Kevin Drum

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

From Justice Department statistics, here are the arrest rates for various types of crime. They are adjusted for population, and each one shows the arrest rate for Black suspects as a percentage of the arrest rate for white suspects:

For example, the arrest rate for robbery is 500% higher for Black suspects after accounting for their share of the population. At the other end, the arrest rate for drunk driving is slightly lower for Black suspects compared to white suspects.

These statistics are well known. The big question is whether Black arrest rates are higher because (a) Black people commit more crimes or (b) they are targeted at far higher rates by the police. Or, alternatively, because (c) if you adjust for income and education and so forth, the difference goes away. The only way to say for sure is to somehow know the "real" crime rate, but that's not possible. Researchers have nonetheless tried a variety of clever methods to tease out the difference, but the results have been all over the map and are mostly of dubious quality anyway. So we still don't know.

UPDATE: The original version of the chart was a little unclear, so I've relabeled it.

In a tweet thread follow-up to his big COVID-19 piece in New York yesterday, David Wallace-Wells comments on something that ought to be obvious to everyone by now:

But the farther along we've gotten on the pandemic timeline, the clearer it's seemed that America is not nearly the outlier Americans — especially liberal Americans horrified by Trump — have believed it was.

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) March 16, 2021

A year on, with vaccines mercifully delivering us into a pandemic endgame, our problems actually responding to the virus seem much bigger, more common and more complicated than Trump. Our journalism should begin to reflect that. (x/x) https://t.co/dcTq3G9euF

— David Wallace-Wells (@dwallacewells) March 16, 2021

A few weeks ago I wrote a post arguing that our response to COVID-19 had actually been pretty good. Unfortunately, I did a lousy job of explaining exactly what I meant by that, and my follow-up post a few days later was only a little better. David's tweet gives me an excuse to give it another try, so here I go.

To put it plainly, I think his first tweet is absolutely right but his second tweet is dead wrong. When I say that our response was "pretty good," what I mean is that I think the basic public health infrastructure of the US responded fairly well. They made mistakes, but for the most part these mistakes were in the very early going when we were truly in the dark about the extent and seriousness of the coronavirus. What's more, it's genuinely unclear whether those mistakes had much of a long-term effect. Does anyone think, for example, that if the CDC had developed a reliable test a few weeks earlier than it did that our mortality spike in December would have been lower? Or that our cumulative death rate would be much different than it is today? I doubt it.

We have a tendency to go nuts over every little thing these days. Our vaccine rollout, for example, has been spectacular, but every day there are multiple stories about how some aspect or another has been mishandled. This kind of constant micro-criticism is understandable when you're dealing with life and death, but that doesn't make it true in any useful sense. The big picture is plain: Generally speaking, we've done really well both in carrying out our plan (healthcare workers first, followed by the elderly) and in our overall speed of approval and delivery (one of the best in the world).

This really and truly does leave us with only one thing that potentially had a large and long-term impact on our response to the virus: Donald Trump. He's the one who initially downplayed it; who touted a wide range of quack cures; who made mask-wearing into a culture war battle; and who insisted on opening up the economy before we were ready—which kept our mortality rate high during the summer while other countries were pushing it down nearly to zero. Trump's malign influence spread to nearly every red-state governor, most of the Republican caucus in Congress, and of course to Fox News. This is truly the big difference between the US and the rest of the West, and the reason that our mortality rate was eventually one of the worst—though not the absolute worst—among our peer countries. Under any other president, things would have been very different.

As for the overall difference in mortality between Asia and the West, the most popular explanation is cultural: following the SARS outbreak of 2003, every country in east Asia became hypersensitive to any viral outbreak centered in China. This wasn't because SARS ended up killing all that many people. It's because China lied so egregiously about what was going on that nobody trusted them anymore. In the aftermath of that, countries in the region got serious about responding instantly to a possible pandemic at practically the first sign that something was happening in China.

That didn't happen in the West, which suffered virtually no SARS fatalities outside of Canada. In fact, it had just the opposite effect: it was widely viewed as just another false alarm. This attitude carried over to 2020, which is why western countries reacted more slowly and more loosely than countries in the vicinity of China.

Needless to say, those days are long gone. Every country in the world is now on high alert, and the mistakes we made in the early days of COVID-19 are unlikely to be repeated thanks to the fact that our public health infrastructure is, in fact, pretty good. The only thing that remains an open question is whether the residents of western countries will put up with the kind of strict lockdowns that have apparently been the key to success in Asia. My personal feeling is that I doubt it. For better or worse, it's just not something we're willing to endure even when the alternative is a higher chance of death.

I get asked about this with some regularity, so here's the answer: Lead poisoning has nothing to do with the overall crime rate these days. Its effects lasted from the mid-60s through about 2010. After that, everyone under 30 had grown up in a low-lead environment and there was little additional improvement to be had.

The past few years have seen some peculiar ups and downs in the violent crime rate, and the murder rate in particular has increased considerably over the past year. There are lots of possible reasons for this, ranging from the statistical to the very real (George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic), but at the moment we don't really know the cause.

But it's not lead.

This is a pair of European starlings at sunrise on the border fence. They have their feathers puffed up to stay warm.

Is Italy a bellwether? Both their case rate and their mortality rate are trending back up, and case rates have also turned upward in France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and other countries. Europe needs to get its vaccination program working pronto.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How much money are Black farmers getting from the COVID relief bill? Here's the Washington Post:

Of the $10.4 billion in the American Rescue Plan that will support agriculture, approximately half would go to disadvantaged farmers, according to estimates from the Farm Bureau, an industry organization. About a quarter of disadvantaged farmers are Black. The money would provide debt relief as well as grants, training, education and other forms of assistance aimed at acquiring land.

So that's one quarter of one half, or 12.5% of the entire amount. Lindsey Graham calls it "reparations," while Sean Hannity uses it as an excuse to whip up the usual Fox News hysteria about white people getting screwed yet again.

You'd think even these two might be a little embarrassed about what they're doing, but they aren't. To them, fanning the flames of racism is just a smart political move. This is what we get from Republicans when we try to do even the smallest thing to concretely help Black people and other minorities.

Nuntes vulpes delenda est!

I'm puzzled about something related to the AstraZeneca vaccine. Several European countries have put it on hold due to reports of blood clots in patients who have received it. If I have the numbers right, about 40 cases of blood clots have been reported out of the 17 million people who have gotten the AZ vaccine.

But COVID-19 itself is far more dangerous on the blood clot front. "Blood clots continue to wreak havoc for patients with severe COVID-19 infection," reported the University of Michigan Health Lab a few months ago, and that hasn't changed.

So let's do some arithmetic. The overall hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is about 100 per million per week, which means that of the 17 million who have received the AZ vaccine since January, something on the order of 17,000 would have been hospitalized if they hadn't been vaccinated. The incidence of blood clots in patients hospitalized for COVID-19, according to a recent study, is about 20%. This means that roughly 3,000 people out of those 17 million would have developed blood clots without the vaccine, simply because they would gotten a serious case of COVID-19.

So . . . 3,000 without the vaccine, 40 with the vaccine.¹ That seems like a no-brainer: keep inoculating people with the AZ vaccine until firm evidence of large-scale harm emerges.²

Unless, of course, I bollixed up my amateur risk-assessment arithmetic. If I did, what am I missing?

¹Also, AstraZeneca claims that 40 cases out of 17 million is about the same as it is for other vaccines. I can't verify that at the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's true.

²The calculus might work out differently if you had plenty of alternate vaccine supplies, but I don't get the impression that's the case in Europe.

This is a panoramic picture of the Eastern Sierras taken in the early morning on Highway 168 just before the turnoff to the Bristlecone Pine Forest. The small patch of brown in the lower middle is Big Pine. The colors in this picture are interesting, but what's really remarkable is how solid the lines are. They look drawn on, not photographed. And yet, photographed they were.

This was a very strange weekend. On Saturday we blew past every previous record by vaccinating 4.6 million people in a single day. Then on Sunday we plummeted down to 1.4 million. Overall, though, this is good news. Saturday's performance demonstrates that we have the infrastructure to vaccinate 4-5 million people in a day, while the three-day weekend average of 3 million is well above any previous weekend. At this point, I think the only thing really limiting us is supply.