A roundup of articles on the status of the Coronavirus and ways we can help….
Big businesses usurp relief loans said to be for small businesses
Thomas Franck, CNBC, 23 Apr 2020
Hundreds of millions of dollars of Paycheck Protection Program emergency funding has been claimed by large, publicly traded companies, new research published by Morgan Stanley shows.
In fact, the U.S. government has allocated at least $243.4 million of the total $349 billion to publicly traded companies, the firm said.
The PPP was designed to help the nation’s smallest, mom-and-pop shops keep employees on payroll and prevent mass layoffs across the country amid the coronavirus pandemic.
But the research shows that several of the companies that have received aid have market values well in excess of $100 million, including DMC Global ($405 million), Wave Life Sciences ($286 million) and Fiesta Restaurant Group ($189 million). Fiesta, which employs more than 10,000 people, according to its last reported annual number, received a PPP loan of $10 million, Morgan Stanley’s data showed.
At least 75 companies that have received the aid were publicly traded and received a combined $300 million in low-interest, taxpayer-backed loans, according to a separate report published by The Associated Press.
“I think you’ve seen some pretty shameful acts by some large companies to take advantage of the system,” said Howard Schultz, former Starbucks chairman and CEO. Instead, the government should act “as a backstop for the banks to give every small business and every independent restaurant a bridge to the vaccine. And that is the money and the resources to make it through.”
Statistics released by the Small Business Administration last week showed that 4,400 of the approved loans exceeded $5 million. The size of the typical loan nationally was $206,000, according to the SBA report released April 16.
The SBA awarded the plurality of PPP dollars (13.12%) to the construction industry. Professional, scientific and technical services received 12.65%, manufacturing received 11.96%, health care received 11.65% and accommodation and food services received 8.9%.
Congress approved the first-come-first-served PPP in March as part of the massive $2.2 trillion CARES Act, which at the time promised to ease some of the financial burden for many of the nation’s smallest business owners. But the program ran out of money on Thursday, when the SBA announced that it was “unable to accept new applications for the Paycheck Protection Program based on available appropriations funding.”
The nation’s top lawmakers have in recent weeks worked to expand the small-business funding.
Staffers for Sen. Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have been in talks with the Treasury Department on drafting another bill, which appeared nearly finished by Monday evening.
Schumer, the top Democrat in the Senate, said Tuesday that he believes the chamber will pass an additional relief bill for small business later in the day.
He told CNN he spoke “well past midnight” with Pelosi, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and “came to an agreement on just about every issue.”
By Sunday, deliberations between Republicans and Democrats included setting aside $310 billion more into the PPP. Some $60 billion of that sum would be earmarked for rural and minority groups while $60 billion would go to the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program, a separate relief offered by the SBA for small businesses.
Mnuchin said the deal may include $75 billion in funding for health-care providers and hospitals and $25 billion for Covid-19 testing.
90 Days of Madness: Official Numbers Prove COVID-19 is STILL Benign
Joshua Michael, Sott.net, 24 Apr 2020
In my first SOTT article published on April 19th, I reported my statistical comparison of COVID-19 infection and death rates based on percentages of whole populations. I generously assumed that the numbers reported by Johns Hopkins University and elsewhere are entirely correct and accurate, fully cognizant that this assumption is extremely questionable.
In my earlier article we learned that, as of 10:00am, April 15th, Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST):
99.994% of China’s 1.4 billion population was uninfected
99.729% of Italy’s 60 million population
99.817% of USA’s 330 million population
99.633% of Spain’s 47 million population
99.842% of Germany’s 83 million population
99.910% of Iran’s 83 million population
99.798% of France’s 65 million population
99.698% of Switzerland’s 8.6 million population
99.858% of UK’s 67 million population
99.979% of South Korea’s 51 million population
99.889% of Sweden’s 10.3 million population
99.974% of Australia’s 25 million population
99.974% of the World’s 7.5 billion population
Now let us compare that with today, April 24th and see how much progress this virus has made in 9 days within the above populations, again assuming static population growth:
99.994% of China is uninfected (no change).
99.683% of Italy (-0.046% change).
99.737% of USA (-0.080% change).
99.547% of Spain (-0.086% change).
99.816% of Germany (-0.026% change).
99.895% of Iran (-0.015% change)
99.755% of France (-0.043% change)
99.669% of Switzerland (-0.029% change)
99.792% of UK (-0.066% change)
99.979% of South Korea (no change)
99.837% of Sweden (-0.052% change)
99.973% of Australia (-0.001% change)
99.964% of the World (-0.010% change)
That is the last 9 days of ‘rampaging’ activity from this coronavirus as a proportion of various whole populations.
Incredible, isn’t it? The world infection rate is ‘skyrocketing’ at just 0.001% per day. It’s almost as if nothing has happened at all. Not that many notice, do they? We’re too busy being both locked up and indoctrinated by propaganda as every jot and tittle of every infection and death and mass unclaimed burial is vomited in our faces daily by the sycophantic mainstream media.
Now, since I didn’t list the official death data last time (the numbers are a factor of ten smaller), let’s examine them now. Please keep in mind that this list is based on the top 10 countries as of March 26th when I began data collation. The top 10 has since changed but my data has not taken this into account because I wanted to be consistent with the dataset I started with. By April 15th 2020:
99.9921% of the US population had NOT died of COVID-19
99.9649% of Italy
99.9616% of Spain
99.9758% of France
99.9819% of UK
99.9944% of Iran
99.9998% of China
99.9639% of Belgium
99.9960% of Germany
99.9827% of Netherlands
99.9900% of Sweden
99.9998% of Australia
99.9983% of the World
And now, 9 days later, as of April 24th, we have the following changes:
99.9849% of the US population had NOT died of COVID-19 (-0.0072% change)
99.9574% of Italy (-0.0075% change)
99.9529% of Spain (-0.0087% change)
99.9664% of France (-0.0094% change)
99.9720% of UK (-0.0099% change)
99.9934% of Iran (-0.0010% change)
99.9997% of China (-0.0001% change due to a ‘data correction’ on the 18th April)
99.9436% of Belgium (-0.0203% change)
99.9933% of Germany (-0.0027% change)
99.9754% of Netherlands (-0.0073% change)
99.9804% of Sweden (-0.0096% change)
99.9997% of Australia (-0.0001% change)
99.9975% of the World (-0.0008% change)
That’s right folks. According to the official data, this ‘rampaging plague’ is mercilessly slaughtering an ‘immense’ 0.0001% of the world population every day. That’s why we’re all living in terror as we watch – as in the ‘Bring Out Your Dead‘ scene in Monty Python – body collectors daily patrol the streets in pickups and refrigerated lorries, piling them full of dead bodies to be carted off to the morgue. Except that morgues aren’t even accepting the bodies because they might infect the living, so they’re constructing pyres in public squares and burning them all there…
Oh, wait. I haven’t seen that at all. Have you? Only on TV? I wonder why it is only on the mainstream media that one can see such ‘vicious devastation’ and unclaimed bodies being dumped unceremoniously into common graves? Are they working in ‘lock-step‘ with a secret agenda, an overarching metanarrative they’re all colluding in to push onto us, I wonder? Surely not! Not our trustworthy mainstream media and governments! Surely they have only our best interests at heart!
Now, let us contrast. The global population increases at approximately +1.1% per year, or approximately +0.003% per day in new births, according to the Population Reference Bureau. Read that again. There will be thirty times as many world births today than people who are reported dead ‘with’ or ‘from’ COVID-19. There will be three times more births today than people reported infected with COVID-19.
In fact, if we take the US data from day zero, January 20th (when 100% of the US population was ‘COVID-19 uninfected/dead’) until the writing of this article on April 24th (0.0151% of the US population dead after 95 days of ‘plague’), the average daily death rate, as a proportion of the US population of 330 million, is 0.000159% of the population ‘perishing’ from COVID-19 per day. Of course, I am aware of exponentials, and that some periods had much higher death rate (USA has been plodding along at between 0.0004 and 0.0008% population death rate since April 4th) but that is not the point of this exercise. The point is to look at the bigger picture and ask ourselves if there is actually a devastating pox marauding the wilderness to bereave our world of more hapless victims.
Again, according to the US Population Reference Bureau, the American population grows at approximately 0.3% per year in births only (this discounts migration, which is another 0.42%, for a total of 0.72%), or roughly 0.00082% new population per day. In the 95 days of COVID-19’s ‘vicious rampage’ across the United States, its population has increased in new births by approximately 0.0779%, whereas COVID-19 has ‘culled’ it by 0.0151%, a difference of 0.0628% net increase in population.
Are you getting it yet? I do not have time in my study schedule to make the same comparisons for every other country I have listed above. All the data is readily and freely accessible to anyone in the whole world to do these comparisons for themselves. Why do I, some schmuck part-time bus driver from an Australian backwater have to be the one to point all this out to a mostly dumb, deaf and mute world?
COVID-19, while there may be some actual virus at the root of it, is nothing to be concerned about. Their own data demonstrates that markedly. I just wish more people were actually paying attention to what their data actually says, instead of feasting on the poison of the false prophets in the media.
99.99% of us have and will survive this thing. I cannot say the same for what comes after, however.
There is no empirical evidence for these lockdowns
Wilfred Reilly, Spiked, April 22, 2010
https://www.sott.net/article/433020-There-is-no-empirical-evidence-for-these-lockdowns
Comparing US states shows there is no relationship between lockdowns and lower Covid-19 deaths
Several weeks ago, one of the USA’s better quantitative scientists, John Ioannidis of Stanford, made a critically important point. During the coronavirus pandemic, ‘we are making decisions without reliable data’, he said.
As Ioannidis and others have pointed out, we do not even know the actual death rate for Covid-19. Terrifying and widely cited case-fatality rates like ‘three per cent’ come from comparing known fatalities to the small pool of people who have officially been tested. Those test cases are mostly made up of sick and symptomatic people or those who had direct contact with someone known to have had Covid-19 – rather than to the far larger pool of people who may have had a mild version of the disease. Because of the same denominator problem, we also don’t know the true infection rate. A recent German study indicates this could be as high as 15 per cent.
Finally, we do not seem to know the effectiveness of the various strategies adopted by national and regional governments to respond to the disease – ranging from the advocacy of social distancing to full-on lockdowns.
This piece tackles that question. As a professional political scientist, I have analysed data from the Worldometers Coronavirus project, along with information about the population, population density, median income, median age and diversity of each US state, to determine whether states that have adopted lockdowns or ‘shelter in place’ orders experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than those which pursue a social-distancing strategy without a formal lockdown. I then briefly extend this analysis to compare countries. In short, I do not find that lockdowns are a more effective way of handling coronavirus than well-done social-distancing measures.
The most basic way to test this thesis is by direct comparison. As of 6 April, seven US states had not adopted shelter-in-place orders, instead imposing social-distancing restrictions such as banning large gatherings and mandating six-foot spacing gaps and maximum customer limits inside all retail stores. Those seven states are Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. These states reported 1,620, 2,141, 952, 343, 1,311, 2,542 and 288 cases of Covid-19 respectively as of 3:40pm EST on 16 April – for an average of 1,321 cases. The states reported 37, 60, 21, 9, 7, 20, and 2 deaths respectively, for an average of 22.3 deaths. Throwing in South Carolina, which did not adopt a shelter-in-place order until 6 April, and still allows most religious services, does not dramatically alter these figures – these states averaged 1,613 cases and 33 deaths.
How do these states measure up to the rest of the US? Rather well. According to Worldometers, by the same time the number of officially tested Covid-19 cases across the US states – including Guam, Puerto Rico, and Washington, DC – ranged from 226,343 in New York to 135 in Guam. The average number of Covid cases in a US state was 12,520. The state-by-state number of deaths varied from 16,251 (New York) to two (Wyoming), with the average figure for deaths being 642. Removing the outlier case of New York State, where roughly half of all US Covid-19 deaths have taken place, shifted these figures downward somewhat – to 8,408 cases and 342 deaths in the average state. However, the social-distancing states experienced substantially fewer cases and deaths than the lockdown states, even with New York out of the mix.
An advocate of lockdowns could object that the social-distancing states are little places, located in America’s ‘flyover land’. While this charge might be based as much on bias as reality – Utah, Nebraska and South Carolina are sizable places – the next step of my analysis was to adjust for population, using a standard deaths-per-million metric. In alphabetical order, the seven social-distancing states experienced 12, 19, 11, 12, 8, 7 and three deaths per million – for an average of 10 deaths per million when you exclude South Carolina and 12 with South Carolina included.
Again, these numbers compare very favourably to the US as a whole, despite adjusting for population. Across all US states, the number of deaths per million varied from 828 (New York) to three (Wyoming), for an average of 69. With New York removed from the mix, the hardest-hit remaining state was New Jersey, with 8,480 cases and 396 deaths. The average number of cases-per-million across the states minus New York was 1,392 and the average number of deaths-per-million was 54. Comparing the social-distancing states plus South Carolina to US states minus New York, the social-distancing states experienced 663 fewer cases per million and 42 fewer deaths per million on average than the lockdown states.
Next, I ran a regression model. For those unfamiliar with academic statistical methods, regression – in this case linear regression – is a computerised mathematical technique that allows researchers to measure the influence of one variable on another with all of the other factors that might be relevant held constant. In this case, the variables for each state included in my model were: population, population density, median income, median age, diversity (measured as the percentage of minorities in a population), and the state’s Covid-19 response strategy (0 = lockdown, 1 = social distancing). The data set used to construct this model is available for anyone to request it.
The question the model set out to ask was whether lockdown states experience fewer Covid-19 cases and deaths than social-distancing states, adjusted for all of the above variables. The answer? No. The impact of state-response strategy on both my cases and deaths measures was utterly insignificant. The ‘p-value’ for the variable representing strategy was 0.94 when it was regressed against the deaths metric, which means there is a 94 per cent chance that any relationship between the different measures and Covid-19 deaths was the result of pure random chance.
The only variable to be statistically significant in terms of cases and deaths was population (p=0.006 and 0.021 respectively). Across the US states, each increase in the population of 100,000 correlated with 1,779 additional Covid-19 cases, even with multiple other factors adjusted for. Large, densely populated areas are more likely to struggle with Covid-19, no matter what response strategy they adopt – although erring on the side of caution might make sense for global megacities such as New York and Chicago.
Finally, I extended my analysis into the international arena. As has been widely reported, Sweden has opted not to lock down in the wake of Covid-19, and Swedes have instead followed similar social-distancing measures to those adopted in the seven US states I focused on.
Again, there is very little evidence that Sweden has become an unlivable Covid-19 hotbed. As of 17 April, Sweden’s Covid-19 statistics were: 13,216 total cases, 1,400 total deaths, 1,309 cases per million and 139 deaths per million. In terms of cases per million residents, Sweden ranks slightly ahead of its close neighbours, Denmark (1,221) and Norway (1,274). But in Europe as a whole, Sweden ranks 23rd in terms of cases per million and 10th in terms of deaths per million.
I am reluctant to compare European examples to the many East Asian countries which avoided significant shutdowns – particularly since these countries had significantly better early-response strategies and there can be larger cultural differences which are difficult to quantify. But essentially, the same pattern holds true. When I conducted my analysis, Japan had 9,231 total cases, 190 total deaths, 73 cases per million citizens, and two deaths per million. South Korea had 10,635 cases, 230 deaths, 207 cases per million and four deaths per million. Taiwan had a total of 395 cases and only six deaths, alongside 17 cases per million and 0.03 deaths per million.
Of course, no single analysis can provide a truly conclusive answer to questions as huge as those posed by Covid-19. Scholars and curious citizens reading this one might want to re-run my analysis with current active cases as a dependent variable rather than total cases or cases per million – although I doubt that would make much difference. It certainly might make sense to redo my regression with ‘date of first case’ thrown in as a variable. I kept the model limited to five independent variables due to the small number of state-level observations available, and left that one out because onset dates were fairly similar for most US states. However, including this information could theoretically produce different results. The more data, the better.
Overall, however, the fact that good-sized regions from Utah to Sweden to much of East Asia have avoided harsh lockdowns without being overrun by Covid-19 is notable.
The original response to Covid-19 was driven by an understandable fear of an unknown disease. The epidemiologist Neil Ferguson projected that 2.2million people could die in the US alone, and few world leaders were willing to risk being the one who would allow such grim reaping to occur.
However, as time has passed, new data have emerged. A top-quality team from Stanford University has pointed out that the infection rate for Covid-19 must logically be far higher than the official tested rate, and the fatality rate for the virus could thus be much closer to 0.1 per cent than the 2 to 4 per cent that was initially expected. And empirical analyses of national and regional response strategies, including this one, do not necessarily find that costly lockdowns work better against the virus than social distancing.
It should not be taboo to discuss these facts.
Oklahoma governor announces businesses to reopen Friday
Mike Brest, Washington Examiner, April 23, 2020
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/oklahoma-governor-announces-businesses-to-reopen-friday
Republican Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt announced certain nonessential businesses will be allowed to open starting on Friday, in an effort to restart the economy.
The governor explained at a Wednesday press conference the state’s three-phase plan to reopen the economy, which is based on coronavirus testing and tracing.
The first stage of the state’s plan allows for personal care businesses to reopen starting on Friday for appointments only, while following strict sanitation protocols, according to KOCO. The stores included under the plan include hair salons, barbershops, spas, nail salons, and pet groomers, and these guidelines are only applicable in communities that do not have more restrictions in place.
“This statewide approach is based on the data from our public health experts, is intended to mitigate risk of a resurgence, and protects Oklahoma’s most vulnerable citizens from the threat of #COVID19,” Stitt explained on social media. “The OURS plan will begin phase 1 on April 24th and is intended for businesses and individuals to utilize in conjunction with guidance from the @OKcommerce, @HealthyOklahoma, and @CDCgov.”
This statewide approach is based on the data from our public health experts, is intended to mitigate risk of a resurgence, and protects Oklahoma’s most vulnerable citizens from the threat of #COVID19.
— Governor Kevin Stitt (@GovStitt) April 23, 2020
Other “nonessential” businesses will be allowed to reopen at the start of next month, contingent upon them following the social distancing and sanitation guidelines. Stitt’s three-phase plan looks to reopen the economy fully by mid-June, as long as there’s no surge in cases or hospitalizations.
Georgia is also starting to reopen its economy on Friday despite significant opposition. GOP Gov. Brian Kemp has decided to restart some businesses even though he has faced criticism from other Georgia lawmakers, health officials, and President Trump.