View this email in your browser

Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Nov. 6, 2020

The 60 Million-Strong Super-Spreader Event

Plus, markets sense doom in state and local governments

 

Voters cast ballots on Election Day in Los Angeles. (Damian
Dovarganes/AP Photo)

Programming Note

Joe Biden is going to be the president. There will be some shouting
between now and Inauguration Day but that's what's going to happen.

First Response

I thought Wednesday was a sad milestone in our coronavirus efforts, but
then Thursday rolled around and gave us 116,000 new cases
. The
numbers are just expanding, especially in the key area of
hospitalizations, which is a less fudge-able indicator. The failure of
Europe to get control of the virus suggests a trajectory in the pandemic
on par with the Spanish flu, which raged in its second wave before
burning itself out. And while the European strain appears to be a
mutation that may be more contagious, if their administrative state
cannot get a hold of the spread
,
ours has no chance.

That's especially true given that roughly 60 million Americans left
their homes on Tuesday, got in a line, went for the most part indoors,
interacted with volunteers at close range, and cast their ballots in the
general election.

We don't have great data on the impact of elections on the spread of
the virus. In Wisconsin, where there was a lot of in-person voting in
April
,
a few dozen cases were linked to polling places
,
but Wisconsin wasn't having a particularly virulent outbreak at that
time. Now it's completely out of control there, with 5,900 cases a day

two days running. Several states are at their record highs in case
counts
right now; in North Dakota it's over 2,000 cases per million, the
highest level recorded anywhere in the country. And people went to the
polls, maybe not in the same numbers because of mail-in voting but at a
healthy enough clip.

Indeed, virtually the entire country

is seeing elevated spread right now, and virtually the entire country
voted in person on Tuesday. We'll have to wait a couple weeks to see
the impacts of that in the numbers, but I cannot imagine that there's
no impact.

**Read all of our Unsanitized reports here**

Click to Support The American Prospect

We also know from the counting that a substantial part of that in-person
vote on Election Day were Trump supporters, and that doesn't correlate
entirely well with social distancing or mask wearing. I have heard from
a few people about wildly varying standards at polling places in terms
of sanitization and masks and general compliance with public health
guidelines. Again, this is not comparable to the primaries, which were
by and large held when there wasn't as much to be concerned about in
those particular states and regions.

The exponential growth we're seeing now, in fact, could be an artifact
of early voting, which featured long lines in many parts of the country,
with people waiting hours to vote, sometimes stuck indoors on that wait.
It will be a while to disaggregate that, but to the extent Americans
were doing something novel in the last month, it's been voting. And
the cases have skyrocketed over that period.

This is not a call, of course, for shaming people who got in line to
vote. There are painful questions about managing safety and exercising
civil rights. People who knowingly had COVID took on significant
hardships

in order to vote, and some were turned away, which is wrong. But it just
seems like an empirical reality that some portion of the 60 million
people who voted in person on Tuesday, and the millions more who voted
previously, were infected, perhaps asymptomatic but infected. And they
likely infected others.

That's something we'll have to deal with, but the political system
has elections and agendas and all the rest to discuss, and the media has
counting to go over, and so this uncontrolled outbreak that has upended
our lives for eight months has faded into the background. Nobody expects
the Trump administration or even state officials to get too invasive
about lockdowns or even public health guidance. We're just going to
let this burn, without anyone to raise their voice and demand caution.

We Can't Do This Without You

Wake Up Mr. Fed

There's a trend piece in the business press right now with a bunch of
quotes from exultant investors glad that the election results signal no
changes whatsoever to their tax burden or financial extraction. But one
set of market participants are despondent: municipal bond traders
.
Munis have been falling since the election, for two separate reasons.
One, divided government likely means little, if any, state and local
government relief; two, the likely lack of changes to the tax system
means that tax-free muni bonds will not look as attractive as an
alternative for investors. A failed ballot measure that would have
brought a graduated income tax increase in Illinois led to fears that
the state's debt rating would fall as well.

The drop in munis is a signal that the states are going to experience
tremendous pain for a while. Even in the relatively good jobs report

today, state and local governments shed 130,000 jobs. Without relief,
these losses are going to rise, it's just undeniable. The Fed has the
power to save state and local governments
,
not just through the Municipal Liquidity Facility, but by using other
authorities to make short-term, endlessly-rolled-over cheap loans. We
know that this is going to be the main obstacle to full recovery. If
Congress won't act the Fed has to step in.

Support Independent, Fact-Checked Journalism

Days Without a Bailout Oversight Chair

224
.

It's A Good Time To Donate!

Today I Learned

* Here are some Election Night clips from me on Twitch
with Hasan Piker. (YouTube)

* The jobs report for October was fairly strong
, but
beware the aggregates; inequality masks the significant pain out there.
(CNBC)

* Denmark is completely sealing off North Jutland

to try and stop the coronavirus mutation from spreading. (The Local)

* Meanwhile, mink are dying in Wisconsin
;
it's thought that the mutated COVID strain in mink in Denmark jumped
to humans. (Wisconsin Public Radio)

* Nearly $13 billion

in COVID-related losses for sports leagues. (Bloomberg)

* ESPN is cutting a bunch of jobs
,
which you can see as a knock-on effect of the above. (Los Angeles Times)

**Click the social links below to share this newsletter**

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (C) 2020 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States