Watch: Massive Fire Engulfs Sprawling UAE Market In Flames Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/05/2020 – 14:55
As GCC member states pledge to send aid to embattled Lebanon following yesterday’s shocking and historic blast, allegedly caused by government negligence in the borderline failed state, a massive explosion just rocked a busy market near Dubai, in the UAE.
The fire has spread rapidly through a market in the emirate of Ajman.
Social media users are speculating without any evidence about a possible connection between this fire and the explosion yesterday in Beirut – though “bad things come in twos and threes” isn’t much of a theory to go on.
Breaking News: A major fire has just broken out at a massive market in Ajman Dubai!!! It was Beirut Lebanon 🇱🇧 yesterday, today it’s Dubai UAE 🇦🇪
💔🔥pic.twitter.com/rhjIfrdp0P
— Millionaire BusinessMan 🇨🇦 (@tboss_guy) August 5, 2020
The fire is apparently ongoing, according to several regional media orgs.
Breaking News: A major fire has just broken out at a massive market in Ajman Dubai!!! It was Beirut Lebanon 🇱🇧 yesterday, today it’s Dubai UAE 🇦🇪
💔🔥pic.twitter.com/rhjIfrdp0P
— Millionaire BusinessMan 🇨🇦 (@tboss_guy) August 5, 2020
Of course, UAE is no stranger to sweeping structure fires. In one recent example, Abbco Tower in the city of Sharjah near Dubai caught fire back in May.
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French Banking Giants SocGen And Natixis Oust Execs After Massive Q2 Losses Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/05/2020 – 14:51
While U.S. banks seemed to have no issues reporting sold earnings a week ago on the backs of stellar trading revenues offsetting a bad debt-driven plunge in net interest income, France’s largest investment banks – Societe Generale SA and Natixis SA – posted giant losses. SocGen posted a second quarter loss of 1.26 billion euros, its worst since 2008 when Jerome Kerviel nearly blew up the bank’s trading desk. SocGen’s crosstown neighbor, Natixis, posted a 57 million euro second quarter loss.
As a result, both banks have seen top executives pushed out.
SocGen CEO Frederic Oudea pushed out two of his top executives on Tuesday, including his head of investment banking, “just hours” after Natixis’ Board of Directors pushed out CEO Francois Riahi, according to Bloomberg.
The oustings show that not every bank in the world is dealing with the pandemic induced recession well. Much of these two banks’ losses came from structured derivative products, prompting what Bloomberg calls the “personnel moves”. The losses come in stark contrast not only to U.S. banks, but to overseas peers like BNP Paribas, who posted great results in its last quarterly report.
Jakub Lichwa, a credit strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in London, said: “Management change looks to me like a knee-jerk reaction at this stage that will obviously not address immediately the composition of the business. As with all restructurings, there will be more costs and uncertain outcomes.”
Shares of SocGen responded by climbing 5% in Paris while Natixis rose 8.5% as a result. Each bank is down about 66% over the course of two years, outpacing a 44% drop for the Bloomberg Europe 500 Banks and Financial Services Index.
U.S. banks posted $45 billion in combined revenue from trading and dealmaking in Q2, which are record numbers for those businesses.
Some of the outgoing executives are names with significant experience in French banking. SocGen Deputy CEO Severin Cabannes had a decades-long track record at the bank. His peer, Philippe Heim, has 13 years of experience under his belt.
Riahi had only been CEO for two years after being at the bank for more than a decade. He had previously worked as adviser to ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy and helped lead the bank’s embrace “of risky derivatives and Asian and U.S. markets,” according to Bloomberg.
Laurent Mignon, chairman of Natixis parent Groupe BPCE said: “If a group is to work well, for a strategic plan to work well, there needs to be full alignment in the governance. As soon as the divergence is acknowledged, it is best that things go the way they did.”
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jonathan Tyce said: “SocGen and Natixis have a similar problem — credibility that they can appropriately restructure and reduce risk without significant income loss.”
This isn’t the first time these banks have been stung by structured products, either. In 2018, Natixis lost $300 million when Korean structured products blew up. The banks are now trying to “stem the damage” and SocGen will “stop producing” the rogue products that went awry.
Gildas Surry, a partner at Axiom Alternative Investments in London, concluded: “Both banks need to revisit their strategy in these businesses. They share the same skills amongst their ranks: sophisticated brains well versed in financial structuring. Unfortunately, the markets, as distorted as they are by the central banks’ liquidity, are not prone to this innovation.”
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Bank of America: Silver Could Hit $50 “In The Near Term” Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/05/2020 – 14:31
A little over two months ago, Bank of America became gold’s biggest cheerleader on Wall Street (and has been spot on so far) in predicting that the price of the yellow metal would hit $3000 in about 18 months due to “loose monetary and fiscal policies around the world” and with the US elections scheduled for November and the EU’s Recovery Fund in place from January 2021, the bank expects that demand will remain supportive next year, even though the pandemic continues to be an immense risk.
The current macro-economic backdrop is also bullish for the precious metals, with gold benefiting from record low real rates, at the same time as central banks are backstopping fiscal spending.
But it’s not just gold that stands to rise by about 50% according to BofA: silver also benefits from this macro backdrop but demand should also strengthen on the back of a so-called “green” stimulus as most stimulus proposals have some environmentally clean aspect to them; As a result, BofA also sees silver rising to $35/oz as a feasible target next year, but more importantly highlights that “the white metal could rally to $50/oz in the medium-term.”
Below are some more details on BofA’s bullish case:
As the bank explains, similar to gold investors have raised their exposure to the white metal over concerns about the current economic policy. Yet, with silver more exposed to industrial demand, these purchases did not matter during the lockdowns, with the gold:silver ratio peaking at 124, and still a ways away from its long-term average of 59x.
Since then, silver has strongly outperformed gold as some offtake from manufacturers has come back. In addition, the prospect of further fiscal easing has also been supportive. Linked to that, BofA notes that the policy outline of US presidential candidate Joe Biden has caught the market’s attention. Perhaps the most ambitious goal in his plans is the 2050 target for achieving net-zero emissions across the US, if he is elected. Over the last fifteen years, US emissions have fallen more than 15%. Yet the drop has been attributable in part to a decline in industrial activity and coal plant retirements that were quickly replaced by combined cycle natural gas plants.
Going forward, in our view, substantial emissions reductions will be needed from all sectors of the economy in order to achieve this goal.
Biden’s climate plan also targets zero emissions from the power sector by 2035, which would require an overhaul of the industry. Coal, natural gas, and petroleum generated more than 60% of the power in the US in 2019 and nearly all CO2 emissions. According to Biden’s climate plan, an emissions-free power sector may be achieved through a combination of changes. First, increased end consumer efficiency, which would help cap or reduce power demand over time. Second, the power sector would need to build grid scale storage to support substantial increases in renewable power generation. Third, fossil fuel power generation would need to be replaced with renewables, nuclear, and other low/no carbon alternatives and negative carbon energy technologies would likely be required to offset any remaining fossil fuel powered generation.
Sticking with the last point, a potential increase in photovoltaics matters particularly for silver, which is a key ingredient in solar panels. Indeed, an accelerated de-carbonisation of the US power sector alone could boost annual global silver demand from 2285t in 2020 to an average of 4272t over the next 15 years.
Looking at the potential implications of that, market balances have averaged +1100t in the past five years (2016-19) and with limited supply increases currently in the pipeline…
… the potential demand additions could push silver into a sustained deficit.
Why is this important? Because as BofA concludes “the last time this happened between 2006 and 2011, the precious metal rallied to $50/oz, a price level we would see within reach this time around as well.”
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A spin of the coronavirus “Wheel of Perplexing Government Mandates” takes us to New York City, where, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this morning, travelers from elsewhere will soon be greeted by quarantine checkpoints in all five boroughs.
The checkpoints are meant to enforce an order Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in July. Cuomo’s order requires New York visitors hailing from 34 states and Puerto Rico to self-quarantine for 14 days. In a press conference this morning, de Blasio said that New York City will enforce the quarantine by stopping people who come into the city by way of major bridges and tunnels and reminding them that the self-quarantine is mandatory and violators face fines of up to $10,000.
New York City’s initial COVID-19 infection and death numbers were the worst in the U.S. and the world. The city has seen more than 23,000 people die from COVID-19, which is nearly 15 percent of all current pandemic deaths in the U.S. But the Big Apple now has a much better handle on managing the outbreak, having gone multiple days without any reported COVID-19-related deaths.
That improvement did not require checkpoints, and it’s not clear how checkpoints will help sustain it. For instance, New Jersey is not on the list of states whose residents must self-quarantine upon visiting New York. Given the traffic between the two states, this makes logistical and economic sense. But it doesn’t make pandemic sense. New Jersey is seeing a spike in new cases and has recorded 185,000 infections and nearly 16,000 deaths. Yet a visitor from the Garden State will not have to self-quarantine, while a visitor flying in from North Dakota (which has had about 7,000 cases and 111 deaths total) will have to self-quarantine.
Details on the new checkpoints are scarce. Reporting from the New York Daily News suggests their purpose is largely informational:
The city sheriff said most of the traffic stops would be done on a randomized basis, perhaps stopping one in every six or eight cars. He said the stops would not target out of state drivers because the law also applies to New Yorkers who travel to one of the states on the list.
He also suggested that no more than 20 officers might be enforcing the checkpoints citywide at any given time, a total that would likely make them less visible and widespread than the mayor implied.
De Blasio stressed that travelers’ civil liberties would be respected and the main purpose of the checkpoints would be to enforce and give information about the quarantine requirements, along with assistance to those who need it.
Much like the security theater at American airports, di Blasio’s coronavirus checkpoints are mostly for show. (Let’s just hope the sheriff’s department officials who operate the checkpoints are at least wearing masks.)
Meanwhile, a policy that has proven to be effective in other parts of the world is not working very well at all in New York City. According to The New York Times, the city’s contact-tracing efforts, which launched in June, have been a mess. New York City has hired 3,000 contact tracers, but de Blasio abruptly shifted responsibility for the initiative from the city health department (which had 50 employees who do this for a living already) to the city public hospital agency, which had no experience with it at all.
So far, less than half of all infected people in New York City have been able to provide contract tracers with the names of anybody they may have exposed, according to the Times. That’s not nearly enough to be effective, according to experts.
Instead, the contact-tracing program sounds a lot like every other work effort put together by a government agency: a bureaucratic mess with misguided priorities. The Times reports:
They spoke of a confusing training regimen and priorities, and of newly hired supervisors who were unable to provide guidance. They said computer problems had sometimes caused patient records to disappear. And they said their performances were being tracked by call-center-style “adherence scores” that monitor the length of coffee breaks but did not account for how well tracers were building trust with clients. …
“It reminds me of an Amazon warehouse or something, where we are judged more on call volume or case volume than the quality of conversations,” one newly hired contact tracer, a public health graduate student, said in an interview.
“To me, it seems like they hired all of us just to say we have 3,000 contact tracers so we can start opening up again, and they don’t really care about the program metrics or whether it’s a successful program,” she said.
The city reports that 20 percent of new cases are coming from outside the state, which necessarily means 80 percent of calls are coming from inside the house. Better contact-tracing could probably help with that; symbolic checkpoints probably won’t.
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The University of Pittsburgh has removed a program director at its medical center because he published a scholarly, peer-reviewed white paper discussing the pitfalls of affirmative action for black and Hispanic students. This violated the First Amendment, which protects even harsh criticism of affirmative action. The white paper was gentle in its criticism of racial preferences, merely arguing that lowering admissions standards for minorities can harm their prospect of academic success by putting them in a university they are not prepared to handle. It did not advocate discrimination against any minority group….
To my knowledge, Prof. Wang has not been removed from his faculty position, only from the administrative post; but public universities are generally not allowed to do even that, given the First Amendment, at least absent serious evidence that it would likely materially disrupt the functioning of the university. And if engaging in substantive academic criticism of race-based affirmative action—a matter that is the subject of a longstanding and substantive debate in the country and in universities—is indeed seen as so disruptive, then something is badly wrong with the University of Pittsburgh.
(I should note that a university could rightly insist that its employees follow legally permissible university policies, including race-based affirmative action programs, whether or not they agree with them; and they could ask their employees for assurances that they would indeed follow such policies. But here, as I understand it, Prof. Wang was removed from the post simply for his public criticism of race-based affirmative action, and not for any statement saying that he wouldn’t do his job.)
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It’s common in a democracy to worry that you’ll have to make peace with unpalatable election results. What’s new this year is the possibility that many Americans might refuse to make peace at all. It’s the logical extension of a moment in which the major presidential candidates seem to have been picked for their ability to accurately represent the pathetic conditions of their parties, the partisans of those parties agree on little other than mutual contempt, and the government over which they’re scrapping has become so intrusive and punitive that nobody can afford to lose control.
President Trump raised eyebrows last month when, asked whether he’d accept a loss in the presidential election, he refused to commit. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no,” Trump told Fox News’s Chris Wallace.
“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election,” the president added, in his ongoing effort to cast doubt on the results of remote voting.
It would be nice to be able to treat Trump’s ambivalence about election results as an aberration, but it’s actually a continuation of the attitude he held during the 2016 election that he ultimately won. More importantly, Trump’s maybe-I will, maybe-I-won’t take on swallowing unwelcome election outcomes is shared by much of the American public.
“Our data shows that partisans are quite open to their preferred presidential candidate rejecting the legitimacy of the election if they claim credible evidence of illegal voting or foreign interference,” reports the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a collaboration of analysts and scholars trying to get a handle on the evolving state of American politics.
“About three in 10 (29 percent) Republicans say it would be appropriate for President Trump to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting,” the study group notes. “On the other hand, 57 percent of Democrats say that it would be appropriate for a Democratic candidate to call for a do-over election because they claim to have credible evidence of interference by a foreign government.”
Let’s emphasize the word “claim” in both of those scenarios. As the study group points out, “there is ample historical precedent for candidates to mislead the public about potential election interference in order to rally supporters against an electoral outcome with limited or no evidence.”
It’s also worth noting here that, despite justifiable concern about Trump’s respect for election outcomes and disturbing support among Republicans for him refusing to leave office if he makes claims of illegal voting, this poll finds even weaker respect for election results among Democrats. Not only would a majority favor a “do-over” in case of claims of foreign interference, but “38 percent of Democrats say it would be appropriate for a candidate to call for a do-over if they win the popular vote but lose the Electoral College.” That’s an outcome that is perfectly constitutional and has put several presidents—including the current one—in office.
Also concerning is that just over 20 percent of both Democratic and Republican respondents believe violence is at least somewhat justified if their side loses the election. That’s up from the 5 to 15 percent open to political violence in an earlier study by Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason, who also participate in the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group.
This all makes horrible sense in the context of a country largely divided into political factions that despise one another. Poll after poll finds that Democrats consider Republicans to be immoral, closed-minded, and racist. Republicans regard Democrats as immoral, unpatriotic, and socialist.
“The level of division and animosity – including negative sentiments among partisans toward the members of the opposing party – has only deepened” since 2016, according to Pew Research.
While partisans of the two major political parties really do agree on less by the year, they also work from distorted conceptions of who their opponents are and what they want. That’s hardly a shocker with many people concentrated in communities dominated by one point of view and intolerant of dissent.
“It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on,” commented Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla, and Angela Y. He in a 2019 piece for The Atlantic on the geography of partisan prejudice. “But what’s clear is that both sides are becoming more hostile toward one another.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, American participation in politics is now driven less by loyalty to one’s own side than by animosity toward the opposition.
Then again, rallying around your own party is a bit of a challenge when the standard-bearers show evidence of having been selected on a dare. Whatever the reality of their fitness to hold office, the two septuagenarian presidential hopefuls have taken to accusing each other of senility in what Politico calls “the dementia campaign.”
“Biden can’t put two sentences together,” Trump says of Biden. “They wheel him out. He goes up—he repeats—they ask him questions. He reads a teleprompter and then he goes back into his basement.”
“Look, all you gotta do is watch me, and I can hardly wait to compare my cognitive capability to the cognitive capability of the man I’m running against,” Biden shoots back.
It would be less sad if there was anybody in the country who would be the least bit surprised if it turned out that both major candidates are a little wobbly in terms of their mental faculties. And those are the leading contenders for the White House in a country struggling with a pandemic and with the economic devastation wrought by social distancing and especially by mandated limits on economic and other activity.
Those limits, arbitrarily defining “essential” businesses that can remain open and others that must close, restricting travel, imposing quarantines, mandating mask-wearing, and barring cross-border movements reach further into people’s lives than we’ve seen in living memory. Whether motivated by sincere public health concern, panic, or vindictiveness toward disfavored segments of society, they involved exercises of vast and dangerous authority over people’s lives.
They also breed stresses which contribute to the recent eruptions of protest and violence in reaction to decades of abusive, biased, and militarized policing. Those protests have yet to subside, and the issues they address as well as the divisions they represent are sure to play a large role as the election approaches.
And those elections may well be a hot mess. While the president exaggerates the potential for expanded fraud in mail-in elections—most Arizonans have voted by mail for years with little difficulty—learning curves seem to be especially steep for government officials. New York turned its June primary into a contentious train wreck through inexperience in dealing with mailed ballots. That might be an opportunity for Trump to push his claim that “mail-in voting is going to rig the election.”
Up To 300,000 Left Homeless In Beirut After Blast Collapsed Walls Miles Away Tyler Durden
Wed, 08/05/2020 – 13:55
After Tuesday’s deadly blast in Beirut which Lebanon’s PM linked to 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate which had unsafely sat in storage on the port going back to 2013, the governor of Beirut has estimated the damage is so pervasive throughout the city as to have left hundreds of thousands homeless.
Within a one mile radius, entire sides of residential buildings were ripped off. Getty Images
During a press conference the governor of Lebanon Marwan Abboud described while fighting back tears during a live press briefing that the two explosions that left 100 dead and over 4,000 injured unleashed at least three billion dollars in damage, devastating up to half the city.
“I took a tour of Beirut, the damage can amount to between three and five billion dollars,” Abboud estimated. And he said that it’s likely up to 300,000 residents of the city were left homeless, given in many cases entire walls of buildings were ripped out by the seismic blast shockwave.
“Almost half of Beirut is destroyed or damaged,” he estimated, with 250,000 to 300,000 people finding themselves homeless.
“Maybe more,” Abboud added while discussion the billions in damage, which also crucially took out the entirety of the city’s economically vital port.
Before and after images from the #explosion that happened in #Beirut, #Lebanon on August 4, 2020. Before image from June 2020 and after image from today, August 5, 2020. More imagery showing the devastation will follow. pic.twitter.com/dfj4ItyTXL
The blast force is being widely estimated in international reports as being one-fifth the size of Hiroshima.
Lebanon’s president has declared a two week state of emergency and has put port authority officials under house arrest while pending an investigation.
Video: Footage posted on social media shows a close-up view of the warehouse area that exploded in Beirut, along with the fire and smaller blasts that led up to the larger explosion. pic.twitter.com/FqyTiJkFUj
It’s clear from widely shared footage showing multiple angles of the enormous blast, the biggest in Lebanon’s history, that buildings and homes within the immediate few kilometres of the epicenter were leveled, and across almost the entirety of the capital city windows were shattered, balconies blown off, and sides of buildings damaged.
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In recent days governments in Australia, Europe, and the US have moved toward imposing a new wave of forced lockdowns in the name of fighting the spread of COVID-19. Australia has imposed harsh new lockdown measures, including a curfew from 8 pm to 5 am. CNN reports:
Those restrictions include a curfew in Melbourne for the next six weeks, a ban on wedding gatherings, and schools must go back to online classes. … Only one person per household is allowed to leave their homes once a day — outside of curfew hours — to pick up essential goods, and they must stay within a 5 kilometer (3.1 miles) radius of their home.
Meanwhile in Europe, Belgium is threatening a “total lockdown” even as it tightens other measures, which now means “a family or those living together can meet only the same five people from outside their household over the next four weeks.” (Belgium has been in a state of lockdown in all but name for months, since even until the most recent restrictions, an individual was allowed to meet in person with only 15 different people per week.)
Other regions of Europe are discussing similar measures.The Guardianreports:
Europe is bracing for a second wave of coronavirus as continuing outbreaks raise the prospect of reimposed restrictions …
[T]he Spanish region of Catalonia may also have to reintroduce lockdown measures if outbreaks are not brought under control within 10 days.
In France, the health minister has called for greater vigilance after a sharp rise in Covid-19 cases in young people, and Germany’s public health advisory body has said it is “deeply concerned” about the rise in cases over the past few weeks.
With these new restrictions will come more economic devastation, more unemployment, more suicide, more drug overdoses, and more cancer death. This cycle is likely to repeat itself because lockdowns do not make diseases go away. They only— assuming the theory behind the lockdown is actually true— spread out infections into the future.
Consequently, it increasingly looks like the global public should expect regimes to keep locking down their citizens again and again. The only possible end to this cycle will be if (a) populations revolt against lockdowns, or (b) herd immunity is reached either through widespread transmission or through a vaccine.
The preferred course of action on the part of the experts and politicians is clear: lockdown forever, or until there’s a vaccine.
The “Successful” First Round of Lockdowns
Yet just a few weeks ago, though, we were hearing about what success stories lockdowns were in Europe and Australia. A commonly used phrase in the media has been that European regimes have “beat back” the virus.
The actual outcomes were apparently immaterial, so long as lockdowns are imposed. It seemed that by definition, a country that employed a lockdown strategy is successful. This is perhaps the only possible explanation for why some experts have ridiculously asserted Italy—among the worst countries in the world in terms of deaths attributed to COVID— “beat” the disease with lockdowns.
The implication of of all these declarations of “victory” was that if sufficiently harsh lockdowns were adopted, then COVID-19 would be under control.
Some even insisted that lockdowns could make the disease disappear. Australian health bureaucrats, for example, suggested that lockdowns could cause the disease to be eliminated entirely. This Australian report claims “it is expected that the virus would die out within Australia” if extreme social distancing mandates are maintained for “months.” Another “expert” proclaimed in June: ““Having brought the case numbers right down [in Australia], we may not need lockdowns again.”
But if we employ the logic of the advocates of lockdowns themselves, there has never been any reason to presume that lockdowns can “beat back” a disease or eliminate it.
The Logic of Lockdowns, As Stated by Advocates
The claim that forced lockdowns lead to fewer deaths has always been debatable. Some countries with harsh lockdowns, like Spain and the UK, have worse per capita death totals than countries and jurisdictions with no mandatory lockdowns, such as Sweden in Europe, and Utah and Iowa in the US.
But for the sake of argument, let’s accept that lockdowns do help to slow—i.e., not prevent—the transmission of disease. (We’ll ignore, for now, the deaths caused by lockdowns themselves.)
The logic therefore is this: a slowing of transmission prevents hospital resources from being overwhelmed. This, it is assumed a certain minimum level of quality can be maintained at medical institutions with the help of lockdowns. Thus, the best that can be hoped for is that some lives will be saved by ensuring hospital beds will continue to be available. But, over time, the total number of infections is the same because lockdowns do nothing to actually eliminate the disease.
Consequently, the number of lives saved is only the number of lives that would have been lost due to a lack of adequate hospital resources.
From “Flatten the Curve” to “Lockdowns Until Vaccine”
That lockdowns bring economic, social, and psychological devastation has long been obvious to more astute observers. This is why the lockdown strategy was at first sold to the public as a strictly temporary and limited option.
During the early days of the COVID-19 panic, politicians and technocrats justified the lockdowns on the rationale “15 days to slow the spread.” But then the rationale changed. We saw this shift begin to take shape in early April when, for example, US health bureaucrat Anthony Fauci claimed it would be impossible to even “relax” mandatory social distancing until there were “essentially no new cases, no deaths for a period of time” Former presidential advisor Ezekiel Emanuel insisted “The truth is we have no choice.” but to remain locked down for “for the next 18 months or more.”
Since then, it has become increasingly clear the preferred policy of the health technocracy is one of permanent lockdown. Both inside the US and outside, we have repeatedly heard that, worldwide, “normalcy may not be possible before a vaccine is widely available.”
What If There’s No Vaccine Coming?
But what if there’s no vaccine right around the corner?
Earlier this week, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said during a press conference from the agency’s Geneva headquarters. “However, there is no silver bullet at the moment and there might never be.” British PM Boris Johnson has admitted a vaccine is “by no means guaranteed.” Given the history of failed attempts at creating vaccines for coronaviruses, there’s no reason to assume this coronavirus will have a vaccine in 2020, or 2021, or even beyond.
One thing we can assume, though, is that politicians and health bureaucrats will seek to continue to keep the world in lockdown indefinitely. They want “immunity passports.” They want a police apparatus capable of enforcing mask mandates, forced house arrest, and any other form of “lockdown” they deem necessary.
They want to maintain the fiction that the only two options available are: world-ending plague and endless lockdown.
Unfortunately for the experts, we’ve already seen the likely scenario that results from a policy of no mandatory lockdown: The case of Sweden. Sweden’s total per capita death toll is by no means presently among the lowest. But Sweden has always maintained that over the long term, the total per capital death toll of COVID-19 will be similar across countries regardless of their lockdown policies. Even now, Sweden’s death toll is better than that of the UK, Belgium, Spain, and Italy, all of which have enacted draconian lockdowns. In fact, the Swedish model looks increasingly prescient as time goes on. While the rest of Europe is talking about surges in cases and new lockdowns, the number of Swedish case continues to decline, while total ICU hospitalizations have plummeted. Meanwhile, Sweden was the only “the only major economy to grow in the first quarter of the year” while most of Europe was in economic disarray.
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A spin of the coronavirus “Wheel of Perplexing Government Mandates” takes us to New York City, where, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced this morning, travelers from elsewhere will soon be greeted by quarantine checkpoints in all five boroughs.
The checkpoints are meant to enforce an order Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed in July. Cuomo’s order requires New York visitors hailing from 34 states and Puerto Rico to self-quarantine for 14 days. In a press conference this morning, de Blasio said that New York City will enforce the quarantine by stopping people who come into the city by way of major bridges and tunnels and reminding them that the self-quarantine is mandatory and violators face fines of up to $10,000.
New York City’s initial COVID-19 infection and death numbers were the worst in the U.S. and the world. The city has seen more than 23,000 people die from COVID-19, which is nearly 15 percent of all current pandemic deaths in the U.S. But the Big Apple now has a much better handle on managing the outbreak, having gone multiple days without any reported COVID-19-related deaths.
That improvement did not require checkpoints, and it’s not clear how checkpoints will help sustain it. For instance, New Jersey is not on the list of states whose residents must self-quarantine upon visiting New York. Given the traffic between the two states, this makes logistical and economic sense. But it doesn’t make pandemic sense. New Jersey is seeing a spike in new cases and has recorded 185,000 infections and nearly 16,000 deaths. Yet a visitor from the Garden State will not have to self-quarantine, while a visitor flying in from North Dakota (which has had about 7,000 cases and 111 deaths total) will have to self-quarantine.
Details on the new checkpoints are scarce. Reporting from the New York Daily News suggests their purpose is largely informational:
The city sheriff said most of the traffic stops would be done on a randomized basis, perhaps stopping one in every six or eight cars. He said the stops would not target out of state drivers because the law also applies to New Yorkers who travel to one of the states on the list.
He also suggested that no more than 20 officers might be enforcing the checkpoints citywide at any given time, a total that would likely make them less visible and widespread than the mayor implied.
De Blasio stressed that travelers’ civil liberties would be respected and the main purpose of the checkpoints would be to enforce and give information about the quarantine requirements, along with assistance to those who need it.
Much like the security theater at American airports, di Blasio’s coronavirus checkpoints are mostly for show. (Let’s just hope the sheriff’s department officials who operate the checkpoints are at least wearing masks.)
Meanwhile, a policy that has proven to be effective in other parts of the world is not working very well at all in New York City. According to The New York Times, the city’s contact-tracing efforts, which launched in June, have been a mess. New York City has hired 3,000 contact tracers, but de Blasio abruptly shifted responsibility for the initiative from the city health department (which had 50 employees who do this for a living already) to the city public hospital agency, which had no experience with it at all.
So far, less than half of all infected people in New York City have been able to provide contract tracers with the names of anybody they may have exposed, according to the Times. That’s not nearly enough to be effective, according to experts.
Instead, the contact-tracing program sounds a lot like every other work effort put together by a government agency: a bureaucratic mess with misguided priorities. The Times reports:
They spoke of a confusing training regimen and priorities, and of newly hired supervisors who were unable to provide guidance. They said computer problems had sometimes caused patient records to disappear. And they said their performances were being tracked by call-center-style “adherence scores” that monitor the length of coffee breaks but did not account for how well tracers were building trust with clients. …
“It reminds me of an Amazon warehouse or something, where we are judged more on call volume or case volume than the quality of conversations,” one newly hired contact tracer, a public health graduate student, said in an interview.
“To me, it seems like they hired all of us just to say we have 3,000 contact tracers so we can start opening up again, and they don’t really care about the program metrics or whether it’s a successful program,” she said.
The city reports that 20 percent of new cases are coming from outside the state, which necessarily means 80 percent of calls are coming from inside the house. Better contact-tracing could probably help with that; symbolic checkpoints probably won’t.
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The University of Pittsburgh has removed a program director at its medical center because he published a scholarly, peer-reviewed white paper discussing the pitfalls of affirmative action for black and Hispanic students. This violated the First Amendment, which protects even harsh criticism of affirmative action. The white paper was gentle in its criticism of racial preferences, merely arguing that lowering admissions standards for minorities can harm their prospect of academic success by putting them in a university they are not prepared to handle. It did not advocate discrimination against any minority group….
To my knowledge, Prof. Wang has not been removed from his faculty position, only from the administrative post; but public universities are generally not allowed to do even that, given the First Amendment, at least absent serious evidence that it would likely materially disrupt the functioning of the university. And if engaging in substantive academic criticism of race-based affirmative action—a matter that is the subject of a longstanding and substantive debate in the country and in universities—is indeed seen as so disruptive, then something is badly wrong with the University of Pittsburgh.
(I should note that a university could rightly insist that its employees follow legally permissible university policies, including race-based affirmative action programs, whether or not they agree with them; and they could ask their employees for assurances that they would indeed follow such policies. But here, as I understand it, Prof. Wang was removed from the post simply for his public criticism of race-based affirmative action, and not for any statement saying that he wouldn’t do his job.)
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