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Wednesday, September 30, 2020
Third Quarter In The Books
By Nicholas Jasinski | Wednesday, September 30
Progress. Investors
who were disheartened by last night's presidential debate may have
been pleasantly surprised by some bipartisan rumblings on the fiscal stimulus
front today. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she was
"hopeful" about a deal, while Treasury Secretary Steven
Mnuchin promised to give it
"one more serious try."
Pelosi and Mnuchin failed
to come to an agreement today, but both said they would continue to speak
in the coming days. There likely remains a wide gap between Democrats and
Republicans regarding the size and scope of a coronavirus relief and
fiscal stimulus package, but today represented marginal progress nonetheless.
The S&P
500 ended
the third quarter with a 0.8% gain, while the Dow
Jones Industrial Average added 1.2%, and the Nasdaq Composite rose 0.7%. The
indexes are up 8.5%, 7.6%, and 11%, respectively, over the past three months.
The market also saw a pair
of direct listings today. Data mining firm Palantir made its
debut at $10 a share, above its $7.25 "reference price" from
last night. The stock closed at $9.73, giving the company a valuation
of roughly $22 billion. Eric Savitz spoke with Palantir's COO Shaym
Sankar today.
Cloud-based project
management software company Asana likewise
traded well above its reference price of $21. The stock opened at $27 and rose
to $29.96 by the close. That makes it worth about $4.6 billion. Eric covered Asana's direct listing today as
well.
After the bell, the Federal
Reserve said it would extend by at
least another quarter limits on dividends and share repurchases for banks
with more than $100 billion in assets. The capital-return restrictions have
been in place since June, and are designed to ensure that banks are
sufficiently capitalized to handle potential loan losses.
The extension wasn't
entirely surprising to investors, Carleton
English wrote
this evening, but still makes it hard to love big bank stocks. Read the rest of
her report here.
50 States of New Summer COVID-19 Wave Death Data, Plus D.C.
By Allison Bell | September 29, 2020 at 03:12 PM
This chart shows the
percentage of all deaths caused by COVID-like illnesses continues to be above
the epidemic threshold. Here are the 5 states where, on Aug. 22, the ratio of
actual deaths to expected deaths was the highest…
5. California: 1.36 to
1.
4. Nevada: 1.37 to 1
2. (tie) Arizona: 1.40
to 1
2. (tie) Florida: 1.40
to 1
1. Idaho: 1.42 to 1
The summer wave of COVID-19 appears to have caused a sharp
increase in total death counts in many states.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) tries to report early death counts quickly, but it takes weeks
to get and process complete death data.
The most recent week that appears to have
reasonably complete death data is the week ending Aug. 22. In that week, 35
states had total death counts that were at least 10% higher than the expected
level.
Resources
·
The
Dynata COVID-19 symptom maps and charts are available here.
·
The
COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic is available here.
·
The Johns
Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center numbers are available here.
·
The
CDC’s weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
·
The
HHS hospital capacity data is available here.
·
An
overview article about the COVID-19 data for the previous week is available here.
The CDC comes up with the expected death count for a week by
calculating the average number of deaths in a state, for that week in the year,
for the previous three years.
The ratio was at least 1.36 to 1 in five states, meaning that,
in at least five states, the total number of deaths was 36% higher than expected
average.
The average ratio for the United States was 1.14 to one.
The United States normally averages about 270,000 deaths per
year. If the number of total deaths stayed more than 14% above average for the
entire year, due to the direct effects of COVID-19, and the effects of the
pandemic on the U.S. economy and U.S. health care system, then it’s possible
that the pandemic could lead, directly or indirectly, to about a 400,000
increase in the total number of deaths for the year.
COVID-19 trackers recently reported that they believe the United
States has already recorded about 200,000 deaths resulting directly from
COVID-19.
The actual numbers could be higher than the current CDC numbers.
Some current and former CDC officials have accused other officials of trying to
manipulate the CDC’s COVID-19 tracking data, to reduce the apparent severity of
the pandemic.
The most serious modern viral epidemic to hit the United States,
the 1918 influenza pandemic, caused about 600,000 deaths, in a population of
100 million. That would be the equivalent of a pandemic causing about 2 million
deaths in the United States today.
But the other major flu pandemics, such as the 1968 Hong Kong flu
pandemic, appear to have to caused fewer than 120,000 deaths in the United
States.
The Dynata Data
Dynata, a data firm, powers many website instant survey
programs. In place of its regular surveys, it serves some site users a COVID-19
symptom survey.
The company than feeds the survey data into a free, public — but
copyrighted — tracking dashboard.
The percentage of Dynata survey participants ages 18 to 24 who
said they had a dry cough with loss of the sense of smell or taste was 3% for
the two-week period ending Sept. 25, That’s down from 3.1% for the two-week
period ending Sept. 18, as many college students with in-person classes started
heading to campus.
The number of states where 3.5% or more of the college-age
Dynata survey takers said they had COVID-19-like symptoms fell to four,
from five for the two-week period ending Sept. 18.
College-age survey taker symptom rates were highest in Arkansas,
Nevada, North Dakota and South Dakota. In South Dakota, 22% of the 60 survey
respondents in the 18-24 age group said they had a dry cough with loss of the
sense of taste or smell. The second worst-hit state, Nevada, had a symptom
report rate of 5% for that age group.
Some COVID-19 watchers say the 80th Sturgis Motorcycle
Rally, a 10-day event that started Aug. 7 in Sturgis, South Dakota, may have
contributed to a sharp increase in the infection rate in South Dakota. The
event attracted about 460,000 attendees, according to the South Dakota State News.
The IA Institute of Labor Economics has predicted that the rally will
eventually cause about 250,000 cases of COVID-19, with the rally infecting some
attendees directly; those attendees transmitting the virus that causes the
disease to other people; and the people with indirect exposure than
transmitting the virus in their own communities.
The ThinkAdvisor Campus COVID-19 Dashboard
Tracker
Some colleges and universities report daily COVID-19 test
results on dashboard websites.
Campus tracking numbers are of interest because some pandemic
trackers say schools could produce a big fall COVID-19 wave.
We created a table using one-day test results, for Sept. 25,
from dashboards that reported both test counts and positive results counts.
For the 18 colleges and universities in our table, the total
number of tests reported increased to 32,574, from 30,365. The number of
samples found to show signs of COVID-19 fell to 289, from 453.
Some states increased the amount of data reported for Sept.
18 between last week and this week.
The percentage of test samples found to show signs of COVID-19
fell to 0.9% for the Sept. 25 test data, from 1.4% for the Sept. 18 test
data. Only a small number of colleges and universities report daily test totals
and positive results counts on a web dashboard. The positivity rates at the
schools with daily results on a dashboard may be different from the
results at the typical college or university. But the results appear to suggest
that schools that are tracking COVID-19 carefully might have a shot at getting
the spread of the virus that causes the disease under control.
U.S. University COVID-19 Case Tracker (Results for Sept.
25) |
||||
School |
Tests |
Positive |
% Positive, Sept. 25 |
% Positive, Sept. 18 |
Arizona, University
of |
1,051 |
36 |
3.4% |
6.1% |
California at
Berkeley, University of |
1,244 |
1 |
0.1% |
0.2% |
Colorado, University
of |
957 |
77 |
8.0% |
10.2% |
George Washington
University |
276 |
- |
0.0% |
0.0% |
Illinois, University
of |
11,090 |
41 |
0.4% |
0.3% |
Lasell University |
428 |
- |
0.0% |
0.0% |
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology |
3,168 |
1 |
0.0% |
0.1% |
Miami, University of |
581 |
3 |
0.5% |
0.7% |
Michigan
Technological University |
181 |
4 |
2.2% |
5.2% |
Nebraska-Lincoln,
University of |
97 |
9 |
9.3% |
12.6% |
Ohio State University |
2,798 |
37 |
1.3% |
2.2% |
Rhode Island School
of Design |
153 |
- |
0.0% |
0.0% |
Rice University |
1,021 |
2 |
0.2% |
0.2% |
State University of
New York system |
4,466 |
32 |
0.7% |
0.3% |
Tulane University |
1,281 |
22 |
1.7% |
1.2% |
Wisconsin, University
of |
1,658 |
22 |
1.3% |
4.9% |
Yale University |
2,124 |
2 |
0.1% |
0.0% |
OVERALL |
32,574 |
289 |
0.9% |
1.4% |
Ratio of All Reported Deaths to Expected Deaths |
||||
(as of Aug. 22) |
||||
State |
COVID-19 Deaths |
Pneumonia, Influenza, or COVID-19
Deaths |
Total Deaths |
RATIO of Total Deaths to Expected
Deaths |
Alabama |
195 |
247 |
1,210 |
1.3 |
Alaska |
NA |
NA |
86 |
1.02 |
Arizona |
165 |
216 |
1,467 |
1.4 |
Arkansas |
89 |
131 |
723 |
1.27 |
California |
808 |
1,058 |
6,356 |
1.36 |
Colorado |
18 |
44 |
851 |
1.18 |
Connecticut |
NA |
10 |
329 |
0.6 |
Delaware |
NA |
12 |
172 |
1 |
District of Columbia |
11 |
16 |
101 |
0.92 |
Florida |
928 |
1,191 |
5,146 |
1.4 |
Georgia |
374 |
452 |
2,004 |
1.3 |
Hawaii |
10 |
21 |
241 |
1.16 |
Idaho |
56 |
62 |
359 |
1.42 |
Illinois |
95 |
194 |
2,127 |
1.13 |
Indiana |
91 |
161 |
1,289 |
1.1 |
Iowa |
61 |
92 |
594 |
1.09 |
Kansas |
37 |
58 |
504 |
1.1 |
Kentucky |
66 |
128 |
951 |
1.11 |
Louisiana |
171 |
192 |
936 |
1.12 |
Maine |
NA |
16 |
312 |
1.19 |
Maryland |
59 |
105 |
986 |
1.11 |
Massachusetts |
33 |
81 |
1,024 |
0.98 |
Michigan |
56 |
148 |
1,880 |
1.12 |
Minnesota |
55 |
93 |
863 |
1.06 |
Mississippi |
181 |
224 |
770 |
1.35 |
Missouri |
91 |
142 |
1,268 |
1.09 |
Montana |
10 |
12 |
234 |
1.25 |
Nebraska |
27 |
43 |
355 |
1.14 |
Nevada |
96 |
125 |
612 |
1.37 |
New Hampshire |
NA |
15 |
249 |
1.12 |
New Jersey |
35 |
81 |
1,333 |
0.98 |
New Mexico |
20 |
32 |
363 |
1.16 |
New York |
32 |
136 |
1,864 |
1.05 |
New York City |
20 |
77 |
960 |
0.99 |
North Carolina |
33 |
40 |
274 |
0.16 |
North Dakota |
NA |
14 |
87 |
0.66 |
Ohio |
159 |
265 |
2,476 |
1.12 |
Oklahoma |
63 |
120 |
824 |
1.18 |
Oregon |
22 |
47 |
744 |
1.13 |
Pennsylvania |
95 |
198 |
2,575 |
1.08 |
Rhode Island |
13 |
20 |
188 |
0.97 |
South Carolina |
199 |
238 |
1,157 |
1.35 |
South Dakota |
NA |
21 |
151 |
1.06 |
Tennessee |
128 |
229 |
1,631 |
1.21 |
Texas |
904 |
1,106 |
4,743 |
1.27 |
Utah |
18 |
36 |
418 |
1.18 |
Vermont |
0 |
NA |
117 |
1.27 |
Virginia |
121 |
161 |
1,427 |
1.16 |
Washington |
50 |
105 |
1,180 |
1.18 |
West Virginia |
25 |
37 |
219 |
0.55 |
Wisconsin |
38 |
77 |
1,052 |
1.12 |
Wyoming |
NA |
NA |
95 |
1.16 |
United States |
5,793 |
8,351 |
57,877 |
1.14 |