news – Page 11357

In New York State, 1/1000th of the Population Has Died from Coronavirus

This is close to the 1.25/1000 in Lombardy, which to my knowledge is the highest for a state- or province-level region. The typical total yearly death rate in New York State is about 8/1000. (As usual, one should note that measuring such things is imprecise business, and the reporting criteria may vary from place to place, or for that matter even within a place.)

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What Each Side of the COVID-19 Debate Should Understand About the Other

Beyond its devastating effect on the health of hundreds of thousands and the livelihood of millions, the COVID-19 crisis is a harshly vivid example of Americans’ inability to understand, fruitfully communicate with, or show a hint of respect for those seen to be on other side of an ideological line.

Americans are divided about the best way to proceed from here, three months since the first case was diagnosed in the U.S. The division is more vivid and harsh on social networks than in the polls, where a vast majority of Americans still think strong lockdowns are the best idea moving forward. Such Americans think the economy needs to stay shut down by law until a vaccine or some effective treatment is developed that ensures no more, or a very tiny number of, people will be seriously harmed or killed by COVID-19.

On the other hand, some Americans think, on balance, the country’s overall quality of life demands we start letting people and businesses make their own decisions about whether it is safe to go out in public or conduct business openly, especially given access to simple prophylactic measures such as gloves and masks.

To sum up each side in the language of their angriest opponents: The “Closers” want to demolish nearly all Americans’ ability to live, and destroy nearly all the wealth our society has built up over decades, by halting the wheels of most commerce for the forseeeable future. And the “Openers” are so dedicated to keeping GDP growing and so ignorant of science they want to see hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of Americans die of a hideous disease because they don’t understand how contagion works.

Both Closers and Openers, though, have a combination of reasons, theories, guesses, and value judgments of a sort many sane people have always made, that make their respective positions make sense to them. Neither side should be blithely written off as either idiotic or sinister or not thinking, in their own way, of human well-being.

The Openers think they see many costs the Closers are not adequately considering, and wonder if the long-term benefits of closing are smaller than the Closers believe.

Openers are worried about over 15 million Americans out of work, and look at industries including hospitality, food service, entertainment not beamed in via smart TVs, sports, construction, oil, education, law, and even, counterintuitively, medical care (not to mention all non-food retail and any financial or other entities who depend on rents and mortgages continuing to be paid in the months to come) all either destroyed or seriously weakened and unable to move forward at anything near their old strength.

They worry that the web of commerce is so complicated and hard to build or to gently snip off portions of that as-yet-unrealized problems will arise with an economy that acts as if making, transporting, and selling food will keep working fine even if nothing else is.

Openers see the government’s short-term solution of loans and giveaways both personal and corporate in the trillions and growing as seriously dangerous, with a real possibility of upending our fiscal and monetary systems under debt and/or money supply explosions that could become truly unsustainable and take decades to recover from. They see states and localities facing already near-impossible pension and other obligations and shrinking tax bases pushed closer, faster, to an abyss of complete inability to function, with dire effects on citizens.

Openers think it is worth seriously wondering about many as-yet-unknown facts, such as actual current infection rates, asymptomatic numbers vs. ill numbers, and death rates and age distributions of same. They understand that the openers vs. closers debate involves cost/benefit decisions, and want to understand the benefits as well as possible. Openers do believe that one cannot build public policy as if “saving one life” (or, more accurately, delaying one death) is the sole goal, and think it important to note that in no other situation and with no other illness have we acted as if that was a reasonable goal.

Openers do take very seriously the idea of “flattening the curve“—perhaps, an Opener might think, even more seriously than the Closers do, because Openers can’t help but think that this virus will, over whatever length of time, infect everyone everywhere until herd immunity is reached or by whatever method R0 becomes less than one.

That is, Openers think it reasonable to consider that we are not facing a choice to “save lives” (or delay deaths) in the sense of preventing infections from ever occurring, which is more or less impossible now. The only really important consideration now is excess deaths or serious illness complications caused by inadequate medical facilities because at some given day in some specific hospital COVID cases are overwhelmingly large.

Openers thus wonder why more public policy decisions aren’t being made based on a rigorous calculation of that number, now and in a reasonably foreseeable future based on best understanding of our hospital capacity, how quickly we could increase that capacity if that became public policy priority one, and the prevalence, percentage symptomatic, and percentage brought to brink of death by the disease. Openers tend to believe a “testing” solution or a “vaccine” solution are both outside the realm of plausibility now and for any foreseeable future.

The Closers, meanwhile, are seen by hostile Openers as driven by some sinister desire for a scenario in which the only “reasonable” endgame for living anything like a free life is either or both enforced vaccination and constant registered surveillance, or who for partisan political reasons want to make 2020 so miserable in America that Trump will lose the election.

However, the Closers have many reasons that make sense to them to keep things closed that don’t involve a mad desire to tyrannize the country or harm Trump. Closers see and acknowledge the economic damage we are suffering, but see most of that damage already inherent in the unchecked spread of a disease that kills or seriously harms people to a greater extent than any we’ve dealt with in a century. They thus don’t see the economic problems solvable just by “opening up America.”

Closers see anyone who, aware that COVID-19 exists, and can spread asymptomatically, and then does anything that could in any way risk someone else catching it as morally akin to murderers. The Closers are very concerned with the fact that people are dying from this disease, in the tens of thousands—that COVID-19 is indeed after just three months by best available data likely killing so far nearly double as many Americans as were killed by the flu this flu season. Closers thus consider some Openers’ niggling obsessions about marginal accuracy in that fatality count as irrelevant to any policy decision we are now facing. Even if those numbers are not 100 percent accurate they are large enough to make worrying over their precise size peculiarly beside the point.

Closers also recognize that the death count is not the best or most accurate way to assess the threat COVID-19 presents and thus what sacrifices are reasonable or prudent to try to keep it from spreading faster. The disease is known or suspected to be neurotoxic and hepatoxic, not merely a respiratory illness, and might cause serious and possibly long term damage to the heart, blood, liver, and nervous systems of those who contract it even if they “recover.”

Closers are also sure that we can’t know how much damage COVID-19 will eventually cause in our nation just based on the experience of the past 6 weeks, when we have been doing our best to keep people from getting close enough to each other in large enough numbers to truly and quickly unleash COVID-19. Thus to the Closers, any calculations based on “existing data” that are supposed to settle the question of whether we’ve done enough, or even too much, and can now “open up” are beside the point, in a genuinely dangerous way. If it’s not an intolerable nightmare yet, they would say, that’s because we are staying shut down.

The damage done by the disease and/or the policy reaction to the disease is baked into our nation, and will almost certainly echo strongly through at least the rest of this decade. Our nation might be slightly better off, though, if more of us did not compound that civic damage through a ferocious and unmanageable cultural and political squabble based on refusing to consider the reasons the other side thinks what they do with anything approaching intellectual charity and empathy.

We could, though might not ever, know the answer to every currently unanswered question about the disease’s spread, extent, and damage. We might figure out accurately the long term damage to life and prosperity the economic shutdown is causing. Even if or when we do, though, human beings of goodwill and intelligence might come to a different value judgment about what policy is best overall. Because we all have to make those tricky, very hard to discuss dispassionately, decisions (of a sort we have always made every day on the margins without explicit debate) about when we think it best to stop shaping policy toward the sole goal of extending every possible life. The answer either side might come to need not be condemned as based in idiotic recklessness or tyrannical fantasies.

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Barr Says DoJ Might Join Lawsuits Against States That Don’t Reopen Fast Enough

During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Attorney General William Barr, who has heretofore enjoyed a reputation as one of the cagiest members of the cabinet, has just made a massive political blunder. Whether he did it at the best of his boss remains unclear.

President Trump’s tweets about “liberating” Democratic-led states has enraged certain conservatives who recognize that Trump has just accepted blame for the handling of the coronavirus response. Delegating to the states was a brilliant move because it meant that no matter what, Trump would be praised for doing the ‘smart’ thing and handing the reins to the states, something that, in theory, also goes against the president’s “authoritarian” nature, which would earn him extra political cred.

By baiting the thousands of Americans willing to go out and join protests demanding an immediate reopening of the economy, Trump is inviting citizens to break the law during an unprecedented crisis when public resources are already strained. If nothing else, it will under mine moderates’ faith in Trump’s ability to make ‘responsible’ choices, likely costing him critical votes in the swing states.

Now, AG Barr has taken Trump’s embrace of the ‘reopen now’ movement to the next level by claiming the DoJ might join lawsuits filed by businesses and citizens against various states over the shutdown orders.

“We have to give businesses more freedom to operate in a way that’s reasonably safe,” Barr said. “To the extent that governors don’t and impinge on either civil rights or on the national commerce – our common market that we have here – then we’ll have to address that.”

The move comes as more conservative groups reportedly heap pressure on the administration to do more to stop governors like Gavin Newsom from keeping their states closed until the summer, according to BBG.

But the last thing states need right now is another reason to blame the White House for meddling in their reopening planning…

One way the Justice Department might act against state or local officials is by joining lawsuits brought by citizens or businesses over restrictions, Barr said. He acknowledged that state governments are at “a sensitive stage,” as they try to balance health and safety against pressure to reopen.But he said that “as lawsuits develop, as specific cases emerge in the states, we’ll take a look at them.”

“We’re looking carefully at a number of these rules that are being put into place,” Barr said. “And if we think one goes too far, we initially try to jawbone the governors into rolling them back or adjusting them. And if they’re not and people bring lawsuits, we file statement of interest and side with the plaintiffs.”

…and Barr just gave it to them on a silver platter.

Leftists are already attacking Barr on twitter.

Seeing the latest “threats” from the AG against the states reminds me of this oldie but goodie where Billy Barr, Esq. touts how “promising” hydroxychloroquine is and is mad that the media is so mean to Trump about it. https://t.co/GlwgkUUdvB

— Asha Rangappa (@AshaRangappa_) April 21, 2020

Note: hydroxychloroquine has actually been found to be effective in treating some patients.

Tyler Durden

Tue, 04/21/2020 – 15:25

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

If COVID-19 Has a Low Infection Fatality Rate, How Many Will Die?

Two studies by researchers associated with Stanford University and the University of Southern California have deployed antibody blood tests seeking to determine what percentage of people in two California counties have been infected with the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Based on their population screening tests, the researchers estimated that 2.49 to 4.16 percent of the residents of Santa Clara County (Silicon Valley) and 2.8 to 5.6 percent of the residents of Los Angeles County have been infected.

In the case of Santa Clara County, that would mean that by early April between 48,000 and 81,000 people had been infected, which is 50 to 85-fold more than the number of confirmed cases at that time. The results of the Los Angeles County study imply that approximately 221,000 to 442,000 adults in the county already had the infection. That estimate is 28 to 55 times higher than confirmed cases at that time in that jurisdiction.

The finding that a huge proportion of coronavirus infections in the U.S. have been going undetected immediately attracted the attention of biostatisticians working at other institutions. Many critiqued the Santa Clara County study, suggesting, among other flaws, that its false positive rate was possibly way too high and that the study was enriched with participants who were more likely to have been exposed to the virus than the general population of the county. Those questions are still being hashed out.

Let’s assume that the results of these two studies are correct. If so, that means that the infection fatality rate—the percentage of infected people who will die of the disease—is somewhere between 0.12 and 0.2 percent in Santa Clara County and between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent in Los Angeles County. The infection mortality rate for seasonal flu hovers around 0.1 percent. Please keep in mind that the rough calculations that follow are intended to tease out some of the implications about the possible future course of the pandemic from the two California studies.

Let’s start by using Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) data from the 2017-2018 influenza season. That season was one of the worst in the last 10 years, with an estimated 45 million Americans becoming infected with the respiratory illness, of whom 34 million were over the age of 18. The adult population in 2018 was 254 million, which means that about 13.4 percent of adults were infected with symptomatic disease. As it happens, a 2016 review article has estimated that about 20 percent of people infected with flu viruses do not experience flu symptoms. This is likely because many asymptomatic carriers have some residual immunity from earlier infections. Nevertheless, those carriers can still shed viruses and infect other people. Including the asymptomatic cases of flu would imply that about 41 million adults, roughly 16 percent of the adult population, had contracted flu during the 2017-2018 season.

The 2017-2018 infection fatality rate (IFR) for symptomatic illness for the whole U.S. population was a bit higher than average at around 0.13 percent. A rough estimate for the IFR for symptomatic U.S. adults suffering from influenza was around 0.18 percent and the IFR for both symptomatic and asymptomatic adults was around 0.15 percent.

Again assuming that estimates in the two California studies are in the ballpark, the big difference between seasonal influenza and COVID-19 is the percentage of the population that is likely to become infected. The extent of influenza epidemics is constrained by the fact that a high percentage of the population has already developed immunity to the disease, either through previous infections or via vaccination. The novel coronavirus is attacking a population that has neither developed immunity to it nor has access to an effective vaccine with which to ward it off.

Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch has estimated that eventually between 20 and 60 percent of adult Americans could be infected with the virus. Again, there are about 254 million Americans over age 18 as of 2018. So let’s use the Los Angeles County study’s range of 0.1 to 0.3 percent IFR for the coronavirus to get a rough estimate of the number of Americans who might die from COVID-19.

In a more optimistic scenario, only 20 percent of adult Americans are infected and the IFR is only 0.1 percent, thus implying that only 50,800 adult Americans would likely die of the disease. Considering that the current death toll from the epidemic as of April 21 is nearly 44,000, this optimistic scenario seems implausible. Now let’s go full pessimism: Assume 60 percent of adult Americans are infected and the IFR is 0.3 percent. In that case, the number of COVID-19 deaths among American adults would exceed 450,000.

The two California studies estimate that the percentage of the U.S. adult population that is infected is between 2.5 and 5.6 percent. This yields an estimate of adult Americans already infected ranging from 6.4 to 14.2 million. Given that 44,000 have died of the disease, this calculation produces IFRs ranging between 0.7 and 0.3 percent.

Yet another way to calculate possible IFRs is to multiply by the low and high rates of undiagnosed cases implied in the two studies. At the low end, the Los Angeles County study suggested that undiagnosed cases were 28-fold greater than diagnosed cases. At the high end, the Santa Clara County study reported an 85-fold ratio. Since about 800,000 cases have been diagnosed in the U.S. as of April 21, that would imply that between 22.4 million and 68 million Americans have already been infected by the novel coronavirus. Using those estimated infections yields a range of 0.2 percent to 0.06 percent for a COVID-19 IFRs.

It is worth noting that a recent German study reported an IFR for COVID-19 at about 0.4 percent.

Many critical biostaticians noted, as I did, that the California studies imply that the COVID-19 infections must be very widespread to produce the excess mortality seen in places like New York City, meaning that essentially most New Yorkers must already have been infected. That seems implausible.

One additional observation: Both California studies were conducted by academic and private sector researchers and supported by private funders. The government efforts at population screening for coronavirus antibody prevalence are lagging behind.

Epidemiologists are trying to see through the murk of the ongoing pandemic. These preliminary studies are part of that ongoing process and absolutely should not be taken as the last word.

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Missouri Sues China, Wuhan Lab Over COVID; Says ‘Deceit, Malfeasance, And Inaction Unleashed This Pandemic’

The state of Missouri became the first in the nation to file a lawsuit against China over their role in the coronavirus pandemic. Also named in the suit are the Communist Party of China, the government of Wuhan City, and the Wuhan Institute of Virology, along with the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Filed on Tuesday in the Eastern District of Missouri, Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt accuses China of knowing that “COVID-19 was dangerous and capable of causing a pandemic, yet slowly acted, proverbially put their head in the sand, and/or covered it up in their own economic self-interest,” according to Fox News.

During the critical weeks of the initial outbreak, Chinese authorities deceived the public, suppressed crucial information, arrested whistleblowers, denied human-to-human transmission in the face of mounting evidence, destroyed critical medical research, permitted millions of people to be exposed to the virus, and even hoarded personal protective equipment—thus causing a global pandemic that was unnecessary and preventable. -State of Missouri v. The People’s Republic of China et al.

According to the complaint, the defendants are responsible “for the enormous death, suffering, and economic losses they inflicted on the world,” and “should be held accountable.”

“When their actions began to kill hundreds of thousands of people across the globe, Defendants sought to minimize the consequences, engaging in a coverup and misleading public relations campaign by censoring scientists, ordering the destruction and suppression of valuable research, and refusing cooperation with the global community, all in violation of international health standards,” the complaint continues.

Missouri cites a Fox News report that the US is currently conducting “a full-scale investigation into whether the novel coronavirus, which went on to morph into a global pandemic that has brought the global economy to its knees, escaped from” the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV). The complaint also notes that an emerging theory states that WIV was “studying the virus as part of a commercial activity.”

Fox News has reported that sources have increasing confidence that the coronavirus escaped from a Wuhan laboratory, not as a bioweapon but as part of China’s attempt to demonstrate that its efforts to identify and combat viruses are equal to or greater than the capabilities of the United States. The U.S. is conducting a full-scale investigation into whether that’s the case.

But U.S. officials and the intelligence community have confirmed to Fox News that they have taken the possibility of the coronavirus being man-made or engineered inside China as some sort of bioweapon off the table and have ruled it out at this point. –Fox News

It also states that “on or around Late December 2019, healthcare professionals in Wuhan were reporting infections indicating human-to-human transmission” of the disease.

According to Chinese sources cited in the National Review, on December 25, 2019, “Chinese medical staff in two hospitals in Wuhan [were] suspected of contracting viral pneumonia and [were] quarantined. This is additional strong evidence of human-to-human transmission.” This was corroborated by the Wall Street Journal.

According to the South China Morning Press, “On December 27, Zhang Jixian, a doctor from Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine, told China’s health authorities that the disease was caused by a new coronavirus. By that date, more than 180 people had been infected, though doctors might not have been aware of all of them at the time.“

China is also accused of allowing the virus to spread by knowingly letting approximately 175,000 individuals leave Wuhan on January 1 to travel for the Lunar New Year. In mid-January, Wuhan leaders hosted a potluck dinner for 40,000 residents, “increasing the potential spread of the virus.”

The coverup

According to the suit, “On December 30, 2019, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission released a notice to medical institutions that patients visiting the Wuhan Seafood Market had contracted a pneumonia-like illness.” The notice warned medical professionals that “Any organizations or individuals are not allowed to release treatment information to the public without authorization.”

Researchers at the University of Toronto observed China “censoring key words about the virus on Chinese social media platforms,” including WeChat, which “has become increasingly popular among [Chinese] doctors who use it to obtain professional knowledge from peers. Because of social media’s integral role in Chinese society and its uptake by the Chinese medical community, systematic blocking of general communication on social media related to disease information and prevention risks substantially harming the ability of the public to share information that may be essential to their health and safety.“

Meanwhile, authorities in China were physically cracking down against dissidents.

On January 1 or 2, the Wuhan police stated that they had “taken legal measures” against eight people who “published and shared rumors online,” and one of them is believed to be Dr. Wenliang.

According to CNN, “The police announcement [against the eight people] was broadcast across the country on CCTV, China’s state broadcaster, making it clear how the Chinese government would treat such ‘rumormongers.’”

The message reportedly said, “The internet is not a land beyond the law … Any unlawful acts of fabricating, spreading rumors and disturbing the social order will be punished by police according to the law, with zero tolerance.

As described by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “The punishment of eight doctors for ‘rumor-mongering,’ broadcast on national television on Jan. 2, sent a chill through the city’s hospitals,” and suppressed information from reaching the rest of the world.

The suit also accuses China of misleading the World Health Organization (WHO) as part of a coverup – delaying reporting on COVID-19 to the organization for weeks after the outbreak was identified within the Chinese medical community. When the CCP finally did inform the WHO, they denied human-to-human transmission, “despite having significant evidence to the contrary.”

This “induced the WHO to also deny or downplay the risk of human-to-human transmission in the critical weeks while the virus was first spreading.”

Missouri’s complaint also alleges that China worked to hoard personal protective equipment (PPE) in dire need by healthcare workers around the world in the treatment and handling of coronavirus patients.

Read the entire complaint below:

Tyler Durden

Tue, 04/21/2020 – 15:05

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Vp9IA0 Tyler Durden

It’s Not Just Oil: Another Critical Index Turns Negative, Hinting Funding “Crisis” Has Returned

It’s not the WTI May contract that shocked investors when it traded as far negative as -$40 on the historic date of April 20: also dipping into negative territory was another benchmark indicator, arguably far more important than an oil future contract: General Collateral.

As Curvature’s Scott Skyrm writes, Repo GC rates began trading in the negatives in the morning [on Monday] and traded as low as -.25% [on Monday] afternoon. Unless there is a crisis or it’s quarter-end, it’s very rare for Repo rates to trade this negative.

So maybe there is a crisis but with equities now directly backstopped by the Fed, nobody told stock traders?

Anyway Skyrm continues:

RP operations are declining, so that means less Fed cash in the market, but with rates near zero, money funds are now giving their cash to the Fed again with $31 billion in RRP volume today. Private cash that was on the sidelines must have come back into the market over the past couple of days.

With all of the Cash Management Bill issuance, you would thing there’s plenty of short-term paper available for cash investors. However, maybe QE is starting to impact the market? Maybe the impact of QE combined with increased investor cash is what’s driving rates lower?

And visually:

While the underlying reasons for GC repo’s slide into negative remain unclear, we will remind readers that just a few days ago, repo guru Zoltan Pozsar warned that the surge in Bill issuance could become the next crisis, warning that the only way to control the short-end would be to launch yield curve control for the entire yield curve:

The Fed has done a lot and yield curve control where they peg three month Treasury bill yields at OIS rates and is the only thing the Fed has not done yet, but soon will have to. The target range for overnight rates and the OIS curve – the bottom layer of the money market cake – are the Fed’s monetary sanctum. Everything the Fed does is priced based on variables within that sanctum: the top of the band, IOR, IOR plus a spread and OIS plus a spread.

As we responded to this proposal, which we are confident will be implemented shortly, “the only thing that experts agree will avoid another crisis in the bond – and funding – markets is if the Fed effectively takes over the entire yield curve, ending capital markets as we know them, and launching “price discovery” by decree. While we have no doubt that the Fed will go the length, we can’t help but remember that such terminal central planning did not have a happy ending for the USSR.”

The drop in GC repo to negative just brought the US one step closer to attaching an SR to its name.

Tyler Durden

Tue, 04/21/2020 – 14:42

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2Vq4946 Tyler Durden

If COVID-19 Has a Low Infection Fatality Rate, How Many Will Die?

It is worth noting that a recent German study reported an IFR for COVID-19 at about 0.4 percent.

Epidemiologists are trying to see through the murk of the ongoing pandemic. These preliminary studies are part of that ongoing process and absolutely should not be taken as the last word.

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Most Americans Are Not Going To Be Able To Handle What Lies Ahead

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

Based on how Americans are handling the COVID-19 lockdowns, it is hard to be optimistic about what will happen when a really severe crisis hits us.

Yes, this pandemic is definitely a great tragedy. There are more than 700,000 confirmed cases in the U.S. and more than 40,000 Americans have died. But it isn’t the end of the world. I am sorry to tell you this, but COVID-19 is not the worst thing that we are going to face. In fact, it is not even close to the worst thing that we are going to face. So it is a bit disheartening to see so many Americans responding to this pandemic so poorly.

Let me give you some examples of what I am talking about. Polling firms have been extremely active lately, and even though nearly 40 percent of all U.S. adults are obese, one survey found that Americans are binging on snack foods during these lockdowns like never before…

About 40% of people say they’ve been eating more snack foods since the outbreak began, with 26% admitting they’re finding comfort in chocolate, specifically, according to a Harris Poll of 2,013 US adults conducted over the weekend.

If overeating was all that we had to worry about, I could live with that.

But it turns out that Americans are also indulging in a whole bunch of other self-destructive behaviors during this time. At a moment in our history when alcohol-related deaths in the U.S. are already at an all-time high, heavy drinkers have decided that this pandemic is a perfect opportunity to drink even more…

One in five said they are guzzling more alcohol, though that number was higher, at 30%, among those 18 to 35 — or millennials and Gen-Zers.

In areas that have been hit extremely hard by COVID-19, sales increases have been especially dramatic. In New York City, one liquor store owner says that it is “like New Year’s every day” during his city’s lockdown…

With the initial surge of panic buying over, wine and marijuana sales are still way up, presenting an opportunity — and a challenge — for the businesses scrambling to meet the demand spikes and shifts in consumer behavior.

“It’s like New Year’s every day,” said Mark Schwartz, the owner of Little Mo Wine and Spirits in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, who has seen alcohol sales shoot up fourfold.

Of course while they are eating and drinking they need something to do, and so the average American is streaming approximately eight hours of shows and movies every single day…

The average American is passing the time amid the new coronavirus pandemic by streaming roughly eight hours of shows and movies every day, a recent survey shows.

OnePoll surveyed 2,000 Americans with access to at least one streaming service and found that not only was the average person watching eight hours’ worth of content but also likely went through three series in a week alone, StudyFinds reported.

This helps to explain why Netflix stock has been absolutely soaring recently.

Personally, I have never watched “Tiger King” and I have absolutely no desire to do so. In fact, I have not had a Netflix subscription for over a decade. Very few corporations have embraced pure evil to the extent that Netflix has, but most Americans don’t seem to care, and right now Netflix is absolutely rolling in revenue.

In addition to binge watching television, Americans are also doing much more online gambling…

Online poker revenues were up more than 100 percent from February, and iGaming revenue reached a new record of $64.8 million according to the figures released Wednesday for New Jersey, one of two states that allow online gambling.

To me, this doesn’t make any sense at all.

One recent survey found that about half of all Americans will have run through all of their savings by the end of April. If you aren’t going to have enough money to pay your bills next month, why would you want to be gambling the little money that you do have away?

Sadly, it does not appear that our society is equipped to handle hard times. Even before this pandemic started, the suicide rate in the U.S. was at an all-time record high, and more Americans were overdosing on drugs than ever before in our history.

But everything that I have shared with you so far pales in comparison to what I am going to share with you now.

As this pandemic has sent a wave of fear sweeping across the country, it has also created a boom in business at abortion clinics all over America…

The Trust Women abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas, reported performing 252 abortions in March, up from 90 in March, 2019. Julie Burkhart, the chief executive of Trust Women, told RT.com this week that between the Wichita, Kansas clinic and her other clinic in Oklahoma City (which was briefly closed but has since reopened), they have seen a “300 to 400 percent” increase in their patient load.

“The women who have been calling are uncertain about having a baby when the world is so unpredictable all of a sudden, and they’re worried about money due to the sharp rise in unemployment,” she said. “We’ve been seeing more women calling earlier than usual in their pregnancy, and there’s this urgent nature to it.”

Just like with individuals, great challenges tend to reveal who we truly are as a nation.

And right now the message that we are sending to the rest of the world with our behavior is not a good one.

Past generations of Americans were called to go to war, but we have been called to stay at home for a few weeks, and we can’t seem to even handle that very well.

Amazingly, the mainstream media has somehow convinced a majority of the American people that the lockdowns should continue. Just check out what a NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll just found…

Nearly 60 percent of American voters say they are more concerned that a relaxation of stay-at-home restrictions would lead to more COVID-19 deaths than they are that those restrictions will hurt the U.S. economy, according to a new national NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

But while strong majorities of Democrats and independents are more worried about the coronavirus than the economy, Republicans are divided on the question, with almost half of them more concerned about how the restrictions could affect the economy.

The longer these lockdowns persist, the more self-destructive Americans are likely to become.

But eventually they will end, and most people will attempt to resume their normal lives.

Of course it is just a matter of time before an even bigger crisis than this pandemic comes along, and if we are failing so badly this time around, how in the world will people be able to handle something even worse?

Tyler Durden

Tue, 04/21/2020 – 14:25

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3bE5h9W Tyler Durden

Mexico Cuts Rates 50bps In Surprise Move, Warns Of GDP Plunge

In a unanimous decision, Banxico’s board surprised the market and lowered the reference rate by 50bps to 6% in the face of a widely-expected recession in the country this year (which it now expects to be a 1H 2020 drop of more than 5% YoY).

“It is estimated that the negative effects on domestic economic activity resulting from the pandemic may lead to an important contraction of economic activity in Mexico during the first half of the year. Although the magnitude and duration of the effects of the pandemic are still unknown, and since available information is still limited, initial estimates suggest that during the first half of 2020 GDP could fall more than 5% as compared to the same period of the previous year. It is clear that slack conditions are widening considerably, in a context in which the balance of risks for growth is significantly biased to the downside

According to the statement.

“Considering the risks resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic for inflation, economic activity and financial markets, major challenges arise for monetary policy and for the economy in general.”

Very little reaction for now in the peso…

Though warnings of “implementing additional measures for orderly markets” may prompt some more selling soon…

“The Governing Board also decided to implement additional measures to foster an orderly behavior of financial markets, strengthen the credit channels and provide liquidity for the sound development of the financial system.”

Tyler Durden

Tue, 04/21/2020 – 14:14

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2x1We3S Tyler Durden

Will New York Ever Recover From COVID-19?

Is COVID-19 the “end of New York” as we know it?

That’s what urbanist Joel Kotkin argued in a recent piece for Tablet magazine.

“This is happening at a time when the demographics of cities like New York, L.A., Chicago, [and] San Francisco are all going in the wrong direction. Young people leaving, and population growth is very low,” says Kotkin. “I think the pandemic is just one more factor that is going to influence migration in general. I think the idea of being in a dense urban place is probably not going to be that attractive.”

With lockdowns and extreme social distancing bringing urban life to a halt, and New York City emerging as the epicenter of the national crisis, a debate among urban studies scholars is breaking out over what this will mean for the future of American cities.

On one side are density skeptics like Kotkin, a Chapman University professor who believes the pandemic will only accelerate an already present decline in urban living, while pro-density urbanists like University of Toronto Professor Richard Florida say that New York will do what New York has always done: bounce back.

“I am 100 percent convinced New York will be fine,” says Florida. “The biggest mistake people ever make is counting New York out.”

Thomas Campanella, a Cornell professor who co-edited a book after 9/11 called The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover from Disaster, agrees with Florida. Campanella and his co-editor found that disasters that damage critical infrastructure, such as the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii, or make land literally uninhabitable, such as the nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, are most likely to do irreparable harm. Cities have recovered from pandemics fairly quickly, including New York after the 1918 Spanish flu.

“To suggest that this is going to mark the end of the cities…it’s ridiculous actually,” says Campanella. “It traffics in a long tradition of anti-urbanist posturing and predicting that goes all the way back to the founding generation in this country.”

Campanella points to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, in which he states that “The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government, as sores do to the strength of the human body.” John Adams similarly wrote in his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States that Americans living “in small numbers, sprinkled over large tracts of land … are not subject to those panics and transports, those contagions of madness and folly, which are seen in countries where large numbers live in small places.”

“De-densifying the city is not going to happen,” says Campanella. “We still have London and Florence and Venice and all these cities that they underwent terrible pandemic diseases.

Campanella recalls his own grandmother recounting the horrors of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic in New York City.

“She remembered seeing the hearses every day,” he says. “So, we have gone through these things.”

But Kotkin argues that what’s changed is that ever-improving communications technology has made all kinds of remote work possible.

“If you take a look at where people are moving. They’re moving to, generally speaking, less expensive, very often smaller cities,” he says.

In terms of broad historical trends, urbanization has increased over the last 200 years, with the percentage of the world population living in urban areas rising from 2 percent to 50 percent. But more recently, megacities like New York have experienced significantly slower growth than small and mid-sized urban areas. The total world population of small urban areas with populations of fewer than 500,000 people is three times that of megacities, with the median urban resident living in an urban area with a population of 650,000.

And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 92 percent of population growth within metropolitan areas has been in the suburbs and exurbs from 2010 to 2018. Only New York has bucked that trend, with rising density over that period.

But Kotkin says New York isn’t immune.

“[The pandemic] may just accelerate some of this,” says Kotkin. ” People are going to have that memory of, ‘God, I was living in the studio apartment in Manhattan when this happened. I was essentially in lockdown.'”

Between 2005 and 2017, remote working increased by about 159 percent according to one study, with about 5 percent of Americans working from home according to census data. Kotkin predicts remote working trends will continue to push more and more Americans out of big city centers.

But Florida points out that venture capital is still concentrated in the Bay Area and New York. He predicts that the coronavirus pandemic will lead to more geographic concentration.

“At the same time that you’re having people leave [dense urban centers], you’re having… the Bay Area’s share of the tech industry increasing, New York’s share of finance increasing. L.A. is still a center of movie making and the creative industry broadly,” says Florida. “With restrictions on air travel, the fact that it [has become] harder to drop in and out of those places will cause a further concentration.”

But Florida agrees with Kotkin that the growth of remote work will also continue to drive the growth of smaller cities in the American heartland. He points to a Kaiser Family Foundation project called Tulsa Remote, which pays tech workers a $10,000 stipend to move to Tulsa and work from home.

“So [small cities like Tulsa will] literally say we’re going to be … a connected hub of remote workers to an incumbent economic center. And I think that can work,” says Florida.

Despite his provocative headline, even Kotkin isn’t predicting New York’s total demise. Rather, he foresees a continued hollowing out of its middle class, with future population growth coming from young, single workers, immigrants, and the ultra-wealthy.

“It’s probably at this stage almost impossible to see a return of middle-class families to cities,” he says, “Not necessarily because of housing stock or even prices [but rather] the kind of governments that are being elected.”

He says the inability of these big cities’ mayors to deal with homelessness, crime, schools, and other quality-of-life issues has and will continue to drive out middle-class families.

“And the problem is, as the middle class has declined in these cities, the politics have gotten crazier and crazier,” says Kotkin.

Florida, who places himself in the “99th percentile” of the political left says that he agrees with Kotkin that too many mayors have lost sight of these basic quality-of-life issues in their cities.

“I think there’s going to be a premium now on no bullshit, no ideology, ‘Can you make my city safe or suburb safe and secure?'” says Florida. “[New York] is going to have time to really think about how to become a more affordable city, a more holistic city, a better city.”

Produced by Zach Weissmueller, graphics by Isaac Reese, opening animation by Lex Villena

Music: “Curtains are Always Drawn,” by Kai Engel licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Photos: Gloved hand in subway, Marcus Santos/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Empty subway tunnel, William Volcov/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Empty subway, William Volcov/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Zoom call, Chloe Sharrock/ZUMA Press/Newscom; Empty New York street, Alcir N. de Silva/Polaris/Newscom; Masked airline attendant, Kike Calvo/Universal Image Group/Newscom; Empty airport terminal, Joe Burbank/TNS/Newscom; Empty Times Square, Alison Wright/ZUMA Press/Newscom

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