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Reminder: The 3 rules of pandemic economics

1. Get families cash, or people will die.
2. Get companies cash, or firms will die.
3. Stop the pandemic, or there will be a lot of death no matter how much cash you spend.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
What we're seeing right now is the revenge of Rule 3.

In the three states with the sharpest increase in COVID cases—Arizona, Florida, and Texas—hours worked at small businesses are declining (via @TheStalwart)
Meanwhile, OpenTable data for Texas, Arizona, Florida, and Georgia is showing a clear story: a steady recovery followed by a sharp dip.
But it's not just those states. It's a national story.

The new COVID wave-on-a-wave is more widespread than the March/April outbreak.

And real-time data shows national small business revenue reversing after a nice-looking "V" recovery in May.
Remember Rule 3: If you don't fix the health crisis, you haven't fixed shit.

Throwing money into businesses that can't open and families that can't go out might be a necessary life-preserving measure, but it won't give you a "V" recovery.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
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Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
This is a great, great piece by @RonBrownstein that really crystallized something for me about how the Sunbelt COVID outbreak is a demographic, electoral, rhetorical, and existential nightmare for Trump.

theatlantic.com/politics/archi…
Trump's language is the language of elite/minority resentment. That language was always part-truth (eg: the gutting of Great Lakes industry) and part-myth (eg: the immigrants are coming to kill you).

COVID can't be slipped into that narrative straitjacket.
COVID is an elite failure, but that failure is largely Trump's own admin. Its disproportionate effect on minorities can't be bogeymanned in any convenient way to demonize non-whites. What you're left with, then, is a national crisis of epic proportions that resists Trumpification
Read 4 tweets
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Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
Today, COVID cases hit a record high.

Also today, the seven-day average of deaths hit their lowest mark since March.

What does it mean? Here are 3 interpretations.
1) Most pessimistic: Deaths lag positive cases by several weeks. If the fatality rate is constant, we could be looking at a massive second "wave" of deaths (on top of a not-really-finished first wave) within a month.
2) Less pessimistic, still bad: Several factors—including better hospital treatment, more knowledge about what works and doesn't, better protection of nursing homes—is pushing down the fatality rate. So, deaths won't rise as much as cases.
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Derek Thompson
@DKThomp
Hospitalizations are up 100% since the end of May in Texas.

texastribune.org/2020/06/22/tex…

Doctors say the new cases are more likely to be under 50: "Younger people [are] requiring hospitalization and younger people who are now requiring ICU."
This is not an apples-to-apples comparison, but a telling indicator about how COVID's current stage is attacking younger ppl:

In March, 82% of those hospitalized in NYC were over 45.
www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/dow…

Today's, 50% of those hospitalized in Dallas hospitals are under 50.
The declining median age of COVID patients is a critical story.

Some of it is a statistical result of expanded testing—that's important.



But you don't get a sudden doubling of hospitalizations led by younger Texans just by administering more tests.
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