Here, via the LA Times, is the current availability of ICU beds in California:

The five big counties of Southern California, which account for about half the state’s population, are responsible for 70 percent of all new COVID-19 cases over the past week and 66 percent of all ICU beds. LA County, which has about a quarter of the state’s population, is responsible for roughly a third of both new cases and ICU beds.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Congressional negotiators are working feverishly to complete a coronavirus relief bill before Christmas, but they’re having a difficult time because Republicans are insisting that the total bill come in under a trillion dollars. Why? Because, they say, they’re concerned about the federal debt.

They shouldn’t be. First off, here’s a comparison of US federal debt to our peer countries before the pandemic:

And here are interest payments on the federal debt over the past 60 years:

Neither one of these suggests any need for panic. As long as investors are eager to buy our debt—and they very much are—we’ll do fine. What’s more, investors will continue to be eager to buy our debt as long as our economy is fundamentally sound. They care much more about this than they do about whether interest outlays increase by a tenth of a percent or so, and strong stimulus spending is what keeps the economy humming until we emerge from the pandemic.

For what it’s worth, I’d also like to repeat something I’ve said before: If you combine the CARES Act with the likely $900 billion from the upcoming relief bill, it comes to $3.1 trillion over the course of 18 months. That’s about $2.1 trillion per year, or 10 percent of GDP. This is more than three times higher than the Obama stimulus bill. Republicans may be misguided in their supposed concern about the debt, but macroeconomically we’re really not doing too badly this time around.

If you take a flash picture at night with an entirely empty background, the foreground object will seem to be floating in inky blackness. In this picture, a bearded iris is in the foreground but all the background stuff is so far off that the flash doesn’t reach it.

I would have tried a few other things to see if I could get a better example, but it was cold and I got bored quickly. Maybe some other time. What would be a good object to study?

Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post via ZUMA

I don’t remember who made this point a few days ago, but it’s worth repeating: Every Republican who yelled and screamed about Donald Trump being robbed was someone with no responsibility over election administration. Among those who did have responsibility for the counting of votes and the declaring of winners, every single one acted properly. That includes governors, secretaries of state, county clerks, registrars, election commissioners, judges (most of them, anyway), and the Supreme Court.

This is, needless to say, not a defense of the jackasses who kowtowed to Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh by going on Fox News every day to whip the Republican rank and file into a frenzy over a “stolen” election. They did real damage, and they deserve to be shunned. That said, even direct, personal pressure from Trump himself failed to move any of the Republican officials who actually had the power to aid his doomed cause.

I’m not entirely sure what lesson to take from this, but at the very least it suggests that democracy in the United States is a little stronger than we might be giving it credit for.

Chris Christie is getting a lot of kudos for this:

Former New Jersey GOP Gov. Chris Christie says in a new national TV ad that he regrets not wearing a mask while visiting the White House earlier this year, a choice he acknowledges led to him contracting the coronavirus and spending a week in the ICU https://t.co/xQ4sCS3Kbw

— CNN (@CNN) December 17, 2020

I’m reluctant to be churlish about this since Christie is, finally, telling people to wear a mask. At the same time, he’s still playing coy. He didn’t contract COVID-19 at the White House because he didn’t wear a mask, he contracted it because no one else was wearing a mask. He’s just afraid to say so because that’s an implicit criticism of Donald Trump.

Does that matter? Am I just being churlish? Yes it matters, and no, I’m not just being churlish. The problem here is that Christie is fooling people into thinking they can avoid the coronavirus if they wear a mask, and that’s plain wrong. What he should be telling people is that they can avoid the coronavirus if they refuse to attend functions where everyone is going maskless. This is, perhaps, a more difficult message and a more partisan one, but it’s also the one that can actually save lives.

Italy’s mortality rate is rising again. France and Britain have stopped declining and are now plateauing. Sweden and Germany are trending upward nearly vertically. Canada and Mexico are steadily rising. And the US recorded 3,656 deaths on Wednesday.

On a related subject, here’s a chart comparing the COVID-19 mortality rate in the Nordic countries to a few large European countries:

Whenever I read about the “Swedish experiment,” Sweden is compared to the other Nordic countries. But is that right? Or should it be compared to other European countries in general? After all, “Nordic countries” is just an arbitrary grouping, and it’s not as if there’s something about their geography that’s much different from Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, etc. On the other hand, Sweden is culturally similar to Denmark and Norway and has similar social services. So I’m not sure what the right comparison is.

In any case, what we see here is that Sweden was in sync with the rest of the Nordic countries until the first week of November. Then, for some reason, both Sweden and Germany took off. This is despite the fact that Sweden has famously lax shutdown rules while Germany has famously strict shutdown rules. Meanwhile, Denmark, Norway, and Finland have remained pretty low for now—although Denmark’s case rate started skyrocketing a couple of weeks ago.

All this is to say that whenever I think we’ve finally figured out if the Swedish model is “working,” it turns out that maybe we haven’t figured it out after all. Maybe Sweden will suddenly turn down next week. Maybe the rest of Scandinavia will start skyrocketing in a few weeks. Who knows? This is why even though Sweden looks horrible right now, I still think we should withhold judgment until spring.

And if the other Nordic countries stay low? Then we should all be asking what they did right. Germany gets all the attention for its disciplined approach to the pandemic, but right now they look like slackers compared to Denmark, Norway, and Finland. Even Canada doesn’t come close. What’s their secret?

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through December 16. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

On average, the economy might be in reasonably good shape right now. But averages can hide a lot. For example, here is the number of people living in poverty:

Before the pandemic, poverty was steadily declining, as you’d expect during an economic expansion. Then the pandemic hit, but thanks to the CARES Act poverty actually spiked downward to about 30 million people.

But since June, when the stimulus benefits ran out, poverty has grown and grown. It’s up by about 8 million people since its low point in June, and by about 5 million people compared to a trendline of where it would likely be if the economy had continued to expand. Either way, that’s a lot of people living in poverty who don’t have to be. Hopefully the bonus unemployment benefits in the relief bill currently being debated will get that number back down at the start of 2021.

Today I’d like to show you a chart you probably haven’t seen before. Here it is:

The blue line shows personal expenditure plus personal saving: in other words, the total amount of money that households have available to them. The two red lines show the trends of this number starting two years before the Great Recession and then two years before the current pandemic recession. The difference is stark.

In 2008, a housing bust produced a huge loss of household wealth and a concurrent reduction in household demand. This hurled the economy into the Great Recession, which led to large-scale unemployment and a substantial loss in household funds. Stimulus spending from the federal government amounted to $1 trillion over two years, which was nowhere near enough. As you can see, we never—not to this day—recovered to the old trendline.

The pandemic recession has been completely different. There was no huge loss of wealth and the federal government almost immediately pumped $2.2 trillion into the economy over the course of nine months. Today, we have not only recovered to the trendline, we’re above it—and getting ready to spend another trillion dollars.

This is a dramatic illustration of two things. First, what if we had done the same thing back in 2009? The equivalent amount of stimulus would have been in the range of $4-5 trillion over two years and probably would have stopped the recession cold. Second, we’re in surprisingly good shape right now. If the economy is able to fully open up this summer, there’s every reason to think that economic recovery will be quick. The main thing is to keep people whole, housed, and fed in the meantime.

This is a secretary bird at the San Diego Zoo. Why is it called that? One theory, promoted by the font of all knowledge, explains that the name derives from secretarius, which is what local farmers near the Cape of Good Hope called it. And why did they call it that? Perhaps Dutch settlers called it sagittarius and someone just misheard them. Another theory is that the name derives from the bird’s quill-like feathers, which “give the appearance of a secretary with quill pens tucked behind his/her ears.” Yet another theory is that the name derives from the Arabic saqr-et-tair, or “hunter bird.” Take your pick.

This man will not rest until everyone gets their stimulus checks.Tom Brenner - Pool Via Cnp/CNP via ZUMA

Good ol’ Washington DC. Congress decided to remove aid to states from the coronavirus relief bill, which brought the total price tag down below $800 billion. But that seemed like kind of a waste since everyone was willing to go up to a trillion. So why not toss in a little early Christmas present for everyone?

The price tag of the emerging deal is roughly $900 billion, and a deal could be finalized on Wednesday, those sources said. Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.) said the proposal would likely include direct checks to individuals of $600 to $700 and a weekly unemployment boost of $300 through March.

So there you have it: another stimulus check and three months of bonus unemployment benefits. Who says Congress can’t make deals these days?