Bolsonaro is a lot smarter than Trump

An article in the Wall Street Journal this morning starts with “Covid-19 has killed more than 130,000 in Brazil, second only to the U.S., and hammered the economy. Still, the administration of President Jair Bolsonaro, who has lashed out at governors who ordered businesses to close and clashed with health experts over social-distancing measures, is more popular than ever.” Since the WSJ article is behind a paywall, you can read this recent article in another publication which says the same thing, although it pursues a more in depth approach.

President Trump has demonstrated that a leader’s approval ratings don’t necessarily go to zero if they bungle their pandemic response and lots of people die as a result. His rating has fallen a few points from the 44% or so that it’s been at for most of his term, but it certainly hasn’t crashed.

However, Bolsonaro’s rating has increased dramatically in the last month or so and is now around 50% - a level Trump has never reached and probably never will. This definitely isn’t because he’s handling the novel coronavirus better, although daily deaths have declined from 1200 to around 700 recently. So how did he do this, and what lesson(s) can Trump learn from him to perhaps save his re-election prospects?

As the article points out, one thing that has helped Bolsonaro is he’s more or less stopped talking about the virus – perhaps because he caught Covid-19 himself. He still isn’t encouraging people to wear masks, etc. But at least he isn’t actively campaigning against mask-wearing and social distancing, as Trump is (of course, to make this difference perfectly clear, Trump held an indoor rally this weekend in Nevada, at which very few attendees wore masks and they weren’t socially distanced. This on the heels of the big spike in cases that his last rally in Tulsa brought to that city, and the death of Herman Cain from Covid-19 two weeks after he attended the rally).

However, by far the biggest reason is, as the article points out, “More than 67 million people, 32% of the population, have received monthly checks providing between $113 to $226, a program that has cost $38 billion through August. The aid, part of the biggest financial pandemic crisis package in Latin America, has helped poverty fall by 21%—or 13.1 million people—this year.”

This is pretty amazing: Despite a lot of people losing work because of the pandemic (although there was never a national lockdown), Bolsonaro has caused poverty to fall 21% since last year. People may not have a job, but they feel secure, knowing they have this amount coming in every month (although you don’t have to be out of work to receive the payments).

Contrast this with Trump. Despite patting himself on the back repeatedly for signing the CARES Act in April, he has stood by while Mitch McConnell and some friends have done their best to ensure that it won’t be repeated, even though Trump repurposed some disaster relief funds to provide the equivalent of 3 weeks of the $600/week payments that the CARES act provided for four months (of course, we’re lucky there aren’t any disastrous fires or hurricanes this summer. We obviously didn’t need to have that money available otherwise…).

The fact that Trump doesn’t see any need for much further federal assistance for the unemployed isn’t exactly going to help him in the election. And it especially won’t help the Republican Senators up for re-election in purple states. But Trump has always believed that the primary feelings that motivate his voters are fear of immigrants and fear of Black people; as long as he can keep that fear going, there’s no need to bother with other stuff like helping them stay out of poverty. Nothing will get him to change that belief.

 

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 the projected numbers – they are all projections based on yesterday’s 7-day rate of increase in total Covid-19 deaths, which was 3%.

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 significant intervening changes.

 

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	1,474%
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	71%
June 6	6,544	935
June 13	5,427	775
June 20	4,457	637
June 27	6,167	881
Month of June	23,925	798	57%
July 4	4,166	595
July 11	5,087	727
July 18	5,476	782
July 25	6,971	996
Month of July	26,649	860	111%
August 1	8,069	1,153
August 8	7,153	1,022
August 15	7,556	1,079
August 22	7,552	1,079
August 29	6,675	954
Month of August	30,970	999	116%
September 5	5,961	852
September 12	5,310	759
September 19	5,413	773
September 26	5,561	794
Month of Sept.	22,758	759	73%
Total March – September	210,499

Red = projected numbers

 

I. Total deaths

Total US deaths as of yesterday: 198,533

Deaths reported yesterday: 506

Percent increase in total deaths in the last seven days: 3% (This number is used to project deaths in the table above; it was 4% two days ago. 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: 6,708,408

Increase in reported cases since previous day: 31,807

Percent increase in reported cases in the last seven days: 4%  

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

Total Recoveries in US as of yesterday: 3,975,097

Total Deaths as of yesterday: 198,533

Deaths so far as percentage of closed cases (=deaths + recoveries): 5%

For a discussion of what this number means – and why it’s so important – see this post. Short answer: If this percentage declines, that’s good. It’s been steadily declining since a high of 41% at the end of March. But a good number would be 2%, like South Korea’s. An OK number would be 4%, like China’s.

 

IV. 7-day average of test positive rate for US: 5.0%

For comparison, the recent peak for this rate was 27% in late July, although the peak in late March was 75%. This is published by Johns Hopkins (recent rates for New York state: .8%. For Texas: 11.2%. For Florida: 12.3%.  For Arizona: 7.2%).

 

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