Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 6. Canada is still increasing. The United States is still plateauing. Sweden looks a little iffy. Everyone else is making good progress.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Sony Pictures

These are bleak times. In the middle of a historic pandemic we are about to give up the fight and commit collective suicide because we are ruled by a mad king. Everyone is out to get me, he broods late at night, fingers flashing over his smartphone. Nobody appreciates what I’ve done for them. The press hates me. The pandemic is a Democratic plot to turn people against me. A cure is just around the corner. They’re exaggerating the death rate to make me look bad. We don’t need more testing. What happened to my beautiful economy? Where are my rallies?

And while the mad king raves, his courtiers shuffle around not knowing what to do. Some enthusiastically support him. Some mutter to the press. Some try to ignore the madness around them and keep working.

And the rest of us sit around feeling helpless. We are on the cusp of needlessly killing tens of thousands because the mad king deems it so, and there’s nothing we can do about it. At times we begin to wonder if we’re the ones who are mad. Maybe we have beaten the pandemic. Maybe the death toll will keep going down. Maybe we really did overdo the whole social distancing thing.

No. We haven’t beaten the pandemic and we know it. But the mad king says we have, and his followers roar their approval. We are headed deep into the darkness, and we’re not doing it because we lost a battle that we fought to the last man. We’re doing it because we’re in thrall to a mad king who no longer belongs to the same world the rest of us live in and tells us that we are all honored warriors for dying in his cause.

It is, once again, gosling season here in Irvine and we have two, possibly three little flocks of baby geese waddling around these days. The biggest is this impressive gaggle of ten:

They practically glow in the early morning sun:

Or you can backlight them for a whole different kind of glow:

That’s all, folks!

Politico writes about Graham County, North Carolina:

With the coronavirus beginning to spread nearby, all accommodation businesses in the county—hotels, motels, guesthouses, campgrounds—had to close by March 23 at noon; exceptions would be made only for people who could prove the need for a “legitimate work-related stay.” What’s more, starting on March 27, anyone traveling on Highways 129 and NC-28—the two roads into Graham County—would have to show a county address or, for nonresidents, proof of property ownership in order to enter. Anyone seeking to enter for business purposes would have to apply for a permit. Checkpoints with orange cones and barricades soon went up, and sheriff’s deputies camped out under tents around the clock.

Is this even legal? Can counties just block off federal and state highways whenever they want to? And what if I’m in Chilhowee and I need to get to Cowee? That’s a helluva detour if I can’t take Highway 28 through Graham County:

I sympathize with the problems faced by small, rural counties with no hospitals and sparse health care in general. But surely this isn’t the solution. As long as residents are free to come and go, you’re eventually going to get some cases of COVID-19. And once you’ve got a few, it’s only a matter of time until you have a lot. In the 21st century, it’s just not possible to wall yourself off from the world.

Every day I show you the growth rate of COVID-19 deaths in the US. But some people think that’s misleading. After surging in April, deaths in New York state are now declining, and that affects the national numbers. In particular, it makes it look as if our death toll is declining, when it’s really rising everywhere except New York. So how about showing us the national numbers without New York included?

Fine. Here it is:

Now let’s talk about whether it’s a good idea to look at things this way. I’m skeptical. In nearly every dataset there are one or two points that are really high and pull up the average. And it’s always tempting to pull those out. Aside from Texas, oil production in the US is down. Aside from Los Angeles, air quality is getting better. Etc. But there’s always a highest data point. And the average always comes down if you can dream up some reason to exclude it. In the case of COVID-19, that happens to be New York today. But tomorrow it might be Florida. Then Illinois. Who knows? Should we always exclude whichever state is rising or falling the fastest?

I don’t think so. I’ll grant that it’s interesting to look at the trendline without New York, but I’m not sure it’s justifiable. It’s better to look at the full set of numbers and just chart the ups and downs. Alternatively, it’s also fine to look at states on their own to see who’s doing well and who isn’t.

One other thing: there’s an op-ed in the New York Times today showing the COVID-19 toll with and without New York, but it’s showing new cases, not new deaths. I continue to think this is probably highly misleading since different states have vastly different testing regimes. If, say, New York is testing 1 percent of its population and Florida is testing 0.1 percent, then New York will overwhelm the total regardless of who’s going up and who’s going down. Likewise, as testing becomes more widespread, looking at cases over time becomes unreliable even within a single state. The case rate can look like it’s skyrocketing just because we’re testing far more people.

I do think we have to look at case counts, and we have no choice but to use the numbers we have. However, they should be taken with a very big shaker of salt.

Samar Abu Elouf/IMAGESLIVE via ZUMA

We are, yet again, in danger of being consumed by the Chinese borg:

While much of the world is consumed by the COVID-19 crisis, the Chinese government is quietly unleashing a financial innovation that will reshape its economy and improve its strategic standing for decades to come. In April, China’s central bank introduced the “digital yuan” in a pilot program across four cities, becoming the world’s first major economy to issue a national digital currency.

….The digital yuan will eventually replace cash in circulation….The move from paper to bytes is more than just a sign of our digital times. Chinese leaders are making a strategic choice to achieve both a vastly more efficient administrative state, and the ability to dictate the terms of 21st century economic diplomacy by setting the standard for digital monetary systems.

Full disclosure: I’m only writing about this because I really, really need at least a short break from COVID-19 blogging. That said, what’s the deal with this? The dollar, after all, is a digital currency. There’s something like $15-40 trillion in dollars and dollar liabilities in the world today, and only $2 trillion of that is physical cash. The rest is all bits and bytes sitting on computers all over the globe.

So what’s the difference between that and a “digital currency”? Michael Casey explains:

As with an exchange of banknotes—the most common physical bearer instrument—both parties to a digital currency transaction recognize final settlement as soon as possession changes. With all other cashless payments, whether by card, wire, check, or digital app such as Venmo, the deal isn’t fully settled—meaning it could still be reversed—until their banks have recorded, reconciled, and settled their respective debits and credits.

This is why digital currencies are so revolutionary. In ending banks’ centuries-long intermediating role in our monetary system and allowing direct peer-to-peer exchange, they can imbue money with the power of software.

Huh. As someone who has a long history with software, I’m not sure I really want my money to be “imbued with the power of software.” Nor do I quite see the advantage of being a bearer instrument. Digital settlement is pretty fast already and can certainly be made almost instantaneous if we want to.

So that’s surely not it. Aside from replacing hundred dollar bills in drug deals, then, what’s the advantage? The big one, I’m guessing, is that it reduces the power of nation states to restrict the use of their own currency. And why would anyone care about that? Well, Iran might care. Maintaining our sanctions on Iran would probably be a lot harder if they could do business with digital dollars and yen and euros that were outside the control of US banking authorities.

In other words, this might look enticing to China, which would be happy to undermine the influence of the Federal Reserve. But more generally, why would the world’s central bankers be all that keen on a transformation that would reduce the power of the world’s central bankers? This remains a bit of a mystery to me.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 5. Canada is not looking so good. Germany is almost down to 1 death per million. The United States remains flat, flat, flat. We will either turn up or turn down over the next week, and that will tell us what our near future looks like.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Kevin Drum

Coronavirus rescue 4.0 is already in the negotiation phase:

Rather than indulging Trump’s insistence on a payroll tax cut, GOP senators have instead shifted their focus to liability protections for businesses, demanding that they be protected from what Republicans view are frivolous lawsuits as private employers try to reopen their doors in the coming weeks. Top Democrats have said they will oppose such sweeping protections, on which Republicans are insisting in exchange for another massive infusion of state and local aid.

The standoff shows no immediate signs of abating, as House Democrats assemble a massive new rescue package expected to exceed $2 trillion that would include around a $1 trillion commitment for states, cities and municipalities. Money is being eyed for a large array of other provisions including housing, social services, law enforcement, tribal government needs, food security, the Postal Service, rural broadband, rent and mortgage relief, as well as veterans issues.

Democrats have also discussed another round of checks to Americans and another extension of unemployment insurance, and are keeping an eye on the Paycheck Protection Program and a separate small-business emergency loan and grant program to see whether supplemental funding will be needed.

This is totally normal. Republicans would typically be in favor of a tax cut, but a payroll tax cut wouldn’t help the rich very much so they’re against it. The only thing that’s really on their agenda is protection for businesses from lawsuits.

Meanwhile, Democrats are interested solely in measures that help ordinary people: state and local bailouts, housing, food, unemployment insurance, etc. This is exactly how Coronavirus 3.0 went. It’s amazing how candid Republicans are about caring only for business bailouts and letting Democrats worry about regular people. All things considered, I suppose this is for the best, since Republicans would just muck things up if they pretended to be interested in helping people. Might as well leave it to the folks who actually do care.

This is a purple owl’s clover. It’s pretty enough, I suppose, but a deep and detailed search of the botanical literature reveals nothing at all interesting about it. I am curious about its name, though. Is it a clover named after a purple owl? If so, I’d like to see one of those. Or is it an owl’s clover that happens to be purple? That seems more likely, but what’s so owlish about it?

Please take five seconds to really savor this headline from the Wall Street Journal:

This is literally insane. We’re already at 70,000 deaths. We’ll get close to 130,000 even if we keep every social distancing measure in place and just ride the bell curve down normally. At this point, a projection of 135,000 is pretty much an absolute minimum.

But we’re not going to do that. We’re going to reopen. We’re going to deliberately make the pandemic worse at the urging of our commander-in-chief and then we’ll have to go through all of this stuff all over again. Or else watch the graveyards fill up.

It doesn’t surprise me too much that Donald Trump wants to do this. He lives in his own fantasy world where something—hydroxychloroquine! a vaccine! bleach!—will miraculously come along and make everything better. But how is it that Republican senators are OK with all this? And Republican governors? And Republican House members? And Republican cabinet secretaries? Do they not care? Do they truly think all the experts are wrong? Or what?

Words start to fail me at this point. I wonder what people in other countries think of our descent into collective madness?

And there’s one more thing that’s possibly even more bizarre. A lot of rural red areas want to reopen because “we don’t even have a dozen cases of COVID-19 out here.” That’s what everyone says, of course, and by the time they have a few hundred cases it’s too late to do much about it.

But the fact that these rural areas have very few cases does give them an option that big urban areas don’t have (not yet, anyway): test-and-trace. The whole point of test-and-trace is that you can only do it if the level of infection is low. It’s simply too overwhelming when thousands of cases per day are popping up. But Sutter County here in California? They have a low population and very few coronavirus cases. They could implement test-and-trace if they were given the money and expertise to do it. And then they could reopen safely.

But even though this would make Trump a hero to his base, it’s the one thing he seems unwilling to countenance. Why? Because everyone has been criticizing him for the lack of testing, and that’s a death knell for a narcissist like him. He can never admit that he did anything wrong on the testing front, which logically means he refuses to put any effort behind a better testing regime. We’ll get one eventually, probably through a combination of bureaucratic inertia and state governors taking the reins, but it will take a lot longer than it needs to. And in the meantime tens of thousands of people will die.