Brian Cahn/ZUMA

Ever since he won Tuesday’s primaries Joe Biden has mostly kept out of sight, something that has lots of lefties upset for reasons that mostly escape me. For one thing, it’s only been three days. For another, it’s normal for candidates to take a breather and review their strategy going forward after they’ve locked up the nomination—as Biden clearly has. Furthermore, even after locking things up, nominees have to be careful not to bigfoot legislative leaders like Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer, who are currently negotiating coronavirus legislation and don’t want to be undermined by Biden mouthing off with his own plans. Ego management is important at all times.

Still, if you’re curious, Politico tells us about Biden’s upcoming plans:

Joe Biden is planning a regular shadow briefing on coronavirus to start as early as Monday to show how he would handle the crisis and address what he calls the lies and failures of President Trump. Biden gave a preview of what’s to come in a conference call with reporters Friday, where he listed a litany of false and misleading statements from Trump, who has been holding regular White House press conferences concerning coronavirus preparedness and response that have been broadcast live on all major networks.

Biden made his comments from his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he has been holed up for more than a week in adherence with Centers for Disease Control guidelines that urge people to practice social distancing.

Immediately after the initial onset of the crisis, Biden also held his fire against the president out of concern it would look too political — an accusation leveled at him anyway by Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale, who said that “Biden will take attention from real updates Americans should know just to score political points.” Ever since his commanding victories Tuesday against Bernie Sanders in Florida, Illinois and Arizona, Biden has made no public appearances or statements. Instead, he said, he has been spending time privately talking to health officials, businesses, governors and members of Congress.

To recap: Biden—who, again, has been out of the public eye for only three days—is (a) following CDC guidelines, (b) getting briefed privately by health officials and members of Congress so that he knows what he’s talking about before he opens his mouth, and (c) making plans to hold regular coronavirus briefings.

This all sounds pretty reasonable to me. I very much doubt that Biden has lost anything by staying quiet for a few days in March.

So far my daily charts of coronavirus growth have tracked confirmed cases, but there’s an obvious problem with this: if a country has a weak testing program it will artificially reduce the number of cases. Can you really compare Germany, which has tested 2,000 people per million, with the United States, which has tested only 300 per million? Won’t the US numbers look artificially low just because we aren’t finding them via testing?

Maybe, although the evidence is a little thin and there are reasons to think it might not make a big difference. Still, it’s a dubious metric (LA County, for example, has given up on most testing altogether) and I always planned to eventually switch to tracking deaths instead of cases. I’ve been holding off only because the current numbers are still low enough that there’s a fair amount of statistical noise in the data.

But we’re getting pretty close, so today I’m making the switch. It might be a little too early, but not by much. What you’ll see is that most countries are on track to follow Italy, but there are two exceptions below the trendline: Switzerland and the United States. In our case, we’re at about one-third the level Italy recorded at a comparable date. That’s a hopeful sign, but keep in mind that it might be just an artifact of our large population. Only time will tell.

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 15; total deaths are at 75x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 6.7 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is very close to where Italy was on their Day 15.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A physicist friend who has been pondering the coronavirus numbers emails to share his frustration:

Knowing that the Gaussian has a peak doesn’t tell you when it happens or how big it is. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find out how variable coronoviruses are but not successfully. So it isn’t clear if the flu model, evolving toward a milder strain, is applicable.

I fucking hate biology. In physics, if you know the past, you can predict the future. There are well formulated, deterministic laws (even quantum laws). Everything in biology is contingent. In retrospect, you can see what caused what, but natural selection is not predictive. It depends on the vagaries of both mutation and predation. Unquantifiable quantities make a physicist scream “Yarbles!”

Quite so. And I happened to run into a great example of this today. As you know, researchers at Imperial College recently released a report with projections about the spread of coronavirus in Britain and the US. Today, the New York Times wrote about one from Columbia University. Here are the most relevant charts:

These are not directly comparable. However, the Times chart is pretty easy to convert to total cases (about 20 million), and from there to total deaths. Using the current consensus estimate of 1 percent for the case fatality rate, the total number of deaths comes to 200,000 by the end of summer in the absence of control measures (red line). The Imperial College chart directly projects 2.2 million deaths by the end of summer in the absence of control measures.

Obviously we are putting in place control measures, so these are not real-life projections. My reason for showing them is that they’re the easiest to compare and they aren’t even in the same ballpark. They’re more than 10x apart. It’s the difference between only 6 percent of the country becoming infected vs. two-thirds or more becoming infected.¹

Unless I did my sums wrong—always a possibility—this leaves us lay folks with nothing to do but shake our heads. Who do we believe?

¹This is the core reason that the Imperial College study has such a high death estimate. Their model projects that 82 percent of the country will eventually be infected, which is a higher projection than most other studies I’ve seen.

This is the 405 at rush hour today, taken from the Sand Canyon overpass. This particular stretch of the freeway is normally a parking lot at this time of day:

And here’s Sand Canyon itself, looking north from the overpass. This is not a road that’s normally jammed to its teeth at rush hour, but it usually has a whole lot more than two cars plus a bicyclist.

And here’s a traffic map of the entire LA/Orange County basin:

It looks like compliance with the lockdown is pretty good. That gives me a little bit of hope that we might actually still have time to flatten the outbreak curve a bit.

Kittens! They’re now eight weeks old and still progressing toward maximum cuteness. The top picture is Stripey, jumping up onto the bed and stalking my mother. Next is Blackie, just moments away from closing her eyes and snoozing in a heap with her sibs. The bottom picture is Gray, who has pulled the pillows off the kitchen chairs and constructed a lovely spot to hang out and watch the world go by.

There’s no harm in sending $1,200 checks to everyone. This kind of flat, one-time payment is a favorite of Republicans, so it’s no surprise they’ve defaulted to it yet again.

But it also doesn’t do much good. We need to get through our heads that the coronavirus outbreak won’t be over in April. Or May. Probably not by June, either. We have months to go.

This means people need income, not one-time checks. And this income needs to fully replace their old income—or come pretty close to it.

This is what Congress should be working on, and they should be doing it in crisis mode, right along with building more temporary hospital capacity. So why aren’t they? Why are they instead fussing over dumb little checks and bailouts for the cruise industry? It’s insane.

INCOME AND HOSPITAL CAPACITY. That’s what we need. And it needs to start yesterday. Then Congress can go back to squabbling over other stuff.

I am now up to 37 (!) emails about Sweden’s coronavirus testing regime. This is roughly 37 more than I have received about any other country aside from the United States. So far, they’re about equally split between people telling me that Sweden narrowed its testing program last week and that’s why its growth rate has flattened vs. people telling me that Sweden has more thorough testing than most countries and I should ignore all the idiots.

I don’t know which to believe. They could both be true, after all. For what it’s worth, Sweden is about average on coronavirus deaths. However, this probably tells us more about where they are on the growth curve than it does about how good their testing program is.

ABC News/Ipsos has a new poll out measuring what people think of President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic:

In the new poll, 55% of Americans approve of the president’s management of the crisis, compared to 43% who disapprove. Trump’s approval on this issue is up from last week, when the numbers were nearly reversed. Only 43% approved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic and 54% disapproved in last week’s poll.

All it took was a week for a lot of people to forget Trump’s early mismanagement. He just had to adopt a slightly more serious tone and he was forgiven. It’s truly amazing, but not much different from what I predicted a week ago.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Thursday. Spain continues to be a disaster area, but the big news for us Americans is that the US growth rate took a big jump and is now precisely on track with Spain’s. We are finally starting to do more widespread testing, and with more accurate numbers it looks as if our true growth rate is about the worst in the Western world.

And a note about Sweden. On Wednesday I said that Sweden’s flattening growth curve meant it was doing something right. I got a bunch of emails about this, so on Thursday I said that maybe it was really just because they weren’t testing very many people. Then I got a bunch of emails about that. Apparently I can say anything I want about any other country, but if I mention Sweden I’d better be prepared for an onslaught of responses. Bottom line: I don’t know why Sweden’s growth rate has flattened out at such a low level, but I’m sure somebody will eventually write a doctoral dissertation about it. In the meantime, I’m going to stay agnostic about the whole thing.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Alex Edelman/ZUMA

In early February Sen. Richard Burr (R–NC), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was getting classified briefings about the coronavirus pandemic. On February 7 he wrote an op-ed asssuring the public that everything was under control. On February 13 he decided to liquidate nearly every stock he owned:

A week after Burr’s sales, the stock market began a sharp decline and has lost about 30% since….Burr is not a particularly wealthy member of the Senate: Roll Call estimated his net worth at $1.7 million in 2018, indicating that the February sales significantly shaped his financial fortunes and spared him from some of the pain that many Americans are now facing.

….His biggest sales included companies that are among the most vulnerable to an economic slowdown. He dumped up to $150,000 worth of shares of Wyndham Hotels and Resorts, a chain based in the United States that has lost two-thirds of its value. And he sold up to $100,000 of shares of Extended Stay America, an economy hospitality chain. Shares of that company are now worth less than half of what they did at the time Burr sold.

Just a coincidence, I’m sure. But then there’s recently appointed Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R–Georgia), who also decided her portfolio needed some rebalancing after receiving a coronavirus briefing:

The Senate’s newest member sold off seven figures’ worth of stock holdings in the days and weeks after a private, all-senators meeting on the novel coronavirus that subsequently hammered U.S. equities….That first transaction was a sale of stock in the company Resideo Technologies worth between $50,001 and $100,000. The company’s stock price has fallen by more than half since then.

….It was the first of 29 stock transactions that Loeffler and her husband made through mid-February, all but two of which were sales. One of Loeffler’s two purchases was stock worth between $100,000 and $250,000 in Citrix, a technology company that offers teleworking software and which has seen a small bump in its stock price since Loeffler bought in as a result of coronavirus-induced market turmoil.

In addition to all this, starting in late January Sen. James Inhofe (R–Okla.) also began unloading big chunks of stock.

That’s a lot of coincidences! But that’s probably all they are. I can’t believe that members of the US Senate would use their position to protect their personal wealth instead of using it to protect the public and sound a serious warning that the pandemic was going to be a lot worse than President Trump was saying.

Right?