Author: Kevin Drum

Last night someone suggested that tracking COVID-19 cases was sort of pointless these days because so many people do home testing that never shows up in national statistics. That's true, and several readers mentioned that sewage testing is the latest and greatest method for tracking COVID according to those in the know.

That got me curious, so I headed over to the CDC site and played around on their wastewater surveillance page. I wasn't able to make a lot of sense out of it, so instead I zoomed into California and then to Orange County to see how things were going in my neck of the woods:

Is sewershed 299 the only site that shows evidence of COVID? Or is it the only testing site in Orange County? I'm not sure, but it looks like levels are very low with just a bit of an uptick starting in late April.

So then I went to the California state water board site and checked in with them:

It looks about the same: COVID levels in wastewater are very low in Orange County, but took a tick upward toward the end of April.

So that's that. I may try to make more sense of the data later on, but this is it for now. Click the links if you want to check out your own local area.

It's the "Breaking News" banner that I find sort of funny here.

It occurred to me that I haven't looked at COVID-19 lately, so I figured I should do that. Here's an old-school look at the daily rate of confirmed cases in various countries:

Cases are way down all over the world. The US case rate has increased slightly since April, but it's still below 250/day compared to a high of 2,400/day during the Omicron outbreak.

For now, things are looking pretty calm. That's great, but I wish it weren't making everyone so complacent. There's still a likelihood of further surges, and we should be spending the money to prepare for them. It's just dumb to pretend that COVID has gone away never to return.

This is the Calvary Chapel of the Canyons located on Silverado Canyon Road. On its own it isn't an especially great looking church, and I long ago gave up on trying to take an ordinary shot of it.

But then, several months ago, I happened to be out in the area when I saw the church from a distance on an evening when the moon was lighting it up. This inspired me to try to take a picture of the church from about half a mile away, but I was never able to take a single image that satisfied me. So I decided to create a composite instead.

This is a very carefully constructed image. The base layer is a photo I took when the moon was full. The next layer is a picture I took with my phone on Monday night. It has lovely clouds and a sky full of stars. In the area around the moon, I made the layer semi-transparent so the moon was visible, and then brightened it up.

The final layer is the foreground hills. I took dozens of versions of this on different days, and then applied different effects to brighten up the area around the church. My Photoshop skills are not up to this, but I ended up liking this version better than any of the others.

Even though I'm not entirely satisfied with this, I'm posting it in order to get it off my plate. I do this sometimes when I've spent too much time trying to capture a perfect shot with no success, and the only way to stop myself is to put it on the blog so there's no point in trying any further. The result is worse photography for you but better mental health for me.

Last month, 30-year fixed mortgage rates hit 5%, up from 3% at the end of 2021. But that didn't even slow them down. Rates busted right past that 5% level and are now at 5.27%:

How much is this really? Here's a chart that shows how much the rise in interest rates has affected the monthly payments on a $500,000 mortgage:

At the beginning of the year, the monthly payment on a $500,000 loan was $2,138. By the middle of April, when interest rates hit 5%, that had gone up $546. In the past few weeks, it's gone up by another $83.

In all, monthly payments on a $500,000 mortgage have gone up from $2,138 at the beginning of the year to $2,767 this week. That's an increase of $629 for this particular size of mortgage. If you prefer percentages because they stay the same no matter the size of the mortgage, it's an increase of 30%. But no matter how you like to look at things, this is a very, very big surge. Can the current housing boom withstand this?

The CDC released drug overdose death figures for the full year 2021 today. Here they are:

Fentanyl accounted for 64% of total opioid deaths in 2021. Fentanyl overdose deaths have increased from under 10,000 in 2015 to nearly 70,000 in 2021.

A few days ago I asked what was really behind the Russian army's epic incompetence in Ukraine. It's a standard war, not a counterinsurgency, so you'd think Russia could do OK. Why isn't it?

A longtime reader writes in with this explanation:

I do have some information as to why the Russian Army is so terrible. The answer is that it utterly lacks a Non-Commissioned Officer corps. This means that there is no enlisted group with institutional memory, nor training, nor technical competence. ALL of that is thrust onto the shoulders of junior officers, and speaking from institutional memory and from experience, junior officers are not up to the many tasks assigned to them. The Russian Army is infamous for its hazing of enlisted personnel, rape is common, and nobody, but NOBODY offers creative solutions in that kind of environment.

I am a retired NCO, son of a career NCO, and you may think that this is prejudice. When I was on active duty, I regularly questioned the judgement of junior officers and at least annually went over their head to a superior officer (with permission). I never got into trouble for that, and never expected to. It takes just one man to sink a ship during combat and it takes just one man to ask a difficult question in difficult times to save it. EVERYONE makes mistakes. When second lieutenants get together to plan an operation, the result is predictable. That’s why those are called a “clusterfuck” (oak leaf clusters).

The Russian Army consists of well-connected senior officers, junior officers who are the sons of the senior officers, and cannon fodder.

OK then. I don't know anything about the (lack of a) Russian NCO corps, but everything I've read about the way troops are drafted and handled confirms that they are indeed treated as cannon fodder. That's a tough assignment for anyone.

Today is inflation day, and the BLS reports that the US inflation rate has finally begun to decline. The headline inflation rate fell from 8.5% in March to 8.2% in April. The core inflation rate, which excludes food and energy, fell from 6.4% to 6.1%.

This means that our collective optimism about a drop in the inflation rate was justified. Good forecasting, folks! But if want to really see optimistic, check out inflation measured since last month, not last year:

Headline inflation rose 0.3% since March, which is an annualized rate of only 4.1% compared to 15.9% last month. Oddly, core inflation did just the opposite: it rose to annualized rate of 7.0% compared to 4.0% last month. This is largely because there was a large drop in energy prices, which shows up in CPI but not in core CPI.

Anyway, the news is largely good on the inflation front, but not so great on the wages front. Weekly blue-collar wages were up 5.5% since last year, which translates to -3.1% after you adjust for inflation. On a monthly basis, wages were up 0.2% from March to April, which translates to a real yearly change of +2.4%. That's not bad, but only if it keeps up for a full year.

Generally speaking, we saw a welcome easing in inflation, but it was about what was expected. Nobody is going to go crazy over this.

On the other hand, the massive drop in the monthly rate of inflation from March to April was, as far as I know, completely unexpected. However, it will probably be treated as a meaningless outlier due to a one-time drop in energy prices that's not likely to be repeated.

You guys are an optimistic bunch!

Only 10% of you think that inflation will continue to rise. As it happens I agree with you: I'm guessing a decline to maybe 8.1% or so.

We'll find out tomorrow if this is wishful thinking or not. As usual, though, I won't get around to posting about it until I wake up, which is usually two or three hours after the new print is released at 5:30 am Pacific time. But I always try to make up for being later than everyone else by providing especially incisive analysis and nice, colorful charts.

This post is a shoutout to my buddy Don, who asks "How does this whole Starlink thing work anyway? What are the Ukrainians getting from us?"

No problem. Each Starlink kit comes with a small dish—referred to by fans as dishy or McDishy—which connects via the Ka-Ku band to Starlink's constellation of satellites in low-Earth orbit:

Dishes can be mounted in lots of different ways but must have a clear view of the sky. Second-generation dishes, like the one shown above, connect via a cable to a Starlink WiFi router:

The router has two ports. One connects to the dish and the other connects to power:

After you've given the dish a few minutes to orient itself, go into your phone's WiFi settings and connect to the Starlink network. If everything has gone right, you're in business.

Each kit costs about $600 unless you want the upgraded business kit, which costs $2,500. Monthly costs are $110 for standard service and $500 for the faster business service. Both include unlimited data usage.

So what is Ukraine getting? The good news is that the Ukrainian army says the small size and portability of Starlink kits is a godsend:

For war-torn Ukraine, Starlink has become an information lifeline....Ukraine’s Digital Transformation Minister Mykhailo Fedorov reported there are more than 10,000 Starlink terminals now operating in Ukraine, according to NBC. Unlike cellphone transmission towers, the satellite dishes used by Ukrainian forces for Starlink reception are small—about 23 inches wide—and readily movable to evade detection and retaliation. A Ukrainian soldier identified as Dima—his last name was withheld—told journalist David Patrikarakos: “Starlink is what changed the war in Ukraine’s favor. Russia went out of its way to blow up all our comms. Now they can’t. Starlink works under Katyusha fire, under artillery fire. It even works in Mariupol.”

The terminals are also resilient and adaptable.....When Russia resorted to electronic countermeasures, Starlink simply pushed out software updates to prevent these, according to Dave Tremper, director of electronic warfare at the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Temper said the speed at which Starlink countered the attack was “eye-watering.”

The (somewhat) bad news is that all this Starlink equipment is not a purely charitable donation from the company, as Elon Musk kinda sorta seemed to imply. The Washington Post reported about this a few weeks ago:

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) announced it has purchased more than 1,330 terminals from SpaceX to send to Ukraine, while the company donated nearly 3,670 terminals and the Internet service itself.

....USAID agreed to purchase closer to 1,500 standard Starlink terminals for $1,500 apiece and to pay an additional $800,000 for transportation costs, documents show, adding up to over $3 million in taxpayer dollars paid to SpaceX for the equipment sent to Ukraine.

In a letter to SpaceX last month outlining the deal, the USAID mission director to Ukraine said the terminals...come with three months of “unlimited data.”

....It is [] unclear whether the price the U.S. government is paying for individual Starlink units matches their typical market price. USAID is paying $1,500 for each standard terminal and the accompanying service, documents show. According to the Starlink website, a standard terminal set costs $600, while the monthly service charge costs $110, plus an additional $100 for shipping and handling.

According to The Verge, Starlink recently unveiled a separate premium service that prices the equipment at $2,500 and the monthly Internet charge at $500, but it remains unclear whether that is what Ukraine has received.

So the US has paid $3 million so far, and the units donated by Starlink come with only three months of data. Nobody seems to know if this is for standard kits or business kits.

There's nothing really wrong with this. Just keep in mind that it's more a discounted price than a pure charitable donation.