Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through April 1. First, though, some good news:

It looks very much like Italy has just about hit its peak, which means that its daily death rate should start declining soon. And the bad news? The rest of us aren’t close. We still have weeks to go before we peak and start to decline.

One thing to note: with the exception of Spain and Britain, it’s now looking as if every country is at least slightly below the Italian trendline. It’s hard to know if this means we’ll have fewer deaths than Italy or if we’ve just flattened the curve a bit and spread things out. We’ll have to wait and see.

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 27; total deaths are at 673x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 60.3 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is below where Italy was on their Day 27.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I’ve been whining for a while about the stimulus checks in the coronavirus bill getting outsized attention even though the expanded unemployment benefits are far bigger and more important. So it’s only fair that I hand the microphone over to a fellow whiner who wants everyone to know that the coronavirus rescue bill also authorizes a huge money hose aimed at small businesses as long as the money is . . .

. . . used for payroll costs, interest on mortgages, rent, and utilities (due to likely high subscription, at least 75% of the forgiven amount must have been used for payroll)

The program starts on April 3. Here is William Winecoff of the University of Indiana:

I can’t believe everyone is missing the news of the day: The US just went full-Denmark on payroll support. Except better (assuming quick expansion to large corporations). I haven’t smiled in weeks. I’m beaming. If we keep recapitalizing this as needed we could actually avoid a Depression.

It’s a loan program. But loans are fully forgiven if 75% or more of them go towards payrolls. Including benefits. And (rapid) rehires. So it should function like a grant program. The reason why it is structured as a loan program is because it can be administered through FDIC banks, credit unions, etc.

If this works well, you can walk into your local bank and get cash fast. Maybe on the spot? But the banks can’t profit; no fees allowed. Also no collateral, no personal guarantees required….Payroll support is for 8 weeks, which buys us a good amount of time. Also creates infrastructure if it needs to be expanded further.

So, as I read it, and if it works, it’s full payroll support, for free, without having to go through the SBA directly, and also support for business rent/mortgage/utilities payments. That’s huge! And because it’s a Treasury program it can be easily backstopped by the Fed, which allows for quick expansion if needed (it will be needed). Unless I’m missing something this is a very big deal. It needs to be expanded to ALL workers, not just small businesses, and it will need more funding support (and/or something creative like a Fannie/Freddie for SMEs). But I never thought this admin would do something this decent.

They’ve released the application form. Very simple.

Yep. This is all correct. So here’s a summary of the assistance that the coronavirus rescue bill provides for ordinary people:

1. A $1,200 check for just about everyone with a middle-class income or less. That’s almost $3,000 for a family of three.
2. A program that encourages small businesses to keep workers employed by funding their payroll costs.
3. For those workers who are laid off anyway, an expanded unemployment insurance program that replaces 100 percent or more of your normal income up to $50-60,000 (depending on what state you live in).

This adds up to about a trillion dollars, and virtually all of it is for non-rich people. Is everyone starting to get an idea of why I’ve been so enthusiastic about the way this bill ended up? It’s pretty damn good.

In a new survey from the Pew Research Center, 79 percent of Fox viewers say the media is exaggerating the risks of the coronavirus pandemic. And there’s more: 39 percent believe the virus was developed in a lab—presumably a Chinese bioweapons lab.

Fox viewers aren’t the only ones who are misinformed or prone to conspiracy theories, but they sure are the most likely. This is hardly a surprise from the network that brought you Benghazi and her emails, but it’s been astonishing to see just how far they’ll go to turn nearly anything into a partisan issue.

We have a a hummingbird buzzing around our yard right now, and I decided to try taking a picture of it using fill flash. The idea is to heavily underexpose the picture so that the ambient light produces almost no image. Instead, nearly all the light comes from the flash, which is very fast and can stop even rapid movement like a hummingbird’s wings.

So I went out Tuesday morning and staked out a position near our Salvia Amistad plant. By good fortune our hummingbird came by in less than a minute, and by further good fortune one of the pictures I took turned out pretty well. It shows our little guy just at the moment his beak is about to meet breakfast.

On a down note, you can see that the hummingbird’s wings weren’t stopped by the flash. Maybe it’s not as fast as I thought. Or maybe my exposure setting was wrong. I’ll try again some other day.

On a normal day in America about 8,000 people die. When the coronavirus pandemic hits its peak—probably in late April—it will likely claim about 4,000 lives per day. For a week or two, our national death rate will increase by 50 percent from its normal level.

But there’s also another way of looking at this. We would normally expect about 3 million people to die this year. If the coronavirus pandemic kills 150,000 people, that’s a 5 percent increase in our normal death rate.

Or this: the population of the United States is 330 million. If the pandemic kills 150,000 people, that’s a death rate of 0.05 percent.

Pick your poison. Are you a glass-half-empty or a glass-half-full kind of person?

Fighting the coronavirus pandemic in Mumbai.Himanshu Bhatt/NurPhoto via ZUMA

This is currently the issue that has a stranglehold on the back of my mind:

Peru tried to do everything right. Officials declared an early national lockdown — and backed it up with 16,000 arrests. Yet confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus are surging, up nearly 60 percent since last weekend. In Egypt, observers say a repressive government is vastly undercounting the infected. In Brazil, where the president has dubbed Latin America’s largest outbreak a “fantasy,” numbers are skyrocketing.

….Epidemiologists and other public health experts say the coronavirus is poised to spread dangerously south, engulfing developing nations already plagued by fraying health-care systems, fragile governments and impoverished populations for whom social distancing can be practically impossible. They warned of an amplified global crisis in the coming weeks, striking nations that can least afford it at a time when wealthy countries are likely to be too preoccupied with outbreaks of their own to offer the kind of assistance they’ve extended during episodes of disease that were confined to the developing world.

I don’t know why the coronavirus initially took hold in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere. If we’re lucky, it really does have something to do with our cool climate, which might mean that the virus will spread less quickly in hotter tropical regions. But I don’t know if I’d count on that. One thing we know for sure is that once a single person dies, it means the virus has settled in enough that it can’t be stopped without strict and universal countermeasures.

Economically, I think the global north can weather the coronavirus pandemic. We are not undergoing a normal recession, after all, where recovery is slow because nobody knows for sure when it’s really over. On the contrary: the day will come, eventually, when we can declare victory. In the meantime, the months of lockdown have acted as something of a forced savings regime. When the crisis is over, there will be huge pent-up demand and the economy should rebound quickly.

But that’s treating the northern hemisphere like an island. It’s not. We are connected to the rest of the world, and if the rest of the world turns into an economic disaster area it will have a big effect on us. There will be ongoing supply chain disruptions. There will be bond defaults. There will be currency crises. There will be stock market crashes.

This will be devastating for the countries at the epicenter, but it will probably also be devastating for us. In the worst case, it could turn a temporary regional recession into a whopping global depression.

Anyway, that’s what’s in the back of my mind. What’s in the back of yours?

Robin Rayne/ZUMA

Italy’s disastrous coronavirus epidemic was kicked off by a soccer match in Bergamo that authorities decided not to cancel. In South Korea it was meetings of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus. In Spain it was—again—soccer matches, which weren’t shut down until mid-March. In Louisiana it was Mardi Gras. In Florida it was spring break. In France it was a five-day gathering of the Christian Open Door church. So count me as disgusted by this:

At any other time, in a predominantly Christian nation that enshrines freedom of worship in the Constitution, the news would sound absurd or terrifying: “Pastor arrested after holding church services.” But that’s what happened this week when sheriff’s deputies handcuffed a Tampa, Fla., minister for violating municipal stay-at-home orders by gathering hundreds to worship….Brown, now out on bail, has complained of “religious bigotry.”

….In Louisiana, police issued a summons Tuesday to the pastor of Life Tabernacle Church in Central, La., near Baton Rouge, after he held services for 1,200 people in violation of state limits. “Never been more proud to be persecuted for the faith like my savior,” the Rev. Tony Spell shot back.

…R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, a prominent conservative Christian magazine, recently said in an article that politicians have been correct to put forth “stern measures to slow the spread of the virus.” But he added that churches should stay open. “When we worship, we join the Christian rebellion against the false lordship of the principalities and powers that claim to rule our lives, including sickness and death,” Reno wrote this month.

Idiots. I won’t pretend to offer biblical advice to these guys, but at the very least they should care about hurting others even if God does protect them. And this kind of obduracy most definitely has the potential to hurt a lot of people. Shut ’em down. All of them.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through March 31. Italy continues to slowly flatten and still has a chance of peaking within a week. Everybody else is tracking about the same as usual too.

I’ve gotten a lot of comments lately about the particular way I construct my charts. The most frequent questions have to do with my choice of Day 0 and whether or not I should simply show absolute death tolls rather than growth rates.

Day 0 is an interesting question. I am a per-capita guy: I think you need to account for a country’s population to get an accurate picture of how they’re doing. That’s why I chose to count Day 0 as the first day that deaths surpassed one in ten million. I figure that 33 deaths in the United States is about equivalent to 6 deaths in Italy.

But there’s an argument for simply assigning Day 0 to the day with the very first death. After all, in the early stages of an epidemic the numbers are so small that the size of the country doesn’t really matter: it’s going to grow at an exponential rate for at least several weeks until it starts to hit resistance as a significant percentage of the population becomes infected. So let’s take a look at mortality rates counting from the day of the first COVID-19 death in each country:

Note that I’m still using deaths per million. Especially now that we have more than a month of the pandemic under our belts, I can’t persuade myself that this is wrong. Using absolute deaths seems like nothing but a way to make big countries look gratuitously bad. It’s like calling California the drunk driving capital of the country without mentioning that this is only because it has more people than any other state.

As it turns out, this chart doesn’t look all that different from my usual batch. Using a different definition of Day 0 just doesn’t change much. For now, then, I’m going to keep them the way they are so that they’re comparable from day to day. I may change them later if I need to.

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 26; total deaths are at 588x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 52.7 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 26.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here’s the latest projection of the US death toll from the coronavirus pandemic:

The top government scientists battling the coronavirus estimated Tuesday that the deadly pathogen could kill between 100,000 and 240,000 Americans, in spite of the social distancing measures that have closed schools, banned large gatherings, limited travel and forced people to stay in their homes….The conclusions generally match those from similar models by public health researchers around the globe.

As dire as those predictions are, Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx said the number of deaths could be much higher if Americans do not follow the strict guidelines to keep the virus from spreading, and they urged people to take the restrictions seriously.

This strikes me as about right. I am optimistically hoping for no more than 150,000 deaths, based entirely on my belief that Americans are going to be pretty good about complying with countermeasures for at least a couple of months. If I’m wrong about that, the number could go much higher.

Yesterday I showed you Segerstrom Hall at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Today I’ll show you the rest: the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall at the Segerstrom Center for the Arts. Perhaps you can guess who donated the lion’s share of the funding for this complex?

This is an interesting picture. It’s a panorama of four shots stitched together by Photoshop, but for some reason Photoshop refused to merge the two leftmost shots. Eventually I had to do it myself, and the fact that I could do it at all means that it was a fairly easy stitch. So why wouldn’t Photoshop do it? I’ve run into this before, and it’s almost always with images that look like they’re really easy. It’s very strange.