Why does Donald Trump hate Jeff Bezos? Is it because Bezos is richer than him? Is it because Bezos owns the accursed Washington Post? Is it because Bezos once wrote a snarky tweet about him? There's no telling.Andrej Sokolow/DPA via ZUMA

Donald Trump’s vendetta against Jeff Bezos continues at Corleone family levels, with the US Post Office caught in the middle:

President Trump on Friday said he would not be approving an emergency loan for the U.S. Postal Service if it did not immediately raise its prices for package delivery, confirming a recent Washington Post article that said he planned to exert more control over the agency. “The Post Office is a joke,” Trump told reporters. “The Post Office should raise the price [of package delivery] four times.”

Well, let’s see. I just hopped over to USPS.com and got the price for a one-pound package at retail ground rates to New York. It’s $9.35. Trump apparently thinks this should cost me $37.40. That seems . . . a little steep, no?

Maybe not. Trump doesn’t care about my package costs, after all, he cares about Amazon’s package costs because he hates Jeff Bezos. That cost is roughly $3.50, and once upon a time a junior Citigroup analyst trying to hype FedEx stock waved his hands and decided it really ought to be $5 or so. That’s probably not correct, but it’s still way less than Trump’s preferred rate of $14.

So where did $14 come from? There’s no telling. But forcing the postal service into bankruptcy would screw Jeff Bezos, it would screw the postal unions, and it would make up for that time a postal carrier accidentally bumped into him on Fifth Avenue. Beyond that, how can we possibly know what goes on with that bowlful of gray matter that Trump uses for a brain?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through April 23. It’s a funny thing. All the countries that were doing the worst a few weeks ago—Spain, France, Italy, the UK—are now clearly on the downswing. Conversely, countries that seemed to be doing better than average—Germany, Canada, the US—are plaeauing or still climbing. If I had my wits about me I could probably figure out why this is.

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

If I’ve done my sums correctly, workers have filed 3.3 million unemployment applications in California through last Saturday. So how far behind are we?

Critical financial support of more than $3 billion in Unemployment Insurance (UI) benefits is flowing to workers who’ve lost their jobs or wages as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, not including any estimated amounts for so far this week. The amount disbursed over the last six weeks ending April 18 includes $2 billion paid just last week alone, according to the latest official data from the California Employment Development Department (EDD). Last week’s total includes the extra $600 in federal stimulus payments the EDD is now automatically adding to every week of regular UI payments between March 29 and the end of July. The EDD has also processed 3.2 million claims over that same period since the pandemic impacts began. The 533,568 claims filed in the week ending April 18 is more than a 1,000% increase over the 44,729 claims filed in the same week last year.

Unless I’m missing something, this means that California has processed 3.2 million claims out of 3.3 million applications. Obviously there have been hiccups along the way as the Employment Development Department opened up a second call center and ramped up capacity by redirecting more than a thousand state workers to the unemployment system. But for the most part, California has caught up.

Which just goes to show what can happen when you take a crisis seriously and ditch the partisan sniping. That’s what California has done.

A few hours ago President Trump took to the airwaves to blather about using heat and light “through the skin” to cure COVID-19. Or maybe we should all be injecting bleach to perform “almost a cleaning.” Or something. Just so you can be sure I’m not making this up, here’s the video:

…WHAT pic.twitter.com/CCOYIsfSm7

— Pod Save America (@PodSaveAmerica) April 23, 2020

This is not just idiotic, even by Trump’s standards, but potentially dangerous since someone watching will probably decide to guzzle a cup of Clorox because they’ve got a fever. But here’s my real question. I just checked the front pages of four big newspapers and not one of them covered this. Why? How are people supposed to know what kind of moron we have in the Oval Office unless the press covers it? Do we literally just not care anymore?

Handwashing definitely works against COVID-19. But does anything else?Kevin Drum

A while back I mentioned that we were in new territory with COVID-19: we’ve had similar or bigger pandemics before, but we’ve never had one where we adopted widespread countermeasures and then studied how well they worked. This was an offhand comment and I got curious today if it was really true. Spoiler alert: It is.

I went looking for empirical studies done before 2020 since I was interested only in pandemics prior to COVID-19. It didn’t take long to come across “Effectiveness of workplace social distancing measures in reducing influenza transmission: a systematic review,” which was published in 2018. It’s a review of previous studies of social distancing and other countermeasures in “socially dense community settings, such as schools or workplaces,” and it’s far more comprehensive than anything I could do myself. Here’s what they found:

• A grand total of 15 studies.
• Of which, only three were epidemiological (the others were modeling studies).
• Of which, the overall risk of bias was rated “critical” in one, meaning the “study is too problematic to provide any useful evidence on the effects of intervention.”
• That leaves two studies. The risk of bias was rated “serious” in both, but at least they weren’t completely useless.
• Of those, one was a study of ordinary seasonal influenza in 2007-08 and looked only at employees who could work at home vs. those who couldn’t.

The sole remaining study was conducted on a group of 1,015 miltary personnel in Singapore during the 2009 H1N1 pandemic. It compared a control group (no intervention) to a “normal” group (individuals were provided general health education on respiratory and hand hygiene and were advised to seek medical care if ill) and an “essential” group (which received enhanced surveillance with isolation, segregation, and personal protective equipment). The study found that 44 percent of the control group contracted the flu compared to 17 percent of the normal group and 11 percent of the essential group. It also found that the pandemic peaked earlier in normal units compared to the control group.

So that’s it: a single study that compared groups to each other but didn’t try to establish the efficacy of individual interventions. Normal hygeine advice apparently had a big effect, reducing incidence from 44 percent to 17 percent, but only the “essential” group practiced any kind of social distancing, and it reduced incidence of the flu only from 17 percent to 11 percent. This may sound worthwhile even though it’s small, but don’t forget that this study had “serious” problems with possible bias.

Effectively, this means we’re flying blind. We have loads of modeling estimates of various interventions:

• Quarantines
• Stay-at-home orders
• School closings
• Social distancing
• Mask wearing
• Bans on large gatherings
• Closure of restaurants
• Closure of non-essential businesses
• Mass testing and contact tracing

For practical purposes, however, we have no reliable empirical data at all on any of these measures. It makes sense that some or all of them have an effect—and it’s probably safe to say that all of them put together have an effect—but we have no idea which particular ones have a large effect vs. which ones have a small effect. And given the vast range of assumptions used in various models, it’s not clear to me that we can trust models to tell us anything useful at the level of specific interventions.

It’s astonishing how much we’re learning about COVID-19 on literally a daily basis. In some ways it works like any other pandemic, but in other ways it truly appears to be unique. Given this, and given the complete lack of good empirical studies of past pandemics, we should be very, very cautious about insisting on any particular intervention as either critical or dispensable. We just don’t know.

The Evil Dex.Kevin Drum

I’ll bet you’re tired of hearing about COVID-19, aren’t you? What you’d really like is to hear someone griping about some other disease. I’m here to help.

Back in 2014, when I went through my first round of chemo, part of the treatment was dexamethasone. The dose was 20 mg every Friday, and on Sunday I would crash as the dex wore off. This usually happened in the afternoon and lasted a couple of hours. I would fall hard asleep during the first quarter of some football game and then wake up in the fourth quarter.

Today, I still take dex. The dose is 4 mg every Friday and on Sunday I crash. For about eight hours. I fall asleep around 10 am and wake up a little before dinner time. Then on Monday I do the same for two or three hours.

Plus I take a second dose on Monday, so I crash for eight hours on Wednesday and another few hours on Thursday.

Altogether, then, I spend something like 20+ daytime hours in a deep dex stupor these days even though I’m taking a fraction of the dose I used to take. This is ridiculous. On the bright side, that’s 20 hours when I’m not tempted to leave the house. So there’s that.

It makes sense that when we adopted COVID-19 quarantines and stay-at-home orders, it would also have a big effect on other communicable diseases like the flu. Kinsa, which makes an internet-connected thermometer and collects body temperature data on millions of people, says that’s exactly what happened:

Is this useful? I don’t know. But it seems interesting, so I thought I’d share.

This is the Via Condotti in Rome, long before anyone had heard about social distancing. I assume it’s empty now. If the camera were pointed in the other direction you’d see the Spanish Steps, which had been declared a non-sitting area even before the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s a little hard for me to imagine the Spanish Steps without crowds of people sitting on them, but I guess times change.

You’ve probably heard that Mitch McConnell wants states to declare bankruptcy instead of getting rescue funds from the federal government. However, this is not due to some kind of generalized fear of running up the deficit. It’s because, like most Republicans, he hates public sector unions:

McConnell pressed his idea during an interview on Hugh Hewitt’s syndicated radio show, arguing that much of the financial strain faced by some states is the result of runaway pension obligations — and that several U.S. cities have used bankruptcy protections to restructure their finances.

Republicans have been targeting the pensions of state workers forever. For the most part, these pensions are protected because they’re part of union contracts, but that just makes them even more attractive targets: If you can gut pensions, then not only will you reduce state spending, but you can crush the unions at the same time. Legally, though, the only way to do this is as part of a bankruptcy restructuring.

So as far as McConnell is concerned, COVID-19 has an upside: by wrecking state finances, it will force them into bankruptcy. And that means Republicans can get their revenge on public sector unions, who are big supporters of Democrats. What’s not to like?

U.S. Navy/ZUMA

Oil prices are cratering! No, wait: oil prices are up! Maybe we’ll get into a war with Iran!

West Texas Intermediate futures that will deliver oil in June, the U.S. benchmark, rose 20% to $16.47 a barrel. Brent crude futures, used to set prices for oil throughout global energy markets, rose 8.6% to $22.12 a barrel.

Helping prices regain some lost ground: signs of a recovery in demand for oil in China, which is emerging from coronavirus lockdowns, and tensions between the U.S. and Iran….“When you look at China, road traffic and refinery operations are back up,” said Norbert Rücker, head of economics at Swiss private bank Julius Baer. “Don’t forget the geopolitical side too,” he added, referring to the potential for U.S.-Iranian tensions to disrupt the movement of oil through the Strait of Hormuz, a vital channel for tankers.

President Trump has ordered US ships to shoot at Iranian gunboats that play games in the Strait of Hormuz, possibly in hopes of sparking a confrontation that would . . . what? Spur Iran to sink a tanker or something? Who knows. But the good news is that it might increase the price of oil by a buck a barrel!