Gripas Yuri/Abaca via ZUMA

A couple of days ago John Roberts asked a question. President Trump immediately tossed it to Mike Pence, who used up nearly a thousand words saying nothing responsive. Remarkably, Roberts followed up not once, not twice, but four times:

You were considering, last month reopening the Healthcare.gov exchanges. There has been a determination not to do that. Could you tell us what the rationale was behind that decision?

But about people who don’t have insurance?

Understood, Mr. Vice President. But there will be people who don’t have insurance —

But, again, Mr. Vice President —

I’m sorry to belabor a point, but that’s for people who —

Finally Trump took pity on Pence and showed him how a pro does it: “It’s something we’re really going to look at,” he said, which in Trumpspeak means that it’s never going to happen. But it also cuts off followups at their knees. What more can you ask? Trump then praised his veep:

I think it’s one of the greatest answers I’ve ever heard, because Mike was able to speak for five minutes and not even touch your question.

This is how these briefings go, and that was between Trump and a Fox reporter. You can just imagine how the rest of it went. It’s pure circus, pure campaign event, pure ratings bonanza, pure performance art. This is why they shouldn’t be broadcast live.

UPDATE: To my great surprise, Trump did end up looking at it. Yesterday he announced that he would pay hospitals for uninsured COVID-19 patients as long as they didn’t charge the patients anything. Good for him.

Amy Katz/ZUMA

What a brilliant idea!

The Trump administration will use a federal stimulus package to pay hospitals that treat uninsured people with the new coronavirus as long as they agree not to bill the patients or issue unexpected charges.

….A 1918-like pandemic would cause U.S. hospitals to absorb a net loss of $3.9 billion, or an average $784,592 per hospital, according to a 2007 report in the Journal of Health Care Finance that called on policy makers to consider contingencies to ensure hospitals don’t become insolvent as a result of a severe pandemic.

This means that the uninsured will have lower costs than anyone, including those on Medicare or private insurance. That’s very progressive, and apparently it will cost only about $4 billion out of the $100 billion earmarked for hospitals.

But this prompts a thought. This proposal is great because it sets a standard reimbursement rate for treating COVID-19 and it makes things easy on patients. They just have to show up at the hospital and not worry about anything else. After all, it’s not their fault they got sick. So what if—and hear me out on this—we just did that for every illness? For everyone. And not just at hospitals, but everywhere. We could call it, I don’t know, universal health care or something like that. Who’s with me?

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 3. France had another big jump and is now above the Italian trendline. Spain continues to skyrocket and will surpass Italy in deaths per million by tomorrow. On the bright side, Spain looks like it’s finally getting close to its peak:

The data has gotten a little noisy over the past few days, but there are obviously signs of flattening here. However, it’s still too early to try to fit a curve to the United States, which remains solidly in its exponential phase:

The model currently in favor at the White House predicts that mortality in the US will peak at 2000-2500 deaths per day, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up above that.

I made some changes today. The scale for Italy and Spain is so big that it’s getting hard to read the charts for everyone else. So I’ve put the three countries with the largest outbreaks on the top row and the other six below with a more compressed scale. I like having the same scale for everyone, but I think it’s outlived its usefulness.

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 29; total deaths are at 1,087x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 97.3 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is above where Italy was on their Day 29.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The RCGS Resolute after its encounter with a Venezuelan patrol boat.Columbia Cruise Services

Nobody dies in this story, so you might find it an amusing start to the day. It begins early Monday morning, when the cruise ship Resolute was idling in international waters off the coast of Venezuela while performing engine maintenance:

Shortly after midnight, the cruise vessel was approached by an armed Venezuelan navy vessel, which via radio questioning the intentions of the RCGS RESOLUTE’s presence and gave the order to follow to Puerto Moreno on Isla De Margarita. As the RCGS RESOLUTE was sailing in international waters at that time, the Master wanted to reconfirm this particular request resulting into a serious deviation from the scheduled vessel’s route with the company DPA.

While the Master was in contact with the head office, gun shots were fired and, shortly thereafter, the navy vessel approached the starboard side at speed with an angle of 135° and purposely collided with the RCGS RESOLUTE. The navy vessel continued to ram the starboard bow in an apparent attempt to turn the ship’s head towards Venezuelan territorial waters.

Unfortunately for the Venezuelans, the Resolute is an Antarctic cruise ship fitted out as an icebreaker. It sustained no serious damage from being rammed on its bow.

The Venezuelan patrol boat was not so lucky. It sank.

Have a nice weekend, everyone.

Richard B. Levine/Levine Roberts via ZUMA

I maintain my position that the coronavirus pandemic is not likely to cause much in the way of permanent change to our way of life. The exceptions are trends that were already in place and might get a boost from the lockdown orders. For example:

• Food delivery was obviously becoming a big thing before the pandemic started. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of new people give it a try while locked down and then continue to use it afterward.
• Brick-and-mortar retail outlets have been in dire straits for years. The pandemic will almost certainly accelerate their demise and give online sales a big upward spike.
• Working from home has been gaining popularity in fits and starts for a long time. Now that the pandemic has forced it on many more people, will it finally break out and become routine? I’m uncertain about this. I suspect that an awful lot of people are learning that they don’t really like working from home all that much.
• If we assume that COVID-19 is just the beginning of a new era of dangerous pandemics—and we probably should—we are going to start spending absolute mountains of money on R&D for quicker vaccines and ameliorative drugs.
• Many of the biggest outbreaks were seeded by religious groups that refused to stop meeting in person. Will this cause any kind of backlash against extreme and fundamentalist religious sects? I haven’t seen it yet, but it’s not impossible.

In the great scheme of things, these are fairly minor changes. It’s worth keeping in mind that humans are fundamentally social animals, and even after just a couple of weeks of lockdown most of us feel like we’re slowly going crackers. After two or three months we’re going to be absolutely desperate for human contact, and nothing about COVID-19 will change that. The details may change here and there, but we will remain just as social as ever.

If you still want to make the case for major changes due to COVID-19, I suppose your best bet is to analogize it to the Black Plague.¹ After the Black Plague was over, the Renaissance blossomed in Italy and labor-saving devices became more popular. Interest in science flourished and that led directly to the Age of Reason and then to our own enlightened era. As it so happens, I think a similar big change is coming soon thanks to robots and artificial intelligence. All I need to do now is figure out a way to make a case that this will be accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic and then crank out a fast insta-book aimed at the airport crowd and timed to coincide with the return of air travel. I’ll be rich!

¹Which killed a third of Europe. So be careful with your analogies given that COVID-19 is likely to kill more like 0.1 percent of Europe.

Earlier today I was surprised that there had been big job losses in the “health care and social assistance” category. You’d think those would be up. I just now got around to looking at the detailed establishment report, and it turns out the losses are concentrated in three areas:

• Offices of physicians, dentists, and other health care practitioners
• Home health care services
• Child daycare services

These three account for virtually all of the 61,000 jobs lost in this sector.

David Becker/ZUMA

The 3M mask story keeps getting weirder, and neither 3M nor the Trump administration seems eager to provide details of exactly what their dispute is about. However, it’s been widely reported that 280 million masks were sold overseas in a single day last month even though American health care workers were desperate for them. This number originates from a Forbes story by David DiSalvo, who spent a day in mid-March with a mask broker named Remington Schmidt:

When contacting potential buyers, Remington needs two things to secure a deal with a seller: a letter of intent to purchase and proof of funds. “If you are working with a seller who has masks but you can’t quickly show proof of funds, someone else is going to buy them,” he told me.

And I watched that happen repeatedly throughout the day. Buyers from state procurement departments and hospital systems expressed desperate need for masks, but the deals bogged down when it came to providing proof that they could commit and follow through. In the meantime, another buyer provided proof of funds and the masks were gone, sometimes within the hour.

By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks¹ from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker — and that was in one day. To his knowledge none of the masks had been purchased by buyers in the U.S.

Remington told me that his focus now is to try to sell masks to federal agencies like FEMA, responsible for securing PPE so the items can go directly to the states that will distribute to hospitals, but it’s been challenging to close a deal and the number of “middle men” in the negotiations keeps rising.

Somebody please stop me if I’m wrong, but halting these shipments didn’t require use of the Defense Procurement Act. It required two things: (a) an executive order banning the export of masks unless approved by federal authorities² and (b) purchasing authority for FEMA to buy as many masks as it wants. You could add to that guidance from FEMA about which items US companies should and shouldn’t export overseas. These are things President Trump could have done two weeks ago with a stroke of his pen. No new legislative authority would have been required.

So unless I’m missing something, this is all on Trump. 3M has no control over the secondary market. Only Trump does. But apparently he did nothing back when it mattered, and now that it’s too late he’s engaged in a war to make it look like someone else’s fault. That’s typical Trump for you.

Eventually I assume we’ll get more details of exactly what’s going on here. If my take on this is wrong, I’ll update.

¹FWIW, this sounds high. But the precise number doesn’t really matter.

²This is, obviously, not something that states can do. Only the federal government can do it.

As I said earlier, I don’t normally spend a lot of time on the details of the monthly jobs report. This month is an exception since people are understandably interested in the effect that the coronavirus lockdown has had. With that in mind, here’s an excerpt from the household survey:

There are several obvious takeaways:

• Men and women are losing jobs at about the same rate. Both groups now have an unemployment rate of 4.0 percent.
• Whites and blacks are losing jobs at the same rate. Asians and Hispanics are losing jobs at a much higher rate.
• The poorer you are, the more likely you are to lose your job. Among those with no high school diploma, unemployment is up 1.1 points. Among college grads, unemployment is up only 0.6 points.

Keep in mind that these figures only go through mid-March, so they should be considered tentative. Next month’s report will include all ten million (or more) who have lost their jobs and will give us a much better idea of where job losses are concentrated.

This is Hilbert a couple of days ago, distracted by some kind of shiny object while he was strolling along the fence. Little does he know that our squirrel flanked him while he was staring upward and made an end run to . . . somewhere. Whatever it is that squirrels go haring off at. After Hilbert was done with his promenade he jumped over into our neighbor’s yard to provide them with some company while they are sheltering in place. What a warmhearted cat!

The American economy lost 701,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at—

Ahem. I suppose that accounting for population growth hardly matters at this point, does it? Just for the record, though, here’s the jobs chart for March:

This is for early March, by the way. The full extent of job losses due to COVID-19 won’t show up until next month.

And also just for the record, March was a fairly good month for wages. Average hourly wages for blue collar workers went up about 3 percent after accounting for inflation. That’s pretty good! Assuming you still have a job, that is. Most of you probably do, but there are obvious exceptions. I don’t normally bother showing job losses by category, but it’s worthwhile this time:

The biggest job losses by far came in four areas: retail, temp services, health care, and hospitality (which includes restaurants). I’m a little surprised about the job losses in the health care sector. There must be a specific story behind this, but I’m not sure what it is.