We’re Heading for ‘Covid Hell’

By Yuval Rosenberg

We’re Heading for ‘Covid Hell’

The Covid-19 pandemic is raging across the United States, and
the numbers are simply staggering:

  • New cases have topped 100,000 a day for seven straight
    days as of Tuesday, with an average of 119,000 new infections a day
    over that time. We hit another record high of 136,325 new
    coronavirus infections yesterday, according to data from Johns
    Hopkins University    .
  • More than 1,400 deaths were reported on Tuesday,
    reportedly the highest total since August.
  • The U.S. had more than 1 million new cases over the first
    10 days of November, with infections rising at an
    accelerating pace    .
  • The 15 days with the highest number of new cases have all
    taken place over the past 18 days,
    Axios     notes.
  • Hospitalizations, up about 30% since the beginning of the
    month, have reached a new high of 61,964, according to the Covid Tracking
    Project    , surpassing levels seen in April and
    July.
  • In all, about 10.3 million Americans have tested positive
    for the virus and more than 240,000 have died.

Texas has become the first state to surpass 1 million
confirmed cases. And CNBC
reports on the grim picture across a number of
other states: “Ohio has had an ‘unprecedented
spike’ in Covid-19 hospital admissions. ICU beds in
Tulsa, Oklahoma,
are full. North Dakota’s hospitals
don’t have enough doctors and nurses. And hospital
administrators in Iowa are warning that they are approaching their
limits.”

But the surge this time isn’t limited to any one region. All but
eight states are in the “red zone” for Covid-19 cases, meaning they
had more than 100 new cases per 100,000 residents over the prior
week, according to a White House coronavirus task force report
issued Tuesday and described by the
Center for Public Integrity.

Public health experts warn that the situation is likely to

grow much worse over the coming months, with the
holidays posing the threat of super-spreading events across the
country and hospitals in many places ill-equipped to handle the
rising number of cases even as medical treatment of cases
has improved substantially. Experts are again
worried about the strain on hospital capacity, and burnout among
health-care professionals. "We have legitimate reason to be very,
very concerned about our health system at a national level," Lauren
Sauer, an assistant professor of emergency medicine at Johns
Hopkins University who studies hospital surge capacity, told

NPR.

That all portends a very difficult winter ahead. “What America
has to understand is that we are about to enter Covid hell,” Dr.
Michael Osterholm, director of the Center of Infectious Disease
Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and a member of
President-elect Joe Biden’s new coronavirus advisory board,

told CNBC on Monday. “You’re going to see not just
case numbers going up, the number of people hospitalized going up,
but you’re going to see the case fatality rates also increase
substantially. The next three to four months are going to be, by
far, the darkest of the pandemic.”

That outlook is made all the more troubling by the prospect that
President Trump could be focused on contesting the election results
or, if he accepts his loss, may nevertheless be
even less interested than before in
addressing the pandemic and enacting measures to
control it.

Trump’s efforts to impede the transition to a Biden
administration could also be costly, as Andy Card and John Podesta,
who served as White House chiefs of staff under Presidents George
W. Bush and Bill Clinton, respectively, warn in
The Washington Post. “With the covid-19 pandemic
continuing to wreak havoc, the costs of a delay are much higher
today than almost any time in U.S. history,” they write.
“Specifically, a delayed transition and the absence of cooperation
between the outgoing and incoming administrations could hinder
economic recovery, slow the distribution of a vaccine and, God
forbid, put American lives at risk.”

What we need to do: “This is not a
question of lockdowns vs no lockdowns,” Dr. Scott Gottlieb, former
commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration,
said Wednesday. “The question is how do we take targeted
measures, get broader compliance to prudent steps like masks,
distancing, avoiding large gatherings; to reduce, slow spread so
that the healthcare system doesn't risk getting
overwhelmed.”

Expiring Unemployment Programs Could Leave Millions Out in the
Cold

Two federally funded unemployment programs are scheduled to
expire at the end of December, threatening about 13 million people
with a loss of benefits in the new year. The loss of income support
could leave millions at risk of eviction and hunger, Ben Casselman
of The New York Times
writes Wednesday, while creating an additional
drag on an economy that is already slowing as it recovers from one
of the most severe economic shocks on record.

The emergency aid programs were created by Congress as part of
the Cares Act in March. The Pandemic Unemployment Assistance
program provides aid to workers who are usually left out of the
system, including gig workers and the self-employed. It allows for
46 weeks of benefits, administered through state employment
offices, covering February 2, 2020, to December 26, 2020. There
were 9.3 million people participating in the program as of the
middle of October (though experts say the number is likely inflated
to some degree by double counting and other administrative
errors).

The second program, Pandemic Emergency Unemployment
Compensation, provides a 13-week extension of support for workers
who have exhausted their state benefits. The program, which will
expire at the end of the year, has seen a big jump in participation
in recent weeks as people hit the time limit on their state
benefits, which typically last for 26 weeks. The number of
long-term unemployed —usually defined as those out of work for more
than 26 weeks — rose to 3.6 million in October, an increase of more
than 1 million.

Savings depletion: Many unemployed workers saw an income
boost in the spring and early summer, as $1,200 relief checks and
enhanced unemployment benefits hit their wallets. The Cares Act
created a third program, called Federal Pandemic Unemployment
Compensation, which provided an additional $600 per week in jobless
benefits for all unemployed workers, but it expired on July 25. The
Trump administration provided a few weeks of additional payments at
about half that level, but that effort has also come to an end. As
a result, unemployed households have started drawing down their
savings and now face an income deficit that will become more severe
as the emergency aid programs come to an end.

“The safety net still has kind of held up until now, and I think
we have been maybe lulled into a sense of complacency,” Andrew
Stettner of the Century Foundation told Casselman. “We’re just
putting people in this really precarious financial position where
the damage of unemployment can just hit really hard.”

Relief bill stuck in neutral: Congressional leaders and
the White House have been negotiating another coronavirus stimulus
bill that would include new funds for unemployment benefits for
months now, but real progress remains elusive. House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi (D-CA) is still pushing for a relief package worth more than
$2 trillion, but Senate Republicans have signaled that they won’t
go anywhere near that high, and instead are focused on a smaller
bill totaling closer to $500 billion. The White House, which before
the election said it would support a $1.9 trillion bill, appears to
have left the playing field entirely as the administration turns
all of its attention to contesting the election (“Trump's public
schedules show little interest in work,” a CNN
headline said Wednesday).

Speaking about the stimulus bill Tuesday, Senate Majority
Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) leader said he saw no signs of
progress: “We need to think about, if we’re going to come up with a
bipartisan package here, about what size is appropriate. It seems
to me that snag that hung us up for months is still there. I don’t
think the current situation demands a multitrillion-dollar package.
So I think it should be highly targeted, very similar to what I put
on the floor both in October and September.”

A New Tax on Stay-at-Home Workers?

A
report funded by Deutsche Bank that examines the
economic recovery from the pandemic suggests that people working at
home should be taxed for the privilege of doing so, in order to pay
for aid to workers who can’t stay home.

Those who can work from home are contributing less to key parts
of the economy, the report says, spending less on travel, clothes,
dining and other services, inadvertently pushing workers in those
sectors into crisis. At the same time, they are gaining valuable
benefits, including less stress from commuting and reduced
consumption outside the home.

The analysts estimate that the direct financial benefits
received by stay-at-home workers are worth about $10 per day, and
they argue that a tax of that amount would leave workers no less
well off than if they had gone into the office. They propose a 5%
tax to collect that amount from the average worker, which they say
would raise something like $48 billion, money that could be used to
pay $1,500 grants to 29 million low-wage workers who cannot work
from home.

"For the first time in history, a big chunk of people have
disconnected themselves from the face-to-face world yet are still
leading a full economic life,” said Luke Templeman, a macro
strategist at Deutsche Bank. “For years we have needed a tax on
remote workers – COVID has just made it obvious.”

On this Veterans Day, we extend
our heartfelt thanks to all who have served the country, and to
their families as well.

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