You’ve seen all the scary charts showing unemployment skyrocketing during the COVID-19 lockdowns, but here’s a more cheerful one to balance things out:

Partly because there’s less to spend money on, and partly because people are scared to spend all their money, personal savings increased significantly in the first quarter. With the exception of a single quarter during the fiscal cliff standoff in 2012, this is the highest personal saving rate of the 21st century. And it will almost certainly rise even further next quarter.

There are plenty of reasons to be pessimistic about the economy rebounding when COVID-19 starts to fade away—the biggest being legitimate doubt about whether COVID-19 will fade away given the bumbling performance of the Trump administration—but this is the prime reason to be optimistic. If (a) the coronavirus rescue bills do their job and keep most people whole during the layoffs and lockdowns, and (b) the personal saving rate balloons, then there should be a huge spending binge later in the year. There’s every reason to think that this could give the economy a huge kickstart.

Of course, this will happen only if we get COVID-19 under control so people aren’t afraid to spend. Donald Trump seems to think he can just order the economy to recover, but he will quickly discover that he can’t unless he gets COVID-19 under control. As a president running for reelection, this should be enough incentive for him to do the right thing and put all his energy into locking down now and ramping up test capacity for later, but instead he’s doing just the opposite. It is a great puzzlement.

ABC News

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo talked with Martha Raddatz on ABC’s This Week today:

RADDATZ: And, Mr. Secretary, have you seen anything that gives you high confidence that it originated in that Wuhan lab?

POMPEO: Martha, there’s enormous evidence that that’s where this began. We’ve said from the beginning that this was a virus that originated in Wuhan, China. We took a lot of grief for that from the outset, but I think the whole world can see now.

Remember, China has a history of infecting the world, and they have a history of running substandard laboratories. These are not the first times that we’ve had a world exposed to viruses as a result of failures in a Chinese lab. And so, while the intelligence community continues to do its work, they should continue to do that and verify so that we are certain. I can tell you that there is a significant amount of evidence that this came from that laboratory in Wuhan.

Help me out here. The idea that the coronavirus might have escaped from the Wuhan Institute of Virology thanks to poor safety procedures has been circulating forever. And of course Donald Trump has blathered about it coming from the Wuhan lab too. But nobody pays any attention to him.

Now Pompeo is flat out saying that this is what happened. He’s right that viruses have previously escaped from labs both in China and elsewhere, but he’s not stopping there. He’s also claiming there’s “enormous evidence” that this is how the coronavirus originated. But this is not something to be lightly tossed around, even if the Trump administration is doing its best to reprise its greatest hits from 2016 and make China the punching bag for the 2020 campaign too. Here’s what CBS News reported a couple of days ago:

A senior U.S. intelligence official said Friday that the two scenarios being examined by the intelligence community about the origins of the novel coronavirus — via human contact with infected animals or as the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, China — are “both” currently supported by “evidence” that the community is continuing to evaluate. “Evidence of both scenarios exists,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, given the sensitivity of the matter. The official declined to further characterize the evidence or its credibility, or to say whether either scenario was considered by the intelligence community to be more or less likely. The official did, however, say there was no indication of a “purposeful” release of the virus.

Various conservative outlets have reported the same thing, but with a twist:

A majority of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s 17 spy agencies believe the coronavirus likely originated with an accidental lab escape from a laboratory in Wuhan, China, a senior intelligence official told the Washington Examiner.

….The Daily Caller cited a senior intelligence official earlier Saturday who stated the majority view among U.S. spy agencies is that COVID-19 is natural and that it was accidentally leaked out of a Wuhan lab.

John Roberts of Fox News reported something similar. “There is agreement among most of the 17 Intelligence agencies that COVID-19 originated in the Wuhan lab. The source stressed that the release is believed to be a MISTAKE, and was not intentional,” Roberts tweeted on Saturday, adding, “Sources say not all 17 intelligence agencies agree that the lab was the source of the virus because there is not yet a definitive ‘smoking gun.’ But confidence is high among 70-75% of the agencies.”

So everyone agrees it’s possible the coronavirus accidentally escaped from the Wuhan lab, but all the conservative outlets appear to have access to a source in the intelligence community who says it was most likely a lab mistake.

Maybe so. But this sure sounds awfully similar to 2002, when intelligence officials were being bullied into supporting the Bush administration’s view that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Needless to say, that turned out not to be the case. Today, the intelligence community appears, if anything, to have been even more thoroughly politicized than it was after 9/11, and once again it’s telling conservatives what they want to hear.

But will we ever see any of the “enormous evidence” they claim to have? I guess I doubt it. That might ruin Trump’s reelection campaign, after all.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 2. Interestingly, France is our new hero country. They did abysmally at first and ended up peaking at a daily rate of 16 deaths per million. But ever since then, they’ve been declining steadily and are now down to 4 deaths per million. That’s a quarter of their peak value, the best of the nine countries that I’m tracking. If they keep this up, they’ll be down to essentially a zero death rate from COVID-19 within a week or so.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Isn’t this adorable? My mother’s kittens are bonding with her tomcat, Tillamook. He’s such an indulgent old soul, Tillamook is.¹

¹In case you’re wondering, he is not the kittens’ father. He, uh, just doesn’t have the equipment for it.

A couple of weeks ago I put up a chart based on data from Apple showing how often people asked their iPhones for driving directions. If you assume that this is a rough proxy for the amount of driving people are doing, it shows us how seriously people are taking lockdown orders. Here’s what it looks like for about 30 American cities:

As you can see, driving plunged considerably starting around March 12, which makes sense. It hit bottom toward the end of the month and stayed there for a few days, but during the first week of April it started to creep up again. It’s gone up about 40 percent since then.

The reason I checked on this is because I got some takeout for lunch on Friday and noticed that the streets and parking lots seemed fairly busy. Not pre-coronavirus busy, but certainly busier than a couple of weeks ago. And so they are. Here’s another piece of evidence:

This chart shows the change in the number of people who are staying at home. For each county, there’s a baseline number, and the bars show how much that’s changed. Overall, it peaked around April 12, when nearly 20 percent more people were staying home than usual. But ever since then it’s been dropping.

I feel like I’m hardly one to talk, since lockdown orders barely affect me at all. Still, these two charts suggest that Americans were able to comply with lockdowns for only about a month before they started to take them less and less seriously. Europeans mostly seem to have done better even though their lockdowns were more severe, and our willingness to sacrifice for only a month speaks poorly for both our political system and our innate stores of self-discipline. Now, a mere few weeks after weariness started to set in, we have this:

These are among the folks that Donald Trump called “good people” who just needed to have a little something done for them. The truth, of course, is that these are well-organized GOP protesters responding to Trump’s own order to “liberate” blue states from Democratic governors. Even the simplest and most obvious responses to the pandemic have been turned into partisan battles:

For progressives, masks have become a sign that you take the pandemic seriously and are willing to make a personal sacrifice to save lives. Prominent people who don’t wear them are shamed and dragged on Twitter by lefty accounts. On the right, where the mask is often seen as the symbol of a purported overreaction to the coronavirus, mask promotion is a target of ridicule, a sign that in a deeply polarized America almost anything can be politicized and turned into a token of tribal affiliation.

This is disgraceful beyond imagining. Conservatives have turned the act of taking a pandemic seriously into a partisan skirmish in the culture wars. A pandemic. And because of this, people are driving more, they’re leaving their houses more, and they’re refusing to wear masks. How can this be happening?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 1. For some reason there was no update on Friday for Spain, so its chart goes only through April 30.

I have a feeling my comments on these posts are going to start getting repetitive. The basic story is that nearly all the countries are continuing to show steady declines, and as the days go by they look better and better. There are two exceptions. The first is Canada, which may or may not have peaked, but certainly isn’t going down. Their absolute numbers are still quite low, but this should make it all the easier to put in place test-and-trace programs to stamp out what little they have. So why isn’t this happening?

The second, of course, is the United States. We are declining, but it’s a slow, weak decline. In the last 14 days we’ve dropped from about 2,400 deaths per day to 2,000 deaths per day. If we keep up this rate, we won’t hit zero until mid-July after 85,000 more deaths, for a total official death toll of about 150,000. This would most likely mean an actual death toll of 250-300,000.

I’m not saying this is what will happen. I’m just saying that normally the biggest decline comes right after the peak, but our post-peak decline has been feeble. Maybe additional testing will get us on the right track. On the other hand, the evidence that the public is getting weary of lockdowns means that we might stop declining at all. I’m not sure anyone truly knows how to project this, but given our weak progress so far it sure looks like we ought to be keeping lockdowns firmly in place for at least a few more weeks.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

From the Friday evening news dump files:

President Trump moved on Friday night to replace a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services who angered him with a report last month highlighting supply shortages and testing delays at hospitals during the coronavirus pandemic.

Ha ha. Of course he did. Before long, every inspector general in the executive branch will understand that their careers are at risk if they criticize anything that Trump doesn’t want criticized. The Senate, of course, will not provide any oversight either. And the House is hobbled by the fact that Trump refuses to respond to their subpoenas. This leaves only the press doing real oversight, and Trump works day and night to convince the public that the press is a lying bunch of jackals whose only goal is to support Democrats by making him look bad.

What happens to oversight of the executive branch if we have four more years of this? I suppose it won’t be completely gone, but it will be as close to eradicated as makes no difference.

Chris Kleponis/CNP via ZUMA

The White House won’t let Anthony Fauci testify before Congress next week:

The White House is blocking Anthony S. Fauci from testifying before a House subcommittee investigating the coronavirus outbreak and response, arguing that it would be “counterproductive” for him to appear next week while in the midst of participating in the government’s response to the pandemic….“It’s not muzzling, it’s not blocking, it’s simply trying to ensure we’re able to balance the need for oversight, the legitimate need for oversight, with their responsibilities to handle covid-19 work at their respective agencies and departments,” said the [White House] official, who noted that health risks entailed in moving around in public places were also a factor.

The White House has no problem routinely sucking up two or three hours of Fauci’s day so that he can be a mannequin while Donald Trump provides bad information to the public and gets into fights with the press. But testimony before Congress? Why, that might eat into his busy schedule!

Fauci is an old hand who can handle himself just fine, but still, there’s really only one big difference between the podium of the White House press room and a Capitol Hill hearing room: in the latter, you’re testifying under oath. At the risk of getting a little too far over my skis here, I wonder if that’s what’s really on their mind in the West Wing?

It is Hopper’s turn this week to be the star of catblogging, but there was no way we were going to be able to get her to pose with a mask. So instead we went with the slightly less manic cat. He’s wearing a custom, cat-sized mask made by Marian, which he tolerated for a good five or six seconds before shaking it off his head. Good boy!

Hugh Hewitt says the next coronavirus rescue package is going to be massive:

Congress will definitely pass a “Phase Four” relief package simply because it must. The measure is likely to be the most significant legislation by any Congress since the statutes authorizing the draft in 1940 and the Lend-Lease Act the following year.

Hugh Hewitt! Of all people, he’s one of the last that I’d expect to support a gigantic rescue bill. However, it turns that this is because he wants the bill to:

• Recapitalize the defense industrial base.
• Revive the manufacture of key pharmaceuticals and personal protective equipment.
• Resurrect the nuclear power industry.
• Preempt state tort law concerning liability for coronavirus-related claims of negligence and intentional injury.
• Make sure that all high-tech companies are an “open book” to US intelligence when it comes to China. “There aren’t any neutrals anymore. Both sides of the fence cannot be played.”
• Provide lots of state and local aid, but attach strings in order to achieve conservative goals.

Whew! That’s a helluva list. “Democrats will have their own wish list,” Hewitt says, and I’d love to see what the progressive counterpart to this might be. Medicare for All, card check, and a massive climate R&D program? It would have to be something big, that’s for sure.