The Angry Bear

Here is a moment of respite: [embedded content] Don’t stand so close to me

“High Contagiousness and Rapid Spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2,” CDC, Emerging Infectious Diseases Doing my usual morning reading, I ran across a comment concerning an early release article by the CDC which as the CDC points out is not considered to be a final versions. I believe what is important about the preliminary information is the increase of R-naught from 2.3 to 5.7. By now I believe you know what R-naught means; but, I...

The superiority of stay at home orders vs. voluntary social distancing: two graphic proofs Here are a couple of graphs I pulled last week that I’ve been meaning to post. Together they show that mandatory “stay at home” orders have been much more effective than voluntary social distancing. First, here is a graph of the “change in distance traveled” by county during March: While almost all counties showed a sharp decline in the average distance travelled...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 9: Are new cases peaking? Or is a lack of testing failing to pick up continued spread Here is the update through yesterday (April 8) (NOTE: significant new developments in italics) I’ve changed the format, moving the “just the facts, ma’am” data to the top, and comments to the end. The four most important metrics are starred (***) below. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins...

Alan Collinge of the Student Loan Justice Org. has a petition promoting the cancellation of Student Loan Debt. When Angry Bear ran (April 1) his commentary on Student Loan Debt asking for signatures, there were 161,000 signatures on the petition. A couple of days later, the number of signatures was approaching 200,000 Today, I was advised, they now have 211,000 signatures. If the Fed will be supporting the asset-backed markets, the primary corporate bond...

Coronavirus dashboard for April 8: peak new infections *may* have occurred on April 4 – by New Deal democrat Here is the update through yesterday (April 7) I’ve changed the format, moving the “just the facts, ma’am” data to the top, and comments to the end. The four most important metrics are starred (***) below. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +31,480 to 368,449 (vs. 33,787 possible...

Kevin Drum reminds us that our fearless leader restricted air travel from China after the airlines had already done so. And today’s New York Times: New research indicates that the coronavirus began to circulate in the New York area by mid-February, weeks before the first confirmed case, and that travelers brought in the virus mainly from Europe, not Asia. “The majority is clearly European,” said Harm van Bakel, a geneticist at Icahn School of Medicine at...

A broad topic (at least it is close to the field in which I am most nearly expert). I am going to write about policy to deal with the economic effects of the Covid 19 epidemic. There has already been an amazingly quick and huge policy response, which generally seems fairly well designed (with different reasonable approaches in different countries). Also there is, of course, an active discussion of what remains to be done and what could have been done...

(Dan here…Best to go there for the content.  And Trump is only one of many.  One could add pipelines as an issue.  Who is coordinating this onslaught while we are pre-occupied?) Via Tom Dispatch : …the latest piece by TomDispatch regular Karen Greenberg, author most recently of Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State, on the many ways in which what may be a pandemic for the rest of us is proving to be the perfect moment for The Donald when it...