Category Archives: coronavirus

Ukraine Invasion, COVID Spread in China Shrink World Economy

In just a month, the global economy has gone from showing signs of stalling growth to providing strong evidence the Earth's economy has resumed shrinking.

That's evident from the sharp drop in the pace at which carbon dioxide is increasing in the Earth's atmosphere recorded at the remote Mauna Loa observatory during the last month. The following chart confirms that outcome as measured by the trailing twelve month average of year-over-year change in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide:

Trailing Twelve Month Average of Year-Over-Year Change in Parts per Million of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, January 2000 - March 2022

There are two driving factors behind this development. First, Russia's 24 February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has disrupted coal, oil and especially natural gas flows from Russia to the European Union, as many EU nations are boycotting or have implemented economic sanctions against Russian firms.

The second major factor is China's increasing use of lockdowns as the government struggles to prevent the spread of COVID-19 within the country, which is also the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide. The lockdowns have shut down the country's largest economic center and are now spreading to more regions along with coronavirus infections.

In terms of overall impact for the global economy, we view Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a secondary event, while China's ongoing use of lockdowns clearly represents a continuation of the global coronavirus pandemic recession that originated within the country in 2019.

Update 20 April 2022

Welcome MarketWatch readers! For those interested, we have created a tool to estimate how the change in atmospheric carbon dioxide translates into lost GDP for the planet. Here are the earliest and most recent posts from that series where we've put a number on that impact:

A quick back of the envelope calculation with a net reduction of -0.80 parts per million in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's atmosphere from December 2019 through March 2022 puts the estimated net global GDP loss at $26.6 trillion. This estimate is likely on the high side of what the IMF and World Bank would estimate.

Reference

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Text File]. Updated 8 April 2022. Accessed 8 April 2022.

The End of Arizona’s Coronavirus Pandemic Experience

Arizona's coronavirus pandemic experience ~~is nearing its end~~ has come to an end.

The first sign that was the case came just a few days after the penultimate update to our long-running series. Arizona's Department of Health Services announced it would suspend daily reporting of the state's data on cases, hospitalizations, deaths, and numerous other related metrics on 26 February 2022 in a transition to weekly reporting that would begin on 2 March 2022. Here's an example of how the state's presentation of its data for new COVID-related hospital admissions presentation changed:

Change from Daily to Weekly Data Presentation for COVID-19 Hospitalizations - Source: Arizona DHS

We've followed Arizona's experience with the coronavirus pandemic for two reasons. First, we were among the first analysts to confirm the state had become an epicenter for COVID-19 infections within the U.S. in June 2020. Second, Arizona is one of 26 states that presented its high quality COVID-19 data on a daily basis, which made it possible to use back calculation techniques to identify both the timing and causes of major turning points in the state's pandemic experience, which we've featured throughout the series.

The change to weekly reporting however closes off our ability to continue our analysis, because the weekly data isn't granular enough to zero in on events contributing to changes in the state's COVID trends. That change however is something that only makes sense for public health officials if they no longer anticipate a need to continue that kind of tracking. It's good news.

Flashing forward one month later, Arizona remained one of 21 states with active COVID-19 emergency orders in effect. Arizona's public officials began signaling they would soon end the state of emergency for the coronavirus pandemic. Here's a Q&A with Arizona's Governor Doug Ducey from 23 March 2022:

Q: Any plans to end the state of emergency?

Ducey: Yes. The emergency is over, look around. The state is wide open. I think we had record number of people out for the Waste Management Phoenix Open. Spring training in full bloom and people are coming here from around the country and around the world to watch the games, so we’re excited about it. We’re winding down a number of things that are purely administrative. We’re working with the legislature, the general fund and federal authorities to bring an end to all of that.

So are we a couple of weeks away from that ending? Months? Days? "It's coming," Ducey remarked.

On 25 March 2022, Arizona's state government took a major step that will allow it to lift its two-year-old state of emergency for the pandemic.

Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey has signed legislation that will prevent temporary medical licenses issued under his coronavirus executive orders from immediately becoming invalid if he ends the state of emergency he issued two years ago.

Friday’s action extends temporary licenses issued since the Republican governor first declared a state of emergency on March 11, 2020. They will be valid until the end of the year if they were active at the start of this month.

Rep. Joanne Osborne of Goodyear told fellow Republicans in a caucus meeting last week that more than 2,200 licenses remain active, including about 1,200 issued to nurses. A waiver issued by the Department of Health Services under Ducey’s emergency order allowed doctors, nurses and other qualified health professionals to be licensed even if they lack current training or other requirements for an Arizona license.

The extension of the temporary licenses will allow boards that issue them time to process permanent license applications. The bill passed the Senate and House with only one no vote.

“If we want the emergency orders to end, this has to be taken care of first,” Republican Rep. Regina Cobb said at the same meeting of GOP House members. “And then once this is taken care of, then the governor can do what he needs to do as far as ending any emergency orders.”

At this writing, though it hasn't officially happened yet, the proverbial writing is on the wall. We've reached the end of our series on Arizona's experience with the coronavirus pandemic!

Previously on Political Calculations

Here is our previous coverage of Arizona's experience with the coronavirus pandemic, presented in reverse chronological order.

References

Political Calculations has been following Arizona's experience with the coronavirus experience from almost the beginning, because the state makes its high quality data publicly available. Specifically, the state's Departent of Health Services reports the number of cases by date of test sample collection, the number of hospitalizations by date of hospital admission, and the number of deaths by date recorded on death certificates.

This data, combined with what we know of the typical time it takes to progress to each of these milestones, makes it possible to track the state's daily rate of incidence of initial exposure to the variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus using back calculation methods. Links to that data and information about how the back calculation method works are presented below:

Arizona Department of Health Services. COVID-19 Data Dashboard: Vaccine Administration. [Online Database]. Accessed 17 February 2022.

Stephen A. Lauer, Kyra H. Grantz, Qifang Bi, Forrest K. Jones, Qulu Zheng, Hannah R. Meredith, Andrew S. Azman, Nicholas G. Reich, Justin Lessler. The Incubation Period of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) From Publicly Reported Confirmed Cases: Estimation and Application. Annals of Internal Medicine, 5 May 2020. https://doi.org/10.7326/M20-0504.

U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. COVID-19 Pandemic Planning Scenarios. [PDF Document]. 10 September 2020.

More or Less: Behind the Stats. Ethnic minority deaths, climate change and lockdown. Interview with Kit Yates discussing back calculation. BBC Radio 4. [Podcast: 8:18 to 14:07]. 29 April 2020.

Signs of Stalling Growth for Earth’s Economy

The pace at which carbon dioxide is increasing in the Earth's atmosphere slowed significantly according to data recorded at the remote Mauna Loa observatory for March 2022. The following chart shows the latest development for the trailing twelve month average of year-over-year change in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide:

That change interrupts what had been a robust upturn in CO₂ emissions, driven primarily by China's record coal spree in recent months. The new change however coincides with indications that China's economic growth has sharply slowed in 2022, as indicated by its negative year-over-year growth rate for imports from the United States for December 2021 and January 2022.

Year Over Year Growth Rate of Exchange Rate Adjusted U.S.-China Trade in Goods and Services, January 1986 - January 2022

That reduction is attributable to China's ongoing struggle with COVID-19, which disrupted economic activity in the Earth's biggest emitter of carbon dioxide in both December 2021 and January 2021. Allowing for the lag in China's carbon dioxide emissions to diffuse into the Earth's air, we think that economic slowdown is now showing up in March 2022's atmospheric CO₂ measurements. With China's government still committed to its COVID-zero policies and still locking down millions of China's productive population for weeks at a time as coronavirus infections continue to spread in the country despite its measures, we anticipate reduced carbon dioxide emissions will show up in the Earth's air from the world's biggest carbon emitter over the next several months.

National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. Earth System Research Laboratory. Mauna Loa Observatory CO2 Data. [Text File]. Updated 7 March 2022. Accessed 9 March 2022.

U.S.-China Trade Growth Recovery Underperforming "Great Recession"

Having closed the door for assessing the performance of the January 2020 'Phase 1' trade deal between the U.S. and China, we've refocused our ongoing trade analysis to focus on the trade recovery from 2020's coronavirus pandemic.

To do that, we need to compare the actual trajectory of the trade between the U.S. and China with a counterfactual - a projection of what the future for trade could reasonably look like following a recession. For our purposes, we opted to model a counterfactual after the recovery in trade between the U.S. and China that followed the so-called "Great Recession". The following chart shows the trailing twelve month average of the combined value of that trade as the heavy black line, where the counterfactual is shown by the dashed red line. We're using the trailing twelve month average to account, in part, for the seasonality in the actual monthly data, which we've shown as the thinner purple line.

Combined Value of U.S. Exports to China and U.S. Imports from China, January 2017 - January 2022

Going by the trailing twelve month average of the combined value of goods exchanged between the U.S. and China, the recovery in trade between the two countries began after this measure bottomed in September 2020. In the first ten months since, up to July 2021, the rate of growth of trade outperformed what was observed in the recovery following the "Great Recession". But since July 2021, the level of trade has consistently underperformed the Great Recession trade recovery. In January 2022, it would take an additional $1.2 billion of goods traded between the two countries to match that earlier recovery.

In truth, that underperformance took hold several months earlier, following March 2021, after a spike in the value of goods traded between the two countries was recorded. This period roughly coincides with a growing backlog of container ships at the U.S.' west coast ports, and specifically at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach in southern California. These two ports typically account for 40% of all imported goods processed into the U.S. economy, where congestion at these two ports built up and was allowed to fester for months without any action to correct the worsening situation by the Biden administration.

The good news is that after months of neglect, the Biden administration was finally forced to take steps to address the problem. There are indications the worst of the trade congestion at these two ports is in the rear view mirror.

That's a positive development, which we see in the small narrowing of the gap between the counterfactual and the actual trajectory of the U.S.-China trade level in January 2022. We'll see how well that progress might continue in the months ahead.

Omicron Rapidly Fades in Arizona

Four weeks ago, we covered the arrival of the Omicron-wave of the coronavirus pandemic in Arizona. Four weeks later, the weak variant is well on its way to fading into the obsurity of history.

Despite being impressively contagious and easy to spread, the Omicron variant of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus lacked the severity that characterized previous waves of coronavirus infections in Arizona. We confirm that's the case with the state's high quality data on COVID-related hospitalization and deaths, where we find neither have trended in the state in th elevated way that cases have. We've visualized these data series, where we've aligned the data for each according to when Arizonans who became infected with COVID-19 were most likely first exposed to the viral infection.

Arizona's Coronavirus Pandemic Experience, 15 March 2020 - 15 February 2022

Based on Arizona's data for cases, new hospital admissions, and deaths, the Omicron variant of the coronavirus began noticeably spreading approximately in the period from 15 through 19 December 2021. That covers the weekend before the Christmas holiday, which points to public events like shopping, Phoenix' Fiesta Bowl Parade, and pre-holiday social events as the likely venues in which infections of the Omicron coronavirus variant took hold in the state.

After lifting off, the surge in COVID infections went on to peak in the period from 31 December 2021 through 7 January 2022, pointing to the end of the holiday season and its related social gatherings as a leading contributor to what is developing into a rapid decline in the incidence of new infections.

The data for deaths is remarkable because Arizona's wave of delta-variant coronavirus infections has largely blended with the omicron-variant in such a way that the overall trend in deaths has fallen within a relatively narrow range since early November 2021. Or rather, as deaths attributed to the more deadly delta-variant waned, they were replaced almost one-for-one by the much less deadly omicron-variant, where infections were occurring in much higher numbers. We anticipate that pattern will hold until the lagging data for deaths catches up to the rapidly declining trends for both cases and hospitalizations in the state.

Arizona's data for ICU bed usage confirms the rapid decline in omicron-related COVID-19 cases in recent weeks.

Arizona COVID-19 ICU Bed Usage, 15 March 2020 - 15 February 2022

While rising in response to Omicron-variant cases, ICU bed usage data points to a lower growth rate for serious cases requiring ICU facilities at this time. The data confirms Arizona's hospitals have maintained high rates of ICU bed utilization, with hospital operators working to keep as many beds occupied with both COVID and non-COVID patients as they could. We have not yet however found any explanation for the reduction in ICU beds in Arizona in mid-December 2021.

We're coming up on the two year anniversary of the coronavirus pandemic in Arizona, which if the positive trends now developing continue to hold, will mark our last regular entry for this series as the pandemic appears to be approaching its end.