Written by Steven Hansen

The U.S. new cases 7-day rolling average are 11.1 % LOWER than the 7-day rolling average one week ago and U.S. deaths due to coronavirus are now 23.0 % LOWER than the rolling average one week ago. Today’s posts include:

• U.S. Coronavirus New Cases are 53,215
• U.S. Coronavirus deaths are at 1,725
• U.S. Coronavirus immunizations have been administered to 31.6 % of the population
• The 7-day rolling average rate of growth of the pandemic shows new cases improved and deaths worsened
• Quad Summit’s Vaccine Deal Is Biden’s Bold First Move in Asia
• What science has learned works and what doesn’t in COVID treatments
• The U.S. death rate remains high, even though coronavirus cases are trending downward
• US comes under pressure to share vaccines with rest of world
• Why experts say it’s especially important for heart patients to get a coronavirus vaccine
• COVID-19 is no longer an excuse to stay inside: Here’s what to know about outdoor safety
• The danger of high public debt is not what you think

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Hospitalizations Are The Only Accurate Gauge But Unfortunately No Longer Updated Daily

Hospitalizations historically appear to be little affected by weekends or holidays – the daily counts do not vary significantly from day-to-day.

The hospitalization growth rate trend is improving.

Historically, hospitalization growth follows new case growth by one to two weeks.

As an analyst, I use the rate of growth to determine the trend. But, the size of the pandemic is growing in terms of real numbers – and if the rate of growth does not become negative – the pandemic will overwhelm all resources.

The graph below shows the rate of growth relative to the growth a week earlier updated through today [note that negative numbers mean the rolling averages are LOWER than the rolling averages one week ago]. As one can see, the rate of growth for new cases peaked in early December 2020 for Thanksgiving, and early January 2021 for end of year holidays – and it now shows that the coronavirus effect is now shrinking.

In the scheme of things, new cases decline first, followed by hospitalizations, and then deaths.

Will The New Variants Cause The Next Spike?

Maybe and maybe not. It all depends on vaccinations:

• the more people that are vaccinated reduces the pool of people that can be infected. Today we have removed over 31 % of the population from being infected which theoretically should reduce the infection rate by 31 % [it is unproven whether the vaccines prevent a vaccinated person from being a carrier of the virus even though showing no signs]. If the vaccines are shown to stop transmission, then in theory it would reduce the infection rate by double the percent vaccinated [in this case you prevent your own infection and do not pass it along to another].
• it is also unknown what the effective rate of the current vaccines is against mutations that seem to appear almost daily. As an example, if the effective rate drops to 60%, it means the 31 % reduction in the infection rate discussed above is almost cut in half. The South African and Brazilian variant is reported somewhat immune to the current vaccines.
• The pandemic should be over immediately if everyone could be vaccinated today. The problem is that every day brings a new mutation (which would not appear if the pandemic was stopped). The longer the immunization process takes – the more ineffective the vaccine will become.
• It is not clear whether the vaccine prevents those vaccinated from spreading the virus. It seems to be well documented that it normally stops the virus from taking hold and when it does not – the infection is mild.

Coronavirus News You May Have Missed

Econintersect published two summary posts for events over the past week:

• Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 14March 2021
• Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 14March 2021

Quad Summit’s Vaccine Deal Is Biden’s Bold First Move in Asia – Foreign Policy

On [last] Friday morning, U.S. President Joe Biden is hosting the first-ever Quad summit with Japanese Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The deliverables are set to be impressive: In addition to the maritime security cooperation usually associated with the Quad—short for Quadrilateral Security Dialogue—Biden and his counterparts will agree on a major initiative for the region on COVID-19, officials familiar with the discussions say. With U.S. biotechnology, Japanese funding, Indian production, and Australian logistics, the four leaders will commit to providing 1 billion doses of vaccine to Southeast Asia, the region most directly exposed to Chinese pressure and expansionism.

After months of Beijing’s self-congratulatory “wolf warrior” diplomacy leveraging its successes in handling the pandemic, the maritime democracies in the Indo-Pacific will thereby deliver a stunning coup that is likely to permanently reverse the vaccine diplomacy wars. The four leaders will also agree to strengthen cooperation on securing supplies of rare-earth metals, driven by wariness of dependence on China for these critical inputs to technology and defense production at a time when Beijing is slapping boycotts on any country that displeases it.

The logic of this play is obvious when one thinks about it. What most U.S. allies want in Asia is for the United States to come back to a leadership role in regional trade and rule-making. But that avenue is closed off for now—it has become obvious that the Biden administration is not ready to use its scarce political capital to rejoin the Trans-Pacific Partnership (now called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP). Similarly, robust U.S. defense spending and redeployment would also blunt China’s growing pressure on India, Japan, and Southeast Asia, but Democrats in the U.S. Congress are still divided on that issue. Biden’s foreign-policy team is solidly Atlanticist and had hoped for an early win with Europe following Trump’s scorched-earth approach to Brussels, but the Europeans are still confused about China—as Biden found at the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 19, when he publicly proposed trans-Atlantic cooperation on China and both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron responded by talking about anything but China.

The Southeast Asians, on the other hand, were quietly telling all four Quad countries exactly what they really needed now: help on COVID-19. So the answer may have been obvious in retrospect, but the diplomatic hustle that led to this Quad summit was still impressive.

… The Quad is not an alliance. There are no collective security commitments—declaring that an attack on one member represents an attack on all four, for example. There are still gaps between India and the other three, particularly as questions mount about democratic backsliding under Modi. In military terms, the U.S.-Japanese-Australian trio is far more interoperable than the four are together, though the recent resumption of joint naval exercises will help. The Quad will be one part of a variable geometry of alliances and diplomacy in Asia. After this summit, it will now clearly be one of the most important parts.

The next act may not be quite as easy for Biden. U.S. allies still want to see the United States back in the region with economic statecraft since there are now two major trade agreements in Asia (CPTPP and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, or RCEP) that have been signed without U.S. participation. China is already in the RCEP, and Xi says he now wants to join the CPTPP as well. Tokyo and Canberra will slow-roll that, but the Biden team has to make it clear that it is prepared to rejoin, or the region may buckle under direct Chinese pressure—or be sucked in by the sheer size of China’s economy. The Quad members will also have to figure out the best configuration for expanding membership—most likely a la carte participation in naval exercises by countries such as Britain, Canada, France, and South Korea. But with Washington’s credibility waning and its options limited, the Biden team just played its one high-value card to the greatest possible effect.

COVID-19 is no longer an excuse to stay inside: Here’s what to know about outdoor safety – USA Today

A new tool to fight COVID-19 is on the rise across the United States: Warm, fresh air.

Spring and summer weather will provide opportunities for people — vaccinated or not — to enjoy low-risk, outdoor activities to better their physical and mental health, experts say.

It’s a development in the fight against COVID-19 because experts are now confident that it’s much harder for the virus to spread in outdoor conditions — especially when people wear masks and keep their distance.

“There (was) a lot of fear in the early parts of the pandemic because we didn’t know how it spread,” Gleb Tsipursky, author of a book about adapting to “the new abnormal” of COVID-19, told USA TODAY.

That uncertainty was at play last year as states closed beaches and parks and has continued to influence policy this year. In February, University of California, Berkeley made headlines for banning outdoor exercise

But research has shown that simple precautions are usually enough to keep you safe from COVID-19 when outside, experts say.

“Outdoors are not only safe, but really, really important,” said Nooshin Razani, a University of California, San Francisco professor of epidemiology and biostatistics.

Razani co-authored a systematic review of studies on indoor versus outdoor spread of COVID-19 and similar viruses. That widely-cited study found there was about a 20 times higher chance of transmission indoors than outdoors.

… It may be more difficult for COVID-19 to spread outside, but that doesn’t mean you should let your guard down.

Tightly packed crowds are still dangerous. Spending long periods of time with people outside your household still increases your risk. And masks still reduce your risk of catching or spreading the virus.

That’s why spring break is still causing concern among health experts.

The primary worry, experts say, is that partying is occurring at a crucial moment in the fight against the coronavirus: More and more vaccines are being administered each day, yet more and more cases of variants – which are highly transmissible – are being reported.

The danger of high public debt is not what you think – Knowable

Global government spending to combat Covid-19 and its economic fallout — $11.7 trillion just in the first six months of the pandemic according to the International Monetary Fund — means public debt will grow by 9 percent of gross domestic product on average this year worldwide. In the United States, the budget deficit hit a record $3.3 trillion for the 2020 fiscal year — and the federal government just passed another relief bill with another $1.9 trillion in spending.

National crises, from wars to depressions, have nearly always required big deficit spending. But in many countries, including the United States, for the last half-century public debt didn’t get paid down during times of peace and prosperity. Economists and politicians argue about whether this leads to higher inflation, interest rates or capital flight. That debate ignores a truly dangerous consequence of high public debt: It undermines trust in government.

Deficit spending, by delivering more public services than taxes paid for, feels like a good deal. It helps citizens view incumbents more favorably, making deficit spending even more appealing to political leaders. It also increases general trust in government.

But there’s a tipping point.

When the cost of servicing that debt makes up a large proportion of the budget, then citizens begin to consistently get less than they paid for, and trust erodes.

US government debt now exceeds the total annual production of the economy

For 40 years, that’s been the reality in the United States. Pew Research Center data show that from 1980 to 1998, debt service averaged 12 percent to 15 percent of the total federal budget.

Currently, even with interest rates at historic lows, debt service is almost 9 percent of the US budget. The situation in Japan, Greece and Italy is far worse.

… Paying down the debt seems like the obvious way to restore trust — but in the short term, repayments squeeze out public services in the budget making this an unlikely choice for political leaders, especially now, when Covid-19 still isn’t under control.

There is one important hopeful sign: Nordic social democracies like Sweden and Denmark have been able to avoid serious problems with public debt and thus trust in government. In Sweden, the debt-to-GDP ratio was 72 percent in 1994; by 2019 it had been reduced to 35 percent. Denmark shows a very similar pattern: the ratio rose to 78 percent in 1993, and was cut to only 33 percent in 2019. Neither country let their debt get out of hand, and trust in government remains higher in Nordic countries than most other developed nations.

The massive spending required for Covid-19 relief did not cause the soaring public debt in the US, but it could make it much worse. Once the pandemic is behind us, we still must find a way to address the debt and its related crisis in public trust.

US comes under pressure to share vaccines with rest of world – The Hill

President Biden is under increasing pressure to share the U.S. vaccine stockpile with the rest of the world.

The federal government has been amassing doses, growing its supply into what will likely become a surplus, as the rest of the world struggles with shortages. The U.S. has purchased enough vaccines to immunize every adult in the country three times over.

The supply is likely to grow.

This week, Biden announced he had directed the administration to purchase an additional 100 million doses from Johnson & Johnson.

The White House said the extra doses could be a backstop for possible manufacturing issues, help vaccinate children, or serve as booster doses if they become necessary to fight against variants of the virus.

If finalized, the deal would not be fulfilled until the second half of the year, but would give the U.S. a total of 200 million shots from Johnson & Johnson, enough for 200 million people.

When asked at the White House event about the widening gap between the U.S. and the rest of the world, Biden acknowledged the global nature of the pandemic but said his goal is to bring COVID-19 under control in America first.

“This is not something that can be stopped by a fence, no matter how high you build a fence or a wall,” Biden said. “So we’re not going to be ultimately safe until the world is safe. We’re going to start off making sure Americans are taken care of first, but we’re then going to try to help the rest of the world.”

On Friday, Biden committed to working with the leaders of Australia, India and Japan to expand vaccine manufacturing and delivery in Asia. The new commitment is aimed at addressing shortages in vaccines in Southeast Asia.

Yet administration officials reiterated that the United States will not donate any vaccines until the full American population is inoculated, and did not say what threshold the country would set before considering exporting vaccines.

Experts and global health advocates think the U.S. has the ability to donate vaccines to other countries without significantly impacting their availability to Americans, but has been unwilling to make such a plan.

The U.S. death rate remains high, even though coronavirus cases are trending downward. – New York Times

Coronavirus cases are trending downward across the United States as the country’s vaccine rollout picks up speed. But despite the large drop in new infections since early this year, the U.S. death rate remains at nearly 1,500 people every day. That number still exceeds the summer peak, when patients filled Sun Belt hospitals and outbreaks in states that reopened early drove record numbers of cases, though daily deaths nationwide remained lower than the first surge last spring. The number of new reported cases per day remains nearly as high as the summer record.

What science has learned works and what doesn’t in COVID treatments – USA Today

Treatments with solid scientific support:

• Dexamethasone
• Proning, or turning someone on their stomach
• Remdesivir
• Baricitinib
• Monoclonal antibodies
• Tocilizumab
• Anti-coagulants

Treatments with potential but limited evidence:

• ECMO, or extracorporeal membrane oxygenation
• fluvoxamine
• Cyclosporine
• Famotidine
• Intravenous immunoglobulin
• Ivermectin
• Interferons

Drugs shown to be ineffective:

• The combination of lopinavir-ritonavir
• Hydroxychloroquine
• Insulin
• High dose zinc and vitamin C
• Convalescent plasma

[editor’s note: this post deserves a full read]

Why experts say it’s especially important for heart patients to get a coronavirus vaccine – Washington Post

More than 30 million people in the United States have heart disease, which alone kills hundreds of thousands each year. It’s also a significant risk factor for developing serious complications from another major threat right now: covid-19.

That’s because the disease caused by the coronavirus often attacks the lungs, forcing the already injured heart to fight that much harder.

Both the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology are urging eligible individuals — including heart patients — to get vaccinated. The American College of Cardiology has even issued a health policy statement to provide guidance on how to prioritize certain cardiac patients for vaccination.

So it makes sense that some heart patients might wonder how well a coronavirus vaccine will protect them. Will it shield them from severe illness, hospitalization or worse? Will it keep them from getting infected at all?

“It’s reasonable to say, ‘Hey, if everyone else is protected from severe disease, but we know that I’m subject to a more severe disease anyway, am I going to be protected?’ ” said Mitchell Elkind, president of the American Heart Association.

The short answer? Yes.

… “As far as we can tell right now, there does not appear to be any increased side effects or safety issues of vaccinating people with heart failure or other cardiac conditions,” said Thomas Maddox, a professor of medicine at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and chairman of the American College of Cardiology’s Science and Quality Committee.

China research team finds 24 new bat coronaviruses within 2km radius – South China Morning Post

The search for the origin of the novel coronavirus behind the Covid-19 pandemic has turned up surprising results for an international team of scientists, according to a non-peer reviewed paper published on Monday.

The researchers found 24 previously unknown bat coronaviruses – four of them related to the strain which causes Covid-19 – all within a radius of less than 4km in southwestern China. One virus carried “a genomic backbone arguably the closest to SARS-CoV-2 identified to date”, the research paper said, but none appeared to be a direct ancestor of the coronavirus responsible for the pandemic.

Bats – which carry more disease-causing viruses than any other mammal, except rats – have long been a major subject of viral research. But bat-hunting scientists, particularly those in China, have come under fire since the emergence of Covid-19, which is believed to have originated from the animals.

One theory that the new coronavirus leaked from a laboratory studying bat viruses in the central Chinese city of Wuhan has been described as extremely unlikely by the World Health Organization, but it continues to be raised, most recently in an open letter by a group of academics published in The Wall Street Journal and Le Monde.

Despite the controversy, Beijing has continued to fund numerous research teams collecting and studying bat viruses across the country. Among them was the team, led by Professor Shi Weifong of Shandong First Medical University, which was responsible for the latest research published by preprint biology server bioRxiv.org.

Shi’s team was most surprised to collect such richly diversified strains from such a small area in Yunnan province, where they collected more than 400 samples – of droppings, urine and oral swabs – between May 2019 and November last year. Scientists from other countries, including Australia, took part in the field trips and data analysis. “The genomic diversity of these viruses has likely been underestimated,” they said.

The following are foreign headlines with hyperlinks to the posts

Japan considering 50 percent cap on spectators at Tokyo Olympics: report

At least 7 Covid-19 patients die in Jordan because of an oxygen shortage, a growing problem around the world.

Global vaccination rates are on the rise, but many countries have yet to start.

Ireland halts use of AstraZeneca vaccine following blood clot reports in Norway

Coronavirus: Gov’t to expand destinations to fly to Israel, maintain cap

Coronavirus: Israeli anti-vaxxers submit ethics complaint to ICC – report. Despite the suit’s claims of severe side effects and deaths allegedly related to the vaccine, only about 0.25% of Israelis who received the vaccine experienced any side effects.

Mental health experts warn of ‘2nd pandemic’ stemming from COVID-19

The following additional national and state headlines with hyperlinks to the posts

Airline travel surges with spring break rush

A year of distance learning wears thin

Relief Money Could More Than Double Support For Child Care Needs In Mississippi

Pandemic sparks marijuana sales boom

Air travel at highest level in nearly a year, TSA says

Newsom Admits to Mistakes in Pandemic as Recall Election Looks More Likely

Maskless Visitors Descend on Texas Beaches After COVID Curbs Lifted

DeSantis Says Florida Penalized by Biden’s Stimulus Package: ‘It Stinks’

Spring breakers flock to Florida in a return to life-as-it-used-to-be, something more states are approaching.

Hundreds of Tesla workers tested positive for the virus after Elon Musk reopened a plant, data shows.

How vaccinated travelers became hot property

Statin users 50% less likely to die in hospital from severe COVID-19

In Puerto Rican island of Vieques, COVID-19 vaccine brings relief—and anger

Today’s Posts On Econintersect Showing Impact Of The Pandemic With Hyperlinks

Did The Federal Reserve Anchor Inflation Expectations Too Low?

Infographic Of The Day: Data Usage Surged During Pandemic

Coronavirus Disease Weekly News 14March 2021

Coronavirus Economic Weekly News 14March 2021

Inflation Is Broken

A Third Of Destinations Remain Closed To International Tourism

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