Month: April 2020

Before we get started today, let’s take a minute to review…

• 3/10 1,000
• 3/11 1,267
• 3/12 1,645
• 3/13 2,204
• 3/14 2,826
• 3/15 3,505
• 3/16 4,466
• 3/17 6,135
• 3/18 8,760
• 3/19 13,229
• 3/20 18,763
• 3/21 25,740
• 3/22 34,276
• 3/23 42,663
• 3/24 52,976
• 3/25 65,273
• 3/26 82,135
• 3/27 101,295
• 3/28 121,176
• 3/29 139,773
• 3/30 160,377
• 3/31 185,469
• 4/01 199,729

…and on Thursday? 4/02 216,722

That looks like exponential growth to us.

Now that the administration is “all in” on social distancing as America battles what is now the biggest novel coronavirus outbreak in the world, President Donald Trump warned that Americans are heading for a “horrendous” two or three weeks as they hunker down at home, reiterating his warning about “painful” times ahead, while raising the possibility that the government might shutter all remaining domestic flights between coronavirus ‘hot spots’ in the US like NYC and Miami.

Looking ahead, economists are bracing for Thursday’s initial jobless claims to jump as much as 5 million – maybe even 6.5 million – after yesterday’s ADP report on private employment, and after last week’s record 3.3 million jump.

“I am looking where flights are going into hot spots.” Trump replied when asked if he was considering a temporary ban on all domestic flights. “Some of those flights I didn’t like from the beginning, but closing up every single flight on every single airline, that’s a very, very, very rough decision. But we are thinking about hot spots, where you go from spot to spot, both hot. And we’ll let you know fairly soon.”

“We’re certainly looking at it but once you do that you really are clamping down on an industry that is desperately needed,” Trump said.

On Thursday morning, the number of confirmed cases in the US climbed above 5,000 (it was 5,137 when we last checked), while the number of confirmed cases has climbed above 200k (to 216,722). This, after Vice President Pence said during last night’s press conference that models suggest the US is facing a trajectory similar to Italy’s, the country with the highest number of coronavirus deaths with more than 13k.

NYC remains the epicenter in the US, with more than 1,374 deaths, more than double the death toll from the rest of the state (585). The global case count is quickly heading toward the big 1 million (last count: 939,436) as case numbers in the US and Europe surge (even as Italy and Spain show the first signs of a ‘plateau’ of new cases) while China, South Korea and other Southeast Asian nations and territories (Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong) report a second wave. Around the world, 76,836 cases were reported yesterday.

More than 10,000 people have now died in Spain after contracting coronavirus, with a record 950 of them dying on Wednesday, the latest in a grim streak of daily death-toll records. Death toll records released Thursday morning in Spain showed the official death toll hitting 10,003, up from 9,053 the day before.

Spain now has 110,238 confirmed cases of coronavirus, an 8% increase. Though that’s slowed from the ~25% daily jumps seen earlier this month, it doesn’t change the fact that Spain is 2.5 weeks into a shelter in place-style lockdown. Thanks to the lockdown, Spain recorded its biggest jump in unemployment in its history, with more than 800,000 people filing for benefits last week.

As it turns out, the US isn’t the only developed western country that is ill-prepared to ramp up testing for the novel coronavirus: As angry tabloid headlines bash the British government, led by a currently sickened PM Boris Johnson, a top British health official expressed frustration with the government’s struggles to provide enough tests, claiming that “everybody involved is frustrated” as the UK scrambles to ramp up testing, the FT reports.

Fortunately, London’s Francis Crick Institute has developed a rapid diagnostic coronavirus test and says it hopes to test 500 frontline workers a day from next week.

Though the US government is preparing to bail out American airlines, international airlines remain locked in a free fall: On Thursday, British Airways is expected to announce plans to suspend about 32,000 employees as it seeks to cut costs now that nobody is flying unless they absolutely need to.

As businesses continue to struggle with planning for the future, a new report from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs said the global economy could shrink by almost 1% before year’s end. Before the outbreak, they had anticipated growth of 2.5%, the Washington Post reports.

Now that the 2020 Tokyo Games have been officially postponed until next year (they’re still the 2020 Games though), Japan can focus on fighting the virus without that albatross around its neck: But as the country stands “on the very brink” of a coronavirus crisis, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has resisted calls to try and enforce a state of emergency and other measures. Instead, he’s planning to send every household two small washable cloth masks, a decision that has earned him no shortage of ridicule.

Abe’s “two masks” plan was brutally mocked on social media, with many questioning how the masks would be split between a whole family.

一世帯に二枚のマスク #贋作 #○○風に時事ネタを振り返ろう pic.twitter.com/43j8zUizyK

— 北村ヂン (@punxjk) April 1, 2020

Tokyo alone reported 97 new cases on Thursday, a new record high, and the latest in a two-week resurgence that has turned back the clock on Japan’s fight against the virus.

As more government officials catch the virus, the Philippine ambassador to Lebanon died of complications arising from the virus this week, the country’s Department of Foreign Affairs announced on Thursday. Ambassador Bernardita M. Catalla, a nearly 30-year veteran of the diplomatic corps., died in Beirut early Thursday morning.

Finally, as Indians continue to grumble about that the inept implementation of that country’s three-week lockdown, imposed despite a relative dearth of cases as officials feared rapid spreading in the country’s slums, the death of a middle-aged man in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum has stoked worries about the highly contagious virus ripping through what’s widely regarded as the largest slum in Asia.

Authored by Ramin Mazaheri for The Saker Blog,

Germany and their moral poses… a century of Europe cries, “Enough!”

It’s hard for those living outside of Europe to understand the resentment towards Germany; Germans themselves often seem totally oblivious – the “German professor” only ever sees bad, unruly students, after all.

When I first moved to Paris in 2009 I remarked how all the Germans I met were so very nice. I was told, “They have to be, after what they’ve done.”

Low blow?

Hardly. Ignoring history is not politeness or PC progress or evidence of forward-thinking: it’s denial, hysteria and illusory thinking.

To paraphrase Henny Youngman: Take my Mutti – please. Angela Merkel is my generation’s Margaret Thatcher. When Thatcher died there were street parties in the UK, which were brutally repressed by cops, but the billionaire-directed Western Mainstream Media ordered paeans to be penned instead.

For Merkel there has similarly never been anything but fawning coverage, as evidenced – aggravatingly – by this recent story from the Associated Press: Merkel shines in handling of Germany’s coronavirus crisis.

Why such love for an abusive mother? Because she certainly hasn’t abused the German 1%: under Merkel German corporations have re-colonised much of Central Europe, they have extracted as much wealth as possible from weaker Eurozone nations like Greece, and downward pressure on wages was maintained on the German post-Hartz Re(De)forms workforce via the importation of hundreds of thousands of skilled Syrians and detested “minijobs”.

On a pan-European level ever since 2008, and even in the heat of the 2012 European Sovereign Debt Crisis, we have Germany’s constant refusal for “more Europe”, which is the only possible way to save this (atrocious, anti-democratic, unaccountable, corrupt, American-penned, socialism-detesting) version of the pan-European project. Germany refuses to collateralise Eurozone debt, even though it is Germany who would collect as they are the debtors, because Germany doesn’t want mere dead gold but living debt slaves.

The Eurozone is simply so riddled with contradictions and stupidities it just defies journalistic explanation:

Germany just doesn’t get it – for every country with an export surplus, there simply has to be a country with a corresponding deficit. It was German (and French) banks who signed off on the bad loans to the “immoral” Greeks which precipitated the biggest Eurozone problems, and yet it is German banks who got bailed out, despite their errors; and yet it is German banks who got QE to loan; and yet it is German banks which didn’t loan a dime of QE, and certainly not to Greeks. Germany is the biggest recipient of the ECB bond-buying, even though they don’t need it, whereas Greece was excluded even though they need it?

Crazy, but let’s look at Germany’s explanation for all these selfish actions action: moral hazard. They simply cannot perpetuate immorality, and deficits (even if to pay for the elderly, the poor, health care, education, etc.) are immoral. Haven’t you read your Kant, and his OCD-morality? German absolutism is absolute; their personal conscience must be clean no matter how many murderers must be let in the door to commit murder.

So… explain your €822 billion bailout, Germany?

Wait – what? A bailout worth 22% of annual German GDP?

What happened to budget rigour and the moral imperative of balanced budgets? What happened to the total, facile nonsense that a national economy is simply a household writ large? What happened to Yanis Varoufakis recycling absurd stereotypes like “Teutonic discipline” (has he never seen an Oktoberfest?)?

Oh, I get it… Germany is in a crisis – EU deficit rules need to be relaxed.

However: Greece and others were in a crisis for years – why didn’t their crises matter?

(Millions starving in Yemen, millions dying of bad water globally, deaths from natural disasters – indeed, why does the Corona crisis matter so very, VERY much more than those crises? I just can’t comprehend the West’s crisis criterion.)

But it gets worse with Germany: Bailouts for Greece and other crisis-hit nations were contingent on forcing open their economies. German and Dutch companies gleefully bought up assets and market share, and forced in their products but now Germany Will Block Foreign Takeovers to Avoid Economy Sell-Out?

It’s disgusting, German hypocrisy.

But Europeans have been dealing with this for quite some time. In January I wrote this article to explain Europe’s perpetual stagnation and unrest: 1941, 1981, 2017 or today – it’s still Germany’s fault.

Need more? In 2017, foolishly assuming that QE would actually end, I wrote France’s historic effort for an anti-austerity Eurozone, which detailed the self-harming, wooing efforts from De Gaulle to Mitterrand to Hollande aimed at ending this historical trend: “France wanted to not be conquered by the US-German alliance, so they kept proposing a Franco-German (capitalist) alliance.”

Ramin, you seem rather anti-German. Are you a tribalist-racist?

No. What I am is a daily hard news journalist in the heart of Europe and I am fed up with reading lecture after lecture from Germany; hypocrisy after hypocrisy; duplicity upon duplicity.

Just tell me this: where is the “moral hazard” in the Corona crisis, Germany?

Shine a light on that for me, Mutti Merkel.

She cannot. There is none.

There are healthy companies – who have as much Teutonic economic discipline, intelligence and good DNA as a pure and spotless German – in places like Italy which are going to go under without something like Corona-bonds to provide financing wrought by the Marxist logic-defying Western shutdown.

Forget it – shot down already by Germany and their Dutch toadies. Same old story….

The corona overreaction defies Marxist logic and is economic suicide (socialist-inspired nations like China and Iran control their economies, so they can do things which the corporate-dominated West cannot) but yet another German refusal to help, to pool debt and risk, to show solidarity means Germany must leave the Eurozone.

Hell, we KNOW they have the money – while they have had their boots on the throats of people like the Greeks the Germans have also been assiduously picking their pockets. Germany can afford such a staggeringly huge bailout because of these incredibly immoral profits! Oh no Ramin, you’re wrong – they got those profits simply because German capitalists are so very moral. Sure, sure….

German bankers entrapped poorer Eurozone countries into debt slavery, and now that their slaves are sick Germany wants a quarantine?

You’ll never read such analyses in the West, that’s for sure, but what is absolutely, absolutely certain is that the average Eurozone citizen knows what I am talking about already. Anti-German sentiment is going to absolutely explode if Germany’s historical pattern – pro-US imperialism, anti-European project, self-interest above solidarity – continues.

Everybody in Europe (and the whole world) has seen how China, and not Germany, is the one sending supplies to corona-hit Italy. Yes, the Eurozone’s terrible structure means it is always fiddling while Rome burns, but I truly believe that German (capitalist-imperialist) leadership simply doesn’t care.

Of course there are good Germans who want Corona bonds, but the simplest solution to the Eurozone’s crisis has always been to expel Germany.

“If Germany is unwilling to take the basic steps needed to improve the currency union, it should do the next best thing: Leave the eurozone.”

 That’s an assessment from Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. Yes, I did write ‘The Euro’ by Stiglitz: Even fake leftists say ‘exit’, but the point is that only far-right neoliberals don’t see that a “Deutsch-parture” can painlessly end the Eurozone’s near-constant stagnation and dissension. The Netherlands can similarly be invited to leave as well.

Unless naked, would-be German emperors can finally get off their high horses and on board with morality and unity – via something like Corona bonds – a huge explosion of jingoism and neo-fascism in the Eurozone is around the corner.

Fine by me I guess – history shows that this is the last step before socialism because: how can fascism ever possibly succeed for the lower classes? It seems some Western nations need to go through this step (yet again) before accepting that the needs of workers, not bankers, and the poor must always be predominant in political policy.

As bodies pile up at New York City area hospitals, 45 refrigerated tractor-trailers were dispatched to the city to act as temporary morgues last month. We noted last week that morgues in the city were “nearing capacity” and would be full by the first week of April.

In a matter of weeks, the city has transformed into the epicenter of the COVID-19 outbreak in the US, with 1,714 deaths and 76,049 confirmed cases (as of Wednesday, April 1).

Makeshift morgues line the streets around some area hospitals in Manhattan, are being used to relieve the stress of the hospital system that has been overwhelmed with COVID-19 patients.

New video (not mine) from #NYC where bodies of the victims of #COVID19 line the sidewalk outside a hospital for transfer to a mobile morgue unit. #NewYork #coronavirus #FlattenTheCurve #CoronaUpdate #Quarantine @NYCEMSwatch pic.twitter.com/sJm6gQh7qT

— Sam (@gotmybelton) March 29, 2020

“We’re putting them out near major hospitals as a precautionary measure to prepare for the worst-case scenario,” a spokesperson said.

New York City is building a temporary morgue to deal with an expected influx of deaths from the coronavirus outbreak pic.twitter.com/xcc0fNB9Ex

— QuickTake by Bloomberg (@QuickTake) March 25, 2020

Two trailers are now needed to handle Wyckoff Heights overwhelmed morgue. Be safe and quarantine new york. #COVIDー19 #nyccoronavirus pic.twitter.com/mkFucfNzVE

— Marc Koz (@mjkoz) April 1, 2020

For those of you who continue to think or say that #Covid-19 is being exaggerated or its not that big of a deal. You can see in this video hospital workers in New York dragging dead bodies into 53’ft trailers.
Still dont think its that serious? #stayhome and #stayhealthy pic.twitter.com/5fmEMj2S8R

— UNREGULATED MEDIA (@unregulatedm) March 31, 2020

Hospitals in New York have rented refrigerated trailers to store overflow bodies from the Coronavirus.

Never have I seen a more incompetent and evil President – one who is responsible for this.

Trump has now joined the pantheon of serial killers and mass murderers of the past. pic.twitter.com/6QRgqCZTKk

— Frank Woods (@quantumscribe) March 30, 2020

The lower building in foreground is the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner of the City of New York, and the “morgue” for New York County = Manhattan. The white 40′ refrigerated truck-trailer is for… exactly what you think it is for. pic.twitter.com/srZwVlaThK

— Nero Claudius Drusus (@drususclaudius) March 26, 2020

In lower Manhattan, a large tent and tractor-trailers have been installed, which is acting as an overflow for the central morgue.

Last week, a shocking video showed a forklift raising a body into a makeshift morgue outside a Brooklyn hospital.

A sad scene at Brooklyn Hospital #Covid_19 #coronavirus pic.twitter.com/dRUNE61yPs

— Joe Borelli (@JoeBorelliNYC) March 29, 2020

Now there’s something even more shocking. On par to what we showed readers several months ago with body bags piling up at a Wuhan hospital. This time it’s allegedly happening at Lenox Hill Hospital, a member hospital of Northwell Health, located in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. 

The disturbing video first shows the makeshift morgue outside of the hospital. Then transitions into a building, presumably inside the hospital, with black body bags scattered across several rooms and lining a hallway, suggesting that this hospital could have already hit full capacity. 

Jack could you confirm whether the is Lenox hill hospital in Manhattan?

WARNING: Disturbing video pic.twitter.com/ZCiY5ZZCpX

— Johnny Bling 🇺🇸⭐⭐⭐ (@Fightba40518677) April 1, 2020

And just in case the Twitter police delete the video, here are some screenshots of the video below: 

We noted on Tuesday that US hospital systems had restricted doctors and nurses from sharing their accounts of how hospitals are running out of medical supplies and are being overwhelmed with the fast-spreading virus. 

America’s hospital system is cracking.

Dr. Sucharit Bhakdi, Professor Emeritus of Medical Microbiology at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, released a now-viral video in which he calmly explained why nationwide lockdowns are “collective suicide”.

Now he has written an open letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel and it is fantastic…

Via Anti-Empire.com,

A medical expert with integrity asks the German Chancellor five devastating questions about her mindless coronavirus lockdown…

Open Letter

Dear Chancellor,

As Emeritus of the Johannes-Gutenberg-University in Mainz and longtime director of the Institute for Medical Microbiology, I feel obliged to critically question the far-reaching restrictions on public life that we are currently taking on ourselves in order to reduce the spread of the COVID-19 virus.

It is expressly not my intention to play down the dangers of the virus or to spread a political message. However, I feel it is my duty to make a scientific contribution to putting the current data and facts into perspective – and, in addition, to ask questions that are in danger of being lost in the heated debate.

The reason for my concern lies above all in the truly unforeseeable socio-economic consequences of the drastic containment measures which are currently being applied in large parts of Europe and which are also already being practiced on a large scale in Germany.

My wish is to discuss critically – and with the necessary foresight – the advantages and disadvantages of restricting public life and the resulting long-term effects.

To this end, I am confronted with five questions which have not been answered sufficiently so far, but which are indispensable for a balanced analysis.

I would like to ask you to comment quickly and, at the same time, appeal to the Federal Government to develop strategies that effectively protect risk groups without restricting public life across the board and sow the seeds for an even more intensive polarization of society than is already taking place.

With the utmost respect,

Prof. em. Dr. med. Sucharit Bhakdi

*  *  *

1. Statistics

In infectiology – founded by Robert Koch himself – a traditional distinction is made between infection and disease. An illness requires a clinical manifestation. Therefore, only patients with symptoms such as fever or cough should be included in the statistics as new cases.

In other words, a new infection – as measured by the COVID-19 test – does not necessarily mean that we are dealing with a newly ill patient who needs a hospital bed. However, it is currently assumed that five percent of all infected people become seriously ill and require ventilation. Projections based on this estimate suggest that the healthcare system could be overburdened.

My question:

Did the projections make a distinction between symptom-free infected people and actual, sick patients – i.e. people who develop symptoms.

2. Dangerousness

A number of coronaviruses have been circulating for a long time – largely unnoticed by the media.  If it should turn out that the COVID-19 virus should not be ascribed a significantly higher risk potential than the already circulating corona viruses, all countermeasures would obviously become unnecessary.

The internationally recognized International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents will soon publish a paper that addresses exactly this question. Preliminary results of the study can already be seen today and lead to the conclusion that the new virus is NOT different from traditional corona viruses in terms of dangerousness. The authors express this in the title of their paper „SARS-CoV-2: Fear versus Data“.

My question:

How does the current workload of intensive care units with patients with diagnosed COVID-19 compare to other coronavirus infections, and to what extent will this data be taken into account in further decision-making by the federal government? In addition: Has the above study been taken into account in the planning so far?  Here too, of course, „diagnosed“ means that the virus plays a decisive role in the patient’s state of illness, and not that previous illnesses play a greater role.

3. Dissemination

According to a report in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, not even the much-cited Robert Koch Institute knows exactly how much is tested for COVID-19. It is a fact, however, that a rapid increase in the number of cases has recently been observed in Germany as the volume of tests increases.

It is therefore reasonable to suspect that the virus has already spread unnoticed in the healthy population. This would have two consequences: firstly, it would mean that the official death rate – on 26 March 2020, for example, there were 206 deaths from around 37,300 infections, or 0.55 percent – is too high; and secondly, it would mean that it would hardly be possible to prevent the virus from spreading in the healthy population.

My question:

Has there already been a random sample of the healthy general population to validate the real spread of the virus, or is this planned in the near future?

4. Mortality

The fear of a rise in the death rate in Germany (currently 0.55 percent) is currently the subject of particularly intense media attention. Many people are worried that it could shoot up like in Italy (10 percent) and Spain (7 percent) if action is not taken in time.

At the same time, the mistake is being made worldwide to report virus-related deaths as soon as it is established that the virus was present at the time of death – regardless of other factors. This violates a basic principle of infectiology: only when it is certain that an agent has played a significant role in the disease or death may a diagnosis be made. The Association of the Scientific Medical Societies of Germany expressly writes in its guidelines: „In addition to the cause of death, a causal chain must be stated, with the corresponding underlying disease in third place on the death certificate. Occasionally, four-linked causal chains must also be stated.“

At present there is no official information on whether, at least in retrospect, more critical analyses of medical records have been undertaken to determine how many deaths were actually caused by the virus.

My question:

Has Germany simply followed this trend of a COVID-19 general suspicion? And: is it intended to continue this categorisation uncritically as in other countries? How, then, is a distinction to be made between genuine corona-related deaths and accidental virus presence at the time of death?

5. Comparability

The appalling situation in Italy is repeatedly used as a reference scenario. However, the true role of the virus in that country is completely unclear for many reasons – not only because points 3 and 4 above also apply here, but also because exceptional external factors exist which make these regions particularly vulnerable.

One of these factors is the increased air pollution in the north of Italy. According to WHO estimates, this situation, even without the virus, led to over 8,000 additional deaths per year in 2006 in the 13 largest cities in Italy alone. [7] The situation has not changed significantly since then. [8] Finally, it has also been shown that air pollution greatly increases the risk of viral lung diseases in very young and elderly people. [9]

Moreover, 27.4 percent of the particularly vulnerable population in this country live with young people, and in Spain as many as 33.5 percent. In Germany, the figure is only seven percent [10]. In addition, according to Prof. Dr. Reinhard Busse, head of the Department of Management in Health Care at the TU Berlin, Germany is significantly better equipped than Italy in terms of intensive care units – by a factor of about 2.5 [11].

My question:

What efforts are being made to make the population aware of these elementary differences and to make people understand that scenarios like those in Italy or Spain are not realistic here?

*  *  *

This is an unofficial translation; see the original letter in German as a PDF.

Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,

It’s been a couple of days since my post on deaths per 100,000 in the USA and several other countries.

I’m very much a cautious “measure twice, cut once” type of person, so I went back and updated some of my calculations using more recent numbers.

Specifically, I’ve updated the third graph in the original post which is the number of deaths per 100,000 at the same point in the timeline since at least 1 case per million population was reported.

In the US, the first day to show more than one case per million population was March 7. So, counting up twenty days we arrive at March 26. On that day, there were 1,295 total deaths in the US. That works out to 0.391 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000. Meanwhile, in Italy, the first day with at least one case per million was Feb 22. Twenty days later, there were 1,106 deaths. That works out to 1.572 COVID-19 deaths per 100,000.

And so on:

And here’s how things looked five days earlier, on day 15:

The gap between the US and Spain and the US and Italy became larger over these five days. At day 15, Italy’s total for deaths per 100,000 was 3.9 times larger than the US rate. At Day 20, Italy’s rate was up slightly at 4 times larger. At Day 15, Spain’s death rate was 4.6 times larger than that in the US. At day 20, Spain’s rate had grown to 5.6 times larger than the US rate.

As I noted earlier, there are many reasons why the deaths per 100,000 could be higher in Spain and Italy than in the US, Germany, and Switzerland.

One may be the quality of healthcare.

While the US, Germany, and Switzerland all have health systems with sizable government sectors, they have multi-payer systems that are more competitive and modern than the systems found in Spain and Italy (and the UK, for that matter).

Switzerland has a system similar to Obamacare.

Another major factor is demographics. Both Spain and Italy have some of the lowest birth rates in the world, and these relatively elderly populations are lopsidedly affected by COVID-19. These demographic trends can be seen a bit in their population growth:

Note how few people Spain and Italy add each day on average. Spain barely adds anyone at all each day. And Italy is declining in population. (These are historical averages, so this doesn’t include deaths from COVID-19.)

Italy is simply a country with a very old population and very low birth rate. In fact, Italy’s population is projected to fall more than 10 percent over the next thirty years. The US’s population growth, while not high by global standards, is certainly more robust than we’re seeing in Spain and Italy. This is true both in total numbers and proportional to the population overall. With the exception of Iran and Switzerland, the US is growing faster percentage-wise than all these countries.

These trends aren’t carved in stone. It’s entirely possible that something will happen in which the US’s death rate accelerates so fast that it overtakes Spain and Italy in this regard. At this time, however, that is not the trend.

(Net population change data, COVID-19 deaths, and total population data are from Worldometer.)