Deaths aren’t going to wind up as only 60K, in fact, pretty safe to assume the US is already there when uncounted deaths are added in. However, the curve seems flattened, but as yet unwilling to decisively curve down.
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This is not exaggeration for effect.
I am awed by the American handling of Coronavirus. Truly awed. I’ve been writing about the slow-motion American collapse for ages. Heck, last year I wrote an article about how the US is a failing state:
The US is a gold-flecked garbage heap slowly rolling towards the ocean. On fire.
Yee-hah!
So, right now we have five states in the US that never bothered to self-isolate.
We have the Governor of Georgia announcing he will allow gyms, barbers, and fitness clubs, among others, to reopen on the 24th.
We have the Governor of Florida reopening Florida’s beaches. Good thing Florida doesn’t have a lot of old people!
There are astroturf protests asking for an end to isolation. “Let us die, let us die, let us DIE!” (Also, let us kill others.)
Virtually all the relief money has flowed to the top, not the bottom. Landlords and tenants are in crisis. Unemployment is going over 30 percent and in many places higher. A vast swathe of US small business will be destroyed, and they are unlikely to recover in a generation. Firms which borrowed money to do stock buy backs, or to give money to their private equity purchasers are slopping at the trough, but many of the actual businesses on the ground (like Neiman Marcus) will go under.
PPE can’t be found for hospital or logistics workers. Important pieces of the logistics hub, like meat packing plants, are shutting down. Warehouse workers are protesting, truckers are scared, etc.
The US is unable to make or procure an adequate number of masks or prioritize who gets them (though, really, everyone should be). The ventilators made by GM are inadequate, because Trump wanted to keep the price down.
Hospitals not only don’t have enough PPE, they’re going bankrupt because they haven’t been given enough money.
And so on.
Failing state. Cannot actually do really basic things. New Zealand did everything right, the US has done almost nothing right, and when it has, it is undone by some drooling, incompetent, ideological stooge or corrupt businessman or politician: “Get them back to work! I’m losing money!”
Here’s one simple issue: New York and other states are turning the corner. Stats are difficult, but it can be seen in the reduction of new cases in the hospitals. It will take some time to really get the curve down, but it’s being done.
Meanwhile, there are still accelerating pockets of infection in states that never shut down and other states are re-opening too soon.
How do you handle this? Well, what I would do if I were governor is get together with other governors who aren’t completely evil and corrupt and close the borders between states. Shipped goods from lunatic states gets put in depots on the border and is picked up by local shippers, everyone from a state which hasn’t isolated correctly doesn’t get in unless they go into quarantine.
To do this, the Governors will likely have to call up the National Guard. The US will be divided into groups of states which have shut off almost all travel between themselves.
All assuming Trump doesn’t get in the way and make it impossible, in which case, reinfection! More isolation, etc.
A complete clusterfuck.
Iceland, which has handled this pandemic in exemplary fashion, has noted that they have done what they were taught to do by Americans. Americans can no longer do these things. Jane Jacobs, in her book “Dark Age Ahead,” said that the key sign of the oncoming Dark Age was old knowledge being lost; that things which we could once do, we no longer could. She actually used the CDC as an example, and that was decades ago.
This is genuinely awe-inspiring to watch. I am truly amazed. I imagine it’s like watching the late Roman Empire, muttering to oneself, “We were never as great as they say, but we we could get things done.”
But the American elite reaction to anything these days is to see it as a looting opportunity. Pump up the stock market, let the peons starve and run out of rent money, shovel money to the rich, and buy up distressed assets. That’s what both DC Republicans and Democrats are doing and okay with. Yes, yes, Democrats are okay with it. They could actually play hardball and have not, and instead have capitulated after token protests.
There are clusters of competence, of course, but they are overwhelmed by incompetence, corruption, and callous disregard for anyone who doesn’t make at least seven figures a year. The elites are inbred, out of touch with actual production and only capable of playing political games. They get money by manipulating politics, not by genuine production.
The masses are little better. If New York Governor Cuomo had put New York on isolation even two weeks earlier, he could have saved thousands of lives. He has been behind the ball on everything all the way down the line. Of course, his approval numbers are soaring. (He’s an inbred incompetent, but less incompetent than Trump, so I guess he’s graded on a scale.)
It’s impossible to keep up with this, but the bottom line is that the US is broken. You’ve off-shored too much production capacity, your elites are incompetent, out of touch, corrupt, and trained to make their money by hurting other people. Your population refuses to vote for anyone who does the right thing, and instead keeps choosing (with the aid of the media, yes) people who are evil and so impaired that a sensible person would be aghast at the thought of even hiring them to walk their dog or babysit their kids. (Tell me that you would tolerate either Biden or Trump doing either job. But those are the people you want to be the most important person in the country.)
All empires and great nations end. With almost no exceptions, they rot from the inside, and any outside push is secondary–such as from threats they could easily have defeated in their prime (as Rome was able to keep the Germans on the other side of the Rhine for centuries).
America is a failing state. It can’t even handle problems for which the solution is well-defined. It can’t resist turning every crisis into an opportunity to make its elites richer. Its population prefers incompetent and depraved leaders who have spent their entire lives demonstrating contempt for the people who vote for them.
Failing state.
But awe inspiring to watch. Surreal. Amazing.
edit (April 23, 2020): Replaced “New Zealand” with Iceland for the quote about who they learned from. Both countries have handled Covid far better than the US to date.
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Our benefactor notes that the mortality rate has flattened at 5.4 percent. Because of limited US testing, this isn’t the real percentage; subtract a little bit and you still get a sense of mortality rates for those severe enough to get tested and, in many cases, to wind up in hospitals.
Deaths per day is meaningful because this is effectively a count of deaths in hospitals plus other obvious Covid deaths (in some states). If it’s declining, less people are dying in hospital.
I don’t want to be premature, but the curve is bending. The problems comes from those states which have never moved to isolation and those states moving to quickly to remove isolation (such as Florida re-opening beaches and Georgia’s announcement of opening various businesses on the 24th). Reopening, in particular, causes a delayed effect; remember that Covid is asymptomatic at first and, for some people, symptoms never occur, but during that time the disease is spreading.
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In response to the Atlantic article on how limited testing is affecting the Covid-19 statistics, our benefactor writes:
Our positivity rates at 20 percent are extremely high and consistent across time. I suspect that low numbers of new cases in the South are partially a reflection of a lack of testing. If you only have so many tests and beds, you will only get so many cases. Most early estimates were that the coronavirus would have to infect up to 60-70 percent of the population in order to reach herd immunity. We currently have .2 percent of the population with known cases. That’s tiny. Current states with the highest increases (over eight percent) of new cases are IA, KY, MI, ND, NE, OH, and WV. That’s not as large a sample as NY, but it tells you where testing has increased.
In addition, the mortality rate was expected to be one to two percent. We keep climbing every day and are well past 5 percent mortality rate. Sweden is at a 10.7 percent mortality rate. If we were testing a much larger population, our mortality rate would be dropping… Finally, though, I am hearing reports of declining ICU populations in NYC. That’s fantastic.
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**GUEST POST**
BY ERIC ANDERSON
Don’t part with your illusions: when they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. — Mark Twain
The latest plague to sweep our planet has seen me thinking hard about Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And I’ve concluded that, for roughly the past decade, I’ve been viewing myself with the 20/20 vision that only the truly delusional are capable. I honestly thought that I had attained the stage in my life that Maslow dubbed “self-actualization.” I haven’t. And if you think you have, well, you’re delusional too.
For those unfamiliar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a bit of context. Maslow set out his theory in a paper published in 1943 titled “A Theory of Human Motivation.” In it, he describes a five layer pyramid of ascending human needs beginning with the most basic like clean air and water, food, sleep, and intercourse, of course, because none of would even be here if we didn’t procreate. We’re intrinsically motivated to satisfy these first level needs, and once satisfied, our motivation to action matures to the next level — safety. Once we feel safe, our motivation turns to interpersonal needs. Those satisfied, we seek confirmation of social status from ourselves and others. Finally, we reach the pinnacle where we express the motivations society generally ascribes to what it really means to be human.
I say “what it really means to be human” because we can find examples throughout the social animal world of the four previous motivations. But, are you self-actualized? Are you, really human? Or, just another animal hanging on by your fingernails to a precarious simulacrum of humanity? Only recently, I’ve come to understand it’s the latter. I’ve come to understand we are only as self-actualized as the society we live in allows us to be.
It’s an easy mistake to make when times are good. When happenstance allows one to focus on “individuality.” But let’s break the pyramid down from the top. I can honestly say there is little about me during this pandemic that is feeling particularly creative. Little thought to my ego. True, I’m lucky to be loved, and, in turn, have others in my life that I love. But, as an abstract concept? Or, being motivated to “belong” to anything outside of my family? No — I can’t say that I’m too interested. Rather, I’m stuck squarely at making sure my family and loved ones are safe.
This is the society we live in. This is the society our “best and brightest” have engineered. It is the opposite of resilient, and therefore, the opposite of safe and dependable. As a result, the daily energy I could be exerting toward creativity, spontaneity, and problem solving instead goes into making sure myself and my family are safeguarded against being deprived of their most basic needs. And, as such, it is only logical to conclude that in order to attain self-actualization, I must be prepared to exist as an individual wholly independent from the “system” we’ve created. Everything I need for the survival of my family must exist at arms length. Remember that basic necessity of of sleep? Well, without these assurances in place, I really don’t.
Our world’s systems, despite the many labels we place upon them such as capitalism, socialism, or any number of theologisms is really little more than precaritism. This isn’t a new insight. The “precariat” is a term that has been thrown about in certain circles for some time now. However, it is typically reserved for the poor. But please, show me a self-actualized billionaire and I’ll show you a frightened effete building a bunker in New Zealand.
It took this pandemic to remove the blinders from my eyes. The rich aren’t building bunkers because of Covid-19. They’re building them, perhaps, because of global warming. Or, perhaps mass insurrection. Maybe an asteroid? The point being, those society deems most worthy of attaining the holy grail of self-actualization feel, deep in their bones, that one butterfly flapping its wings in just the right place and time will bring this entire charade to the ground.
The world we live in has never been one of anything more than basic animal motivations. And so I conclude, the ability to attain self-actualization isn’t what it means to be human — the ability to lie to ourselves is. Delusion, get behind me.
by Tony Wikrent
Economics Action Group, North Carolina Democratic Party Progressive Caucus
Is America Going to Have a Covid-19 Apocalypse?
Ian Welsh, April 17, 2020
In the US, we have predictions of a 30 percent unemployment rate. I just saw that less than half of Los Angeles county still has a job. The bailout for regular people is $1,200. In a place like Los Angeles, that won’t even cover most people’s rent.
There’s been a vast bailout, mainly–though not exclusively–through the Fed, for the rich. Basically, as much free money at the trough as they can gorge on. But small businesses are toast. A third of households, at least, are on the verge of not just homelessness but not being able to eat….
Meanwhile, multiple states have not instituted isolation, and there are “protests,” backed by Republicans, to reopen states that have. Not isolating nationally means there are pockets of plague which are still expanding exponentially, and which can reinfect the areas which did isolate. Coming out of isolation too soon will mean that cases will explode again a month to a month and a half after self-isolation ends.
The job issues mean trouble. People who can’t afford food become violent. Food riots bring down nations.
The New Fault Lines in a Post-Globalized World
Marshall Auerback [Economy for All (Independent Media Institute), via Naked Capitalism 4-16-20]
Forget about the “new world order.” Offshoring and global supply chains are out; regional and local production is in. Market fundamentalism is passé; regulation is the norm. Public health is now more valuable than just-in-time supply systems. Stockpiling and industrial capacity suddenly make more sense, which may have future implications in the recently revived antitrust debate in the U.S.
Biodata will drive the next phase of social management and surveillance, with near-term consequences for the way countries handle immigration and customs. Health care and education will become digitally integrated the way newspapers and television were 10 years ago. Health care itself will increasingly be seen as a necessary public good, rather than a private right, until now in the U.S. predicated on age, employment or income levels.
The Plan Is to Save Capital and Let the People Die
[In These Times, via Common Dreams 1-9-20]
Those are all obvious steps to take if your goal was to protect humans. But imagine, instead, if you had an entirely different goal: protecting capital. What would you do then? Well, you would prioritize the health of corporate balance sheets, rather than human bodies. You would keep the healthcare industry, now booming, in private hands; you would stimulate consumer demand via unemployment benefits, rather than by keeping workers on existing payrolls, in order to create an enormous pool of cheap and desperate labor; you would pursue tax cuts for the investor class; you would welcome the opportunity to allow debt to pile up on individuals; and you wouldn’t be too sad about small businesses going bankrupt—they are, after all, just ceding market share to bigger, richer businesses. You would use this crisis to create a greater, not lesser, concentration of wealth. You would emerge on the other side with more, not less, inequality. The truth is, it would be easy.
Now, guess what the U.S. federal government is doing? It is allowing the unemployment rate to skyrocket, as tens of millions of workers are fired; it is allowing countless small businesses to go bankrupt, from incompetence and neglect; it has not even considered a national suspension of rent, nor a strong national policy of paid sick leave, much less a national system of free public healthcare; as millions of needy people struggle with decrepit and broken state unemployment systems and wait weeks or months for their emergency checks to come, and essential workers are forced to agitate or walk out to gain hazard pay, the administration plots a new bill featuring a capital gains tax cut and “a waiver that would clear businesses of liability from employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.”
….The true heroes of this crisis, from the perspective of those in charge, will be the private equity firms that rush in to buy up distressed businesses, and the hedge funds that pour money into cheap debt, and the investors that scoop up the homes that people will be evicted from. They are the ones that renew the blood of capital, you see. They are the ones that will rescue us. They are the ones who will shepherd our precious capital through this dangerous time, and into the promised land.
Mark Blyth and Jeffrey Sommers: Austerity – A Dangerous Idea Returns
Mark Blyth and Jeffrey Sommers [Naked Capitalism 4-13-20]
Our benefactor writes:
No new news. From other news sources, measurable numbers of deaths are happening at home in other states. No one seems to know if they’re being counted.
One important thing to note is that the amount of testing in the US is constricted. As a result, the numbers of confirmed cases are also constricted. It may well be, as the Atlantic argues in this article from the 16th (which you should read) that we just don’t know the number of cases.
But there is another way to interpret the decline in new cases: The growth in the number of new tests completed per day has also plateaued. Since April 1, the country has tested roughly 145,000 people every day with no steady upward trajectory. The growth in the number of new cases per day, and the growth in the number of new tests per day, are very tightly correlated.
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Our benefactor writes:
New format.
There are significant percentage increases in cases in lots of states. In terms of new cases, one-third are from NY. There is also a significant increase in deaths–again, possibly a restating of deaths at home in NY, not sure. Over half came from NY. The long tail persists. I’m having a hard time not seeing us reaching 60k deaths by end April.
Ian: Florida has re-opened its beaches. This is hilariously stupid and evil and is going to end so, so, well. Good thing Florida doesn’t have many old people.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
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