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Matt O'Brien Profile picture
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22 Oct, 4 tweets, 2 min read
The EU’s second wave of coronavirus cases has now, in per capita terms, even passed our own.

The combination of pandemic fatigue & people gathering with friends & family indoors during the cold months is going to be very, very bad. It’s why our third wave is starting too.
The fact that already hard-hit countries like Spain, Italy, and Britain are seeing such big resurgences should put to rest the idea that we’re anywhere close to herd immunity
Belgium has the second-highest covid death toll, in per capita terms, in the world. It also has a massive outbreak right now that dwarfs anything we've seen. Herd immunity will not save us.
A play in three acts

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More from @ObsoleteDogma

Matt O'Brien Profile picture
10 Sep
The bottom line is that Trump knew the coronavirus was airborne back on February 7th, but has mocked or otherwise undermined the idea of wearing masks almost the entire time since.

This has likely cost tens and tens of thousands of lives.
How many lives might have been saved if Trump had mdae masks mandatory back in March?

Well, Austria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia all did that then—they were the first European countries to do so—and their per capita death tolls are 7 to *85* times lower than ours. Image
Slovakia closed its borders, closed its schools and restaurants, and made masks mandatory—with its prime minister making a point of wearing one in public—within 10 days of identifying its first case.

We have 85x more per capita deaths than they do. theatlantic.com/international/… ImageImage
Read 4 tweets
Matt O'Brien Profile picture
9 Sep
Seems bad washingtonpost.com/politics/bob-w… Image
“I wanted to always play it down,” Trump said on March 19th.

Mission accomplished, amirite. Image
Lordy, there are tapes.
Read 5 tweets
Matt O'Brien Profile picture
4 Sep
The good news: The economy added 1.4 million jobs in August, which pushed the unemployment rate down to 8.4%.

The bad news: the number of people who permanently lost their jobs increased again, this time by 534,000 (it’s up 2.1 million since February).
This is the recession we’ll face once the pandemic is finally over.

And, after starting to improve a little last month, it’s getting worse again now.
The number of people who have permanently lost a job since February is now higher than the number who did after the tech bubble burst Image
Read 4 tweets
Matt O'Brien Profile picture
20 Aug
Read this whole thread.

College presidents are endangering their students, their staff, their faculty, and the communities around them all so that they can justify charging full tuition before sending everyone home again in a few weeks.
What’s going on with colleges was so predictable that pretty much everyone who’s not a college president predicted it.

Here’s what @JuliaLMarcus & @drjessigold wrote a month ago: theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… Image
At this point, it’d almost be more newsworthy if a college reopening *wasn’t* a complete disaster
Read 4 tweets
Matt O'Brien Profile picture
19 Aug
China’s economic recovery has, stop me if you’ve heard this before, done a lot more for their rich than their poor.

Making that even worse, though, is that China’s government does remarkably little to help non-rich workers. ft.com/content/e0e294… ImageImageImage
How little does China’s government directly do to help its workers? It’s only given 2 million of them unemployment insurance despite the fact that probably around 60 million people are unemployed. Image
This is a point @M_C_Klein has made well (and you should buy his book Trade Wars Are Class Wars): China really is an example of trickle-down economics.

China’s tax system is extremely regressive, and almost all of the government's subsidies go to the rich/well connected.
Read 4 tweets
Matt O'Brien Profile picture
17 Aug
It’s almost like bringing college kids back to campus is an exceptionally poor idea that we shouldn’t be trying right now Image
This is the inevitable result of any college trying to bring students back to campus this fall.

It won’t work. Don’t even try.
UNC and the rest of the ACC are still trying to play college football this fall. Are football players going to be the only students on campus? The idea that they’re normal student-athletes is already laughable, but this would end any pretense.
Read 5 tweets

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