Employment Surge Boosts Recovery

 Popular Economics Weekly

MarketWatch

Another sign of a roaring 2020’s economy just came out, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) today. The February employment report added 355,000 jobs just to payrolls in leisure and hospitality — restaurants, hotels, casinos, theaters—all in the service sector.

These industries had lost 500,000 jobs during the pandemic. A total of 379,000 jobs were created with manufacturing, wholesale trade and retail sales adding to the total.

“The rebound in job creation in February is likely the start of a major new cycle of hiring. Warmer weather, falling coronavirus cases, rising vaccinations and another massive increase in federal stimulus are likely to act as jet fuel for the economy in the spring and summer,” says MarketWatch’s Jeffry Bartash.

A rebound in the service sector is what economists have been waiting for. It means more consumer spending on travel, dining out, and visits to public venues like sports and museums.

There is one caveat, however. Dr. Fauci and other health experts are warning that the pandemic fight isn’t over. There could be an infection surge in the spring with new variants of the virus beginning to appear for which the current vaccines are not as effective.

COVIDTrackingProject

CDC head, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, has repeatedly warned that declining case numbers have stalled at a high level, and urged Americans to stick with the recommended safeguards — frequent hand washing, social distancing and wearing a face mask in public — until it’s their turn to be vaccinated.

"Things are tenuous," Dr. Rochelle Walensky said at a White House briefing. "Now is not the time to relax restrictions." The U.S. is still averaging about 70,000 cases a day and the seven-day average is higher today than it was earlier in the week, she said. "This recent shift in the pandemic must be taken seriously," she said. If the infection rate remains at such a high level, the virus, and new variants of the virus, will continue to spread, she said. "We may be done with the virus, but the virus is not done with us,"

This happened with the Spanish flu pandemic of 100 years ago, which prolonged the original ‘roaring 20’s’ recovery for another year. It is literally a race to vaccinate as many people as possible to limit the spread of these new variants.

Harlan Green © 2021

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen

“When Will We Ever Learn?”

Answering the Kennedys’ Call

@TBPInvictus

Pete Seeger first wrote his ode to ending wars, Where Have All the Flowers Gone? in 1955 but it could just as well apply to today’s war against the novel coronavirus pandemic that is killing more Americans than all the wars since World War II. It ends with the stanza:

Where have all the graveyards gone?
Covered with flowers every one
When will we ever learn?
When will we ever learn?

Yet one political party has chosen to surrender to the pandemic, rather than follow the scientific guidelines of the CDC, WIH, and FDA in many of the red states it controls.

Thirty-eight U.S. states have seen a rise in cases in the last 14 days, says MarketWatch’s Jeffrey Bartash. Harvard Global Health Institute researchers have developed a national tracker to trace the severity of the outbreak on a state-by-state basis, and it’s flashing red for red states like Arizona, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Georgia with 25 cases per 100,000 people.

Republicans are also ignoring the rising death toll by holding political rallies without mandating the mask and social-distancing requirements in the face of today’s 63,500 plus coronavirus infections per day in the US and still rising.

President Trump was going to hold a rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire that is now postponed, in spite of the objections of its Police Commissioner, Stefany Shaheen, who has called such a rally without requiring mask-wearing and social-distancing the waging of “biological warfare” against vulnerable New Hampshire residents—and even the diehard out of state Trump supporter’s already arriving in New Hampshire that has one of the lowest infection rates in the US.

This is after Trump held a rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma that Tulsa’s Medical Director said caused an outbreak of COVID-19 infections. “The president lives in a biological bunker,” said Shaheen. “He gets tested all of the time and yet the people attending this rally are not. They’re not getting daily testing. They don’t know if the person next to them without a mask has COVID-19. It is unacceptable and it’s dangerous.”

There is no rational or moral reason to hold any large gatherings at this time when all the health agencies say many states and counties should in fact close down again, since the pandemic is now racing out of control.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci is now warning about the consequences of such ignorance. “When you don’t have unanimity in an approach to something, you’re not as effective in how you handle it,” he said in an interview Thursday with FiveThirtyEight’s PODCAST-19, as quoted by Bartash. “So I think you’d have to make the assumption that, if there wasn’t such divisiveness, that we would have a more coordinated approach.”

 The U.S. death toll stands at 133,291. Brazil is second to the U.S. with 1.76 million cases and 69,184 deaths. India is third measured by cases at 793,802, followed by Russia with 712,863 and Peru with 316,448.

Why are Republicans making such a cold and really very stupid political calculation while President Trump’s ratings continue to fall? Why won’t they learn the lessons this pandemic is showing them?
Perhaps it’s because the credo of self-reliance is no more than a myth propagated by those who refuse to share their wealth.

Mother Nature’s latest pandemic will win in any encounter with the followers of an ideology choosing to ignore safety measures in the name of self-reliance, as I said yesterday, rather than a “unanimity of approach.”

What mother doesn’t rely on the shared generosity of others to raise their children?

Harlan Green © 2020

Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen