The continuing lockdown is directly leading to a decline in health. Large volume of articles for many weeks now have been pointing this out.
This is second of two posts describing recent articles. Part 1 here. This will be posted on several of my blogs.
5/11/20 – Wall Street Journal – Medical Lockdown Will Cause a Disease Surge – Two practicing MDs point out that lots of people have not sought treatment during the pandemic for initial signs of some other form of illness. There will be a surge of people visiting doctors after the lockdown ends. Six or eight weeks of delay will not be an issue for many people but for others it will make their illness far worse and for some, unrecoverable.
Disaster exercise In Tel Aviv on November 11, 2010. Allegory to where the US public health will be in near term. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.
The continuing lockdown is directly leading to a decline in public health. Large volume of articles for many weeks now have been pointing this out.
This is first of two posts describing just a sampling of recent articles. This will be posted on several of my blogs.
5/19/20 – A Doctor a Day letter-signed; letter to Pres. Trump signed by over 500 doctors– You can read the letter yourself at the link.
A mass casualty incident is currently underway in the United States.
Letter explains the assessment protocol in a catastrophe:
“During a mass casualty incident, victims are immediately triaged to black, red, yellow, or green. The first group, triage level black, includes those who require too many resources to save during a mass crisis. The red group has severe injuries that are survivable with treatment, the yellow group has serious injuries that are not immediately life threatening, and the green group has minor injuries.”
Goal of medical providers during such a catastrophe is to focus treatment on the red group while making sure the yellow and green groups do not deteriorate a level.
Assessment by the doctors of where we are in the United States?
Red – millions of Americans are currently at triage level red. There are normally 150,000 Americans who are given a cancer assessment each month.
We now have two months of no testing which means there are over 300,000 Americans who have detectable cancer, don’t know it, and have not started any treatment. An unknown but calculable number of those will die because of the lack of testing during the shutdown.
Our very form of existence as the United States of America is based on the idea that the power of government is based on having consent of the governed. In other words we, free citizens, give government the power it has.
Phrased more eloquently, the Declaration of Independence declares:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, …
We are beginning to see damage to trust in public policy and confidence in government. Governors who continue to keep their economies locked up when there is no consent to do so and no justification for doing so are whittling away at that “consent of the governed” concept.
Politicians urgently need to pay attention to this. There is danger of long-term damage which nobody is going to like. More on the risks at the end of this post.
The growing resistance to the harshness of state policies is becoming more visible with each day that passes.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Many churches planning to open in California on May 31
I just came across this issue in the news. It has been brewing for a couple of weeks.
On my daily walk yesterday I noticed a girl’s softball team (high school or younger) practicing. In other corner of park, six or eight boys were in football scrimmage (high school age). At another park I noticed a boy’s baseball team (elementary school age) practicing and half a dozen high school age boys working on their pitching arms. Also saw a few coaches, one coach, six parents, one coach, and one coach. Not a mask in sight.
I have noticed surface traffic on main streets in my area is picking up over the last week or two. Have had opportunity to be on the freeway during evening commute time recently and noticed the traffic volume has definitely picked up over what it was a couple weeks ago.
Other indications compliance with statewide house arrest is evaporating:
5/16/20 – Daily Bulletin – Some Inland Empire businesses reopened – defying coronavirus orders – Reporter was able to find eight businesses in Riverside and San Bernardino counties that have opened. Officials report they received a number of complaints about some of those businesses.
Lots of people are starting to make guesses on what the impact will be from the pandemic on different industries over the next few years. No guess is better than another, so here is some speculation for your consideration.
The longer the economy of major states stay closed by deliberate choice of multiple governors the worse the effect is going to be. At some point there will be a disproportionately compounding effect with every extra week.
Discussion in this post brings together speculation for
higher education,
retail, and
airlines.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Higher Education
A flood of articles are discussing damage to the higher education world. Eventually all colleges and universities will concede they have to refund something in the range of half a semester of room and board.
More institutions are getting pressure, if not getting served with litigation papers, to refund a portion of Spring 2020 tuition. Pressure is growing to discount tuition in the fall if classes are held online.
There is a growing probability there will be a severe impact over the next few years. One of many articles discussing the possibilities:
New York order sending people sick from coronavirus to nursing homes.
Multiple states, including New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania required nursing homes to admit or readmit people who were sick with COVID-19. A lot of articles have appeared describing the impact of these intentional policies.
In case you are like me and have a hard time believing reports that government officials would knowingly implement such policies, a copy of the New York order is provided above.
Just a small selection of the articles appearing of late:
3/14/20 – Wall Street Journal – Nearly 3 Million Jobless Benefits Last Week – Seasonally adjusted new claims for unemployment were 2.981M in the week ending May 3. That brings cumulative new claims to around 36.5M.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Summary of new claims and running total
Here is my running tally of the new unemployment claims.
How much more of this will we see if L.A. County is closed for five months? Poverty by Joe Green is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
“With all certainty” the safer-at-home orders that have shut down the County of Los Angeles will be extended another three months, through August 15. That will make five months of crippling shutdown along with devastation to the economy along with expected damage to physical and emotional health and the consequent increase in excess mortality.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Had to check that report against other media sources to make sure that it wasn’t just one outfit making it up. Turns out it is not an April fool’s day joke.
The county’s Public Health Director Barbara Ferrer later issued a press release which said the goal is to test every citizen of the county every day. (These posts are going to start naming names for future accountability of the reasonably foreseeable, fully expected excess deaths that will take place.)
Current level of testing in LA County is running at 15,000 per day.
Testing in the United States is running about 150,000 per day.
Previous post explains the County of Los Angeles intends to continue the stay-at-home orders for another three months. That will make five months of the economy being shut down. Poor people falling behind five months on their rent and car payments. Five months of no revenue for most businesses.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
To highlight the devastation caused by the shutdown here are merely a few of the recent articles to consider for the consequences of said shutdown:
Increase in suicides
5/7/20- Breitbart – Report: Suicide rise from lockdowns to kill more than coronavirus in Australia – Researchers at a university in Australia estimate there will be a doubling of the suicide rate in the country because of the economic lockdown. If that horrible estimate is even close to correct, far more Australians will die by their own hand than are killed by coronavirus.
Ninety days ago the following stories would have been nothing more than the opener to a scary fantasy about some dystopian future. I am nowhere near creative enough to guess how bizarre the plot line would have been to incorporate these fantastical events.
Now approaching the end of the eighth week of California lockdown it is still hard to believe the stories are true instead of the figment of a creative sci-fi writer.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
The shutdown will be repeated every night in order to clean the cars.
Based on numerous comments I have read elsewhere, but for which I don’t have specific citations, this is apparently the first time the subway cars been disinfected since the coronavirus pandemic erupted.
If I get this straight after having read multiple articles, the subway cars had not been disinfected until 5/5/20, making them a major source of viral spread in the city.
This next story is more weird. It is sufficiently out there into the surreal realm that I had to cross check it with other articles to make sure it wasn’t fabricated. Turns out it’s actually real.
Required spreading of coronavirus into at-risk communities
For a number of years I have been tracking the monthly unemployment data. That information is shown in the graph above. Included is monthly information back to April 2010. Prior to that I only picked up a few data points.
This graph shows the hit from the Great Recession and the painfully slow recovery which followed.
This discussion will be posted on several of my blogs.
Six different ways to measure unemployment
There are actually six different ways to calculated labor underutilization, all provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. The economic devastation caused by the shutdown of the US economy means we need to start looking at these different indicators.
The above graph shows what is referred to as the U-3 and U-6 rates.
“What in the world are you talking about,” I hear you ask.
Shutting down the economy has predictable, expected consequences. One that became visible on Friday was 20 million jobs vaporizing in the last month which resulted in an expected soaring unemployment rate.
A ban on everything other than immediate emergency medical care has cratered revenue of hospitals bringing layoffs to the entire industry.
Finally, making unemployment benefits higher than the earning capacity of a large portion of people has the fully expected consequence of making people hesitant to return to work.
This discussion will be posted across several of my blogs.
5/8/20 – Wall Street Journal – April Unemployment Rate Rose to a Record 14.7% – Thirty-three million people filing a first-time claim for unemployment drove the unemployment rate to 14.7%. Oh, lots of those new claims were filed after the cutoff for the April calculations.
A staggering 20.5 million jobs disappeared. Article points out the number of jobs destroyed are equal to all the job gains over the last decade.
Picture it this way – that is the equivalent of everybody who found a job over the last decade getting laid off.
Even the state government in California may be starting to realize that putting the economy in a deep freezer for an extended and unknown period of time might have some adverse consequences.
Just a few of the business casualties over the last few days:
New unemployment claims for week ending 5/2/20 are 3,169,000, seasonally adjusted.
The tally of new claims is 33.48 million since the economy was put in an induced coma.
That means about 1 out of every 5 people in the civilian labor force back in February are out of a job today.
I’m running out of words to describe how horribly the economy has been hit. Seem to have exhausted the adjectives that apply. We have a terrible mess and it is going to take a long time to fully recover from the lost jobs and even longer to recover consumer and business confidence.
This discussion will be posted across several of my blogs.
Expectations from economists interviewed by the WSJ, or perhaps we should say their wild guesses, are the flood of new claims will taper off in May. Will likely be months before the new jobs exceed the new unemployment claims. Will likely be years before new jobs offset the tidal waves of job losses in March, April, and May.
Summary of new claims and running total
I have prepared a running tally of the new unemployment claims, which is shown below.
Thousands upon thousands of needed health procedures were canceled in Ontario, Canada in order to make room for the massive surge of coronavirus patients which never arrived.
New study in Ontario estimates that 35 people are dead because their heart surgeries were postponed. There were 12,200 surgeries and other procedures postponed each week.
