The Angry Bear

Effect of Remdesivir vs Standard Care on Clinical Status at 11 Days in Patients With Moderate COVID-19A Randomized Clinical Trial, JAMA, Christoph D. Spinner, MD; Robert L. Gottlieb, MD, PhD; Gerard J. Criner, MD, August 21, 2020 This is a freebie so you should be able to get into this article and pickup on additional detail. Those who were treated early on had a better result from remdesivir than those who were treated later after contracting Covid. This...

by Joseph Joyce FDI in a Risky World The pandemic has shown that global supply chains are vulnerable to shocks. Output contracted as factories were closed in China and the impact was transmitted to firms further along the chains and the distributors of the final goods. Foreign direct investment had already slowed in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, and there were questions about its future (see here). How will multinational firms...

The 2020 Presidential and Senate polling nowcast: partisan positions continue to harden Here is my weekly update on the 2020 elections, based on State rather than national polling in the past 30 days, since that directly reflects what is likely to happen in the Electoral College. Remember that polls are really only nowcasts, not forecasts. They are snapshots of the present; there is no guarantee they will be identical or nearly identical in early...

Whining About Lack Of Academic Leadership  At my so-called university named for the fourth president, the slave-owning “Father of the Constitution.”  No, I am not going to talk about the racism issue, which there is some effort to deal with on campus, notably in renaming three buildings named for Confederate figures, with our Provost originally from South Africa speaking reasonably intelligently about that issue. No, we had our annual general faculty...

In 1968, when Richard Nixon called for Law and Order, a term used by Goldwater in 1964 and Reagan in 1966, he was appealing to working-class voters who would normally be expected to vote Democratic but were becoming more and more uneasy about a perceived increase in crime and frequent stories of protests in the streets. In 1968, the real domestic issue was the economy, but that was far too complicated for American political discourse, and, besides, this...

Housing roars back As I wrote yesterday, the background longer term fundamental factors for the economy, most importantly all-time low interest rates, are very positive. In particular I wrote, this “has already made an impact on the housing market…Lower mortgage rates cause more people to buy houses. Housing permits have already made back about half of their pandemic losses as a result.” Well, with this morning’s report on July housing permits and...

Coronavirus dashboard for August 19: a regional look at infections; the Deep South remains almost totally out of control Total US cases: 5,457,824 Average last 7 days: 48,764 Total US deaths: 163,595 Average last 7 days: 1,048 Source: COVID Tracking Project My overall thesis is that under the present leadership the US as a whole is politically and socially incapable of bringing the coronavirus under control, as almost every other industrialized country...

Lifted from comments, reader likbez alerts us to this issue: In the meantime happening live in the USA but hardly on this blog… https://www.popsci.com/story/environment/why-us-lose-power-storms/ US has more power outages than any other !!! developed country. Our grid is outdated and rundown, but utilities aren’t willing to do much about it… oops (Generator-Industries bribes, lol ??!!) ...