According to Families USA, about 5.4 million non-elderly Americans (i.e., those without Medicare) have lost their health insurance during the COVID-19 pandemic:

It goes without saying that this is insane. More than 5 million working-age people have lost their health insurance during a pandemic. The bulk of the newly uninsured are in the South, in states that refused to expand Medicaid after Obamacare was passed. The rest lost their employer health care when they were furloughed and couldn’t afford to replace it. And of course, the states where lack of insurance is the worst are the same states where COVID-19 is rising the fastest:

If there’s anything that could convince the American public that our current hodgepodge of health insurance is broken, this ought to be it. I’ll just repeat the bottom line in case anyone missed it:

More than 5 million working-age people have lost their health insurance during a pandemic.

Insanity. We need universal health care. We need it now.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 13. Europe and Canada are fine. Argentina might be plateauing, but probably not. Mexico is hard to make sense of. And the United States is continuing its post-reopen rebound.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

I’ve seen quite a few pieces lately about the dire condition of renters and homeowners as the COVID-19 pandemic continues. For example:

The COVID-19 Eviction Defense Project, a coalition of economic researchers and legal experts, estimates that 19 million to 23 million Americans are at risk for eviction by the end of September.

Or:

Today, upwards of 20 million U.S. renters are poised to be evicted between now and September, according to Emily Benfer, the chair of the American Bar Association’s Task Force Committee on Eviction.

How bad are things, really? That’s difficult to say because there are so many different ways of measuring housing insecurity. However, near the beginning of the year the Census Bureau put together a survey specifically designed to find out how people were being affected by the pandemic. One of the questions was about the ability to make rent or mortgage payments:

It’s frustrating that the survey doesn’t start until April 23, which means we don’t know the level of housing insecurity prior to the pandemic. That said, my interpretation of this data is that as the stimulus checks and UI bonuses finally made their way to families, they became less concerned about missing rent payments. Then, in June, as they spent down the one-time stimulus and started to worry about the end of the UI bonus, housing insecurity rose.

An increase of four percentage points may seem small, but it represents about 10 million people. If housing insecurity rises to 30 percent by September, that would represent about 20 million people. So it’s fair to say that something like 20 million people might be at risk of eviction by September. It all depends on what Congress does. They have two choices:

• Twiddle their thumbs and let people be evicted.
• Extend the UI bonus and do it now. This would most likely keep housing insecurity from rising at all.

Which do you think they’ll do?

This is yet another view of Slot Canyon X from my Arizona trip earlier this year. I wonder how they’ve weathered the COVID-19 shutdowns?

Aurelien Meunier/Getty Images

Facebook recently released a civil rights audit that’s been two years in the making. Kara Swisher describes it:

Facebook actually got an F, too, this week in an independent report that the company had commissioned about itself. The report decried Facebook’s decisions about how to protect its users from discriminatory content, including in ads….Sadly, the 89-page report was not much of a surprise to most critics of the company, which has been slow-walking its responsibility over hate speech and a range of other toxic waste on its platform since, well, always.

This is a columnist expressing an opinion, but it’s pretty typical of the news stories that covered the audit. That got me curious, so I read the report. You would never guess from reading the almost universally negative coverage of the audit that it spends three pages at the very beginning outlining all the things that Facebook has done well:

1. Reaching a historic civil rights settlement in March 2019
2. Expanding their voter suppression policies
3. Creating a robust census interference policy
4. Taking steps to build greater civil rights awareness and accountability
5. Improved Appeals and Penalties process
6. More frequent consultations with civil rights leaders
7. Changing various content moderation practices
8. Taking meaningful steps to create a more diverse and inclusive senior leadership team and culture
9. Investing in diverse businesses and vendors
10. Investing in a dedicated team to focus on studying responsible Artificial Intelligence methodologies
11. Implementing significant changes to privacy policies and systems

You can read the report for more details, but these weren’t half-hearted endorsements. The auditors genuinely believed they represented significant progress. They were followed by a few items that Facebook could improve on, most of which were things Facebook was already doing, but needed to do better.

Overall, then, it seemed like the audit was at least moderately positive. So why the intensely negative press? Because of this:

Facebook’s decisions in May of 2020 to let stand on three posts by President Trump, have caused considerable alarm for the Auditors and the civil rights community. One post allowed the propagation of hate/violent speech and two facilitated voter suppression….While these decisions were made ultimately at the highest level, we believe civil rights expertise was not sought and applied to the degree it should have been and the resulting decisions were devastating. Our fear was (and continues to be) that these decisions establish terrible precedent for others to emulate.

The Auditors were not alone. The company’s decisions elicited uproar from civil rights leaders, elected officials and former and current staff of the company, forcing urgent dialogues within Facebook. Some civil rights groups are so frustrated that Facebook permitted these Trump posts (among other important issues such as removing hate speech), that they have organized in an effort to enlist advertisers to boycott Facebook. Worse, some civil rights groups have, at this writing, threatened to walk away from future meetings with Facebook.

Facebook has taken the position that posts from the president of the United States are, by definition, something that citizens have a strong interest in seeing without mediation. After all, if we’re going to vote for someone, we need to know what they think. Facebook has taken a similar stance on posts by other politicians.

The civil rights community, by contrast, takes the position that any post containing bad information about voting should be deleted, no matter who put it up. The president should be treated the same as anyone else.

Does it really make sense that a generally positive report should be treated instead as a huge indictment over this one disagreement? Especially since this disagreement strikes me as a very close call.¹ Why would three posts from Donald Trump, all by themselves, cause civil rights groups to threaten a boycott of future meetings with Facebook? Especially when their criticisms seem to have yielded a fair amount of progress so far?

And why would the news media play along with this? No fair reading of the audit would call it anything other than broadly, but not exclusively, positive. I’m no fan of Facebook generally, but in this case it sure seems like they deserve better press than they got. What am I missing?

For more on Facebook and Trump, Ali Breland has you covered here. For more on Facebook’s Oversight Board in general, Ali and Rebecca Leber have the story here.

¹This doesn’t really matter, but I tentatively think Facebook made the right decision. I don’t especially want them to be the arbitrator of what I’m allowed to see from the president and what I’m not.

With two weeks left until the Phase 3 coronavirus rescue package ends, the White House is still dithering over Phase 4:

Kudlow today on some key WH priorities for phase 4:

— Payroll tax holiday

— “Unemployment reforms” (WH wants to knock down $600 plus-up)

— Return to work bonuses

— PPP extension (?)

— Targeted/direct form of stimulus checks

— Capital gains holiday

— Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 13, 2020

Return to work bonuses? As COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing? That’s insane. But perhaps not quite as insane as a capital gains holiday, which would—

Do what? Literally nothing except help rich people. Do Republicans just pick this stuff out of a hat every time there’s some opportunity, regardless of what problem they happen to be facing? What else could explain this?

Out of this whole list, the only thing that would directly help the 17 million unemployed is the $600 bonus UI payments, so naturally that’s the one thing Trump wants to cut back. Naturally.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 12. It looks like Wave 1.5 is well underway.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Whatever happened to Anthony Fauci? We don’t see much of him anymore. It turns out that President Trump got tired of Fauci’s pessimism about COVID-19 and has mostly sidelined him. In fact, it’s worse than that. When a Washington Post reporter asked about Fauci, the White House dumped their oppo file on him:

A White House official released a statement saying that “several White House officials are concerned about the number of times Dr. Fauci has been wrong on things” and included a lengthy list of the scientist’s comments from early in the outbreak. Those included his early doubt that people with no symptoms could play a significant role in spreading the virus — a notion based on earlier outbreaks that the novel coronavirus would turn on its head. They also point to public reassurances Fauci made in late February, around the time of the first U.S. case of community transmission, that “at this moment, there is no need to change anything that you’re doing on a day-by-day basis.”

And there’s this:

Trump is also galled by Fauci’s approval ratings. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll showed that 67 percent of voters trusted Fauci for information on the coronavirus, compared with 26 percent who trusted Trump.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is your president.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 11. This is going to be a bad month.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through July 10. We are now on our fourth day of rising mortality in the US and it’s now looking like a genuine upturn. The lag time between the rise in cases and the rise in deaths appears to be four weeks this time around, as you can see in this Washington Post chart:

If this chart is any indication, four weeks of rising cases means we’re now in for four weeks of rising deaths. And if the rise in deaths matches the rise in cases, our mortality rate won’t plateau until we hit about three times our current death rate.

On the other hand, it’s still true that COVID-19 is now targeting younger people, who are less likely to die from it, and that our hospitals have gotten better at treating it. So even if deaths rise for the next few weeks, they may never get as high as 3x our current rate. We’ll just have to wait and see.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.