The graph above, sampled from the site of the Illinois Department of Public Health and annotated by me, depicts the number of COVID-19 cases on a daily basis from March 10, the day after Gov. Pritzker declared a state of emergency, to the present. Gov. Priztker says we’re “bending the curve”. If we are, I don’t see it. The good news, I guess, is that the number of diagnosed cases isn’t doubling every six days, suggesting the outcome won’t follow the worst case scenarios.

What I think is happening is that despite the “stay at home” directives, banning public gatherings, closing the beaches, etc., the disease is running its course.

I continue to believe that the only public health measure that might have been effective would have been to ban all foreign travel starting in late December. Under the circumstances that would have required prescience.

It’s possible that the spread of the contagion within the U. S. might have been contained had we suspended domestic air travel and started epidemiological testing in late January. That would have required considerable political courage.

In the years, decades to come, the events of the last six months will undoubtedly be studied, rehashed, and second guessed millions of times. As I see it anyone trying to come to a complete understanding of COVID-19 and its spread needs to answer some questions:

1. In the absence of full disclosure and complete cooperation from the Chinese authorities starting in December 2019, could we reasonably expect anything effective to have been done?
2. Why was Italy so affected by the contagion?
3. Why has the spread of the disease been so limited in Germany?
4. Why is New York City so stricken? It accounts for a third of all of the cases in the United States. As a side note, why are the subways still running in NYC?
5. Why are the prevalence and morbidity of the disease so different from state to state?
6. Why do people of sub-Saharan African descent in the United States comprise such a large percentage of the cases of COVID-19 and an even larger percentage of the deaths due to the disease?

I think the answers to those questions will be a sort of litmus test.

I found the proposal for improving the CARES Act, supported here by the editors of the New York Times prudent:

Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, has proposed an American version. Under his plan, the government would pay up to 80 percent of payroll costs for each employee up to the median wage — which the Social Security Administration pegged at $32,828 in 2018.

Mr. Hawley’s whatever-it-takes plan recognizes the immensity of this crisis.

“It’s like, ‘Wow, we’re going down, down, down, down, down.’ Nobody can see the bottom,” he told The Washington Post. “I personally don’t care to find out where the bottom might be!”

Crucially, the money would be distributed by a much larger arm of the government, the Internal Revenue Service. (The program is technically designed as a payroll tax rebate.)

The plan also would provide a bonus for rehiring workers laid off since the crisis began.

And the same aid would be available to larger employers affected by the crisis, too.

It does have a fatal problem, hwoever: it was proposed by a Republican which will probably render it DOA in today’s House while Rep. Jayapal’s considerably less prudent proposal will likely sail through.

A key problem, one shared by elected representatives, is that people just don’t appreciate the immensity of the task or its logistical requirements. Issuing checks probably isn’t the best approach, either. About 7% of U. S. households are “unbanked” while another 15% only have a tangential relationship with a bank.

There are plenty of people with the required logistical mindset, both in the private sector and public sector, and there’s an urgent need to make someone of that stamp responsible for coordinating the country’s response to the present crisis, either a general, someone in supply chain management for a large company, e.g. Apple or Amazon, or someone presently working for a big 3PL (third party logistics company, e.g. UPS).

I suspect we’ll see many, many more course corrections to the policies we’ve been putting in place over the last few months over time.

Against my better judgment I am presently listening to President Trump’s briefing on the status of the “war on coronavirus”. I just wanted to comment on one thing. President Trump just said that the United States had administered tests for the virus than more people than any other country. That is true but it is quite misleading. We have administered nearly 2.5 million tests but we are a very large country.

On a tests per million population basis not only have we not administered the most tests, we aren’t even in the top 40. Who is?

Nearly all of those in the top twenty per 1M population are relatively small islands and city-states. After that are Norway, Switzerland, Slovenia, Germany, and Austria. Then other highly cohesive ethnic states including places very hard-hit by COVID-19 including Spain and Italy.

I see little correlation between raw number of tests administered and anything useful. I think we’d be better off being smarter than that but it’s hard to drum up support for that in a country like ours.

Here’s an expert opinion from the National Academy of Sciences on the prospective effects of various conditions of temperature and humidity on the “novel coronavirus”. From the conclusion:

Some limited data support a potential waning of cases in warmer and more humid seasons, yet none are without major limitations. Given that countries currently in “summer” climates, such as Australia and Iran, are experiencing rapid virus spread, a decrease in cases with increases in humidity and temperature elsewhere should not be assumed. Given the lack of immunity to SARS-CoV-2 across the world, if there is an effect of temperature and humidity on transmission, it may not be as apparent as with other respiratory viruses for which there is at least some pre-existing partial immunity. It is useful to note that pandemic influenza strains have not exhibited the typical seasonal pattern of endemic/epidemic strains. There have been 10 influenza pandemics in the last 250-plus years—two started in the northern hemisphere winter, three in the spring, two in the summer and three in the fall. All had a peak second wave approximately six months after emergence of the virus in the human population, regardless of when initial introduction occurred.

Additional studies as the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic unfolds could shed more light on the effects of climate on transmission.

In summary, though experimental studies show a relationship between higher temperatures and humidity levels, and reduced survival of SARS-CoV-2 in the laboratory, there are many other factors besides environmental temperature, humidity, and survival of the virus outside the host, that influence and determine transmission rates among humans in the “real world”.

Cheery, no?

Is this a fair summary?

1. We shouldn’t bet the farm on the summer baking the virus out.
2. It is likely, nearly certain, that SARS-CoV-2 will return in the late summer or early fall.

To that I would add that New York City may have provided a nearly optimal environment for the virus: it was the right temperature, the right humidity, and a lots of travel back and forth with China in the weeks of active spread there.

Said another way, I don’t think we should be too quick to attribute successes against SARS-CoV-2 to the actions that have been taken. We don’t know enough, it’s more complicated than that, and the situation is very fluid.

I suppose I ought to react to Joe Biden’s proposal, published in Medium. Reading around the persiflage, he proposes two things. First

I have directed my team to develop a plan to lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60.

Costs for the expansion are to be paid from general revenues. And

I’ve also directed my team to develop a plan to forgive federal student debt relating to the cost of tuition currently held by low-income and middle-class people for undergraduate public colleges and universities, as well as private Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and private, underfunded Minority-Serving Institution (MSIs).

Since these are the keystones of what he has proposed for some time, they are hardly surprising. I find continuing to paddle your canoe during a crisis ghoulish but on the positive side, these proposals aren’t as ghoulish as some responses to what is clearly being perceived as a “good crisis”. He also proposes grants to states to pay for “educators and health care workers and first responders”:

In addition to funds to keep workers on payroll, the next recovery package will need to provide significant funds to states, to make sure that educators and health care workers and first responders can keep getting paid. It will have to provide hazard pay to frontline workers putting themselves at risk. It will have to provide health care coverage for millions who lose their insurance, by allowing them to stay on their health care plans and covering the cost, as well as reopening enrollment for Obamacare and creating the public option I’ve been calling for. It will have to extend unemployment benefits, and provide further direct cash relief, and take care of the people left out of the CARES Act, through an immediate cancellation of a minimum of $10,000 of student debt per person, as proposed by Senator Warren, and Social Security boosts. And so much more.

as well as proposing that the federal government shoulder the costs for all testing for the “novel coronavirus” and all care for COVID-19:

And we must — must — make sure not only that every American can be tested for coronavirus free of cost, but also make sure every American can be treated for coronavirus free of cost. Period.

While I support a federal plan for epidemiological testing, I think that testing “every American” is a step too far. Not only do I think it would be much more expensive than its proponents anticipate (no less than $1 trillion), it’s a logistical nightmare. Would it actually tell us more than sampling would? To the contrary I suspect it would be the world’s largest and most expensive game of Whac-A-Mole. If you came back and retested a week later, you’d get different results. It would also take limited resources away from more urgent uses. As to paying for all of the care for COVID-19, under existing law the federal government will probably already pay for most of the costs.

Demanding that all care be paid for by the federal government is exactly why I opposed payouts to the victims of 9/11. We had not made such payouts to victims of war in the past and it set a precedent of which VP Biden’s proposal is an example. Benign as it may sound it’s unclear to me why the federal government should pay the health care costs of people who have private health care insurance.

I know I’m the dog in the manger on this subject but why provide grants to pay health care workers and not grocery store clerks? Health care workers who believe that they did not sign on to be around sick people, a complaint I’ve been hearing recently, really should reconsider their chosen careers. It’s exactly what they signed on for. It is not, in fact, what grocery clerks signed on for and they are keeping people alive as surely as health care workers are.

I note that there is no consideration as to how all of the spending will be paid for. I would presume that it will be paid in the same way that our budget has been paid during nearly the entire 40 years during which Vice President Biden has held political office—it will be borrowed. I think that should be reconsidered.

For 2019 the federal budget was about $4.5 trillion. Interest on the debt comprised 8% of that. At the end of 2019 the federal debt stood at about $22.7 trillion. The recently-passed CARES act will add $2 trillion to that. That will sharply increase interest payments which are already one of the largest line items in the federal budget. As I see it there are several different strategies for handling the spending:

1. We can handle it the way that Keynes proposed: we can reduce spending and/or increase taxation during an expansion subsequent to the sharp contraction that practically everybody presently envisions. We have never done that in the past and I believe there would be strong opposition to doing so now. Most Keynesians including economists who should know better are content with what I’ve called “folk Keynesianism” under which more spending is always good.
2. We can merely extend ourselves credit without actually borrowing it. No interest would be due. If there has ever been a good time for an experiment with Modern Monetary Theory, this is probably it. We could use a little inflation about now and I say that as a saver who stands to lose by inflation. The challenge will be in controlling the inflation.
3. We can increase taxes on corporations and individuals immediately to make up the difference. From an economic standpoint that’s probably the worst alternative but I suspect it’s the one that the class warriors who are wielding so much influence on the Democratic Party these days will seize on.

What I got most from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s New York Times op-ed on how the outbreak of COVID-19 is killing off the last vestiges of any belief that the United States is the greatest country in the world was a graphic example of how much things have changed over the last 80 or 90 years. Take a look at the movies of back then like Foreign Correspondent, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mrs. Miniver and so many of them. Those pictures were made by immigrants who were grateful to their adoptive country. It used to be that immigrants whose lives were, literally, saved by the United States appreciated it.

We are a much better, more tolerant country than we were then. We are enormously more accepting of those who don’t match the hypothetical norm. Even with the manifest flaws of those 80 or 90 years ago, there was still manifest love for the country that had taken them in. Perhaps people under 50 don’t understand that. If they don’t, it’s because their parents taught them poorly.

It proves how right Sam Clemens was. The difference between a man and a dog is that if you feed a dog and make him prosperous, he won’t bite you.

Thinking about Florida’s much-criticized spring break shenanigans, at RealClearPolitics Sean Trende crunches some numbers and arrives at the tentative conclusion that Florida’s governor might have made the right decision. He concludes like this:

To be clear, I support most of the social distancing that has been imposed (I think the jury is still out on school closures). I don’t think the cure is worse the disease right now. Analogies to the flu are too flippant; left unchecked this virus seems certain to kill off at least one order of magnitude more people than seasonal flu. At the same time, the social distancing seems to have stopped a pretty nasty flu outbreak dead in its tracks. We could do this every winter and save tens of thousands of lives annually; over the course of my lifetime the failure to do this every winter probably will kill more Americans than unchecked COVID-19 spread would. We don’t do that, of course, but to be clear: We don’t do it because the social and economic costs of doing so would be too great.

There’s a certain beauty and moral rightness in saying that every life counts, and that one life lost to this virus is one life too many. In reality, almost every one of us at some point solves the cold equations against life. There is more than ample room to conclude that DeSantis did it wrong here, but we should be honest with ourselves that we all have our limits as to what we will tolerate, and be willing to consider arguments to the contrary if things don’t change for the worse there.

I’ve recently heard some people suggest, mildly, that we will need to keep the economy closed down for 18 months or more, apparently not understanding that would result in a global collapse that most living human beings probably would not survive while the remnants roasted the less fortunate over fires for food.

Our political leaders in particular need to adjust themselves to the realization that we cannot “shelter in place” for a year or more. Even raising the possibility of indefinitely long shutdowns is irresponsible. I don’t think we can do it for six months. For one thing at some point non-compliance will just make the whole thing moot.

There is a difference between knitting a sweater over a week’s time and knitting 1,000 sweaters over a week’s time. Lots of the commentary I’ve read lately fails to recognize that. It’s not just 1,000 times more complicated. It’s many, many times a 1,000 times more complicated.

For Iceland to test 8% of its population of 365,000 people is a major undertaking. For the United States to test 8% of its 330 million population isn’t 1,000 times more complicated. It’s a million times more complicated. The logistical, manpower, communications, and material components are all incredibly vast. That’s sufficiently complex that it may not even be a worthwhile goal at all.

We need to be smarter than that.