TIA Daily COVID-19 Update: May 4th

As TIA continues to monitor the situation surrounding COVID-19 and it’s impact on the 3PL and transportation industries, here is your Daily Update for May 4. As a reminder, you can find all the latest information, resources, guidance, and news from TIA’s COVID-19 Response Center.

ADVOCACY UPDATE:

TIA’s Government Affairs Team continues to hold regular Zoom meetings with Members of Congress and their staff. This is an excellent opportunity to improve your advocacy skills and build or maintain relationships with your elected representatives. If you would like to participate, or to learn more, please contact Chris Burroughs at [email protected].

VIRTUAL LUNCH & LEARN UPDATE:

Reminder to join us tomorrow at 12:00 PM ET for our Virtual Lunch & Learn webinar: Financial Strategies for Challenging Market Conditions, analyzing how shippers have responded to coronavirus and what brokers can do to prepare for the next 3-6 months. A special thank you to TriumphPay for sponsoring this webinar!

NOËL PERRY UPDATE:

Sunday was down from Saturday for the U.S. but up from seven days ago in cases and just a few down in deaths. It was down on both metrics in Europe, assuring we in the U.S. that their contagion is well on the way to resolution.

You can see again in the state data that the early victim northeastern states were down, while much of the remainder of the country, those states with younger contagions, were up from a week ago. We will see over the next two days if this is just a weekend measurement issue or something more pressing. We are reminded that, although the Asian and European examples point towards resolution, the downward pace to that desired place is slower than we would like.

As expected, states are beginning to loosen restrictions. Note that the impetuous for that is as much the realization of the necessity of a return to full economic activity as the lessening of the contagion. What we can say is that there is no evidence that this contagion is the catastrophic event predicted by some a month ago. Yes, it is worse than other recent flu seasons, but it should produce less than a fifth of the deaths as the Spanish Flu of 1918-1920, an event to which it is frequently compared. Clearly, a bug that infects only one in three hundred people and kills one in almost five thousand does not appear to be a sufficient threat to our society to justify the continued historic disruption of economic activity. Such a conclusion is all the more supported when one considers that science remains unsure of the benefits of sequestration. We are trading the chance of reduced health risks for the certainty of economic disaster.

We’ll be back tomorrow with COVID-19 updates and information that came through overnight.

On a beautiful Monday in the Nation’s Capital, I leave you with Benny Goodman’s “King Porter Stomp.”