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From my lovely and talented wife: The important thing that isn't really coming through to the public, I think, is the relative risk of various behaviors/activities. I worked for 28 years with bucket loads of respiratory pathogens without getting sick. I studied how the microbes caused the diseases once they were transmitted. I didn't study transmission, epidemiology, or public health. But close. For a respiratory pathogen to cause disease, it has to get into the respiratory tract. The most direct route is breathing in droplets in the air from an infected individual who is secreting them into the fluids of their respiratory tract. Even then, there is a dose effect, so the more of them you breathe in, the more likely you are to get infected. For very rare diseases it only takes a very few microbes, but for most it takes a minimum of several thousand, often millions or more. The number in a single droplet will depend on how many the infected individual you encounter is secret...

Who doesn't want good news about COVID-19? Nobody! But I see a lot of assumptions and wishful thinking at work here. The good news is that if you stay healthy, you'll get to find out whether he is right! https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-22/coronavirus-outbreak-nobel-laureate

" One way or another, we need to rescue both consumers and businesses with serious money that will last until the crisis is over. Let’s knock off the bullshit and get started." https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/chart-of-the-day-1-million-new-unemployment-claims-this-week/

" I think it is useful to look at the last round of bailouts from 2008-9 for lessons learned. First with the benefit of hindsight, does it seem that bailing out firms was a mistake ? On the one hand one can argue that it was necessary to prevent the Great Depression. It is hard to discuss whether it was worth the cost, because there was no cost. Instead, the US Federal Goverment obtained the highest profits recorded in human history by accident when focused on saving the financial system (and GM and Chrystler). The many brilliant economists who argued that we should stick to laissez faire and that, in particular, socialism for bankers and ruthless capitalism for everyone else is no good, have not examined the outcomes. I think this is because the evidence is overwhelmingly damaging to their case." https://angrybearblog.com/2020/03/bailouts.html

" Scientists and authorities across the world are monitoring the spread of the virus and there have not been any reports of transmission through food. For this reason, EFSA is not currently involved in the response to the COVID-19 outbreaks. However, we are monitoring the scientific literature for new and relevant information." https://www.efsa.europa.eu/en/news/coronavirus-no-evidence-food-source-or-transmission-route?fbclid=IwAR0kIOg6i9FtvV15a8bNMtDJ7LemnOVCbzEld1f6-zL0lLC1lckOBpG7D4Q

Back when I was in grad school, I read a column by Andrew Young in the Raleigh News and Observer in which he said "Never trust anyone who says they aren't a racist. What you should say is 'I'm working on my racism.' No, it hasn't changed after Obama. "Metzl goes to hospitals where people simply tell him they would rather die than have Obamacare go to the undeserving. For these people, very much working class whites, race simply means far, far more to them than class. Moreover, it means more to them than their own lives. They are comfortable with their own death. They are not comfortable with Guatemalan migrants receiving health care. And it’s certainly no better with guns. Metzl visits on e of the leading areas of gun suicides in the country–southeast Missouri. Even though people are dying left and right from guns–suicide for sure, but accidental shootings and intentional shooting too–these people just won’t see the guns as the problem. Or even if they...

Ever since Ronald Reagan, the GOP has held as a central existential tenet that tax cuts cause economic growth. The only things that have reliably grown with Republican tax cuts have been the federal deficit and national debt. And what about those Trump tax cuts that promised to supercharge the economy? Same ole same ole. " My best guess, based on both GDP figures and a few other things is that the Republican tax cut, remarkably enough, had virtually no effect on growth. I’m not sure how they managed that since lower taxes   should   stimulate growth, but apparently Republicans can even screw up a tax cut these days. Then again, the best way to make a tax cut effective is to give less of it to the rich and more of it to the middle class. If the real goal here was merely to make the rich a little richer, then it worked great and Republicans didn’t screw up anything." https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/03/the-republican-tax-cut-had-no-effect-on-growth/