the cure may ultimately be more deadly than the disease. The engine of our economy is small business. Business owners are having their American Dream shattered by these extended shutdowns. The Federal Reserve is spending a million dollars a minute from our children’s future to prop up business revenue.

The entire economy is at risk. We are losing jobs to the tune of nearly 1 million every day. Since mid-March, some 33 million people have filed claims for unemployment.

This creates an immense human toll, the other side of the equation that is not being appropriately considered. The unprecedented economic revitalization during the first three years of the Trump administration is seriously threatened. The U.S. economy will struggle to recover for months or even years.

Unemployment causes stress, health problems, and suicides. According to RestartNOW!, there are counties where the number of suicide deaths resulting from the shutdown have exceeded the number of COVID-19 cases, never mind COVID deaths.

Many hospitals are laying staff off because there are so many open beds. At the same time, people with critical need for surgeries and other procedures are staying home because their treatments are considered “elective.”

A friend recently suffered heart failure and went to the hospital to receive a stint. He was sent home because it was not COVID-19 related. He said to me, “So Jim, I sit at home waiting to die, while abortion clinics are open for business and marijuana dispensaries are considered ‘essential services.’ This is insane!”

Oil major Shell shocked the oil markets last week, not just by cutting its dividend, but also by saying that it expects crude demand to never fully recover //

Analysts are warning that a V-shaped recovery is highly unlikely, with the sheer scale of the demand destruction--estimated at a staggering 30 million barrels a day in April--making for a long and tough road back to the pre-crisis global demand of ~100 million barrels per day.

Shell says it’s bracing itself for a worst-case scenario: Demand to never fully recover. //

With oil and gas companies set to lose $1 trillion in revenues in the current year--or 40% lower than 2019 revenue of $2.47 trillion--it’s not hard to see where these gloomy outlooks are coming from.

By spiking unemployment benefits with an additional $600 a week, Congress made it more profitable to file for taxpayer handouts than remain employed.

Tens of thousands of health care workers across the United States are going without pay today, even as providers in the nation's hot spots struggle to contain the coronavirus pandemic.

This "tale of two hospitals" is a function of clumsy, if well-intentioned, federal and state directives to halt all non-emergency procedures, which appeared at first blush to be a reasonable precaution to limit unnecessary exposure and safeguard staff, beds and equipment.

But instead of merely preserving hospital beds and other resources, this heavy-handed injunction has created a burden of its own design: a historic number of empty beds in systems left untouched by the pandemic.

Those hospitals have resorted to unprecedented levels of furloughs to stave off temporary budget shortfalls, but industry and economic trends point to more lasting outcomes unless immediate action is taken. //

Outpatient services account for half of all hospital revenue, which means hospitals are now making, and spending, half what they were this time last year.

It's not surprising, then, that the industry shed a record 43,000 health care workers in the first month of this crisis. Experts expect equal or greater layoffs this month, when the sustained forbearance has made revenue even more urgent.

Even before this crisis, one in four rural hospitals were vulnerable to closure. Now, many of these rural systems have more empty beds than ever before.

It doesn't take an economist to understand the underlying economics here. And it won't just be rural health care that will suffer—hospitals in every corner of the country might close for good. //

In the past 30 years, there have been only four months where the industry destroyed jobs. What used to be the worst case, in 2003, was just one-quarter of the losses experienced in March.

Hospitals are in the business of treating patients, but few are any more—which means more furloughs are ahead unless and until hospitals are allowed to perform their basic function: provide health care.

Because one in eight Americans is employed in health care, the fastest way to get Americans back to work is to allow hospitals to treat patients. Allowing these workers to get back on hospital payrolls will also save the federal government as much as $2 billion a day through safety net benefits.

The fastest way to help the poor is to let billionaires make money. //

People thrive when the economy thrives because the economy and the people are one and the same. That graph you see of the market’s ups and downs isn’t just a series of numbers, it’s our collective heartbeat. When people say they want to get the economy back on track, they mean the well being and health of the people. The economy is our vehicle to not only comfort and wealth but health as well. When our economy thrives, our medical system does too. New technologies are developed that improve treatments and life expectancy. In a world where AOC runs the economy, medical systems stagnate at a certain level and healthcare has to be rationed. //

At this time, we have stagnated. Tech isn’t advancing, the things these men produce aren’t being produced, and, as such, our options are shrinking. The first to be affected will be the poor that many people who hate Musk claim they care about.

It’s always been amazing to me that the very people who despise the system they’ve benefited so much from and blame for all the world’s ills is the very system that has lifted the lowest of us into heights people in lesser systems could only ever dream of. Sure, capitalism can create monstrous people and has its negatives. The free market can sometimes be unfair.

However, it’s far fairer than any other system and even the monstrous men it creates can go on to change the world. For all intents and purposes, Steve Jobs was a real piece of crap but, thanks to the capitalist system, this piece of crap changed our lives for the better.

The second data point is this: we’re already in the second wave.

Why do I say that?

The current policies are all predicated on the idea that Wuhan virus emerged in a big way in the United States in late-February/early-March. //

But now we know for a scientific fact that is not true. The first fatality with Wuhan virus in the US (I say with rather than from because the actual cause of death was a heart attack) happened on February 6. The consensus is that this was a ‘community’ based infection as the dead person had no history of overseas travel or using cruise ships. //

this moves the date of a significant influx of Wuhan virus from the late February time frame back to early January at the absolute latest. And that meshes with the stories we had in November-December about an especially hard flu season. If, as it now seems, what we were experiencing in November was the initial onslaught of Wuhan that no one recognized, what we are reacting to now is the ‘second wave.’ //

As one of my favorite bosses used to say at times like these, “Maybe we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop and we’re fighting with a one-legged man.” //

If this is the first wave, it is really no big deal and we need to man-up and work through any ‘second wave.’ If it is, as I suspect, actually the much-feared second wave, we need to start putting statisticians and public health officials up against walls for waging a war of aggression upon our nation.

The longer we go without adequate cancer screenings, the more lives we will lose in our attempt to save other lives.

Across the country, hospitals shut down 'non-essential' procedures in preparation for a surge of coronavirus patients that never appeared. //

So we stayed home, businesses closed, and tens of millions of Americans lost their jobs. But with the exception of New York City, the overwhelming surge of coronavirus patients never really appeared—at least not in the predicted numbers, which have been off by hundreds of thousands.

During a press conference Wednesday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis noted that health experts initially projected 465,000 Floridians would be hospitalized because of coronavirus by April 24. But as of April 22, the number is slightly more than 2,000. //

Meanwhile, hospitals and health care systems nationwide have had to furlough or lay off thousands of employees. Why? Because the vast majority of most hospitals’ revenue comes from elective or “non-essential” procedures. We’re not talking about LASIK eye surgery but things like coronary angioplasty and stents, procedures that are necessary but maybe not emergencies—yet. If hospitals can’t perform these procedures because governors have banned them, then they can’t pay their bills, or their employees. //

If Hospitals Can Handle The Load, End The Lockdowns

I’m sure the governors and health officials who ordered these lockdowns meant well. They based their decisions on deeply flawed and woefully inaccurate models, and they should have been less panicky and more skeptical, but they were facing a completely new disease about which, thanks to China, they had almost no reliable information. //

Public officials responsible for the lockdowns will no doubt claim that without these draconian measures, our hospitals surely would have been overwhelmed. And who knows? Maybe they would have. It’s an unfalsifiable assertion.

At least one guy in DC understands the Constitution and American history //

We’ve tried what the ‘experts’ said. We’ve gone along with their stupid models. We’ve stood in line to get into stores. We’ve seen friends and families put out of work and had businesses crushed by stupid and illogical diktats from people who would be more at home in Stalinist Russia than in the United States. We’ve just about had enough and President Trump seems to recognize that and that, my friends, is a very good thing.

If you think the virus is bad, wait till you see what mass poverty does. //

One thing that is undeniable is that being poor comes with health problems. Your healthcare isn’t exactly Cadillac, your diet has a higher chance of being bad, and the stresses of raising a family with little money can induce its own health problems. It’s a sad fact of life and one that we’ve been dealing with since time immemorial. In fact, epidemiologists refer to poverty as the “cause of causes.” //

According to the University of California San Francisco, your wealth is one of the best gauges for success or failure of the human health condition:

“Socioeconomic status is the most powerful predictor of disease, disorder, injury and mortality we have,” says Tom Boyce, MD, chief of UCSF’s Division of Developmental Medicine within the Department of Pediatrics. Socioeconomic status is a term that often includes measurements of income, education, and job prestige – individually or in combination. The predictive power of income alone is perhaps most obvious when considering life expectancy. Impoverished adults live seven to eight years less than those who have incomes four or more times the federal poverty level, which is $11,770 for a one-person household, whether you live in Silicon Valley, the Rust Belt or the rural South. //

Imagine being in isolation as you watch your bills come due and no job to show for it. Imagine not having much help in the way of finances.

You’re alone, you can hardly afford food, you’re jobless, and you don’t know when this will end. Hope starts to look like a stupid concept and ideas start to roll through your head that aren’t safe. //

Meaning this virus is far more infections than we thought and way more ineffectual for the vast majority of people who have or had it.

With that known, we can come to some easy conclusions. The effects of poverty are hard to escape. No matter what, it’s going to affect your health and you’re likely going to die earlier because of it. Infection by the coronavirus is hard to escape too but it’s far less likely to even put a dent in your day. Some people will become sick and sadly some will even die as many have already.

This is tragic, but a far greater tragedy will definitely occur if we stay locked up in our homes as our country crumbles around us.

Delta posted its first quarterly loss in more than five years as coronavirus destroyed air travel demand. //

The airline spent the quarter shoring up cash and slashing expenses to combat the sharp drop in revenue. Delta's is carrying about 5% of its normal passenger loads, Bastian told CNBC.

The carrier burned through $100 million a day at the end of March, a rate it expects to halve by the end of the second quarter.

Delta posted a net loss of $534 million for the first three months of the year. On an adjusted basis, Delta reported a per-share loss of 51 cents, compared with analysts' estimates for a 70 cent per-share loss in the first quarter. Delta shares were up 2.6% in premarket trading. //

"The decade of work we put into the balance sheet to lower debt and build unencumbered assets has been critical to our success in raising capital and we expect to end the June quarter with approximately $10 billion in liquidity," Delta's CFO Paul Jacobson said in a release.

Sweden’s unusual approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic is starting to yield results, according to the country’s top epidemiologist.

Anders Tegnell, the architect behind Sweden’s relatively relaxed response to Covid-19, told local media the latest figures on infection rates and fatalities indicate the situation is starting to stabilize.

“We’re on a sort of plateau,” Tegnell told Swedish news agency TT. //

“The trend we have seen in recent days, with a more flat curve -- where we have many new cases, but not a daily increase -- is stabilizing,” Karin Tegmark Wisell, head of the microbiology department at Sweden’s Public Health Authority, said on Friday. “We are seeing the same pattern for patients in intensive care.”

The details are out of Treasury now, and it looks like it isn't going to work for a large number of small business owners after all. //

If you don’t make the Senate’s requirements, you have to pay that loan back, and thanks to Mnuchin, you’re not going to be able to do that either. In the bill, Congress set a window of a maximum interest of 4 percent and loan repayment within 10 years. This was just a window, so it was up to Treasury to set the final costs and they put them at 1 percent interest and two years to pay the bank.

In real life, that means you’re looking at beginning your third quarter in debt, limping on into the winter, losing an entire year’s profits getting your business running again, and owing nearly half of next year’s profits to the bank, all before any other loans you had to take out to keep from bankruptcy. You might have been able to spread that pain out, but two years is too little time

JetBlue Airways Corp. JBLU-1.97% is burning through $10 million a day as it grapples with the coronavirus pandemic, company Chief Executive Robin Hayes said in a note to employees Friday. The airline is losing money because only 7,000 customers are "likely to fly us each day in April and possibly May, compared to the 120,000 we would typically expect," Hayes wrote. On a typical day in April last year, JetBlue took in about $22 million from bookings and ancillary fees. Today, it's hauling in only $1 million per day, while $2 million per day is being issued in cash refunds.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted that any relief bill include a left-wing wish list unrelated to the pandemic and the economic slowdown it’s causing. //

Pelosi succeeded in delaying the relief package by several days, but she failed to capitalize on what her No. 2 lieutenant, Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., called a “tremendous opportunity to restructure things to fit our vision.” //

Even before this relief package becomes law, politicians on both sides of the aisle were already calling for another one to follow, so expect Pelosi and the progressives to try again to make the wishes on their wish list come true.

There is no danger that the airlines are about to disappear. //

But the carriers would almost certainly be able to continue paying their workers in bankruptcy. Once a public company enters Chapter 11, it rarely has difficulty raising new credit to cover operating costs, such as payroll. This was true even during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when, despite the general credit crunch, private bankruptcy lending reached a new peak. Bankruptcy loans to companies in Chapter 11 are extremely safe, because the Bankruptcy Code gives the bankruptcy lender a high-priority claim on the assets. And potential bank lenders are now flush with cash, thanks to the Federal Reserve’s market interventions in recent weeks. //

Airlines aren’t running out of cash because their debts are coming due sooner than expected. They’re running out of cash because their revenues are much lower than expected. That’s a solvency problem, not a liquidity problem. Losses are inevitable. The only question is whether Washington leaves the losses with private investors or shifts them to taxpayers.

Federal and state governments are making a massive gamble about a little-understood new virus. They are betting our future as a nation. //

The current gamble seems to be to shut down the nation indefinitely to suppress a virus that is especially deadly to some demographics and experts agree cannot be contained, only slowed. The New York Times claims the basis of many U.S. officials’ decisions so far is a report from Imperial College London, and other models that spit out similar results. It says to contain the virus it will be necessary to quarantine Americans for two- to three-month stretches repeatedly over the next 18 months. //

Just one competing projection, from the Hoover Institution, suggests “the total number of cases world-wide will peak out at well under 1 million, with the total number of deaths at under 50,000″ (emphasis added). This is near the annual death rate due to flu in the United States alone. We don’t know if that estimate is accurate either, but that’s the point.

Here’s another hysteria skeptic with impeccable medical and statistical knowledge, John P.A. Ioannidis, a professor of medicine, epidemiology, and statistics at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Meta-Research Innovation Center.

If we assume that case fatality rate among individuals infected by SARS-CoV-2 is 0.3% in the general population — a mid-range guess from my Diamond Princess analysis — and that 1% of the U.S. population gets infected (about 3.3 million people), this would translate to about 10,000 deaths. This sounds like a huge number, but it is buried within the noise of the estimate of deaths from ‘influenza-like illness.’ If we had not known about a new virus out there, and had not checked individuals with PCR tests, the number of total deaths due to ‘influenza-like illness’ would not seem unusual this year. At most, we might have casually noted that flu this season seems to be a bit worse than average. The media coverage would have been less than for an NBA game between the two most indifferent teams.
Some worry that the 68 deaths from Covid-19 in the U.S. as of March 16 will increase exponentially to 680, 6,800, 68,000, 680,000 … along with similar catastrophic patterns around the globe. Is that a realistic scenario, or bad science fiction? //

Sharyl Attkisson has gone through the U.S. deaths to March 17, and as in other countries they are overwhelmingly among the very elderly and people with pre-existing conditions. The entire population is not at severe risk from coronavirus — although we are at severe risk from a wrecked economy and welfare expansions beyond Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s wildest dreams.

Bad at math

Speaking to reporters Tuesday at the Capitol Building shortly after a meeting of legislators and some key petroleum importers, Petro Trade’s chief, Abraham Kaydea said amidst all of the reasons, excuses and/or justifications being given for the excruciating shortage of gasoline, the major cause of the problem is the gross abuse of the provisional lifting exercise.

Provisional lifting is a practice under which the, Liberia Petroleum Refinery Company (LPRC) would allow one petroleum importer to take the product of another importer with the understanding that the borrower will replace the product in time enough upon the arrival of his own product, a strategy which was designed with good intent to keep the market open and running but has backfired due to either the inability or callous refusal of some seemingly reckless companies to replace petroleum products they took and sold under the provisional lifting program.

Mr. Kaydea maintained that dredging of the Freeport and few other technicalities account for only a small portion of the shortage but the abuse of the provisional lifting by these delinquent companies or individuals who have failed or refused to pay back product given to them is the major cause of the problem.

Kaydea is therefore calling for the suspension and revocation of licenses as well as the prosecution of those whose’ willful actions or inactions led to the gasoline shortage which seriously affected the business of others and pushed the nation to the brink of economic collapse and chaos.

Monrovia – President George Manneh Weah has mandated the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority (NaFAA) to give a one-month grace period to all fishermen fishing in the territorial waters of Liberia, beginning Wednesday, March 4, 2020, //

The president’s mandate followed series of consultations with stakeholders as well as the National Fisheries and Aquaculture Authority and in addition to the one month grace period. NaFAA new fisheries fees adjustment are as follow:

That the 15-horse power (hp) engine will be classified with the first category of motorized boats; hence, the first category will now cover 1-15 HP. This category will pay the amount of US$250;

Motorized boats in the category of 16 to 40 horse power will pay US$475.00 for their license fees.