COVID-19

[fiby41]

Doubling period pushed to 8 days. At this rate we'll cross 60k by 3rd May until when the lockdown is.
Contactless doorstep delivery of non-essentials to resume from 20th April.
Members of parliament take a 30% pay cut in annual salary.
Public sector employees take 50% pay cut in previous month's salary.
Hiring freezes in hospitality, tourism, travel and allied sectors.
Pay hike freezes in IT and service sectors.
Reserve bank revises reverse repo to below 4%.
PPE from China found to be defective. China's central bank picks up 1.01% stake in largest lender.
Now we're the only country that has the population to take USA's top spot as China's numbers turned out to be untrustworthy. Fatality is 3.8%.

[jacob]

Denmark update:

After acting earlier than most of EU with a semi-hard shutdown (somewhere between blue state-US and Italy) that lasted about a month and which the public mostly followed, the curve broke about 10ish days ago. The reopening strategy concentrates on mass testing (tents are being set up in city squares) and sending out the strongest (young children) first to drive up herd immunity. All daycare centers and schools up to the 5th grade will open on Monday. Most regular/scheduled healthcare and dentist services will reopen as well as the risk of overloading the health care system has passed for now. The OMX C20 index has clawed back most of its initial losses and is now priced approximately at where it was at the beginning of January 2020. Bonus: Regular influenza has been eliminated from the country. Some restaurants and travel agencies have declared bankruptcy (I presume this is above the normal background rate). No reports of mass unemployment or riots---it's mostly people going stir crazy or getting tired of being in the company of their own family.

Total running death rate: 3.0/100k

[jacob]

From the department of interconnectedness: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-heal ... SKBN2200G3

US soda and beer(!?) manufactures are running out of CO2 which normally is a side-product of ethanol manufacturing for E85 fuel for which the demand is less due to less car driving.

In "normal" brewing fizzy CO2 is a side-effect of the yeast growing under pressure, but apparently that's not how it's done on an industrial scale.

[chenda]

Good to hear about Denmark. I expect it's small size and social cohesion made the whole process a lot easier.

[jacob]

@chenda - More like a general high-level of confidence in the idea of government and a generous welfare state (no fear of falling through the cracks for lack of income). Pretty much everybody followed directions even those who didn't like it (mostly CEOs, right-wing think tanks, and anti-vaxxer types with a libertarian bent). The idea of social cohesion was pretty much destroyed in the first hour after the announcement as supermarkets were plundered after people were specifically told not to.

Add: As expected the innumerates are already beginning to question why the big brouhaha "when nothing happened!?"

[chenda]

@jacob yes that's kinda what I meant by social cohesion, a willingness to follow government guidelines in the national interest. And I imagine people have a more personal relationship their politicians. You probably see the prime minister wondering around Copenhagen on a Saturday morning just like everybody else. Well not at the moment but you know what I mean...Something I like about small countries.

[George the original one]

@gtoo

Since small businesses make up conservatively 60 billion of Oregon's gdp, I don't think 3.8 billion in loans which need to be repaid is going to do much more than slow a pretty big bleed. Maybe if the economy really does restart quickly.

Remember, much of Oregon's meat & potatoes business is still operating: logging, fishing, construction, trucking, & farming. High tech is partially operating. It's only the retail & consumer side of things that is shut down.

[1taskaday]

Jacob,other European countries are looking at Denmark and Austria's "experiment" for reopening the country from a lock down stage.

Would be grateful for yours and J_'s personal insights (with good detail if possible) into how things progress over time.

[bryan]

If another stimulus bill (or whatever you want to call it) needs to happen, how about we do a short "seeking rent for next X months is illegal" instead of the 880 page bill that passed (in the USA) last time?

[thrifty++]

New Caledonia is going to open up from lockdown tonight.

They have really stamped out the virus there. Almost completely gone. That is somewhere I would love to be right now.

I guess it was probably easier being a small island.

Im not sure when they will open up borders to France again. Would be extremely risky to do so. It is a very small isolated economy on its own.

[George the original one]

Silly observations:
Russia and Brazil are rocketing past Canada.
If NYC were a country, it has the 5th most deaths.
North Dakota, like Ohio, has unfortunately taken off in the wrong direction.
Kansas is going for a double peak.
Maine is finding the top of its double peak.
Alaska bottoming for the second time; hopefully it won't start towards a third peak.
There are no states below 300 cases; remember when President Trump didn't want the numbers to double by allowing a cruise ship to dock?

[thrifty++]

Silly observations:
Russia and Brazil are rocketing past Canada.

Russia is massively on a consistently upward trajectory.

Also Singapore has had its biggest daily increase ever so it looks like there is a second wave happening there.

[thrifty++]

You may begin seeing “hyperbolic” vídeos on the news as hospitals in some cities in Brazil are over capacity and people are being left without care. Part of the health professionals are not working because sick, dead, or because they bail out. Relatives of sick people are revolting and there was at least one case of them destroying hospital glass doors. At least bodies are being stored in freezer containers now instead of being piled up in hospitals.

that is horrific. Sorry to hear about this. I have a friend who lives in Brasilia who I have been talking to. He doesn't seem to have relayed these sorts of things to me. But he has said that people are staying inside at the moment and are scared of the situation.

[thrifty++]

There is a stringency map to show the extent of stringent measures imposed by countries in response to COVID19.

https://covidtracker.bsg.ox.ac.uk/stringency-map

[classical_Liberal]

North Dakota, like Ohio, has unfortunately taken off in the wrong direction.

The ND case is interesting in that the uptick of positives over the past couple of days (prior to that it has been very stable) was related to a single place, a manufacturing company. Well over 100 positives were confirmed because the State DOH moved in, shut down the facility, tested the employees and families en mass, and began contact tracing. Also issued an executive order that all employees of that facility self isolate for 14 days, even if tested negative, or risk a misdemeanor charge. ND, in general, does not have a stay at home order, but the economy is mostly shuttered due to orders related to restaurants, bars, gathering places, ect. Also many other companies voluntarily shutting down, or WFH.

This response seems like a template for how future outbreak controls would work in areas not overwhelmed. If and when other states who are in more lockdown mode would begin to reopen businesses, they may want to see how this plays out. It'll be very interesting to watch over the next week to see if this spreads (like SD who has a similar situation in a food processing facility, but SD has NOT shut down other businesses). Or if it can be relatively contained by the quick action, mass testing, forced by law isolation, and contact tracing.

[fiby41]

State: ₹2k to 1.2 million construction workers.

Nation:
Foreign direct investment from neighbours sharing land border to require prior approval. RBI pumps another ₹1T.
from 20th:
Online orders of non essentials to remain suspended.
Commercial, private industries to be allowed to operate except in containment zones.
All agriculture, horticulture, fishing to be allowed. Plantations at 50% maximum occupancy.
Air travel grounded until June.

[Jason]

I don't see how death rates can be calculated without universal testing. If you don't know the denominator, what good is the numerator?

One issue with the critique/portrayal of Trump is that it's just more singing from each choir and it's getting tiresome listening to the same fucking two songs for all these years. If you thought he was the worst President in history before this, of course you're going to think he is handling it inappropriately. Maybe the real question to ask is how has our federalist form of government responded to the crisis, specifically, have we as citizens, over time, become too accustomed to placing so many of our eggs in its basket when its comes to solving our problems, especially when they come on this scale. Our government is so huge, so politicized and unwieldy at this time, its irrational to think it's instaneously going to become nuanced and nimble when a crisis comes. It's like asking your fat, slovenly, drunken, dumbass, wife-beater wearing step-father to help you with your calculus final when you yourself haven't cracked the book all year. It obviously would have been better to have studied all year and then bribe the smartest kid in the class if you needed help.

[JL13]

So I spent the last couple weeks wracking my brain about the CHIME model, specifically the one used to create the projection for DC. See slide 11:

https://coronavirus.dc.gov/sites/defaul ... 040320.pdf

This model shows a peak around July 1, with 93,000 cases (out of a population of 702,000), this is about 13% infection rate. The curve then flattens through the rest of the year. I've been trying to figure out why it flattens.

Two possible interpretations:

1.) 93,000 is the number of people with severe enough symptoms that they get tested & confirmed. While the other 47% of the population has mild/no symptoms and are not tested.

That means herd immunity by Fall.

This is incredibly optimistic, but it might be correct. If this thing didn't originate in Wuhan, and has been spreading since as early as September, there may be many many cases that are asymptomatic.

2.) It's based on an R0 of 1.15, which is consistent with that other nations (& cruise ships) have reported after lockdowns were imposed. R0 of 1.15 = herd immunity at 13%. That means that the projection shows complete lockdown through December.

This makes sense too, but I wonder if the flat curve through December is not the actual plan. I would imagine that they would slowly lighten up on the lockdown, incrementally increasing R0 so that there is a steady flow of (hopefully young and healthy) people becoming infected to move everyone to increasing levels of herd immunity.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/co ... story.html

[jacob]

@Jason - Dealing with an epidemic falls in the same category as dealing with a natural disaster or a war, where federal response is better. This is to avoid every single state developing its own army, FEMA, or CDC-equivalent, and so on. Instead the fed can just move its resources to wherever they are needed. For example, medical personal and equipment could be shifted to the hotspots from all over the country. Instead the states are being told to deal with it themselves. It would be as if Canada invaded Vermont and Vermont was told: "That's your problem. You deal with it" by the federal government. Well, now a virus has invaded NY, WA, MI, LA, and a couple of others... but they're being told exactly that.

This does not (my opinion) mean that the federal government is the boss of the states. Again (my opinion), to use the boss analogy, when dealing with competent employers (state), the job of the boss is not to tell them what to do but rather act as a janitor/fixer to keep operations smooth. Obviously, bad actors (states) can't be fired, but they could be contained to avoid damage to the rest of the system. For example, if a state with a hotspot decides to do nothing, the federal government should be able to shut down travel from that state. Just to give a simple example of something that would be a constitutional nightmare.

Basically, the federal government is what's supposed to put the U in the USA.

[Jason]

I'm not intimating that the Federal government is not the chief decision maker and central arbiter of response philosophy. What I am intimating is that our continued dependence on it as our chief provider, chief source of intelligence, chief source of guidance, chief source of solution, chief source of blame when we have Viet Nam, 9/11, Katrina in our rear view mirror and now this event in our windshield seems to demand reevaluation of its functionality as it has evolved over time. I understand Fed vs. states rights is a swing not a square dance but this time it seems like some post-modern interpretive thing where the East Coast has formed some type of Army and other states are rolling rogue and are starting to see Militias. I am far from an expert and Fauci seems knowledgable and competent. But he's also just the guy who happens to be there and he was underplaying this in January when others weren't. I'm not blaming him or anyone. They have called in the private sector but that also doesn't seem to well organized. It's what we have and I'll take this system over any, but if it's as war and Canada has invaded Vermont and maple syrup producers are being slaughtered, someone needs to explain to me that PBS getting $75 fucking million is part of the solution. I'm not arguing against the form of government. I am arguing that is has grown into an overblown, inflexible and ineffective administrative state that has a track record at failing when faced with crisis.

Edit: @ Bigato thanks for explaining testing.