How is New York doing? Here’s a quick look:

My horseback guess is that they are within a few days of their peak and will start declining by the end of this week.

Tasos Katopodis/CNP via ZUMA

I don’t suppose anyone is in the mood to hear this, but have you noticed that Donald Trump hasn’t seized more power during the coronavirus emergency even though it gives him a perfect excuse to do so? In fact, if anything, he’s been eager to push authority down onto the states and away from the federal government.

This shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s an odd thing, but Trump has never been hungry for power. On the contrary, he’s afraid of power because he’s afraid of being truly responsible for anything. He much prefers to delegate and blame.

If not power, what then? Trump is driven by a desire for attention and praise—and its flip side, revenge against those who malign him. He doesn’t care one way or another who’s in charge of things. He just wants all the credit. This is why, in the end, he’s neither an autocrat nor an authoritarian. He’s just a sad little man who craves approval but has never gotten it.

From Larry Kudlow, director of Donald Trump’s National Economic Council:

“No one could have predicted the exponential rise of this.” – Kudlow, on @CNBC now. #covid19

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) April 6, 2020

Is there anything these guys won’t say? The scale of the lies and deceit from this administration is just mind boggling. If they took the time they use to blame everyone else for things and used even half of it to oversee the implementation of actual solutions, we might cut our death toll by a third. California Gov. Gavin Newsom has shown that it’s possible.¹

And Jared Kushner! God almighty, why is he still in charge of dicking around in serious problems that need to be left up to adults? He promised a website. There’s no website. He promised drive-through testing. There’s hardly any drive-through testing. He wrote Trump’s disastrous March 11 prime time speech. He insisted that the national emergency stockpile is “ours”—whatever that means—not meant for the states. He calls his in-laws for medical advice. He encouraged Trump to say he wanted to reopen the economy by Easter. He promised millions of test kits that have never materialized. He is perhaps the all-time poster child for the Dunning-Kruger effect. But we’re stuck with him.

¹I would never have guessed that Newsom would turn out to be the best and most effective governor in the country at managing a crisis. But he has been. Go figure.

According to the Daily Caller, acting Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly flew to Guam Monday “and delivered a fiery speech to the sailors aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt after their captain was fired over a leaked letter pleading for those infected with coronavirus.” Fiery indeed: he says Captain Brett Crozier was either “too naive or too stupid to be a commanding officer of a ship like this” and calls his letter a “betrayal.” CNN has confirmed the story. Here’s the text:

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 5. Spain now has a higher death toll per capita than Italy. Germany appears to be near its peak:

If this holds up, it will be a remarkable performance from Germany.

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 31; total deaths are at 1,349x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 120.8 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 31.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

High voter turnout is generally good for Democrats and low turnout is good for Republicans. Because of this, Republicans have long opposed things like motor voter laws or early voting periods. In recent years, however, they’ve gotten far more aggressive, routinely championing nearly anything that might suppress voter turnout.

Which prompts a question: how far are they willing to go? I mean, they wouldn’t start gunning down voters in the streets, would they? Or would they?

As other states have canceled their nominating contests in the face of the pandemic, Wisconsin has chosen to go it alone — even though more than 100 municipalities will not have enough poll workers to open a single voting location, some voters may not receive their mail-in ballots in time, and those who do vote in person will be doing so at a time when public health officials have warned all Americans to stay home.

Amid public uproar over the issue, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers (D) called for delaying the contest and abruptly convened a special legislative session on Saturday. But at the session, the state legislature refused to take up a proposal to cancel in-person voting in Tuesday’s elections. Republicans on Saturday also filed an appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to block a deadline extension for mail-in ballots to be received, throwing further uncertainty into the primary.

This will get people killed. And it’s all over a state Supreme Court election that, in turn, will likely decide the fate of a voter purge that Republicans want to complete before the November presidential election.

This is how desperate Republicans are to suppress the vote. It’s not as dramatic as mowing down a few voters in order to send a message to the rest, but is forcing people to vote during a pandemic really all that different?

This week is going to be our “Pearl Harbor moment,” says the surgeon general, and he’s not alone. But I don’t see where that’s coming from. Here’s a look at the day-to-day growth rate of COVID-19 deaths:

The good news, obviously, is that the growth rate appears to be going down. The bad news is that as long as it’s above zero the number of deaths is increasing every day. This means that although next week will be bad, the week after that will be even worse:

This is the roughest kind of projection, but it suggests that we’ll have 20,000 new deaths next week and 30,000 the week after that. The rate of new deaths should then start to slowly decelerate.

Of course, this all depends on countermeasures being kept in place and holdout states not releasing a big new pool of infections into the country. For what it’s worth, here’s a messy look at some state data (the dashed black line is for the entire country):

New York is showing signs of flattening, and so is New Jersey. Louisiana appears to be accelerating. Other states seem to be growing at a fairly steady rate.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 4. Canada is now on Day 20 and it looks like they really have flattened their curve significantly. The Swedish data, as usual, should be taken with a grain of salt since this is a weekend.

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 30; total deaths are at 1,262x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 113.0 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 30.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Jack Kurtz/ZUMA

Just a reminder in case you haven’t absorbed enough bad news over the past few weeks: epidemiologists expect COVID-19 to return in the fall even if we successfully stamp out the current outbreak by the end of spring. This means that after a few months of respite, we will be adopting social distancing measures again later this year. There’s no telling when, but I’ll bet it will be at the first hint of a new outbreak.

Among other things, this means we need to be prepared with another huge rescue package. This time, since we know it’s coming, hopefully we’ll be ready. There are plenty of kinks in the package we passed last week, which is understandable for a first try passed in record time. By fall, however, the states should have their unemployment insurance systems running more smoothly; the small business loan package can be tweaked to avoid delays and bank problems; and medical supplies will have been fully stockpiled. We’ll be old hands at this, but only if we spend the summer planning for it.

It's pretty in Plumas County, but that's not going to stop the coronavirus from spreading.Sacramento Bee/ZUMAPRESS

The LA Times reports today on the attitude toward the coronavirus pandemic in rural northern California:

On Tuesday afternoon, no confirmed cases of COVID-19 had been announced in rural Plumas County. But it was getting closer: a few cases in neighboring Butte County, the first death just announced in Reno — the nearest city, at 82 winding-mountain-road miles away. “We’re just waiting to hear when the first case will be,” said Carey, co-owner of Quincy Provisions.

A few hours later, her nephew broke the news: Plumas County had just announced its first confirmed case. On Facebook, locals were already sleuthing, trying to figure out who the sick person was. The tension in this Sierra Nevada town rose. “I think it shocked some people because maybe they didn’t think it would come,” Carey said. “But it’s here.”

With only a handful of exceptions, this has been the response everywhere in the world. Nobody is willing to take the pandemic seriously when the first case shows up. Or the second. Or the fiftieth. It’s not until there are hundreds of cases and a few dozen dead that the lockdowns start. And that’s true even now, long past the time when there’s any excuse for not knowing better.

Added to that—in the US, anyway—is the idiotic refusal of many red state governors to order lockdowns for purely partisan reasons: Donald Trump said it was no big deal, so by God, it’s no big deal. Trump has since changed his tune, but it’s too late. The holdout governors are still mostly holding out, and even if they change their minds in the next few days they’ll be weeks behind everyone else. So just as the pandemic is starting to ease off everywhere else, there will be a huge new—and growing—pool of infected people who are ready to re-spread the virus all over the country.

I realize that I’m pretty lucky: I’ve been working at home for the past 20 years and I don’t especially crave social interaction. So the lockdown isn’t much of a hardship for me. Still, even granting that it’s harder on other people, the response to the pandemic has been a remarkable display of just how resistant we humans are to changing our habits until we’re almost literally forced to by images of hospitals overflowing with the sick and dead. The COVID-19 pandemic is obviously coming everywhere, but even now there are people holding out hope that maybe it will somehow see the invisible border that defines their county or their state or their country and decide to detour around it. If it weren’t for the fact that humans have displayed this same behavior a thousand times before throughout history, I’d say it was pretty stunning. But it’s not. It’s just human nature.