Why are people stockpiling canned goods and water? The coronavirus, of course. But does that make any sense? Are we really expecting the virus to lead to a collapse of the country, a collapse so complete that water utilities stop functioning and truckers all stop making deliveries?

I understand the logic behind stockpiling an extra month or two of important medicines. A lot of the raw ingredients for pharmaceuticals are made in China, and it’s possible that shipments along the supply chain could be interrupted. Even this seems like a bit of an overreaction, but at least there’s some sense behind it.

But prepping for doomsday? Come on, folks.

Afghans celebrate the Taliban ceasefire that began a week ago. Will it continue during the 14-month withdrawal of US forces? Nobody knows.Xinhua via ZUMA

We have signed a peace deal with the Taliban! Or, more accurately, we have signed a peace deal with the IEoAwinrbtUSaasaikatT, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States as a state and is known as the Taliban. The fully written out version is used throughout the text of the agreement.

And a simple agreement it is. The United States agrees to remove all allied forces from Afghanistan within 14 months. The Taliban agrees not to harbor anyone on Afghan soil who poses a security risk to the United States. That’s it, aside from a commitment by the Taliban to “start intra-Afghan negotiations with Afghan sides on March 10, 2020.” There is no commitment to end these negotiations, only a promise that they will take place and will include a “permanent and comprehensive ceasefire” as an agenda item.

This sure seems like a great deal for the Taliban. All they have to do is act like good boys for the next 14 months. Then, when all the US and other foreign troops are gone and it’s obvious they aren’t coming back, they can break off negotiations on some pretext and go back to destroying the Afghan government. Easy peasy.

I’m all in favor of this. It provides a (bare) fig leaf of credibility for the United States, and ends up where things were always bound to end up from the start. Eventually we were always going to leave, and when we did the Taliban would once again have a free hand. If the past is any guide, that means they’ll control the country before long.

The Taliban is a thuggish, murderous, theocratic gang that the world would be better off without. Unfortunately, after 19 years, we still have no good way of eliminating them, and it’s long past time for someone to face this reality and leave. In the same way that only Nixon can go to China, perhaps only Trump could leave Afghanistan. This doesn’t make me like Trump any better, but at least there’s a small silver lining to his presidency.

It’s a dex night and I got bored, so I went out and shot a bunch of nighttime photos of my neighborhood. To my surprise, I ended up with one shot that I really like. Needless to say, I was on my way to take a different picture entirely and this one just popped up unexpectedly.

But we’ll save that for another time. For now, here’s a picture of my house a few minutes before sunrise with some very colorful clouds in the background. It’s the one on the right.

Sue Dorfman/ZUMA

Over at The Corner, Jim Geraghty talks about who you’d trust most with a public health crisis like the coronavirus epidemic:

I concur with Michael Brendan Doherty’s assessment that the Trump administration’s response is, so far, not entirely reassuring. The markets aren’t going to be reassured by advice to “buy the dip” or talk of tax cuts, and investors are not going to feel confident when the White House chief of staff tells them to turn off their televisions….The prospect of a tanking stock market and genuine public anxiety about a virus might have Democrats feeling better about their chances in the presidential election in November. Big problems usually generate sentiment against the incumbent.

Then again, if it feels like the country is in a really dangerous spot . . . how much do Americans want to entrust everything to Bernie Sanders? Does a public-health crisis make Americans say, “Hey, let’s have a socialist revolution on top of all this?” Sanders believed, into his late forties, that cancer had psychosomatic aspects. Does he seem like the guy you want in charge during a pandemic or some other major public-health crisis?

I think Geraghty misses the point here. No one expects the president of the United States to be an expert on pandemic diseases. Bernie Sanders probably knows no more about them than Donald Trump does. What we do expect is a couple of things. First, we want a president who’s likely to listen to experts and let them speak to the public. Second, we want a president who’s going to appoint the best possible people to deal with the crisis.

Bernie Sanders would almost certainly be far better than Trump on both scores. There’s every reason to think he’d pay close attention to what the experts say. He would encourage someone like Anthony Fauci to hold daily press conferences instead of sidelining him. He would appoint a czar who had a reputation for both aggressiveness and deep knowledge of the federal bureaucracy—definitely not someone like Mike Pence. He would tell the truth when he spoke to the public, and he would mostly care about fixing the problem rather than fretting endlessly about his own reputation.

Even if you think Bernie Sanders has ridiculous ideas about the economy, there’s no reason to think he has weird ideas about how to handle a public health emergency. He would at least handle it normally, and quite possibly handle it well. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has weird ideas about everything and is motivated primarily by a desire to show that he’s not to blame for anything bad. That’s a toxic combination that Sanders can’t come close to matching.

According to Chinese authorities, here are the number of COVID-19 cases in the city of Wuhan, where the outbreak started:

If these numbers are to be believed, the number of new cases is starting to level out and looks unlikely to ever pass 55,000. That’s about 0.5 percent of Wuhan’s population of 11 million.

Now, as near as I can tell, the virus spreads far more widely in urban areas than in rural areas. If COVID-19 were to spread in American cities the same way it did in Wuhan, that would suggest maybe 1.5 million infections and 70,000 deaths, mostly concentrated among those over 60. But that’s almost certainly way too high. Wuhan is something of a worst-case scenario, after all: it was the first place hit; nobody knew what to do at first; and it quickly grew beyond the ability of the Chinese medical system to handle. Even in China, nearly all the victims have been in Wuhan, and it seems unlikely that any other city will ever reach the infection rate they’ve suffered.

Given all this, it seems very unlikely that American infections will ever surpass 1 million or that deaths will surpass 40,000—at most. This compares to the estimated 34,000 deaths from flu last year and 61,000 the year before. In other words, every time you go out shopping you’re already taking a bigger risk of dying from the flu than you’ll ever have from COVID-19.

So here’s my question: I understand that no professional would ever whomp up a prediction like this and make it public. It’s the flimsiest kind of horseback guess and shouldn’t be taken seriously by anyone. What’s more, COVID-19 is still new: we don’t have good data about the infection rate and it’s not clear how reliable the Chinese data is. Still, surely epidemiologists have estimates that they’ve passed around privately. Are they anywhere near mine? Like, even within an order of magnitude? I realize that keeping people scared is a good way of ensuring behavior that will keep infections down, but is that the only reason? Or are professionals genuinely more scared than I am?

Test results from a PCR assay of a herpes virus.Mohammad Hadi Sadeghian et al., Open access

I finally got curious about how and why the CDC managed to botch COVID-19 testing so badly. The answer isn’t complicated, but I still have questions.

The whole story is pretty short. The CDC test is a PCR¹ assay, a well-known and fairly easy diagnostic to perform. However, to make sure it isn’t simply flagging everything as the target virus, PCR tests always include an unrelated sample of DNA as one of the reagents. If everything is working properly, the unrelated sample should never produce a positive response. Unfortunately, the CDC bit off more than it could chew and created a test for multiple viruses—and then botched the reagents for one of them. The result was lots of false positives, which in turn meant that the CDC restricted use of its test to a very small number of laboratories that followed a very specific protocol. They also declined to allow state labs to simply create their own PCR tests.

Beyond this the details are unimportant except to say that the COVID-19 tests used in other countries are also PCR assays, so it’s not as if the CDC was breaking new ground here. And eventually the CDC agreed to limit its test just to COVID-19, which means it no longer has the false positive problem. This took several weeks, and I’m curious why it took so long. But what I’m really curious about is why the CDC didn’t just approve the use of PCR tests that were already being used in China, Europe, and elsewhere. Is there some reason that the United States of America just has to have its very own test instead of using someone else’s test that’s already in the field?

¹Polymerase Chain Reaction. More precisely, it’s an RT-PCR, or Reverse Transcription PCR, which can be used to detect RNA strands. This is what’s needed in the case of COVID-19.

My mother’s kittens are now five weeks old, so I figure it’s time to check in again. It turns out that they have escaped their box and are now energetically exploring the entire bedroom—but not the rest of the house. Not yet, anyway. I’m not sure what’s up with that, but I’m sure that soon they’ll be scampering everywhere that’s not locked up tight.

The top picture is their official five-week group portrait. They are engaged in their favorite activity: gathering up in a heap and squirming around. Below that we have individual shots of Stripey, Blackie, and Gray. They are adorable, no? Let me know if you’re interested in taking one home with you.

UPDATE: This morning the kittens broke the invisible barrier of the bedroom doorway and began exploring the rest of the house. Mayhem is expected.

This is nuts. Here’s a Washington Post survey asking people what they think of the various presidential candidates. As you might expect, Democrats mostly like the Democratic candidates and Republicans mostly dislike them. Likewise, Democrats dislike the Republican candidate while Republicans . . . also dislike him:

Even Republicans mostly describe Donald Trump as a bumbling jerk. But then they go ahead and vote for him anyway. It just goes to show how much we all hate each other these days.

BTW, you might notice that Amy Klobuchar gets good marks from everyone across the ideological spectrum. Don’t let that fool you: it’s only because the Fox News smear machine hasn’t bothered to go after her. If they thought she had a chance of winning, it would take them only a couple of weeks to convince Republicans that Klobuchar is mean, bumbling, and stupid.

UPDATE: After a brief Twitter conversation I took another look at this and it’s pretty meaningless. I scrutinized the topline numbers, and my best guess is that the total sample of Republicans is about 25. Of that, three described Trump as “president” and one each described him as bumbling and a jerk. The rest all used other words. Or something. I’m really just guessing here, but one thing’s for sure: the sample size is so minuscule that none of this means anything.

The New York Times poses a question today:

Ha ha ha. Yes it is. Any other questions?

Neil Irwin offers a different perspective on interest rate cuts from the Fed:

The Fed’s interest rate tools are poorly suited to protect the economy from shutdowns in production resulting from disease fears. Economists can’t invent a vaccine or slow disease transmission rates. On the other hand, you go to war with the recession-fighting tools you have, not those you might wish to have.

But assuming the central bank indeed cuts interest rates to try to buffer the economy from damage, it would find itself with interest rates of around 1 percent or lower, in an economy that is doing quite well, for the moment at least. That leaves little room for further stimulus through that conventional tool. Even a mild downturn would mean the Fed would be looking to less conventional tools, including the quantitative easing policies used extensively from 2009 through 2014, and sending more explicit signals about its intention to keep rates low far into the future.

Irwin is right about this, but it’s telling that he stops where he does. Because there is, in fact, one more conventional tool for fighting a recession: fiscal policy. When interest rates can’t go any lower, Congress can intervene to stimulate the economy with massive deficit spending. This is, admittedly, not a Fed tool, but who cares? In a sane country, it would still be a tool that we could count on if things get bad. The fact that Irwin doesn’t even bother mentioning it is a sign that no one trusts either Congress or the president to act rationally in the event of an economic turndown.