This is Italy. But it's going to get way worse than this.Cozzoli/Fotogramma/Ropi via ZUMA

Coronavirus countermeasures can flatten the curve of infections, but it’s now clear that they won’t flatten it enough. There’s just not enough time. So in addition to continuing efforts to reduce the infection rate, our top priority needs to be the construction of temporary hospital capacity. Ideally this would be intensive care capacity, but if that’s not feasible then we just have to come as close as we can.

This needs to start now. As in today. It needs essentially infinite funding. It has to be nationwide. Construction needs to be a 24/7 effort. We only have until June to be up and running. That’s ten weeks from now.

It’s time to stop screwing around. Donald Trump’s reelection checks can wait a few days. Job 1 right now is the construction of more hospital capacity.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Tuesday. France and Germany remain precisely on the Italian flight path. The US has moved slightly above it, possibly due to more widespread testing. Sweden continues to level out, suggesting that they’re doing something right.

It’s worth noting some slightly good news here: the Italian trendline is still skyrocketing, but for the past week or so it’s been increasing at a linear rate, not an exponential one. It’s a very high linear rate, but that’s still better than any exponential rate.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

It looks like Uncle Joe has won all three primaries today in the landslide fashion predicted by the polls. So that’s that. If it was just barely not a done deal yesterday, it is today. November is going to be Biden vs. Trump and nobody should waste a single penny or a single neuron that isn’t directed toward winning that battle.

Earlier this morning I suggested we should ditch the idea of mailing out thousand-dollar checks to everyone. It would barely help the people who really need it, and it would be lousy macroeconomic stimulus to boot. Click and read for more details.

I got a lot of pushback on this, almost all of it objecting to anything that makes this program too complicated. If we target it just at people who have lost income thanks to coronavirus restrictions, it will take a whole pile of application forms, along with proof of income, etc. etc. Plenty of people won’t even bother, and for others it will delay things past the point where they’ve run out of money and can’t pay the grocer. So just send them the damn money!

This is a legitimate issue. But it’s also one that can be addressed if we’re serious about it. Here’s my idea: The IRS (or whoever) puts up a website. It asks for your name, address, and Social Security number. It then asks, under penalty of perjury, for you to swear that you really did lose your job for coronavirus-related reasons. You will be audited about this at the end of the year, but in the meantime we will send you a $500 check every week for 20 weeks. If Congress extends the program, the checks will keep coming. That’s it.

Now, I realize that in the real world it could never be quite that simple. There might be ADA compliance stuff. Or maybe some checkbox for members of recognized indigenous tribes. Or teachers, because there’s some law that says teachers always get special consideration when we’re giving away money. Who knows? But of course all those laws were passed by Congress. If they want to mail out coronavirus checks without any of that stuff, they merely have to say so in the enabling legislation.

I’m not saying this is the right idea or even the best idea. All I’m saying is that if we want to give away targeted money quickly, we could do it. All it takes is the will. And this kind of money would be far better than a one-off thousand-dollar check for everyone. A targeted series of checks would provide a level of income security for those who really need it, and because they need it they’d spend it. That also makes this a far superior macroeconomic stimulus.

Republicans would probably object that lots of people would cheat the system and never get caught. Probably so. But this is an emergency and they need to get over it. Democrats would have objections too, mainly because the stimulus bill would inevitably include money for businesses. But why not? It’s not just the waiters at that restaurant down the street who are going broke after they get laid off. The owner of the restaurant is also taking a bath, so why not help her too? This could probably be done with a bit more up-front complexity since business owners are all used to more complexity already in their financial affairs. In any case, this is an emergency. Get over it.

As for the airlines, well, we can argue about that later. It’s not as if they did something special that they should be punished for, but on the other hand we all hate airlines, don’t we? Maybe we should just let them go bankrupt and allow someone else to buy them out of Chapter 11. The unions probably wouldn’t like that, though.

This is a pair of rainbow lorikeets at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. Luckily for them, they are lorikeets and don’t need to practice social distancing. And that’s a good thing: the lorikeet enclosure has hundreds of these birds and they swarm all over the place. They also love humans, but only if the humans are feeding them a special broth that sounds like it was cooked up in Frankenstein’s lair. They sure seem to like it, though, and signs all over the place assure us that it is the ne plus ultra of nutrition for these guys.

A few days ago I asked if giving away money to everyone was really a good response to a recession caused by a pandemic. After all, the problem we face is not a lack of money, as we do in a normal recession. It’s fear of spending money. I am happy to see that one of my favorite economists, Dean Baker, seems to agree:

In past recessions, the reason most people did not spend is because they didn’t have money. If you gave them more money, they would likely spend most of it, creating demand in the economy, shoring up employment, and in that way having a second round spending effect from the workers who get or stay employed.

In this case, the main reason that spending is being cut back is because people are scared to spend. They don’t want to go out to restaurants, movies, or travel. Giving them $1,000 will not change this fact.

For people who are losing their jobs because they are in the most affected industries, the $1,000 will lead to a boost in spending, but it is likely to provide them little help if they lose their jobs. For someone earning $20 an hour (a bit more than the median wage), this is enough to replace 50 hours of pay. These workers will need considerably more money if they are to get through a period of six or nine months before the economy starts to get back to normal.

I don’t imagine that mailing everyone a thousand dollars will do any harm, but it seems like a pretty inefficient way of doing things. Even for most minimum wage folks, this is only a couple of weeks of pay—hardly enough to make a dent. It would be better to use that $300 billion to target the people and businesses most affected by government mandated measures like restaurant closures, social distancing, and so forth. If those people feel confident that there’s a strong bipartisan commitment to making their income whole for at least the next several months—or close to it—they’ll continue to spend normally. Families that aren’t affected as much will most likely adapt and simply spend their income on different things instead of cutting back.

As with everything related to the coronavirus, the key is to move quickly. We need to figure out who to target and how to do it, and we need to do it now while the number of affected people is still fairly small and they haven’t been out of work too long. Conservatives need to get over their dislike of helping the poor and liberals need to get over their dislike of helping businesses. Everyone will need help.

Finally, we already know how to mail checks to people. If we decide we need to do it a few months from now, we can. For now, though, figuring out the best way of getting substantial targeted assistance to the right places ought to be Job 1.

I’ve gotten some questions about my daily coronavirus charts that are worth answering. To refresh your memory, here’s an enlarged version of the chart for the United States:

The gray line is Italy. The red and blue circles are the United States. Italy is the baseline for comparison because it was the first Western country to confirm more than 100 cases of coronavirus infection, so it’s the farthest along the growth curve.

For every country, Day 0 is the first day that it recorded more than 100 confirmed cases. For Italy, this was February 23, when they recorded 155 cases. For the US, it was March 3, when we recorded 118 cases. We are nine days behind Italy. Since we seem to be following their path very closely, this means that in nine days we’ll probably be where Italy is today.

Now for the questions:

Q: What does the y-axis mean?

A: It’s the growth since Day 0. Since Day 0 is always pretty close to 100, you can just multiply by 100 to get the raw number of cases. The US, for example, was at 40x yesterday, which means about 4,000 confirmed cases.

Q: Why not just show the number of cases instead of making us calculate it?

A: Because the growth rate is more important. We should be thinking a lot more about growth rate than number of cases.

Q: But what about country size? Sure, the US has 4,000 cases, but that’s out of a much bigger population than Italy. Wouldn’t it be better to show the number of cases per million, or something like that?

A: No. Take a look at the populations of the largest European countries:

Take a look at the line for Germany. It has a population of 83 million. The United States is four times as big. That sounds like a lot, but it’s really nothing. We’re only two doublings bigger than Germany, and at the current doubling time for the spread of coronavirus this represents only about 1.6 weeks. What this means is that raw size barely matters. When we hit Germany’s level of confirmed cases, it’s only a week and a half until we hit their level on a per-capita basis.

So don’t worry too much about raw size. The coronavirus grows on an exponential basis, which means the growth rate swamps any raw number in a matter of days or weeks. Think growth, not levels.

Q: How reliable are these numbers, anyway?

A: Probably fairly reliable, though not perfect. In the case of the US, they’d probably be higher if we had done more testing, but since the numbers are small in the early days it’s not clear that we missed much due to lack of testing. In any case, remember doubling! Even if we were off by 100 percent, that means we were off by 5.5 days. That’s not really very much.

Q: Can you show the point at which various countries adopted strict lockdowns, quarantines, etc.?

A: Sure, but that would require that we define our terms pretty precisely since every country has adopted different kinds of measures. If somebody with an expert knowledge of this stuff produces an index that measures “severity of countermeasures” or somesuch, I will be happy to add it to the charts. But it’s not really something I can do on my own.

Q: Why are you only charting Western countries? What about China and South Korea?

A: Our experience so far suggests very strongly that Asian populations are willing to tolerate far more severe countermeasures than us freewheeling types in the West. China is the best example of this, but it’s true of Singapore, South Korea, and Japan as well. Since the United States is my main interest, I want to make comparisons that help us understand the trend that we’re most likely to be on. This means comparing ourselves to countries that are similar to us in their tolerance for things like social distancing, quarantines, and so forth.

Q: What’s the point of all this, anyway? Are you just trying to scare people?

A: I’m trying to do my best to show the trend we’re on so that we have a better idea of where we’re going to end up. That should help us plan for the most likely case. But if this scares you, that’s a bonus: you should be scared.

Let me say that again: you should be scared, and the growth rate in my charts should help you get there. We have 4,000 confirmed cases right now. If this doubles ever 5.5 days, we’ll have gone through 13 doublings by June 1. That’s about 32 million cases and it’s only ten weeks away. Do you think that in ten weeks we can seriously reduce the doubling rate? I don’t. Do you think our hospital system is anywhere close to being able to handle millions of cases? Do you think maybe we should create a crash program to build more hospital capacity? I do. And by crash, I mean (a) starting now, (b) funded with infinite dollars, and (c) construction running 24/7.

Q: Why should I be so scared? The world has gone through plenty of pandemics in the past century.

A: Yep, and every single one of them is something we’ve had a vaccine for—or were able to create one fairly quickly. This is the first time we’ve had a fast-spreading virus with no immunity whatsoever. The last time this happened was 102 years ago, during the Spanish flu of 1918. And we all know how that one turned out.

Now that nobody wants to fly anyway, TSA has decided that large bottles of fluids and gels aren’t all that dangerous after all:

The Transportation Security Administration will allow travelers to bring larger bottles of hand sanitizer on board with them when they fly, the agency announced Friday — the latest in a series of policy changes tied to the novel coronavirus outbreak. Passengers will now be allowed to travel with containers of liquid hand sanitizer up to 12 ounces.

But wait. If terrorists can make a bomb out of fluids and gels, they can just as readily make it from fluids and gels packed into a bottle marked “Purell.” So if it’s OK to carry 12 ounces of Purell on board a plane, why not 12 ounces of anything else? Does this make sense? Our resident chemist, Cheryl Rofer, explains:

To wrap a bit of context around this, the fear of liquids was based on the idea that terrorists could do a chemical synthesis, complete with filtering a solid from a liquid, in the airplane restrooms, which was always absurd. https://t.co/ANvLzaQpbb

— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) March 17, 2020

Oh.

Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto via ZUMA

In the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Jacob Schlesinger made a point that I’ve also made a few times before: Bernie Sanders may not be on track to be our next president, but there’s no question that he’s accomplished a big part of what he set out to do four years ago. Joe Biden might seem like the most moderate of Democrats, but he’s been pushed pretty far to the left:

On taxes, health care, climate change and labor rights, Mr. Biden proposes a significantly bigger government role than Hillary Clinton did during her 2016 presidential bid and what the Obama-Biden ticket advocated during their two White House campaigns.

….Mr. Biden proposes tax and spending increases equivalent to 1.5% of U.S. gross domestic product, more than double the level Mrs. Clinton advocated four years ago, and higher than the budget blueprints from the end of President Obama’s term, according to a recent study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. “What’s being called moderate now would have been the far left eight years ago,” says Matthew Chingos, an education expert at the Urban Institute, a Washington-based think tank.

….The Biden proposal is more ambitious than Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 health plan. His would cost the government as much as $1.3 trillion, net, over 10 years, compared with $250 billion for hers, according to analyses by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. And the Biden plan goes beyond what Barack Obama envisioned in what ultimately became the Affordable Care Act. Among other differences, Mr. Biden would allow workers with employer coverage to buy into a government health-care plan—a concept neither Mr. Obama nor Mrs. Clinton raised.

“That’s a huge deal,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. He estimated that would mean millions more “low-and-modest-income workers could get substantial health-care cost relief.”

Joe Biden is obviously no Bernie Sanders. His policy agenda may be to the left of Hillary Clinton’s but his proposed spending level is far lower than Bernie’s. Still, even if Bernie didn’t get his revolution, you might say that at least he’s gotten a bit of a rebellion. Given the political inertia of a country the size of the United States, that’s not bad.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Monday. I’ve added three new countries. One reader suggested Canada, since they’re right next door. My old boss wanted to see Spain, and since I used to do everything he told me, why break tradition now? Then, to even things out, I added Sweden just to see how one of the Nordic countries was doing.

There’s not a lot new here. Almost everyone is still on the Italian growth path. The big exception is Spain, which is in terrible shape, and the UK and Sweden, which continue to be a little under the Italian trendline. The United States remains almost perfectly on the Italian trendline, and there’s really no reason to think we can get off it before the next two or three weeks at the earliest.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

NOTE: Do you have questions about these charts? They’re answered here!