Yesterday I showed you the surprisingly high differences between police spending in various big cities in California. Here’s a different look at the same thing:

Spending on police does increase along with violent crime rates, but not by a lot. Los Angeles, for example, spends twice as much as Modesto to achieve about the same violent crime rate.

I wouldn’t try to draw any conclusions from this. It’s just a way of showing that police funding is surprisingly variable even when it achieves essentially the same results.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 10. Nothing especially new to report.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

How useful is mask wearing? Two new studies suggest it works pretty well. First up is a study from Germany that compared the city of Jena, where mask wearing became compulsory early on, with a “synthetic Jena” designed to be similar to the real Jena. Here are the results:

The authors believe the introduction of face masks to Jena had a very substantial effect on the spread of COVID-19:

We believe that the reduction in the growth rates of infections by 40% to 60% is our best estimate of the effects of face masks….We should also stress that 40 to 60% might still be a lower bound. The daily growth rates in the number of infections when face masks were introduced was around 2 to 3%. These are very low growth rates compared to the early days of the epidemic in Germany, where daily growth rates also lay above 50%. One might therefore conjecture that the effects might have been even greater if masks had been introduced earlier.

Next up is a CDC study of the COVID-19 outbreak on the USS Theodore Roosevelt. The biggest reductions in virus spread are represented by the numbers that are the furthest below one:

Mask use is the most effective countermeasure, followed by social distancing and avoiding common areas. Hand sanitizer use may also be effective, but the error bars extend above one, so we can’t be sure.

These are just two studies, both with flaws. The Jena study is a single city and depends on the quality of the synthetic control constructed by the authors. The Roosevelt study is based on an artificial environment with a non-random sample. As always, more research is needed. Nonetheless, both of these point in the same direction: mask wearing is highly effective in halting the spread of COVID-19.

Krista Kennell/ZUMA

Over at NRO, Ramesh Ponnuru points to a YouGov poll showing weak public support for cutting police funding:

The results for “cut funding for police departments” was that 16 percent favored it and 65 percent opposed it. The highest support for the idea, 33 percent, was found among black respondents, but a narrow plurality of 36 percent of them still opposed it.

Fine, but this poll was taken only a few days after George Floyd was killed. Have things changed since then? Here’s a YouGov poll taken a couple of days ago:

So approval for cutting police funding has increased from 16 percent to 22 percent. That’s not huge movement, but it’s not bad for a single week. Nevertheless, it’s still nowhere within light years of a majority. “Defund the Police” has a long way to go to get the public on its side.

This is yet another in my series of photographs of lantana growing wild at the Jeffrey overpass of the 405 freeway. I’ve only got one more left, so enjoy this while you can.

How much scope is there for cutting spending on police? Just to give you an idea, here’s the variation in spending among big California cities:

In Los Angeles, residents pay an average of $750 per year for police protection. In Fresno, which has about the same violent crime rate, they pay only $450 each. In San Diego, with a modestly lower violent crime rate, they pay about $300 each.

That’s a huge range, and obviously there’s more to the picture than just the crime rate. Nonetheless, it does give at least a hint that there’s considerable scope for reductions in some of our highest spending cities.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through June 9. The UK and Canada have both put their upward spikes behind them and look to be declining again. Mexico is climbing very steeply. So is Argentina, though from a tiny base. The US is continuing its slow decline.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Ringo Chiu/ZUMA

You don’t want lengthy explanations. You just want an answer after all the confusion of yesterday. I’ve got you covered:

Q: Even if I’m not feeling any symptoms of COVID-19, can I still infect other people if I myself am infected but don’t know it?

A: Yes, very much so.

That is all. Keep wearing those masks, people.

A new study published in Nature estimates that lockdown orders around the world “prevented or delayed on the order of 62 million confirmed cases, corresponding to averting roughly 530 million total infections.” That’s a lot! However, be aware that this is, as usual, based on a model of COVID-19 spread that may or may not be accurate.

In the US, the authors estimate that as of April 6, countermeasures reduced the number of cases by 4.8 million, or about 20,000 deaths using the current best estimate of the infection mortality ratio. That’s a whopping 93 percent decrease in cases and a 70 percent decrease in deaths.

But that’s not what interests me. This is:

The authors tried to tease out the impact of individual countermeasures and they confirmed what other studies have shown. First, school closures have no effect. Nor does shutting down churches. Travel bans are also ineffective. Just generally, rules banning large gatherings appear to have little impact. The measures with the highest impact are business closures, quarantines, home isolation, and general social distancing.

All of this has to be considered tentative, but this is now the third study I’ve seen showing that school closures have no effect—or even a slightly negative effect. These are empirical studies, and it’s frustrating that they don’t tell us why school closures have so little impact. Nonetheless, that’s what they show. I hope we take this to heart and re-open schools in the fall without thinking we have to take massive and debilitating (and expensive) countermeasures. There are some obvious things we can do to protect both kids and teachers, but generally speaking, it sure looks like only modest measures are needed to re-open schools safely without increasing the danger of COVID-19 spread.

This is a Grand Canyon elk. There was a time when they were shy and rarely seen, but those days are long gone. They are now so used to people that they’re positively dangerous (if you get too close and threaten them, anyway). This one was wandering across a parking lot blocking my way, so I hauled out my camera and took her picture. After she ambled off, I got onto the road and found the rest of her brood, all munching stuff alongside the road and causing a huge backup—which, I admit, I was part of. Eventually they crossed the road and we all went on our way.