You may have heard talk of eventually redeploying the resources mobilized to fight the pandemic to tackle carbon emissions. It’s not a misplaced sentiment exactly, though I do think the parallels are generally inapt. But then TPM Reader FL wrote in a few days ago and framed it up in a way that felt more on point than other discussions I’ve seen. I yield the floor:
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This is a follow up on my April 3rd post about how TPM is holding up amidst the COVID-19 economic crisis. Before I get to that, here’s an update on what I shared with you back on the 3rd. I told you that we were setting up a system to allow readers to support our work above and beyond the cost of your Prime or Prime AF membership. Well, here it is. Click here and we welcome your support at whatever level you think appropriate and whatever level you are able. We truly appreciate it.
We promise you that we will put it to good use. These contributions will all be earmarked for the TPM Journalism Fund. For every increment of $50 we receive we will create a free membership for someone who cannot afford a Prime membership or for a registered student. (More detail on this below.) As I mentioned on the 3rd, we had been workshopping and building this new system for six months to a year and had scheduled its launch for mid-March. We slightly delayed the launch and have slightly retooled it for this new reality. Prior to the COVID19 crisis, our promise was to use these additional FIN (Future is Now) funds to add new reporting capacity to TPM, to turbocharge TPM reporting. With this new COVID19 reality, we will use it either for that purpose or to cover revenue shortfalls tied to COVID19 as they arise.
If you find our work important and want to helps us remain vital and hopefully expand our ability to report news, please consider it.
Now to our status a month into this crisis.
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.
He brings one of his favorite TV defenders to the White House.
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.
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.
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.
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 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%.
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.