Two op-eds

                                                                                                                

Two very important (in my opinion) op-eds were published in two major newspapers last week. One was a call by Senator Tom Cotton to send in the US military – not just the National Guard, which is under the control of state governors - to put down “rioting” in cities. What was the red-blooded conservative newspaper that published this? The New York Times (although the piece now carries a notice that it was a mistake to publish Sen. Cotton’s statement without requiring a number of changes).

The other piece was a column pleading for national agreement that a) the killing of George Floyd was not just a terrible injustice, but a symptom of a pervasive problem that must be corrected; and b) rioting and looting are definitely not the answer to the problem, and are never justified. The column went on to discuss President Trump. Its final paragraphs state:

He (Trump) has maxed out his base. He’s got his 40% and will keep it, but it isn’t growing. His polls are down, he has historically high negatives. As for suburban women, they’d crawl over broken husbands to vote him out.

He is proud of his many billionaire friends and think they love him. They don’t. Their support is utterly transactional. They’re embarrassed by him. When they begin to think he won’t be re-elected they will turn, and it will be bloody and on a dime.

This will not end well. With his timing he’d know it. He should give an Oval Office address announcing he’s leaving: “America, you don’t deserve me.” Truer words have never been spoken in that old place. And he won’t be outshone by his successor. Network producers will listen to Mike Pence once and say, “Let’s do ‘Shark Week.” But you know, America could use a shark week.

What was the radical, left-wing paper that published this column by its longest and most beloved columnist, Peggy Noonan? The Wall Street Journal.

I’ve been a big fan of Ms. Noonan’s columns for years, although I certainly don’t agree with her all the time. But it always seemed to me that she is quite willing to look squarely at the facts and not push one side of an argument over the other in order to push a pre-conceived opinion –  a failing that is almost universally present with the other WSJ editorialists and columnists, especially in recent years and especially since the pandemic took hold (I don’t deny this happens with “liberal” papers like the Times as well, but their columnists exhibit a wide diversity of views and are quite willing to admit when they’re wrong. They’re also always quite ready to criticize editorials they think are misguided).

I’ve been expecting for a while that, not only would Trump not win the election in November, but that he would be pushed out of office by fellow Republicans before then – so he won’t even be on the ballot. I advocated in March that he be forced to step aside (not necessarily removed from office, but removed from any role in pandemic response), so that an experienced manager could be brought in to manage the pandemic response (I had Bill Gates in mind, but I would have accepted almost anybody who could look at facts and the science, and be guided by them).

I wrote that post on a day when the previous day’s 7-day growth rate in total cases was 757% (vs. 9% yesterday); the 7-day rate for total deaths was 609% (vs. 6% yesterday). Had deaths kept growing at that rate, the entire US population would have been dead by my birthday, May 10 (it wouldn’t have been too happy a birthday, to be sure). And Mike Pence – who had just been put in charge of the Covid-19 response – had made it clear that the best measure to avert this catastrophe, a nationwide lockdown, wasn’t being considered at all (as it is, we got a lot of state lockdowns, which were fairly effective but didn’t get the virus under control. It now looks like we won’t get the virus under control until a) there’s a workable vaccine that doesn’t have to be renewed say every 2-3 months (not at all certain); b) we’re forced to by a much larger wave; or c) it becomes clear that we’ll be international outcasts – with most foreign travel out of the question – until it’s under control).

I have to admit I really thought the Congressional Republicans would have forced Trump out already. I thought that surely, as the deaths kept growing, they would realize they had to put the interests of the country ahead of what they perceived to be their party’s interests. However, when Mitch McConnell suggested that it was fine with him if states went bankrupt, I realized this wasn’t going to happen.

However, it’s now becoming clear to those same Congressional Republicans that their party’s interests are the same as the country’s: If they let Trump continue on his destructive path, the entire party will be dragged down in his defeat (and his worst sin isn’t his willingness to call out the military on American citizens. It’s his deliberate undermining of the very measures that are required to get the novel coronavirus under control, including face masks and social distancing. Note his burning desire to have 19,000 unmasked and untested people in a single large room to cheer him on in August in Charlotte. His attitude is setting us up for the virus to come roaring back in the fall, with perhaps a much higher level of deaths – as happened in 1918).

As it is, were Trump to resign and Pence to take over, things wouldn’t be rosy the next day, but Pence will be much more willing to pay attention to facts and to scientists (for example, he always wears a mask when he travels nowadays, after the debacle at the Mayo Clinic last month). Republican Senators will then have much more of a fighting chance to retain their seats than they do now (although I’d say it’s inevitable the GOP will lose the Senate no matter what Trump does. The GOP is down by doubt digits there, as some polls have them in the presidential race).

Either way, November will be a huge debacle for the GOP, and there will be a call for a fundamental change in the party – if not to start over again with a new party.

But is that the end of the road for a conservative party in the US? Not at all. The US is fundamentally a conservative country, and that won’t change (Trump isn’t a conservative anyway, by any true definition of the word). Remember what happened when the Whig party collapsed after the 1852 elections (and the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854): In 1854, a new party – the Republican Party – was founded and attracted many former Whigs. In 1860, they took a flier and nominated for president a former one-time Congressman from Illinois, who was mainly known for the debates he’d engaged in during his losing run for the Senate in 1858. He won the election, and ended up being a pretty good president, by most accounts.

The numbers

These numbers are updated every day, based on reported US Covid-19 deaths the day before (taken from the Worldometers.info site, where I’ve been getting my numbers all along). No other variables go into these numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 6%.

Note that the “accuracy” of the projected numbers diminishes greatly after 3-4 weeks. This is because, up until 3-4 weeks, deaths could in theory be predicted very accurately, if one knew the real number of cases. In other words, the people who are going to die in the next 3-4 weeks of Covid-19 are already sick with the disease, even though they may not know it yet. But this means that the trend in deaths should be some indicator of the level of infection 3-4 weeks previous.

However, once we get beyond 3-4 weeks, deaths become more and more dependent on policies and practices that are put in place – or removed, as is more the case nowadays - after today (as well as other factors like the widespread availability of an effective treatment, if not a real “cure”). Yet I still think there’s value in just trending out the current rate of increase in deaths, since it gives some indication of what will happen in the near term if there are no intervening changes.

However, it’s 100% certain that deaths won’t stop at the end of June! They might decline some more this summer, but Drs. Redfield (CDC head) and Fauci both predict there will be a new wave of the virus in the fall, and one noted study said there was a good probability the fall wave would be greater than the one we’re in now, as happened in the 1918 pandemic.

Week ending	Deaths reported during week/month	Avg. deaths per day during week/month	Deaths as percentage of previous month’s
March 7	18	3
March 14	38	5
March 21	244	35
March 28	1,928	275
Month of March	4,058	131
April 4	6,225	889
April 11	12,126	1,732
April 18	18,434	2,633
April 25	15,251	2,179
Month of April	59,812	1,994 (= 1 death every 44 seconds)	1,474%
May 2	13,183	1,883
May 9	12,592	1,799
May 16	10,073	1,439
May 23	8,570	1,224
May 30	6,874	982
Month of May	42,327	1,365 (=1 death every 63 seconds)	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	6,950	993
June 20	7,381	1,054
June 27	7,838	1,120
Month of June	31,284	1,043 (= 1 death every 83 seconds)	74%
Total March - June	137,481

Red = projected numbers

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 112,101

Increase in deaths since previous day: 707 (vs. 1,184 yesterday)

Percent increase in deaths since previous day: 1% (this number was 1% yesterday)

Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 6% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above – it was 7% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in deaths, caused by lack of reporting over the weekends from closed state offices. So this is the only reliable indicator of a trend in deaths, not the three-day percent increase I used to focus on, and certainly not the one-day percent increase, which mainly reflects where we are in the 7-day cycle).

II. Total reported cases

Total US reported cases: 1,988,700

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 19,294

Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 1%

Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 9%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 752,048

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 112,101

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 13% (vs. 13% yesterday)

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post.

I would love to hear any comments or questions you have on this post. Drop me an email at tom@tomalrich.com