Consumer spending increased in June, but it’s still about $1 trillion below where it ought to be:

Even though national income increased thanks to stimulus checks and expanded unemployment benefits, people still aren’t willing to spend like they used to. Instead they’re saving more than normal, and who can blame them? If they had more confidence in both the federal response to COVID-19 and Republican willingness to continue benefits to the unemployed, spending might be closer to normal. But they don’t, so it’s not.

This is good news, I suppose:

The White House is willing to cut a deal with Democrats that leaves out Senate Republican legislation aimed at protecting employers, hospitals and schools from coronavirus-related lawsuits, according to two people with knowledge of internal White House planning….One of the people familiar with the administration’s thinking said the measure was “considered important but not absolutely essential.”

Mitch McConnell probably could have gotten his liability shield if he had been more reasonable. There’s a case to be made for some kind of modest “safe harbor” legislation, after all. But McConnell wouldn’t go there. Instead he insisted on a shield so strong it would have protected businesses even from the most egregious negligence. Even the Trump White House was able to see what a political loser this was.

Now let’s get to work on extending unemployment benefits, shall we?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 30. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

This is a very pretty king snake being exhibited by a handler at the Orange County Zoo in the Before Times. I was hoping to handle it myself, but by the time I finished taking pictures the zoo guy got a call and had to rush off somewhere.

CDC/Planet Pix via ZUMA

The more we learn about COVID-19, the worse it gets. This is from a recent study of recovered patients in Germany:

CMR [cardiovascular magnetic resonance] revealed cardiac involvement in 78 patients (78%) and ongoing myocardial inflammation in 60 patients (60%), independent of preexisting conditions, severity and overall course of the acute illness, and time from the original diagnosis.

Nearly two-thirds of patients, even those with no preexisting conditions, developed myocarditis! Now, myocarditis is not always serious, but it can be. Sometimes it lasts a few hours, other times a few months. But why is a respiratory virus causing heart problems? The good folks at UCSF magazine explain:

We Thought It Was Just a Respiratory Virus
We were wrong.

By the luck of the evolutionary draw, [the coronavirus can] easily grab hold of protein gates on human cells known as ACE2 receptors and, like jackknives, pry these gates open….“You can think of an ACE2 receptor like a docking site,” says Faranak Fattahi, PhD, a UCSF Sandler Fellow.

….It stands to reason that SARS-CoV-2 affects the heart. After all, heart cells are flush with ACE2 receptors, the virus’s vital port of entry. And, indeed, laboratory experiments suggest that the virus can enter and replicate in cultured human heart cells, says Bruce Conklin, MD, a professor of medicine and an expert in heart-disease genetics at UCSF and the Gladstone Institutes.

This, along with interactions from the immune system, appears to be responsible for many of the non-respiratory effects we’ve started seeing in COVID-19 patients. That’s why, increasingly, it’s not just important to get COVID-19 deaths down. We need to crush the case count too because even seemingly asymptomatic cases can sometimes cause serious problems down the line.

Pat A. Robinson/ZUMA

OK, let’s get this straight:

Q: Can President Trump delay the November election?

A: No.

Nor does Congress have either the desire or the votes to delay it. There’s not really any need for further discussion of this topic.

GDP plummeted 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year, an annualized rate of 32.9 percent. Just in case that’s not dramatic enough for you, here’s a view of GDP that you don’t normally see:

The reason you seldom see this view of raw GDP is that even big drops barely show up. The 1980 recession is hardly visible and even the 2008 Great Recession looks pretty puny. It’s just a nice, steady march of trendline growth until 2020. The coronavirus recession is the first in 90 years to be so big that it’s visible from outer space, so to speak.

I used to take solace from the fact that this drop was deliberately manufactured, which meant it could be deliberately remedied when the coronavirus was under control. Little did I know that our president had no real interest in controlling the virus and Republicans had no real interest in keeping the country afloat in the meantime. There is going to be tremendous suffering over the next year.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 29. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here we go again:

“Trump’s weakening hand.” In other words, they think Trump is going to lose and they’re making sure everyone knows they will refuse to spend a single penny when a Democrat is in office, pandemics and recessions be damned.

Serious question, folks: Is there a Democratic equivalent of this? That is, something where Democrats literally turn on a dime whenever Republicans occupy the White House? Nothing comes to mind, but I loathe Republican leaders far too much these days to be able to think straight about it.

“If you make $40,000 or less,” the chairman of the Federal Reserve said today, “you had a 40% chance of losing your job in April or May.” But that’s only half the story. A lot more people than that lost at least part of their income. Here’s the breakdown by income level:

The poor suffered the most, of course. Here it is by race and ethnicity:

Here it is by size of household:

Men and women lost income equally, and there wasn’t a very big difference by age either. Generally, the poorer, sicker, and least educated—that is, the ones who could least afford it in the first place—are the ones who suffered the most.

This is why it’s so appalling to watch Republicans in Congress screw around with people’s lives by slow-walking the latest coronavirus rescue bill. But the poor have never been their constituents, after all, so they just don’t care about them much.