At the urging of Senator Lindsey Graham, Trump Considers Domestic Air Travel Restrictions.
President Donald Trump said Wednesday he’s “certainly looking at” potentially restricting air travel between some U.S. cities, especially those with significant numbers of coronavirus cases, but conceded that would create yet more pain for the already-hobbled airline sector.
“It’s a very, very rough decision,” Trump said Wednesday evening at a press briefing. “We are thinking about hot spots where you go from spot to spot — both hot. We will let you know fairly soon.”
Asked during the same briefing if he was considering a broader ban or more targeted restrictions, Trump said: “We’re looking at the whole thing,” and suggested the administration would offer recommendations soon.
Air travel is down dramatically in the last few weeks, with the TSA recording fewer than 200,000 travelers passing through its checkpoints per day this week, compared to more than 2 million at the same time last year. On Tuesday, it reported screening just 146,348 travelers, a ten-year low.
Rail travel is also severely limited, with Amtrak reporting record cancellations and low bookings, which has forced reductions on many of its routes. Trump said he was considering “similar” restrictions on railroads between virus hot spots.
My how far we have come from Trump proclaiming we have 15 coronavirus cases and soon heading to zero.
What about the hoax?
Trump denies he called the coronavirus a hoax. He says it was the Democrats response to it that was the hoax.
OK.
Where’s the hoax of any kind?
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
They should ban all flights everywhere. Every place in the US is a hotspot. One side note. Airlines are keeping some empty flights so they can force people to rebook rather than refund their money. Case in point. Hawaiian airlines is keeping two flights a day from CA – one from LA and one from SF – to Honolulu so they can refuse to refund those of us who booked flights to other islands(they force a connecting flight instead). They have no one on those flights but they can use this to force thousands of people to reschedule or take a voucher. I’m going to wait them out to see if they’re forced to cancel all flights. I don’t want a voucher that’s only good until December. Southwest is doing the same. We can’t get our money back. It’s a stand off. This virus isn’t going away this year. Hawaii has a forced 14 day quarantine when you arrive so literally no one is going there. Lots of airlines could go bankrupt and then these vouchers are worthless.
Trump did not call the coronavirus itself a hoax.
Mish, get your facts straight: During a Feb. 28, 2020, campaign rally in South Carolina, President Donald Trump likened the Democrats’ criticism of his administration’s response to the new coronavirus outbreak to their efforts to impeach him, saying “this is their new hoax.”
More disinformation
Hotels and short term rentals (vacation) are now closed to non-essential individuals in Connecticut. This means those from out of state must quarantine for 14 days in their 2nd house or at a friend’s house.
And it means that all the tax revenues that come from hotels has evaporated, which is not going to be good for many small towns.
Here’s an interesting story:
A Coronavirus Fix That Passes the Smell Test
What if a Wall Street veteran has a way to track how fast the virus is spreading before lab tests can ramp up?
By Michael Lewis
April 1, 2020, 5:00 AM EDT
TLDR People with C19 don’t smell things. Let’s count such people.
is the web site.
That’s something to do with how moneymaven reaches out to the site to set up the post to display in the browser. The link will still work fine if you click on it.
Were you around years and years ago when people said that computers always did the same thing with no thought or variance? Humans, though, would adjust their actions from time to time and would sometimes just do things on a whim.
Many thought, wouldn’t it be nice if computers would be smart like humans?
Well, now they are. 🙂
I get “We’ve detected unusual activity from your computer network” with instructions to click a “box” that doesn’t exist.
The base URL goes to an acronym-named tosv2.html . The Bloomberg site, itself, is fine.
How is this more effective than having everyone wear masks, especially in places like grocery stores, airports and planes?
I would think the answer is self-evident:
Feds will not come to the rescue
…there are only about 9,500 ventilators remaining in the Strategic National Stockpile and that by the week of April 13, the Supply Chain Task Force will have acquired only about 3,200 more. FEMA reported that most of the 100,000 ventilators promised by President Trump will not be available until late June at the earliest…..
…..FEMA recommended that medical professionals preserve, optimize, and re-use personal protective equipment. The briefer acknowledged that reusing this equipment increases the risk that health care providers will be infected with coronavirus, but asserted that this step is “critical” given current shortages…..
…On March 30, HHS admitted that the Department knew as early as mid-January based on 2015 models that the United States would not have enough N95 respirator masks to respond to an infectious disease outbreak. HHS and FEMA officials were not able to provide specific timelines about when additional equipment and supplies would be procured by the federal government and made available to states….
… FEMA pushed back on suggestions that the Administration should take a more active role in procurement, saying that FEMA “attempting to replace private sector supply chains does not work” and that the agency is instead helping the private sector supply chain “adapt.” …
In this case centralization prob would only have slowed the efforts to get supplies
“By the end of the day, roughly 280 million masks from warehouses around the U.S. had been purchased by foreign buyers and were earmarked to leave the country, according to the broker — and that was in one day.
To his knowledge none of the masks had been purchased by buyers in the U.S.”
Meanwhile France is accusing US of buying up masks it ordered, by making offers on the airport tarmac for those about to be loaded in China.
No politician ever leads; They follow, but from the front. It’s where the cameras are.
The time for useful, valuable leadership would have been 2005, when it became apparent that the world had dodged a bullet on SARS and desperately needed a virus antigen shift warning system in place before the next shift occurred. Our “leaders” wasted the fifteen years, and here we sit with the next one killing us off in growing numbers.
I’m a firm believer that we, the people, do indeed ultimately get the government we deserve. A few months from now, when this thing has killed and maimed it’s quota, will we, the people, have learned our lesson and shout down any political hack trying to peddle, whatever, as more important than an effective worldwide pandemic warning system…or not?
Trump negotiated oil production cuts so prices can stay higher. More winning.
He said that he did. The Russians and Saudis disagree.
We are headed to $10 oil very soon. And a massive economic crash in Russia, Texas , Canada and elsewhere where it takes an oil price of $30-$50 to make a profit.
Up here in Canada (Quebec) we are taking the whole thing far more seriously. Now travel has been reduced between the regions. This morning I was driving 20 miles from home and was stopped twice by police officers asking where i was going and why, at least two automobiles were “turned back” by the police. Social distancing has been a thing here for nearly three weeks. Yet the number of coronavirus keeps on rising.
No offense but all of Canada is like the entire state of California. You don’t have a population density problem in Canada.
Yeah because doing nothing was such a great solution…seriously we may not have the density but we are still taking this very seriously. Americans have been rather delinquent on that one. Canada is still thinking of sending the army to the US border simply to stop Americans “fleeing the virus”. A shockingly large number of Canadian coronavirus cases had their origin in the US (NYC in particular)
Your issue is with New York and a handful of other states. Your job is easy in Quebec. My governor has not been delinquent here in California along with the governors of a handful of other states like Washington and Ohio. Don’t characterize America as one whole country with one level of government or people. Also wait until you get out of the spring thaw. Viruses percolate when seasons change and that has barely started in Canada.
In hindsight we could have dramatically slowed the pandemic here and cut our economic damage by a huge amount by Trump halting all human traffic in and out of the country and forced anybody coming in to quarantine for 14 days back in late Jan when it was obvious to anyone with a half a brain China had a huge problem on their hands. The howls from the brain-dead masses, congress, press, corp sector would have been legendary. Hell, Trump might even have been removed from office only to be exonerated 5-6 weeks later as Italy was over-run.
Tesla’s donated “ventilators” are actually old BiPAP machine (Resmed C9)….
Why Was It So Hard to Raise the Alarm on the Coronavirus?
The nations that took the most aggressive actions, most quickly, have fared best, and those that have moved cautiously, waiting for undeniable prompts to action, have done worst. link to nymag.com
In the US one of our political parties downplayed it as a matter of policy, aided by a very popular captive news channel. And that party, so far, has been rewarded for that murderous strategy. Beyond belief.
I don’t see the point at this point. We are 2-4 weeks from the (first) peak by some estimates, how is stopping the few flights remaining going to make a difference overall? No one is flying out of New York to visit grandma in Ohio.
Frankly this is starting to smell like: stop the virus from spreading to one more person AT ANY COST. Which is dumb. Smart is: always weigh the costs.
Obviously it will NOT stop it from spreading… look at the fat tail on new Italian cases, now weeks and weeks beyond total lockdown there.
The goal, as stated a billion times by now, is to flatten the curve, which right now is WAY STEEPER in the US than anywhere else!
Even a modicum of imagination would be helpful just now: If you were a virion on a suicide mission to find a new host within a few hours, would you prefer to travel by foot or on board a 737? Excellent!
Now, if you were the same virion clinging to a grocery store shopping cart handle, would you prefer to see every shopper with or without an N95 mask and gloves? Think carefully; Your life may depend on it.
Why order a shutdown?
It will happen organically.
Morons. Morons will travel and spread it. It only takes a few, and there are hundreds of millions of them.
So, let me think about this: I’m pumping crude out of the ground and burning my dwindling cash with every barrell. Now, with the drastic reduction in worldwide economic activity, I’m suddenly also rapidly running out of any place to put my crude.
Some guy slips a note under the door suggesting that I consider production cuts.
Hadn’t thought about it; I’ll discuss it with my policy wonks.
It is not quite that simple … at least in the US.
For starters variable costs. If you can get a higher amount on market than variable cost then you pump away. Yes, you lose money, but not as much with shutdown. Then capping and reopening is expensive … cheaper to just pump away. Finally, much of drilling occurs on leased land … that pay royalties to land owner. Contracts (which are generally VERY favorable to driller, especially when land lord is Uncle Sam) stipulate production can only shut down for maintenance … or lease can be avoided. If I hold a very favorable lease … you guessed it … pump away.
Understand, but I’m noodling what I’d do if I’m SA or Russia.
If I were them … “you first”.
There’s the rub. No cartel anywhere has ever held together during a prolonged period of surplus, whether peddling crude or coffee.
The time for leaders in the major oil exporters to have sounded their alarms, domestically, was 2009, when Bernanke’s Zirp infinitum started driving $500 billion into the US oil patch…to make oil out of rock.
Also, had the Chinese mercantilism ala CCP economic model not driven a net plus ten million barrel/day of demand into China, the present day of reckoning for oil exporters would have arrived a decade earlier.
The march of folly continues.
when will unleaded be 99 cents a gallon? thank you
Trump claims Russia and Saudi have agreement on oil cuts. Oil spikes. They deny. Seems like a repeat of the Chinese trade deal.
The Russians are prepared to fight this to the finish. Their currency floats, and they have ample reserves. Trump thinks people work according to his timeline.
After all this time, fools still believe that con man.
After all this time, people still believe ANY politician?
Politicians should be viewed with suspicion, but individuals should be judged on their merits.
Lie down with dogs…
Trump and his cronies are front-running trades based on Trump’s tweets. Isn’t it obvious?
1. Place your bets (up or down, doesn’t matter)
2. Trump tweet
3. Predictable desired market response
4. Sell
5. Deny
6. Rinse and repeat
This was their goal from the moment Trump decided to run.
If ban then another hit to oil.
Of course, oil rallying hard this morning on following POTUS tweet:
“Just spoke to my friend MBS (Crown Prince) of Saudi Arabia, who spoke with President Putin of Russia, & I expect & hope that they will be cutting back approximately 10 Million Barrels, and maybe substantially more which, if it happens, will be GREAT for the oil & gas industry!”
…
Really? They’ll cut production … and not US?
Just looked at EIA’s most recent weekly production numbers … US well ahead of last year’s production number for comparable week.
So, THEY will cut … while US continues merrily along … reaping benefits of higher prices … sure, sure …
Everyone is Trump’s “good friend”, until they are not!
Some of the Trump criticism is over the top because we all know the blue team wouldn’t have handled the virus much better, if at all.
That said, you have to wonder about anyone who would go out of their way to call a total psychopath like MBS a friend.
Not to mention anyone dumb enough to believe, at a time when half the population is out of a job and trying to survive on as little as possible, making a central commodity like oil more expensive, is somehow a good thing. You’re talking economic illiteracy at a level so staggering it doesn’t even seem possible, here.
The Saudis, and Russians, are handing the world a gift from their big underground (black)goldmines right now. At exactly a time when getting energy for cheap, is a huge boon for cash strapped people. And yet, the apes running Idiotopia, instead think now is the time to squeeze all those newly minted destitutes at the pump. Un-bloody-effing-believable!
MAGA
Make America Grapes (of Wrath) Again!
Not a hoax. After “social distancing” and quarantine knock this wave down, what then? A permanent state of emergency? Why does no one talk about the end game??? There is still only a small fraction of a percent of us that have been infected. Until there is a vaccine 18 months from now or a treatment, perhaps sooner, this will not end.
“what then?”
…
Well, (peeking at stock market) a V shaped recovery. Pronto.
A surprise awaits Mr Market.
What’s the end game if you let everybody fall ill at the same time and completely overwhelm the health care system? How does the economy fare if a lot more people die? Those predictions of 100K deaths would balloon into something much larger if we make no attempt to stop infections.
Can you please show any stats how many of us are infected not tested and confirmed. Infected!
no one can do that because of insufficient testing. The US is flying blind due to early mismanagement.
WHO went to China to see if they could find a large pool of people who were infected, but whom had shown no symptoms, in the hopes that the infection had actually been much more widespread than known, and that a large group was already immune. They found no evidence that there were numerous people who had been infected.
In my city, they have done 140 tests in the last two days of people who seemed likely to have it. Of these, only 1 tested positive. If they started testing random people who seem unlikely to have it, I would have to think that the percentage of positive tests would be much, much lower.
From near closed studies, say Diamond Princess, Vo… which we still don’t have full data on… around 30% are asymptomatic or few symptoms, around another 50% do not need hospitalisation, and fatality ratio of infected people (not just cases) is somewhere around 1 to 5 % after all is calculated. You can argue the lower bound, not by much. That means in very rough and simple terms, there are at most a hundred infections per fatality, so given that fatality is said to be average two weeks, by looking at fatalities now times a hundred you have a very rough number for infected two weeks ago. Demographics and other factors will influence this number a fair amount, but that is as close as you can get without actually testing everyone or running a complex model projecting infections. In Spain they did this and reckoned ten times as many were infected as tested, BUT for each circumstance a model like this is carried out it is unique, you cannot just apply it to any other country, nor will it be correct for Spain say in a months time.
The difficulty for many people is that they cannot see that the world has changed. Even once a vaccine is available our lives are changed forever. You are right WildBull no one dare talk about the end game. So many unknowns. “The answer to the question everyone is asking — “When will this be over?” — is simple and obvious, yet terribly hard to accept. The answer is never.
Global catastrophes change the world, and this pandemic is very much akin to a major war. Even if we contain the Covid-19 crisis within a few months, the legacy of this pandemic will live with us for years, perhaps decades to come. It will change the way we move, build, learn, and connect. There is simply no way that our lives will resume as if this had never happened. “By Aisha S. Ahmad
We’ll all be exposed and the survivors will have immunity. The only question is how long it takes. The idea is to extend the infectious period so hospitals aren’t overwhelmed.
My hunch is China is going to speed up the process by pretending everything is OK. They don’t care if a few million die. They’ll be the first country to return to normal which might give them a big edge in the recovery.
The other place there is hope for a fast recovery is that widely deployed antibody tests will show the vast majority of people exposed to this virus never get sick and many people already have developed immunity. Of course, it would be very foolish to suggest such a thing before tests show this to be the case. I imagine there will be some data on this soon.
If neither of those scenarios happen (no vaccine and no herd immunity without widespread illness), then COVID-19 is with us for a generation and it will cause a higher rate of respiratory illness than the world is used to. Hopefully, there will be some therapeutic drugs that blunt the illness, but people will have to live their lives with a greater percentage of older adults becoming seriously ill. There better not be a “permanent state of emergency” if this happens. There is no way that is going to be helpful, and the US Government better acknowledge it.
I absolutely agree.
Pragmatism doesn’t care about or even consider the long term consequences.
And at the end of the day, nearly all politicians and “world leaders” are pragmatists.
Which means they will keep kicking the can as long as possible because keeping their personal gravy train of cash, hookers, and blow from coming to a grinding halt tomorrow is the most important thing to them.
And why shouldn’t it be? They have bills to pay – just like the rest of us….
Hey Mish, can you compare the US number with India numbers? You wrote a few weeks back about how bad it’s going to be in India. Why don’t you stop being part of fear-mongering? I was a big fan, now I see the reality, will still read your blogs purely on economics and finance, but not pandemic or politics. UK already declared Covid-19 not being HCID, the real numbers are not so bad….is Covid-19 for the layoffs, or the layoffs for the Covid-19, like chocken and egg problem, I know what would be your answer….at least a mask has been dropped!
India has been trending upward, didn’t they have over 600 new cases yesterday? They hardly had any cases until a week or two ago, so their curve is behind a lot of the others.
You could have made same argument when the US cases were low, that they would never approach the numbers of China, Iran, or Italy. Given your inane post, it seems likely you did make that argument.
Watch this interview :
Read this article : link to lewrockwell.com
Let’s hope so, because a 1% fatality rate = 3.3 million Americans.
Here is Dr Fauci’s article : link to nejm.org
So we’re debating India numbers, then you post three separate articles/videos that have nothing to do with that topic?
It has everything to do with that. In normal case, India has 27000 deaths per day, if some of those could be certified as Covid-19 death even though the real cause is due to comorbidity, numbers would be inflated. And then as Mark Twain popularized – link to en.wikipedia.org,_damned_lies,_and_statistics
And Dr Jay Bhattacharya is more believable than this Mish. He is a professor of medicine at Stanford, if we don’t have an estimate of the denominator, then how can we have the correct fatality rate. In India, over-enthusiastic govt, and police will make any number possible, if required.
Per India’s death rate, 27000 people die every day in normal scenario, if some of those deaths are certified as caused by Covid-19 even though the real cause is comorbidity, the numbers would look inflated.
Hello Mandian. I don’t know if the kinds of intervention we are seeing now are correct or avoidable, what I do know is that if it is all left as business as usual the result would be dire. You just cannot avoid that fact, a look at Wuhan or any other epicenter (even under lockdown) would tell you that clearly. Mish has his approach, he has been ahead on much of this, if authorities had paid attention previously then we might not be at this juncture. I also see coronavirus being used as a tool, but the fact is that it is what it is also, and blaming Mish for highlighting that side to it is not very fair, it will not make the problem it represents go away. You might have different ideas to solutions, I won’t argue, but remember you are taking a stance of opposition, you are not saying what actually should be done.
“what I do know is that if it is all left as business as usual the result would be dire.”
You do not KNOW that at all w/o an actual control group!
Re: control group — you mean like red states?
Well there is this city called Wuhan with ten million people, which is quite a large control group, and they had the epidemic break out there, and by all reports it was dire. Did lockdown make it more or less dire ? It was still dire either way, it was dire before lockdown.
Well normally we don’t see or hear any news from China, even FB, Google etc aren’t open there, and suddenly the world saw like a horror movie many videos and news from China….it was just to set the stage for the horror to take place in the west and elsewhere. Chinese govt is evil, and so are those govts working with them.
Now the chinese numbers looking awesome, and in order to sustain fear and hysteria, a new wave will be created.
I don’t trust what China presents, but I think that what occured in Wuhan was real, and that unchecked the epidemic would cause a lot of misery. I never rule out that the story is completely exaggerated, but I don’t think so, I think what the virus is capable of is real. As to whether it was purposefully released, if its expansion was managed, if there is a form of organisation behind that, it is a question a lot of people are asking themselves. I don’t have any evidence that clearly shows this, but there is a lot that would suggest it, but that might also have other explanations. So I don’t mind if people approach it from a conspiratorial viewpoint, because they will be doing that line of investigation, and it does need to be done.
Still early innings.
FWIW, I read an article dated yesterday quoting an epidemiologist that India 2 weeks behind US on the curve.
I look up hicd in uk. It seems they have just taken it out of the same class or way of treatment as say ebola. From what i read it seems they are doing the same shut down distance ect as the us is. Please let me know if im wrong.
Governments do whatever they want to do like Hitler’s govt chose to kill the jews.
Easy to fault Trump. Lots of video of his detractors criticizing him early on for halting flights from China, etc.
He should have done more, but their criticism (and the MSM’s as well) didn’t help. Now, of course, they’re all geniuses and saw it coming.
The facts tell a far different story…
He didn’t really ban travel from China. The restrictions didn’t apply to US citizens, permanent residents, or their immediate family members. There were still dozens of passenger flights arriving daily from China well after the 1/31 announcement.
Excuse me but the President is not like you and me, he had access to any and every epidemiologist in the country, if he asked. But he didn’t seek out politically unpleasant facts, hoping they’d go away. (That strategy often works out for him — when the politically unpleasant facts are people, not a virus.) His own cowardice is 100% his own fault.