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Trump Was Probably Wrong About Coronavirus and Suicides, But the Associated Press Botched Its Fact-Check

On Tuesday, President Trump warned that keeping the country under lockdown could drive people to recession-induced suicide and that the number of deaths “probably, and I mean, definitely, would be in far greater numbers than the numbers that we’re talking about with regard to the virus.”

To the extent Trump was suggesting that the economic costs of fighting the coronavirus are likely to produce more suicides than there would be deaths from the disease if the U.S. government did nothing, he’s almost certainly wrong. There were about 50,000 suicides in the U.S. last year. Even if this number increased dramatically, it would be very difficult to match the estimated deaths of COVID-19, which are in the hundreds of thousands or even millions under worst-case, do-nothing projections. If aggressive countermeasures to limit the coronavirus’ reduce the COVID-19 death toll to a bad flu season—the outcome many are hoping for—you would still have a problem at least as serious as the national suicide rate.

But while Trump likely exaggerated the trade-off here, the Associated Press—which published a fact-check of the president’s remarks—went too far in the opposite direction: significantly understating the possibility that suicides would increase if prolonged social-distancing measures lead to a sustained economic downturn.

“There’s no evidence that suicides will rise dramatically if nationwide social-distancing guidelines that have closed many businesses and are expected to trigger a spike in unemployment stay in place,” wrote the AP, prefacing this remark with a “THE FACTS” heading.

This is technically true in that we have not been able to run this exact experiment in some sort of laboratory. But suicides do tend to rise during periods of economic turmoil. During the first year of the Great Depression, the U.S. suicide rate surged from about 14 per 100,000 people to 18 per 100,000. In 1932—the last full year of the depression—the suicide rate reached its all-time high of 22 per 100,000.

The AP is aware of this fact, but bizarrely waves it away with this line: “The even higher suicide rate seen during the Great Depression of the 1930s fell sharply with the onset of World War II.” That an even larger crisis saw declining suicide rates a full decade later is cold comfort. The AP cites an expert who claims that “war and natural disaster” cause society to pull together and thus drive the suicide rate down, but a man-made crisis caused by deliberate government action to shut down the economy is neither a war nor a natural disaster.

Another fact-check of Trump’s remarks on suicide, published by ABC News, was much more responsible with its claims:

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, suicide mortalities have gone up every year since 1999, but it’s still “selective” for the president to latch onto that, says Richard Dunn, associate professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of Connecticut who has studied the connection between markets and depression.

“The general fact that President Trump cited is, in fact, true that when economies contract suicides do go up,” Dunn said, acknowledging how the financial crisis of the early 2000s triggered more suicides, “but that is not the only cause of death that responds to economic downturn.”

“If you were to look across all the current causes of death in a recession, you would see that the number of deaths actually declines. Heart deaths from heart disease fall. Deaths from motor vehicle accidents crashes fall,” Dunn added. “One of the few activities that we have left to us in many parts of the country is to go out for a walk, so physical activity tends to go up.”

“So we actually see overall that there are fewer deaths in economic downturn—but suicide is the one major cause of death that does not follow that pattern,” Dunn said.

It’s one thing to say that Trump exaggerated the likely impact on the suicide rate. It’s quite another to say the impact is something we would have no reason to consider at all.

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S&P Downgrades Ford To Junk – Biggest Fallen Angel Yet

S&P Downgrades Ford To Junk – Biggest Fallen Angel Yet

Given where Ford’s CDS was trading – more in line with B1/BB- rated American Axle – it should hardly come as a surprise that S&P has finally bitten the bullet and downgraded Ford debt to junk.

Via S&P,

The decision to downgrade Ford Motor Co. from investment grade to speculative grade reflects that the company’s credit metrics and competitive position became borderline for the investment-grade rating prior to the coronavirus outbreak, and the expected downturn in light-vehicle demand made it unlikely that Ford would maintain the required metrics.

Ford Motor Co. announced it is suspending production at its manufacturing sites in Europe for four weeks and halting production in North America to clean these facilities and boost containment efforts for the COVID-19 coronavirus. We expect Ford’s EBITDA margin to remain below 6% on a sustained basis and believe that its free operating cash flow to debt is unlikely to exceed 15% on a consistent basis.

Ford has drawn $13.4 billion on its corporate credit facility and $2 billion on its supplemental credit facility. We believe the company’s current cash position stands at about $36 billion.

We are downgrading our long-term issuer credit rating to ‘BB+’ from ‘BBB-‘. At the same time, we are assigning issue-level ratings of ‘BB+’ on Ford’s unsecured debt.

We are also placing the ratings on CreditWatch with negative implications, which reflects at least a 50% chance that we could lower the ratings depending on factors such as the duration of the plant shutdowns, the rate of cash burn, and the adequacy of Ford’s liquidity position.

This S&P move follows Moody’s cutting Ford’s long-term corporate family rating to Ba2 from Ba1 earlier in the day.

With a total amount of public bonds & loans outstanding around $95.8 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, Ford has just become one of the largest fallen angels yet.

 

Will this sudden large fallen angel lead to further repricing in the junk bond market, just as the market is dead-cat-bouncing on Fed intervention?


Tyler Durden

Wed, 03/25/2020 – 17:09

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3alHgDZ Tyler Durden

The Pandemic In My Neighborhood: Michael Lewis Laments The End Of Human Interaction

The Pandemic In My Neighborhood: Michael Lewis Laments The End Of Human Interaction

Authored by Michael Lewis, op-ed via Bloomberg.com,

We have so little data for how we’re supposed to live in this social-distancing world…

At the same time much of Northern California was ordered to shelter in place, it was granted lots of exceptions to the order.

You could go out for groceries and prescription drugs and dog walking. You could go out if you performed an “essential service.” You could go out for a walk or a run or a bike ride so long as you kept 6 feet between you and other human beings. Instantly many more people than usual in Berkeley took to the streets and, instantly, you could see that no one was quite sure how to behave. No one had ever tried to estimate 6 feet every time they passed another person, and people had different ideas of how much it was. Basically everyone avoided eye contact and small talk — as if any human interaction, no matter how remote, might cause a coronavirus infection.

If you ranked all American towns and cities by the likelihood that passing strangers would acknowledge each other’s existence, Berkeley would fall some place in the middle. Ahead of New York City, behind any place in Mississippi. (New Orleans would rank first.)

The first day of the lockdown, people on the streets of Berkeley became New Yorkers. But it felt less like indifference than some combination of guilt and uncertainty. Here was a new social situation for which the etiquette manual had yet to be written.

By the second day, behavior on our streets changed, radically. People kept their physical distance but now made more of an effort with each other than I’d ever seen here. Everywhere you turned you saw total strangers not only saying hello but also stopping to chat. All of a sudden we all had something in common! (Aside from our left-wing views.) We were all in lockdown! And we were all outside! The streets of Berkeley for a moment felt almost like the streets of New Orleans.

Within a few days the novelty mostly wore off, and people went back to treating each other with the same old indifference. Except the old people. The old people are still making eye contact.

There’d been only a couple of reported Covid-19 cases in town, both contracted someplace else. So far as anyone could tell, no one in Berkeley had caught the virus from someone else in Berkeley. And so we’re still waiting, for an answer to a question. Italy or Germany: Which will we be? Italy has only twice as many cases as Germany but almost 50 times the deaths. Maybe the Italians are especially old or vulnerable, but it’s more likely the Germans have tested huge numbers of people and the Italians have tested only people with serious symptoms. That is, some vast number of Italians have had the virus but were never tested, either because their symptoms never sent them running to the hospital or they never even knew they had it. We in the U.S. have tested far fewer people than the Italians. We’ve tested fewer people than basically every advanced country — which raises another question? Are we still one?

The nation that led the data revolution, that invented the job title of “data scientist,” that has held up better data analysis as the key to smartening up everything from political campaigns to baseball teams is now, at its moment of greatest peril, without data.

This is a problem.

If you don’t know who has the virus, you can’t see where it is and where it isn’t. If you can’t see where it is, you don’t know how to fight it, except by shutting everything down and telling people to stay away from each other. On the one hand, there are probably a lot of data geeks here who don’t mind being told they can’t go out; on the other, it’s a little odd that the corner of California that gave birth to the data geek was the first in the country to be told it had to take extreme measures to prevent people from killing each other — because there is no data.

* * * * *

It seemed like a good time to call Bill James. James is in some ways the father of the data revolution – or at least the idea that people who have good data, and know how to use it, have a huge advantage over people who don’t. In the early 1970s, he began to marshal data about baseball players, and to argue that Major League Baseball teams didn’t understand the value of their own players, or the wisdom of their strategies. His ideas reached the Oakland A’s, who used them to win lots more games than they should have, given how little money they had to spend on baseball players. I wound up writing a book about this, called “Moneyball,” and James wound up being hired by the Boston Red Sox – who in short order won their first World Series in nearly a century. Now James’s idea has infected every corner of American life, except, oddly, the corner in which this virus is meant to be fought. A kind way to view President Donald Trump’s administration is to think of it as being run about as well as the 1970 Cleveland Indians.

It’s interesting how people are spending the pandemic. James, 70, is staying more or less locked inside his home in Lawrence, Kansas.

“There’s nobody on the streets here,” he said.

“Nobody. The only time I go out is to walk the dog in the morning.”

He’d recently left his job with the Red Sox but thought he might join another team. The virus put a hold on that ambition. Instead he’s using the time he now has on his hands to rethink how to measure the value of a baseball player’s defense, as he thinks the baseball establishment has it wrong. Former Atlanta Braves outfielder Andruw Jones is on the ballot for the Hall of Fame and that fact alone troubles James. Jones was more famous for his defense than James thinks he should have been, because the data on baseball defense, and the ability to analyze it, is inadequate. James is busy building a new metric that will reveal more truth. Thus one consequence of the pandemic is to make it a bit more difficult for Andruw Jones to enter the Hall of Fame.

I asked James a question I’ve been asking lots of people: What are the three things that he’s saddest to have lost?

“The NCAA tournament,” he said, without missing a beat.

“My Jayhawks were the consensus No. 1 team.”

After that he mourned the delay to the start of the baseball season. “That’s going to tear a huge hole in my daily life.”

He rattled off the years that MLB’s season was shortened, by war or strike: 1918, 1919, 1972, 1981, 1994, 1995. A few days earlier he’d put a poll up on Twitter, asking people to predict this year’s Opening Day. He had his own prediction: May 15. More than a thousand people took his poll. All but one thought he was being wildly optimistic.

James has no privileged information about the virus. He reads the news like everyone else.

“It’s hard to distinguish between what is being said responsibly and what’s just being said,” he told me.

But he also has a history of looking at data and deciding to think one thing, even when everyone else is thinking another, and being proved right.

“I have four reasons for thinking what I think,” he said.

First, warm weather might deaden the virus’s spread.

Second, the global medical research community might prove surprisingly resourceful.

“I believe we will find medicine that will combat this more quickly than most people seem to believe,” he said.

“I think most people have the sense not to pay attention to the rules that don’t make sense to pay attention to, and so doctors will be doing more freelancing and we’re going to start hearing people say, ‘I’ve got a medicine that works.’”

Third, he thought that the country with the best testing data had the most accurate view of the disease. And that it was possible that a huge number of Americans have it now, or have had it, without really knowing it.

“If 30% of the population has already been exposed to this then that number will go to 70% in two weeks,” James said.

Assuming that having the disease left you with immunity to it, the crisis would then be as good as over, and baseball could begin.

“What’s the fourth reason to your argument?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “There’s another reason, but being an old person I can’t remember what it was.”

“What’s the third thing you are saddest about having lost?” I asked.

“I had a goal of going to lunch with a friend 100 times this year. That’s not going to happen.”

I said goodbye to Bill James and checked our local news site. Berkeleyside, it is called, and it is suddenly the go-to place for the news that matters most. An hour earlier, the site reported, an 80-year-old Berkeley man had tested positive for the virus. His girlfriend (!) said that the man hadn’t gone anywhere for a long time. But he had, a few days earlier, shopped for his groceries at our local Safeway. 


Tyler Durden

Wed, 03/25/2020 – 17:00

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WKMGVs Tyler Durden

FDA Tells At-Home Diagnostics Companies To Stop Coronavirus Test Roll-Outs

Four different diagnostics companies were planning to ship at-home tests for the coronavirus infections to their customers this week, but are instead “pausing” their roll-outs in order to avoid the displeasure of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bureaucrats. In fact, companies are destroying samples sent back from customers rather than testing them to comply with FDA guidance.

The companies had launched their tests based on their interpretation of the latest FDA Emergency Use Authorization, (EUA) which says that any lab that had been certified under the appropriate quality-control standards could start performing coronavirus tests. They were all using just such labs.

For example, to comply with the FDA’s testing guidance TechCrunch reports that the California-based Carbon Health sent out a notice to their coronavirus at-home test customers stating that “we sincerely regret to inform you that you will not get a test result. If you have already shipped your kit back, the specimen will be destroyed by Curative, Inc [their lab testing partner] using standard biohazard disposal. If you have not received your kit yet, please discard it upon receipt.”

Austin-based Everlywell was ramping up to handle 250,000 of its at-home coronavirus tests per week. Since the FDA’s EUA does not now stop private labs from developing and deploying coronavirus tests for clinical use, the company has pivoted to making its initial supply of COVID-19 tests available to hospital and health care providers, as a way to get around the FDA’s regulatory roadblock. Carbon Health is offering their coronavirus testing at its walk-in clinics.

The fact that self-administering these tests is uncomfortable may make their results less accurate, but the fact that the FDA allows their use by health care providers indicates that these tests work and are in no way fraudulent. The FDA needs to get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing now.

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Law students quietly agree with my post on pass/fail grading

Yesterday, I blogged that professors quietly support my views on pass/fail grading. Since then, I have received several emails from students. They note there is quiet support for my view, but many students are afraid of being shamed by classmates on social media. I post here two such messages, with slight edits.

First:

Professor Blackman,

Thank you for sharing your platform with us. You have no idea how validating it is to know that professors also share the same views on the pass/fail grading system. I have taken the brunt of the attacks on social media. I have to admit that I am concerned about my reputation among my peers, but it is what it is. Here are my thoughts:

Like professors, the main method of attack on students who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system is a lack of compassion for others. Any reasoning given to support our stance is drowned out by the droves of students claiming we are “gunners who want to screw the rest” and we should be worried about our community, not our GPA.

Based on the comments on social media that I’ve seen, what I can tell you about students like me who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system – we are not gunners. The majority of students advocating against pass/fail are those who have suffered extreme personal tragedies during their law school career that negatively affected their grades. Arguably, we are students who have the most empathy for others. Because we know first-hand the challenges a law student will face should they or a family member contract COVID-19. Maybe the issue is that our perspective on problems is irreversibly skewed after what we’ve been through. Maybe the other law students simply cannot understand us because they are fortunate to never have experienced the things that we have. Things like taking care of someone with cancer, the death of a loved one, or Hurricane Harvey destroying their car and home.

Other students against the mandatory pass/fail system are those who are in their last semester of law school and this is their last chance to achieve the GPA they need to secure the job they are applying for. Students who need scholarships to continue their education. Students who are early in their law school career and are facing being kicked out if they don’t up their GPA.

The major problem lurking beneath all this is that future attorneys, lawmakers, and judges are reinforcing the culture of hating anyone who disagrees with them and refusing to listen to the other’s perspective. Hate is spread. Rumors are created. People are silenced. That’s a problem that I am worried about.

Second:

It seems Professors are dealing with the same situation as law students. Currently, students across the nation are utilizing different avenues of social media to brutally wield their opinion as a weapon against all in opposition essentially silencing all that disagree. The opinion—mandatory pass or fail. There are many law students sitting quietly in opposition waiting for someone to be that voice.

Many of the things you have posted are silently supported by law students. However, I can only speak for myself. As a law student, I rely on my graded performance on exams to help gauge my weaknesses and strengths. With that information, I’m able to form a more suitable study approach to the Bar Exam. Without that feedback, I would not be able to identify where I need the most work.

I would consider myself affected by COVID-19. In fact, the other day, my significant other and I made a list prioritizing which bills to pay first in the event either of us lose our job. My new day consists of working from home, home schooling two small children and studying for and attending law school classes virtually. Fortunately, my significant other has a job but the future of it, is uncertain. With these financial and health concerns coupled with the limited time to devote to my studies, I fear I may under perform on exams. However, I have learned from multiple professors and mentors along the way that nothing worthwhile comes easy. I enrolled in law school as a young parent knowing I would face different obstacles than most. I welcomed the challenge at the time and stand ready for this challenge now.

If the Law School I currently attend switches to Pass/Fail (no decision has been made as of yet) it will take away my opportunity to rise to the challenge and learn a very important lesson. Wanting to refrain from a mandatory pass/fail is not wholly about boosting my GPA or maintaining my GPA (as most vying for pass/fail believe is the reason why students oppose). More importantly, it’s about learning how to juggle the curve balls life can through because as an attorney, I won’t be able to press pause or step away when it gets tough. This is a lesson most people, not just law students, need to learn. Law Schools taking this opportunity away are doing a disservice to their students.

The National Law Journal published a story on this issue. The University of Chicago has (at least so far) agreed to stick with the usual grading curve. Many students are unhappy. But some students were willing to sign a counter-petition.

A much smaller group of Chicago law students signed a counterpetition in favor of maintaining some form of the traditional grading system, citing a desire to have letter grades for 2L summer employment purposes and to ensure high-quality class participation.

“Many students chose to attend the law school due to the balance struck between collaboration and incentives for personal academic growth,” the counterpetition reads. “We worry a mandatory pass/fail grading system would disrupt that balance by reducing class participation and lowering the quality of discussion.”

I suspect more students agree, but are unwilling to publicly put their names on the petition.

Peer pressure to conform exists at all levels: for students and for faculty. Thankfully, peer pressure never worked on me, even as a kid. I will always voice my views candidly.

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Despite Coronavirus, Sweden Refuses To Shutter Businesses and Limit Gatherings

The lights are going out all over Europe, the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the world. Borders are closing, cities are shutting down, and governments are imposing export bans. It looks like one of the first victims of the new coronavirus is globalization. 

The World Bank has estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the economic damage from epidemics usually comes from aversion behavior, not from disease, deaths, and the associated loss of production. This time, due to the massive scale of the shutdowns, that cost is going to be much bigger.

Perhaps not in Sweden, though. It’s hard to predict even the next few hours or days, but it is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

With beautiful exaggeration, Bloomberg News reported that “Swedes Try Laissez-Faire Model in Controversial Virus Response.” Sweden did not do this out of libertarian zeal, but because of a tradition of listening to experts and health authorities, who thought it better to track individual cases within the country than to shut everything down. When everybody is awaiting the latest epidemiological data to make decisions, there is less room for political grandstanding and strongman rhetoric. 

There is also a case to be made that the culture of personal responsibility and interpersonal trust makes it easier for the Swedish government to leave the ultimate decisions to the people. When the public health agency recommends working from home and avoiding unnecessary gatherings, most Swedes abide by it, even without putting police on the streets and imposing stiff penalties. That leaves necessary room for local knowledge and personal needs. Individuals, organizations, and businesses can go ahead anyway, if their particular situation makes it especially important that they remain open or move around freely. 

And by the way, it might help that Sweden is a country of introverts, famous for distant relations between generations. Swedes did social distancing before it was cool.

There are reasons to fear that this near-consensus toward cordoning off whole nations will strengthen an already ongoing global reactionary impulse against the movement of people and goods across borders. If we can’t find our way back to an open world after this, our reaction to COVID-19 will hurt us even more than the virus. After decades of unprecedented progress at combating poverty, hunger, and disease, these trends would be reversed, and we would be even less well prepared for the next nasty surprise nature throws at us. 

Despite the popular perception, our best hope against pandemic is continued trade and cooperation across borders. Travel bans are mostly “political placebo” as U.K. health researcher Clare Wenham puts it, and the World Health Organization is advising against it, for the simple reason that COVID-19 is already everywhere, but vital supplies and medical equipment are not. 

In fact, one reason why Italy has suffered terribly seems to be that closed borders gave them a false sense of security and made them underestimate the spread already going on within the country.

It is easy to see the political logic behind bans on the export of essential equipment, implemented by countries like Germany and France at an early stage. You have to serve your own population first, right? But it’s the same logic as toilet paper hoarding, and it has the same result. It forces others to do the same, which means that it is not on the market when you really have to go.

During the global food price crisis of 2010–11, many governments banned food exports to secure local supplies. But afterward, we found out that those bans were part of the problem. In fact, they accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and almost a quarter of the increase in the price of corn.

So even though the world often moves in a nationalist direction during crises, it is exactly the time when we have the most urgent need for international agreements to forego beggar-thy-neighbor policies. 

Wealth, communications technology, and open science have made our response to new diseases faster than ever. In a poorer and more closed world, without mass transportation, microorganisms traveled slower but they traveled freely, recurring for hundreds of years, until they had picked almost all of us off, one by one. Today our response is also global, and therefore for the first time, mankind has a fighting chance. 

Hospitals, researchers, health authorities, and drug companies everywhere can now supply each other with instant information. They can coordinate efforts to analyze and combat the problem. By organizing clinical trials of therapeutics in many countries simultaneously, they can reach a critical mass of patients they would never have found at home.   

The pace of the response has been extraordinary. After having tried to conceal the outbreak for weeks, China announced that it had found a new coronavirus on January 2. Using technologies developed on the other side of the globe, Chinese scientists could read the complete genome of the virus and publish it on a new global hub for medical research in just a week. This information enabled researchers in Berlin to develop a test to detect infections in just six days. This is what we now use to track infected people around the world—except in the U.S., where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on keeping it out and developing a domestic, faulty test, which set back American efforts several weeks.

When someone reveals the mechanism of the virus, researchers and algorithms everywhere can get to work on ways of attacking its weak spots. On March 25, not even three months after China admitted a new virus was on the loose, America’s National Library of Medicine lists 143 potential drugs and vaccines against the virus, already recruiting (or preparing to recruit) patients to participate in clinical trials.

Those companies are, just like our health care systems, disproportionally reliant on immigrant workers. According to the immigration advocacy nonprofit Partnership for a New American Economy, eight out of 10 medical patents from leading U.S. universities are invented by someone born outside of the country. In other words, immigration bans kill Americans.

That is not all. Globalization might even prevent many pandemics from happening. A 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Tel Aviv showed that frequent travel between populations makes us catch a lot of bugs, but also increases immunity against new strains. So apocalyptic outbreaks become less likely. This is the reason why previously isolated populations are most at risk—from Native Americans after 1492 to the swine flu in 2009, when 24 of the 30 worst affected countries were island nations.

Human mobility is like a “natural vaccination” says Oxford’s Robin Thompson. The researchers speculate that this might help explain the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the Spanish flu in the last 100 years. 

That doesn’t help at all when a virus that previously only affected animals mutates and jumps to humans, like the new coronavirus. Then we have no resistance and it can spread quickly.

But if the researchers are correct, the jet engine has saved millions of lives from pandemics only in the last few decades. And as even Sweden’s governing Social Democrats emphasize right now, the greatest threat to our economy, our jobs, and our health is that the planes stop flying and the trucks get stuck at the border.

That is also worth taking into account before we turn off the last lights.

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First World Problem, Resolved: Hilton to Extend 2020 Status Till 2021

In the past few weeks, I have had to cancel many plane tickets, hotel bookings, rental car reservations, and other travel plans. Fortunately, all cancellation and change fees were waived. But the airlines, at least, do not offer refunds. They simply give you credits for future trips. At present, I have given United a ~$5,000 interest-free line of credit. You’re welcome.

Frequent fliers have also begun to worry about a related issue: status. As a general matter, airlines award status based on miles flow and hotels award status based on nights stayed. Now, airplanes are grounded and hotels are vacant. Business travel has ground to a halt. What will happen to status for 2021?

Hilton released an announcement that should put frequent fliers at some ease:

We consider it our privilege to have you as a Hilton Honors member and we want to show our appreciation by extending your benefits:

  • 2019 Status Extension. All members whose 2019 status was scheduled to be downgraded on March 31, 2020—whether it’s Diamond, Gold or Silver—will automatically receive an extension through March 31, 2021.
  • 2020 Status Extension. We are extending your 2020 member status through March 31, 2022. This means you will continue to enjoy all the Diamond, Gold or Silver benefits you have access to today for the next 24 months.
  • Points Extension. We will pause the expiration of all Points scheduled to expire between now and December 31, 2020.
  • Weekend Night Rewards Earned on Eligible Hilton Credit Cards. We have extended the expiration date of all unexpired Weekend Night Rewards as of March 11, 2020, and all new ones issued until August 30, 2020, through the end of next summer (August 31, 2021).

The second bullet is the most important. Whatever status members currently have in 2020, they will retain in 2021 (to be precise, through March 2022).

I hope United and other travel companies follow suit: simply extend current status for another year.

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FDA Tells At-Home Diagnostics Companies To Stop Coronavirus Test Roll-Outs

Four different diagnostics companies were planning to ship at-home tests for the coronavirus infections to their customers this week, but are instead “pausing” their roll-outs in order to avoid the displeasure of Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bureaucrats. In fact, companies are destroying samples sent back from customers rather than testing them to comply with FDA guidance.

The companies had launched their tests based on their interpretation of the latest FDA Emergency Use Authorization, (EUA) which says that any lab that had been certified under the appropriate quality-control standards could start performing coronavirus tests. They were all using just such labs.

For example, to comply with the FDA’s testing guidance TechCrunch reports that the California-based Carbon Health sent out a notice to their coronavirus at-home test customers stating that “we sincerely regret to inform you that you will not get a test result. If you have already shipped your kit back, the specimen will be destroyed by Curative, Inc [their lab testing partner] using standard biohazard disposal. If you have not received your kit yet, please discard it upon receipt.”

Austin-based Everlywell was ramping up to handle 250,000 of its at-home coronavirus tests per week. Since the FDA’s EUA does not now stop private labs from developing and deploying coronavirus tests for clinical use, the company has pivoted to making its initial supply of COVID-19 tests available to hospital and health care providers, as a way to get around the FDA’s regulatory roadblock. Carbon Health is offering their coronavirus testing at its walk-in clinics.

The fact that self-administering these tests is uncomfortable may make their results less accurate, but the fact that the FDA allows their use by health care providers indicates that these tests work and are in no way fraudulent. The FDA needs to get out of the way of at-home COVID-19 testing now.

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Law students quietly agree with my post on pass/fail grading

Yesterday, I blogged that professors quietly support my views on pass/fail grading. Since then, I have received several emails from students. They note there is quiet support for my view, but many students are afraid of being shamed by classmates on social media. I post here two such messages, with slight edits.

First:

Professor Blackman,

Thank you for sharing your platform with us. You have no idea how validating it is to know that professors also share the same views on the pass/fail grading system. I have taken the brunt of the attacks on social media. I have to admit that I am concerned about my reputation among my peers, but it is what it is. Here are my thoughts:

Like professors, the main method of attack on students who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system is a lack of compassion for others. Any reasoning given to support our stance is drowned out by the droves of students claiming we are “gunners who want to screw the rest” and we should be worried about our community, not our GPA.

Based on the comments on social media that I’ve seen, what I can tell you about students like me who are against a mandatory pass/fail grading system – we are not gunners. The majority of students advocating against pass/fail are those who have suffered extreme personal tragedies during their law school career that negatively affected their grades. Arguably, we are students who have the most empathy for others. Because we know first-hand the challenges a law student will face should they or a family member contract COVID-19. Maybe the issue is that our perspective on problems is irreversibly skewed after what we’ve been through. Maybe the other law students simply cannot understand us because they are fortunate to never have experienced the things that we have. Things like taking care of someone with cancer, the death of a loved one, or Hurricane Harvey destroying their car and home.

Other students against the mandatory pass/fail system are those who are in their last semester of law school and this is their last chance to achieve the GPA they need to secure the job they are applying for. Students who need scholarships to continue their education. Students who are early in their law school career and are facing being kicked out if they don’t up their GPA.

The major problem lurking beneath all this is that future attorneys, lawmakers, and judges are reinforcing the culture of hating anyone who disagrees with them and refusing to listen to the other’s perspective. Hate is spread. Rumors are created. People are silenced. That’s a problem that I am worried about.

Second:

It seems Professors are dealing with the same situation as law students. Currently, students across the nation are utilizing different avenues of social media to brutally wield their opinion as a weapon against all in opposition essentially silencing all that disagree. The opinion—mandatory pass or fail. There are many law students sitting quietly in opposition waiting for someone to be that voice.

Many of the things you have posted are silently supported by law students. However, I can only speak for myself. As a law student, I rely on my graded performance on exams to help gauge my weaknesses and strengths. With that information, I’m able to form a more suitable study approach to the Bar Exam. Without that feedback, I would not be able to identify where I need the most work.

I would consider myself affected by COVID-19. In fact, the other day, my significant other and I made a list prioritizing which bills to pay first in the event either of us lose our job. My new day consists of working from home, home schooling two small children and studying for and attending law school classes virtually. Fortunately, my significant other has a job but the future of it, is uncertain. With these financial and health concerns coupled with the limited time to devote to my studies, I fear I may under perform on exams. However, I have learned from multiple professors and mentors along the way that nothing worthwhile comes easy. I enrolled in law school as a young parent knowing I would face different obstacles than most. I welcomed the challenge at the time and stand ready for this challenge now.

If the Law School I currently attend switches to Pass/Fail (no decision has been made as of yet) it will take away my opportunity to rise to the challenge and learn a very important lesson. Wanting to refrain from a mandatory pass/fail is not wholly about boosting my GPA or maintaining my GPA (as most vying for pass/fail believe is the reason why students oppose). More importantly, it’s about learning how to juggle the curve balls life can through because as an attorney, I won’t be able to press pause or step away when it gets tough. This is a lesson most people, not just law students, need to learn. Law Schools taking this opportunity away are doing a disservice to their students.

The National Law Journal published a story on this issue. The University of Chicago has (at least so far) agreed to stick with the usual grading curve. Many students are unhappy. But some students were willing to sign a counter-petition.

A much smaller group of Chicago law students signed a counterpetition in favor of maintaining some form of the traditional grading system, citing a desire to have letter grades for 2L summer employment purposes and to ensure high-quality class participation.

“Many students chose to attend the law school due to the balance struck between collaboration and incentives for personal academic growth,” the counterpetition reads. “We worry a mandatory pass/fail grading system would disrupt that balance by reducing class participation and lowering the quality of discussion.”

I suspect more students agree, but are unwilling to publicly put their names on the petition.

Peer pressure to conform exists at all levels: for students and for faculty. Thankfully, peer pressure never worked on me, even as a kid. I will always voice my views candidly.

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Despite Coronavirus, Sweden Refuses To Shutter Businesses and Limit Gatherings

The lights are going out all over Europe, the U.S., and increasingly the rest of the world. Borders are closing, cities are shutting down, and governments are imposing export bans. It looks like one of the first victims of the new coronavirus is globalization. 

The World Bank has estimated that 80 to 90 percent of the economic damage from epidemics usually comes from aversion behavior, not from disease, deaths, and the associated loss of production. This time, due to the massive scale of the shutdowns, that cost is going to be much bigger.

Perhaps not in Sweden, though. It’s hard to predict even the next few hours or days, but it is interesting that Sweden—the one European country that did not want to shut its borders, did not close schools, and has not banned gatherings of fewer than 500 people—so far seems to be containing the spread better than other countries have.

With beautiful exaggeration, Bloomberg News reported that “Swedes Try Laissez-Faire Model in Controversial Virus Response.” Sweden did not do this out of libertarian zeal, but because of a tradition of listening to experts and health authorities, who thought it better to track individual cases within the country than to shut everything down. When everybody is awaiting the latest epidemiological data to make decisions, there is less room for political grandstanding and strongman rhetoric. 

There is also a case to be made that the culture of personal responsibility and interpersonal trust makes it easier for the Swedish government to leave the ultimate decisions to the people. When the public health agency recommends working from home and avoiding unnecessary gatherings, most Swedes abide by it, even without putting police on the streets and imposing stiff penalties. That leaves necessary room for local knowledge and personal needs. Individuals, organizations, and businesses can go ahead anyway, if their particular situation makes it especially important that they remain open or move around freely. 

And by the way, it might help that Sweden is a country of introverts, famous for distant relations between generations. Swedes did social distancing before it was cool.

There are reasons to fear that this near-consensus toward cordoning off whole nations will strengthen an already ongoing global reactionary impulse against the movement of people and goods across borders. If we can’t find our way back to an open world after this, our reaction to COVID-19 will hurt us even more than the virus. After decades of unprecedented progress at combating poverty, hunger, and disease, these trends would be reversed, and we would be even less well prepared for the next nasty surprise nature throws at us. 

Despite the popular perception, our best hope against pandemic is continued trade and cooperation across borders. Travel bans are mostly “political placebo” as U.K. health researcher Clare Wenham puts it, and the World Health Organization is advising against it, for the simple reason that COVID-19 is already everywhere, but vital supplies and medical equipment are not. 

In fact, one reason why Italy has suffered terribly seems to be that closed borders gave them a false sense of security and made them underestimate the spread already going on within the country.

It is easy to see the political logic behind bans on the export of essential equipment, implemented by countries like Germany and France at an early stage. You have to serve your own population first, right? But it’s the same logic as toilet paper hoarding, and it has the same result. It forces others to do the same, which means that it is not on the market when you really have to go.

During the global food price crisis of 2010–11, many governments banned food exports to secure local supplies. But afterward, we found out that those bans were part of the problem. In fact, they accounted for 40 percent of the increase in the world price of wheat and almost a quarter of the increase in the price of corn.

So even though the world often moves in a nationalist direction during crises, it is exactly the time when we have the most urgent need for international agreements to forego beggar-thy-neighbor policies. 

Wealth, communications technology, and open science have made our response to new diseases faster than ever. In a poorer and more closed world, without mass transportation, microorganisms traveled slower but they traveled freely, recurring for hundreds of years, until they had picked almost all of us off, one by one. Today our response is also global, and therefore for the first time, mankind has a fighting chance. 

Hospitals, researchers, health authorities, and drug companies everywhere can now supply each other with instant information. They can coordinate efforts to analyze and combat the problem. By organizing clinical trials of therapeutics in many countries simultaneously, they can reach a critical mass of patients they would never have found at home.   

The pace of the response has been extraordinary. After having tried to conceal the outbreak for weeks, China announced that it had found a new coronavirus on January 2. Using technologies developed on the other side of the globe, Chinese scientists could read the complete genome of the virus and publish it on a new global hub for medical research in just a week. This information enabled researchers in Berlin to develop a test to detect infections in just six days. This is what we now use to track infected people around the world—except in the U.S., where the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on keeping it out and developing a domestic, faulty test, which set back American efforts several weeks.

When someone reveals the mechanism of the virus, researchers and algorithms everywhere can get to work on ways of attacking its weak spots. On March 25, not even three months after China admitted a new virus was on the loose, America’s National Library of Medicine lists 143 potential drugs and vaccines against the virus, already recruiting (or preparing to recruit) patients to participate in clinical trials.

Those companies are, just like our health care systems, disproportionally reliant on immigrant workers. According to the immigration advocacy nonprofit Partnership for a New American Economy, eight out of 10 medical patents from leading U.S. universities are invented by someone born outside of the country. In other words, immigration bans kill Americans.

That is not all. Globalization might even prevent many pandemics from happening. A 2019 study by researchers at the universities of Oxford and Tel Aviv showed that frequent travel between populations makes us catch a lot of bugs, but also increases immunity against new strains. So apocalyptic outbreaks become less likely. This is the reason why previously isolated populations are most at risk—from Native Americans after 1492 to the swine flu in 2009, when 24 of the 30 worst affected countries were island nations.

Human mobility is like a “natural vaccination” says Oxford’s Robin Thompson. The researchers speculate that this might help explain the absence of a global pandemic as severe as the Spanish flu in the last 100 years. 

That doesn’t help at all when a virus that previously only affected animals mutates and jumps to humans, like the new coronavirus. Then we have no resistance and it can spread quickly.

But if the researchers are correct, the jet engine has saved millions of lives from pandemics only in the last few decades. And as even Sweden’s governing Social Democrats emphasize right now, the greatest threat to our economy, our jobs, and our health is that the planes stop flying and the trucks get stuck at the border.

That is also worth taking into account before we turn off the last lights.

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