Preview

It’s hard to believe that something as world-shattering and culture-breaking as the coronavirus can be overshadowed and downplayed in American life. Over 180,000 people have died. The economy has been battered. It remains the story of a lifetime. And now it exists on a lower tier.

You’d think, from the indifference, that everything that can be said has been said about COVID-19. But the trajectory of the virus continues to change, and likely will until there’s a vaccine, treatment, or rapid test that keeps people safe. Only five states, clustered in the Northeast and New England, are on a solid path that enables the resumption of something approaching normal life. (As we’ve seen from Europe, however, any wider relaxation of restrictions will lead to a resumption of case counts.)

Where the trouble spots were once in the South and West, however, now the Midwest is flashing red. This was one of the last regions to not get hit by the spread of the virus, and you can view it almost as the introduction of the disease, six months after it arrived. In particular, the Plains region north from Oklahoma up through the Dakotas is a problem.

In one sense that’s not surprising. We saw the first death from the Sturgis biker rally that took place in South Dakota, and that state is now among the highest in the nation per capita for new cases, and the highest by one count.

The virus appears to be gaining in Midwestern college towns like Grand Forks, North Dakota and Ames, Iowa, where thousands of Iowa State University students and faculty are either sick or in quarantine. Residence halls, classrooms, and parties have become magnets for the virus.

The mitigation measures in these states are light, if they exist. Governors in the Dakotas and Iowa are disinclined to impose much of anything on the population. As the spread is already uncontrolled, you can expect it to thrive in that environment. These are enormous population centers, which helps, but the virus will surely burn through there, as it has elsewhere.

Nationally speaking, yesterday’s count of 30,409 new cases was the lowest since June 22. We still had over 1,000 Americans die, though that was a good trend week-over-week, where the seven-day tracker is now under 1,000, as it has been for the past two weeks.

The good news there is that anti-inflammatory steroids have proven successful in reducing mortality, reducing deaths by about one-third compared to the alternative. Though we had a possibly equivalent amount of virus in the nation in July compared to April, deaths never approached that terrible April level, and stalled out at roughly half that rate. As I had said, better treatments would make a difference several months into the crisis, and our health system has responded.

The problem is that the steroid treatment really only affects mortality in late-stage patients. We have nothing that stops people from getting sick. As people move indoors in cooler weather, the threat of more spread (and economic depression as the innovation of outdoor dining, for example, becomes untenable in much of the country) looms. Flu season’s resumption could compound matters.

We are not close to being done with the virus, even if it isn’t infecting or killing quite as many people as before. Last year, news of something taking away a thousand people every day would rightly be seen as a catastrophe. Now it’s just “2020.” We cannot become deadened to this reality.

When the Labor Department counts job numbers, they add a “seasonal adjustment” to the final figure. Layoffs follow a pattern; every holiday season there’s a surge of hiring, and every January loads of lost jobs, for example. So each week in the series has a seasonal adjustment based on past experience.

Past experience does not tell us much about the pandemic economy. So the Labor Department ditched the seasonal adjustment. Starting with today’s first-time jobless claim, the headline will reflect the actual number of claims last week, not the seasonally adjusted number. Prior weeks were not revised, so the possibility emerged of a number that looked like progress when it wasn’t.

That’s exactly what happened. The prior week’s first-time claims number was 1.01 million, and this week’s headline number was 833,352. Sounds good! Except last week’s number was seasonally adjusted. The real number was 825,761. So first-time claims went up. Total initial claims, in fact, have risen every week for a month.

The continued claim number, meaning people still filing for unemployment, sits at 29 million. This is the fifth week that the $600/week enhancement has not been available for the unemployed. According to the Century Foundation, only seven states have begun to pay out the Lost Wages Assistance program of $300/week that Trump ordered last month. Those seven states represent 15 percent of unemployed workers. By the Century Foundation’s estimate, $3.85 billion has been spent on LWA, and if the $600/week had been extended through this period, it would have paid $68 billion. So that’s over $64 billion out of what the unemployed have been using as wages. I don’t know exactly when we’ll see this show up in consumer spending, poverty, debt default, and food assistance data, but it will.

It’s another example of how the haves and have-nots have grown even wider in this economy.

I was on the Lawyers, Guns, and Money podcast with historian Erik Loomis talking about my book Monopolized. Listen here. (Lawyers, Guns and Money)
Record corporate bond issuance for a calendar year, and we just started September. The Fed bailout continues. (Financial Times)
More on the corporate bond rush, including a cameo from me. (CFO Dive)
Meanwhile, United, one of those bond (and bailout) recipients, plans to cut 16,000 jobs next month. (Wall Street Journal)
Business bankruptcies are on the cusp of soaring right as voters make their choices in the election. (Politico)
I’ve been told that states are being asked to prepare for a vaccine in October. This story puts the date at November 1, two days before the election. (New York Times)
Maybe the Pelosi blowout was a setup, but the judgment remains suspect given who she is. (Los Angeles Times)
Silvio Berlusconi has coronavirus. (The Hill)