The protests we’ve seen in a handful of locations around the country have bamboozled a lot of the national press. Look closely and a lot of the turnout is heavily stocked with militia types and the kinds of groups who turned out for the Charlottesville protests a couple years ago. But the bigger thing is that for now they appear highly orchestrated. In Michigan, they appear to be in part in reaction polling showing severe declines in public support for President Trump. They’re organized by groups funded in large part by the DeVos family. These are basically Trump loyalists supporting Trump at his request and mobilized by key rightist groups. The key question, as TPM Reader TS explains, is whether what starts here as orchestrated and largely inorganic takes on a life of its own and gains political traction. They now have Fox and an incumbent President cheering them on as a demonstration of political identity.
As for the “open the economy” protests right now, I am keeping an eye on them. A modest number of places so far, and participants in the tens to hundreds to around a thousand apiece. These early events look very orchestrated by a few key national professional organizations – and more electorally aimed than early Tea P or resistance protests were in 2009 and 2017. The orchestrators are Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Works, Club for Growth, and the Trump reelect campaign, all national professional operations. The advocacy groups are all ultra-free-market operations that most certainly do not want most Americans to become reliant upon public benefits or more trusting of government.
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Let me add a few more nuggets of information on this emerging topic.
More on that serology study I noted below. My general point stands about how vulnerable and relatively untouched the California population remains based on these numbers. But there’s another key point to take note of. TPM Reader BR focused my attention on this. If we extrapolate the total number of infections across California, this shows just how massively the official infection numbers undercount what appears to be the actual number of California residents who’ve been infected.
We keep hearing about how we will know more once we get the first serology data to find out just how many people have been exposed, infected and thus (presumably but not certainly) immune to further COVID19 infection. We now have a preprint just released of a study from Santa Clara, California of over 3,300 people. The news is not great, though there are certainly many different ways of defining ‘good’ or ‘bad’ news in this case. The study found that 1.5% of people in the study were seropositive; adjusted for demographic weighting the number was 2.81%.
Michael Cohen was never going to have to endure the typical prison experience, even if a pandemic never struck the globe. Even if life as we knew it never came to a halt.
We have some new data on which states are getting the biggest share of the forgivable loan funds (the biggest percentage of a state’s payrolls covered) from the Payroll Protection Program, which is part of the CARES Act, the federal rescue bill. It turns out generally red and/or rural states are doing quite well while big blue states, which are among the hardest hit in the country, are doing much less well. The analysis was done by Ernie Tedeschi, a former US Treasury economist who is now with Evercore. This article from Bloomberg uses Tedeschi’s analysis to build this chart. These are the numbers the Treasury Department released.
Here’s the data.
TPM Reader AR flagged to me this informed, cautious and insightful overview of what we can glean about COVID19 testing data in the United States – numbers of tests, the percentage of positive tests and what if anything we can infer from these numbers about the true size of the epidemic and how pervasive it is in the United States. It’s written by two people running the COVID Tracking Project.
I’ve mentioned before that news of US intelligence reports from November 2019 about a disease outbreak in China are extremely difficult to square with the most exacting news reporting and genomic analyses of the virus itself. And yet, according to the Times of Israel, Israel’s Channel 12 reported today that the US Intelligence Community became aware of an “emerging disease” in the second week of November. The Trump administration “did not deem it of interest” but intelligence officials shared a classified report with NATO and Israel.
He brings one of his favorite TV defenders to the White House.
I’m returning to this topic of calculating the full death toll of the COVID19 Crisis. As I noted yesterday, samplings of data from New York, Spain and Italy suggest a pattern in which the true scale of mortality tied to the COVID19 Crisis is roughly twice that recorded in the COVID19 death tolls we see each day, and sometimes much higher. Here are a few more data points which add weight to this emerging pattern.