Month: January 2022

Infection Experts: We Will “Never” See The End Of Coronavirus

Infection Experts: We Will “Never” See The End Of Coronavirus

Authored by Paul Joseph Watson via Summit News,

Danish infection experts countered the WHO’s prediction that the COVID-19 pandemic could end in 2022 by asserting “we will never be able to wave goodbye to the coronavirus.”

During a statement to mark the start of the year, WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said that the pandemic could be over this year if the majority of people in all countries get vaccinated.

He added that “narrow nationalism” and “vaccine hoarding” were stumbling blocks that were preventing this from being accomplished.

However, Ghebreyesus received pushback from infectious diseases experts in Denmark, who see no end in sight for COVID-19 impacting people’s lives.

Eskild Petersen, professor of infectious diseases at Aarhus University, said it would be a number of years before the pandemic truly ends.

Chief physician at Aarhus University Hospital and professor Lars Østergaard asserted that while the pandemic stage of the virus may be declared over, coronavirus will always be hovering in the background.

“The pandemic may end. But that doesn’t mean that corona will disappear from our everyday lives. I think we will never be able to wave goodbye to the coronavirus. What we want is to have such good immunity in the population that we can deal with it like the other diseases we know,” Østergaard said.

As we highlighted last month, a poll found that a third of Brits think the pandemic will never end, underscoring how people have embraced the perma-bio security police state as a result of learned helplessness.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 10:45

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3ERRR8h Tyler Durden

Inflation In Turkey Explodes To 36.1%, Blowing Away Estimates, As Hyperinflation Sets In

Inflation In Turkey Explodes To 36.1%, Blowing Away Estimates, As Hyperinflation Sets In

Think 6.8% CPI is high? Think again: this morning long-suffering Turks living in Erdogan’s macroeconomic experiment woke up to learn that the country’s annual inflation rate surged to 36.1% last month, its highest in the 19 years Tayyip Erdogan has ruled, blowing away expectations of “only” 27.4%, and laying bare the depths of a currency crisis engineered by the president’s unorthodox interest rate-cutting policies. Staples such as transportation and food – which took increasing shares of households’ budgets during 2021 – rose even faster

In December alone, consumer prices soared by a hyperinflation-like double-digits, rising 13.58%, the Turkish Statistical Institute said on Monday, eating deeper into the earnings and savings of Turks ravaged by Erdogan’s demented economic turmoil.

The surge in prices reflected a more front-loaded exchange rate pass-through than usual triggered by the size of the exchange rate depreciation. However, as Goldman Sachs notes, inflation in categories like services that are typically not as sensitive to the exchange rate rose sharply as well – reflecting the lack of anchoring of inflation expectations.

Core inflation also surprised to the upside rising to 31.9% yoy in December from 17.6% yoy in November (consensus 24.3% yoy). Given the upside surprise with mom inflation of 13.6% not seasonally adjusted, Goldman thinks that inflation will rise above 40% in Q1-22 and remain there for most of the year.

The explosion in prices is tied to the record drop in Turkey’s lira which lost 44% of its value last year as the central bank slashed interest rates under a drive by Erdogan to prioritize credit and exports over currency and price stability. On Monday it whipsawed down 5% then up 3%, before trading flat at 13.2 vs the dollar.

Some economists are predicting that inflation will reach as high as 50% by spring unless the direction of monetary policy is reversed, which as Erdogan has made very clear, it won’t be, and after the central bank is done blowing tens of billions of dollars it doesn’t have to keep the lira from cratering, we expect total currency and economic collapse.

“Rates should be immediately and aggressively hiked because this is urgent,” said Ozlem Derici Sengul, founding partner at Spinn Consulting in Istanbul. Ozmel will probably be arrested in the next 24-48 hours for pointing out the obvious.

The central bank was however unlikely to act, she added, and annual inflation “will probably reach 40-50% by March”, by when administered price rises would have been added into the mix, including a 50% minimum wage hike.

While last year was the worst for the lira in nearly two decades, while the annual CPI was the highest since the 37.0% reading of September of 2002, two months before Erdogan’s AK Party first took office.

But Erdogan’s focus on Monday was on trade data which showed exports surged by a third to $225 billion last year.

“We have only one concern: exports, exports and exports,” he said in a speech, adding the trade data showed a sixth-fold rise in exports during his tenure as leader. What Erdogan didn’t focus on is that while exports for all of 2021 rose, in December the country’s trade deficit exploded by 46%, widening to $6.64BN, as imports rose 29% to $28.9BN, far more than exports which rose just 25% to $22.3BN.

In other words, even Erdogan’s focus on exporting his way out of the current crisis is starting to fail.

Erdogan, a self-declared enemy of interest rates, overhauled the central bank’s leadership last year, by which we mean he fired any central bank direct who disagreed with him.

The bank has slashed the policy rate to 14% from 19% since September, leaving Turkey with deeply negative real yields that have spooked savers and investors. The subsequent accelerating surge in prices and drop in the lira have also upended household and company budgets, scuttled travel plans and left many Turks scrambling to cut costs. Many queued last month for subsidized bread in Istanbul, where the municipality says the cost of living is up 50% in a year.

“We don’t sit with our friends in a cafe and drink coffee any more,” Mehmet, 26, a university graduate, said as he did his job as a pollster in Istanbul.

“We don’t go out, just from home to work and back again,” he said, adding he was buying smaller meal portions and believed inflation was higher than official data showed. In other words, just like in the US.

And just like in the US, the Turkish central bank has idiotically argued that “temporary” factors had been driving prices and forecast a volatile course for inflation, which – having been around 20% in recent months and mostly double-digits over the last five years – it said in October would end the year at 18.4%. Oops.

Sengul said that, with Monday’s data, that argument was over: “This reflects a vicious cycle of demand-pull inflation, which is very dangerous because the central bank had implied the price pressure was from cost-push (supply constraints), and that it couldn’t do anything about it,” she said.

Reflecting soaring import prices, December’s producer price index rose 19.08% month-on-month and 79.89% year on year. Annual transportation prices soared 53.66% while the food and drinks basket jumped 43.8%, the CPI data showed.

The economic turmoil has also hit Erdogan’s opinion polls ahead of a tough election scheduled for no later than mid-2023. read more

The lira touched a record low of 18.4 against the dollar in December before rebounding sharply two weeks ago after state-backed market interventions, and after Erdogan announced a scheme to protect lira deposits against currency volatility.

What does all of this mean for the worst performing currency of 2021? Well, at first, the Turkish lira weakened sharply as the market did the only logical thing it can do when hyperinflation sets in – it sold the currency, and in early trading, the lira depreciated as much as 4.5% per U.S. dollar on its first trading day in the new year, extending its losing streak to a sixth day, having given up more than 30% of the gains made after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan unveiled a plan on Dec. 20 to bolster the lira by shielding savings held in local currency.

However, shortly after the central bank stepped in with yet another ridiculous intervention that cost it about $1 billion (at this rate the central bank will be out of all intervention funding in a few weeks), and the lira reversed losses of as much as 4.5% to gains as much as 3.6%.

Unfortunately for Erdogan, such day-to-day attempts to crush the shorts will only work for a few days, and as Goldman wrote today, the bank continues to believe that the current interest rate policy with rates of 14% supported by administrative and quasi fiscal measures will not succeed in stabilizing the TRY sustainably. And while Goldman’s forecast is for rates to rise sharply in Q2-22 the bank’s Turkish strategist admitted that his “confidence is not high in this call” given that the authorities continue to prefer non-standard policy choices to attempt to stabilize the TRY. As a result, the most likely outcome is that the currency will soon retest – and breach – its all time lows as the Turkish economy sinks into the hyperinflationary mire.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 10:29

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

CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity


dreamstime_m_207993437

One of the only silver linings of the pandemic has been that young people are less affected by COVID-19 than the elderly. In fact, the most vital indicator of negative COVID-19 outcomes is age: Unlike the Spanish flu, which ravaged armies that were overwhelmingly comprised of otherwise healthy young people during World War I, COVID-19’s death toll is dramatically skewed toward those who have already lived many years. (For context, the average age of death from Spanish flu was 28.)

That said, about 600 Americans under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took a closer look at young people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in July and August, while the delta variant wave took hold, and largely found that healthy young people continue to mostly evade the worst of COVID-19.

The study found that most young people who suffer severe COVID-19 outcomes had underlying health conditions. The most common, especially for teenagers, was obesity.

“Among patients aged 12–17 years, 61.4 percent had obesity,” according to the study, “60.5 percent of whom had severe obesity.”

The study looked at six U.S. hospitals—all of them in the American South—and evaluated 915 cases of COVID-19 in adolescents that required hospitalization. The vast majority were hospitalized for COVID-19, though some had other infections as well. Of the 713 patients who were primarily hospitalized for COVID-19, two-thirds had at least one underlying health condition. For the teenage cohort—patients at least 12 years of age—the obesity rate was 61.4 percent. The severe obesity rate was 60.5 percent. Just one of the eligible patients had been vaccinated, and 11 patients died in total.

What this means, of course, is that COVID-19 can be a fatal disease, even for young people—but vaccine status and general health are extremely important variables. It remains the case that healthy children who do not have underlying health conditions—particularly obesity—are by and large safe from negative COVID-19 health outcomes.

“Compared with patients without obesity, those with obesity required higher levels and longer duration of care,” wrote the study’s authors. “These findings are consistent with previous reports and highlight the importance of obesity and other medical conditions as risk factors for severe COVID-19 in children and adolescents.”

One of the best ways to guard against obesity is to encourage healthy eating and active lifestyles among the youth population. Exercise is not a panacea, but kids who play sports or engage in physical activity are less likely to become obese. Physically active kids tend to have better diets than those who stay indoors all day, glued to their screens.

It’s important to perform this reality check—the more healthy and active kids are, the less COVID-19 threatens them—given just how much the lives of young people were upended by pandemic mitigation efforts. In the name of slowing COVID-19’s spread, public health authorities closed schools, shuttered extracurricular activities, and instructed young people to remain by themselves, indoors. Even benign activities like playing at the park were discouraged for the first few months of the pandemic. And while many activities have resumed, some college campuses (for instance) would rather their student populations quit sports than dare to do them unmasked.

Those who have rule-making power over young people would be well-advised to consider whether the purported cure is worse than the disease—and whether it actually makes the disease more dangerous for some. Young people need socialization and activity. They need a reason to put down their smartphones and venture out into the world. It is not in the interests of public health to keep them shut up in their bedrooms and dormitories for long periods of time.

As the super infectious—though seemingly more mild—omicron variant threatens to force public health officials to re-implement stringent mitigation measures, that’s worth keeping in mind.

The post CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity appeared first on Reason.com.

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The Year Ahead In The ‘New Normal’

The Year Ahead In The ‘New Normal’

Via Off-Guardian.org,

Our first “This Week” of 2022 doesn’t just look back over our shoulders, but forward too. What were the unfinished plotlines of 2021? What minor stories of last year could be major stories of this year?

This week we review what OffG will be on the lookout for in 2022.

1. PROGRAMMABLE DIGITAL CURRENCY

For the uninitiated, a programmable digital currency is a form of digital currency which can be programmed…I hope that clears up any confusion.

In all seriousness, central banks are researching the possibility of issuing their own digital currencies. These central-bank digital currencies (CBDCs) would be “programmable”, meaning either the bank issuing the currency, or the company paying it out as wages, have direct control over its use.

Banks (or employers) would have the power to set limits on the usage of the money they issue. They could limit how much of it can be spent, where it can be spent and what it can be spent on etc.

We published a long-form article on the possible abuses of such a controlling system of currency last summer. Since that article came out there have been further calls for its introduction, with Estonia and Ukraine both moving towards trialling the system soon, and Japan researching its feasibility.

Definitely a major concern for human freedom, and a major story to keep an eye on 2022.

2. THE PIVOT FROM COVID TO CLIMATE

We reported on this a few times over the course of 2021, but we don’t think it’s going anywhere. If anything, expect this campaign to pick up steam.

Today, Yahoo News lays out their big concerns moving into the new year:

In the new year: Fight against COVID and climate change and strengthen our democracy

On Christmas Eve, the Guardian had yet another article equating Covid to Climate Change, on December 17th the New York Times warned climate was an “emerging threat” to financial stability, whilst the New Statesman, on December 16th, warned that Covid was distracting from the climate “red alerts”, and argued climate catastrophe was the bigger threat.

Writing in the Independent yesterday, and rehashing an old, old, old talking point, Caroline Lucas argues that if we can find money to fix the financial crisis of 2008 (we didn’t) and fight a global pandemic (we didn’t do that either), then why can’t we pour money into fighting climate change? (we already are).

Her examples are well-chosen, even if she doesn’t realise why. Both the crash of ’08 and the “pandemic” are deliberately created crises used as a pretext for funnelling huge amounts of taxpayer money into private hands. Which is likely what any “green new deal” would be too.

Look for more of this as the year progresses.

Amusingly, the press seems to know we know, because they’re already trotting out some pre-emptive damage control, the Independent headlining, “Covid conspiracy groups may switch to climate misinformation in 2022, experts warn” just today.

3. EXPLAINING HEART ATTACKS THAT HAVEN’T HAPPENED YET

There was a lot of this in 2021, especially through the second half of the year.

And not just heart attacks, articles were popping up all over the media explaining strokes, blood clots and heart disease that hadn’t actually happened yet.

The omicron variant was initially said to have cardiac symptoms that were unheard of in previous variants.

Depression and anxiety were reported to be on the verge of increasing heart disease by 5% nationwide in the UK, they’re calling it “post pandemic stress disorder”.

The cold weather is blamed too. Young people smoking weed is blamed for increasing heart problems, as is bad diet.

A vitamin deficiency is causing a spike in strokes, apparently.

A lot of these people suffering the spike in heart attacks are “seemingly fit”.

Why are the media pumping out explanations for an increased risk of blood clots and associated diseases?

Well, when you factor in that the (untested and unnecessary) “vaccines” all have heart problems and blood clots as “very rare” complications, it doesn’t take a genius to put the pieces together.

This is a story we should all be following heading in to the new year.

BONUS: “ARE THEY SERIOUS?” MOMENT OF THE YEAR

We’re only two days in, but we already have a strong entry for most ridiculous story of the year. In Israel they are reporting the first cases of…wait for it…”flurona”:

Yes. The “pandemic” narrative’s desperate need for ever scarier headlines has resulted in a rushed and barely coherent sequel. A real “Frankenstein vs the Wolfman” moment.

Will they try and sell “flurona” to the people? Part of me really hopes so.

*  *  *

All told, it looks like OffG is in for a busy year, and we didn’t even cover the continuing war on free speech, or what the hell they have planned for Russia. Good times ahead. Happy New Year everyone.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 10:15

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3pN5nFQ Tyler Durden

CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity


dreamstime_m_207993437

One of the only silver linings of the pandemic has been that young people are less affected by COVID-19 than the elderly. In fact, the most vital indicator of negative COVID-19 outcomes is age: Unlike the Spanish flu, which ravaged armies that were overwhelmingly comprised of otherwise healthy young people during World War I, COVID-19’s death toll is dramatically skewed toward those who have already lived many years. (For context, the average age of death from Spanish flu was 28.)

That said, about 600 Americans under the age of 18 have died of COVID-19 during the pandemic. A new study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) took a closer look at young people who were hospitalized for COVID-19 in July and August, while the delta variant wave took hold, and largely found that healthy young people continue to mostly evade the worst of COVID-19.

The study found that most young people who suffer severe COVID-19 outcomes had underlying health conditions. The most common, especially for teenagers, was obesity.

“Among patients aged 12–17 years, 61.4 percent had obesity,” according to the study, “60.5 percent of whom had severe obesity.”

The study looked at six U.S. hospitals—all of them in the American South—and evaluated 915 cases of COVID-19 in adolescents that required hospitalization. The vast majority were hospitalized for COVID-19, though some had other infections as well. Of the 713 patients who were primarily hospitalized for COVID-19, two-thirds had at least one underlying health condition. For the teenage cohort—patients at least 12 years of age—the obesity rate was 61.4 percent. The severe obesity rate was 60.5 percent. Just one of the eligible patients had been vaccinated, and 11 patients died in total.

What this means, of course, is that COVID-19 can be a fatal disease, even for young people—but vaccine status and general health are extremely important variables. It remains the case that healthy children who do not have underlying health conditions—particularly obesity—are by and large safe from negative COVID-19 health outcomes.

“Compared with patients without obesity, those with obesity required higher levels and longer duration of care,” wrote the study’s authors. “These findings are consistent with previous reports and highlight the importance of obesity and other medical conditions as risk factors for severe COVID-19 in children and adolescents.”

One of the best ways to guard against obesity is to encourage healthy eating and active lifestyles among the youth population. Exercise is not a panacea, but kids who play sports or engage in physical activity are less likely to become obese. Physically active kids tend to have better diets than those who stay indoors all day, glued to their screens.

It’s important to perform this reality check—the more healthy and active kids are, the less COVID-19 threatens them—given just how much the lives of young people were upended by pandemic mitigation efforts. In the name of slowing COVID-19’s spread, public health authorities closed schools, shuttered extracurricular activities, and instructed young people to remain by themselves, indoors. Even benign activities like playing at the park were discouraged for the first few months of the pandemic. And while many activities have resumed, some college campuses (for instance) would rather their student populations quit sports than dare to do them unmasked.

Those who have rule-making power over young people would be well-advised to consider whether the purported cure is worse than the disease—and whether it actually makes the disease more dangerous for some. Young people need socialization and activity. They need a reason to put down their smartphones and venture out into the world. It is not in the interests of public health to keep them shut up in their bedrooms and dormitories for long periods of time.

As the super infectious—though seemingly more mild—omicron variant threatens to force public health officials to re-implement stringent mitigation measures, that’s worth keeping in mind.

The post CDC: 61% of Teenagers Hospitalized for COVID-19 Had Severe Obesity appeared first on Reason.com.

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Tesla Shares Surge After Record Quarter: Here’s What Analysts Are Saying

Tesla Shares Surge After Record Quarter: Here’s What Analysts Are Saying

Shares of Tesla are surging more than 7% in pre-market trading on Monday after the automaker announced it had delivered a record of over 308,000 vehicles in Q4.

We highlighted yesterday’s delivery numbers from Tesla here. For the year, the automaker delivered “over 936,000” vehicles, per a company press release. Those numbers are up about 87% from the year prior, according to Bloomberg. The report also reminded that Tesla has said “repeatedly it expects 50% annual increases in deliveries over a multi-year period”.

On that front, it’s so far, so good, heading into 2022.

It looks as though the phasing out of the Model S and the Model X is heading toward completion. Of the deliveries in the fourth quarter, 296,850 of them were Model 3 or Model Y vehicles, while just 11,750 were Model S or Model X vehicles.

Estimates had called for 12,719 Model S and X deliveries and 263,422 Model 3 and Y deliveries.

Recall, we highlighted Gordon Johnson’s analysis in late November where he claimed Tesla would beat its delivery expectations for Q4. Here’s what analysts are saying about the record quarter to start the new week, according to Bloomberg Monday morning:

Wedbush (outperform, PT $1,400)

  • Deliveries underpin electric- vehicle demand which looks “robust” for Tesla going into 2022, analyst Daniel Ives writes in a note
  • Says China demand is notable this quarter and “will be a focus for the bulls digesting these results”
  • Figures will improve sentiment for the EV industry as a whole, Ives writes

Jefferies (buy, PT $1,400)

  • Jefferies analysts including Philippe Houchois say “Tesla ended 2021 on a high”
  • Model S and Model X deliveries were “light due to capacity constraints” but Models 3 and Y over-compensated
  • Notes that deliveries exceeded production for the second quarter in a row

Cowen (market perform, PT $625)

  • “Tesla continues to shrug off the chip supply crunch and clearly has ramped Shanghai at breakneck speed”
  • However, Tesla will also need to successfully ramp up its new plants in Austin, Texas and Berlin, as well as maintain growth in China, for the stock to “continue to work” in 2022
  • Believes 2022 will be a more challenging year than 2021 due to increasing competition as Tesla’s existing vehicles get “long in the tooth”

Piper Sandler (overweight, PT $1,300)

  • Tesla’s 4Q run-rate suggests 2022 consensus is too low
  • Believes the company’s margins may also have ramped up substantially in the quarter
  • “Our estimates are biased higher”

Standing at odds with most analysts was GLJ Research’s Gordon Johnson, who put out a note on Monday morning asking whether or not Tesla’s numbers could be overstated. Johnson wrote:

Well, according to official Chinese Communist Paty (“CCP”) mouthpiece Yicai Global, in an article published today, we learned, and we quote: “According to industry insiders, Tesla’s sales in China in December 2021 may exceed 60,000. However, due to soaring orders and insufficient supply of chips and other components, it is estimated that only orders for October 2021 will be delivered at most”. We take this to mean that the numbers reported by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (“CPCA”) next week may fall materially below TSLA’s implied Dec. 2021 sales of 80.041K cars. 

“…there could be quite a bit of explaining to do (by both the company and the media/sell-side-analyst-community, who are seemingly ignoring what Yicai Global reported this morning regarding TSLA’s China sales),” Johnson concluded.

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 10:04

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/32CnqGh Tyler Durden

Stocks Tank After Weak Manufacturing Data, Dollar & Bond Yields Spike

Stocks Tank After Weak Manufacturing Data, Dollar & Bond Yields Spike

Well that escalated quickly. All that anticipation of hopeful new money gone shortly after the cash equity open as US Manufactruing PMI hit a 12 month low…

The Dow, S&P and Nasdaq are all back in the red while Small Caps oscillated wildly…

The long-bond spiked to Friday’s high-stops and reversed…

The dollar is spiking…

And as the dollar rallied, gold puked back down towards $1800…

Will 2022 start with a red day for a change?

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 09:59

via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3JCz30w Tyler Durden

It’s COVID Year 3 and the CDC Is Still Confused and Confusing


sfphotosfive243781

Trust the experts? If the pandemic were high school, we’d be juniors by now. Yet the fact that we’ve entered our third calendar year of full-blown pandemic—yes, technically it started in 2019, but the World Health Organization declared it a pandemic in 2020—feels surreal and almost unbelievable. While a lot has changed since early 2020, many things remain stubbornly and depressingly similar.

Schools are still closing without much warning, plagued by both politics and logistics. COVID-19 tests are still hard to come by. We’re still arguing about how to keep people in jails and prisons safe. Shows and festivals are once again shutting down. Hospitals are being overwhelmed. Flights are getting canceled.

And public health officials still can’t get it together. Their guidance is slow-moving, prone to flip-flopping, and weird, often out of line with scientific best practices, practical behavior, or both.

Take the latest from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), which since the start of the pandemic has been providing a master class in how to confuse the American public. For a long time, the agency recommended that Americans who test positive for COVID-19 quarantine for 10 days.

We now know that most infected people are not contagious for that long—here’s a great thread about testing and contagiousness that elaborates on this. Which means that officials have been asking many people to disrupt their lives for days longer than is necessary.

We’ve known this for a while. So, last week—finally—the CDC shifted course from its 10-day recommendation, saying five days of isolation were sufficient.

“People with COVID-19 should isolate for 5 days and if they are asymptomatic or their symptoms are resolving (without fever for 24 hours),” the updated CDC guidance says. “The change is motivated by science demonstrating that the majority of SARS-CoV-2 transmission occurs early in the course of illness, generally in the 1-2 days prior to onset of symptoms and the 2-3 days after.”

Great, right?

Welllllll…kind of. The agency forgot to include in its advice one important step: a negative COVID-19 test. Meanwhile, it did include some scientifically dubious (or at least incomplete) advice.

The CDC says infected people should follow isolation with “5 days of wearing a mask when around others to minimize the risk of infecting people they encounter.” But cloth masks, no matter how well-fitting, likely aren’t enough to stop transmission. Even common surgical masks may not do that; for effective mitigation, N95 masks are where it’s at. Still, officials refuse to say much about what types of masks people should wear, instead preferring the simple but potentially dangerous message that general masking is protective. This gives people a false sense of security and—if they’ve read much about transmission and masking—makes the agency seem scientifically unreliable.

Meanwhile, something that actually is consequential for determining—and stopping—potential contagiousness is whether a rapid antigen test comes back negative. Yet this was left out of the CDC’s updated advice last week.

Now, top White House COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci says the CDC is considering updating its recommendation to say that a five-day isolation period and a negative rapid test are recommended.

The paucity of rapid tests in America may explain why the CDC didn’t put that in its new guidance already. Unlike in Europe, rapid tests here remain hard to come by and relatively expensive. And why? Once again, we can blame the federal government. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been painfully slow to approve new rapid tests.

Regardless of why the CDC didn’t recommend testing before ending isolation, the result is once again making the agency appear wavering and unsure.

The oversight—and potential correction—marks the latest in a line of questionable CDC guidance, regarding everything from how the virus spreads to masking to what to do if you are infected. Since the start of the pandemic, messaging from the CDC and other government actors has been confused and confusing. At every step, it seems the agency has managed to undermine public confidence or put politics over clarity.

Is it any wonder many Americans aren’t keen to simply “trust the experts” anymore?

(If you’d prefer to end on a more positive note, here’s The New York Times with some ways that this point in the pandemic is not the same as two years ago and some reasons for hope.)

FREE MINDS

The conspiracy theory spiral. In two new studies, researchers found that “increases in conspiracy beliefs predicted subsequent increases in conspiracy beliefs, suggesting a self-reinforcing circle,” write researchers in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

FREE MARKETS

The student loan forgiveness debate is raging again. In his newsletter, Matthew Yglesias—who formerly supported such action—makes good arguments against this plan:

The economy is not depressed, and instead the Federal Reserve is pivoting to fight inflation. That means student loan forgiveness in 2022 is a purely distributive issue — one that will shift resources from the majority of Americans with no student loan debt to the minority of Americans who have it.

Both the debtors and the non-debtors are highly heterogeneous groups, but it’s pretty clear that the non-debtors are both more numerous and poorer on average.

So while there are certainly lots of individual cases where debt relief sounds like an appealing idea, under the current circumstances the case for broad debt relief has become extremely weak. There’s basically no other situation in which progressives would talk themselves into this kind of idea, which is currently being propped up with some very odd math about the racial wealth gap.

But I’d also say that the discourse around this seems to me to be largely driven by a correct sense that the higher education finance system in the United States is messed up and bad. The problem is that the form of debt relief that is being contemplated — one with no forward-looking reforms and in which even the most dysfunctional or abusive institutions still get paid in full — won’t fix anything about the system and could make it worse. Last but not least, I think the fascination with this idea represents a kind of unhealthy obsession with executive branch unilateralism. It’s important to understand and exploit the powers of the presidency, but the thing that sane people want here is not achievable through those means. What you need is a legislative coalition for reform, and probably a bipartisan one at that.

More here.

QUICK HITS

• The “plot” to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was an FBI creation, argue defense lawyers for those charged with conspiracy.

• Violence against the government can sometimes be justified, say one-third of Americans polled by The Washington Post. This is up from 23 percent saying so in a 2015 poll and 16 percent back in 2010.

• Sixty-two percent of people in a recent CBS News poll say they don’t want Donald Trump to run for president again:

• States around the country are raising their minimum wages this week. “Starting Saturday, 20 states saw a rise in their minimum wages take effect, while New York’s increase began Friday,” notes CNN. (See also: “How Economists Learned to Love Minimum Wage Hikes.”)

• “Copyright doesn’t need 95 years to get the job done,” argues Alan Cole at Full Stack Economics.

• Goodbye “genetically modified” food, hello “bioengineered” food.

• France is banning plastic packaging on produce.

• Dutch protesters stand up against new lockdown measures in the Netherlands.

• Another Hong Kong news outlet—Citizen News—is shutting down among diminishing press freedom. Its closure comes “days after police raided and arrested seven people for sedition at a separate pro-democracy news outlet,” notes the Associated Press. “Citizen News is the third news outlet to close in recent months, following pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily and online site Stand News.”

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US Manufacturing Slides To Weakest Since Dec 2020, New Orders Tumble

US Manufacturing Slides To Weakest Since Dec 2020, New Orders Tumble

Markit’s US Manufacturing survey printed 57.7 for its final December 2021 level, slightly below the flash level of 57.8 and at its weakest since Dec 2020…

Source: Bloomberg

Siân Jones, Senior Economist at IHS Markit said:

“December saw another subdued increase in US manufacturing output as material shortages and supplier delays dragged on. Although some reprieve was seen as supply chains deteriorated to the smallest extent since May, the impact of substantially longer lead times for inputs thwarted firms’ ability to produce finished goods yet again.

“Adding to the sector’s challenges was an ebb in client demand from the highs seen earlier in 2021, with new orders rising at the slowest pace for a year, largely linked to a reluctance at customers to place orders before inventories were worked through. Alongside a slight pick-up in hiring, softer demand conditions contributed to the slowest rise in backlogs of work for ten months.

“While shortages remained significant, the end of the year brought with it some signs that cost pressures have eased. The uptick in input prices was the slowest for six months, and firms recorded softer increases in selling prices amid efforts to entice customer spending.”

And this is what Powell is going to be tightening into?

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 09:50

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Monday Flight Delays Top 1,800 Amid Hard-Hitting Winter Storm In Mid-Atlantic

Monday Flight Delays Top 1,800 Amid Hard-Hitting Winter Storm In Mid-Atlantic

The timing of Monday’s winter storm for Mid-Atlantic states isn’t great as more flights have been canceled or delayed due to staffing issues and inclement weather. 

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued a winter storm warning for Virginia, Washington, D.C., Maryland, Deleware, and South Jersey. The storm could blanket D.C. with a foot of snow by Monday night. 

NWS warns that some areas could see upwards of 2 inches of snow per hour. Total snowfall could reach 10 inches in certain areas, but a large swath of the Mid-Atlantic could see 4-8 inches. 

Adverse weather conditions worsened the travel situation amid a crew staffing shortage. Flight tracking firm FlightAware.com reports (as of 0700 ET) 1,800 flights within, into, or out of the U.S. were canceled, with nearly 672 delays. That follows Sunday’s 2,709 cancellations. 

Reagan National, LaGuardia, Denver International, Baltimore/Washington International, Newark Liberty International, and Washington Dulles International had some of the highest flight cancellations this morning. Southwest, SkyWest, Endeavor Air, and JetBlue were the most affected airlines. 

Since Christmas Eve, at least 12,000 flights have been canceled around the country, making this past holiday travel season an absolute mess for airline passengers. It appears the travel chaos will be extended for the next few days. 

Tyler Durden
Mon, 01/03/2022 – 09:40

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