Will I need a visa to travel to Wisconsin?



We’re beginning to see some clear signs of what the world will look like going forward (I won’t say “post-pandemic”, because it’s not at all certain the world will ever be “post” this pandemic). Warning: It’s not pretty. If you’re looking for happy talk and reassurance, you’ve come to the wrong blog.

One thing is becoming painfully clear in the US: People coming from countries that aren’t doing a good job of controlling the coronavirus aren’t going to be welcome in countries that are. Americans can’t travel to Europe, joining such paragons of public health response as Brazil and Russia. But there is one country whose residents can travel freely in Europe, even though they have the highest Covid-19 deaths per capita in the world: the UK. That is because the UK is still part of Europe through the end of this year. It’s a safe bet that they won’t be welcome there next year, unless they have a remarkable turnaround (fortunately for the UK’s population, the Johnson government seems to have finally gotten the message about what’s needed to do that. Would that were also the case for the White House).

Of course, the fact that US residents can’t travel to Europe will hurt us economically. If there are two companies that provide the same product, one in the US and one in Canada, the Canadian company will be at a big advantage in Europe, since their representatives will be able to travel there to present their case in person with potential customers. Meanwhile, their US counterparts will be stuck on WebEx, and they’ll miss out on all of the interaction that goes on on the sidelines of sales presentations, or afterwards.

However, even more worrisome economically is that, given the wide and growing disparities between states that are on the downside of outbreaks and those where the virus is infecting record numbers of new people daily, states are beginning to impose travel bans on each other – and that will only get worse until the states with rising infections act to get them under control, including perhaps lockdowns. If they don’t get things under control, they will face becoming pariahs in their own country.

The Constitution was drafted to make the US a single country, rather than the loose alliance in the Articles of Confederation. A key reason why the US grew so rapidly was because there was total freedom of travel and trade between the states. As that breaks down – not only with flight cancellations but perhaps with checkpoints at state borders on the interstate highways and other measures – we’ll quickly move backwards economically, beyond where we even are today.


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). I have omitted my usual table of projected deaths, since the projections are almost exactly what they were yesterday. The actual numbers below are all updated.

I. Total deaths
Total US deaths as of yesterday: 128,819
Increase in deaths since previous day: 381
Yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total deaths: 5% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 5% yesterday. There is a 7-day cycle in the reported deaths numbers, 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: 2,683,239
Increase in reported cases since previous day: 46,059
Percent increase in reported cases since yesterday: 2%
Percent increase in reported cases since 7 days previous: 12%

III. Deaths as a percentage of closed cases so far in the US:
Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 1,122,590
Total Deaths as of yesterday: 128,819
Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 10% (vs. 11% 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

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