Author: chogan@directresearch.com

Post #1320: More crisis standards of care? Yawn.

Source:  Colorado Department of Health, accessed 11/11/2021

“Vaccine hesitancy” gets my vote for the most misleading phrase in the popular press of late.

I don’t perceive the least bit of hesitancy or ambiguity among those who refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine.  How does “hell no, I won’t get vaccinated under any circumstances” get characterized as “hesitancy”?

I blame liberals.  Liberals remain the naïve children of the Enlightenment.  Despite strong evidence to the contrary, they cling to this crazy belief that people are, at heart, fundamentally good and reasonably rational.  That they will, by and large, make informed choices for the benefit of themselves and society at large.  Within that fictional world-view, those who turn down a free, more-or-less harmless shot that reduces odds of an early death and could end the pandemic for society at large — those people must merely have different values and beliefs.  Perhaps they’ve assessed the facts differently, and have some reasonable doubts or fears regarding the efficacy of the vaccine or likelihood of true side effects.  And so they hesitate to get vaccinated.

In this liberal fantasy world, the unvaccinated are just unenlightened, or have made alternative, rational choices. They hesitate to get vaccinated.  Perhaps they can be led to see the light with proper guidance and education.

But back in the real world, nope, they’re just stupid and stubborn.  No amount of appeal to reason can fix that.  So if you want to get the entire population vaccinated, you’re going to have to resort to some level of coercion.

It’s actually completely unfair to blame “liberals” for this wishy-washy misleading term for the unvaccinated.  The true story is that “vaccine hesitancy” has been a term-of-art in public health circles for decades.  The earliest Wikipedia page on it (under the current Wikipedia page on vaccine hesitancy) dates back to 2007.  A quick search using date ranges on Google shows that the phrase appears to have emerged in the 1990s (and/or any references to it prior to 1990 aren’t captured by a Google search).

The true story isn’t that “vaccine hesitancy” is some polite new buzz-phrase, cooked up by the liberal media.  It’s just a mis-application of a bit of standard public health jargon. 

That said, surely we need something that’s a more accurate description of the current circumstances.  “Hesitancy” just doesn’t cut it.

At the very least, it should be “vaccine refusal”.  Just to make it clear that these people have been given a choice, and they’ve turned it down flat.  And that they own the consequences of their decisions.

Colorado declares crisis standards of care for hospitals.  Nobody notices.

But why bother with the whole vaccine thing, at this point?  I mean, everything’s OK, right?  More-or-less?

Well, no.  That brings me to crisis standards of care.  That’s the formal, legal declaration  by the governor of a state that, owing to a shortage of hospital beds, physicians may triage patients/allocate hospital care based not on need, but on likelihood of survival.  It provides the legal cover for physicians to allow individuals to die for lack of hospital care, because there simply aren’t enough hospital beds (or ICU beds or respirators or whatever) to meet current demand.

The potential for governors to invoke crisis standards of care has been on the books for years.  It’s a reasonable and rational part of medicare emergency preparedness.  It went hand-in-hand with pre-established CDC rules for the substitution of sub-standard PPE for normal hospital PPE in the event of a shortage. Rules that (I believe) were never invoked prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.

When Alaska and Idaho made formal declarations of crisis standards of care, that made the news.  It was judged to be a fairly significant event, that a U.S. state had reached the point of letting people die for want of hospital beds.

Only in Alaska was the effect of the hospital bed shortage obvious enough to be clearly visible on a graph (Post #1269).  You can see that in the two-month-old graph below.  Cases spiking (red), admissions declining (yellow).  In Idaho, by contrast, they largely managed to slough the problem off onto hospitals in eastern Washington.

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker, accessed 9/19/2021.

But at least that made the headlines.

Now it’s reaching the point that when another Western state runs out of beds, people hardly notice.  And the case in point today is Colorado.  They declared something like crisis standards of care last week.  And if my wife hadn’t picked up on it, based on a single New York Times article, I surely wouldn’t have noticed.  Near as I can tell, that’s the sole reference in mainstream media.

Running out of hospital beds has become the new normal.

There’s an oddity, in that the wording of the Colorado executive order is different from others.  (I’d better provide a link to the actual executive order, because in the nut-o-verse this has been characterized as requiring hospitals to refuse admission to unvaccinated individuals.  Whereas the actual executive order says nothing of the sort.)

It says ” … Order authorizing the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE) to order hospitals and freestanding emergency departments to transfer or cease the admission of patients to respond to the current disaster emergency due to coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) in Colorado.”

And, to be clear, it not only empowers the Colorado DPHE to stop admissions at some hospitals, it requires other hospitals to take those admissions if DPHE so directs it.  In effect, it gives the Colorado DPHE the right limit admissions and to re-allocate hospital admissions across the entire Colorado hospital system.  Not just to deny admission to certain hospitals, but to require other hospitals to accept those admissions.

If you read further, you’ll see that this particular language is taken directly from Colorado state statute.  And, as an extra for experts, this is all to get around the requirements of EMTALA, the Federal law that prevents hospitals from “dumping” undesirable (that is, uninsured) patients.  Hence the “transfer or admission” phrasing of the executive order.  The oddity of phrasing doesn’t necessarily reflect a different view of how best to triage patients.  It’s an artifact of how Colorado state statutes were written, and in turn, how the Federal EMTALA law was written.

Just to be completely clear, the declaration doesn’t even mention COVID-19 or vaccination status.  (So the claims in the nut-o-verse that this requires hospitals to deny treatment to the unvaccinated are completely fictional).

In fact, the bulk of the document pertains to insurance issues.  (Only in America, right?)  It notes that hospitals cannot take a patient’s insurance status into account, and that patients will still be insured even if sent out-of-network on an emergency basis under the provisions of this law.

But at this point, I need to cease ragging on Republican governors.  Because, despite the surge in cases, and the fact that Colorado hospitals are full, the Democratic governor of Colorado won’t do anything more than issue this order allowing the state health department to transfer cases across hospitals.  Mask mandates appear to be local-option only.  Near as I have been able to tell, bars and indoor restaurant seating remain open with no restrictions.

With that, about half the people in Colorado report wearing masks now.  That’s unchanged since the first of September.  So a little thing like running out of hospital beds doesn’t seem to be enough to affect behavior there.

Source:  Carnegie-Mellon University COVIDcast.

In any case, unlike Alaska at its peak, there’s no indication of any outright denial of hospital care yet, in Colorado.

Source:  CDC COVID data tracker accessed 11/11/2021

 

Coda:  An un-funny anecdote about Medicare Durable Medical Equipment.

Or:  Why COVID-19 in Colorado is distinctly different from COVID-19 in Louisiana.

I used to be a self-employed consultant in the area of health economics.  One day I was tossed the following problem:

In the Medicare program, at that time, there was a more than five-fold difference across the states in spending for home oxygen.  Worse, there was no indication of any difference in need for home oxygen.  There was almost no difference in prevalence of the main disease for which these rentals would be authorized (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), which used to be called emphysema.)

That sort of thing is a big red flag for Medicare.  When they see massive differences in service use or spending, and no differences in the underlying health of the population, they immediately investigate for waste, fraud, and abuse.  In this case, my client — a manufacturer of oxygen concentrators — was rightly worried that this was going to affect his business.

At first, the Government’s case looked pretty good.  The scatterplot of oxygen use against COPD prevalence showed only a weak association.  There really was a lot of spending variation that appeared unrelated to prevalence of the relevant illness.  In particular, prevalence of illness did nothing to explain the high spending outliers.  (That is, the dots net the top of the graph below.)

Next, that spending variation was large.  The high-spend states really did out-spend the low-spend states by a factor of five or more.

But somewhere along in this process, I managed to recall that the Denver Broncos used to play in Mile High Stadium.  And then it all fell into place.  Those states at the bottom of the list all have one thing in common:  They are Mountain region states.  There isn’t much oxygen there.

When I arranged the same set of states by mean elevation above sea level, I got a much more orderly plot.  Suddenly, those big outliers made sense.

Medicare was supplying a lot of oxygen in those states because Mother Nature wasn’t.  Here’s a quantitative estimate of the impact of elevation on the amount of oxygen available (the partial pressure of oxygen).

Source:  Highpeak.com

If you live in Aspen, CO, you’re missing about one-quarter of your oxygen, compared to life at sea level.  If your lungs are healthy, you’ll soon get used to it.  But if you’ve got COVID, and your blood oxygen saturation starts to fall, you’re going to be a lot worse off in Aspen than you would be at sea level.

And so, my guess is that for a given population of individuals severely ill with COVID-19, a higher fraction of them are going to require an inpatient level of care in Colorado, compared to (say) the U.S. Gulf Coast states.  That’s because a critical deciding factor is their 02 blood saturation levels.

The upshot is that COVID is different in Colorado.  Not because the disease is different, or the people are less healthy.  There’s just less oxygen there.

Post #1319: Use of the semi-attached figure: COVID-denial and climate-change-denial propaganda

There is an entire line of disinformation about global warming that works like this:

  1. Find any indicator of climate change that isn’t hitting a new high this year.  E.g., global average temperature.
  2. Point to that decline and and contrast it to the increase in atmospheric C02 (which reliably hits a new high every year).
  3. When that indicator begins hitting new highs again, find something else.
  4. Repeat.

For a while, it was all about “the hiatus” in global warming (Forbes, NOAA), until that turned out to be literally imaginary.  The news outlets that touted “the hiatus” simply don’t talk about global temperature now.  A common alternative target for this style of propaganda is summer arctic sea ice extent, where you will reliably see Fox News coverage in any year in which the sea ice extent increases.  (Despite a clear long-term downward trend, consistent with (duh) a much warmer Arctic).  Weirdly, for a while, when the Arctic summer ice was clearly falling, denialists focused on winter antarctic ocean ice cover (which, unlike the arctic summer ice cover, has no strong implications for the future of warming and is more-or-less unrelated to summer arctic ocean ice cover).  Focused on that, except in years when the winter antarctic ice cover is below the peak.  At which time, then turn to some other target of opportunity.

When done properly, everything said in such propaganda pieces is true.  Some years, global temperatures fall, compared to the prior record.  Every year, atmospheric C02 goes up. True facts.

But these pieces are, nevertheless, propaganda.  The are disinformation designed to persuade readers to believe something that isn’t true.  The disinformation works due to the careful cherry-picking of the data point shown and the use of the semi-attached figure of one year of C02 increase.  It’s left up to the reader to make the incorrect inference (that the theory behind global warming requires temperatures to increase in yearly lockstep with annual increases in C02, so this contrary fact disproves global warming).  Many willingly do so.

The details don’t matter here, it’s the basic technique that I’m trying to emphasize.  Any time series of data that shows temporary ups-and-downs (or seasonal changes, or cross-sectional differences) is a potential propaganda tool.  Cherry-pick the right data points, tack on the semi-attached figures, and the result is a steady stream of propaganda pieces that give the impression of something (e.g., that data are always contradicting the scientific consensus on global warming) without actually telling actionable lies about it.

And I guess it goes without saying that Fox News is the master of this tactic.  Near as I can tell, the only information about global warming that makes it onto Fox News is propaganda of that sort.  They’re silent on the vast majority of studies and information that reinforce the scientific consensus (the planet is warming rapidly, we’re causing it), and highlight any piece of information that can be made to seem as if it contradicts that consensus.

And, once you’ve seen it enough times in one context (global warming), it jumps off the page when you see it in other contexts. 

Again, to review the method:

  1. Find any relevant data series that goes up and down.
  2. Cherry-pick a time where the data are trending the way you like.
  3. Tack on the semi-attached figure.
  4. Leave it to the reader to make the incorrect causal link between the two.

With that as introduction, look at the Fox headline above and tell me what you’re supposed to believe, based on that. 

Did you come up with “well, that proves that masks don’t work, doesn’t it”?  From which you have to move on to “mask mandates don’t work”.  And so, obviously, based on that, we don’t need mask mandates.  Why would any idiot think that mask mandates had any purpose?

Let me now illustrate what you should have gotten out of that headline:

Data source for this and other graphs of new case counts:  Calculated from The New York Times. (2021). Coronavirus (Covid-19) Data in the United States. Retrieved 11/10/2021, from https://github.com/nytimes/covid-19-data.”  The NY Times U.S. tracking page may be found at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-cases.html.

As an Extras for Experts, note the critical timing here.  As little as two weeks ago, they couldn’t have written that headline.  Four weeks ago, they’d have to have written it the other way around.  Give it another four weeks, and I’m betting they wouldn’t be able to write that.  But for this brief time window, they can write that headline, and it’s a fact.  Four weeks from now, this will have been forgotten.  And they’ll have found another target of opportunity for their next piece of propaganda.

But why?

A lot of rational people, particularly scientists, have a hard time understanding why anyone would bother to produce (or consume) this continual stream of propaganda.

To me, having seen this time and again, and having run up against it with my ultra-conservative older brother, the answer is simple.  It’s all about faith and belief, and has nothing to do with science.

In a nutshell, for most people, when facts conflict with faith, you must deny the facts.  It really doesn’t go any deeper than that.  It’s not intrinsically different from the Catholic Church’s persecution of Galileo for the heresy of claiming that the earth moved around the sun.

In my brother’s case, anything that would require deviating from orthodox political conservatism must be dismissed.  It’s not that he is anti-science, per se.  It’s that he works backwards from the policy implications.  If the science implies policies that conflict with his political faith, then the science must be denied. 

It really is that simple.

There are two types of people.

For some, facts and reason determine what their course of action should be.  And if rationality conflicts with faith, then faith has to change in light of the facts.  For others, faith determines their course of action.  And if facts and reason get in the way of that, those facts and that reasoning must be denied, so that faith remains unchallenged.

And so, broadly speaking, that “faith based community” creates a tremendous demand for hearing only what they want to hear.  Free markets will supply anything that is demanded.  The result is entire industries devoted to satisfying that demand for “facts” that match faith.

Back in the objective world, the fact is, the earth is warming.  That’s primarily due to a buildup of an incredibly stable gas (C02) in the atmosphere, faster than the ecosphere can absorb it.  The C02 comes from burning fossil fuels at a rapid rate.  The overwhelming consensus of informed opinion is that this process isn’t going to end well for civilization.

Fact is, masks work to reduce spread of COVID-19.  (And other airborne illnesses, for that matter.)  A high-quality mask (e.g., N95 respirator) works better than a low-quality mask.  But, all other things being equal, the higher the fraction of the population wearing masks in situations with non-negligible risk of disease spread (indoor public spaces), the lower the spread of COVID-19 will be.

If your faith bars you from considering anything but individual action, motivated by individual incentives, then these facts are inconvenient.  That’s because the most effective ways to stop C02 emissions, and to stop COVID-19 spread, require coordinated action that cannot be achieved by person-level free-market incentives. (Or, at least, none that have ever been proposed as feasible.)

As with the Catholic church and a heliocentric solar system, a lot of people maintain some sort of faith that requires that they must declare such actions to be heresy.   Those people need someone to feed them the disinformation that will allow their faith to remain unchallenged.  And one way or the other, the dollars behind that demand support the sort of mainstream disinformation highlighted at the top of this post.

It’s not that people are too dumb to know the difference.  It’s that they don’t care, and they actively crave the disinformation. 

And as a result, we have a fully-developed denial industry.  Literally the same entities that helped deny that smoking causes cancer were hired to help deny that combustion of fossil fuel causes global warming.

Given that, it’s really no surprise that the same techniques keep showing up.  In this case, the technique is to take any time-varying data, and pop up with a bit of disinformation during any brief period when the numbers are running your way.  Remain silent when the numbers aren’t in your favor.  And keep changing targets, because nobody in your target audience will even hold you to task for anything you’ve ever said.

I’d like to say that people will eventually figure that out.  But they won’t.  To the contrary, it’s not that the propaganda causes their non-factual beliefs.  It’s that they actively seek the disinformation that agrees with their faith.  They take comfort in it.  And the rest of us just have to live with the results, as best we can.

Post #1318: IED

 

I enjoy crossword puzzles.  And I’m not ashamed to admit it.

My puzzle habit was formed during ten years of daily commuting from the suburbs to downtown Washington DC, via DC’s Metro system.  Now, after more than three decades of puzzle-solving, I have an appreciation for the subtle science and exact art of crossword-puzzle making.

Filling in a hard crossword puzzles requires an odd assortment of skills.  It becomes roughly equal parts of:

  • Knowing the structure of language (e.g., plurals usually end in “s”).
  • Straight-up trivia (e.g., Pierre is the capital of South Dakota).
  • Current pop culture (e.g., Grammy winners).
  • Older pop culture.
  • A good sense for puns, alternative word meanings, and the like.

Much of it has a unique crossword-puzzle slant, owing to a chronic need for vowels.  For example, ONO (Yoko), ARLO (Guthrie), OCALA (Florida) all appear in crosswords far out of proportion to their importance in the real world.  As do the many, many vowel-rich four-letter rivers of Europe (e.g., ODER, YSER, URAL, ARAL, AARE, …) .

The popular-culture aspects of crossword puzzles typically don’t age well.  It’s hard to pick up a 20-year-old book of difficult crossword puzzles and fill them in.  The world has moved on.  Pop-culture names and terms familiar to every well-read reader in 2001 are seldom on the top of the tongue two decades later.

That said, they are never truly current, either.  It takes a while for any new pop-culture phenomenon or phrase to work its way into the day’s crossword puzzles.  So what you really get in crosswords is pop culture with a lag.

Which brings me to IED.  That was in a puzzle I worked yesterday, with the clue “hazard to troops”.  It was, in that sense, a perfect crossword puzzle word.  Lots of vowels, and a term that every U.S. resident would have absorbed over the past couple of decades.

But IEDs haven’t been in the news of late.  Which is a good thing.  And I can only hope that this clue and answer will be completely mystifying to some puzzle-solver a couple of decades from now.

My point being that sometimes the news ought to be about what hasn’t happened recently.  We ought to see a great big headline stating that “No American troops died in Afghanistan over the past two months”.  Or that we failed to spend $20B propping up a corrupt and unpopular government over that same time span.

But that sort of obvious good news just isn’t what the popular press is all about.  Too many other things that are better click-bait.  U.S. casualties that didn’t occur are the sort of thing that will only sink into our collective consciousness a decade or two from now.  If then.

Meanwhile, I’ll continue to enjoy the absence of the IED from our popular press.  Even if that word is still in crossword puzzles, for the time being.

Post #1317: COVID-19 Vaccine side effects in children ages 5-11

 

I saw an article yesterday listing out all of the extremely likely side-effects you should expect if you get the COVID-19 vaccine for your 5-to-11-year-old child.  It made it look like a terrible gamble.  If I’d seen that article, and nothing else, I’m not sure I’d have gotten my kid vaccinated.

The only problem is, they showed the numbers for vaccinated children ages 5-11 in complete isolation.  They didn’t show how young children fared, relative to teens.  And they didn’t compare to the placebo group.  Or to typical self-reported side-effect rates for (e.g.) flu vaccine.

If your job had been to scare parents away from vaccinating their kids, you could not have done a better job of it than by cherry-picking that exact bit of information.  And showing zero context.

Just to be clear about how these numbers arise, if somebody had asked me if I’d felt fatigue or muscle pain in the past week, the answer would have been “yes”.  As it would, pretty much any week of the year.  If I’d been part of the study, by responding honestly to that question, I’d have been contributing to the reported potential side-effect rate of the vaccine, as shown in the popular press.

This isn’t to dismiss the side effects.  They sometimes occur.  It’s more that you need some context to make sense of the reported side-effect rates.

I thought I’d get the actual data, and show how the side-effect rates for children look in proper context. 

Here’s the original slide of results, as presented to the U.S. CDC, which I will now simplify to highlight the main findings:

Source:  Presentation to CDC, “BNT162b2 (COVID-19 Vaccine, mRNA) Vaccine in Individuals 5 to <12 Years of Age”, November 2nd 2021, Alejandra Gurtman, MD, Vice President. Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, Pfizer Inc

Point 1: The side effects … were generally milder and less frequent in 5- to 11- year olds than they were in adolescents.  Putting aside that most of the side effects disappear within one to three days, little kids actually had lower rates of side effects than teens and adults.  That’s what these pairs of bars below are showing.  So if you weren’t too worried about vaccinating your  sixteen-year-old, you should be even less worried about vaccinating your six-year-old.

 

Point 2:  Side effect rates were only modestly higher for children actually getting the vaccine, compared to placebo.   These contrasts below are between vaccine and control groups.  If I had to condense it, it would say that compared to children who got the placebo, the vaccinated children were:

  • 10% more likely to report fatigue or headache
  • 5% more likely to report fever or chills
  • 3% more likely to report muscle or joint pain.

Point 3:  And again, to be clear “If they arise, side effects generally are gone within one to three days.”

There’s another potential point of comparison, which is the rate of the same reported side effects for standard flu vaccine.  One might reasonably ask how frequently these same side-effects get reported for flu shots.  That’s a vaccine that most of use get annually without a thought in the world of having a significant adverse reaction.  (N.B., a flu shot is recommended in the U.S. for everyone over the age of six months, so it’s a vaccine that is definitely recommended for this 6-11 age group.)

It’s tough to get any hard numbers on that, probably because the flu vaccine has been considered safe for so long.  Here are a few bits and pieces.

Of the side effects tracked above for COVID-19 vaccine, the one article I found listed these rates of side-effects in adults, for flu vaccine:

  • fever (perceived) 15.2%.
  • fatigue (17%)
  • muscle pain (17.7%)

Here are the side effect rates for Fluzone in adults:

  • Muscle pain 18.9%
  • Headache 13.1%
  • Shivering 4.8%
  • Fever 0.9%

I’m not going to beat this point to death, because my point is simple.

Side effects are not some new thing that just happened with the COVID-19 vaccine for young children.  The common side-effects of the COVID-19 vaccine in children are the same as the common side effects, for the same vaccine, in teens and adults.  And the same as the common side effects of the flu vaccine. 

The rate of side-effects from the COVID-19 vaccine, in young children, is less than in teens and young adults.  And, very roughly speaking, the rate of side effects of COVID-19 vaccination in children is not grossly different from the rate of the same reported side effects from flu vaccination in adults.

If you didn’t hesitate to get your teenage kids vaccinated, there’s no new reason to hesitate about younger children.  And if you get the flu vaccine every year for you and yours, you have arguably taken on as much risk of adverse events with that as you will with the COVID-19 vaccine.

It is all-but-impossible to get those conclusions out of standard mainstream news reporting about this.  It’s just too dog-bites-man, I guess.  It doesn’t fit into the modern style of fear-oriented journalism.  Instead, what will catch your eye is some chart showing an apparently high rate of side effects.  With no way for you to know that this is completely normal, no different from the experience of other age groups, and not hugely different from the side-effect rates for flu vaccine.

Post #1316: The universal state budget surplus of FY 2021 and the economic boom of FY 2022.

 

In Post #G21-058, I stumbled across an interesting finding.  More-or-less every U.S. state had a large (often record) budget surplus for FY 2021.  As far as I can tell, this has gotten exactly zero notice in the popular press.

Reading a few reports of these surpluses, it seems like various sources of state tax receipts started to pick up around April 2021 and just haven’t quit since.  And nobody is quite exactly sure why, although the obvious suspect is all the spending power that the Federal government injected into the economy over the past 18 months.

Now here’s the weird thing, and the main conclusion that I’ve drawn so far:  We seem to be in a genuine economic boom.  I keep looking for signs that revenue growth will be petering out, now that we’re reaching the end of the pandemic.  But there’s no sign of that in sight.

At some level, it shouldn’t be a surprise.  The Federal government has just gotten through two years of the largest peacetime economic stimulus in U.S. history.  A good chunk of that was simply saved, presumably to be spent later.

And now, with all that free money burning holes in many pockets, the result is just standard Keynesian economics.  There’s a whole lot of new economic activity, with a side-order of inflation.

But you’ll have to judge for yourself.  As I say, this started out as a study of state budgets, and rapidly turned into an analysis of just how rapidly the U.S. economy seems to be heating up.

U.S. Treasury Revenues are clearly up.

Let me start with the most stable source of timely national information on economic activity that I know of:  The Monthly U.S. Treasury Statement.  If somebody’s making money from it, it’s a good bet that Uncle Sam is taxing it.  So, putting aside the big lump of revenue that arrives at tax time, Federal receipts provide a pretty good estimate of the pace of economic activity.

Source:  My plot, of data taken directly from the U.S. Monthly Treasury Statement.

No matter which perspective you take — two decades, or five years — we have clearly entered a period of rapid growth in U.S. Treasury receipts.

Flash GDP estimates are running to double-digit growth.

These get a little murkier, as they are no longer hard data, but are estimates from somebody’s economic model, fed by current data.  For this, I’m relying on the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s GDPNow estimate.

“The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the fourth quarter of 2021 is 8.5 percent ”

They also note that their model is well above the “blue chip consensus forecast” of real GDP.

Virginia’s general fund revenue numbers are running 10 to 15 percent above the same period last year.

Source:  Virginia monthly revenue letter, September 2021.

And, from what I can tell by casually checking a few other states, this is not unusual.  Seems like a lot of states have seen broadly-based revenue growth continuing well into FY 2022.

Whether or not state tax receipts will continue to grow is the question of the moment.

The fact that started me on this analysis — the large number of states with record FY 2021 budget surplus — has not gone unnoticed in the academic press.  Of the articles that have focused on this, the Pew Charitable Trust managed to hit the nail on the head.

Awash in Cash, State Lawmakers Ask How Long the Boom Will Last, dated July 26, 2021, by Sophie Quinton. 

By now, more-or-less everyone involved in state finance has noted the jump in revenues in FY 2021.

But here are two conclusions, based on that article, that I find remarkable.

  1. Nobody has any idea how long these higher revenues will last.
  2. A far as I can tell, other than direct federal payments to states for COVID relief, nobody has any firm idea of what caused the jump in revenues, including tax revenues.

Here’s a quote that pretty much sums it up:

“The growth trajectory—it’s higher than we expected,” said Adams of Idaho’s Division of Financial Management. “I don’t anticipate that it will continue at this pace. I don’t think anyone does, frankly.”

Kate Watkins, who leads the team that prepares revenue forecasts for the Colorado legislature, said she expects Colorado’s revenue growth to flatten out.

“In many cases,” she said, “we’re still waiting on data to validate what the story is moving forward, whether or not this is really kind of a blip or if it really is a sustainable growth trajectory.”

As I read it, the reason there’s no “smoking gun” is that revenue growth is quite broad-based.  Not only is income tax withholding up, so is sales tax, so are corporate tax payments, and so on.

Basically, we seem to be in the middle of an economic boom.  One that doesn’t seem to have gotten much attention.  But one for which the Federal and State tax data, and the flash GDP estimates, suggest is pretty substantial.

Amidst all the negative press regarding the President, I sure haven’t heard much about the U.S. being in the middle of rapid GDP growth.  The only sign of that has been the steadily falling unemployment rate.

But, as far as I can tell, that appears to be true.  I started out assuming that we were in the middle of some temporary bubble in state finances caused by direct Federal pandemic relief.  But now, that appears to be wrong.  For whatever reason — making up for lost time in the pandemic, spending all that free pandemic money, or who knows why — we’re suddenly in the middle of economic good times.

 

Post #1315: COVID-19 trend to 11/5/2021: Probable start of the U.S. winter wave.

 

Let me get right to it.  I think we haven’t had winter wave of COVID-19 yet because we haven’t had much winter yet.  Certainly not when you compare this year to the same months last year.

And now that’s changing.  Both the weather, and the trend in U.S. cases.  Let me do the U.S. COVID-19 case counts first, then talk about the weather. Continue reading Post #1315: COVID-19 trend to 11/5/2021: Probable start of the U.S. winter wave.

Post #1314: William and Mary COVID-19 trend to 10-5-2021, 7 new cases this week.

 

I’m continuing to track this just because you can’t easily recover the history of case counts off the William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard.

I would classify this week’s seven new cases as no different from new case rate for the past six weeks.  In other words, I wouldn’t read anything into it.

Source:  Calculated from William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard, last accessed 11/5/2021.

If you read any of the rest of my blog — and there’s no reason you should — you can see that I’m still waiting for any sign of a U.S. winter COVID-19 wave.

So far, there’s nothing.  Just a little flattening of the trend in the past two weeks.  Same thing appears to be happening in Canada.

But in the U.S. South, and Virginia in particular, the COVID-19 new case rate continues on a modest downward trend.

If that changes, I’ll surely note it in these William and Mary posts.

For now, no news is good news.

Post #G21-058: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 2: Peppers

 

This is the gardening post I started to write yesterday.  We’ve finally hit full fall conditions here in Northern Virginia, with frost or near-frost conditions each night.  So this is a post about a few final things I learned in this year’s gardening.

In a nutshell:

  • If you are planting sweet potatoes, plant lots of slips, rather than counting on the spreading of the vines to fill your beds.
  • Radiant barrier works well to extend the fall season of low-to-the-ground crops such as lettuce.
  • Might as well plant what survives well, rather than struggle to keep ill-suited crops alive.

Sweet potato nuances:  In times of famine …

“In times of famine, we’d be glad to have that.”  That’s the polite phrase my wife uses when I pull some undesirable bit of produce out of the garden.

It’s far nicer than “who in their right mind would eat that”, yet makes the same point.  It can be said equally of the undesirable (e.g., eggplant), the ludicrously undersized (e.g., pinky-sized carrots), and the only-partially-edible (e.g., spade-marked potatoes).

But before I diss the sweet potato as mere famine-food, let me sing its praises.  As far as I can tell, it needs absolutely no care whatsoever, other than keeping it watered until it gets established.  It grows like a weed, covering its beds and shading out any actual weeds.  It puts out lovely little morning-glory-type flowers (as it is in the same family as morning glory).  It produces a lot of calories per square foot.  You can plant it beneath taller plants (such as sunflowers or peppers) and it’ll cover the ground beneath and produce tubers.  And harvest is easy — peel back the vines, scrape the soil, and you’ll see the tops of the sweet potatoes, ready to be pulled.

The yield of calories per square foot is only slightly lower than potatoes (per this reference).  If I’ve done the metric-to-ridiculous conversion correctly, that works out to just about 100 edible calories per square foot for either of them.

I learned one important thing about sweet potato cultivation this year:  Plant lots of slips.

This year, I grew them on a lark.  I had a few store-bought sweet potatoes that had gotten moldy, and I decided to try to grow slips from them rather than just toss them.  One out of three moldy potatoes yielded slips. But I figured it wouldn’t matter, as they would spread, and could be easily propagated by cutting the ends of vines and re-planting them.

So I started with just a handful of slips, and I let those spread to fill out the allotted portions of the beds.  I had heard that the vines would put out sweet potatoes wherever they set down roots, as they spread out.  I figured that I’d end up with a bed full of sweet potatoes, despite starting with just a few plants.

That was a mistake.  Sure, the vines will put out additional sweet potatoes as they spread.  But each vine only puts out big sweet potatoes at the original rooting spot for that vine.  As it went along, it produced additional sweet potatoes at various nodes along the vine.  But all of those “secondary” sweet potatoes were much smaller.  

Here’s my harvest, from about 50 square feet of raised beds.  (The hammer is  there to give a sense of scale.)

By weight, I ended up with a roughly 60/40 mix of sweet potatoes of the size you’d see in the store, and sweet potatoes of the “in times of famine” variety.  Large enough that they’re probably worth the effort of peeling and eating.  But only just.

The moral of the story?  In my climate (Zone 7), plant lots of slips.  You can grow them the lazy way, by planting a few slips and letting the vines run to cover the allotted bed space.  But you don’t want to.  That gives you a few good-sized sweet potatoes, and a whole lot of undersized ones.  I’d have done far better to have had three times as many slips, and kept the vines one-third as long.

Would I plant these again?  You bet.  I’m just going to plant them a little smarter next year.  Stick them in the ground in the spring.  Come back in the fall and harvest a significant amount of food.  That’s pretty hard to argue with.

Radiant barrier for late lettuce.

In April (Post #G21-018), I tested the idea of using a radiant barrier to keep raised beds warm at night.  And by tested, I mean tested.  I used data loggers to track temperatures overnight in beds with and without a radiant barrier cover.  The cover raised the bed temperatures by about 10F.

In Virginia, 10F should add about a month to the growing season.  In Vienna, VA, over the past 30 years, the median date at which nighttime temperatures reached 22F or lower was roughly December 8.  Compared to an expected first-frost date in the first week of November.

So, this fall, I’m putting that to use.  Beneath the radiant barrier above is a small patch of lettuce.  So far, practice validates theory.  My lettuce is still alive despite a couple of frosts so far this week.  I hope to grow that lettuce — albeit slowly (Post #G21-055) — into December.

In the end, I’m not sure this is any less effort than a hoop-house style greenhouse, set atop the bed.  (PVC pipes bent into semi-circles, anchored to the ground, and covered with clear plastic sheet.)  But I already own the pieces of radiant barrier, cut to size.  So radiant barrier it is.  It works.

Final harvest before winter:  Peppers and other stragglers.

With frost coming, I did that garden ritual of picking absolutely everything that was left in the garden.  That yielded the artfully arranged jumble you see above.  Or the more orderly view of the same pile, below.

This year, overwhelmingly, what was left was peppers.  Green to the left, banana to the right, cayenne at the top.  (The cayennes are green, but in theory they will turn red now that they’ve been picked.)

I’m ambivalent about peppers.  They don’t produce a lot of calories.  But they pickle well, they’re OK in salads, and they have the outstanding advantage of taking care of themselves.  Nothing around here seems to bother them much.

The lesson learned here is that I didn’t start out to have a pepper-heavy garden.  With the exception of the eggplant and beans, these are the long-term survivors of what I planted back in the spring/early summer.  With the lesson being that if I’m aiming for the best yield per unit of effort, maybe I need to change my attitude toward a family of produce that manages to last the whole year with no effort on my part.

Concluding remarks for the 2021 gardening year.

At the end of 2021, the only things left growing are some lettuce, and some garlic that I planted for harvest next year.  So now’s a good time to recap and tentatively plan for what I’ll grow next year.

Non-food crops:  Sunflowers, marigolds, zinnias.  These are nice for taking up the odd corners of the garden and attracting bees.  Zero upkeep other than watering the sunflowers in the driest part of the year.  The sunflowers require serious deer deterrents.  But they look nice, they feed the bird and the bees.  So why not grow them again.

Low-maintenance starchy root crops:  Potatoes, sweet potatoes.  Those are both a definite yes for next year.  So far those have been zero maintenance with good yield.  Fresh potatoes tasted particularly good.  I won’t bother with fingerling potatoes (turned out way too small).  I’ll plan to fill a bed with sweet potato slips, rather than count on the spread of the vines to fill the bed.

Tomatoes:  Yes, but.  I will continue to “follow the rules” as I did this year, including staking and trimming.  But I need to stagger the plantings by month so that I have them coming in all year.  I have a least-effort process for making small batches of tomato sauce down cold (Post #G21-046).  But if I’m going to end up making sauce, I should just go ahead and plant Romas or similar, as that should be much more energy-efficient (Post #G21-046).  The home-dried tomatoes were a big hit, so I will definitely do that again next year.  Given that, it’s well worth working out a practical way to do that with solar energy, in my humid climate (Post #G21-050).

Cucumbers and summer squash.  I’m going to give those a pass next year.  I expected these to be mainstays of my garden.  Instead, after one year of bliss, they turned out to be nothing but trouble.  I how have a garden area infested with cucumber beetles and targeted by squash vine borers.  I may consider growing parthenocarpic (self-fertile, no-bees-needed) cucumbers under netting.  But honestly, once you reach that point, it’s like Mother Nature is telling you to grow something else.

Butternut squash.  Those are a definite yes.  They seem to grow well, produce a reasonable yield of calories per square foot, and keep well once harvested.  And they’re tasty.  I can even keep the powdery mildew off them if I’m willing to put in the effort (Post #G20).  The traditional Waltham variety has beaten all others that I’ve tried.  And they all taste the same.  So I see no reason to plant anything but that.

Green beans.  Despite early failures, those are definitely on the list.  For some reason, my first two plantings got hit by common bean mosaic.  Only the last planting had a significant yield.  They are labor-intensive to pick, but when they grow, they produce a nice steady yield.

Peas.  Of course, peas.  No work, some yield.  Every year, I am tempted into growing “bush type” peas, figuring they need no support.  Every year, I regret that when I end up with a tangle of peas that is difficult to harvest and impossible to weed.  So my pledge is never to grow peas without support again.  No matter what.

Beets, rutabagas, turnips, radishes.  Maybe.  I’m taking radishes off the list.  Even if they grow to size, I just don’t like them enough to bother to grow them.  Beets have been a total failure due to failure-to-sprout.  But I now know this is a common problem in heavy soils, and I’ll try something new next year.  Rutabagas and turnips were a near-total-failure this year, for reasons unknown.  But the turnip varieties that grew were tasty — not at all like the turnips of my youth.  So these remain on the list, if only because, in theory, you can get an early spring crop of them.  I’m not going to bother with a fall crop because, unlike the spring crop, the fall-planted ones were devastated by insect or insects unknown.

Lettuce:  Yes.  I never had any luck at all in the past, but this year, the lettuce seemed to thrive with no intervention on my part.  Zero calories, but nice in salads.  I’ll go for both a spring and a fall crop again.

Peppers.  Well, I guess so.  I mean, they are edible, they produce a nice steady crop, and (this year, at least) they seem to grow with no intervention on my part.  They make a nice lacto-fermented pickle when there are more than can be eaten at once.  Now that I know that I can grow them, rather than pick up the first seed pack I see at the hardware store, I’ll do a little more research on sweet pepper varieties.

Others.  I’ll probably try okra again, but only if I can get my hands on some of the high-yield varieties.  Four mature Clemson Spineless never gave me enough pods at one time to do anything with.  Eggplant, I may try for a late-spring planting.  A planting for fall harvest yielded a lot of leaves and little in the way of anything edible.  I have a few herbs that may overwinter, and I have garlic started for harvest next year.  I may try walking onions next year.  Not that I’m particularly fond of them, but every other variety of onion I have tried has failed.  I’m still undecided on pumpkins, if only because they need a lot of space and a lot of time to mature.  If I plant them again, they are going in early, in the back corners of the yard.  And then if they survive, great, and if they don’t, so be it.

That’s it for this garden year.  I don’t anticipate posting anything about gardening until next year.  If then.

Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

 

With the onset of cold weather, I’m now waiting to see what this year’s crop of nuts is going to look like.  I am of course referring to events of two days ago, here in Virginia.  I’m hoping that our newly elected leadership will be in the mold of traditional (that is, rational) Virginia Republicans.  But ever since the last Republican administration here, which I will describe briefly below, that assumption of rationality has been questionable.

Anyway, this started off as a post on gardening, but quickly morphed into a post on politics.

Let me start with the interesting fact that you probably haven’t realized, first.  And then get into it.

Continue reading Post #1313: Nuts, peppers, and storing up for winter. Part 1: Nuts.

Post #G21-057: First frost, fall garden fail, COVID winter prep

 

Depending on exactly which forecast you believe, we should have our first frost in Vienna VA sometime in the next few days, possibly as early as tonight.  The National Weather Service is showing lows of 33F for the next few nights at Dulles Airport.  Other forecasts show lows of 31F.

A first frost date in the next few days puts us more-or-less exactly on the recent upward trend line.  This is the National Weather Service data for Dulles, VA. for the past few decades.

Not unexpected.

At this point, I can evaluate my “fall garden” as more-or-less a complete failure.  In theory, you can plant crops late in the summer, for fall harvest.  In practice, as far as I can tell, plants grow so slowly in the reduced temperatures and sunlight of the fall (Post #055) that the harvest is hardly worth the effort.

Plants that were already well-established continued to produce at reduced levels.  E.g., I got a few more peppers off the pepper plants.  But the plants that I put in at the end of August have produced more-or-less nothing.  A few eggplant, a few lettuce leaves.  Not worth the bother.

In hindsight, I note that a lot of the sites that I referenced said that you can plant certain crops late in the year.  And that was true.  I planted them, and, in theory, I got them in before the days-to-maturity exceeded the likely first frost date.  I did, in fact, successfully grow them.

I think I’ve learned the difference between “can” and “should” in this case.  I can direct-sow crops in late summer for a fall harvest.  But I’m not convinced that I should.  This year, that seems to have been a near-total waste of time. Either I have to start my fall garden in the heat of late July, or start the plants indoors for planting outside in late August.  Or just skip it.

Finally, with first frost, we are now starting the season of low indoor relative humidity.  As I have noted in many prior posts, I think that low relative humidity increases the spread of respiratory illness.   I believe that national heating and cooling experts say the same:

As of today, there’s scant indication that there will be any resurgence of COVID-19 this winter.  That said, I’m sticking to the plan.  I have a couple of hygrometers placed around my home.  (Why not?  They’re cheap.)  When indoor relative humidity dips below 40 percent, I’m going to drag my humidifiers out of the closet and get them running.  As with wearing a mask, or getting vaccinated, it’s just another harmless bit of cheap insurance against airborne illness.