The Path to Recovery: How to Re-Open America

Despite claims that May rent payments would drop drastically and show extreme distress in the economy -- this has turned out to not be true. Nationally on-time Rent payments have only dropped 1.5%. In Florida even with all the problems with getting unemployment payments had a 4.2% drop -- but their 2020 85.5% rate is still above the national average of 81.7% for on-time payments in 2019.

On-time rent payments fell in Florida at the beginning of May; landlords brace for worse if unemployment system not fixed soon
https://www.sun-sentinel.com/corona...0200512-grvnkzqkxnhedhijguwmkc6oq4-story.html

More Florida tenants failed to pay their May rent from May 1 to May 6 compared with last year, triggering concerns those numbers could worsen if unemployment benefits don’t start flowing faster.

In Florida, 85.5% of tenants paid their rent in full or in part between May 1 and May 6, a 4.2 percentage point drop compared with the 89.7% who paid during that time in 2019.

Lantana resident Victoria Alliji is among those Florida tenants so far unable to pay rent for May. The 25-year-old splits a $2,300-a-month apartment with two roommates, but they all lost their jobs at the beginning of the shutdown, she said.

None have received promised unemployment benefits and they are worried their landlord will quickly go to court to remove them when Gov. Rick DeSantis’ 45-day eviction moratorium expires on May 17.

Since they first became unable to pay their rent at the beginning of April, “we’ve been making small payments" — totaling about $900 — "to show the landlord we do want to pay it,” Alliji said. “But we need to come up with $3,500 in six days.”

Nationwide, 80.2% of tenants paid by May 6 compared to 81.7% the year before, a difference of 1.5 percentage points. One reason the national average is lower is that some states have laws giving tenants more time to pay.

(More at above url)
 
Study projects over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed
https://www.axios.com/small-busines...res-ea6b998e-2b83-407f-8b84-d958a3b2e268.html

A new study by economists at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University and the University of Chicago projects that more than 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed since the coronavirus pandemic was declared in March, the Washington Post reports.

Why it matters: The mass devastation to small businesses comes despite efforts by the federal government to keep them afloat as large swathes of the economy have been forced to close as a result of the pandemic.
  • Congress has approved over $700 billion in relief funds for small businesses, and approximately 4.2 million have received loans from the Small Business Administration, per the Post.
  • Many small business owners have considered the Paycheck Protection Program as well, but worry about not being able to meet the staffing levels required by the law.
Details: The study projects that at least 2% of American small businesses are gone for good.
  • The damage has been especially severe for certain sectors like the restaurant industry, which has seen 3% of restaurants permanently go out of business, according to the National Restaurant Association.
  • 34% of small businesses are paying reduced rent or postponing payment, according to the Post.
 
Carolinas in ‘yellow zone’ for COVID-19, report says. What’s that mean for reopening?
https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/coronavirus/article242670466.html

There is no one-size-fits-all model for reopening the country without a vaccine or approved treatment for the coronavirus — but experts at Harvard say a robust program to test, trace and isolate is where it should start.

“Different metro areas and communities have different levels of COVID prevalence and thus different testing and tracing needs,” Danielle Allen, Director of Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, said in a news release Tuesday.

What does that look like in North and South Carolina, where case numbers continue to climb but aren’t nearly as high as places such as New York and California?

According to a report released Tuesday by Harvard’s Center for Ethics, there’s a formula state and local officials can follow depending on how prevalent COVID-19 is in their area. Taking into account the number of infections, the report divides localities into green, yellow or red zones.

Green indicates a low prevalence of the disease, with yellow meaning moderate and red meaning high. Lime green and orange pinpoint whether a yellow area is leaning more towards green or red.

The report measures prevalence by the number of deaths and confirmed cases.

There were about 19 million people in green zones nationally two weeks ago, according to the report — which encompassed the areas surrounding Wilmington, Jacksonville and Greenville in North Carolina.

Now there isn’t a green zone left on the map.

Had officials in those areas performed “a modest aggregate testing level of 1,900 tests a day,” experts at Harvard said they might have stayed in the green zone. Instead, testing needs have increased and those areas moved into the yellow zone.

According to the report, state and local officials need a plan for testing, tracing and supported isolation — also known as TTSI — in order to mitigate the disease while safely reopening.

“A basic lesson of TTSI programs is that the earlier the investment, the less expensive it will be,” the report states.

The U.S. needs to perform about five million tests a day “for an aggressive surge this summer,” according to the report. After that, TTSI programs will still be needed — albeit on a smaller scale — for anywhere from six months to two years.

“The more ambitious a given locale is in ramping up its testing program, the sooner it will be able to drop back to low levels of testing suitable for low prevalence areas,” the report states.

What that looks like in the Carolinas
North and South Carolina sit squarely in the yellow zone, according to Harvard’s data.

Goldsboro in North Carolina as well as Columbia, Sumter and Florence in South Carolina are pockets of orange. Asheville, the Hickory area, Greenville, Jacksonville and Wilmington, North Carolina, are lime green — as is the Myrtle Beach area in South Carolina and Charleston.

According to the report, that means both states “should aggressively use TTSI to suppress COVID-19 over the next one to two months,” something experts say can be done “even with the economy fully open.”

In the Carolinas, that formula looks something like this, per the report:
  • 60 teams of five tracers for every death per day and a testing capacity at the level of 2,500 tests multiplied by the number of deaths per day, or 2,500 tests x (#deaths/day).
Data compiled by The New York Times shows the median and average deaths per day in North Carolina for the week of May 5 hovered close to 20. Under the formula provided by Harvard’s Center for Ethics, that means the state would need 1,200 teams of contact tracers (6,000 tracers) and 50,000 tests per day.

According to the N.C. Department of Health and Human services, the state currently has 250 contact tracers — soon to be 500 — and performs less than 10,000 tests on any given day.

It’s a similar picture in South Carolina, where the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental control has reported between 14 and 17 deaths per day since early May.

That means the state would need roughly 900 teams of contact tracers (4,500 tracers) and 37,500 tests per day.

South Carolina currently performs less than 3,000 tests on any given day and has 400 contact tracers, along with another 1,400 contact tracers though two private companies, The State reported. Officials have said their goal is to have 1,000 by June, according to S.C. DHEC.

(More at above url)
 
gwb-trading said:
Study projects over 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed
https://www.axios.com/small-busines...res-ea6b998e-2b83-407f-8b84-d958a3b2e268.html

A new study by economists at the University of Illinois, Harvard Business School, Harvard University and the University of Chicago projects that more than 100,000 small businesses have permanently closed since the coronavirus pandemic was declared in March, the Washington Post reports.

Why it matters: The mass devastation to small businesses comes despite efforts by the federal government to keep them afloat as large swathes of the economy have been forced to close as a result of the pandemic.
  • Congress has approved over $700 billion in relief funds for small businesses, and approximately 4.2 million have received loans from the Small Business Administration, per the Post.
  • Many small business owners have considered the Paycheck Protection Program as well, but worry about not being able to meet the staffing levels required by the law.
Details: The study projects that at least 2% of American small businesses are gone for good.
  • The damage has been especially severe for certain sectors like the restaurant industry, which has seen 3% of restaurants permanently go out of business, according to the National Restaurant Association.
  • 34% of small businesses are paying reduced rent or postponing payment, according to the Post.
More...

Well, if true, at least we have a higher than 1:1 for destroying businesses and putting out the gainfully employed and the reported death statistics.

Bravo.
 
Trump Administration Tells States To Yank Benefits From Those Who Won’t Return To Work
New Labor Department guidance encourages states to get employers to report on people refusing job offers.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/coro...s-labor-department_n_5eb9f403c5b687934c5918d7

Congress created special unemployment benefits so that laid-off workers could stay home while the coronavirus pandemic rages outside, but the Trump administration wants states to make sure that nobody’s getting benefits if they could be at work.

The U.S. Department of Labor has told states, which implement unemployment insurance programs according to federal rules, that they should ask employers to notify the state if someone turns down an offer to come back to work.

In a guidance memo on Monday evening, the Labor Department said “states are strongly encouraged to request employers to provide information when workers refuse to return to their jobs for reasons that do not support their continued eligibility for benefits.”

The guidance comes as President Donald Trump is calling on states to lift restrictions on commerce so that the economy might get back on track ahead of the November election, even though the national death toll from COVID-19 is still rising at a brisk pace.

“We have to be warriors,” Trump said last week. “We can’t keep our country closed down for years.”

Several Republican-led states have already said business can resume and specifically warned that workers can’t receive unemployment benefits if their employer wants them back. At the same time, states are still struggling with the basic task of distributing benefits.

Several laid-off workers have told HuffPost that they’re still waiting for payments, including some who filed their claims more than a month ago. Millions of workers have probably not been paid, said Andrew Stettner, a senior fellow at The Century Foundation, a progressive think tank.

The government’s “responsibility is to pay for weeks of unemployment compensation when the payments are due,” Stettner said, noting that the federal standard for acceptable performance is that 87% of benefits are paid within 21 days ― a standard that has likely not been met.

More than 30 million Americans have applied for unemployment benefits in the last six weeks, an unprecedented surge in claims. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act provided an extra $600 per week in unemployment compensation and made independent contractors and the self-employed eligible for benefits for the first time. The new policies forced states to attempt to quickly update antiquated computer systems.

To reduce its backlog of claims, California tried suspending a requirement that claimants repeatedly certify that they are still eligible for benefits. Monday’s Labor Department guidance, however, said states can’t cut people any slack on certification.

Employers are generally encouraged to report anyone on unemployment who refuses an offer of “suitable work” ― this is not a new feature of the program. But the Labor Department is asking for a crackdown on people who decline work offers when it’s not clear if the definition of “suitable” includes risking exposure to a highly contagious, brand-new virus that is still mysterious to doctors and that has killed more than 82,000 Americans in a matter of weeks.

“If this guidance is going up that people need to be reported for refusing suitable work, then the department should also make it clear that you shouldn’t be offering unsafe work and considering it suitable,” said Michele Evermore, a senior researcher and policy analyst at the National Employment Law Project.

(more at above url)
 
Tsing Tao said:
And what is the population of the US, and what is the death rate for Covid in comparison to that? I mean, I know these answers but lets see if you do. I'll even settle for the inflated reported death rates.
More...

The proper way to evaluate is COVID-19 deaths is based on the KNOWN cases. The number of KNOWN cases in the U.S. of COVID-19 is 1,411,018. The number of deaths from COVID-19 is 83,558. This gives a known Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of 5.92%. This is how the professional medical community calculates the death rate of a disease - it is based on the known numbers of cases - not unproven estimates of infections.

In the same way the number of KNOWN small businesses in the U.S. is 30.2 Million. We calculate the known small business failure rate of 0.33% based on the KNOWN number of small businesses in the U.S. not on some magical estimated number of entities believed to be small businesses. Keeping in mind the article's number of 100,000 failures is just a projection at this point.
 
gwb-trading said:
The proper way to evaluate is COVID-19 deaths is based on the KNOWN cases. The number of KNOWN cases in the U.S. of COVID-19 is 1,411,018. The number of deaths from COVID-19 is 83,558. This gives a known Case Fatality Rate (CFR) of 5.92%. This is how the professional medical community calculates the death rate of a disease - it is based on the known numbers of cases - not unproven estimates of infections.

In the same way the number of KNOWN small businesses in the U.S. is 30.2 Million. We calculate the known small business failure rate of 0.33% based on the KNOWN number of small businesses in the U.S. not on some magical estimated number of entities believed to be small businesses. Keeping in mind the article's number of 100,000 failures is just a projection at this point.
More...

Bollocks on your proper way, that has nothing to do with what I was originally saying.

All I was saying is we should be congratulating ourselves. We've killed more than one business (and all the livelihood that goes with it, employees welfare, etc) for each patient that died. And that is pretending for a moment than the horseshit death statistics are accurate.

Monumental stupidity.
 
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