I keep seeing articles about how the coronavirus pandemic is going to change things forever. Dating will be changed forever. Book publishing will be changed forever. Comic books will be changed forever. Bars and restaurants will be changed forever. Hollywood will be changed forever. Conventions will be changed forever. Remote work will be changed forever. Journalism will be changed forever. Vacations will be changed forever.

I’m going to go out on a limb here: I don’t think much of anything will be changed forever and I wish people would stop saying so based on two whole weeks of practicing isolation and social distancing.¹ All it does is scare people even more just for the sake of being able to write a provocative op-ed. If this is the best you can do, maybe you should just stop writing for the duration.

¹Actually, one week, and that’s only in California, which started on March 21. For most of the rest of you, it’s only been four or five days.

Ting Shen/Xinhua via ZUMA

Over at National Review, Dan McLaughlin echoes the sentiments of many conservatives about the House version of the coronavirus rescue bill:

The House’s voice vote passing the Senate’s version of the $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill puts the final nail in the coffin of House Democrats’ deeply misguided effort to pass their own version of the bill…larded with progressive policy priorities on topics with little or no connection to the pandemic: carbon emissions, corporate board diversity, federally imposed rules for early voting and voter registration, collective bargaining, a minimum wage hike, a Postal Service bailout, student loan forgiveness, permanent changes to Medicaid and Obamacare, minority-owned credit unions, funding for the arts, and many, many more.

….The tone-deafness of Clyburn and Nancy Pelosi, who have typically been savvier operators than this in the past, raises real questions about the judgment of the geriatric leadership of the Democratic caucus, and whether they are truly in charge anymore or getting pushed around internally by their party’s ideological extremists. Nobody in their right mind could have expected even the most supine Senate Republicans to take this bill lying down.

McLaughlin could be right. Maybe Nancy Pelosi is finally succumbing to senility and had no idea that her bill had no chance of passing. And yet, she seems perfectly healthy and lucid, doesn’t she? Savvy, even. So what’s going on?

I’m not privy to anything behind the scenes, but the conventional lefty wisdom about this has been very different from the start. Pelosi made her bill public at a time when Senate Republicans were resisting a few final changes that would have helped out regular folks and put some oversight on the corporate bailout. This is not coincidence. Her goal was not to get her bill passed, but to put pressure on Republicans: this is the bill you’ll have to fight over if you don’t give Chuck Schumer what he’s asking for. And it worked. Within a couple of days Republicans had caved and President Trump was urging his troops to pass the Senate bill post haste.

Anyone who reads liberal commentary knew this. And anyone who doesn’t could guess it based on how hard Pelosi fought for her bill: which is to say, not at all. This is because she never cared about it as anything other than leverage.

The is not 11-dimensional chess. It’s 2.1 dimensional chess, the kind that’s just ordinary politics as practiced by people with IQs in the triple digits. This includes Pelosi, but not Trump and possibly not many Republican senators either.

This is the sternest look that Hilbert and Hopper are capable of. Stay home and pet ur catz! They are virus free and you don’t even have to shop for them since you can buy months’ worth of cat food at once. Staying home with your cats is the safest possible activity you can engage in during these difficult times.

Say something!Kevin Drum

Judging from my Twitter feed—I know, I know—conservatives know only one thing about the Democratic Party contribution to the coronavirus rescue bill: it includes money for Obamaphones and the Kennedy Center. I assume that this is basically the only thing Fox News has told them.

That’s the conservative noise machine for you. Even in the face of a massive pandemic the only thing they care about is pressing Trumpish hot buttons for their audience. Still, I wonder: how many people of any political persuasion understand that the expansion of unemployment benefits in the rescue bill is worth an extra $600 per week through the end of June? How many understand that this adds up to $10,000 or so? How many understand that this is literally the only thing in the bill that will keep most people whole while they’re out of work thanks to government lockdowns?

And how many understand that the only reason this is in the bill is because Democrats insisted on it? Republicans couldn’t have cared less. Their original bill bailed out businesses and gave people a flashy but utterly inadequate one-shot $1,200 check. That was it. That was all anyone would have had to get them through the next few months.

But why would anyone know this unless Democrats do something to take credit for it? Have they? Not that I’ve heard. So conservatives think Democrats were all about Obamaphones and the Kennedy Center, while everyone else figures that Democrats did nothing.

Once again, then, Democrats do the right thing but commit political malpractice by not crowing about it. It’s a wonder the party is still in business.

Here’s the coronavirus growth rate through Thursday. The chart for Canada was incorrect yesterday for some reason, but it’s been corrected today. The Italian death rate continues to decelerate on the same trendline as yesterday. The US death toll remains anomalously low, but I don’t know why. It could be a statistical artifact based on the choice of Day 0 or it could be something real based on how we treat coronavirus cases. The latter would be pretty intriguing, but right now it’s too early to tell.

Here’s how to read the charts: Let’s use France as an example. For them, Day 0 was March 5, when they surpassed one death per 10 million by recording their sixth death. They are currently at Day 21; total deaths are at 283x their initial level; and they have recorded a total of 25.3 deaths per million so far. As the chart shows, this is slightly below where Italy was on their Day 21.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

The Wall Street Journal tells us about the plight of tipped workers who are now unemployed:

Take Ian Prebo. On a good night, Mr. Prebo was making $400 in tips bartending at Seattle’s Blue Moon Tavern, which closed this month after a patron caught Covid-19. Since then, like many bars and restaurants across the country, Blue Moon Tavern—which can’t provide takeout or delivery—has remained shut.

Mr. Prebo, 36 years old, estimated roughly three-quarters of his monthly $3,500 income was from tips. After applying for unemployment benefits, he was told he would receive $188 a week. “I have customers who take care of me,” he said. “But the flip side is in a catastrophic event like this, my income is completely wiped out.”

Why does the Journal use this as its opening anecdote? As they acknowledge farther down, the median wage for tipped workers is a meager $2,000 per month, which means that Prebo’s experience is not even remotely typical. What’s more, the expanded unemployment insurance in the coronavirus rescue bill will pay at least $800 per week for low-wage workers. Virtually all of them will lose no income, and some might even make more than they did while working.

These are tough times, and the benefits from the rescue bill are still a few weeks away. I have nothing but sympathy for low-wage workers who are scared about what’s happening. Nevertheless, we’ve just passed legislation that will make up the lost income for nearly all of them, and surely that should rate more than a passing sentence midway through the story?

Here are the results of yesterday’s survey:

This doesn’t seem like a bad guess to me. I think we have to be prepared to hunker down through June, and two-thirds of you agree that it’s going to be June or later.

On the other hand, a third of you think we’ll be finished with control measures by May, and that’s despite the fact that my readers tend to be pretty well informed and pay no attention to Donald Trump. I wonder if a real survey would show that most people think we’ll be done with this whole thing by the end of April?

From the department of buried leads:

New data from the rest of Europe suggests that the outbreak is running faster than expected, said [Neil] Ferguson. As a result, epidemiologists have revised their estimate of the reproduction number (R0) of the virus. This measure of how many other people a carrier usually infects is now believed to be just over three, he said, up from 2.5. “That adds more evidence to support the more intensive social distancing measures,” he said.

Neil Ferguson is the guy in charge of the Imperial College study that predicted 2 million coronavirus deaths in the US and 500,000 in Britain if no control measures were taken. He now believes that Britain will keep its death toll under 20,000 due to the strong isolation and social distancing measures being taken.

Which is great! At the same time, estimating that R₀ has increased from 2.5 to 3.1 is . . . very, very bad. It means that on average, every infected person infects three other people, not 2.5 other people—which makes the spread of the virus much wider and faster. Without any control measures, for example, it means that after ten generations a single person will be responsible for 120,000 infections instead of 15,000 infections.

In other words, control measures are even more important than we thought. This is really, really no time for Donald Trump to be screwing around with this stuff.

Here’s a quick survey for you. I’m just asking for your best guess based on what you’re hearing from experts and media briefings.

Gripas Yuri/Abaca via ZUMA

Hmmm:

There is no evidence that Trump could tell a lie so false and dangerous that Dr. Fauci wouldn’t immediately leap to defend it as a reasonable way of giving Americans hope.https://t.co/Xz5m5QKDgq

— Susan Simpson (@TheViewFromLL2) March 27, 2020

I know my position on Fauci is an unpopular one, but he needs to knock this off. Whenever he waffles and equivocates like this he lends Trump credibility for everything he says—and Trump’s blatherings are heard by ten times more people than Fauci’s next-day corrections. On a net basis, Fauci is doing more harm than good unless he stands up to Trump more forthrightly and consistently.