Month: March 2021

Boat memes are now over:

The giant cargo carrier blocking the Suez Canal was finally on the move Monday afternoon, nearly a week after it wedged sideways, causing billions of dollars worth of damage to global trade.

Just one comment here. Total global trade amounts to about $20 trillion, give or take a trillion or two. "Billions" is therefore something on the order of one five-thousandth of total trade—an amount that's literally less than a rounding error. When you hear about the cost of the big stuck boat, keep this in mind.

We remain on the same upward trajectory we've followed since the beginning of February:

We have vaccinated about 90 million people so far. Another 30 million have already been infected with COVID-19, and epidemiologists estimate that there may be yet another 30 million who have been infected but never knew it. That's 150 million people who have some level of immunity to the virus. By the end of April that should be up to 230 million or so, which might be virtually every adult who's willing to be vaccinated. After that it's mostly a matter of vaccinating children.

That's still a ways off, and it's not clear how much danger it represents. The same is true of all the variants currently circulating. Nonetheless, it seems likely that by the end of June things will be mostly back to normal.

Except, of course, for the fact that the rest of the world will still have plenty of COVID-19 cases. We'll never be completely safe until the entire world is vaccinated, and even at that point the virus is likely to be endemic in the human population. It's possible that annual COVID-19 shots will become as routine as annual flu shots.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 28. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Italy continues to see a surge in deaths, and there are worrisome plateaus almost everywhere else, including the US. This is an immense tragedy. We were so close.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 27. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Republicans insist there's a crisis on the border. Progressives insist there's hardly anything worth mentioning going on down south. It's all just the usual seasonal variation.

I'm skeptical of that, but put it aside. The one thing everyone can agree on is that the number of unaccompanied children at the border is truly headed for record territory:

But even this understates what's happening. The fiscal year used by CBP starts in October, and for the first four months encounters with unaccompanied minors were steady at about 5,000 per month. That's high but hardly record shattering.

But in February that doubled to 9,000, and the Biden administration forecasts that it will rise to more than 20,000 by May. That's more than four times the normal rate.

This is obviously not just seasonal variation, nor is it merely making up for a slow 2020. The evidence suggests pretty convincingly that it's largely due to a belief among migrants that the Biden administration would be more tolerant of illegal immigration than the Trump administration, and that children were the key to getting in.

At this point, however, it really doesn't matter if Biden is responsible for the current state of affairs. What matters is that it's real and it's happening on his watch. Politically, that means Biden can't make excuses; he has to do something to rein in the surge of illegal immigration or suffer the consequences. That's just the reality of the thing.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 26. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Here are the furballs, staring intently at something outside. Probably a stray leaf or something. Sadly, this display of domestic comity ended as it usually does, with some lickey-lickey from Hilbert followed by some bitey-bitey and then a quick escape.

Good:

Dominion Voting Systems on Friday filed a $1.6-billion defamation lawsuit against Fox News, alleging that the cable news giant tried to shore up its flagging ratings by falsely claiming that Dominion had rigged the 2020 election.

....In the lawsuit, Dominion argues that Fox News, which amplified inaccurate assertions that Dominion altered votes, “sold a false story of election fraud in order to serve its own commercial purposes, severely injuring Dominion in the process,” according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained by the Associated Press.

....“This was a conscious, knowing business decision to endorse and repeat and broadcast these lies in order to keep its viewership,” attorney Justin Nelson said.

I imagine that the standard for proving libel in this case is "reckless disregard for the truth," which sure seems like precisely what Fox News was guilty of. They knew perfectly well that Dominion hadn't rigged its machines, but they said so anyway because they knew their audience wanted to hear stuff like that.

Am I concerned about the precedent of finding a news outlet guilty of libel? I'll let you know if and when a news outlet gets sued.

Over at 538, Nate Silver has a detailed analysis of poll performance. It tells us that 2020 poll performance was mediocre, but it turns out to have been mediocre in a specific direction:

What's going on? Silver offers this explanation:

We think there’s good reason to expect that these types of mistakes in one direction or another — what we sometimes call systematic polling errors — will be more of an issue going forward. How come? The systematic errors aren’t necessarily a function of the polls themselves. Rather, they’re because in a time of intense political polarization and little ticket-splitting, race outcomes are highly correlated with one another up and down the ballot.

....The old cliche that the Electoral College is really “50 separate contests” is highly misleading in our nationalized, polarized electoral climate. Everything is connected, and for better or worse, you need some relatively fancy math to get a decent estimate of a party’s chance of winning the presidency, or the Senate.

Put another way, in the past random errors canceled each other out, so overall bias was usually small. But if every race is similar, then a single mistake just keeps accumulating in the same direction.

Another possibility is that Donald Trump is a wild card. Presidential polls were heavily biased toward Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, but not so much in most other years. Perhaps this is because Trump voters tend not to answer the phone for pollsters?

In any case, Silver says that phone polls are no longer the gold standard of polling. The tiny rate of responses makes them no more reliable than other forms of polling. No surprise there.

This morning the BEA released state GDP figures through Q4 of 2020, which gives us a good idea of which states have weathered the COVID-19 pandemic the best. Here are per-capita growth rates for the ten largest states:

And via the CDC, here's how those states are currently doing on the COVID front:

Here's a crude ranking that combines each state's rank in 2020 growth with its recent COVID-19 performance:

There are other ways of ranking the states, of course. For example, here's a ranking that uses cumulative cases (per 100,000) rather than recent cases:

Feel free to dig into the data and come up with your own ranking!