Ha ha. Just kidding. You can find dozens of stories telling you how much to expect from the one-shot $1,200 stimulus checks. Here, here, and here, for example. You can also find dozens—or hundreds—of stories about low-wage workers who have suddenly lost their jobs and are now terrified because they don’t know how they’ll be able to afford food for their kids, let alone rent and utilities.

But what you won’t find are dozens or hundreds of stories explaining how much money people can expect from the expanded UI benefits in the coronavirus rescue bill. Or explaining that for a great many people UI benefits will completely replace their usual income. Or that this is good through June.

As a result, lots of people don’t know about this. They don’t realize that they don’t have to be terrified. The next week or two will be tough, but at least there’s something to look forward to if they can make it through the middle of the month. For example, here are approximate unemployment benefits in California before and after the $600 top-up from the rescue bill:

Under the stimulus bill, UI benefits, including the $600 bonus, are even available to freelancers and gig workers who don’t normally qualify for unemployment benefits. Don’t you think a lot of people would have their minds put at ease if they knew this? I do.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through March 29. Sweden continues to be oddly flat, which looks more like a reporting issue than a real flattening. Italy remains on track for the death rate to peak around April 7 and then start declining. No other countries have shown any big changes since yesterday.

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 24; total deaths are at 435x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 39 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 24.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I'm sure the the Trilogy Evo is a fine portable ventilator. But it's kind of pricey and—more importantly—also not available yet. Too bad the next gen project from Newport Medical Instruments failed, isn't it?Philips North America

The New York Times has a story today that you might have missed. Back in 2008, after realizing that the country would be woefully short of ventilators in the case of a big flu epidemic, the federal government announced a contract to design and build a new generation of cheap, portable ventilators. The contract was awarded in 2009 to Newport Medical Instruments, a small ventilator maker in California, and at first the project went swimmingly:

Then everything changed.

The medical device industry was undergoing rapid consolidation, with one company after another merging with or acquiring other makers….In May 2012, Covidien, a large medical device manufacturer, agreed to buy Newport for just over $100 million….Newport executives and government officials working on the ventilator contract said they immediately noticed a change when Covidien took over. Developing inexpensive portable ventilators no longer seemed like a top priority.

….Government officials and executives at rival ventilator companies said they suspected that Covidien had acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business.

….In 2014, with no ventilators having been delivered to the government, Covidien executives told officials at the biomedical research agency that they wanted to get out of the contract, according to three former federal officials. The executives complained that it was not sufficiently profitable for the company.

The contract was eventually re-awarded to Philips, and last year the FDA signed off on the new Philips ventilator, the Trilogy Evo. Delivery of 10,000 units was set for . . .

Mid-2020. Just a little late. Too bad.

How long do we all need to stay at home? A team from AEI headed by former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb says this:

To slow the spread [of COVID-19], schools are closed across the country, workers are being asked to do their jobs from home when possible, community gathering spaces such as malls and gyms are closed, and restaurants are being asked to limit their services. These measures will need to be in place in each state until transmission has measurably slowed down and health infrastructure can be scaled up to safely manage the outbreak and care for the sick.

….The trigger for a move to Phase II should be when a state reports a sustained reduction in cases for at least 14 days (i.e., one incubation period).

I’m not sure anyone trusts our case counts right now. I sure don’t. But a sustained reduction in cases will produce a sustained reduction in deaths a week or two later, so the AEI report is suggesting that the earliest we can ease up on lockdown measures is a week or so after deaths have peaked and started to decline. But when might that be? Here’s a chart showing the cumulative per-capita death toll in eight states:

That’s no help. All the lines are going up, up, up, with no sign of slowing down. So let’s take a look at the daily death toll instead. These are absolute numbers, not per capita. I’ve used a rolling four-day average to smooth out the trendlines:

Still no help. How about if we look at the percent change in the daily death toll?

This is a mess. But if I squint hard I think I can see a slight downward trend, which leads to my usual projection: deaths will peak in mid-to-late April before they start to decline in May.

Put all this together and the best answer is: we don’t know. April is going to be a bad month, but beyond that the data so far just doesn’t tell us much about when we’ll hit our peak. We have to wait and see.

POSTSCRIPT: For what it’s worth, I’d be pretty skeptical of the AEI recommendation anyway. I’d prefer to keep countermeasures fully in place until we see a very sustained drop in the death rate. Nor do I think states are the right units of analysis. If it makes sense to ease up on countermeasures at different times in different places, surely we’d want to do it on a county basis?

Personally, I think our biggest risk is giving in to public pressure and easing up too soon. I’d vote for a nationwide lockdown that doesn’t end until the daily death rate has declined to a dozen or less and, in the words of the AEI report, “local hospitals are safely able to treat all patients requiring hospitalization without resorting to crisis standards of care; and the capacity exists in the state to test all people with COVID-19 symptoms, along with state capacity to conduct active monitoring of all confirmed cases and their contacts.”

Maybe we'll get lucky and avoid big coronavirus outbreaks in the red areas, but I wouldn't count on it. We need to be prepared for ongoing large breakouts as the southern hemisphere enters fall and winter and starts to cool off.

I’m not sure I agree with everything Adam Tooze said in his recent interview with Ezra Klein about the economic impact of the coronavirus pandemic, but I agree with this:

I think the third element is the crisis that is hitting the big emerging markets: the South Africas, the Brazils, the Nigerias, and potentially the Algerians, the Indias, the Indonesias. These are huge countries with big economies, with large American interests in them, and big geopolitical ramifications. And they are in harm’s way. Their currencies are plunging, they have large debts, and they’re going to be hit by the public health crisis on a really epic scale — especially in South Africa, where they have a big immunocompromised HIV[-positive] population.

We don’t have a handle yet on whether COVID-19 is seasonal, but at this point it hardly matters. The southern hemisphere is entering fall, which is coronavirus season no matter what, and they are less prepared to handle it than the rich countries of the northern hemisphere. Nor do they have the financial cushion that rich northern countries have. Financially, the United States is lucky: we have our own currency; we’re enormously rich; we have a highly advanced health care system; and we can afford things like a debt-financed $2 trillion rescue without even blinking an eye. The same is not true of Nigeria or South Africa or India.

If you’re a sociopath, maybe you don’t care. But you should anyway: if the economy of the global south implodes, it will have an impact on us that no puny $2 trillion bailout can fix. So if anyone is thinking about this—Donald Trump certainly isn’t, so it’s up to someone else—we should start making plans for things like temporary debt holidays; longer-term debt restructurings; plain old assistance grants on a huge scale; and ramping up production of medical supplies far beyond our own needs and timeframes.

Is anyone thinking about this? I would like to think so.

The self-absorption of our president is truly astonishing:

“President Trump is a ratings hit. Since reviving the daily White House briefing Mr. Trump and his coronavirus updates have attracted an average audience of 8.5 million on cable news, roughly the viewership of the season finale of ‘The Bachelor.’ Numbers are continuing to rise…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 29, 2020

More than 2,000 people have already died and Anthony Facuci estimated this morning that the final death toll would be 100-200,000. In the midst of this, Trump is busy insulting the CEO of GM; fighting with governors he doesn’t like; dithering about the Defense Production Act; declining to bother with a plan to tell manufacturers of medical goods where to ship their stuff; explicitly warning that people have to treat him nicely or they won’t get any federal assistance; claiming that he’s going to quarantine New York and then backing off; lying endlessly about the state of testing; and now bragging about the ratings of his press briefings.

From any other human being on the planet this would be considered deranged behavior. Can you imagine what we’d be saying if it were Saddam Hussein bragging about his TV ratings in the middle of a pandemic? But from Trump it’s just normal.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, this is yet another reason why the cable nets need to stop carrying Trump’s briefings live. We already know that they’re full of misinformation, but now we even know why: Trump cares only about high ratings, and he knows he has to amp up the eccentricity every day to get it. That’s what motivates him, not a desire to provide information to the public.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through March 28. Sweden reported no deaths on Saturday, which is probably a mistake. Italy remains on the same track as always, though perhaps starting to show a slight deterioration that will extend their timetable by a day or two. The United States reported 445 deaths and remains precisely on the trendline I showed you yesterday. Canada continues to do really well.

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 23; total deaths are at 386x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 34.6 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 23.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

I hate to get too morbid, but it’s a fact that a fair number of elderly folks are going to die over the next few months. And as Marian and I discovered when her father died a few years ago, dying is not a simple thing in the 21st century. Her father was a pretty organized guy, but it still took months to sort everything out. There were just so many things that neither he nor we had thought of. Mother Jones editor-in-chief Clara Jeffery is going through the same thing right now:

My dad did not die of the coronavirus. He died of acute myeloid leukemia, first diagnosed at Christmas of 2018. But his final days, as we moved from hospital to home to hospice, were stalked by the virus. Every day the protocols got tighter, though not tight enough soon enough. Would we still be able to visit him? How many in the room? What if someone had come from abroad? When did each of us need to leave to get ahead of travel restrictions and home to our own families? What would happen when all the things you need to do after someone dies are upended or impossible?

So I say to you: You need to get on top of your parents’ personal information, the tools that you will need if they are hospitalized or die. And you need to do it right now.

If you’re anywhere near this situation—or could be thanks to the coronavirus pandemic—the whole piece is worth reading. It’s not pleasant, but if the worst happens it will be well worth it.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Friday. Nothing much has changed since yesterday. Italy had a bad day, but that made up for a couple of good days and they’re still on roughly the same trendline: peaking in early April and going to zero in early June.

So let’s take a closer look at the United States. It appears to be well below the Italian trendline, which is good news if true. Unfortunately, that’s hard to confirm since the US curve depends a lot on the formula that sets Day 0—and it’s possible that the formula doesn’t scale properly for a country as big as ours. If that’s true, the correct choice of Day 0 might produce a curve that’s right on the Italian trendline, not below it.

So let’s take a look at something else that shows a little more detail. The chart below displays the total death toll for the US on a log scale. I don’t use a log scale for the main set of charts because it’s confusing for anyone who isn’t fairly proficient in math. However, it’s not hard to understand: as you can see, the y-axis is done in powers of ten, which means that every increase from one line to the next indicates that the number of deaths has been multiplied by ten. The handy thing about this is that exponential curves end up looking like straight lines:

So far, the US death toll is a very precise straight line, which means it’s growing exponentially. If it continues on this path, we’ll hit 2,500 deaths by the end of the week; 11,000 by the end of next week, etc. The big question, therefore, is: how long will it continue on this path? There’s really no way to know for sure, but it’s a good sign when the line starts to flatten out. That hasn’t happened yet. In fact, the line is actually accelerating a bit, though that’s hard to see by eyeballing it.

With no way of predicting the peak based on the US trendline, my best guess is that we’re on the Italian path but two or three weeks behind. I figure they’ll peak in early April, which means we’ll peak in mid-April. Maybe. Needless to say, this depends on our control measures starting to have an effect, which ought to begin this week or next, and it also depends on our control measures being as good as Italy’s and being kept in place for at least a couple of months. For what it’s worth, though, this is close to a new prediction from a team at the University of Washington, which projects a peak in the second week of April and a death toll of 80,000 through June. It would be great if we kept the death toll so low, but unfortunately this projection assumes that every state adopts a total lockdown by next week and keeps it in place through June. I doubt that will happen, which is why I’m more pessimistic than they are.

Here’s 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 22; total deaths are at 332x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 29.8 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 22.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

In Nepal, police use this device to arrest lockdown violators.Skanda Gautam/ZUMA

How long will we have to remain on lockdown? There doesn’t appear to be any sure answer, but based on various expert testimony it looks to me like a good guess is 8-10 weeks. In the US, lockdowns started around March 20, which would mean they’d start getting lifted in mid to late May. If anyone knows of a better expert prediction, leave it in comments.

By the way, compared to Europe our lockdowns are sort of feeble. Aside from plain old tougher rules, there are two reasons for this. First, European lockdowns are generally countrywide, not just here and there wherever a governor or mayor happens to want one. Second, lockdowns are enforced by police and military and there are big fines for breaking the lockdown rules. Check out this Politico piece to get a sense of just how seriously European governments take the whole thing.