Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 30.The trendlines mostly look the same, which is good. I have to say, though, that although the US numbers are declining, they are sure taking their sweet time. We really, really need to start seeing a steeper drop in CV19 deaths. At the rate we’re going, it’ll be August before we finally get to zero. Or it might be even worse: if it turns out that our slow progress is because we’re getting lazy about social distancing, we might never get to zero.

Come on, folks! We’re only in the fifth inning. This is no time to let up.

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

Did you think yesterday’s economic news was bad? Try this on for size:

The eurozone’s gross domestic product…shrank by 14.4% on an annual basis, far exceeding the 4.8% contraction in the U.S. economy over the same period. That largely reflects Europe’s earlier and broader lockdown….Some rebound in activity in the eurozone is expected in the second half of the year, but economists no longer expect the lost output to be quickly recovered. ECB economists expect the economy to shrink by between 5% and 12% this year, Ms. Lagarde said.

There’s not really much to say about this. These are Great Depression numbers. The only silver lining is that modern Europe’s social democracies are better placed to stay on an even keel than we are—though a lot of that depends on how they handle the crushing economic blow that CV19 has brought to southern European countries.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, though, I’ll point out that I learned of this from the Wall Street Journal, which gave it modest placement below its main story along with a bland headline: “Record Contraction in the Eurozone Bodes Ill for Quick Global Rebound.” They would have paid more attention to a thousand-point drop in the Dow. It’s pretty obvious that no one is treating this like a “real” drop of 14.4 percent.

No, I don’t have COVID-19. This is just the usual multiple myeloma update. As you may recall, for a while I was on two meds: Darzalex and Pomalyst. But my breathing was getting worse, so we stopped the Pom. That didn’t help my breathing and my M-protein numbers also went up. Bad! So we stopped the Darzalex and restarted the Pom by itself. That hasn’t helped my breathing either, but my M-protein numbers have declined. Hooray!

Anyway, we’ll stick with the Pom by itself as long as it keeps working. If it needs an extra push, it will get paired up with a new med whose name I can’t remember but starts with an e.

And the Evil Dex? It doesn’t matter what chemo meds I’m taking, they will always require dex to work properly. Boo.

Earlier today I wrote about beaches and today Matt Yglesias writes about parks. For the most part, he says, everyone seems to be acting pretty responsibly, but not always:

We could also from time to time see people behaving irresponsibly at the park — either parents allowing small children to play on the climbing structure, which was riskier than I was willing to do, or else younger kids or teens playing basketball, which involves too much physical contact to follow social distancing guidelines. In response to this kind of activity, the mayor ordered the parks and playgrounds run by the city government to close and worked with the federal government to close some but not all of the numerous federally managed parks in DC.

As an emergency measure, these kinds of broad closures may be the best the US could do. But as America settles in for a long haul of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic, it doesn’t seem to be well-grounded in the evidence. Transmission of the virus from runners or people walking around outside looks to be unlikely and possibly even less likely in the warmer days to come.

This is why I’m so frequently on a soapbox about trying to figure out which social distancing measures are most effective. I think the reality is that people are simply not going to put up with the most stringent C19 countermeasures for a long time, but they’re more likely to put up with them if there are at least a few places to blow off steam. This is basically the Swedish model: instead of clamping down hard, put in place a regimen that will be moderately effective but can be sustained for months on end. How’s that working out for them?

Compared to its peer countries, Sweden is in the middle of the pack. Compared to other Scandinavian countries, it’s not doing so well. In other words, it’s kind of hard to say. But it doesn’t seem to be disastrous.

Here’s another idea: We have, at the moment, something like 30 million people temporarily unemployed due to C19 restrictions. How hard would it be for the federal government to sponsor a modern-day CCC but for towns and cities? Harder than I think, perhaps, but why not offer jobs to these folks as park monitors? They wouldn’t be hard-ass peace officers or anything like that, just people who would stroll around and encourage park users to keep their distance. It might be worth a try.

Here’s a nice summer picture of the UN building and the Chrysler building in New York City. It was taken, of course, from the the deck of a Circle Line sightseeing boat.

This is, naturally, insane:

Senior U.S. officials are beginning to explore proposals for punishing or demanding financial compensation from China for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic, according to four senior administration officials with knowledge of internal planning….President Trump has fumed to aides and others in recent days about China, blaming that country for withholding information about the virus, and has discussed enacting dramatic measures that would likely lead to retaliation by Beijing, these people said.

In private, Trump and aides have discussed stripping China of its “sovereign immunity,” aiming to enable the U.S. government or victims to sue China for damages. George Sorial, who formerly served as a top executive at the Trump Organization and is now involved in a class-action lawsuit against China, told The Washington Post he and senior White House officials have discussed limiting China’s sovereign immunity. Legal experts say an attempt to limit China’s sovereign immunity would be extremely difficult to accomplish and may require Congressional legislation.

However, the real issue here isn’t that Trump is nuts. We’ve known that for a long time. The issue is that he’s successfully surrounded himself with people who are willing to encourage his temper tantrums and an entire party that’s not willing to face up to him.

For now, this is probably just an instinctive lashing out, a play to his base. But if we’re unlucky, and events unroll the wrong way, it could get a lot worse.

This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it. https://t.co/EKyUw88gZF

— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) April 30, 2020

Ding Ting/Xinhua via ZUMA

Periodically the press anoints someone as worthy of nonstop coverage. Sarah Palin had that honor long after most losing VP candidates have drifted back into obscurity. (Quick: who was Hillary Clinton’s running mate?) Still, Palin was a former VP candidate. More recently Donald Trump has had that honor, which is arguably defensible since he’s the president of the United States.¹

But why Elon Musk? He doesn’t get Trumpesque coverage, but still, every single thing the guy does or says makes the news. Maybe not on the front page, but somewhere, and I don’t get it. He runs a couple of interesting little companies and he’s got a big mouth that writes checks his IQ usually can’t cash, but that’s about it. Is he really that fascinating?

¹Right? I have to rattle my brain a little bit every time I write that sentence.

Does this lens make me look fat?Mindy Schauer/Orange County Register via ZUMA

Los Angeles closed its beaches last weekend, so instead people flocked south to Orange County beaches and north to Ventura County Beaches. This made our governor mad:

“This virus doesn’t take the weekends off,” Newsom said during his daily COVID-19 briefing in Sacramento. “The only thing that will set us back is people stopping to practice physical distancing and appropriate social distancing. That’s the only thing that’s going to slow down our ability to reopen this economy.”

So he’s considering a statewide beach closure. LA Times columnist George Skelton is not happy about that:

Going to the beach is our birthright as native Californians — and our promise to newcomers. It’s our gift from the Creator — a trade-off for all the quakes, wildfires, mudslides and smog….And forget about wearing masks on the beach. One of the ocean’s appeals is breathing in that salt air drifting in on a soft breeze.

My parents left Oklahoma and Tennessee in the 1920s searching for the California Dream. They met at a Ventura beach party. I practically grew up on beaches between Ventura and Santa Barbara — Hollywood Beach, the Rincon, Carpinteria, East Beach — while sheltering in Ojai.

Fighting over beaches is the most California thing ever, right up there with the way we now treat the marijuana industry with the same seriousness that the Wall Street Journal gives to banks and hedge funds. But Newsom better act fast if he’s going to act at all: the weekend weather forecast looks pretty awesome right now.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 29. In an obvious effort to make my life more difficult, the UK has suddenly decided to start reporting COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes. Why haven’t they been doing this all along? Beats me, but they’re doing it now which means the Johns Hopkins numbers showed a sudden, artificial spike on Wednesday. The UK health authority has a different data series that adds the new deaths over time instead of all in one day, and obviously that’s a better one to use. Unfortunately, it’s always a day behind, so the numbers in today’s chart for the UK only go through April 28. With any luck, the Johns Hopkins folks will catch up and start using the new series before long.

In any case, it doesn’t make a big difference to the shape of the chart. All the dots are a little bit higher than yesterday, but the peak still looks to have been around mid-April and the number of deaths has been slowly declining for more than a week.

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

It’s California poppy season once again here in Orange County, but in these days of COVID-19 should I really be driving around looking for a good spot to take a picture of them? Probably not. But no worries: I still have a picture left over from last year’s wildflower extravaganza that I haven’t used yet. Enjoy!