Trump's Principal Legacy

[Jeffrey Brown + 207]

14 hours ago, ronwagn said:

What does that have to do with President Trump? Virtually nothing

As a former federal prosecutor noted several months ago*, it has a lot to do with Trump, since Trump confessed to Bob Woodward (on tape) that he knew how deadly the virus was and that he was deliberately downplaying the lethality of the virus in public:

"There are only two elements for second-degree murder. The first is you caused the death of another," Kirschner said Thursday. That factor was fulfilled because Trump "was lying to the American people about the danger this virus posed," and now 190,000 people are dead, Kirschner said. "The second element is the intent element," which would "get tricky if we didn't have Trump's incriminating admissions," he continued. But "in my opinion as a career prosecutor," Trump admitted to "conscious disregard" of the risk his coronavirus downplay created, thus admitting to "second-degree murder" that he "must be held accountable" for, Kirschner finished.

 

*The COVID Trump enabled death count has almost doubled since this was published. 

[Enthalpic + 1,496]

^

He also used covid as a political tool.

Look at people here posting crap like below.  They are the sheep who think covid suppression techniques make you a nazi. In reality they are the ones that were programmed.  Trump turned the mask and social distancing into symbols unrelated to science for attempted political gain.

What's next from them, thinking bathing and hand washing is bad? Only evil sheep clean their bodies?  It has happened before after the fall of Rome...

Double down on fail, lose the election and a bunch of lives.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/

 

[Boat + 1,315]

On 12/27/2020 at 11:19 AM, Jeffrey Brown said:

One out of every thousand Americans have died from COVID-19 so far this year.  How does that compare with 12 other selected countries with greater than 20 million population? 

Maskless idiots!

[Boat + 1,315]

I cant wait for the Trump movies to be shown with the WWII movies around Memorial Day. We’re writing the plot lines of how he goes out real time. I feel badly for the good Germans. Like Hitler, a stain on the name.

Edited January 4, 2021 by Boat

[Jeffrey Brown + 207]

4 Numbers That Make the Pandemic’s Massive Death Toll Sink In

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/us-covid-19-death-toll/617544/

1. ON AVERAGE, EACH PERSON IN THE U.S. WHO HAS DIED FROM COVID-19 WAS DEPRIVED OF ABOUT 13 YEARS OF LIFE.

2. FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE WORLD WAR II, U.S. LIFE EXPECTANCY AT BIRTH COULD DROP BY A FULL YEAR.

3. ABOUT ONE IN 800 BLACK AMERICANS HAS DIED FROM COVID-19, WHILE ONE IN 1,325 WHITE AMERICANS HAS.

4. ROUGHLY 3.1 MILLION AMERICANS HAVE LOST A CLOSE RELATIVE TO COVID-19.

[Tomasz + 1,608]

If we are talking about idiots on the right, the newly elected Republican senator from Alaska said that the Americans, by landing in Normandia, freed occupied Western Europe from socialism.

Well, after all, socialism or National Socialism, also called Nazism, makes no difference.

 

But if we compare US to other state let me say something by comparing excess mortality - from Anatoly Karlin blog

Quote

 

Excess Mortality

 

Early on, we had to rely on official COVID-19 mortality statistics from national disease task forces and aggregator dashboards such as the ones I collated here: https://akarlin.com/corona-resources/

The official numbers were not very accurate, because in many cases, deaths from COVID-19 were not correctly registered, e.g. being ascribed instead to generic flu, or the proximate cause of death. (The case numbers were even worse, given problems with procuring test kits early on). Conversely, there were claims – mainly from the “Coronahoax” right – that COVID-19 deaths were if anything being overestimated, because doctors were supposedly labeling any which death as being caused by COVID-19. The only way to cut through these claims and counterclaims was to look at something called “excess deaths” – that is, by how much deaths increased (or decreased) relative to the same period last year in the absence of Corona, or (in more sophisticated versions) relative to preexisting mortality trendlines. These statistics would become progressively more available for increasing numbers of countries as the year wore on.

The most comprehensive such project that I know of has been carried out by the Financial Times’ stats man John Burn-Murdoch, who released his latest update just a couple of days ago:

At the global level, we have the following picture:

Excess mortality estimates give 1.5 million for the countries tracked, compared to 960,000 attributed to COVID-19 in the same countries during the same period in what is a heavily First World-based sample.

The undercount can be safely said to be far higher in the Third World (discussed below).

There will be ~1.8 million official deaths in 2020.

Multiplying that by 50% gives 2.7 million deaths.

But Third World undercounting means that probably something like 5-7 million is likelier (or, 10% of the world’s ~60 million annual deaths).

I suspect something like 10 million deaths globally before vaccines stamp it out in the next couple of years – and in the process preempt the death toll from going into the tens of millions range.

The FT numbers have recently been very closely reproduced by Russian stats professor/blogger Dmitry Kobak.

This all entirely and completely if sadly congruent with my Feb 24, 2020 prediction that “Corona Will Kill Millions & Crater the World Economy“.

Now to be sure, excess deaths are not the ultimate authority – they can have other causes. But if they happen during some notable, mortality-elevating event – for instance, a heat wave, a famine, or a pandemic – then the onus needs to be on the critics to provide an alternate explanation for why deaths would spike during that precise time interval – for instance, by demonstrating that there was a universal cause behind it (e.g. Soviet apologists for the 1932-33 collectivization famines have claimed that millions of Americans died of starvation in the same period due to global climatic effects; these claims are baseless and demographically illiterate, but points for trying, I guess).

The Corona Hoaxers’ equivalent of “drought” are the lockdowns. But as we see from the above table, Taiwan, Australia, Iceland, and South Korea – all countries that notable managed to contain their outbreaks at a low or negligible level – actually saw an overall reduction in mortality. Since many of them had lockdowns of some kind – very harsh ones, in Australia’s case – it obviously can’t be ascribed to suicides or missed operations. If anything, lockdowns have a pronounced mortality-reducing effect (reductions in traffic accidents are one obvious factor).

***

The foremost “accessible” authority on Corona in the US is demographer Lyman Stone, who provides “deaths day” updates for US excess mortality once every few weeks. Latest one as of now is from Dec 11:

There will probably be something like 450,000 excess deaths in the US during 2020, raising total deaths to 3.3 million from the usual level of 2.8-2.9 million in the past few years. Incidentally, this is pretty much the half a million that Ron Unz projected in his August podcast with Robert Stark.

The most interesting finding, perhaps, is that the US has generally done better than Europe – the part of it that regularly reports excess deaths, at any rate – with the second wave hitting the latter much harder. There has been no truly cardinal difference in Corona response – although European lockdowns were longer (and economically harder-hitting), Europeans did not wear masks at a much higher rate than Americans, nor did either region practice centralized quarantine. So I think this difference is ultimately more a function of geographic factors (US is more spread out), a younger American median age (though partially balanced out by more diabetes and obesity), and better US healthcare. What Europe has done undoubtedly better in is with PR, with virtually none of its leading politicians playing about with floomerism as Trump did – for which he was punished at the polls.

So far as concerns internal variation within Europe, the question of why Germanics and Nords enjoyed lower mortality from Corona – even after adjusting for infection rates – than the Med remains an open one. Perhaps something as banal as population physiological differences, e.g. in lung capacity, in addition to better healthcare systems in the latter.

Meanwhile, Eastern Europe – hitherto the least affected major European region – is surging ahead of cumulative death tolls observed even in Spain, the country hardest hit by the first wave.

Here are the estimated COVID-19 mortality numbers from stats professor/blogger Dmitry Kobak, based on the prior official Corona mortality to excess mortality ratios and projecting forwards to Dec 29, 2020.

US excess mortality for the year is estimated at 450,000 deaths, which dovetails with Lyman Stone’s. He projects Russia going up to 360,000 excess deaths by the end of the year.

The per capita numbers for Russia (254/100k) and Poland (222/100k) seem to be going along a similar trajectory, so it seems unlikely that the situation is cardinally better in any major countries within that region. For instance, official Ukrainian Corona mortality exploded from October – and the undercount there is likely to be massive as well. There is also a large undercount in Hungary. I don’t expect very major differences in outcomes within this region, which seems on track to systematically “overtake” Mediterranean Europe and approach or exceed the death tolls of some of the Latin American countries: Peru (279/100k), Ecuador (246/100k), Mexico (243/100k).

***

So which country is going to end up with the dubious “honor” of volunteering the greatest amounts of tributes to Corona-chan as a share of its population?

Croat Twitter user @volvoks99 believes it will be in the Balkans. They have a bad combination of Med social vibes, middle-income country healthcare quality, and European age profile.

The ex-USSR is not as “social” as the Balkanoids, but OTOH, they have a greater legacy of vodka abuse and their populations are much less healthy than Westerners at any particular age. Both the Balkanoids and ex-sovoks were relatively “shielded” during the first wave because they are more peripheral on global traffic/tourism flows, then summer came. But with Corona now endemic throughout the world, that’s no longer a big factor during this winter wave.

ECE/V4 do have an outside chance – perhaps Hungary especially – but I doubt it.

Although so far as available estimates of excess mortality are concerned, Peru still has an overall global lead. However, it is now “summer” there, and by mid-2020, it’ll probably have access to vaccines.

Corona Economics

Latest World Bank estimates see global GDP contracting by an estimated 4.4%, which is 50% as deep as the Great Recession and the greatest economic collapse on record since post-World War II demobilization

So, in retrospect, the Corona to “crater the world economy” was quite the accurate prediction – especially in the context of betting markets in late February giving just a 32% chance of a global recession within the next year.

Just weeks later, American GDP was crashing by a third and oil futures going into negative figures.

A depression was avoided mainly thanks to massive monetary loosening and fiscal stimulus equivalent to a sixth of US GDP (similar figures in other developed countries), the seasonal reprieve during summer, and growing confidence that vaccines would soon put the whole affair behind us.

So far as individual regions and countries go (IMF Oct 2020 figures):

United States growth of -4.3% is much better than the -5.8% projected for the advanced economies at large. Ironically, in the big picture, Corona could be seen as an Amerotriumph in comparison to most everyone except China. Not only will the US eventually lose fewer people than Europe in per capita terms, its economy will also be hurt to a somewhat lesser extent. In fairness, US stimulus spending was higher as a percentage of GDP than any major country except Japan (though this is partially mitigated by the fact that in Europe’s more generous welfare states, stimulus spending increases “by default” during recessions).

European Union will grow by -7.6%, with the hardest hit being the Med – our early 2010s friends the PIGS – all of whom will decline by 10-12%, thanks in significant part to a collapse in tourism revenue. Their debt to GDP ratios will also swell, perhaps presaging new crises in the early 2020s. The UK and France will also decline by 10%. Germany did much better, it will only decline by 6% – numbers which are also typical of the ECE and Scandinavia. Its single best performer is Poland, which will only fall by 3.6%.

Eastern Europe will do much better, growing at -4.6% – with Russia in particular doing much better than expected, only falling by 4.1% (discussed separately here).

East Asia is the only region to see positive growth at 0.3%, led by China with 1.9% – performance in the rest of the year making up for its deep Q1 2020 collapse. Japan is not bad at -5.3%, although that was only achieved through stimulus spending equivalent to 21% of its GDP – the single highest such figure of any G20 country.

Latin America (-8.1%) does very badly, although Brazil will do better at -5.8%. Thanks to Bolsonaro’s generous income support for poor Brazilians, it will – almost uniquely – see an absolute decline in poverty this year. South Asia (-8.4%) will both do very badly, driven above all by India’s 10.3% decline. All its meager gains relative to China in the past few years have evaporated in 2020. National performance in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa seems to have been heavily variegated.

Whither now? The unprecedented global monetary and fiscal experiments this year have led to the rather paradoxical effect that even as economic activity contracted, stock markets and many other assets (e.g. cryptocurrencies) have exploded to record heights, as all the newly created dollars had to go somewhere. Market cap to GDP in the US has never been higher, and US stock markets in turn may be the world’s most overvalued at the present time (Tesla with its 1,000+ p/e ratio can be seen as the poster child for this). We are in uncharted waters so far as economic policy is concerned, long-term consequences are unclear, and my Twitter followers are all over the place so far as the timing of the next recession is concerned.

 

***

Edited January 5, 2021 by Tomasz

[Jim Profit + 46]

[Jeffrey Brown + 207]

The Christmas effect is now showing up in the numbers.  Almost 4,000 confirmed US COVID fatalities yesterday.  At this rate, it’s equivalent to total US military deaths in Vietnam, every two weeks.