A reader, Ed Hanson, critiques the flagging of the fact that there were three waves of the 1918-20 flu:

You may not be a fortune teller, but you do tend toward being a panic monger.

Case in point, never knew that the Spanish flu was coronavirus. Maybe, that is because it is not.

While not being a doctor, a little research shows that there have been 7 identified coronaviruses causing human disease. 4 associated with the common cold, and 3 known for acute respiratory syndrome. These being MERS, SARS, and the covid-19.

OF the first 6, none shows the the wax and wane you write of in the topic.

That leaves covid-19. certainly the most deadly of the 7. I would rate a Spanish flu like wax and wane, far down as a possibility but still possible. More likely it won’t because the other coronoviruses have not shown that tendency.

Now Mr. Hanson is merely a random commenter; I quote him because he is representative of a group of individuals who are happy to predict with apparently no expertise, and without any apparent reference to mainstream scientific analysis. So, from The Hill:

A potential second wave of the novel coronavirus late in the year would likely be more deadly, as it would overlap with flu season, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) head Robert Redfield told The Washington Post on Tuesday.

“There’s a possibility that the assault of the virus on our nation next winter will actually be even more difficult than the one we just went through,” Redfield told the Post. “And when I’ve said this to others, they kind of put their head back, they don’t understand what I mean.”

Mr. Trump has tried to whitewash the statement; from WaPo today:

In a tweet Wednesday, Trump alleged Redfield had been misquoted. But he accused CNN of having done so, even though CNN merely relayed the comments published by The Post.

“CDC Director was totally misquoted by Fake News @CNN on Covid 19,” Trump said. “He will be putting out a statement.”

In yesterday’s press conference, he indicated he’d been correctly quoted by WaPo.

Courtesy of Hoover Institution:

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From ABC News yesterday:

“I think we lean way too much in the direction of keeping the economy shut down to try to save every life, not realizing that we’re causing huge hardship for citizens — again, people at the bottom and businesses — and we’re going to suffer a big loss of living standards because of this,” he said.

While Moore acknowledged that robust testing is essential, he argued the U.S. cannot wait until it becomes more widespread to start reopening the economy.

“I don’t think we can wait two or three or four more weeks for testing….The rate of infection to the economy is very similar to the rate of infection of this disease.”

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Call For Papers

July 6-7, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has triggered a massive spike in concerns and uncertainties and raised challenges in macroeconomic forecasting surrounding almost every aspect. The purpose of this virtual workshop is to bring together researchers working on various aspects of measurement, modelling, evaluation and forecasting of COVID and its impact on the economy.

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Here are some key indicators followed by the NBER’s BCDC as of today:

Figure 1: Nonfarm payroll employment (blue), industrial production (red), personal income excluding transfers in Ch.2012$ (green), manufacturing and trade sales in Ch.2012$ (black), and monthly GDP in Ch.2012$ (pink), all log normalized to 2019M01=0.  Manufacturing and trade sales for February assumed to be at stochastic trend for 2018-2020M01. Source: BLS, Federal Reserve, BEA, via FRED, Macroeconomic Advisers (3/26 release), and author’s calculations.

Surely, they’ve got the expertise…well maybe not

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The 20181918-20 pandemic waxed and waned. This suggests there is not necessarily a quick return to “normalcy”.

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“Red Dawn” emails documenting how everybody who was knowledgeable about pandemic threats knew by 1/28, even as Trump kept on comparing the novel coronavirus to the flu up to March 9th – example:

Email from Dr. James Lawler, professor, and doctor who served in the WH under Pres. G.W. Bush, & adviser to Pres. Barack Obama. More emails, see here, article here.

I still wait to find out when the President’s Daily Brief on the coronavirus threat was circulated.

From ABC News today:

“Analysts concluded [a novel coronavirus pandemic] could be a cataclysmic event,” one of the sources said of the NCMI’s report. “It was then briefed multiple times to” the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff and the White House.

From that warning in November, the sources described repeated briefings through December for policy-makers and decision-makers across the federal government as well as the National Security Council at the White House. All of that culminated with a detailed explanation of the problem that appeared in the President’s Daily Brief of intelligence matters in early January, the sources said. For something to have appeared in the PDB, it would have had to go through weeks of vetting and analysis…

We need the PDB declassified and released, to understand the full magnitude of the public policy disaster this administration has visited upon America, just like this PDB of August 6, 2001 “Bin Laden determined to strike in US” was released.

If you despair of the administration bringing us safely through this test, then let this provide some hope, click here.

Elgar’s Nimrod Variation IX, from the Enigma Variations – musicians of the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra.