Jack

Italy’s government normally spends about 50% of GDP, even more than Sweden, making it one of the most lavish welfare states in the world.  So what does Italy get for all of that spending?  Here’s the NYT:

The underlying logic of Italy’s welfare system, which offers little support for those without tax contributions, remains intact. So Mr. Esposito and his family are relying on weekly food parcels from a community center. “Without their help,” he said, “we just wouldn’t have anything to eat.”

Even workers who are in the system can fall through the cracks. Lucia Vitale works at the Naples airport for about half the year, catering to the hundreds of thousands of tourists who arrive from March onward. For the other half of the year, she and seasonal workers like her can claim unemployment benefits. But those benefits have now run out. And they can’t get help from the government because, Ms. Vitale said, “we don’t fit into the right categories.”

The government has granted a one-time payment of 600 euros, around $650, to the self-employed and to seasonal workers in the tourist sector. But Ms. Vitale technically works in the transport sector, so she can’t apply for the support. For now, she too is getting by with handouts from volunteer organizations.

The situation for many is bleak. “Everyone here is having problems now,” Mr. Gallinari, the florist, said. “There are lots of people who are going hungry. You can see that their behavior is beginning to change.” Reports of social unrest across the region — shopkeepers forced to give away food, even some thefts — have ruffled a usually close-knit community. “The other night I caught some kids trying to break into my garage,” Mr. Gallinari said. “This is new for us.”

Even so, such incidents are rare. More striking — and representative of neighborhood life in Naples — has been a groundswell of community initiatives, to fill the void of absent state support. Some have set up a mutual aid help line so that volunteers can deliver food and assistance. And certain shops have begun encouraging customers to cover a shopping bill for someone unable to pay, in the Neapolitan tradition of the “caffè sospeso,” or suspended coffee.

Notice that even a welfare state like Italy is unable to provide a basic safety net in an emergency.  Why is that?  Why not increase spending to 60% or 70% of GDP for a couple of years, until the emergency is over?

Italy could have done exactly that if they had not run up unsustainable budget deficits when they were not facing a crisis situation.  In fact, they did the opposite, borrowing so much that investors now view Italian bonds as having a greater default risk than German government bonds, despite both being priced in euros.  Because Italy did not save for a rainy day, they now lack the ability to provide emergency relief in a crisis.  Fortunately, Italy has volunteer groups to help out.

In recent years, pundits have often claimed that budget deficits don’t matter, as interest rates on government debt have fallen close to zero (or even negative in many European countries.)  I’ve been arguing that it is risky to boost the debt to GDP ratio to a very high level, at a time when most other pundits thought my ideas were old fashioned and out of date.  I argued that although interest rates are currently quite low, if they rose to high levels in the future then the interest burden on a large public debt could become unsustainable. That seems far-fetched today, but then the 15% interest rates of 1981 seemed equally far-fetched in the 1950s.

This is one reason why it’s not wise for countries to “max all of their credit cards”—borrow as much as lenders are willing to lend. History provides many examples of economic conditions changing in quite unexpected ways.  The “black swan” event in this case turned out to be a global pandemic, not higher interest rates.  But that’s the point—black swans are hard to predict.

Countries with their own currency (such as the US and Japan) have a greater ability to borrow money than those that lack their own currency (such as Italy and Greece.) But having your own currency doesn’t entirely eliminate the long run budget constraint. Rather the “default” that is most likely would involve high inflation, not outright refusal to pay the nominal obligation of the debt.

PS.   Switzerland has also been hit very hard by the coronavirus epidemic, but I don’t see press reports of hungry people in Switzerland.  Their government spends about 34% of GDP, one of the lowest ratios in Europe.

Actually, it very likely is. The first and the last.

AFAIK, the world has never had a global pandemic where vast numbers of people stopped working out of fear of becoming infected. We have had pandemics where vast numbers of people stopped working because they were dead. But that’s nothing like what we have today.  (The Spanish flu was associated with only a very brief and mild recession.)

As for the future, who can say? We now have a company that has a million thermometers in circulation, all linked to a central database. It picked up the oncoming disaster in America well before most other people, but its warnings were ignored by the government. Now this company says that the number of high fevers in America is falling fast. We shall see.

Does anyone doubt that this is the wave of the future—connecting IT with medicine? That we’ll be able to spot epidemics in real time?  Does anyone doubt that in the future our ability to test huge numbers of people for viruses will be scaled upward dramatically? It was 102 years between the Spanish flu and this epidemic. Say it’s another 57 or 91 or 114 years until the next big one. Does anyone feel confident predicting what health care will look like that far into the future?

Don’t get me wrong, I believe we will face major medical challenges in the future. There’s a growing risk of antibiotic resistant bacteria. Perhaps a deadly flu will jump from animals to humans. But it’s dangerous to assume that we know what form the next emergency will take.

We’d be smarter not to be reactive, focusing all our planning on a repeat of the coronavirus. Maybe we should focus our thinking on a wider range of possible crises. We should be trying to prevent terrorists from using bioweapons, or AI run amok, or accidental nuclear war, or asteroid strikes. I don’t know what the next global crisis will look like, but I very much doubt it will be a replay of the crisis of 2020.

Look for something totally unexpected, coming out of the blue.

And remember, the US government was almost completely unprepared, despite numerous warnings from experts.

Update:  On second thought, the post should have been entitled “This WHO official is both stupid and immoral”.  I didn’t mean to suggest that everyone who works at the WHO falls into that category.

The video where a WHO official refuses to mention the word “Taiwan” has gone viral.

The immorality of his action is obvious.  Less obvious is the stupidity.  You might think that he caved in to China’s demand that the WHO not recognize Taiwan.  But China does not demand that people refuse to recognize the existence of Taiwan.  Indeed China itself recognizes Taiwan, as a province of China.  (As does Taiwan’s constitution.)  People talk about Taiwan all the time in China.  The weather reports I used to watch on Beijing TV show forecasts for each provincial capital city, including Taipei.  The Chinese don’t act like Taiwan doesn’t exit; they officially regard it as just another province of China.  All the WHO official had to do is say, “The Chinese province of Taiwan has done a very fine job in controlling the epidemic.”  What a dummy.

And then there’s this:

On Jan. 14, the World Health Organization sent a tweet that turned out to be one of the most significant statements in the world’s fight against the virus now known as Covid-19. Based on information from China, the global health agency wrote, the new coronavirus didn’t appear to spread via human-to-human transmission.

Two weeks earlier, health authorities in Taiwan had reached the opposite conclusion. Not only did Taiwan’s Centers for Disease Control surmise that people were passing the disease to each other, they notified the WHO of their suspicions through the UN agency’s International Health Regulations reporting window, a platform for sharing information and updates.

“We tried to get clarification from the IHR on what’s going on in Wuhan,” Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told me. “But the response from the WHO was, ‘OK, we’ll take it from here.’” The Taiwanese never heard back.

BTW, the epidemic is finally slowing in Europe, and there are even a few signs that the curve might be beginning to bend in the US.  This is a very positive sign:

Austria has set out plans to become the first country in Europe to ease its lockdown against the coronavirus pandemic, with shops due to reopen as early as next week.

I’d expect the following from the GOP.  But the Democrats?

“We are concerned that Treasury Department’s recent guidance on the ‘Airline Industry Payroll Support’ Program does not fully reflect the intent of Congress,” they wrote in the letter, which also was signed by House Transportation Chairman Peter DeFazio and Sherrod Brown, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Pelosi and DeFazio have previously said that demands for airline equity stakes in exchange for the $25 billion in grants designed to save jobs are onerous and could prompt carriers to decline the help.

It’s bad enough that both parties want to throw money at the airlines (more specifically airline stockholders like me), but now the Democrats seem to oppose any provision that would allow taxpayers to claw back some of that reckless spending.

Wouldn’t it be so sad if the airlines refused the $25 billion we were trying to give them. . . .

I don’t have any axes to grind on coronavirus (except perhaps on masks), so some of my posts may seem to conflict. But they probably conflict less than you assume. Earlier I did a post questioning whether summer would make the problem go completely away, pointing to a rapid rise in coronavirus cases in many tropical countries. Today, I’ll present three pieces of evidence that warm weather will help at least somewhat:

1. Warm weather in the US seems to help. The three big warm states (CA, TX, FL) have (per capita) caseloads well below the national average. The same is true of Arizona, Hawaii and Puerto Rico. And this is mostly true even if you exclude New York from the sample, as it biases the national figures.

2. A few weeks ago, I noticed that Australia and Canada had tracked each other very closely for a considerable period of time. But in the past few weeks they’ve strongly diverged, to the benefit of Australia. Perhaps the first cases were mostly imported, and now that community transmission is the key factor we see Canada doing much more poorly. You might wonder why I don’t compare Canada to the US, but I actually regard Australia and Canada as the more similar countries.

3. The tropical countries continue to have strong growth in caseloads, but it doesn’t seem as explosive as the previous growth in Europe and the US, especially given their huge populations. Of course there may be a delayed reaction, or perhaps flawed data. But as of today they seem to be doing better than I would have expected.  India and Luxembourg?!?!?

In an earlier post I suggested that this is becoming a white man’s disease. If anything, that tendency has since become even stronger. South and East Asia have most of the world’s population, but only about 80 of the roughly 6000 coronavirus deaths today will be in that huge region. Africa is also mostly unaffected. Of the 26 countries with the highest active caseload, 25 are mostly white or mixed white (i.e. Brazil.) South Korea is 20th, and falling.

But a few weeks from now I might have a completely different view.

China’s active caseload has been steadily falling for many weeks. But the internal composition is interesting. The active caseload in China’s big cities (and some border regions) has been rising fairly rapidly, but the effects are masked by an even more rapid decline in Hubei province. At some point something will have to give. Either travel restrictions will slow the number of imported cases, or the total caseload will again begin to rise.

PS.  Don’t confuse official national policies with reality.  Governments in Brazil and Sweden have not adopted strong social distancing policies.  But Brazilian state governments have done so and in Sweden I’d guess that at the individual level people are doing much more social distancing that if the epidemic did not exist.  Someone correct me if I’m wrong in that assumption.

The United States now has more coronavirus cases than any other country, including China, marking a new stage in the epidemic. As before, feel free to treat this as an open thread for all coronavirus-related issues. Everything here is speculative and not intended as medical advice.

Hammer and dance

Most of the smart people I’ve been reading have converged on something like the ideas expressed in The Hammer And The Dance – see this Less Wrong post for more.

Summary: Asian countries have managed to control the pandemic through mass testing, contact tracing, and travel bans, without economic shutdown. The West lost the chance for a clean win when it bungled its first month of response, but it can still recover its footing. We need a medium-term national shutdown to arrest the spread of the virus until authorities can get their act together – manufacture lots of tests and face masks, create a testing infrastructure, come up with policies for how to respond when people test positive, distribute the face masks to everyone, etc. With a lot of work, we can manage that in a month or so. After that, we can relax the national shutdown, start over with a clean slate, and pursue the Asian-style containment strategy we should have been doing since the beginning.

This is the only plan I’ve heard from anybody that doesn’t result in either hundreds of thousands of deaths, or the economy crashing so hard we’re all reduced to eating weeds and rocks.

I relayed some criticism of a previous Medium post, Flattening The Curve Is A Deadly Delusion, last links post. In retrospect, I was wrong, it was right (except for the minor math errors it admitted to), and it was trying to say something similar to this. There is no practical way to “flatten the curve” except by making it so flat that the virus is all-but-gone, like it is in South Korea right now. I think this was also the conclusion of the Imperial College London report that everyone has been talking about.

Thank you for not smoking

[EDIT: This part is possibly wrong, see here]

There isn’t a lot you can do to improve your chances if you get coronavirus, but one really important intervention you can take right now is to STOP SMOKING.

I try not to lecture my patients on their health failings. I am not a jerk to obese people or people who don’t get enough exercise. But I try to tell every smoker, at least once, to STOP SMOKING. Studies have shown that having a doctor or other authority figure say this actually helps a lot, and every person who STOPS SMOKING gains 5 – 10 years of life expectancy. There is nothing else you can do as a doctor or a human being that gives you a medium chance of saving ten life-years with a ten second speech. Everything that effective altruism has to offer pales in comparison. So even though I hate lecturing people – on this blog as much as in my medical practice – I suck it up and tell everyone STOP SMOKING.

If you need a reason to quit now instead of later, here it is: coronavirus is a lot worse for smokers. The virus kills by infecting your lungs. If your respiratory health is pretty good, you have lung capacity to spare and will probably be okay. If your respiratory health is already iffy, you will need ventilation and maybe die. From this article:

An article reporting disease outcomes in 1,099 laboratory confirmed cases of covid-19 reported that 12.4% (17/137) of current smokers died, required intensive care unit admission or mechanical ventilation compared with 4.7% (44/927) among never smokers. Smoking prevalence among men in China is approximately 48% but only 3% in women; this is coupled with findings from the WHO-China Joint Mission on Coronavirus Disease 2019, which reports a higher case fatality rate among males compared with females (4.7% vs. 2.8%).

[EDIT: In Sweden, men and women smoke equally but men still die more, so the gender argument may not be as strong as it sounded a few weeks ago]

I want to clarify that what I’m telling you right now is totally unprincipled propaganda, intended to take advantage of a moment of panic – realistically, on the list of ways smoking can kill you, coronavirus is somewhere near the bottom. Quick back-of-the-napkin math: assume you have a 30% chance of getting coronavirus this year, that smokers’ death rate is 4% compared to non-smokers’ 1%, so quitting smoking now will save you a 1% risk of coronavirus death this year. But about 10% of smokers get lung cancer eventually, compared to very few non-smokers, and lung cancer has about a 66% death rate, so it’ll save you a 6.6% chance of death by lung cancer. Honestly, coronavirus shouldn’t even figure into your calculations here.

But since you are panicking about coronavirus right now, you might as well use it as motivation to STOP SMOKING. Smokers’ lungs start to heal as soon as one month after quitting – so quit now, and if Trump makes good on his threats to stop self-isolation and restart the epidemic after Easter, you’ll be feeling better by the time things get bad again.

Some people have a lot of trouble quitting smoking. If you’ve been unsuccessful before and you don’t have good access to medical care, try e-cigarettes – whatever you’ve heard about them, they’re infinitely better than the real thing. If you do have good access to medical care, ask your doctor for bupropion (aka “Wellbutrin”, “Zyban”), a very effective stop-smoking medication. I have seen dozens of patients quit smoking on bupropion; my most recent success was yesterday. It’s a great medication, and the most common side effects are curing your depression, improving your sex life, and making you lose weight. If you’re worried about going outside to get it, remember that most US doctors and psychiatrists are seeing people by video now, and many pharmacies have started drive-thru and delivery services. Alternately, you could travel to your local pharmacy on a crowded bus, lick everyone who goes on or off, then stop in Wuhan on your way home for a tasty bowl of bat soup. It doesn’t matter, taking care of this now instead of putting it off would still increase your life expectancy on net.

Japan and other mysteries

Japan should be having a terrible time right now. They were one of the first countries to get coronavirus cases, around the same time as South Korea and Italy. And their response has been somewhere between terrible and nonexistent. A friend living in Japan says that “Japan has the worst coronavirus response in the world (the USA is second worst)”, and gets backup from commenters, including a photo of still-packed rush hour trains. Japan is super-dense and full of old people, so at this point the living should envy the dead.

But actually their case number has barely budged over the past month. It was 200 a month ago. Now it’s 1300. This is the most successful coronavirus containment by any major country’s, much better than even South Korea’s, and it was all done with zero effort.

The obvious conclusion is that Japan just isn’t testing anyone. This turns out to be true – they were hoping that if they made themselves look virus-free, the world would still let them hold the Tokyo Olympics this summer.

But at this point, it should be beyond their ability to cover up. We should be getting the same horrifying stories of overflowing hospitals and convoys of coffins that we hear out of Italy. Japanese cities should be defying the national government’s orders and going into total lockdowns. Since none of this is happening, it looks like Japan really is almost virus-free. The Japan Times is as confused about this as I am.

Some people have gestured at the Japanese being an unusually clean and law-abiding people. Maybe the government has just sort of subtly communicated “don’t do anything that will mess up our Olympics chances” and everyone has been really good at not touching their face. Maybe widespread use of face masks is much much more important than anyone has previously believed. I don’t know.

One way this should affect us Westerners is by making us worried that an Asian-style containment strategy wouldn’t work here. The evidence in favor of such a strategy is that it worked in a bunch of Asian countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. But if there’s something about wealthy orderly mask-wearing Asian societies that makes them mysteriously immune to the pandemic, maybe their containment strategies aren’t really that impressive. Maybe they just needed a little bit of containment to tip them over the edge. I don’t know, things sure seemed bad in South Korea a few weeks ago (and in Wuhan). I am so boggled by this that I don’t know what to think.

Also, what about Iran? The reports sounded basically apocalyptic a few weeks ago. They stubbornly refused to institute any lockdowns or stop kissing their sacred shrines. Now they have fewer cases than Spain, Germany, or the US. A quick look at the data confirms that their doubling time is now 11 days, compared to six days in Italy and four in the US. Again, I have no explanation.

Takeout

So far every US state and local self-isolation order has included exceptions for getting takeout or delivery food. I’m sure restaurants appreciate the business and consumers appreciate getting to keep that particular aspect of a normal lifestyle. But is it actually safe?

All the big organizations say yes. From Forbes:

“Takeout food seems to pose a very minimal risk of passing on coronavirus. Here, virology experts explain why….”There is no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 can be transmitted by eating food. I imagine that if this is possible, the risk is extremely low,” said Angela L. Rasmussen, PhD, a virologist in the faculty of the Center for Infection and Immunity at the Columbia Mailman School of Public Health, adding that she is not aware of any human coronaviruses that can be transmitted through food.

And the San Francisco Chronicle:

With dining in restaurants off the table, many Americans are wondering if take-out and delivery food options are still viable in the age of coronavirus. Luckily for people tired of their own home cooking, the answer is, by and large, yes.

According to the CDC, transmission of COVID-19 primarily happens person-to-person, so your largest risk is not in the food but in human interaction. Keep your distance as much as possible when picking up food, or request that delivery workers leave the food on your doorstep. As with other in-person interactions, remember to avoid touching your face and be sure to wash your hands thoroughly as soon as you can.

“It may be possible that a person can get COVID-19 by touching a surface or object that has the virus on it and then touching their own mouth, nose, or possibly their eyes, but this is not thought to be the main way the virus spreads,” the CDC says.

On the other hand, all of my friends who are actually worried about getting the condition are avoiding delivery food like, well, the plague. Their argument is that we know the virus can survive on surfaces for a while, so all you need is one food worker to cough on your food after it’s been cooked (or on food that doesn’t get cooked at all), and you’re screwed. Restauarants are supposed to follow sanitary precautions, but people familiar with the industry say these precautions are not so strong to 100% (or even an especially high percent) ensure you get un-coughed-on food. The CDC telling food workers they don’t need face masks does not exactly inspire confidence here.

I am really craving something other than the three or four things I can cook myself, and I have a lot of mutually-quarantined housemates to convince, so if any of you have any clearer estimate of the risk situation, please share.

Ventilator numbers

Britain has 5,000, or one per 12,000 citizens. The US has 160,000, or about 1 per 2,000 citizens (why are these numbers so different?). The head of a small ventilator company says they usually “sell 50 in a good month”.

Elon Musk recently delivered 1,255 ventilators to California from some of Tesla’s Chinese contacts, and promised to make more. Dyson, the British vacuum manufacturer, says it will be able to make 10,000 ventilators in time to help with the crisis – remember, that’s twice what the whole UK has right now. The American Hospital Association says 960,000 Americans may require ventilators during the pandemic – hopefully not all at once.

Ventilators also require trained staff to operate. I never know how far to trust medical people when they say something requires training. You would think doing a lumbar puncture requires training, but the training I received for this in residency was watching one (1) guy do it one (1) time, and then them saying “Now you do it” – which by the way is exactly as scary as you would expect. This is an official thing in medical education, called see one, do one, teach one. So when people say some medical task requires training, I don’t know if they mean “ten years’ experience and a licensing exam”, “watch it once and then we throw you in the deep end” or “we’re going to make you go through the former, but the latter would have worked too”. Hopefully ventilators are more like the latter and someone can train new people really quickly.

If you’re confused about the difference between ventilators, oxygen concentrators, etc, or you have clever questions like “can we repurpose CPAP machines as ventilators?”, you might like Sarah Constantin’s Oxygen Supplementation 101.

The British reversal

A UK critical care doctor on Reddit wrote a great explanation of their recent about-face on coronavirus strategy.

They say that over the past few years, Britain developed a cutting-edge new strategy for dealing with pandemics by building herd immunity. It was actually really novel and exciting and they were anxious to try it out. When the coronavirus came along, the government plugged its spread rate, death rate, etc into the strategy and got the plan Johnson originally announced. This is why he kept talking about how evidence-based it was and how top scientists said this was the best way to do things.

But other pandemics don’t require ventilators nearly as often as coronavirus does. So the model, which was originally built around flu, didn’t include a term for ventilator shortages. Once someone added that in, the herd immunity strategy went from clever idea to total disaster, and the UK had to perform a disastrous about-face. Something something technocratic hubris vs. complexity of the real world.

Maybe we should have taken it easy with the huddled masses

China had Wuhan, Italy had Lombardy. Two weeks ago, everyone expected Seattle or the Bay would be the epicenter of the pandemic in the US. Well, right now both of those places combined have about 3,000 cases. New York City has 30,000. The New York/New Jersey area has about half the cases in the US, and is rising fast.

What changed? Partly the international epidemic shifted from Asia (which has immigrant communities and transportation links on the West Coast) to Italy and Europe (which have immigrant communities and transportation links on the East Coast). Partly the West Coast had some good policy whereas New York had terrible policy (while California was instituting shelter-in-place, Governor Cuomo was vetoing NYC’s shelter-in-place order and later griping about the term shelter-in-place’s etymology).

But the other major factor seems to be density. NYC is by far the densest city in America, almost twice as dense as second-placer San Francisco. Density forces people together and makes infections spread more easily.

At least that’s the story. So how come San Francisco – again, number two on the density list – has been almost completely spared? How come, despite its towering skyscrapers and close links to China, SF has only 178 diagnosed cases – fewer than such bustling metropolises as Indianapolis, Indiana, or Nashville, Tennessee? How come the virus is so well-behaved in very dense countries like Japan, and so deadly in relatively sparsely-populated places like Switzerland?

I’m not sure. Maybe density measures are really bad? Like if NYC annexed all of Long Island, it would drop to having one of the lowest densities in the nation on paper, but this purely political act wouldn’t affect its coronavirus susceptibility at all. Maybe there are enough problems like this that all existing density statistics average very dense areas with less dense areas and so don’t tell us what we want to know for disease spread.

Consider Spain. On paper, it’s one of the least densely-populated countries in Europe. In practice, it’s a lot of rolling countryside plus a few very dense cities – four of the ten densest cities in Europe are there. Maybe that’s why it’s got the fourth most cases in the world right now, behind only China, Italy, and the US?

The worst-affected US city per capita isn’t any of the ones I would have predicted – it’s New Orleans. Nathan Robinson lives there and takes some guesses about why things there are so bad. By the way, it’s going to reach 89 degrees in New Orleans tomorrow; keep that in mind whenever someone says the virus can’t spread in warm weather.

Irresponsible opinions on meds

Donald Trump tweeted excitedly about hydroxychloroquine/azithromycin, a drug combination which looked good in a single small preliminary trial against coronavirus but is otherwise unproven.

A few days later, an Arizona couple took a fish-tank cleaner including the closely-related drug chloroquine to try to protect themselves from the disease. The man died and the woman is in the ICU.

First things first – from a medical perspective, what went wrong here? Fish tank chloroquine is chloroquine phosphate, which is a perfectly acceptable form of chloroquine approved for human consumption as the antimalarial drug Aralen. Chloroquine has lots of nasty side effects, but none of them are bad enough to kill you instantly. My guess is that the guy either took orders of magnitude too high a dose – the news articles just say “a spoonful” – or that there were other things in the fish tank cleaner. Interested to hear from doctors who know more about chloroquine on this.

Okay, now let’s get to the controversial part: is Trump responsible? He seems causally responsible, in the sense that his endorsement led to the overdose. But is he morally responsible? I just got done telling all of you that stop-smoking-aid bupropion is an amazing drug that can save your life. If one if you is an idiot and responds by taking 100 times the safe dose of some industrial chemical with bupropion in it, does that make me responsible for your death? Is the difference that bupropion is known to work, but chloroquine is only speculative? Why should this change how we distribute responsibility?

Maybe responsibility is the wrong lens here? Maybe Presidents should be aware that they have such an immense platform that all of their statements can be interpreted in absurd ways, and perform a cost-benefit analysis before saying anything at all? Maybe (to go back to my example), the cost benefit analysis passes muster for bupropion, because the chance that one of you does something idiotic and kills yourself is counterbalanced by the chance that many of you use it correctly and stop smoking? But responsible scientists were going to investigate hydroxychloroquine responsibly before Trump said anything, so his statement had no benefit and he should have thought more about the costs.

I appreciate this line of reasoning, but I hate it. It means you stop being able to communicate your real thoughts in favor of communicating whatever information a utility calculation says it’s most beneficial to communicate – which is fine until people very reasonably choose to stop interpreting your mouth movements as words. On the other hand, the President of the US is not really supposed to be a clearinghouse for medical information, and is definitely somebody whose words have direct effects on the world, so maybe we should make an exception for him.

For a fun example of how complicated this way of thinking becomes, @WebDevMason condemns the media for over-reporting on fish-tank-man’s death. She points out that that hydroxychloroquine may yet prove effective and become an important part of our arsenal against coronavirus. And when doctors start trying to prescribe it, a big chunk of the US population is going to know it only as “that thing Trump irresponsibly recommended even though it’s an ingredient in fish tank cleaners that kills you if you take it”. And they’re going to freak out and refuse. Might this also cause deaths? Who knows!

So who deserves blame here? Trump, for irresponsibly praising the drug? The media, for irresponsibly condemning Trump for praising the drug? Mason, for irresponsibly condemning the media for condemning Trump for praising the drug? Me, for irresponsibly praising Mason for condemning the media for condemning Trump for praising the drug? Had gadya, had gadya.

The third world

…is in really deep trouble, isn’t it?

The numbers say it isn’t. Less developed countries are doing fine. Nigeria only has 65 cases. Ethiopia, 12 cases. Sudan only has three!

But they probably just aren’t testing enough. San Diego has 337 diagnosed cases right now. The equally-sized Mexican city of Tijuana, so close by that San Diegans and Tijuanans play volleyball over the border fence, has 10. If we assume that the real numbers are more similar (can we assume this?), then Mexico is undercounting by a factor of 30 relative to the US, which is itself undercounting by a factor of 10 or so. This would suggest Mexico has the same number of cases as eg Britain, which doesn’t seem so far off to me (Mexico has twice as many people).

The developing world doesn’t have many ventilators and doesn’t have enough state capacity to enforce self-isolation very effectively. It’s full of very densely packed slums. It has a lot of dictators who like to deny the existence of problems and shoot anyone who keeps insisting a problem exists. It could get really bad.

I worry that nobody has the spare energy to do anything about this. The First World is busy saving itself. Rich countries will probably corner the facemask and ventilator supply. The kind of doctors who go to Doctors Without Borders are probably at home busy saving their countrymen. Everyone else is going to have such a bad time, with few reasons for optimism.

I’m not even sure what concerned people can do. Charities’ usual MO is to divert resources from First World countries to Third World ones, but First World countries are using all their relevant resources and won’t sell for any price – can you imagine trying to export ventilators from the US right now? You’d probably get arrested. Maybe the highest-leverage interventions are figuring out how to repurpose cheap pre-existing material for medical care – face masks made out of paper/cloth/whatever, ventilators out of ???.

Nigeria and Mexico and so on make me confused in the same way as Japan – why aren’t they already so bad that they can’t hide it? If the very poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa were suffering a full-scale coronavirus epidemic, would we definitely know? In Liberia, only 3% of people are aged above 65 (in the US, it’s 16%). It only has one doctor per 100,000 people (in the US, it’s one per 400) – what does “hospital overcrowding” even mean in a situation like that? I don’t think a full-scale epidemic could stay completely hidden forever, but maybe it could be harder to notice we would naively expect.

How can you help?

Sanjay on the Effective Altruism forum has a post about the best places to donate [to fight] COVID-19. Some of these are long-term work of questionable immediate relevance – the Johns Hopkins Center on Health Security does great work, but I wonder if a donation now just means that they hire some better researchers in six months and produce better policy recommendations next year. Also, I predict biosecurity think tanks won’t be funding-constrained for the immediate future.

Development Media International and Univursa Health are their recommendations for where to donate to help fight coronavirus in the Third World, but as far as I can tell neither organization is publicly doing that yet – they just seem like the kind of organizations that could and will eventually have to.

The writer is not entirely sure you should donate to coronavirus control at all – everyone’s doing it and the field probably has enough funding to pick most low-hanging fruits. Remember that malaria still kills 400,000 people per year (about 20% of the expected coronavirus death toll) but is probably getting a tiny fraction of the funding and attention right now.

Give Directly, previously known for giving cash directly to poor Africans, is now also working on giving cash directly to Americans who are affected by coronavirus. You can read about their program here, and donate here.

The Frontline Responders Fund is working with Silicon Valley logistics company Flexport to try to transport masks and other medical supplies from producers to people who need them. You can read about them here and donate here.

r/CoronavirusArmy is the subreddit for people trying to coordinate various useful virus response projects. There’s the expected massive variation in quality, but some of them could be really helpful.

Worth it

A lot of people are secretly wondering whether preventing the potential damage from coronavirus is really worth shutting down the entire economy for months. You shouldn’t feel ashamed for wondering that. Everyone, including the US government, agrees that it is sometimes worth putting a dollar cost on human life, and there are all sorts of paradoxes and ridiculous behaviors you get trapped in if you refuse to do so.

Some people on this thread on the subreddit have tried to calculate it out, using the government’s value-of-one-life-year figures. There are a lot of variables involved that we can only guess at, but given some reasonable predictions, even at a low value of $30,000 per life-year it’s worth spending trillions of dollars to slow down the epidemic.

I don’t want anyone to feel uncomfortable discussing this, so if you disagree or have different calculations please feel like the comments here are a safe place to talk about it.

But no, You sent us Congress

The Senate mercifully approved a stimulus bill earlier this week. I say “mercifully” because watching the negotiations was painful. I still have no idea which party was Boldly Trying To Provide The American People With Necessary Relief and which one was trying to hold the bill hostage in order to add a wish list of stupid partisan demands.

The narrative I’ve been hearing from Democrats was that they were Boldly Trying To Provide The American People With Necessary Relief by giving loans to nonprofits, and the Republicans held it hostage by hamhandedly adding rules intended to guarantee that none of the loans could go to Planned Parenthood in particular – hamhandedly because the particular fig leaf they used – “no loans to nonprofits receiving Medicaid funding” – also disqualifies anyone else who helps poor people get healthcare.

The narrative I’ve been hearing from Republicans was that they were Boldly Trying To Provide The American People With Necessary Relief by giving loans and money to a broad selection of the American people, and the Democrats held it hostage by trying to make it about all of their pet issues instead. So National Review makes fun of Democratic demands that the package include rules restricting carbon emissions and expanding the bargaining power of unions. (see conservative satire site Babylon Bee for the complete list, YES I KNOW THIS IS FAKE).

But apparently all that got cleared up, and now the bill is under threat from – libertarians! According to the Washington Post, the main holdout in the House of Representatives is a “constitutional libertarian” who’s trying to prevent the House from voting remotely because the Constitution says it shouldn’t.

I have a lot of respect for principled constitutionalists who believe that the nation’s government should occasionally follow the document that they take a solemn oath to protect. But insisting on that now, of all times, seems kind of like closing the barn door after the horse has left, caught a plane to Cape Canaveral, boarded an experimental rocketship, gotten halfway to the Oort Cloud, and also some kind of weird terrorist group is threatening to start a nuclear apocalypse if anyone closes any barn doors. Just let this one go and get back to your noble-yet-quixotic crusade sometime when we’re not all going to die.

Getting it Right

It took the mainstream media a while to realize the seriousness of the coronavirus. The right wing has its own parallel media system, and I’ve heard accusations that it failed even worse, and for longer. I can’t comment on whether this was true at the time, but it seems to have improved; as of me writing this, fox.com, breitbart.com, nationalreview.com, and townhall.com all have front pages full of the same kind of frantic coronavirus news I would expect to see anywhere else. Reddit’s big pro-Trump subreddit r/The_Donald has a sticky thread of “President Trump’s Coronavirus Guidelines For America – 15 Days To Stop The Spread – READ AND FOLLOW”. Even the front page of Infowars urges readers Don’t Be A Covidiot – their term for someone who ignores the danger of coronavirus and doesn’t practice good social distancing.

Still, that was the result of a long battle. Just like on the left, a few prescient right-wingers had to battle to make their friends and colleagues realize the danger. I’ve heard Tucker Carlson deserves special honor for fighting the good fight when the rest of FOX was trying to downplay everything. Steve Bannon and Lindsey Graham also took a hard line and helped their colleagues see reason.

I’m not sure what the role of liberals (here used as a general term encompassing everyone except the hard right) should be in this process. I can only beg us not to mess it up. Calling right-wingers dumb for not getting the point fast enough risks messing it up; it could just make them more stubborn and angry. Also, Trump is the acknowledged world expert at reaching Trump supporters. If he thinks that calling it “the Chinese virus” will convince his xenophobic fans to take it seriously, consider not messing with that.

Short Links

Iceland has finally done what everyone’s been waiting for and tested lots of people to see how many are asymptomatic. They conclude that about half of carriers don’t know they have the disease. If there had been very many more asymptomatic carriers than symptomatic patients, it would have been good news – most cases never show up in the statistics, and all of our estimates of hospitalization rate and mortality rate would be much too high. Although it’s nice to be able to divide all of those by two, a lot of people were hoping we could divide them by ten or a hundred and stop worrying completely. This study suggests we can’t. [EDIT: jgr79 points out a more optimistic interpretation: the testing happened around March 20, when Iceland had 300 reported cases, but detected that 1% of Icelanders were positive, ie 3,000 reported cases. This matches all the other evidence that real cases outnumber diagnosed cases by a factor of 10 or so, and probably does mean we can divide observed mortality rates by that amount. Is everyone already doing this in their models?]

In 1918, people got so tired of containment procedures for the Spanish Flu that concerned citizens started an Anti-Mask League Of San Francisco.

Future of Humanity Institute has put up a dashboard making advanced pandemic modelling software available to the public. They are also also offering pro bono forecasting services to under-resourced groups like hospitals and governments in developing nations). They’ve asked me to help spread the word on this, and I will, but I’d be more comfortable if someone who knows their stuff can confirm it’s net helpful, so please contact me if you consider yourself informed enough to have an opinion on this.

Robin Hanson makes the case for variolation – deliberately exposing people to virus particles at low doses through routes that make the infection less dangerous. This operates as kind of a poor man’s vaccine, giving a very mild case that prevents the person from getting sick in the future. Has worked with many past epidemics (like smallpox), still unknown how to predict how it would work for this one.

Hall of shame: Bangladesh (where 25,000 people have gathered for a mass prayer rally against the coronavirus – if only the New Atheists were still around to offer opinions on this kind of thing). Mississippi, as usual (see this comment by an MS Redditor). Russia, as usual. Donald Trump is a permanent lifetime member at this point. The FDA is also probably a permanent lifetime member.

Last links post I included tech company Triplebyte in the shame list for refusing to let employees switch to work-from-home, then firing them. A representative of Triplebyte contacted me and asked me to explain their perspective, which is that they took the pandemic seriously and went all-remote around the same time as everyone else. The reluctance to let employees switch to work-from-home applied only to a few employees in early March, before the scale of the crisis was widely appreciated, and they say that they would have tried to make accommodations if they had understood the seriousness of the requests. They had been planning the downsizing for a while, it was really unlucky that it ended up in the middle of a pandemic, and they tried to make it as painless as possible by offering good severance pay, etc. I’m relaying their statement because I’m realizing it was probably unfair of me to single them out in particular – my hearing a lot about this was downstream of my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte, and my having a lot of friends who work(ed) for Triplebyte was downstream of them being a great company doing important work which all my friends wanted to work for. I continue to generally respect them and their vision (see here for more), and you don’t need to give them any more grief over it than they’re already getting.

Hall of fame: Service Employees International Union (“found” 40 million face masks and is donating them to local hospitals; what does it even mean to “find” this many masks in this context?), and Amazon (now giving workers double pay for overtime). And Brazilian gangs, in the face of government inaction, declared a unilateral quarantine order in Rio de Janeiro, saying “If the government won’t do the right thing, organized crime will”. I deeply appreciate the commentator who described this as “state capacity anarcho-capitalism”.

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The government of Singapore is tracing the coronavirus in ways that are simultaneously impressive and terrifying for those who worry about high-tech dictatorship.

The latest example: On Saturday, a friend living there received a WhatsApp message from the Singaporean government with instructions to download a new coronavirus tracing app called "TraceTogether."

• The app uses Bluetooth to help the government track down and notify people who have come into close contact with somebody infected with the coronavirus.

How it works, per ChannelNewsAsia (CNA):

• Singaporeans download TraceTogether from the App Store, enter their cellphone number and consent to their numbers being "stored in a secure registry."
• They switch on Bluetooth and push notifications. According to the Singaporean government, the app attaches a random ID to your cell number.
• "It then uses Bluetooth to detect other users who come within two to five meters of you and records their random IDs internally," per CNA.
• If a user of the app tests positive for the coronavirus, Singapore's Ministry of Health will have them send their app logs to the government.
• The Singaporean government will then "decrypt the random IDs to determine the mobile numbers of my close contacts." This means that Singaporeans won't have to rely on their memories to recall whether they've had contact with somebody who later tests positive for the virus.

Between the lines: This app is a high-tech form of contact tracing — identify an infected person, then immediately identify who they might have infected, test those people, on down the line.

• Testing is the first and essential step to making it work. That's why we can't do it. Testing plus contact tracing is the right thing to do in any outbreak, it's what worked in Singapore and South Korea.
• There are ways to do it that are not incompatible with freedom but we can't do it here in the United States because testing sucks so much here.

The other side: Some of the government's techniques would be difficult to implement in a free society. Over many decades, Singaporeans have become comfortable unquestioningly following directives from their dictatorial government.

• For example, Singapore's government didn't just recommend that people stay in quarantine for 14 days after they return from overseas. Instead, the authorities enforce their "stay-at-home" notices by sending text messages to residents throughout the day. When they receive the texts, Singaporeans are required to share their GPS location with the government, per CNA.
• If Singaporeans don't comply with stay-at-home notices, they could be prosecuted under Section 21A of the Infectious Diseases Act. "First-time offenders are liable for a fine of up to S$10,000, jail of up to six months, or both," per CNA. "Repeat offenders face double the penalties."

We hear this all the time:

“After this is over, our lives will never be the same.”

Speak for yourself. I plan to return to exactly the same life I had before.

Perhaps people believe that government policy will never be the same. I doubt that. Yes, there’ll be a new “Pandemic Security” department in the federal government, just as 9/11 led to an ineffectual “Homeland Security” department. There’ll be stockpiles of masks, ventilators, etc. (horse, barn door) But so what?

The media is full of people claiming that this will lead to a left wing revolution. Tyler Cowen pushes back, claiming it will hurt the progressive left. I’m not convinced by either argument.

I recall that Trump said he would abolish Obamacare, end Nafta as we know it, reduce the trade deficit, reduce illegal immigration, expel the illegals, bring back the manufacturing jobs, bring back coal mining, and lots of other nationalistic goals. He did none of that. Instead, we basically have the same system in place that we had in 2016.

In his book “The Great Stagnation”, Tyler explained how hard it was to get anything done in the modern world. There’s so much inertia, so many special interest groups that like the status quo. Where’s this war on the tech companies that we’ve been promised for years? Where are the get-tough policies on bankers we were promised after 2008? Where are the policies to help downtrodden workers in Ohio and West Virginia? Where is the end of neoliberalism?

The deadliest epidemic in history was either the Black Death or the Spanish flu. I cannot find the source (this will have to do), but I distinctly recall reading that just a year after the Spanish flu had occurred it had already faded into the past. Even in 1921, it rarely came up in conversation and was largely forgotten. Life went on as before.

If people won’t gear up for a global warming problem that we will certainly face this century, then why would they gear up for another major pandemic that might not occur for another 102 years—by which time we might have a cure for colds/flus/etc.

The world isn’t even doing much to prevent accidental nuclear war, which would be 100 times worse than this; why would the world suddenly become far-sighted about this issue?

PS. Life in China is already returning to normal:

Fireworks were set off in at least one section of Wuhan on Saturday as authorities began removing checkpoints used to enforce a strict lockdown since January in the Chinese city considered the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.

The checkpoints started coming down after no new cases of COVID-19 were recorded for a third straight day. Other parts of China are also easing restrictions, the South China Morning Post reported, as Wuhan and other cities start returning to work. Routes out of Wuhan will remain blocked, the paper reported

The new cases in China are rising again, but 100% are incoming travelers that are all being quarantined. The pattern is broadly similar throughout much of East Asia. Meanwhile, the situation in Italy goes from bad to horrific, and Spain isn’t far behind.

Back in March 15, I predicted that by the end of the month Switzerland would have more active cases than China. (On that date, China still had more than 4 times as many as Switzerland.) My prediction came true 10 days early, as Switzerland has already passed China in active cases. So now I’ll predict 5 times more active cases in Switzerland than China by the end of March.

Right now, this is overwhelmingly a European/Iranian crisis, although give it another week and it could be a global crisis. How will Italy pay its bills? Will this blow up the euro?

PPS. This caught my eye:

Nigeria reported two cases of chloroquine poisoning after U.S. President Donald Trump praised the anti-malaria drug as a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Health officials are warning Nigerians against self-medicating after demand for the drug surged in Lagos, a city that’s home to 20 million people.

Can’t believe that Nigerians of all people would fall for an American scammer.

PPPS. I know this is like shooting ducks in a barrel, but I can’t resist:

Under increasing pressure to detail exactly when he learned that the spread of coronavirus would be a problem, Mr. Trump claimed that he first knew about the virus around the time he ordered border closures in late January [the 31st].

“I wish they could’ve told us earlier because we could’ve come up with a solution,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the Chinese government.

I was hiking in the wilds of New Zealand in mid-January and knew of the epidemic. My wife and I were looking for masks in drug stores in NZ around January 23rd, and they were already all sold out. Taiwan was testing all travelers from Wuhan in late December. Does Trump have no one to tell him what’s going on in the world? (Don’t answer that.)

Regarding the second paragraph, why did the US government do nothing in the entire month of February, if it was actually so important to find out about the epidemic as soon as possible?

We are governed by clowns.

Experts say its unlikely coronavirus would survive on FedEx, Amazon, or UPS packages that are shipped over a period of days. Here's what to know.

Italy has overtaken China as the country with the most coronavirus deaths. By Friday, COVID-19 had killed 4,032 people in Italy and 3,253 in China.

[Before beginning, let me emphasize that this post is not discussing the use of government policy to provide income assistance for the unemployed. My focus is on the use of fiscal policy to boost aggregate demand.]

During the current epidemic, we are seeing an avalanche of articles advocating the use of fiscal stimulus. At times the media/twitter/blogosphere gives the impression that only a fool would fail to see the rationale for giving every American $1000. In fact, the evidence favoring fiscal stimulus is almost non-existent. I’ve discussed these issues before, but there is obviously a need to remind people of why fiscal stimulus is unlikely to work. Like Sisyphus, I have to keep making the same points, over and over again.

As recently as 2007, the consensus among macroeconomists was that monetary policy should be used to control inflation, and that fiscal stimulus was ineffective for all sorts of reasons. That consensus changed after 2007, but there isn’t any new evidence that would justify a change.

We’ve had 4 major fiscal policy shifts since 2007, and all four completely failed to have the impact predicted by Keynesian economists.  Let’s examine each one of them.

1. In early 2008, the economy had fallen into a very mild recession.  During the spring, President Bush got Congress to agree to a program of sending $300 checks to each person (excluding people earning less than $3000, and also excluding those who were upper middle class or rich.)  Very soon after the checks were sent out, the economy fell off a cliff.

Now it’s true that the rebates probably boosted consumption and GDP slightly in 2008:Q2, but the Fed responded by tightening policy and hence by the second half of 2008 any beneficial impact was more than neutralized by monetary offset.

2.  In early 2009, Congress passed President Obama’s $800 billion ARRA program.  It was claimed that this would prevent unemployment from rising above roughly 8%, and that unemployment would rise to 9% without the program.  Actually unemployment rose to 10%, with the program.

Obviously I cannot prove that the program had no impact, ceteris paribus; but does anyone seriously believe that the Fed would not have been more aggressive in the absence of the ARRA program?

3.  At the very end of 2012, Congress sharply tightened fiscal policy.  The deficit fell from $1050 billion in calendar 2012 to $550 billion in calendar (not fiscal) 2013.  Roughly 350 Keynesian economists signed a letter suggesting that the fiscal austerity would slow the economy, and risked pushing us into recession.  In fact, both NGDP and RGDP growth increased, and by 2013:Q4, the 12-month growth rate was considerably higher than in 2012:Q4, right before the austerity.

The explanation is simple.  The Fed saw the fiscal austerity coming and rolled out some new monetary stimulus programs, including QE3 and a more aggressive form of forward guidance.  The Fed successfully offset the fiscal austerity.

4.  Between 2015 and 2019, the fiscal deficit exploded from $442 billion to $984 billion.  This is not supposed to happen during a period when unemployment is falling to low levels.  Keynesian models predict that all this unneeded fiscal stimulus during a period of low unemployment would push the inflation rate above 2%, and thus the Fed used “Phillips curve models” as a rationale to boost interest rates and prevent a rise in inflation.  But the inflation never came, as fiscal policy doesn’t determine the rate of inflation, monetary policy does.  Inflation actually undershot the 2% target.

And this leads to an important point that people miss.  If fiscal policy doesn’t determine inflation, then it does not have a significant impact on aggregate demand (NGDP.)  That doesn’t mean fiscal actions cannot affect RGDP; they can.  But they do so by boosting aggregate supply, not demand.

If the fiscal authorities give every American $1000 it will be like throwing a stone in the ocean.  It doesn’t create any new money, it just moves money around.  (It doesn’t boost the supply side either.)  The fiscal authorities borrow $1000 from John and give the $1000 to Jack.  The Fed determines the rate of inflation through monetary policy, the creation of new money.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying it is impossible that fiscal policy could have some impact.  You can conceive of a case where fiscal actions cause the central bank to adopt a different monetary policy, cause it to produce a different inflation rate.  Central banks are often incompetent.

But the last 12 years gives us little reason for hope.  We’ve done four major fiscal operations, and each one had an impact that was quite different from what was expected by Keynesian policymakers.

It’s time to focus on monetary stimulus, which is an order of magnitude more powerful than fiscal, is far less costly, and can be deployed much more quickly.  Start by switching to level targeting (of prices, or better yet NGDP), and then adopt a “whatever it takes” approach to asset purchases.  That’s the only way to meaningfully boost aggregate demand.

Speaking of Sisyphus, here’s Titian’s magnificent version:

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All Georgia state Senate members and employees have been "asked to self-quarantine" for 14 days after a senator tested positive for the novel coronavirus, the legislature confirmed in a statement late Wednesday.

Details: Sen. Brandon Beach said he was tested Saturday after seeking medical attention for a cough and mild fever, per AJC.com. He turned up to vote Monday after feeling better and his COVID-19 result came back Wednesday.

What they're saying: "The diagnosis I was given was not coronavirus, but I did get tested for it on Saturday," Beach said, per the Marietta Daily Journal. "With medication, I felt better by Monday and thought I was in the clear. Today, however, my test came back positive.

• Fellow Republican state Sen. Scot Turner expressed his anger at the situation in a Facebook post.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with new details throughout.

There were no new cases of the novel coronavirus in the past 24 hours in Hubei Province, China, including the city of Wuhan, China, where COVID-19 was first discovered, per a post on the local health department's website Wednesday.

Why it matters: Chinese authorities introduced unprecedented measures in January in an effort to contain the virus, including suspending all travel in and out of all cities in Hubei province and preventing the province's 59 million people from leaving home.

• The report of zero cases is the strongest indication yet that such extreme measures can help contain the virus, as cases soar globally to more than 217,000.

Of note: China's National Health Commission reported later there were a total of 34 new infections in the country Wednesday, mostly in Beijing (21 cases). All of the new cases were patients who had returned from travel in other countries.

The big picture: Health officials are still trying to trace the source of the outbreak of the new strain of the coronavirus. But the first known case to have been reported appeared in Wuhan on Dec. 1, 2019, according to a study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal The Lancet last month.

Editor's note: This article has been updated with new details throughout.

Plain old soap and water absolutely annihilate coronavirus.

You’ve been told the same thing a million times: The best way to prevent the spread of coronavirus is to wash your hands.

It’s true. But why?

It’s because soap — regular soap, fancy honeysuckle soap, artisan soap, just any soap — absolutely annihilates viruses. It has to do with how the soap molecules interact with the virus.

Soap is made up of two-sided molecules. One side is attracted to water; the other side is attracted to fat. And viruses are made up of material surrounded by a coating of proteins and fat. When viruses interact with soap, that fat coating gets ripped out by the soap molecules. Soap literally demolishes viruses.

Of course, it takes time for this effect to happen: 20 seconds, to be specific.

Wash the video above to learn how this process works or read more from senior science reporter Brian Resnick.

You can find this video and all of Vox’s videos on YouTube. And if you’re interested in supporting our video journalism, you can become a member of the Vox Video Lab on YouTube.

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

• Boeing is burning through massive amounts of cash as the spreading coronavirus complicates a recovery from its 737 Max scandal. 
• The company said Tuesday it had maxed out a $13.8 billion credit line it obtained from banks in February.
• Shares of Boeing closed at a near four-year low on Tuesday. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Boeing maxed out a $13.8 billion credit line it arranged in February, the company said Tuesday, giving an insight into the embattled planemaker's cash burn as it seeks to escape the 737 Max crisis that has been complicated by the spread of coronavirus.

The company first disclosed the loans — from Citibank, JPMorgan, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — on February 6. By March 13, Boeing said in a regulatory filing Tuesdayy, those lines had been completely used up.See the rest of the story at Business Insider

NOW WATCH: What it takes to be a first-class flight attendant for Emirates

See Also:

• Tesla's Fremont factory will be allowed to keep building cars despite 'shelter in place' lockdown order in the Bay Area
• A $54 billion bailout for airlines could come with new rules on bag fees, stock buybacks, and more
• Ford is shutting down factories in Europe amid worsening coronavirus outbreak

Associated Press/Vahid Salemi

• Iran has become one of the worst-affected countries by the coronavirus pandemic, reporting nearly 1,000 deaths and more than 16,000 cases.
• Some experts and critics of the Iranian regime say it's likely the virus is far more severe than the government is reporting, alleging that officials have sought to cover up the full extent of the outbreak.
• Amid the worsening crisis, American sanctions on Iran have come under fire as the country struggles with a shortage of medical equipment and protective gear.
• A series of disturbing satellite images has also revealed the deadliness of the virus — workers have been digging mass burial pits for weeks.
• On Tuesday, an Iranian state TV journalist warned the country could see 4 million cases of COVID-19 and and 3.5 million deaths if people don't comply with the government's travel warnings and guidance to socially isolate.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Just months into the global coronavirus crisis, Iran has emerged as one of the pandemic's hardest-hit countries, with a skyrocketing death toll, sick and dying government officials and religious leaders, and a crackdown on information.

As of Tuesday, the health officials had reported 988 deaths and more than 16,000 cases across the country.

The Iranian government has been accused of a range of missteps in handling the outbreak, from initially downplaying the extent and the severity of the outbreak, to facing allegations of a full-blown cover-up.

There's even reason to believe the true number of deaths far exceeds what the government has reported. Western media reports have been skeptical about the reliability of the Iranian government's data, and satellite images captured last week have revealed massive burial trenches that can be seen from space.

Here's how the situation has devolved in Iran and how it got so dire.

Iran's coronavirus outbreak first began in Qom, the holy city in which thousands of pilgrims arrive daily. The government's first acknowledgement of the virus was on February 19, when officials reported two deaths in Qom.

Source: The New Yorker

But by that time, the coronavirus had already struck the country days — or even weeks — earlier, revealing that the outbreak could already be spiraling out of control.

Source: RFERL

In one particularly jarring moment that revealed the severity of the outbreak, the deputy minister, Iraj Harirchi, aggressively wiped sweat from his forehead during a press conference in which he downplayed the severity of the outbreak. He tested positive for COVID-19 the next day.

Youtube Embed:
//www.youtube.com/embed/NHkN_7CfPig
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Height: 315px

Sources: Business Insider, The Guardian

See Also:

• 21 mistakes by public health officials and ordinary people that helped spread the coronavirus around the world
• Almost all US states have declared states of emergency to fight coronavirus — here's what it means for them
• Confirmed New York coronavirus cases surged to 1,500, more than any other state. Here's what the state is doing to address the outbreak.

SEE ALSO: Iran is closing schools, scrambling for hospital places, and spraying disinfectant in the subway as coronavirus deaths and cases spike

DON'T MISS: From silencing medics to banning 'rumors': Here's why Iran is struggling to contain its coronavirus outbreak

Stay inside, they said. Don’t leave the house. Whether following guidance for those who may have been exposed to coronavirus or choosing to self-isolate to help slow the spread, people around the world are faced with managing relationships with family members and partners while in close confines for weeks on end.

“Scary times have the potential to drive people together or apart,” Pepper Schwartz, a psychology professor at the University of Washington told Quartz in an email. On the one hand, romantic partners could have “a new appreciation for having someone to face a scary future with. On the other hand, if you are at odds with one another, and you realize this is not the person who has your back, or not the person you want to have your back, it might be a stark realization that you are in the wrong relationship.” Dramatic times tend to heighten emotions and outcomes, Schwartz says.

Psychologists expect two sociological outcomes from quarantine: increased birth rates and divorces. Research suggests that when people are forced to stay home together during natural disasters, there tends to be an uptick in fertility nine months later, notes Daniel Kruger, a social and evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. While the relationship between disaster and birth rate is far from definitively proven, it makes intuitive sense that some couples will end up with a new family member nine months after being cooped up without social distractions.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.

The question: What’s the difference between Italy and the rest of the Western world?

The FT provides a graph:

Here are a few misconceptions I see:

1. It’s not that bad because the death rate is only around 1%, and it mostly kills old people.

2. It’s not that bad because it’s likely to fade away once the weather gets warmer.

The “misconception” part of each claim is the “It’s not that bad because”, not what comes later.  Wuhan’s medical system was overwhelmed by the disease, despite less that one percent of its population becoming infected (maybe a bit more unreported, but at most a few percent.)  Some experts believe that half of the entire population would be infected without social distancing.  Italy’s medical system was also stressed, especially in Lombardy, despite a much lower infection rate than in Wuhan.  If it truly became widespread, medical systems might be unable to handle the caseload.  As for only one percent dying, if 50% of Americans become infected that might be somewhere around 1.6 million deaths.  I certainly don’t think that will happen, but that raises the question of why won’t it happen?

The second claim sounds reassuring, but at a 33% daily growth rate we’d be overwhelmed long before we reached summer, (and we don’t even know yet whether the virus will slow down in the summer.)  Again, I don’t expect the 33% growth rate to continue, but that raises the question of why won’t it continue?

We are already seeing quite a few shutdowns of universities, large social events, travel, etc., despite a relatively low rate of infection in the US, thus far.  That tells me that when the highly risk averse US public becomes fully aware of the severity of the crisis, there will be much stronger measures taken, much more social distancing.

This is a frustrating problem because it’s not obvious to me that there are any attractive solutions.  There might have been if the US government had had a plan for dealing with pandemics, as did the (quite small) governments in Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong.  But we did not.  Nor did the Europeans.  It’s like the old joke about the farmer who told the motorist, “First of all, if I were going there I wouldn’t start from here.”  It’s too late for the Taiwan solution.

Instead we seem to be faced with two unpleasant choices:

1. Lots of deaths and lots of overburdened medical systems.

2. Lots of social distancing, and perhaps a recession.

Because I believe the second option is far more likely, we need to focus our attention on that outcome.  In my view, the stock market is already assuming that outcome, and also assuming that this outcome will last for longer than a few months.  Even if the caseload falls back in the summer months, it’ll spike again in the fall and winter.  (Given that the caseload in Florida is rising rapidly, there’s no reason to assume it will go away entirely in the summer.)

So I expect social distancing to last until there is a vaccine, and perhaps a few months after that.  We may face 18 months of greatly reduced social interaction.

Is there a more optimistic scenario?  The caseload in China is down to very low levels.  The main risk in China right now (outside Wuhan) is from international travelers coming into China. And even they get quarantined for 14 days.  The Chinese are now restarting their economy.  The optimistic outcome would occur if China were able to restart their economy without cases spiking upwards.  So if we were able to achieve Chinese levels of social distancing and reduce the outbreak to extremely low levels (a big if) and if we could then restart our economy without a resurgence in the epidemic (another big if) we could get a much better outcome than the 12 to 18 month plague that I’ve described.

But can we?

PS.  If you think my criticism of our pandemic preparation is just Monday morning quarterbacking, consider that Tyler Cowen (who is not known as an especially negative complainer) made this observation on February 23:

Here is further information about the obstacles facing the rollout of testing.  And read here from a Harvard professor of epidemiology, and here.  Clicking around and reading I have found this a difficult matter to get to the bottom of.  Nonetheless no one disputes that America is not conducting many tests, and is not in a good position to scale up those tests rapidly, and some of those obstacles are regulatory.  Why oh why are we messing around with this one?

That was three days before the very first case of community transmission in the US.  It was more than a month after the epidemic had reached crisis proportions in China.  Other countries were doing widespread testing.  And it turns out that widespread testing is essential in preventing a wider outbreak of community transmission.

PPS.  This NYT article on government incompetence is horrifying:

To repurpose the tests for monitoring the coronavirus, they would need the support of state and federal officials. But nearly everywhere Dr. Chu turned, officials repeatedly rejected the idea, . . . By Feb. 25, Dr. Chu and her colleagues could not bear to wait any longer. They began performing coronavirus tests, without government approval.

What came back confirmed their worst fear. They quickly had a positive test from a local teenager with no recent travel history. The coronavirus had already established itself on American soil without anybody realizing it.

“It must have been here this entire time,” Dr. Chu recalled thinking with dread. “It’s just everywhere already.”

Read the whole thing.  And then weep.

Cutting every single American a check was once the zany idea of a long-shot Democratic presidential candidate (Hi, Andrew Yang!). It's now the consensus policy response to an imminent coronavirus-induced recession.

"We're looking at sending checks to people immediately," said Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin at a press briefing. "Many companies have shut down, whether it's bars or restaurants. Americans need cash now, and I mean now in the next two weeks."

On Monday, Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) endorsed a minimum one-time transfer of $1,000 to all Americans as part of a broader set of economic relief proposals.

Democrats are warming to the idea as well. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) has introduced a resolution for an emergency universal basic income to last until the current crisis is over. Harvard professor and former Obama administration economic advisor Jason Furman has reportedly been trying to get House Democrats behind a check-cutting policy.

These proposals are not entirely unprecedented.

To combat the dot-com bubble bursting, Congress passed stimulus legislation in June 2001 that saw some 90 million taxpayers get rebate checks of between $300 and $600.

Then in early 2008, Congress passed the Economic Stimulus Act in an attempt to stave off the Great Recession. That legislation included provisions for mailing 130 million taxpayers a basic tax rebate of either $600 for single-filers or $1,200 for married couples. Parents could claim an additional $300 for each dependent child.

There are some significant differences between these rebates and what is being proposed now, however, says David Beckworth, an economist at George Mason University's Mercatus Center.

"They were just one-time shots. They weren't like what was being proposed now, which is a little more continuous, or at least [continued] for the duration of the crisis," says Beckworth. That means the current policies being considered would be much, much more expensive.

The 2001 rebates cost $38 billion. The rebates given in 2008 cost $113 billion. Sending every adult American a $1,000 check, as is being proposed now would cost $2.8 trillion a year according to the Tax Foundation, or about $230 billion a month.

Paying for something like that, says Beckworth, will likely require intervention from the Federal Reserve. The Treasury, he says, could sell bonds to the Fed for cash, and then give that money to the Internal Revenue Service to mail out as checks to taxpayers.

This would essentially be the "helicopter money" approach Milton Friedman first proposed as a thought experiment in the late 1960s.

Beckworth says the idea has a couple of things going for it during this current crisis. With huge swaths of the economy essentially shutting down in an effort to stop the spread of coronavirus, dropping money from metaphorical helicopters (or maybe drones) would be the best way to ensure that everyone who suddenly finds themselves out of work will get some relief.

"It would bypass the normal plumbing of monetary policy. I think that's the biggest argument for it," says Beckworth.

The Cato Institute's Michael Tanner criticized this approach to me yesterday, suggesting that most people either aren't missing paychecks because of the current crisis or are already eligible for existing relief programs. Sending checks to everyone will then shower benefits mostly on people who don't really need it, Tanner argued.

"This is a knowledge problem," counters Beckworth, saying that government officials are not going to be able to come up with precise eligibility requirements that funnel aid to the people who need it while avoiding sending it to people who don't.

Even if bureaucrats could come up with the appropriate eligibility criteria, there's a question of whether the government would be able to effectively administer a program like that in a pinch.

There are still huge risks of an emergency universal income financed by the Fed, acknowledges Beckworth.

"If you start doing that, then you open a Pandora's box for politicians and others who are going to want to do it all the time," he says, adding an ideal policy "needs to be very much based on a rule or condition. You don't want to send them out willy-nilly. You want to tie it to an economic indicator." Such a rule, he says, would force politicians to "turn off the spigot" when the crisis has passed.

He suggests tying such a policy to a monthly measurement of household income or even a rate of nominal GDP growth, with the government continuing to spend until that target is reached.

Even if a helicopter money policy was bound by such a rule, however, there'd always be the danger that politicians and central bankers could ignore it. Paying for economic relief by creating money also raises the specter of inflation.

Beckworth urges free marketers to "think strategically, not tactically." If universal economic assistance, financed by the Fed and bound by some sort of nominal GDP or other target, is successful in staving off a serious economic crash, that would reduce the demand for more extensive regulatory interventions that could have a longer, more damaging effect, he argues.

"Take a pragmatic approach here," says Beckworth. We should be willing to "fight the good fight to minimize any further growth of permanent government programs that are going to happen if we don't get ahead of this."

The series, set in the tech world of the ’80s and ’90s, has the hard-won optimism these times require.

In all the years I’ve been working as a TV critic, no show I’ve recommended has had more people end up digging it than Halt and Catch Fire, the ’80s- and ’90s-set tech world drama that aired on AMC from 2014-2017 that now can be watched in its entirety on Netflix. Invariably, the people I recommend the show to at least like it, and most of them come away loving it. It’s a foolproof people-pleaser with a little bit of something for everyone.

It also absolutely nails a tone that’s tricky to manage: optimism, tempered with a sense of how hard it is to accomplish anything with real meaning in this world. The characters on this show strive and strive and strive to build a better computer, then a better internet experience, and finally a better search engine. And because they live in our world, we know that they will fail to take out the Apples and Googles and Facebooks of the world. But as we watch them fail, we also see them become better people for having known each other — even if they frequently come into bitter conflict with one another.

Really, that above paragraph will let you know if this is the show you need right now. But if you want to know more, read on for more thoughts on why Halt and Catch Fire — one of the best TV shows of the 2010s — should move to the top of your queue. (At 40 episodes, all around 45 minutes in length, it will make for a substantial watch, but not an insurmountable one.) And if you’ve already watched, consider this an invitation to visit it all over again.

You might wonder at first if Halt and Catch Fire knows what it’s doing. It’s worth being patient with the show.

Like so many TV dramas of the 2010s, Halt and Catch Fire has some false starts. Creators Christopher C. Rogers and Christopher Cantwell originally set up the series as a conventional antihero drama about the sneering, self-proclaimed genius Joe Macmillan (Lee Pace), who hijacks a small Texas computer manufacturer in the early 1980s and tries to get it to build his dream machine. He’s joined in this by two computer whizzes who can do the work while Joe offers the Steve Jobs-style bravado — Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) and Cameron Howe (Mackenzie Davis).

These early episodes struggled to stand out from the glut of other antihero dramas rattling around in the 2010s. Yet they’re also necessary for setting up the series’ larger idea, which is that Joe might think he’s a genius, but the thing he really needs is to be tempered and improved by the people around him. By the show’s ninth episode — which ends with a reveal so good I won’t spoil it, even though it aired in 2014 — it’s clicking on all cylinders. When season two starts, it’s instantly one of the best TV shows of its era.

A big reason for this dramatic shift was the show’s change of focus from Joe to its two main women characters, Cameron and Donna Clark (Kerry Bishé), who is a genius tech brain in her own right but also Gordon’s wife. The friendship between the two powers the show’s final three seasons, and each season is better than the last for the ways they all examine this professional and personal partnership as it grows, frays, then rebuilds itself.

Beyond the central foursome, the series also builds out a pretty stunning bench of recurring characters, from Toby Huss as the head of the company Joe hijacks, who becomes an unlikely father figure to Cameron, to the folks who work for the early internet company Cameron and Donna found, to Donna and Gordon’s two daughters, who grow up into complicated characters in their own right. And the show’s casting directors have an eye for talent, from burgeoning movie star Davis to Big Little Lies star Kathryn Newton, lots of actors got one of their first major roles on this show.

Halt and Catch Fire is remarkable for how little of its drama is tied to life-and-death stakes but how important it feels all the same. Its most gutting moment occurs during a boardroom meeting in the show’s third season, and the big dramatic question of its final season is “Can these people ever forgive each other and work together again?” The characters are cruel to each other, but in believable ways where you rarely think they’re being cruel for sport. And yet they can be so, so kind to each other as well.

Roger Ebert used to say that he found few things as moving to see depicted onscreen as kindness that is offered in spite of any ulterior motive. Television often forgets that kindness, too, is a muscle we can flex, in addition to all the ones bent on taking as much stuff as we possibly can. Halt and Catch Fire might start out as an antihero drama, but by the end, it’s earnestly engaged in the question of not just how we can better ourselves but how we might, through being kind, help others become better too. There’s never been another show quite like it.

Halt and Catch Fire is streaming in its entirety — all 40 episodes — on Netflix.

The early signals from the coronavirus crisis point to a scale of damage unseen in the modern U.S. economy: the potential for millions of jobs lost in a single month, a historic and sudden plunge in economic activity across the nation and a pace of sharp market swings not seen since the Great Depression.

As the coronavirus outbreak ravages a paralyzed nation, Wall Street suffered another brutal bloodbath on Monday with the Dow Jones Industrial Average diving around 13 percent in its worst percentage loss since 1987’s “Black Monday” crash. A reading on business conditions in the New York area plunged a record 34.4 points to -21.5 in March, suggesting a recession is underway that could be sharp and deep as revenue quickly bleeds out of major industries from airlines to hotels, restaurants, bars and sports leagues.

The Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index, the broadest gauge of U.S. companies, fell 12 percent. It has shed $6 trillion in value since peaking in February, slamming retirement accounts for millions of Americans in ways that could have psychological ripples for many months to come. The last time the S&P had three days of similar wild swings was 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.

The S&P is now only around 300 points away from wiping out all its gains since Donald Trump won the White House in November 2016. President Trump himself, one of the grandest boasters of the strength and resilience of markets and the American economy, appeared to capitulate on Monday with a more somber tone reflecting the immense magnitude of the challenge facing the nation.

“We have an invisible enemy,” he said, acknowledging that the virus could push the U.S. into recession. “This is a bad one. This is a very bad one.” Trump urged Americans not to gather in groups over 10 and to avoid bars, restaurants, food courts and other public spaces.

The VIX, a gauge of fear and panic on Wall Street, hit 82.69 on Monday — bringing it to territory unseen since the worst of the financial crisis in 2008. Oil prices tanked 10 percent — after a severe plunge last week — as traders bet the virus will ignite a global recession that sharply reduces demand for fuel.

The massive sell-offs have led to suggestions by market professionals that regulators may have to take dramatic steps seen during the Great Depression and after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. That could include shuttering Wall Street — perhaps for days — until more is known about the direction of the coronavirus spread in the United States and until Washington comes up with a massive, bipartisan policy response to shore up flagging industries and direct money straight into the pockets of American citizens losing work as they remain shuttered in their homes at the direction of the government officials.

For now, Securities and Exchange Commissioner Jay Clayton pledged to keep markets open, despite the waves of panicked selling. “Markets should continue to function through times like this,” he told CNBC. Still, many traders expect that if the market plunges several more thousand points, and trips more circuit breakers that temporarily halt trading, the administration could be forced to simply shut Wall Street down.

“With new measures being put in place by the hour, the federal government at some point will have to consider a modern version of the bank holiday imposed by the Roosevelt administration back in 1933,” RSM Chief Economist Joseph Brusuelas wrote in a client note. “That four-day holiday was put into place to restore confidence in the banking and financial system. Perhaps the governing authority should consider a 10-business day holiday until Congress can act.”

Wall Street analysts are already assessing the damage done to the economy thus far: stark and likely to get far worse, very quickly.

“Movie box-office revenues are down more than 60 percent in data through March 15 and more than 70 percent relative to the average of recent years,” JPMorgan analysts wrote in a research note. “Broadway box office revenues were already down about 20 percent relative to trend in data through March 8, and are presumably set to be down essentially 100 percent after theaters closed last Thursday, a result we also expect to see for professional and college sports revenues.”

Restaurant bookings were collapsing in many cities and may now plunge to zero. Streets are increasingly empty as citizens follow government warnings to slow the spread of the virus.

The hope on the part of White House officials is not to avoid a sharp economic slowdown — they all know it is coming — but that the short-term pain from extreme measures will lead to a flattening in the curve of the virus spread. Then economic activity can be made up when the crisis ebbs.

But that will require agreement on a massive package of aid for both individuals and corporations to stave off mass bankruptcies and waves of layoffs. The White House hopes for a V-shaped economic cycle this time: a recession in which growth plunges then sharply recovers as consumers emerge from their bunkers with jobs to go to and money to spend.

Kevin Hassett, the former White House Council of Economic Advisers chairman who remains in contact with Trump and the White House, said in an interview that jobs reports for March and April could show horrific numbers that will force massive congressional action if it has not already occurred by then.

He predicted losses of perhaps over 1 million jobs in coming reports and a spike in the jobless rate. “We really could see the worst jobs reports we’ve ever seen in our history.”

Hassett said he did calculations over the weekend with conservative economist Larry Lindsey showing that the economy could contract by 5 percent in the second quarter, though a swift containment of the virus could lead to a bounce-back in the third quarter. (Goldman Sachs economists also predicted a drop of around 5 percent in economic growth in the second quarter.)

And he noted that infighting between the House and Senate and uncertainty about the next stimulus package from the White House could make matters far worse. The White House is trying to settle on a package that would include a payroll tax suspension and emergency lending facilities, including from the Federal Reserve, and other measures for impacted businesses that would stop short of direct cash “bailouts,” a politically toxic word since the bank rescues of 2008 and 2009.

William Lee, chief economist at the Milken Institute, suggested the United States is headed into what could be the first recession whose length and depth will be determined largely by how effectively Washington responds, both on the fiscal and public health fronts.

“This will be first recession induced by public health policies, and the nature of those public health policies and their effectiveness accelerating the recovery from the virus. And that will determine the course of the depth of the recession.”

Lee said he was certain the second quarter would show a contraction, but that multiple policies, most of which are currently under consideration, could prime the economy to bounce back.

Those policies would include direct aid to corporations slammed by the virus, through loan forbearance and acceptance of late payments. He also suggested credit rating firms would have to take into account the impact of the virus when making ratings changes, including potentially crippling downgrades.

On the consumer side, Lee said supplemental sick pay leave and extended benefits for laid-off workers would be critical along with payments to cover day care. “Our avenues for pushing this stuff out through negative income taxes for households can be easily done. The key thing as that as soon as people feel safe to go out, that they have money in their pockets and they go and spend it.”

Lee said he did not believe in giving free money away to corporations, but that decisions would have to be made about which companies are simply mismanaged and which are suffering directly from the virus. “We have to be generous about getting money out. It’s really important to preserve the transport infrastructure. We can’t have airlines filing for bankruptcy.”

Joel Prakken, chief U.S. economist and IHS Markit, said in a note to clients that the spread of Covid-19 to the U.S. "is causing a sharp contraction in spending on activities that involve travel and congregating in public.” His firm now expects a recession to start in the second quarter, delivering a peak-to-trough decline in GDP of 2.3 percent, with the jobless rate rising to 6 percent by mid-2021.

Goldman Sachs analysts increased their expectations for stimulus action out of Washington. Their base case is to see stimulus worth 1 to 2 percent of GDP in both 2020 and 2021, or roughly $400 billion to $800 billion worth.

White House National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow said Monday the administration was pursuing at least $800 billion in relief for an economy hit by the crisis.

Steve Moore, a conservative economist and outside adviser to the president, said he sent a plan to Kudlow for items to include in the next stimulus proposal expected to come out of the White House and Treasury by the end of the week. Moore authored the proposal along with publishing magnate Steve Forbes and supply-side economics guru Art Laffer, a close Kudlow ally.

“They haven’t settled on any one thing at this point. But it’s on a fast-track. They want it by the end of the week,” Moore said. “We proposed a four-step plan and the best idea is to suspend the payroll tax for the rest of the year. That’s something that would help everyone. It’s clean and it doesn’t pick winners and losers.”

Moore said his group suggested financing the payroll tax holiday by issuing 50- and 100-year Treasury bonds at 1 percent interest. They also suggested avoiding any direct cash bailouts to hard-hit industries like airlines or hotels.

“Every business is materially affected by this. Who is going to make these decision about who gets aid and who doesn’t?” Moore said. The final piece of the plan would be for the Federal Reserve to open lending facilities for low-interest loans to any business that has collateral to avoid cash crunches that could force companies into fire sales of existing assets to raise cash to replace revenue lost to the crisis.

“Trump listens to us. He seeks out our advice,” Moore said. “We are urging him not to do things that are bad policy that he would not do otherwise.”

“When the virus is contained, the economy will bounce back. But how long that will take and much damage is done to supply chains and the number of bankruptcies — we just don’t know. Every day this lasts compounds the economic damage.”

America’s oldest film studio is using the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity to experiment with what many believe is the inevitable future of film distribution.

Universal Pictures will release its current theatrical movies, including The Invisible Man and The Hunt, to audiences online as early as Friday (March 20), the Wall Street Journal reported. The studio will also release the upcoming animated comedy, Trolls World Tour, online at the same time it’s set to hit theaters on April 10—if there are any theaters still open then. The US box office hit a 20-year low this weekend as hundreds of theaters shut their doors, and many others cut capacity in half.

The move, though forced by theater closures around the world, nonetheless blows up the longstanding Hollywood theatrical release window. Usually, films play in theaters for 90 days before they’re made available to stream, rent, or buy online. Studios, which make most of their money on theater ticket sales, have been extremely reluctant to shorten that window, even as streaming competitors like Netflix and Amazon have upended the industry.

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