COVID-19 Update

People have been wondering about getting back to normal. And, what will "the new normal" look like?

First, the old normal was kinda shitty - people more or less chained to a job because they can't afford to lose their healthcare insurance. People being unable to afford a fairly simple emergency that costs more than a few hundred dollars. No sick time. No vacation time. A pay structure that sets out the daily requirement for throughput, at a fixed pay rate, which means you almost never get it all done, which means your hourly rate is less than it says it is on your check stub, which means there's always month left over at the end of the money.

So, for most people, "getting back to normal" is more like a threat than a promise.

And until the smart people come up with a vaccine, or some workable therapeutics, we're already in "the new normal" - this is it, folks.

Anyway, Growth Rates are hangin' in there at about 1.02.

I'll go out on a limb and say that the DumFux News crowd will see enough of a downturn in that growth rate, and take to heart President Stoopid's daily pronouncements of what a great job he's done, and what a great victory he's engineered for the American people because of his superb leadership and blah blah blah - and we'll go charging into the sinkhole, guaranteeing a second wave in the fall.

That, of course, is the conventional wisdom, and while there's no good reason to believe otherwise, we're flying blind - we don't know near enough about COVID-19 to be making any solid predictions.

And there's the rub. The rubes continue to accept a string of logical fallacies (Straw Man, Ad Hominem, Argument From Ignorance, False Dichotomy - you name it, these idiots will swallow it) as the basis for their support of a guy whose only talent is that he knows how to milk the Dunning-Kruger effect, and to take it a step or two farther by persuading stupid people that their stupidity is what makes them smart.

NYT Morning (in my email) - David Leonhardt:

Most countries with severe coronavirus outbreaks have come well down from their peak in new cases each day. It’s happened in Italy, Spain, France, Germany, Turkey and, if you believe the official numbers, China.

But it has not happened in the United States. Here, the number of both confirmed new cases and deaths has fallen only slightly in the last few weeks. Every day since April 2, there have been at least 22,000 new cases and 1,000 deaths.

Now, with many states preparing to reopen their economies, the toll is likely to start rising again, according to a private Trump administration forecast obtained by The Times. It projected about 3,000 deaths per day on June 1.

Why has the United States failed to bring down its caseload as much as most other countries?

The answer isn’t completely clear, given the complexity of the virus. But the leading suspect, many experts say, is the uneven nature of the U.S. response — like the shortage of tests so far and the mixed approach to social distancing.

“The problem with the American response is that it’s so haphazard,” Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me.

One way to see the pattern is to look at the U.S. caseload outside the New York metro area. New York has been hit harder than any other city in the world, thanks to its large number of foreign visitors, its high population density and a slow initial response from its political leaders.

But New York has since engaged in fairly rigorous social distancing, and its caseload trend looks like that of a European country: up and then down.

The story is different in the rest of the country. Outside of the New York region, the caseload still has not peaked: