Caroline Brehman/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

If William Barr is in the running for worst attorney general ever, perhaps Eugene Scalia is in the running for worst labor secretary ever:

The Labor Department is facing growing criticism over its response to the coronavirus pandemic as the agency plays a central role in ensuring that the tens of millions of workers affected by the crisis get assistance.

….In recent days, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, who has expressed concerns about unemployment insurance being too generous, has used his department’s authority over new laws enacted by Congress to limit who qualifies for joblessness assistance and to make it easier for small businesses not to pay family leave benefits. The new rules make it more difficult for gig workers such as Uber and Lyft drivers to get benefits, while making it easier for some companies to avoid paying their workers coronavirus-related sick and family leave.

….At the same time, frustrations have built among career staff at the Labor Department that the agency hasn’t ordered employers to follow safeguards, including the wearing of masks, recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to protect workers.

Of course Scalia is slow-walking assistance to workers affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. By God, even in a national emergency we need to teach these slackers not to depend on the federal teat when they lose their jobs.

The race for worst attorney general in history is heating up:

William Barr has said without evidence that he believes the Russia investigation that shadowed Donald Trump for the first two years of his administration was started without any basis and amounted to an effort to “sabotage the presidency”, he said in an interview with Fox News Channel that aired on Thursday.

….“Even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign, a whole pattern of events while he was president,” Barr said. “To sabotage the presidency, and I think that – or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

Vote for America’s worst attorney general ever!

In my COVID-19 summary this morning I mentioned that the US case fatality rate was quite low. Here’s how we compare to my usual full set of nine countries:

Here’s a broader look courtesy of the Center for Evidence-Based Medicine:

What accounts for the big drop between Sweden and Greece? Why does the United States have one-third the CFR of Great Britain? It’s not because of our low testing rate: if we tested more and therefore uncovered more cases, our CFR would be even lower. Does it have something to do with demographics? National health profiles? The quality of medical care?

I don’t know. But a 7x spread from 1.7 percent to 13.0 percent seems pretty remarkable. Whatever the answer is, it goes a long way toward explaining why our death rate from COVID-19 is pretty low (so far).

This is a remarkable chart from NPR, based on the coronavirus model from IHME:

California is projected to have about one-twentieth the per-capita death toll of New York and Massachusetts. Only Oregon is lower, and California is by far the lowest among large, urban states. Can we just elect Gavin Newsom president right now and get it over with?

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 9. There are no big changes since yesterday: Italy is declining, Germany is rising, and France is still noisy. So let’s take a close look once again at the United States, where the news seems to keep getting better every day. Here’s the day-to-day growth rate of coronavirus deaths (smoothed as usual by using a 6-day rolling average):

The growth rate of daily deaths is down to 10 percent and looks like it will be at zero by April 16. This means the average for the next week will be in the ballpark of 5 percent, and for the week after that it will be zero. If I plug in those growth rates starting today, I get this:

Every day, when I plug in the daily number, it’s less than I projected. So every day my projection goes down. It now suggests about 40,000 deaths at next week’s peak and about 80,000 deaths through summer. This is still a little higher than the IHME estimate, but not by much.

I’m not sure what accounts for this. My best guess is that our social distancing and other countermeasures have been much more effective than any of us guessed. Another possibility is that our health care system has saved more lives than most: our case fatality rate of 3.5 percent is one of the lowest among Western countries. In any case, it’s worth mentioning that if—if—this holds up, the US response to COVID-19 will not be one of the worst in the world. It will be one of the best.

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 35; total deaths are at 2,038x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 182.5 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 35.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

We're all wearing masks these days, but how much is it helping?Kevin Drum

Los Angeles will start testing residents for COVID-19 antibodies today. But that’s not the big news:

Starting Friday, county health officials will begin testing the blood of 1,000 randomly selected residents, including those with no symptoms, to see if they have or had COVID-19. Using emerging technology that tests for antibodies to a virus, the study has the potential to shed light on the true mortality rate of the coronavirus, the efficacy of social distancing efforts and when this unprecedented clampdown on daily life could end.

….The research aims to fill in a number of blanks about COVID-19, including how deadly the disease truly is — a figure that is difficult to pin down without knowing how many people have the virus, said Neeraj Sood, a professor and vice dean for research at USC’s Price School of Public Policy, who worked with the county on the study.

A random test will finally give us an idea of how widespread the coronavirus really is. All we know now is the number of “confirmed cases,” which is wildly unreliable since it depends on how widespread testing is in each country. Random tests wil provide a much more accurate measure, including people who never had any symptoms and therefore never got tested.

Apparently my old workplace has been deemed nonessential. Sad.Kevin Drum

How quickly will the American economy recover after the COVID-19 pandemic is over? That depends on a whole lot of things:

• Will it really be over in a couple of months? Or will small outbreaks keep springing up here and there?
• Will there be another big outbreak in the fall?
• Will there be a widespread outbreak in the southern hemisphere later this year?
• How quickly will our trading partners in Europe recover? And Asia?
• How soon will people return to their old spending habits?
• Will we provide the right kind of rescue and stimulus spending?

That’s a lot of unknowns. I’ve been pretty solidly on the side of believing that the economy can bounce back fairly quickly from the pandemic, but the more I read about new outbreaks in Asia; pandemic spread in the southern hemisphere; northern European unwillingness to help their poorer neighbors; and so forth—the more I read about this stuff, the less confident I become.

I have no strong new opinion to share here. I’m just acknowledging that this is a question that depends on a whole lot of unknowns.

This was me last night.Trask Smith/CSM via ZUMA

Terry Nguyen reports on one of the lesser-known effects of the COVID-19 pandemic:

As people around the world hunker down in quarantine or otherwise adjust to the disease, many have anecdotally reported having weirder, more vivid dreams than usual — some related to the coronavirus, some about mundane life in the pre-pandemic world, and some just plain strange and inexplicable.

This is so true! You know that dream where you go long, weaving down the field as the quarterback launches a huge bomb? You run and run with a cornerback right on your tail, desperately trying to figure out where the ball is as time runs out on the clock. You finally glimpse the ball, but it’s too late: you lay yourself out and the ball falls to the grass just beyond your fingertips.

What’s that? You never have that dream? Well, I do sometimes, but last night was different: I finally caught the ball! And then eased my way into the end zone for the winning score. So I guess that’s the end of that dream, eh?

Kevin Drum

Republicans and Democrats are at loggerheads over an interim coronavirus rescue bill. Let’s call it Rescue 3.5:

For now, Republicans leaders want to keep this measure narrow, focused exclusively on giving a $250 billion boost to the Paycheck Protection Program….“That by definition is a clean bill,” McConnell said in a floor speech. “I want to add money to the only part of our bipartisan bill that is currently at risk of running out of money.”

Democrats, however, disagree. They noted that the Paycheck Protection Program is not the only effort that needs more money…..Plus, while the CARES Act had already allocated money to health care providers and states and cities, Democrats note that it’s far from enough to make up for the lost revenue that these institutions are experiencing because of the coronavirus outbreak. In addition to the $100 billion that the CARES Act has for hospitals, and the $150 billion it has for states, Democrats are interested in adding more to cover costs like medical supplies and tax losses.

I find this a little puzzling. Donald Trump should be single-mindedly focused on opening the money firehose as widely as possible and as soon as possible. He wants to be reelected, and that means getting the economy back on track by October. That’s unlikely to happen if, say, state and local governments are cutting back just as everyone else starts spending again.

So his instructions to Mitch McConnell should be something like Give ’em anything they want! Hell, goad them into demanding more if you can!

And Democrats, hogtied as always by their ridiculous desire to actually help people, will go right along. So why are Republicans playing so coy?

This is my mother back in 2007. She’s a docent at the Bowers Museum, and here she’s teaching some eager young minds about the secret language of fans. As you can see, Danielle appears quite thrilled about the whole thing. I wonder if she still remembers?