans killed in 2019. By contrast, a police officer is 18½ times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is to be killed by a police officer.

On Memorial Day weekend in Chicago alone, 10 African-Americans were killed in drive-by shootings. Such routine violence has continued—a 72-year-old Chicago man shot in the face on May 29 by a gunman who fired about a dozen shots into a residence; two 19-year-old women on the South Side shot to death as they sat in a parked car a few hours earlier; a 16-year-old boy fatally stabbed with his own knife that same day. This past weekend, 80 Chicagoans were shot in drive-by shootings, 21 fatally, the victims overwhelmingly black. Police shootings are not the reason that blacks die of homicide at eight times the rate of whites and Hispanics combined; criminal violence is.

The latest in a series of studies undercutting the claim of systemic police bias was published in August 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The researchers found that the more frequently officers encounter violent suspects from any given racial group, the greater the chance that a member of that group will be fatally shot by a police officer. There is “no significant evidence of antiblack disparity in the likelihood of being fatally shot by police,” they concluded.

A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. Research by Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer Jr. also found no evidence of racial discrimination in shootings. Any evidence to the contrary fails to take into account crime rates and civilian behavior before and during interactions with police.

The false narrative of systemic police bias resulted in targeted killings of officers during the Obama presidency. The pattern may be repeating itself. Officers are being assaulted and shot at while they try to arrest gun suspects or respond to the growing riots. Police precincts and courthouses have been destroyed with impunity, which will encourage more civilization-destroying violence. If the Ferguson effect of officers backing off law enforcement in minority neighborhoods is reborn as the Minneapolis effect, the thousands of law-abiding African-Americans who depend on the police for basic safety will once again be the victims.

The Minneapolis officers who arrested George Floyd must be held accountable for their excessive use of force and callous indifference to his distress. Police training needs to double down on de-escalation tactics. But Floyd’s death should not undermine the legitimacy of American law enforcement, without which we will continue on a path toward chaos.

In that litany I do not find the observation “white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects” particularly convincing. That could as easily be indicative of white racism is not. That’s the paradox. Any difference in the handling of black suspects on the part of white officers might be indicative of racism. Moreover, black and Hispanic officers are quite capable of anti-black racism themselves.

I don’t know what the underlying problem is and I do think that our police departments are in substantial need of reform. I’m wary of demand for immediate and unconditional elimination of the killing of black suspects by white police officers if for no other reason that it might actually place more black people in jeopardy than the status quo.

This looks like a good place to begin a little inquiry. The editors of the Washington Post are alarmed at the disinformation and distortions being promulgated:

“WHERE ARE the protesters?” asked several accounts on Twitter early Monday morning, after most Washingtonians had gone to bed and the Web-waves had quieted. Using the hashtag #DCblackout, they claimed that communications downtown had been blocked to cover up police violence. Then came a series of suspicious missives in identical language declaring that all was well — spurring more concern among observers that something fishy really was afoot.

The entire thing was a ploy, carried out through fraudulent accounts and designed, it appears, to instill panic.

The #DCblackout scare is only one example of the disinformation flourishing amid the week’s anguish and unrest. The favorite tactic of Internet meddlers has been to exploit existing rifts in our society rather than to break open new ones on their own, and this crisis in particular may be ripe for infiltration. The largest Russian troll farm on Facebook leading up to the 2016 election had a go-to topic for sowing discord and division: Black Lives Matter. The Internet Research Agency even attempted to recruit the family members of African Americans killed by the police. America’s endemic racism is an Achilles’ heel.

Let’s start compiling a little list of the disinformation and distortions presently being promulgated. This is just a first approximation. Feel free to contribute your own candidates for the list. If you disagree that something on the list is either disinformation or a distortion, please provide evidence. The best sort of evidence would be multiple independent corroborations, especially from disinterested sources or sources on differing parts of the political spectrum. For example, a news report from the Washington Post and another distinct news report from the Wall Street Journal would be convincing evidence.

A few cautions. Extrapolation from what we believe to be true is not evidence. It’s an unproven hypothesis. Absence of an alternative explanation isn’t evidence, either.

Here we go:

• Communications blackout in Washington, DC to cover up police violence (see above)
• The rioting and violence in many American cities is being coordinated by Antifa or some left wing or anarchist groups.

  I have been unable to find a corroboration from a reliable source of the reports that loads of bricks have been pre-positioned in some of the riot areas or any other evidence of coordinated activity by left wing or anarchist groups. That having been said I would be tremendously surprised if there were no individual or even group left-wing or anarchist participation in the rioting and looting (the distinction between coordination).

• The rioting and violence in many American cities is being perpetrated and/or aggravated in an organized way by white supremacists.

  Again, no evidence but I’d be tremendously surprised, etc.

• The rioting and violence in many American cities is the work of organized criminal gangs.

  Despite Mayor Lightfoot having mentioned this multiple times I have found no corroborating evidence of it. Getting a panel van does not require a great deal of organization.

• There is systemic racism in America’s police forces.

  More on this later.

• President Trump’s entourage used tear gas on the demonstrators to enable Trump to have a photo op brandishing a Bible.

  Trump denies this adamantly. I suspect it was pepper spray rather than tear gas.

It might be entertaining to come up with a list of the disinformation and distortions associated with COVID-19. There’s certainly a lot of it.