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Unsanitized: The COVID-19 Report for Jan. 8, 2021

Oh Yeah, That Other Crisis

The pandemic is burning through America right now

 

I really don't think "we got this," in Los Angeles or anywhere else in
America. (Damian Dovarganes/AP Photo)

First Response

There's no way that, a year ago, you could script the scenario where
the death of over 4,000 Americans in a day would not be the top news
item. But that's where we are, as yesterday brought us 4,033 deaths
from the coronavirus
, 4,028
more than in the Capitol Riot. This was the deadliest day of the virus
so far, and the seven-day average of 2,750 deaths per day is also a new
high, and that still includes the low-reporting New Year's Day.

I can't imagine that the death rate will relent in January. Yesterday
was the third straight day

of record daily deaths. And we're right at the beginning of the surge
within a surge of infections from gatherings around Christmas and New
Year's. I'd expect the case rates to go back up, and with them
hospitalizations.

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In the context of the top story right now, just think about the
superspreader event that was the Capitol Riot. Reportedly
, the members
of Congress huddled into a secure location featured a great number of
Republicans not wearing masks, even after being pleaded with to do so.
And that's before you take into account the thousands of unmasked
people from all over the country, now headed back to their respective
residences, who were packed in pitched battles with the Capitol Police,
in close quarters. I've seen videos of masses of humanity all
breathing on each other. Think of the impact of the Sturgis rally over
the summer, or that initial Biogen conference in Boston. Sturgis had
more people than the Capitol Riot but the Biogen conference had just 175
people

and it has been linked to 300,000 cases. There were ten times that many
people at the Capitol on Wednesday, at least.

On top of the public health crisis-and there's no other way to
describe it-employment fell by 140,000
in December, according
to the Labor Department. (Payrolls were revised up in October and
November, so it's more of a wash.) Year-over-year, the economy lost
9.37 million jobs, and that includes the relatively good months of
January and February 2020. The world's scariest job chart

looks even scarier, like a bouncing ball that has begun to descend
again.

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Digging into the report, it looks very much like part-time restaurant
work was a major culprit; the combination of cold weather and a ban on
outdoor dining in the populous region of southern California meant less
need for help at eating and drinking establishments. But government
payrolls also dropped by 45,000, a continuation of the slow grind of
state and local austerity that was the one thing not really dealt with
in the recent COVID relief package.

There's money in that package for schools and hospitals and transit
that you can construe as state and local fiscal aid because all money is
fungible, but most of that will have to go to new costs like
retrofitting schools to minimize viral spread and hospitals to increase
capacity. Ongoing operations costs from the drop in revenue aren't
covered. This is why we're now starting to hear in Democratic circles
that the $2,000 checks should be paired

with state and local aid and vaccine funding, although politically
that's probably a mistake since it gives most Republicans a way to
oppose the package, frustrating a quick victory. You'd likely have to
go the budget reconciliation route, thereby ticking off one of those
three silver bullets.

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The one bit of good news, as I'll elaborate on below, is that vaccine
distribution is picking up. Perhaps that's as more funding kicks in,
or perhaps that's because officials are getting up to speed with the
system as it rolls out. But we're quite a long way from vaccination
being an effective depressant of the outbreak.

I've seen one benchmark as whether we are doing more vaccinations per
day than there are infections. We don't see all the infections pop up
on case results, so a good rule of thumb is 2-3 times more infections
than cases. That puts us at around 600,000 infections per day. We just
hit 700,000 vaccinations yesterday, but that's not the good comparison
to make. You don't really have protection from the virus in the first
week to ten days of getting the shot, and of course without two full
doses it's not entirely clear how much protection you have at all. So
you almost have to stagger the numbers. If the infections per day is
smaller than the vaccinations from, say, 10 days ago, THEN we'd be
making progress on getting more people immunized than infected. And
we're not on pace for that for another 10 days yet, and that's only
if infections don't continue to climb.

In other words, the secondary story of the moment should really be the
top story that it's been for the last year, and when power transfers,
whether orderly or not, it will remain the only story worth talking
about, as it's the primary force affecting all of our lives.

Number of Vaccines Given

6.25 million
.
So that's 1.2 million shots in the last two days. We're still at 29
percent of allocated shots being administered, though. We need to get
much closer to exhausting supply. The worst states are now all three in
the deep South (Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi). Having people in
government who believe in government, it turns out, matters.

We Can't Do This Without You

Today I Learned

* This is very good news, Biden will be releasing all vaccine doses

rather than holding back supply for second shots. (CNN)

* The first piece of the restarted Paycheck Protection Program will roll
out next week
.
(Axios)

* Predatory lender that preyed on borrowers during the pandemic wants to
become a national bank
.
(ProPublica)

* People are driving like maniacs
with
fewer cars on the road. (Wired)

* Sweden, hero to the herd immunity crowd, now is implementing a
lockdown law
.
(Washington Post)

* We really have no idea

about the extent of the more transmissible mutation of COVID-19. (New
York Times)

* Prison transfers just spread COVID around

and threatened the sick and the elderly. (The Intercept)

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