Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

I was just thinking yesterday while scrubbing my hands for the fourth time before noon - that’s the one Covid-era activity that I will carry on forever.

 

Yes, that's a new habit I won't break. It will be interesting to see if come flu season the illness rate bounces back to its pre-covid levels. It'll increase for sure, but it might remain lower than before due to better public health hygiene by a significant percentage of the public.

 

Not a perfect analogy, but people who refused to wear a condom and knowingly spread HIV at the height of that mess were charged with various crimes, including assault and homicide.

 

'Lockdown' states like California did better economically than 'looser' states like Florida, new COVID data shows

 

I'm glad their GDP numbers were relatively peachy. I'm pretty sure people care more about jobs, however.

California unemployment claims rise, now 67% above normal

California unemployment rate: 8.3%
Florida unemployment rate: 4.8%

 

Did you even read the story?

It’s true that if unemployment is your metric, California has a very high rate relative to Florida. But people who dropped out of the labor force because of COVID — either because they contracted it or because of concern for themselves or their families — are not counted in the unemployment rate. Likewise, there’s evidence that states that opened up earlier may have reduced their employees’ hours because fewer people were coming through the doors; the reduction in hours per employee was 4.2 percent in Texas versus 1.1 percent in California. So unemployment is actually quite complicated, and you can’t really rely on it.

[The UCLA report also suggests that “the answer lies in the structure of the California economy.” In California, “sectors with a high degree of human contact” — that is, “leisure and hospitality, education, retail trade, and health care and social services” — contributed only “0.3 percentage points to annual GDP growth over the decade preceding the pandemic.” But last year, “they accounted for 75 percent of the state’s job losses.”

Meanwhile, the sectors driving growth in California — “information, professional and business services, manufacturing and financial services” — weren’t hit nearly as hard. That helps to explain the discrepancy between the state’s unemployment rate and its overall economic performance. UCLA expects “many of those lost jobs to return.”]

 

Yeah, anyone wanting to claim there's an unemployment problem anywhere in California hasn't been anywhere IN California lately.

Case in point: I'm staying at a Marriott for a couple of days while my home gets tented; even though it was renovated during Covid, the bar, restaurant and kitchen are closed and, get this, housekeeping comes one time per week per stay.

While I was at the front desk this morning, the CSR asked her colleague, "do you know anyone who wants a housekeeping job? We just lost two more..."

 

Yeah, I'm seeing a lot of those "we can't find anyone to work" stories in my neck of the woods, too. I still was 0-for-applications in NC before I took a job out of state . . . in Florida.

In a 40-hour work week, that difference amounts to 1.2 hours per week.

 

But I thought NC handled Coronavirus better than anyone?

 

Nah. Just better than New York and California.

And I don't blame the virus for it, anyway. I just haven't seen employers handing out jobs willy-nilly since the late 80s in the newspaper industry.

 

I don't know how the newspaper industry was in Russia, but in the US in the Eighties they were not "handing out jobs willy-nilly."