Corona recap

States are beginning, slowly, to re-open from the Moo Goo Gai Panic and we're seeing some lightly-reported lessons.

• We've suspected that CV19 is wildly contagious, but we're now discovering that it's only wildly contagious in certain circumstances, viz. close contact with a symptomatic infected person over an extended time frame;  some (like the New England Journal of Medicine) are suggesting upwards of 10 minutes is required for transmission.


• asymptomatic infected persons appear to not be carriers of CV19.


• casual contact, even with an individual exhibiting symptoms, presents nearly no danger of infection.


• N95 masks, touted as the gold standard for PPE, trap particles with a minimum size of 0.3 microns (E-6);  the diameter of the CV19 virus is 80 nanometers (E-9), about 1/4 the minimum size an N95 mask will collect.
  


• mask use, therefore, provides close to zero protection for ordinary people going about their ordinary business.  They only protect against droplet infection when someone coughs into your face or sprays blood on you — which is why medical professionals use them on the job.  For you shopping for groceries?  Fundamentally useless, but perhaps comforting.


• To die from CV19, you first have to catch it, then be part of a susceptible population, someone whose immune system won't successfully fight it off, and then have some co-morbidity (obesity, diabetes, heart disease, immunosuppressed, etc.).  If your immune system is working and you're in reasonable health otherwise, yes, you're going to catch it eventually, but you won't die from it.

None of this is meant to deter you from wearing a mask, even a cloth mask that is nowhere near as useful as an N95 mask, if you feel that it makes people around you more comfortable.  Just understand that it isn't really providing any measurable benefit.

Second, states that started reopening early, around May 4, are not showing indications of increasing hospitalization.  There's some confusion here because the news media bleats about "increase in cases" and lets you draw the (incorrect) conclusion that CV19 is resurgent.  The (reported) increase is typically an increase in individuals reported as infected after being tested, not 'individuals complaining about symptoms and/or being admitted for treatment'.  Most people who become infected with CV19 show no symptoms (asymptomatic), and perhaps don't even know they have it until they get tested and...  surprise!  Eventually everyone will be positive for CV19, but with a death rate in the neighborhood of 0.03%, look for the real death-from-CV19 number to come out around 100,000 — which is approximately what happens in flu season.  All those deaths where a mugging victim was discovered on post-mortem to have CV19 don't count.

It appears FDR was right: the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.

Bailouts and IRAs

In less than a month, the government has added $5T to our national debt.  They did it by printing money.  It's backed by nothing.  There can only be one result from that: inflation.  "Big deal!" I just heard someone say.  Yes, indeed, a very big deal, especially if you've already retired.

Washington is spending enough money that its effect will be felt almost immediately.  There are already reports of retail price increases for food.  What this means is that over the next few months and years, virtually everything you want to purchase is going to cost substantially more than it does right now.

If you're a workin' stiff, you can campaign for a wage increase on the grounds that your employer is charging more for whatever your employer sells/provides, but if you're retired:

• you're on Social Security and you're probably not going to get an increase in that,
• you have an IRA with a certain balance, and that balance isn't going to be adjusted upward,
• the stock market is presently in the basement.

That $3,500 cruise you had planned for next Summer?  It'll be $4,000.  For every $7 you were planning to spend, you now have to plan on spending $8.  To put it another way, if you had $400G put aside for your retirement, somebody in Washington just stole $50G.  The balance in the account doesn't change; only its purchasing power does.

Now, if you happen to be one of those fortunate people who are the beneficiaries of the bulk of that $5T bailout, you can grab your pot of gold and put it where it will generate some more wealth for you.  If you're Joe Sixpack, you're shit out of luck.  Better luck next time.

And the reason for all that extra spending?  It's to combat the ill-effects of COVID-19.  The Kennedy Center needs money to help them get past the enforced shutdown, and Planned Parenthood seems to be... well, to be honest, I don't know what they're doing to battle COVID-19, but it's important enough for them to rate $35B.  In fact, almost none of that spending will actually help the man in the street... excuse me, the man forced to quarantine at home.

The real problem here is that all those people who just got the shaft from the financial wizards in Congress will go to the polls in November and re-elect the very same people who just stole 13% of everything the voters had saved, because "Hey, I got a check for $1,200!"  They saw that; they didn't see their retirement savings shrink by 1/7th.