Yesterday we said we’d do numbers and then news. Here is the news.
I’m sure that there are more headlines that we could reference here. We’re doing out best to give a broad overview today, largely focused on news that will be relevant for more than 24 hours.
SBA has announced the EIDL & PPP loans applications are available again.
These loans may be used to pay debts, payroll, accounts payable and other bills that can’t be paid because of the disaster’s impact, and that are not already covered by a Paycheck Protection Program loan. The interest rate is 3.75% for small businesses. The interest rate for non-profits is 2.75%.
SBA
You can barely find a mortgage at those rates. We’re glad to help you with the application if needed.
Arizona is being reported as a hotspot with over 1,000 new cases yesterday. The same day, the South China Morning Post called an outbreak in Beijing, “explosive.” Beijing had 79 cases Thursday-Monday. How does China respond to 79 new cases?
Authorities have locked down 21 residential estates in Fengtai and the northern district of Haidian, which is also home to a big food market. Access to the areas is strictly controlled and mass coronavirus testing is under way.
The South China Morning Post
We’ll probably keep highlighting the differences between how Asia and the West respond because the American media does a very poor job explaining how vast the gap is. The Asian countries that have the virus under control consider a couple of dozen cases serious. In the US, a couple of dozen cases seems like magical realism. In China, they will lock down harder over 100 cases than the US locked down at the peak of the outbreak.
It also means that it is very difficult for us to learn about public policy responses from watching China.
FDA has ended allowing the use of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine as a treatment for COVID-19. This isn’t a surprise, there isn’t solid science to backup that it helped and those drugs are needed by other people who have non-COVID medical conditions.
Ars Technica has an excellent article on a topic we’ve touched on: early research is showing that 10-20% of infectious people are responsible for most of the Sars-Cov-2 spread. In one study, 70% of people didn’t pass it on to anyone. Take all of this with a grain (or box?) of salt: these studies are still early and biased towards Asian data. As we’ve mentioned, the Asian response has been vastly different from the US response.
The Washington Post is reporting that those with underlying conditions have a mortality rate 12x higher than others. However, separate studies show similar increases in mortality due to race alone.
“Policymakers’ natural instinct is to think this correlation is because of income disparities, or having health insurance, or diabetes, obesity rates, smoking rates, or even use of public transit,” Knittel said. “It’s not. We controlled for all of those. The reason why [Black people] face higher death rates is not because they have higher rates of uninsured, poverty, diabetes, or these other factors.”
STAT News
It’s worth understanding how hard it is to tease out these separate variables. There is enough research into the effects of race and the inequalities that came with being non-white on health that we don’t doubt that race is a significant component, by itself. However, it will probably be years before we have solid science behind the effects of race on COVID-19 outcomes: we just don’t have enough quality data.
24 Hour Fitness is filing for chapter 11 (restructuring bankruptcy) and closing 130 locations. The same article notes that, “Financial services company Moody’s had already downgraded 24 Hour Fitness’ status in December 2019 before the onset of the pandemic…” You can call weak corporate finances a comorbidity for business outcomes, in our opinion.
Arizona is getting blistering criticism for it’s handling of Coranvirus. They are clearly on the upswing:
The growth rate here is really high: that’s a 7-day average of >1500 new cases per day. It looks like AZ is on the exponential curve up. A key consideration: these numbers probably are close to reality, compared to New York at it’s peak when the actual cases were likely multiples higher than what was being tested.
Their cases are concentrated around Phoenix, however, the northeast counties have much higher rates per capita:
Source: ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SERVICES
Source: ARIZONA DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH SERVICES
Those would be the Navajo and Apache counties with the highest case rates per capita.
Parts of Europe are re-opening, with France re-opening borders this morning, and other countries opening borders or easing other restrictions.
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