Good morning.

Friday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of forty-six.  Sunrise is 5:38 AM and sunset 8:04 PM, for 14h 26m 24s of daytime.  The moon is a waning gibbous with 98.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1429, Joan of Arc lifts the Siege of Orléans, turning the tide of the Hundred Years’ War.

Recommended for reading in full —

Lawrence Summers writes Given what we’re losing in GDP, we should be spending far more to develop tests: 

We are embarked on a policy path of opening things up without major complementary measures, an approach based more on wishful thinking than on logic or evidence. In guidance issued last month, the Trump administration stated this relaxation should only begin when the number of new cases daily had declined for 14 days. This criterion has not been met for the country as a whole or in many states, yet reopening has begun.

A simple calculation illustrates why this path is so dangerous. The most important parameter for understanding an epidemic is what epidemiologists label R0 (R-nought) — the number of people infected by a single individual with the virus. If R0 is greater than 1, an epidemic explodes; if it is less than 1, it diminishes and eventually ceases to be a problem. Experts estimate that before lockdown R0 was about 2.5, which is why lockdown was necessary. They now estimate, in part because case counts have been stable, that R0 is a bit below 1 — perhaps 0.9 or, on an optimistic view, 0.8.

Basic but grim arithmetic implies that if we move from lockdown even 20 percent of the way back to normal life, the epidemic will again be potentially explosive. (For example, if we are currently at an R0 of 0.9, and assuming that the R0 without any distancing is 2.5, then returning to 20 percent of normal would take the R0 to 1.22, clearly in the danger zone.) This is very worrying as the president and many other political leaders seem to be encouraging substantial reversals in lockdown policies.

….

The problem is that the main constraint on economic activity is not mandatory lockdowns. Rather, whatever is technically permitted, people will be reluctant to resume normal behavior for fear of being infected. The likely result: a resurgent pandemic, dramatically lowered economic activity, or both simultaneously.

(Emphasis added.)

Paige Winfield Cunningham reports Coronavirus is shifting from urban areas to rural ones:

Rural areas of the country, where 15 percent of Americans live, are seeing a rise in new daily cases even as the numbers decline in New York City and other urban centers that are now past their peak, according to Carrie Henning-Smith, a rural health researcher at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. These new hot spots aren’t seeing the declines experts had hoped for, even after weeks of social distancing.

In the two-week period between April 13 and 27,  novel coronavirus cases increased 125 percent in non-metro counties, compared to 68 percent in metro counties, according to research by the Kaiser Family Foundation. During that time period, deaths from the virus increased 169 percent in non-metro counties and 113 percent in metro counties.

 The History of Sriracha:

Good morning.

Thursday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-three.  Sunrise is 5:39 AM and sunset 8:03 PM, for 14h 24m 06s of daytime.  The moon is full with 100% of its visible disk illuminated.

 On this day in 1945, General Alfred Jodl signs unconditional surrender terms at Reims, France, ending Germany’s participation in the war. The document takes effect the next day.

Recommended for reading in full —

Robert Faturechi and Derek Willis report On the Same Day Sen. Richard Burr Dumped Stock, So Did His Brother-in-Law. Then the Market Crashed:

Sen. Richard Burr was not the only member of his family to sell off a significant portion of his stock holdings in February, ahead of the market crash spurred by coronavirus fears. On the same day Burr sold, his brother-in-law also dumped tens of thousands of dollars worth of shares. The market fell by more than 30% in the subsequent month.

Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, who has a post on the National Mediation Board, sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that have been hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn.

A person who picked up Fauth’s phone on Wednesday hung up when asked if Fauth and Burr had discussed the sales in advance.

In 2017, President Donald Trump appointed Fauth to the three-person board of the National Mediation Board, a federal agency that facilitates labor-management relations within the nation’s railroad and airline industries. He was previously a lobbyist and president of his own transportation economic consulting firm, G.W. Fauth & Associates.

Burr came under scrutiny after ProPublica reported that he sold off a significant percentage of his stocks shortly before the market tanked, unloading between $628,000 and $1.72 million of his holdings on Feb. 13 in 33 separate transactions. As chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and a member of the health committee, Burr had access to the government’s most highly classified information about threats to America’s security and public health concerns.

 Daniel Beer reviews Putin’s People by Catherine Belton – a groundbreaking study that follows the money:

A groundbreaking and meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime, Belton’s book shines a light on the pernicious threats Russian money and influence now pose to the west. Deepening social inequality and the rise of populist movements in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis have “left the west wide open to Russia’s aggressive new tactics of fuelling the far right and the far left”. Kremlin largesse has funded political parties across the continent, from the National Front in France to Jobbik in Hungary and the Five Star movement in Italy, which are united in their hostility to both the EU and Nato. The Kremlin’s “black cash”, former Kremlin insider Sergei Pugachev laments, “is like a dirty atomic bomb. In some ways it’s there, in some ways it’s not. Nowadays it’s much harder to trace.” Putin’s People lays bare the scale of the challenge if the west is to decontaminate its politics.

(Putin’s People will be available for sale on 6.16.20, and Amazon is now taking advance orders for electronic or print copies.)

A Grocery Store at the Epicenter of the Pandemic:

Good morning.

Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with a high of sixty-four.  Sunrise is 5:40 AM and sunset 8:02 PM, for 14h 21m 46s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 98.5% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinctions committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 3 PM.

 On this day in 1915, George Orson Welles is born in Kenosha.

Recommended for reading in full —

Dan Mangan reports Trump does not wear coronavirus mask at Honeywell factory that makes masks:

President Donald Trump did not wear a mask as a coronavirus precaution during a visit Tuesday to a Honeywell factory in Phoenix that is producing millions of N95 masks for the federal government.

Other official visitors with Trump, who did put on safety glasses for his tour, also were not wearing masks.

But Honeywell employees working on the production line were wearing masks. And a sign in the factory said that everyone there is required to wear a mask.

At one point during his tour, the Guns N’ Roses cover of the James Bond movie song “Live and Let Die” was being blasted from the factory’s PA system, as workers performed their tasks.

Trump, who has consistently refused to wear a mask while interacting with others despite federal guidance urging all Americans to do so, earlier Tuesday had said that he would put on a mask if it was required at the Honeywell facility.

A White House official said that Honeywell had told the White House that Trump and other visitors did not need to wear masks.

“If it’s a mask environment, I would certainly do that,” Trump had said Tuesday before boarding Air Force One to fly to Arizona.

“I would wear it. If it’s a mask environment, I would have no problem.”

Trump was not wearing a mask when he walked off Air Force One after it landed in Arizona.

And the president did not wear a mask at a roundtable discussion about Covid-19 assistance to Native Americans, which took place before he toured the Honeywell plant, which is producing masks under a $27.4 million Defense Department contract.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee, Tom Hamburger, and Anu Narayanswamy report Well-connected Trump alumni benefit from coronavirus lobbying rush:

As a wave of coronavirus restrictions shuttered more than two dozen of his hotels, Dallas hotelier Monty Bennett publicly pleaded for help.<

“Every American should expect just enough from government that our businesses can survive. Is that too much to ask?” the longtime GOP donor wrote in a March blog post.

Behind the scenes, Bennett’s companies paid $50,000 to hire two well-connected allies of President Trump for help seeking financial relief: Jeff Miller, former vice chairman of Trump’s inaugural committee, and Roy Bailey, a top fundraiser for the president’s reelection campaign, according to lobbying disclosures.

As lobbyists blitz Washington for a piece of the massive federal response to the global pandemic, a group of former Trump administration officials and campaign alumni are in the center of the action, helping private interests tap into coveted financial and regulatory relief programs.

In all, at least 25 former officials who once worked for the Trump administration, campaign or transition team are now registered as lobbyists for clients with novel coronavirus needs, according to The Washington Post’s analysis of federal lobbying records and employment data compiled by ProPublica.

Fireballs! Eta Aquarid meteors captured by NASA all-sky cameras:

Good morning.

Tuesday in Whitewater will see clouds, scattered showers, and a high of fifty-one.  Sunrise is 5:41 AM and sunset 8:01 PM, for 14h 19m 26s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 94.4% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Common Council meets via audiovisual conferencing at 6:30 PM.

 It’s Cinco de Mayo: Mexican troops led by Ignacio Zaragoza halt a French invasion in the Battle of Puebla.

Recommended for reading in full —

William Booth, Carolyn Y. Johnson, and Carol Morello report The world came together for a virtual vaccine summit. The U.S. was conspicuously absent:

LONDON — World leaders came together in a virtual summit Monday to pledge billions of dollars to quickly develop vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus.

Missing from the roster was the Trump administration, which declined to participate but highlighted from Washington what one official called its “whole-of-America” efforts in the United States and its generosity to global health efforts.

The online conference, led by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a half-dozen countries, was set to raise $8.2 billion from governments, philanthropies and the private sector to fund research and mass-produce drugs, vaccines and testing kits to combat the virus, which has killed more than 250,000 people worldwide.
….

A senior Trump administration official said Monday the United States “welcomes” the efforts of the conference participants. He did not explain why the United States did not join them.

 Danielle Moran reports Red States Will Need Coronavirus Bailouts Too:

On April 27, President Trump took to Twitter to escalate the spat over the next coronavirus stimulus, questioning whether the federal government should rescue “poorly run” states led by Democrats. His tweet echoed the comments of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who suggested during a radio interview that states with large pension obligations under union contracts could pursue bankruptcy instead of federal aid. The Kentucky Republican’s office gave his comments a twist in a press release with a section titled “On Stopping Blue State Bailouts.”

It’s true that many of the states that are ground zero for the Covid-19 pandemic—New York and New Jersey, as well as California and Illinois—are solidly Democratic. But the fiscal challenges that states now face aren’t limited to the blue ones and go well beyond pension obligations. States across the country are reeling from a brutal double whammy of lost revenue: With 30 million people thrown out of work in the past several weeks, income tax collections are tanking, and sales taxes have evaporated after stores and restaurants shuttered. Most states receive a majority of their revenue from those two sources.

Moody’s Analytics projects a fiscal shock to states of $158 billion to $203 billion through the end of the fiscal year ending in June 2021, resulting in almost half of states having to fill a budget gap of at least 10%. (Their ability to weather the impact will depend in part on the amount in their reserves.) Under Moody’s most severe scenario, Louisiana, North Dakota, and West Virginia—all red states—are projected to lose more than 39% of their revenue. Another Republican stronghold, Alaska, is poised to see the largest loss, potentially as much as 79.6% of its general fund. That’s because the state gets much of its revenue from the oil and gas industry, and prices have crashed.

I.C.U. Doctor Brings Music, and Hope, to Coronavirus Patients:

Good morning.

Monday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five.  Sunrise is 5:42 AM and sunset 8:00 PM, for 14h 17m 03s of daytime.  The moon is a waxing gibbous with 87.2% of its visible disk illuminated.

 The Whitewater Unified School District’s distinction committee meets via Zoom at 9:30 AM and district’s school board via Zoom at 6 PM.

 On this day in 1942, the Battle of the Coral Sea begins.

Recommended for reading in full —

 Peter Baker reports Trump Foresees Virus Death Toll as High as 100,000 in the United States:

President Trump predicted on Sunday night that the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the country may reach as high as 100,000 in the United States, far worse than he had forecast just weeks ago, even as he pressed states to reopen the shuttered economy.

Mr. Trump, who last month forecast that fatalities from the outbreak could be kept “substantially below the 100,000” mark and probably around 60,000, acknowledged that the virus has proved more devastating than expected. But nonetheless, he said that parks, beaches and some businesses should begin reopening now and that schools should resume classes in person by this fall.

(A respected model from MIT now projects that America will suffer – and then continue to exceed – 100,000 deaths as soon as May 22nd. )

William H. Frey writes COVID-19’s recent spread shifts to suburban, whiter, and more Republican-leaning areas:

There is a stereotypical view of the places in America that COVID-19 has affected most: they are broadly urban, comprised predominantly of racial minorities, and strongly vote Democratic. This underlines the public’s perception of what kinds of populations reside in areas highly exposed to the coronavirus, as well as some of the recent political arguments over social distancing measures and the states easing their restrictions.

While that perception of high-prevalence areas was accurate during the earlier stages of the pandemic, COVID-19’s recent spread has changed the picture. During the first three weeks of April, new counties showing a high prevalence of COVID-19 cases are more suburban, whiter, and voted more strongly for Donald Trump than counties the virus hit first. These findings result from a new analysis of counties with high COVID-19 prevalence rates (more than 100 confirmed cases per 100,000 population) based on data available from The New York Times and the U.S. Census Bureau.

….

The shift was most marked with respect to urban residence status. On March 29, four-fifths of high-prevalence county populations resided in the urban cores of large metropolitan areas. This fell sharply in the subsequent weeks, as more shares of residents in new high-prevalence counties lived in suburbs and smaller areas. Among residents of counties which entered high-prevalence status between April 6 and April 12, for example, only 31% lived in urban core counties, while 45% lived in suburbs and 24% lived in small and nonmetropolitan areas.

Counties entering high-prevalence status during the April 13 to April 19 period showed a rise in shares of urban core residents, due largely to the inclusion of the three populous California counties. But overall, there has generally been an increased spread to areas outside of urban cores.

Celebrating May the 4th in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: