by Karl Denninger, Market Ticker:

One of my amusing pastimes this last weekend has been doing informal surveys of traffic patterns and hotels in my local area, along with a few others where I can check prices and availability.

Let me say this quite-clearly: Those who think people will put up with the “distancing” bullcrap and yet come out and spend money on vacations have another think coming; when you send a message that your employees are the Angel of Death people respond to that with the obvious and logical reaction.

Traffic was, shall we say, catastrophically bad in many areas.  Witless “reopened” northern Michigan but she may as well not have bothered.  Memorial Day Weekend is usually slammed up there to the point that Google Traffic looks like rivers of blood in every single town.  This weekend finding orange was hard.

Those who have tried to be the “early birds” and open up to get the few worms might have had some business, but the bad news is that at 50% occupancy it’s not enough and when you have people running marquees on (still closed) theaters telling tourists to stay home (as is in the case in at least one place I’m aware of up north) well, ok, I won’t go spend the $500+ I was going to on a nice, expensive weekend between hotel, fuel and lots of good beer and food.

My not-so-old stomping grounds around Destin weren’t any better.

I’m sure there will be plenty of lies out of the local Chambers of Commerce and those trying to make “good-good” out of what was a catastrophe when it comes to the gross receipts line.  Nobody’s selling anything if there are no cars being driven around the area, and that’s what reality was everywhere I looked.

The land of few Karens here might be sort of less catastrophic, but it still wasn’t good.  Putting lipstick on a pig still leaves you with a pig, and that’s what we got.  Hotel occupancy was perhaps 40-50%; it is usually flat-out slammed, period.

Then there’s Cuomo who has now admitted that “we all failed” at predictions:

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo admitted Monday that coronavirus projections from experts were all wrong — and he’s getting out of the business of speculating because of it.

Cuomo said he can’t predict when the hospitalization and death rate numbers will drop to the necessary threshold required for reopening certain regions because as he put it, “we all failed” at predicting.

So Cuomo can’t predict when the numbers will meet Der Furher’s requirements (his) but he believes the thresholds are still valid causes to remain closed — which came from the very same people?  Excuse me?

And by the way, not everyone got this wrong.  Perhaps taking victory laps is “not very nice” but you might note the date on this article.

The bend should be evident in one viral generation time.  The new case rate should collapse in two viral generation times.  If Community Transmission via bars, restaurants and “social interaction” was more than 2/3rds of the total the effective R0 would go under 1.0 and community transmission would collapse.  If it was half then R0 would be 1.5 and we’d have transmission approximately equal to a bad seasonal flu.

IF you actually bent the curve.

What did I say at the time?  Let me quote it for you:

“Social distancing is close to worthless.”

Oh by the way, what’s the death and positive rate look like?

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