Texas Jeff

I did. I also drove by the hike and bike trail today and saw a lot of people "working from home" from the trail. Maybe we're gonna die...

Looking at the data some more, we are now at the point where China was on Feb 1st. China got to zero new cases yesterday, about 46 days later, with a massive lockdown. For the US, 46 days from today is May 4th. We could get this under control and be at the same spot sometime in May, but April is going to suck.

Some good news, Italy's new case rate is bending down a bit if you look at the log scale. It's still exponential but the rate of growth is slowing. It took them 6 days to go from 100 to 1K, 10 days to go from 1K to 10K, and they are now right at 10 days without hitting 100k. Of course, it's possible they have reached the limit of their ability to test per day. But still it appears to be slowing but still exponential. Meanwhile in the US, we are right on a log-linear track. Eight days to go from 100 to 1K, eight days to go from 1K to 10K, and we are now seven days away from 100K. I think we will see a knee in the log-linear curve sometime in the next week as the effects of self-isolation start to show. Hopefully we don't hit 100K cases by next Thursday. If we keep it under 100K through the end of the month, that is real progress and a sign that all of the stay at home efforts are paying off. If we hit 100K prior to next Thursday, well then you can say that maybe testing is ramping up and catching more cases but our growth rate is still exponential and speeding up. Not great, Bob...

You can try here: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ They have handy dandy linear and log charts for cases and deaths over time....

You can do this today but you have to ride a bus from the red line station downtown to the airport. The train would be the same thing but maybe a little faster. How long are you willing to spend on the red line + the new train to get to the airport? A 45 minute ride? An hour? More than an hour? At some point it makes sense to have someone drop you off at the airport or take ridesharing or just pay for parking at the airport.

A town in Italy was running an infection control experiment at the beginning of the outbreak. Timing was accidental, they were just trying to see what would happen if they tested an entire population for a disease. They tested everyone for COVID-19 in round 1, all 3300 town members, and found that 3% were infected and half of the infected had no symptoms. So they quarantined those folks and their contacts and retested everyone 10 days later. Infection rates had dropped tenfold, to around 0.3% infected. https://www.ft.com/content/0dba7ea8-6713-11ea-800d-da70cff6e4d3 An easy to do at-home test would really help beat this thing...

Q&A with Trump from today's press conference. sorry for the all-caps ... he was asked how long Americans would have to really focus on social distancing Knows nothing, commits to nothing, ready to take credit should things break his way...

There is some data from Wuhan to show how this works. In China, they asked all of the people who tested positive to guess what day they started showing symptoms, and then backed that up to show when they probably were exposed. Shortly after the date of the lockdown, they believe new infections dropped significantly. But it took around 12 days for that drop to show up in the form of a reduction of new daily cases. Once you start social distancing or lockdowns, you have to go through about two weeks and trust that it is working before you see a benefit in the data.

His shipping is about $10, plus he has to take orders and individually mail them to people. So .... he went into a store where the cost of producing, delivering and staging these items was completely paid for, took everything they had Grinch-style, and built his horde. Now, he either has to give it away or sell to a local population, or increase the cost of delivery 10x by sending small packages all across the country.

I normally don't use foul language, but fuck these guys: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/technology/coronavirus-purell-wipes-amazon-sellers.html Dudes drove around Tennessee and Kentucky early in the crisis, hitting up every place they could find and buying all of the hand sanitizer and wipes they had. Now they have 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer in their garage and self-storage, hoping to sell it on Amazon for multiples of what they bought it for.

I was a kid in the 1970's during gas rationing. The rule was if your license plate ended in an odd number you could get gas on an odd numbered day, even on even numbered days. It sucked. Lines around the block every day for gas. Cars idling to keep A/C going. Everyone topped off their tank every chance because they knew they could not get gas on the next day, or were afraid that rationing would get worse, or that the stations would run dry. We used to roll up for maybe two gallons of gas at a time. I remember being amazed when it went away and one day we could just go get gas, anytime we wanted, no lines.

After watching the White House press conference I am adding Dr. Deborah Birx to my list of trustworthy folks working on this. She talked about working with Google to create a web site that allows you to answer some questions, describe your symptoms, decided if you need a test or not, and then get directed to a list of drive through sites to be tested. The Wal-Mart CEO was there saying that many of their sites are going to have drive through testing in their parking lots.

Paging George Bailey ... stand up and talk George and save us all...

And they called me at 3:45 am to let me know that...

I'll have whatever South Korea is having...

Depends on the grocery stores staying open and stocked, utilities still up and running, and people having reasonable access to care if they need it. If we still have that, everyone not needed to run critical stuff is probably OK at home for a while.

No way they cut taxes and benefits. Any payroll tax cut will just be a cut, they would be crazy to touch benefits. It just means the "trust fund", aka T-bills the social security admin owns, will run out sooner and screw someone around 2035.

Drs. Fauci and Redfield talked to Congress today, lots of good info from Fauci. I had never heard of Fauci before this crisis but he seems to be the most trustworthy and apolitical person we have working on this. https://www.c-span.org/video/?470224-1/federal-health-officials-testify-coronavirus-outbreak-response

That graph shows infections going up roughly an order of magnitude every ten days. South Korea bent the curve right around where the USA will be in seven days. This next week is critical. We need to slow it down. But, if it is going to grow by an order of magnitude every ten days and we assume 60% of us will get it, then it will look like this: March 11th, around 1000 cases March 21st, around 10,000 cases March 31st, around 100,000 cases April 10th, around 1,000,000 cases April 20th, around 10,000,000 cases April 30th, around 100,000,000 cases If the growth rate continues, somewhere between the end of April and mid-May we will have "peak corona" in the US, where the virus runs out of new targets. Most of the cases will be infected in mid-late April and recover sometime in May. After that we can turn the machines on again and resume consuming mass quantities... It's hard to believe the growth rate will continue at that pace. Most of the people I meet have stopped shaking hands and stopped sitting close together. Social distancing will have an effect, the question is how much and will it be soon enough to help the health system manage the strain.

A cut in Social Security or Medicare taxes withheld from paychecks. Basically a reduction in revenue for the feds that normally funds Social Security and Medicare. Benefits are unlikely to be cut, so either the govt would take on more debt or the date at which these programs run out of funding would come in.

Nope

Venus and the Moon are pretty close together in the evening sky right now. Check it out...

CNBC is broadcasting live from the stock exchange ... where evidently they had a musical performance scheduled for after the close. The music sounds like someone screaming over and over...

Sanders was born three months before Pearl Harbor. He'll be 79 at the inauguration. If you look at the social security tables, he'll have on average just under 9 years to live. Reasonable odds of making it through one term but maybe not two. Trump is younger but with his diet, weight and stressful job he is a cardiac case waiting to happen.