Believe it or not, we’re still in the month of March. On March 1, New York City recorded its first positive case for the novel coronavirus. On March 2, Mayor Bill de Blasio—with future “Love Gov” Andrew Cuomo at his side—said “We have the capacity to keep this contained.” On March 10, de Blasio told MSNBC, with reckless inaccuracy, that “If you’re under 50 and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here. This disease, even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu. And transmission is not that easy.” By March 15, with great reluctance, Hizzoner finally joined the rest of big-city America in closing public schools. On March 16, he worked out at the Park Slope YMCA.
Now near the end of the month, New York City is the American epicenter of the deadly virus, with more than 36,000 positive tests and 750+ deaths, and de Blasio has gone from reluctant institutions-shutterer to someone who has threatened churches and synagogues with “potentially closing the building permanently” if they don’t keep their doors closed during the upcoming holidays.
Plague-life comes at you fast, exposing some of the worst pathologies of governance and politics. An examination of such begins today’s Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. We discuss the catastrophe of slow testing, the mixed messaging on masks, the gargantuan bailout/stimulus, and—of course!—what to watch and listen to during the long days of quarantine.
All of a sudden, people all over the country are very afraid of travelers from New York, Louisiana and other COVID-19 “hotspots” across the nation. In fact, as you will see below, some states are now trying to intercept travelers from other states and force them into quarantine. Measures that would have been unthinkable just a few short weeks ago have now become a reality, and things are likely to get even crazier in the days ahead. If this pandemic is causing this much fear already even though less than 3,000 Americans have died so far, what will the level of fear be if 30,000 or 300,000 Americans die?
Unfortunately, many experts are now warning that the death toll will eventually get very high in this country. For example, on Sunday Dr. Anthony Fauci told CNN that he expects to see more than 100,000 deaths in the U.S. alone…
Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top expert on infectious diseases, predicted Sunday that the United States will end up with “millions” of cases of coronavirus and up to 200,000 deaths by the time the pandemic ends, though he cautioned that any projection of mortality statistics could “easily” end up being wrong.
“Looking at what we’re seeing now, I would say between 100,000-200,000 [deaths],” Fauci said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
This virus spreads so easily from person to person, and once it gets loose in a city it can spread like wildfire.
Right now, New York City is being hit harder than anywhere else in the country. At this point close to 700 members of the NYPD have tested positive for the virus, and the public transportation system is being flooded with calls from sick employees…
The MTA’s 24-hour hot line for workers with coronavirus symptoms is constantly crashing because it’s being flooded with calls — and higher-ups are bracing for a mass sickout, transit insiders told The Post.
Bus and subway employees already called out sick at three times the normal rate last week, prompting the MTA to dramatically reduce service.
Overall, the death toll in New York has reached nearly 1,000, and many believe that what we have seen so far is just the beginning.
Needless to say, hospitals are rapidly being overwhelmed, and basic medical supplies are being used up fast.
Fortunately, a lot of outside help is coming in. On Sunday, I was greatly encouraged to learn that Samaritan’s Purse is actually putting up a field hospital in Central Park…
Dozens of people worked in a drizzle to erect the facility for an expected influx of COVID-19 patients at the epicenter of the US coronavirus pandemic.
Samaritan’s Purse, a US-based Christian global relief agency, is setting up the hospital on the park’s East Meadow lawn, where workers in face masks unloaded a white tarp and other equipment on the grass. The site is right across from one of the facilities in the Mount Sinai hospital group.
But as other states have watched the nightmare that is currently unfolding in New York, they have become greatly alarmed, and some have even taken measures to try to prevent New Yorkers from spreading the virus to their communities.
Beginning on Friday, authorities in Rhode Island started stopping vehicles “with New York plates”, and any New Yorkers that were discovered were forced into “14 days of self-quarantine”…
Rhode Island police began stopping cars with New York plates Friday. On Saturday, the National Guard will help them conduct house-to-house searches to find people who traveled from New York and demand 14 days of self-quarantine.
“Right now we have a pinpointed risk,” Governor Gina Raimondo said. “That risk is called New York City.”
When New York Governor Andrew Cuomo found out about this, he went ballistic, because it specifically discriminated against citizens of his state.
So Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo later expanded the directive to include anybody coming into Rhode Island from any other state…
Gov. Gina Raimondo instead has expanded the order to include ‘any person’ coming to Rhode Island from another state to ‘immediately self-quarantine for 14 days’.
The directive, signed late Saturday, does not apply to health workers or those working in public safety. It reads: ‘Any person coming to Rhode Island from another state for a non-work-related purpose must immediately self-quarantine for 14 days.’
Of course Rhode Island is basically the size of a postage stamp, and so not that many people are too worried about what they are doing.
But Florida is a much bigger deal.
Florida has already been forcing anyone flying in from New York to self-quarantine for 14 days, and on Friday Governor Ron DeSantis expanded that directive to include anyone traveling into the state from Louisiana…
New Orleans is experiencing a coronavirus surge of more than 1,000 infections linked to the Mardi Gras celebration in February, sending Louisiana’s total number of cases past 3,300 as of Saturday. DeSantis wants to intercept any Louisiana travelers from “seeding” the virus in Florida.
It’s about a three-hour drive from New Orleans to Pensacola, Florida, and panhandle officials had expressed concerns to him about travelers fleeing the Bayou State and carrying the virus into Florida.
In fact, a highway checkpoint has already been set up on Interstate 10 so that police can monitor who is coming into the state…
“Look, we’re either trying to fight this virus or we are not,” DeSantis said of his plan that includes a checkpoint on Interstate 10 at the Alabama line and National Guard members greeting travelers from the New York City area at airports.
In the days ahead, more states may start implementing such measures.
So if you are still not where you want to be to ride out this pandemic, you need to get there as quickly as possible.
We still don’t know how bad this crisis is going to become. It may fizzle out with just a few hundred thousand deaths globally, or we may end up with a nightmare scenario in which millions die.
We just don’t know yet.
But those that are running things are starting to act like we are facing a worst case scenario, and that should deeply alarm us all.
‘To ensure that we can defend the homeland despite this pandemic, our command and control watch teams here in the headquarters split into multiple shifts and portions of our watch team began working from Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, creating a third team at an alternate location as well,’ Air Force General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, head of U.S. Northern Command and NORAD, said during a Facebook Live town hall with those under his command.
Perhaps such a move is warranted during a time of great crisis, but what really got my attention was the following statement that O’Shaughnessy made…
‘My primary concern was … are we going to have the space inside the mountain for everybody who wants to move in there, and I’m not at liberty to discuss who’s moving in there,’ O’Shaughnessy added.
Ummm, what?
Apparently so many people were clamoring to get inside Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station that he was concerned that there wouldn’t be room for them all?
I don’t like the sound of that at all.
We live in very strange times, and they are about to get even stranger.
I hope that you are somewhere safe, and I hope that you are well stocked up for the long, dark months that are ahead of us.
“Stop The Revolver Run”: Cash-Strapped Banks Quietly “Discourage” Companies From Drawing Down Their Loans
One week after the Fed expanded its “bazooka” by launching a “nuclear bomb” in the words of Paul Tudor Jones , at fixed income capital markets which it has now effectively nationalized by monetizing or backstopping pretty much everything, some signs of thaw are starting to emerge in the all important commercial paper market, where the spread to 3M USD OIS is finally starting to tighten, coming in by 60bps overnight.
But while the move will be welcomed by companies in dire need of short-term funding, it is nowhere near enough to unfreeze the broader commercial paper market, with the spread still precipitously high even for those companies that have access to commercial paper, which is why most companies continue drawing down on revolvers.
As we reported over the weekend, according to JPMorgan calculations, aggregate corporate revolver drawdowns represent 77% of the total facilities, with JPM noting that the total amount of borrowing by companies is likely significantly greater than this, well above 80%, as it only reflects disclosed amounts by large companies, and there are likely undisclosed borrowings by middle market companies.
In nominal terms, this means that corporates that have tapped banks for funding has risen further to a record $208 billion on Thursday, up $15 billion from $193 billion on Wednesday and $112BN on Sunday. That’s right: nearly $100 billion in liquidity was drained from banks in the past week; is there any wonder the FTA/OIS has barely eased indicating continued tensions in the interbank funding market.
Yet the bigger problem remains: with banks already pressed for liquidity, they are suffering a modern-day “bank run”, where instead of depositors pulling their money, corporations are drawing down on revolvers at unprecedented levels, something we first described three weeks ago “Banking Crisis Imminent? Companies Scramble To Draw Down Revolvers.”
Of course, at the end of the day, liquidity is liquidity, and banks are starting to fear when and if this revolver run will ever end, and just how much liquidity they need to provision, especially since many of these companies will have to file for bankruptcy in the coming months, sticking banks with a pre-petition claim (albeit secured).
As a result, and as Bloomberg reports, the biggest U.S. banks have been quietly discouraging some of America’s safest borrowers from tapping existing credit lines amid record corporate drawdowns on lending facilities.
To banks, this tidal wave of revolver demands is a two-edged sword. On one hand it impacts their profit margins, on the other it jeopardizes their overall liquidity levels:
as Bloomberg notes, investment-grade revolvers, “especially those financed in the heyday of the bull market,” are a low margin business, and some even lose money. The justification is that they help cement relationships with clients who will in turn stick with the lenders for more expensive capital-markets or advisory needs. While this is fine under normal circumstances when the facilities are sporadically used, “with so many companies suddenly seeking cash anywhere they can get it, they’re now threatening to make a dent in banks’ bottom lines.“
The second issue is more nuances: while Bloomberg claims that the drawdown wave “is not an issue of liquidity for Wall Street” we disagree vehemently, and as proof of strained bank liqidity we merely highlight the fact that after $12 trillion in monetary and fiscal stimulus has been injected, it has failed to tighten the critical FRA/OIS spread which remains at crisis levels.
The good news is that at least some corporations – those who have the most alternatives – are willing to oblige bank requests, turning instead to new, pricier term loans or revolving credit lines rather than tapping existing ones. “McDonald’s last week raised and drew a $1 billion short-term facility at a higher cost than an existing untapped revolver” Bloomberg notes, adding that while rationales will vary from borrower to borrower, analysts agree that for most, staying in the good graces of lenders amid a looming recession is important.
The bad news is that most companies remain locked out of other liquidity conduits – be they new credit facilities, or commercial paper – and are thus forced to keep drawing down on existing lines of credit, which puts bankers – especially relationship bankers – in a very tough spot.
“The banker is coming at it trying to manage two things — the relationship profitability and their portfolio of risks and assets,” said Howard Mason, head of financials research at Renaissance Macro Research. “Bankers have some cards to play because they can talk to their clients that have undrawn credit lines. The sense is that there’s a relationship involved so relationship pricing and good will applies.”
Meanwhile, as banks quietly scramble to raise liquidity of their own – because, again, liquidity is always and everywhere fungible – U.S. financial institutions have sold almost $50 billion of bonds over the past two weeks to bolster their coffers, ironically even as corporate bankers are advising companies not to hoard cash unless they urgently need it. Some are even telling certain clients to hold off on seeking new financing to avoid over-stressing a system already stretched to its limits operationally as bankers are inundated with requests while stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“The banks are open but if everybody asks at the same time then it’s going to be difficult from a balance sheet perspective,” Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Arnold Kakuda said in an interview.
Kinda like the whole fractional reserve concept: banks have money in theory… as long as not all of their depositors demand to withdraw money at the same time. With revolvers, it more or less the same thing.
“The corporate banker doesn’t want everybody to take a hot shower at the same time in the house,” said Marc Zenner, a former co-head of corporate finance advisory at JPMorgan Chase & Co. “They want to use their capital where it’s most beneficial.”
Amusingly, even McDonald – right after it signed a new revolver – immediately tapped the full $1 billion as a “precautionary measure” to reinforce its cash position, the company said in a regulatory disclosure Thursday. It also priced $3.5 billion of bonds last week as part of its broader liquidity management strategy.
In short, it’s a liquidity free for all, and the bottom line is simple: those bigger companies that still have access to liquidity will survive; those that are cut off, will fail, giving the bigger companies even greater market share, and crushing the small and medium businesses across America.
As a result, the prevailing thinking across corporate America is is “it’s ‘better safe than sorry,” said Jesse Rosenthal, an analyst at CreditSights Inc. “They might believe with all their hearts that the bank has all the liquidity they need, but it’s just fiduciary duty, due diligence, and prudence in a totally unprecedented situation.” Ironically, we reported last week that a bankrupt energy company, EP Energy, listed a trolling risk factor in its annual report, in which the company mused that it may be challenged if one or more of its lender banks collapsed.
Meanwhile, confirming that this latest freakout is all about liquidity, bankers are now including provisions in new deals that ensure they’ll be among the first to be paid back when companies regain access to more conventional sources of financing, according to Bloomberg sources.
And for those insisting on drawing down revolvers now, Renaissance Macro’s Mason says banks will ultimately seek to recoup the costs down the line.
“The message to corporate clients is, ‘you can continue to do this, but we are looking at profitability on a relationship business, so if we don’t make our hurdles here we need to make them somewhere else,’” Mason said. Of course, those companies which have already drawn down on their revolvers and/or have anything to do with the energy sector… see you after you emerge from Chapter 11.
Believe it or not, we’re still in the month of March. On March 1, New York City recorded its first positive case for the novel coronavirus. On March 2, Mayor Bill de Blasio—with future “Love Gov” Andrew Cuomo at his side—said “We have the capacity to keep this contained.” On March 10, de Blasio told MSNBC, with reckless inaccuracy, that “If you’re under 50 and you’re healthy, which is most New Yorkers, there’s very little threat here. This disease, even if you were to get it, basically acts like a common cold or flu. And transmission is not that easy.” By March 15, with great reluctance, Hizzoner finally joined the rest of big-city America in closing public schools. On March 16, he worked out at the Park Slope YMCA.
Now near the end of the month, New York City is the American epicenter of the deadly virus, with more than 36,000 positive tests and 750+ deaths, and de Blasio has gone from reluctant institutions-shutterer to someone who has threatened churches and synagogues with “potentially closing the building permanently” if they don’t keep their doors closed during the upcoming holidays.
Plague-life comes at you fast, exposing some of the worst pathologies of governance and politics. An examination of such begins today’s Reason Roundtable podcast, featuring Nick Gillespie, Katherine Mangu-Ward, Peter Suderman, and Matt Welch. We discuss the catastrophe of slow testing, the mixed messaging on masks, the gargantuan bailout/stimulus, and—of course!—what to watch and listen to during the long days of quarantine.
In addition to gun retailers, Murphy said car dealerships will be able to conduct sales online or remotely. Vehicles can be delivered directly to customers or via curbside pickup. Repair and service centers have been allowed to remain open.
Real estate agents can show houses to prospective buyers, but only on a one-to-one basis or to immediate family. Open houses are still banned. And breweries and brew pubs can now deliver to customers’ homes, Murphy said.
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Millions of people sheltering in their homes for fear of catching a deadly virus is not normally a sign of a healthy environment. Yet some environmentalists and members of the media think they’ve found a big silver lining in this whole global pandemic thing: Harmful emissions are down, and quarantine life is acclimating people to more sustainable ways of living.
“There’s an unlikely beneficiary of the coronavirus: the planet,” says a CNN headline about extreme quarantine measures in Wuhan, China. “It seems the lockdown had an unintended benefit—blue skies.” Nice!
One Stanford professor, drawing on not-necessarily-reliable Chinese government statistics about COVID-19 deaths, has argued that the virus is saving lives in that country by causing this reduction in air pollution.
Here in the U.S., sharp declines in traffic caused by coronavirus-related shutdowns of economic and social life are being treated as a gleaming example of the way things could be.
I could document this golden light, this blue, this clear air all day long. Five years since emissions didn’t haze out sky by midday. There’s been a white haze around the earth seen from space last few years. Not visible in 1st pics from space. Are NASA pics now clearer again? pic.twitter.com/vnvzCduR5i
Some have even argued that self-isolation might even be leading people to live better lives.
“It’s ironic to me that it’s a quarantine order that’s getting people to do what public health experts have been advising for years—walking around the neighborhood,” Bryn Lindblad of Climate Resolve toldCurbed.
In The New York Times, science writer Meehan Crist tries to make the case that coronavirus-induced isolation and economic deprivation are forcing people to adopt planet-friendly behaviors that will hopefully become permanent habits:
Personal consumption and travel habits are, in fact, changing, which has some people wondering if this might be the beginning of a meaningful shift. Maybe, as you hunker down with cabinets full of essentials, your sense of what consumer goods you need will shrink. Maybe, even after the acute phase of the coronavirus crisis has passed, you will be more likely to telecommute. Lifestyles that include, for example, frequent long-distance travel already seem ethically questionable in light of the climate crisis, and, in an age irrevocably scarred by pandemic, these lifestyles may come to be seen as grossly irresponsible.
Some scholars have expressed a similar wish that extreme changes in individual behavior will be mirrored at the governmental level as states move from fighting the virus to fighting climate change.
“It’s all about somebody else stepping in and forcing us to internalize the externality, which means don’t rely on parents to take their kids out of school, close the school,” climate economist Gernot Wagner toldYale Environment 360. “Don’t rely on companies or workers to stay home or tell their people to stay home, force them to do so or pay them to do so, but make sure it happens. And of course that’s the role of government.” Of course.
Do not misunderstand me. These people are not claiming that the current pandemic is on net a good thing. But the fact that they view these developments as silver linings is a telling indicator of how little they value the normal course of American life.
After all, an equally plausible response to falling carbon emissions and clearer skyline views is that these improvements come at the expense of a lot of things that make life worth living, whether that’s going to the bar, going on vacation, or even going to work. Most people are willing to make these trade-offs only in the context of preventing the spread of a deadly virus.
And yes, maybe some of these crisis-era changes could be permanent. If we learn that we can live just as easily with fewer regulations on the policy level and fewer commutes in our personal lives, then we should keep those lessons in mind after the pandemic is over. But COVID-19 should not be a shortcut to our preferred policy outcomes. We should eagerly hope for things to return to normal, so that we can have normal arguments about traffic mitigation and climate policy.
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In addition to gun retailers, Murphy said car dealerships will be able to conduct sales online or remotely. Vehicles can be delivered directly to customers or via curbside pickup. Repair and service centers have been allowed to remain open.
Real estate agents can show houses to prospective buyers, but only on a one-to-one basis or to immediate family. Open houses are still banned. And breweries and brew pubs can now deliver to customers’ homes, Murphy said.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/33VJM1u
via IFTTT
Millions of people sheltering in their homes for fear of catching a deadly virus is not normally a sign of a healthy environment. Yet some environmentalists and members of the media think they’ve found a big silver lining in this whole global pandemic thing: Harmful emissions are down, and quarantine life is acclimating people to more sustainable ways of living.
“There’s an unlikely beneficiary of the coronavirus: the planet,” says a CNN headline about extreme quarantine measures in Wuhan, China. “It seems the lockdown had an unintended benefit—blue skies.” Nice!
One Stanford professor, drawing on not-necessarily-reliable Chinese government statistics about COVID-19 deaths, has argued that the virus is saving lives in that country by causing this reduction in air pollution.
Here in the U.S., sharp declines in traffic caused by coronavirus-related shutdowns of economic and social life are being treated as a gleaming example of the way things could be.
I could document this golden light, this blue, this clear air all day long. Five years since emissions didn’t haze out sky by midday. There’s been a white haze around the earth seen from space last few years. Not visible in 1st pics from space. Are NASA pics now clearer again? pic.twitter.com/vnvzCduR5i
Some have even argued that self-isolation might even be leading people to live better lives.
“It’s ironic to me that it’s a quarantine order that’s getting people to do what public health experts have been advising for years—walking around the neighborhood,” Bryn Lindblad of Climate Resolve toldCurbed.
In The New York Times, science writer Meehan Crist tries to make the case that coronavirus-induced isolation and economic deprivation are forcing people to adopt planet-friendly behaviors that will hopefully become permanent habits:
Personal consumption and travel habits are, in fact, changing, which has some people wondering if this might be the beginning of a meaningful shift. Maybe, as you hunker down with cabinets full of essentials, your sense of what consumer goods you need will shrink. Maybe, even after the acute phase of the coronavirus crisis has passed, you will be more likely to telecommute. Lifestyles that include, for example, frequent long-distance travel already seem ethically questionable in light of the climate crisis, and, in an age irrevocably scarred by pandemic, these lifestyles may come to be seen as grossly irresponsible.
Some scholars have expressed a similar wish that extreme changes in individual behavior will be mirrored at the governmental level as states move from fighting the virus to fighting climate change.
“It’s all about somebody else stepping in and forcing us to internalize the externality, which means don’t rely on parents to take their kids out of school, close the school,” climate economist Gernot Wagner toldYale Environment 360. “Don’t rely on companies or workers to stay home or tell their people to stay home, force them to do so or pay them to do so, but make sure it happens. And of course that’s the role of government.” Of course.
Do not misunderstand me. These people are not claiming that the current pandemic is on net a good thing. But the fact that they view these developments as silver linings is a telling indicator of how little they value the normal course of American life.
After all, an equally plausible response to falling carbon emissions and clearer skyline views is that these improvements come at the expense of a lot of things that make life worth living, whether that’s going to the bar, going on vacation, or even going to work. Most people are willing to make these trade-offs only in the context of preventing the spread of a deadly virus.
And yes, maybe some of these crisis-era changes could be permanent. If we learn that we can live just as easily with fewer regulations on the policy level and fewer commutes in our personal lives, then we should keep those lessons in mind after the pandemic is over. But COVID-19 should not be a shortcut to our preferred policy outcomes. We should eagerly hope for things to return to normal, so that we can have normal arguments about traffic mitigation and climate policy.
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One of the keys to slowing a pandemic is to trace infections: Find one person who’s infected. Identify, test, and quarantine all his contacts. Then trace, test, and quarantine his contacts’ contacts. Repeat until you run out of potential victims. This is pretty much the strategy followed during the current coronavirus outbreak by countries such as Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. All three were faster off the mark than the U.S. or Europe, largely because their experience with SARS and MERS was so traumatic that they built the legal framework and the muscle memory to act quickly in the next outbreak.
The U.S. didn’t take this approach, and it was particularly hampered by botched testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, from which we still haven’t completely recovered. Tests are becoming available much faster now, but widespread testing and tracing may not be feasible in places that have been hit hard, such as New York and New Jersey. In those states, more than 30 percent of the people tested have already been infected. But there are other states, such as New Mexico or Minnesota, where testing has been growing fast and infection rates are low enough that tracking infections looks like a feasible strategy. With the caveat that these numbers are undoubtedly distorted by who gets tested and how results get reported, there are still striking differences in the results among states, according to statistics compiled by the Covid Tracking Project and adjusted per capita by Buzzfeed:
State
Tests per 100,000 population
% found infected
New York
736.2
30.6
New Jersey
283.2
34.8
Washington
736.5
7.1
Minnesota
266
2.8
New Mexico
460
2.0
For places like Minnesota, New Mexico and even Washington, President Trump may have been right when he suggested that some parts of the country could use a strategy other than lockdowns to fight the virus. If so, the best alternative will be aggressive testing and contact tracing.
The countries that did contact tracing the most effectively relied in part on technology—phone location tracking, in particular. They’ve used the location services already built into mobile phones to find others who’ve been close to those who test positive. Privacy and civil liberties advocates hate the idea in principle, but they know no one values the privacy of their location history more highly than they value the lives of their loved ones. Rather than argue directly against phone tracking, privacy advocates such as Susan Landau have instead fallen back on a couple of practical objections.
First, they argue, we don’t have enough tests to imitate Asia. Really? I know the press is full of stories about U.S. testing shortages, and there are indeed supply bottlenecks in everything from protective gear to reagents. But a Trump-loathing press has every incentive to dwell on testing shortages as an emblem of administration errors at the start of the outbreak. In fact, testing capability in the U.S. is rising dramatically. Nationwide, testing has risen from a risible level—less than a thousand in early March—to 894,000 as of March 28. And new testing capabilities are coming online fast. The test-shortage argument may have been correct relatively recently, but if it still has merit, it won’t for long.
Indeed, we may soon have enough tests for some governors to mandate South Korean-style tracking and tracing. In fact, South Korea dodged disaster with a testing rate that isn’t any higher than New York’s or Washington’s today (around 730 per 100,000). Even more remarkable, Japan and Vietnam flattened their infection curves with per–capita testing rates that are even lower—well under 40 per 100,000.
To get a tracking program in place, we’ll need to use phone data; the alternatives are too slow and rely too much on fallible memories. Which brings us to the privacy advocates’ second argument: that phone location technology won’t do the job.
They have a point. Routine cell-sector data might identify a phone’s location within a few blocks—not exactly a fine tool for measuring the risk for infection. While triangulation and other tricks can improve that resolution substantially, it usually can’t say what floor of a large building the customer was on, and in many cases, such fine-grained resolution isn’t routinely collected. GPS signals are great if the user is outside, but not inside.
What public health officials need is a tool that will tell them who the phone’s owner has been close to—really close, like six feet or less. Luckily, the Singapore government has developed an app that does exactly that—and it’s open sourcing the software for the world. The app, called TraceTogether, uses Bluetooth to find nearby phones the way it finds our car audio or wireless earbuds.
The basic idea is simple: If two people who’ve downloaded the app come within six feet of each other and stay there for half an hour, their phones exchange unique identifiers and each phone logs the contact in encrypted memory. It remains encrypted unless one of them turns up positive for the virus. If that happens, public health officials ask for the phone’s contact log, translate the unique identifiers into phone numbers, and quickly call everyone who came within electronic range of the infected person. There are plenty of privacy safeguards built in: The logs never leave the user’s phone without his or her consent, and other users can’t learn anything about the people around them from the identifier.
In short, the app addresses most of the practical and privacy objections that American privacy advocates have put forward. It could be a game changer for states like Minnesota and New Mexico that already have strong testing programs and haven’t yet been swamped by the virus. They should be acting now, talking to Singapore officials and mobilizing local tech talent to adapt the tool and construct the back-end processes needed to get a state version off the ground.
For the app to work, it needs to be installed on a lot of phones. Some people will install it without much prompting. Who wouldn’t want to be called if they’ve unknowingly crossed paths with a coronavirus carrier? And many of us would be glad to have a log of our contacts if we test positive, instead of trying to reconstruct contacts from memory.
But asking people to download an app means delays and gaps in coverage, especially when some privacy advocates are dragging their feet, claiming as we’ve seen that the technology won’t work or arguing that it should wait until a regulatory regime has been enacted. To jump-start the program, governors should ask Apple and Google to auto-download the app to every phone in their states, along with a message explaining why users should activate it.
Actually, the governors probably don’t need to ask. Some 40 states have adopted one version or another of a model public health emergency law promulgated after 9/11. The law gives governors explicit authority to issue orders seizing “materials and facilities as may be reasonable and necessary to respond to the public health emergency.” Those facilities expressly include “communication devices,” and there’s no good reason to exclude the Android and Apple app stores from the authority.
In fact, if push comes to shove, the governors likely have authority to require that residents of their states activate the app. The law grants individual states the emergency authority to conduct “any diagnostic or investigative analyses necessary to prevent the spread of disease.” And, since Apple and Android know which apps we’ve activated, they could be ordered to identify those who haven’t registered for contact tracing. The federal law prohibiting disclosure of subscriber information to governments without a subpoena contains an express exception for “an emergency involving danger of death or serious physical injury to any person.”
In short, a forward-leaning approach to high-tech contact tracing is feasible. It could save many lives and get the economy back on track much faster. It’s time for governors in less affected states to do this.
If more incentive is needed, there’s one more thing. There’s a good chance that the governor who makes this work will end up running for president on the strength of that performance in four years. And perhaps even sooner.
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Not to be a Free-Range Pollyanna, but one possible (small) upside to this world-wide pandemic could be that kids become more independent—and less anxious—if we let them use their time differently.
Bear with me, and with research psychologist and fellow Let Grow co-founder, Dr. Peter Gray.
Gray points out that over the past generation or so, kids have been losing their “internal locus of control,” the feeling of being in control of their lives. Obviously, when you don’t feel in control of your life, you are more likely to feel depressed and anxious. And in fact, childhood anxiety levels have been shooting up long before the virus hit. Almost one in three adolescents has an anxiety disorder.
That may have to do with the fact that childhood free time has been evaporating, thanks to the belief that kids left unsupervised are in danger of being hurt physically, emotionally, or educationally. This is true across the economic spectrum and, increasingly, across the world: The idea that kids need intensive adult supervision and structure to succeed, from their first baby movement classes (as if they wouldn’t otherwise wiggle) to the extracurricular arms race.
But with the world in the throes of a deadly virus, and school and after-school activities canceled everywhere, there’s nothing official for kids to do. It’s like they have been thrown back into a 1953 summer (except with Tik-Tok). This is an opportunity.
Yes, yes, obviously now their parents are closer than ever. Nonetheless, this period we’re in is very different from the typical school/lacrosse/tutoring/homework/reading log days. Now the parents are busy, the day is long, and lots of time is up for grabs.
I’m hearing about kids making up games, digging holes (very popular), drawing, making videos, talking to their friends online, playing outside, playing video games (obviously), sleeping more (that’s great!), cooking, and even organizing their rooms. That’s the power of boredom mixed with free time. Instead of being marionettes, the kids are figuring out who they are and what they like to do.
At Let Grow, we had been promoting almost this same idea (minus the deadly pandemic). One of our main school initiatives is the Let Grow Project. (Here’s a video.) Basically, the project is a take-home assignment where kids are told, “Go home and do something that you feel ready to do but haven’t done yet—and do it on your own.” The idea was to get parents to back off and let their kids go ride their bikes, walk to school, babysit, or almost anything else. The point is to remind both generations that kids are capable.
The amazing thing was that the more kids started to do things on their own—even something as simple as making lunch—the more their anxiety went down. This video of 7th graders who completed the project is pretty remarkable. The kids all admit to having been exceedingly anxious: One girl said that before she started doing things on her own, she had grown so nervous that she could barely even talk to anyone. But being forced into a little independence literally gave her back her voice. Another kid was too scared to walk to school until the project. After that, at about age 13, walking to school became normal.
Parents gain confidence too. There’s nothing like seeing your kid do something you thought you had to do for them.
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