3M

Here is 3M’s response to the presidential Twitter tantrum:

In the course of our collaboration with the Administration this past weekend, the Administration requested that 3M increase the amount of respirators we currently import from our overseas operations into the U.S. We appreciate the assistance of the Administration to do exactly that. For example, earlier this week, we secured approval from China to export to the U.S. 10 million N95 respirators manufactured by 3M in China.

The Administration also requested that 3M cease exporting respirators that we currently manufacture in the United States to the Canadian and Latin American markets. There are, however, significant humanitarian implications of ceasing respirator supplies to healthcare workers in Canada and Latin America, where we are a critical supplier of respirators. In addition, ceasing all export of respirators produced in the United States would likely cause other countries to retaliate and do the same, as some have already done. If that were to occur, the net number of respirators being made available to the United States would actually decrease. That is the opposite of what we and the Administration, on behalf of the American people, both seek.

We also continue to act on reports of price gouging and unauthorized reselling related to 3M respirators. This activity is unethical and illegal. We are working with the U.S. Attorney General and attorneys general of every state, making it clear that 3M has not and will not raise prices for respirators and offering our assistance in the fight.

So it appears that Trump was indeed going ballistic over the fact that masks produced overseas were not all being shipped to the United States. There’s little that 3M can do about that, though.

But it turns out there’s more. 3M also makes masks in the US for the North and South American markets. Trump apparently wants 3M to tell other countries to bugger off and confiscate the entire domestic production of masks for the United States. I assume that the “humanitarian implications” of this don’t matter to Trump, so perhaps he needs to understand that if we do this we’re making ourselves into pariahs. Nobody will ever trust products made by a US corporation again.

If the IRS has direct deposit information for you, you’ll get your $1,200 stimulus payment in a couple of weeks:

Then, starting the week of May 4, the IRS will begin issuing paper checks to individuals, says the memo obtained by AP Thursday. The paper checks will be issued at a rate of about 5 million per week, which means it could take up to 20 weeks to get all the checks out. That timeline would delay some checks until the week of Aug. 17.

Hmmm. I suppose it’s too much to ask that they at least get the money out to the poorest folks first. Hell, knowing how they usually operate, they’ll probably—

The checks will be issued in reverse order of adjusted gross income, meaning that people with the lowest income will get payments first.

Oh. Well, good job.

I wonder why they’re issuing only 5 million checks per week? Is that literally the limit of the check printers they have? Or what?

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 2. France had a big jump today and is now right on the Italian track. Spain continues to skyrocket. Britain is now above the Italian track. And the United States recorded its first day with more than a thousand deaths. On the bright side, Italy now looks like it’s definitely starting to decline from its peak.

I’ve gotten a few questions about death rates recently. As you recall, a while back I switched from tracking cases to tracking deaths because the case numbers were too inaccurate. Now, however, there are questions about whether countries are even counting deaths accurately. And if they aren’t, how does that affect the charts?

Not much, I think. There’s been no suggestion that different countries are counting deaths differently, nor that the counts have changed over time. It’s mostly a matter of people dying at home and not getting counted. There are also legitimate questions of what “counts” as a coronavirus death. In any case, I don’t think any of this shows up as a systematic difference either between countries or over time, so the charts are still reasonably accurate. But it’s something to keep an eye on.

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 28; total deaths are at 900x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 80.6 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is exactly where Italy was on their Day 28.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

David Becker/ZUMA

President Trump mysteriously invoked the Defense Procurement Act against 3M on Thursday:

We hit 3M hard today after seeing what they were doing with their Masks. “P Act” all the way. Big surprise to many in government as to what they were doing – will have a big price to pay!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 3, 2020

The White House didn’t explain this, and it’s a little unnerving to see Trump using the DPA in such a gleefully punitive way. It’s supposed to be a technocratic tool for coordinating production, not a way for a president to score political points on Twitter.

In any case, this presumably has something to do with how and where 3M is shipping N95 respirator masks. But how much control does 3M have over this?

3M is a global company that has outsourced N-95 mask production to other countries where the labor is much cheaper. Only a third of the masks are made here in the United States. That means other countries are keeping the masks for themselves and not shipping them back here.

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) April 3, 2020

It doesn’t matter then whether Trump invokes the Defense Production Act since domestic production of masks is limited and other countries are blocking exports to the United States. Trump needs to talk to these other countries and make a deal to get them to send these masks to us.

— Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) April 3, 2020

I can’t independently vouch for this, but it sounds pretty plausible. If other countries have put export controls on N95 masks, there’s probably not much 3M can do to direct them to the US.

Perhaps we’ll learn more on Friday if either the White House or 3M comment on this. And who knows? Maybe it will turn out that the issue with 3M is something entirely different.

POSTSCRIPT: Either way, I’m not thrilled that Trump has finally figured out that he can use the DPA selectively as a way of burnishing his political fortunes. Matches to children, my friends, matches to children.

Watchara Phomicinda/Orange County Register via ZUMA

An ICU doctor writes to tell me that the problem with false negatives on the coronavirus test is worldwide:

It’s been reported in the US, China, and Italy for a number of weeks that the sensitivity of the RT-PCR swab test for COVID-19 is not great. To put it simply, the issues aren’t specific to the US version(s) of the COVID-19 tests….We’ve known from very early on in the outbreak that the SARS-CoV-2 virus has higher affinity for receptors that are in the lower respiratory tract than it does for those in the NP/OP region like typical circulating coronaviruses. Given the dangers to healthcare workers of attaining lower respiratory specimens and the massively increased resources to do so safely, no country has moved to expectorated sputum samples outside of hospitalized patients, and even then only rarely.

This issue was obvious and widespread to Chinese and Italian authorities who have published numerous studies that predominantly used CT scans looking for a particular pattern of lung disease that most COVID-19 patients seem to demonstrate.

Not sure if that’s helpful or not, but this is something that physicians have rather widely understood for a number of weeks, but has not appeared to reach national leaders, which is sad.

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been posting daily updates on the spread of COVID-19 in western countries, and one of the things that’s caught my attention is the fact that virtually every country seems to be on the same track. Some are farther along (Italy, Spain) and some still have a ways to go (France, USA), but the growth curve looks awfully similar in every case. But how can that be if every country has different testing regimens?

Without any explanation for this, I’ve been reluctant to speculate. But perhaps the explanation is the poor sensitivity of the COVID-19 PCR test? To put it bluntly, if the test is so bad that it misses a third of all cases, how much does testing even matter? I can even imagine that widespread testing might be detrimental if it produces a big pool of people who are infected with COVID-19 but feel confident that they aren’t.

If this is the case, it would also mean that the testing fiasco in the United States didn’t really have much effect. We didn’t “squander” two or three weeks of time. In the end, it hardly mattered at all.

For now, consider this speculation. But I would sure like to hear from some experts about it.

Today’s picture is a hazy day in summer in New York City. Our accompaniment is Simon and Garfunkel’s “Hazy Shade of Winter.”

This morning, as part of my daily report on the spread of coronavirus in western countries, I posted a chart showing that Italy’s daily death rate from COVID-19 seems to have hit its peak. That got me curious about all the other countries. Do any of them also show signs of being near their peak? Here’s the full set:

Note that all these charts begin on March 1 and the y-axis is just plain old daily deaths. I’ve used a 6-day rolling average to smooth out the noise.

There’s no good news here. Spain is showing a few glimmers of peaking, but none of the other countries looks anywhere close. We’re all still on the early exponential part of the curve and probably at least two weeks away from our respective peaks.

Based on cellphone location data, the New York Times was able to draw a map of where and when people started complying with coronavirus stay-at-home orders. The answer is infuriating:

The map doesn’t look this way because people in the South are idiots. It’s almost certainly because they’re conservative and they watch a lot of Fox News. They also listen to President Trump. And Rush Limbaugh. And what they heard was that the coronavirus was “just a bad cold.” That “within a couple of days it’s going to be down to close to zero.” That the hysteria was nothing but a “new hoax” from Democrats who want to bring down the president.

For weeks that’s what they heard. And they believed it. And so they resisted taking it seriously. That’s starting to shift now that Trump and the conservative noise machine have changed their tune, but it’s several weeks too late. What a shameful performance.

UPDATE: A lot of commenters are suggesting that this map has nothing to do with COVID-19. All it’s really showing is that in the South you generally have to travel several miles just to get to a grocery store. So even if residents are staying home, cellphone location data will show them traveling more than two miles just because they’re buying food.

I’m not sure that makes much sense, since both the Midwest and mountain West on this map are mostly green even though they’re much more sparsely populated than the South. Here’s a map showing the distribution of grocery stores throughout the country:

And here’s a map from the USDA showing areas with “low access” to grocery stores:

This isn’t definitive, but the South seems to have a fairly normal density of grocery stores for its population, and it’s actually better than most areas on access to grocery stores. There are lots of other areas of the country that are more sparsely populated and require longer driving distances, but it’s only in the South that people are still doing it. Grocery shopping just isn’t the answer here.

Kostas Lymperopoulos/CSM via ZUMA

Say what?

Health experts say they now believe nearly one in three patients who are infected are nevertheless getting a negative test result. They caution that only limited data is available, and their estimates are based on their own experience in the absence of hard science.

That picture is troubling, many doctors say, as it casts doubt on the reliability of a wave of new tests developed by manufacturers, lab companies and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most of these are operating with minimal regulatory oversight and little time to do robust studies amid a desperate call for wider testing.

WTF is going on? Our test is still inaccurate. The WHO test is apparently very accurate, but it’s available only to low-income countries. The Chinese test is questionable. The German test is . . . who knows?

This is insane. How long will it take the richest country in the world to develop a coronavirus test that’s (a) accurate and (b) can be produced in the millions?

And what’s up with the WHO test, anyway? Maybe they focus on providing test kits to poor countries, but that doesn’t mean they can’t give rich countries the specifications for their test and then let them manufacture it. Why not do that?

Every time this comes up, it seems like “we’re really close” and there’s no need for the WHO test. How about if this time we just go ahead and set up a track to manufacture it? Worst case, we don’t need it and it’s a tiny bit of wasted effort. Best case, it saves our skins. That’s a pretty easy tradeoff.

This headline is not a joke. Here’s the chart showing initial unemployment claims through this week:

The Washington Post says this is a “stunning sign of an economic collapse.” EPI calls it a “portrait of disaster.” That’s nonsense. It’s a deliberately engineered temporary freeze. And one of the reasons we should be able to get through it without permanent damage is that we passed a rescue bill that vastly increases unemployment benefits. We want lots of people to apply for benefits. The more the better.

So yes, this is good news. It means that laid-off workers are applying for benefits, and nearly all of them will see no reduction in their income. In fact, many will see an increase.

Now, having said that, I’ll backtrack on my suggestion that states shouldn’t have too much trouble handling the volume of applications. I figured they could probably muddle through 3 million applications, but now we’re up to 10 million. That’s going to be a mess. Still, just knowing that help is on the way should be a huge relief for workers who have lost their jobs for the duration.

POSTSCRIPT: I will add one thing to this. The rescue bill may replace income, but it doesn’t replace lost health insurance. This is obviously a big deal, but I don’t know how big. It depends on how many laid-off workers had health coverage in the first place. It depends on how long their coverage stays in place after a layoff. It depends on how accessible COBRA is. It depends on whether you qualify for subsidies under Obamacare. There are a lot of variables here and I don’t know how they’ll all play out.