Social Distancing in 1666

War and social upheaval hastened the spread of the plague, which had broken out several years earlier in Holland. But when he wasn’t displaying the severed heads of his enemies, the king was invested in scientific progress. He sanctioned the founding of the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, a venerable scientific institution known today as The Royal Society.

It was most likely thanks to his interest in science that government representatives and doctors quickly used social distancing methods for containing the spread of bubonic plague. Charles II issued a formal order in 1666 that ordered a halt to all public gatherings, including funerals. Already, theaters had been shut down in London, and licensing curtailed for new pubs. Oxford and Cambridge closed.  https://dnyuz.com/2020/03/29/what-social-distancing-looked-like-in-1666/

Updated projections for the Coronavirus

These are projections for the US through April 30:

Date	Deaths	Total
03/29/20	363	2,583
03/30/20	607	3,190
03/31/20	722	3,912
04/01/20	846	4,758
04/02/20	981	5,739
04/03/20	1,121	6,860
04/04/20	1,264	8,124
04/05/20	1,412	9,536
04/06/20	1,559	11,095
04/07/20	1,700	12,795
04/08/20	1,833	14,628
04/09/20	1,951	16,579
04/10/20	2,052	18,631
04/11/20	2,136	20,767
04/12/20	2,199	22,966
04/13/20	2,241	25,207
04/14/20	2,265	27,472
04/15/20	2,271	29,743
04/16/20	2,261	32,004
04/17/20	2,236	34,240
04/18/20	2,200	36,440
04/19/20	2,154	38,594
04/20/20	2,101	40,695
04/21/20	2,043	42,738
04/22/20	1,982	44,720
04/23/20	1,919	46,639
04/24/20	1,855	48,494
04/25/20	1,791	50,285
04/26/20	1,728	52,013
04/27/20	1,664	53,677
04/28/20	1,601	55,278
04/29/20	1,539	56,817
04/30/20	1,478	58,295

Source: http://covid19.healthdata.org/
and https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

I think this is too pessimistic but we will know very soon.  It projects the first day with over 1000 deaths in the US to be April 3.

By the way, this model is projecting 15,546 COVID-19 deaths in New York by August 4.

My coronavirus projections

Here is what I think will happen in the US with the current pandemic:

Date 03/29/20	Total Cases 143491	Total Deaths 2583	New Cases 19913	New Deaths 363
03/30/20	163491	2983	20000	400
03/31/20	183491	3383	20000	400
04/01/20	203491	3783	20000	400
04/02/20	223491	4183	20000	400
04/03/20	243491	4583	20000	400
04/04/20	263491	4983	20000	400
04/05/20	283491	5383	20000	400
04/06/20	303491	5783	20000	400
04/07/20	323491	6183	20000	400
04/08/20	343491	6583	20000	400
04/09/20	363491	6983	20000	400
04/10/20	383491	7383	20000	400
04/11/20	403491	7783	20000	400
04/12/20	423491	8183	20000	400
04/13/20	443491	8583	20000	400
04/14/20	463491	8983	20000	400
04/15/20	483491	9383	20000	400
04/16/20	502491	9763	19000	380
04/17/20	520491	10123	18000	360
04/18/20	537491	10463	17000	340
04/19/20	553491	10783	16000	320
04/20/20	568491	11083	15000	300
04/21/20	582491	11363	14000	280
04/22/20	595491	11623	13000	260
04/23/20	607491	11863	12000	240
04/24/20	618491	12083	11000	220
04/25/20	628491	12283	10000	200
04/26/20	637491	12463	9000	180
04/27/20	645491	12623	8000	160
04/28/20	652491	12763	7000	140
04/29/20	658491	12883	6000	120
04/30/20	663491	12983	5000	100

By May 1, the pandemic will be winding down, with just a few thousand new cases per day.  The total number of cases will be less than 700,000 (but at least less than 1 million), and the total number of deaths less than 13,000 (but at least less than 20,000).  Let's see what happens and we will know very quickly.  I will revise this every few days.

Mr Massie goes to Washington

Thomas Massie from Kentucky wasn't allowed even one minute to speak about the proposed $2 trillion bill.

The Gentlelady is out of order

Representative Haley Stevens from Michigan completely loses it and starts screaming as her time expires and she kept talking:  "You will see darkness".

Federal Reserve balance sheet exceeds $5 trillion

Source: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

As you can see, the Federal Reserve balance sheet declined to a low of $3,759,946,000 on 8/28/19, then it increased because the overnight financing plumbing broke.  It increased to $4 trillion as of 10/30/19.  Then it increased slowly until we get to $4,158,637,000 on 2/26/20.  Since then the increase has gone vertical, hitting $5,254,278 as of 3/25/20.  The Fed is buying up the entire inventory of the primary dealers so they will have cash to purchase the gigantic $2 trillion in Treasury notes and bonds that will be issued shortly to pay for the coronavirus bailout (that just passed the House and Senate but hasn't yet been signed by President Trump).  The Fed balance sheet will likely exceed $6 trillion within just a few weeks.

I started this blog many years ago because I was concerned about the increase in the national debt and to try to make sense of it.  So it seems that the increase in the national debt without an increase in the Fed balance sheet ("Fiscal Irresponsibility") is not inflationary - it is debt that has to be paid back and this may even be deflationary.  It also seems that an increase in the Fed balance sheet without an increase in the national debt ("Quantitative Easing") is not inflationary because it is just exchanging one asset (Treasury debt) for another (Fed dollars).  However, this money goes into the stock market. 

But what about when both the Fed balance sheet and the Treasury debt ("Helicopter Money") increase rapidly?  This certainly will be inflationary, especially when you consider that the supply side is being constricted by unemployment.  But how much inflation are we looking at?  The debt held by the public will increase from $17.5 trillion to $19.5 trillion, an 11% increase.  So that is probably what we should expect.  The question is, is this just a one-time event or will the inflation continue?  I think it would be very difficult to put the inflation genie back in the bottle.  So we should expect 10% inflation and $2 trillion annual deficits as a baseline from here on out.  And this will affect the forecasts which are being prepared as much as 75 years in the future.  (I am waiting for the CBO to issue a new long-term projection before doing another forecast, which will probably be in June).

Not The Onion - Mexicans demand crackdown on Americans crossing the border

Residents in Sonora, south of the US state of Arizona, have promised to block traffic into Mexico for a second day after closing a checkpoint for hours on Wednesday. They wore face masks and held signs telling Americans to "stay at home". Mexico has fewer than 500 confirmed Covid-19 cases and the US over 65,000. The border is supposed to be closed to all except "essential" business, but protesters said there has been little enforcement and no testing by authorities. The blockade was led by members of the group Sonorans for Health and Life, who called for medical testing to be done on anyone who crosses from the US into Mexico.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52053656

COVID Act Now is spreading panic

The website https://covidactnow.org/ is a website created by Democratic activists that is panicking officials into ordering ill-advised lockdowns.  The model comes from a team at Imperial College London that is criticized for relying on incorrect assumptions.

Perhaps the goal of COVID Act Now was never to provide accurate information, but to scare citizens and government officials into to implementing rash and draconian measures. The creators even admit as much with the caveat that “this model is designed to drive fast action, not predict the future.” They generated this model under the guise of protecting communities from overrun hospitals, a trend that is not on track to happen as they predicted. Not only is the data false, and looking more incorrect with each passing day, but the website is optimized for a disinformation campaign.

Killing the economy

The following states are as today March 24 on complete lockdown, except for "essential" workers.  The states are:

CALIFORNIA Locked down: 39.5 million Deaths: 35
CONNECTICUT Locked down: 3.5 million Deaths: 10
DELAWARE Locked down: 967,000 Deaths: 0
HAWAII Locked down: 1.42 million Deaths: 0
ILLINOIS Locked down: 12.74 million Deaths: 12
INDIANA Locked down: 6.7 million Deaths: 7
LOUISIANA Locked down: 4.66 million Deaths: 35
MASSACHUSETTS Locked down: 6.9 million locked down Deaths: 9
MICHIGAN Locked down: 10 million Deaths: 15
NEVADA Locked down: 3.03 million Deaths: 4
NEW JERSEY Locked down: 8.9 million Deaths: 27
NEW YORK Locked down: 19.54 million Deaths: 183
OHIO Locked down: 11.6 million Deaths: 6
OREGON Locked down: 4.19 million Deaths: 5
PENNSYLVANIA Locked down: 12.81 million Deaths: 6 
WASHINGTON Locked down: 7.5 million Deaths: 111
WEST VIRGINIA Locked down: 1.8 million Deaths: 0
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8146759/Four-states-lockdown-bringing-total-14-halt-coronavirus-spread.html

This is completely unreasonable behavior.  The only place where a lockdown is justified is in areas of New York (but not the complete state).  The governors of these states are complete morons and are committing economic suicide.  And of course they will demand hundreds of billions to trillions in bailouts which they will unfortunately probably get.

Note how these are mostly blue states.  The only states that voted for Trump in 2016 to lock-down are:  Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

This Too Shall Pass

The Brian Buffini Show

The Fed is buying the world

The Fed is printing trillions to purchase everything under the sun ... treasury bonds, corporate bonds, muni bonds, mortgage-backed securities, swap lines with foreign banks, etc.  The Treasury will have a multi-trillion bailout package which will be used to nationalize many corporations.  The Greater Depression is a planned crashing of the market to allow those connected to buy everything up on the cheap.

Not the Onion - Baltimore Mayor begs residents to stop killing each other because of coronavirus

The mayor of Baltimore is begging residents to stop shooting one another to allow doctors and nurses to focus on saving coronavirus patients and not gunshot wound victims. 

In a statement on Wednesday, the Mayor Jack Young said: 'I want to reiterate how completely unacceptable the level of violence is that we have seen recently. 

'We will not stand for mass shootings and an increase in crime. 

'For those of you who want to continue to shoot and kill people of this city, we’re not going to tolerate it. 

'We’re going to come after you and we’re going to get you. 

'We cannot clog up our hospitals and their beds with people that are being shot senselessly because we’re going to need those beds for people infected with the coronavirus. 

'And it could be your mother, your grandmother or one of your relatives. So take that into consideration,' he said. 

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8127379/Baltimore-Mayor-begs-residents-stop-gun-violence-hospitals-clear-coronavirus.html

The Fed is lending against stocks and corporate bonds

The Fed already offered its primary dealers short-term cash loans secured by Treasuries, in “repurchase agreements” meant to keep interest rates under control. But with this offering, it will lend cash against securities such as equities, corporate bonds, municipal bonds, asset-backed securities and commercial paper.
https://www.barrons.com/articles/follow-the-consumer-and-stick-with-these-staples-through-coronavirus-crisis-advises-jefferies-51584361556

To be clear, the Fed is only lending to primary dealers.  Who are these elite members?  Here is the list:

Amherst Pierpont Securities LLC

Bank of Nova Scotia, New York Agency

BMO Capital Markets Corp.

BNP Paribas Securities Corp.

Barclays Capital Inc.

BofA Securities, Inc.

Cantor Fitzgerald & Co.

Citigroup Global Markets Inc.

Credit Suisse AG, New York Branch

Daiwa Capital Markets America Inc.

Deutsche Bank Securities Inc.

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC

HSBC Securities (USA) Inc.

Jefferies LLC

J.P. Morgan Securities LLC

Mizuho Securities USA LLC

Morgan Stanley & Co. LLC

NatWest Markets Securities Inc.

Nomura Securities International, Inc.

RBC Capital Markets, LLC

Societe Generale, New York Branch

TD Securities (USA) LLC

UBS Securities LLC.

Wells Fargo Securities, LLC

Source:  https://www.newyorkfed.org/markets/primarydealers

These companies can borrow at close to zero (the actual rate is 0.25% per year).  These are all effectively too big to fail.  They are a critical part of the funding mechanism for the Treasury.  When the Treasury needs dollars (and it will soon need more than a trillion for the latest bailout), it sells bonds to these primary dealers.  The primary dealers in turn are wholesalers and try to sell the bonds to pension funds, mutual funds, etc.  They also sell bonds to the Federal Reserve, which prints electronic dollars out of thin air to buy them.

The National Debt will hit $30 trillion by the end of 2022

Jeff Gundlach predicted during his DoubleLine call yesterday that "the U.S. national debt likely to grow to $30 trillion in two or three years as spending explodes in response to the crisis", which means about $3-4 trillion in net issuance per year.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/something-about-crazy-treasury-move-nobody-can-explain

I would like another source for this, but if he said this, he could be right.  It seems like everyone is giving up on the economy due to the pandemic and just expecting the government to give them free money.

Flattening the curve doesn't work

Read:  https://market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3520190

My paraphrase of this.  Social distancing if less than 40% of the population is exposed is pointless.  Because as soon as you lift the restrictions, then the virus will grow unchecked again.  You would really have to lock down the country for 6 months or more, maybe a year, to make sure this wouldn't happen. And this causes financial armageddon, which we are facing.

A better alternative would be to let it grow unchecked until at least a million people are infected, and then do the lockdown, which would be short.

For a competing argument see: https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-03-17-coronavirus-deaths-exceeding-original-pandemic-projection-model.html

Coronovirus is a hoax

Governments love crises because when the people are fearful they are more willing to give up freedoms for promises that the government will take care of them. After 9/11, for example, Americans accepted the near-total destruction of their civil liberties in the PATRIOT Act’s hollow promises of security.

The chief fearmonger of the Trump Administration is without a doubt Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health. Fauci is all over the media, serving up outright falsehoods to stir up even more panic. He testified to Congress that the death rate for the coronavirus is ten times that of the seasonal flu, a claim without any scientific basis.

On Face the Nation, Fauci did his best to further damage an already tanking economy by stating, “Right now, personally, myself, I wouldn’t go to a restaurant.” He has pushed for closing the entire country down for 14 days.

Over what? A virus that has thus far killed just over 5,000 worldwide and less than 100 in the United States? By contrast, tuberculosis, an old disease not much discussed these days, killed nearly 1.6 million people in 2017. Where’s the panic over this?
http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2020/march/16/the-coronavirus-hoax/

The Ramen Noodle Diet

I'm thinking of trying a Ramen Noodle diet, where I mostly eat ramen noodles.  What do the haters say about this?

Ramen contains tertiary butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), which is poisonous.  Lots of foods contain TBHQ (in minute quantities), and I am pretty sure the FDA would ban it if it were that bad. I'm not worried about this at all.

Ramen contains monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is poisonous.  Same

Ramen is extremely high in sodium, which will cause a heart attack. There might be some truth to this.  One packet of ramen contains 1750 mg of sodium, which is about 75% of the daily RDA.  However, lots of foods are very high in sodium.  Also, the main effect of high sodium is that it causes you to become thirsty and it causes water retention.  It can cause high blood pressure, but the link between high sodium and a heart attack isn't straight forward.  This is a minor area of concern.

Ramen has no nutritive value, it is just empty carbs and fat.  It lacks protein and fiber and vitamin C.  This is true.  But I am not worried about this in the short-run.

Ramen is low in satiety - it doesn't fill you up.  Not in my experience.  I find that it is very filling, and I don't crave more of it.  Unlike, say french fries or even beef.  There is a video about how all the TBHQ makes it hard to digest.

Now that I have that out of the way, what are the advantages?

Ramen is dirt cheap.  I bought a 12-pack for $2.59, and each pack is supposed to be 2 servings.

Ramen is low in calories.  You are supposed to eat only half the packet which would be 190 calories, and even the whole packet is only 380 calories.

You can make it more nutritional.  Of course add cabbage or celery or bok choi or whatever to it.  Also, I am going to check out the non-instant variety, which just has to be boiled for a few minutes. 

In conclusion, I think this is exactly what I am looking for.  A fad diet that is low in calories, cheap, and tasty.

Read: Man Describes Immense Torture Of Eating Only Ramen For 30 Days
So this guy "Danger" Dooley bought 90 packages of instant ramen noodles and ate 3 per day for a month, nothing else.  What happened?  He had digestion problems.  He got moody.  He lost interest in food.  And he lost 24 lbs.

The Coronavirus Spreadsheet

Available here:  https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-03-09-mike-adams-downloadable-pandemic-projection-model-spreadsheet-coronavirus.html

Note that it projects 23 total deaths in the US as of March 9 (today) whereas actual total deaths are 26 with 640 confirmed cases.  It assumes a 2% mortality rate.

The most likely scenario is about 100 million coronavirus infections and 500,000 deaths in the US (only 0.5% mortality rate) by July 4 before it will run out of steam.

Update - March 10.  975 confirmed cases and 30 total deaths.  Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/
This is still higher than the spreadsheet which is at 25 on March 10.