It feels like no one is interested in any news that’s not coronavirus related right now, but here’s a bit of it anyway. A team of researchers has been digging into the life expectancy numbers for the United States to test the theory that we’re seeing more “deaths of despair”—i.e., deaths due to suicide, drug overdoses, and alcoholism. What they found is that since 2010, when US life expectancy suddenly flattened out, the real culprit is cardiovascular deaths:

For both men and women, they found that if they assumed fewer drug-related deaths the life expectancy numbers barely moved (green lines). However, if they assumed that cardiovascular deaths were still declining as much as they used to, the life expectancy numbers went up by more than a full year (red lines). That turns out to be the real problem: we stopped making much progress against heart disease while other countries have continued to see cardivascular deaths decline significantly:

This is by no means the end of the story. I suspect that over the next few years we’re going to see a lot of studies of life expectancy in an effort to figure out why the US has deviated so strikingly from other rich countries. The “deaths of despair” hypothesis is one explanation, though it gets kind of complicated when you take a deep dive into precisely who’s dying more these days. Now cardiovascular disease is another hypothesis. Somehow I have a feeling that it might be quite a while before the numbers are all crunched finely enough that we finally reach a consensus about what’s really going on.

I just got back from a trip to the market and things seemed to be getting back to normal. Plenty of milk and eggs. Lots of produce, a pretty good selection of meat, and even some pasta and pasta sauce. Still no paper goods, of course, and the bread aisle was pretty picked over—though the bakery department had plenty of bread. I asked the checker how things were going, and he said the crowds had started to abate as people began to realize that the shelves really were being restocked every night.

How are things in your neck of the woods?

Today we celebrate the start of spring with a lovely picture of a peacock at the Bronx Zoo, taken during a trip to New York City in 2011. I guess there’s no telling when I’ll visit a new city next. Maybe in 2021.

A few days ago I suggested that the economic impact from the coronavirus pandemic might not be that bad. After all, the Spanish flu was worse, and its impact in the US was surprisingly moderate.

That suggestion has aged badly. I still believe that government action can ameliorate the downturn in ways that weren’t feasible in 1918, but the underlying shock will almost certainly be worse than it was for the Spanish flu.

What I failed to consider was the speed of the modern world. There are two ways that speed affects us. The first, and most obvious, is the spread of the virus itself: air travel and automobiles allow it to spread almost instantly. Still, even in 1918 a virus could spread pretty quickly, so that’s not as big a difference as you might think.

It’s the second type of speed that’s truly different, and that’s the speed of information. In 1918 there was hardly time for panic to spread before the virus itself hit. There was no radio, no TV, no long-distance telephone to speak of, no social media. The only source of information was newspapers, and they mostly reported about the epidemic in understated columns below the fold, not in screaming headlines. It’s not that the epidemic was unknown; far from it. But it didn’t dominate the news in ten different ways 24/7. There was barely time for flu panic to tank the economy before it was all over.

The exact opposite is true today. Hell, we’re not even waiting for panic to tank the economy on its own. We’re very deliberately tanking the economy in an effort to slow the spread of coronavirus, and we’re doing it well before the coronavirus has even had a chance to spread very widely. Luckily, we also have economic tools available to keep the economy afloat that we didn’t in 1918, and that can make a big difference. We just have to be willing to use them.

Unemployment claims last week were about a quarter higher than the week before. This week they’ve already doubled and may double again when every state is counted. Justin Wolfers has the chart:

This is just the start, and it’s the reason that a $1,000 check is so inadequate. We’re facing a crisis that will last for months at least, and if we want people to continue spending we need to provide them with the security of knowing that they’ll have an income for that entire time. Otherwise they’ll hoard their money just the same as they’re hoarding food and toilet paper now. Expanded unemployment insurance will help, but it’s not enough. We need to commit to replacing upwards of 70-80 percent of lost income. Or maybe even more.

And this needs to apply to just about everyone. You might think that someone with a six-figure income can get by, but if they lose their job they probably can’t. Even most upper middle-class folks don’t have a lot of savings, and their mortgages and car payments and credit card bills are all at upper-middle-class levels. They might be better off than the poor, but most of them will still run out of money pretty quickly if they get laid off.

If Donald Trump is dead set on mailing out checks with a MAGA hat on the back, I guess there are worse things than letting him do it. But make no mistake: this is just a reelection stunt. One way or another, we need to rescue both consumers and businesses with serious money that will last until the crisis is over. Let’s knock off the bullshit and get started.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Wednesday. The US is now slightly above the Italian trendline, possibly because we’ve picked up the pace of testing.

A couple of notes. First, a friend emails to warn me against calling the spread of coronavirus “exponential.” Technically, that’s true. At the beginning of a viral outbreak the growth rate is pretty much exponential, but it slows down later. This article suggests that it then follows a power law, and eventually it flattens out and then declines. When all’s said and done, the outbreak will follow a Gaussian path that looks like a familiar bell curve. For example, here is the growth curve of the Spanish flu in 1918, skyrocketing from nothing to massive death tolls over the course of only four weeks:

Second, a couple of readers have emailed to tell me that Sweden’s flattening rate of coronavirus growth has nothing to do with great case management. They just aren’t bothering to test for it. Here is one comment:

I’m an American living in Sweden, where they have not been taking coronavirus seriously and have an almost nonexistent testing regime. It is much more likely that this flattening has to do with the unavailability of tests than anything else. You can see English-language coverage here, which confirms that not only is Sweden not tracking contacts of infected people, but it is also only testing people who “have severe respiratory symptoms or who belong to a risk group.” From what I hear from contacts in the hospital system, this does not even include all healthcare workers, much less anybody else; the rest of us have just been advised to stay home, with no real quarantine measures, lockdowns, or closures (except for, starting this week, higher education). I have been profoundly underwhelmed by the Swedish response and have no confidence in their management of this going forward.

As always, the raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Could you use a heap of adorable, sleepy kittens right about now? I’ll bet we all could, so here you go. I am told that Blackie, on the far left, has started to purr. The others probably aren’t far behind.

If you’re desperate for a surgical mask but you can’t get one, you can always try making your own. This is most likely only slightly better than nothing, but if you just have to do it a team of researchers has some advice about which materials work the best. Here are the results:

The vacuum cleaner bag is the best filter by a large margin, “but the bag’s stiffness and thickness created a high pressure drop across the material, rendering it unsuitable for a face mask.” Ditto for the tea towel. In the end, the pillowcase and the 100 percent cotten t-shirt “were found to be the most suitable household materials for an improvised face mask.” However, the authors are killjoys about the whole thing anyway:

An improvised face mask should be viewed as the last possible alternative if a supply of commercial face masks is not available, irrespective of the disease against which it may be required for protection. Improvised homemade face masks may be used to help protect those who could potentially, for example, be at occupational risk from close or frequent contact with symptomatic patients. However, these masks would provide the wearers little protection from microorganisms from others persons who are infected with respiratory diseases. As a result, we would not recommend the use of homemade face masks as a method of reducing transmission of infection from aerosols.

File this under “last resort measures in case of the apocalypse.”

A rainy night at the Green Apple market in downtown Los Angeles.

Oddly—or so you may think—I’m more OK with $2,000 checks for everyone than $1,000 checks for everyone. I still think this is a bad way of helping those in the most need and a bad way of stimulating the economy, but at least $2,000 is enough to make a difference for more than a couple of weeks.

So here’s a thought. I have no idea how to implement it, but maybe someone else does. There are lots of us who don’t need these checks. I certainly don’t, and I’d be happy to endorse mine over to some organization that will transfer the money to those who have lost their jobs or part of their income because of coronavirus restrictions. Details of how to do this are left as an exercise for the reader. But I want the recipients to get the cash, not some sort of in-kind charity. Just match up donors with donees with maybe a bit of vetting so donors feel comfortable they aren’t being ripped off.

In my case, a $2,000 check would get deposited straight into savings, where it would do no good for anyone. Who can help people like me do something better with it?