Aha! Reader JK emails to propose a solution to the mystery of the healthy grocery workers. It didn’t occur to me that there was a source that broke down grocery workers by age, but in the era of the internet there’s a source for everything. The numbers here are from 2008, but I don’t imagine they’ve changed a lot since then. You can combine them with the CDC’s numbers for coronavirus deaths by age group here. What you get is this:

Take a look at the top line. Those aged 16-24 make up 29.4 percent of all grocery workers. Out of 3 million total workers, that comes to 882,000 people. The CDC says the death rate in that age cohort is 0.16 per million, which means we’d expect about 0.14 deaths among all grocery workers of that age. Now do that for all age groups and add them up. You get a total expected death toll of 27 out of 3 million.

In reality, there have been 41 deaths, about 50 percent higher than you’d expect from that age distribution.

This is still a guesstimate, and there are obviously other factors that might be at work. But by using more detailed demographic data, it looks like grocery workers really do skew quite young and should be dying at a pretty low rate. Their higher-than-expected rate is presumably due to being exposed to the virus far more than the general population.

Now, I still think there’s a bit of a mystery here. Grocery workers are exposed to the general population for eight or more hours per day with little protection. Social distancing is difficult; shoppers don’t all wear masks; and transmission risk should be high. And yet the death rate is only 50 percent higher than expected? I’m not being callous here: I know that 50 percent represents a lot of people. But epidemiologically speaking, wouldn’t you expect a bigger difference than that between, essentially, no countermeasures (grocery stores) and full countermeasures (rest of the world)?

Well, martial law it is, I guess.

TRUMP: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total. And that’s the way it’s gotta be. It’s total.” pic.twitter.com/zIuiBn1Mhw

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 13, 2020

Our commander-in-chief is ranting away at his daily press show, insisting over and over that he acted earlier on the coronavirus than anyone in the whole world. He keeps yelling January 17th! as if it’s some kind of talisman. January 17th! No cases! No deaths! And you think I should have shut down the country?

I’m not sure why he picked January 17 as his magical date, and needless to say, no one was suggesting he should have locked down the country on January 17. Lots of people are suggesting that he should have used, say, the month of February to prepare for a spreading pandemic by stockpiling supplies; using the bully pulpit; and taking the whole thing seriously. Instead, even at the end of February, he was still minimizing the likely spread of the virus: “When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero, that’s a pretty good job we’ve done.”

This, of course, is just more of the usual. But in a new low—they just keep coming, don’t they?—Trump used his press briefing to air a campaign video that defended his response and instead laid the blame at the feet of . . . the press:

This is bad enough. But here’s the weird part: the clips of the media “minimizing the risk” are all from Fox News. And it’s certainly true that Fox dutifully followed Trump’s lead during February by downplaying the pandemic risk. But why pick on Fox? Trump certainly could have found at least a clip or two from the other cable nets as well. This was very clearly a deliberate choice.

But what does it mean? Is it a shot across the bow at Fox News? Or what?

UPDATE: I see that I misread the “Fox News” clips. They are actually all clips from an episode of Hannity in which Sean Hannity plays clips from other networks downplaying the pandemic. This is an odd choice, but obviously Trump’s intention was to buddy up with Hannity and blame the non-Fox media for minimizing things. This is breathtakingly dishonest, of course, but that’s Trump for you.

CNN's Jim Acosta: "That is the biggest meltdown of a president of the United States that I've ever seen in my career. I don't think a reasonable person could watch what we just saw over the last hour and conclude that the president is in control."

— Helen Kennedy (@HelenKennedy) April 13, 2020

.@PaulaReidCBS presses Pres. Trump about his administration's early actions on the coronavirus, after he spent the beginning of his press conference complaining about his media coverage https://t.co/ySmFq3sUis pic.twitter.com/iKuTfTqg4I

— CBS News (@CBSNews) April 13, 2020

Waiting for drive-thru fruits and vegetables at a local farm.Kevin Drum

I want to summarize in one place a few of the coronavirus oddities I’ve noticed over the past week or so:

• Social distancing was supposed to reduce the transmission rate of the virus and push out the peak. Instead, the peak seems to have stayed the same or even been pulled forward.
• Grocery workers, by all odds, should be more at risk from the virus than the rest of us. But their death rate is lower than the national average for working-age adults.
• The case fatality rate varies exceptionally widely between countries. Some of this is due to testing differences, demographic differences, etc. But none of that seems to be enough to account for a range of 7x or so.
• Everyone agrees that the United States responded late and chaotically. But our death rate is pretty low compared to other similar countries.
• Sweden has deliberately adopted a much less stringent version of social distancing than other countries. Despite this, their death rate is about the same as most places (though higher than other Nordic countries).

I don’t have any conclusion to draw from all this. It just strikes me that there are enough little weirdnesses to make me wonder if something is going on that we’re missing. I can’t imagine what it might be, since the basic epidemiology of pandemics is reasonably well understood. And yet.

This is a picture of my local lake, taken on a dex-fueled walk early in the morning. It’s a lovely view with the mountains in the background, but I’m not sure what accounts for the purple cast. It’s not what dawn usually looks like around here. Just some coincidence of atmospheric haze, I suppose.

Bloomberg dryly reports on this morning’s presidential tweets:

President Donald Trump declared Monday that he has the power to “open up” states and relax social-distancing practices adopted to combat the coronavirus outbreak, not governors. He didn’t elaborate on how he reached his conclusion….“It is the decision of the president, for many good reasons,” Trump said in a subsequent tweet. He didn’t list any.

Hmmm. Short of martial law, I suppose Trump would have to invoke the commerce clause. Would that work? It might! Shutting down all the nonessential businesses in a state arguably affects interstate commerce, after all. The irony is that liberals like me believe the commerce clause is fairly broad—broad enough, for example, to allow the federal government to mandate that everyone buy health insurance. So I might support Trump’s authority here. Conservatives, by contrast, believe in a narrow reading of the commerce clause—no individual mandate for them! So they would presumably oppose Trump’s power grab.

In any case, Trump has a couple of problems here. First, the states with lockdowns in place would go to court immediately and almost certainly find someone to stay Trump’s order. Then we’d have to wait for the Supreme Court to eventually rule, which would take more than a few months. By then it would be moot.

Second, even if the Supreme Court issued a fast emergency ruling, who’s going to enforce it? What happens if the states ignore Trump? Is he going to send in the National Guard? Something tells me that a city full of guards toting M16s is not going to be open for business no matter what the president says.

For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect….

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020

….It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 13, 2020

UPDATE: A reader points out an obvious flaw in my reasoning (and Trump’s, assuming he has any reasoning to begin with):

Problem with this analysis is that while Dems believe in a broad interpretation of the commerce clause is that it is an enumerated power of Congress. The President can’t order everyone to buy insurance on his own.

— Miguel Duran♑ (@Capricornio_Uno) April 13, 2020

Quite so. Martial law it is, then.

A plexiglass shield protects this Ralph's checker from customers who might have COVID-19.Kevin Drum

There’s something weird here:

Next to health-care providers, no workforce has proved more essential during the novel coronavirus pandemic than the 3 million U.S. grocery store employees who restock shelves and freezers, fill online orders and keep checkout lines moving….Some liken their job to working in a war zone, knowing that the simple act of showing up to work could ultimately kill them. At least 41 grocery workers have died so far. They include a Trader Joe’s employee in New York, a Safeway worker in Seattle….

In the country as a whole, there have been 22,000 deaths among 330 million people. That’s 67 per million. If you adjust for age, there have been about 4,400 deaths among those 20-64 years old. There are 200 million people in that age group, so that’s 22 deaths per million.

According to the Post, there have been 41 deaths among 3 million grocery store workers. That’s only 14 per million.

Any way you cut it, being a grocery store worker seems to be a pretty safe job. That doesn’t make much sense, but the numbers are what they are. Have I made a mistake somewhere?

UPDATE: It turns out that grocery workers skew very young. If you analyze them more carefully by age group, their death rate is 14 per million vs. 9 per million expected. That is, about 50 percent higher than the general population. Details here.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 12. There’s nothing special to report. Germany and France have probably peaked. The Swedish numbers, as usual, are unreliable because it’s a weekend. My best updated guess for the US is a national peak toward the end of the week, with different states peaking at different times. As always, this depends a lot on what happens in the states that have refused to impose countermeasures.

How to read the charts: Let’s use France as an example. For them, Day 0 was March 5, when they surpassed one death per 10 million by recording their sixth death. They are currently at Day 38; total deaths are at 2,402x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 215.1 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 38.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

California closed nonessential businesses on March 19. President Trump *still* hasn't done this nationally, or even recommended that laggard red-state governors do it. Some courage.Kevin Drum

Our president spent the weekend on an insane Twitter rampage, insisting that he bravely cut off travel to China in January even though everyone denounced him for it. This is, of course, a lie, but one that Trump is apparently going to repeat forever until we all get so tired of it we just let it go. For the record, though, Aaron Blake dismantled it a month ago:

After adjusting his tone on the novel coronavirus in recent days, President Trump has set about arguing — against oodles of evidence to the contrary — that he took the virus “very seriously” from the start. And to make his case, he’s again pointing to his decision to halt travel from China six weeks ago. He has repeatedly claimed that there was widespread opposition to the restrictions and has thus hailed it as a bold step.

But there are two major problems with that. The first is that there actually wasn’t anything amounting to the resistance he described, and the second is that his move actually came after the airlines had already said they would stop service to China.

Click the link for more. The truth is that Trump dithered and finally took action only when it hardly mattered anymore because nearly every airline in the world had already stopped service to China. On the morning of January 31 the three big American carriers followed suit, and it wasn’t until hours later that Trump announced his ban. The only real criticism, if you can call it that, came from experts who said that it was too late for a travel ban to have much effect. And they were right.

After the travel ban, as we all know, Trump spent the next six weeks insisting that the coronavirus was no big deal and would miraculously disappear in no time. By the time he finally came around, the United States had at least 5,000 cases of COVID-19 and 85 dead. Now he wants to claim that this was courageous leadership. Don’t buy it.

Sentences I never expected to read:

Saudi Arabia, Russia and the U.S. agreed to lead a multinational coalition in major oil-production cuts after a drop in demand due to the coronavirus crisis and a Saudi-Russian feud devastated oil prices.

So I guess we’re now a member of OPEC?