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

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How naïve I was…

On March 18, 2020, I put up my fifth post in this blog (this is my 356 th post, for those keeping score at home). I had written my first pandemic post (although I wrote it on my cybersecurity blog ) on Saturday, March 14. This was right after I’d read a really disturbing article that shattered my assumption that the unfortunate incident in Wuhan two months previous could never happen here. I recently reread the March 18 post because a significant number of people have been reading it in the last couple of months, even though I haven’t referred to it at all. Of course, I can’t ask those people why they’re reading it, but what struck me when I reread it was my (in retrospect, of course) incredible naivete when I wrote it. It’s instructive to read some of my statements, a little more than three years later: Since there have already been thousands of deaths worldwide (but not yet tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or millions), the battle is to keep that number as low as pos
Read more

It’s all about health care

Over the weekend, there were two momentous events in Washington that will undoubtedly have a seriously negative effect on the health (or lack thereof) of the American people. However, just one of these events on its surface seems to be about healthcare. In this post, I will discuss the one that doesn’t seem to be about healthcare, but actually is. Barring some unforeseen development before then, in my next post I’ll discuss the other event. The former event was the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday and Mitch McConnell’s immediate (i.e. about 1 ½ hours after her passing was announced) announcement that he would push through Trump’s nominee before the election – assuming four Republican Senators don’t block that process. Why is this event about healthcare? Because the Supreme Court is set to decide in December a case that would literally overturn Obamacare and cause more than 20 million people to lose healthcare coverage in the middle of a pandemic.   The case is based on a ridi
Read more

An up-close look at a hospital breaking under the Omicron load

This opinion piece in WaPo today provides a horrifying perspective by an ER doctor on the situation in her ER on a “typical” day of the omicron wave. It shows very clearly that lack of beds is just the beginning of the problem. The lack of staff at all levels – EMTs through nurses through physicians – is really hurting, but even worse, it’s leading to more burnout among the existing staff, which of course is making the staffing shortage worse, which of course is increasing burnout…lather, rinse, repeat. I have two ideas for Joe Biden: First, turn Build Back Better into another Covid relief bill, this one focused entirely on building back the hospital staff (and infrastructure, although that’s not the main problem) that we need to handle what – as the author points out – will undoubtedly be an overload of the system for a long time to come. This is both because we’re almost certainly not finished with Covid, even when the omicron wave subsides, but because there is a big backlog
Read more