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This week we’re keeping an eye on lockdowns, bailouts, and borders. And we still want to hear from you. Please send questions, thoughts, or stimulus packages to [email protected]. Let’s get started.

Why is it so hard to pause an economy?

The world needs to limit economic activity to allow for social distancing, which will slow the spread of Covid-19. This should be something a prosperous society can do. “Right now we still have plenty of stuff,” Bloomberg’s Joe Weisenthal wrote on Twitter. “And if we were to take a one- or two-month pause on building homes or cars, it wouldn’t be the end of the world.”

The problem, says economist Larry Summers, is that “economic time has stopped, but financial time has not been stopped.” Bills keep coming due and most Americans aren’t prepared—39% of US households couldn’t cover a $400 expense without borrowing money or selling something. The median small business in the US has enough cash on hand to last just 27 days. For businesses and households alike, putting work on hold for a couple of months would be a disaster.

This is the sort of problem financialization is supposed to help with. “In finance you can time travel,” says University of Michigan professor Gautam Kaul in his introductory finance course. Borrowing money can shift spending from the future into the present; lending it can do the opposite. But when everyone wants to time travel in the same direction, things don’t work as well. All that demand for loans drives up prices just as investors, spooked by uncertainty, are searching for safe places to park their money. The market, left to its own devices, will only lend on onerous terms.

And it’s especially hard to hit pause in an economy obsessed with efficiency. For decades, investors have urged companies around the world to trim the fat, including by making sure wages were no higher than strictly necessary for performance. This creates a tradeoff between efficiency and resiliency, argued Roger Martin, professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, in a Harvard Business Review article last year. The US in particular has chosen the former.

To pull off this act of economic time traveling, governments have to step in. In the US, the Small Business Administration has a program to offer “economic injury” loans, which former SBA administrator Karen Mills says “are perfect for today’s environment.” Shrimp fishermen whose businesses were disrupted by the BP oil spill were able to get low-interest loans, for example. These loans can help businesses survive social distancing, but US state governors have to declare an emergency before businesses in their state become eligible.

The limiting factor here isn’t capital but coordination. Governments need to have the capability and the credibility to act, and they must be willing to do so on behalf not just of the powerful but for everyone. Unfortunately, excessive financialization erodes that too. A strong financial sector might promote efficiency and boost growth, but it can also capture the political system, increasing inequality, shifting risk onto individuals, and eroding state capacity. In the US and in many other market economies around the world, we’ve created economies that have to keep moving. If we could travel back 40 years, we’d probably do some things differently.

Coronavirus contractions

While China’s draconian measures for controlling the coronavirus have been seemingly effective, they have also inflicted serious pain on the country’s economy. On Monday, the world’s second-largest economy released a slew of economic data that points to what will likely be its first contraction in quarterly GDP since 1989. Here are some of the year-over-year changes for January-February figures.

• 📉13.5% decline in industrial output
• 📉 24.5% decline in fixed-asset investment outside rural households (a reflection of construction activity)
• 📉 20.5% decline in retail sales, including:
• ⬇️ 43.1% decline in restaurant sales
• ⬇️ 3% decline in online sales
• ⬇️ 17.6% decline in general merchandise sales

Shifting definitions

As coronavirus testing picks up in the US, you may have seen two different kinds of reports in each state’s case counts: confirmed and presumptive positive.

This distinction traces back to the early days of the US outbreak, when the CDC ran almost every coronavirus test through its labs in Atlanta, Georgia. That quickly created a bottleneck, so the government expanded the ways that swabs could be tested: Many are now processed in state public health labs. Thus:

Presumptive positive: There’s evidence of the virus in the sample, but the test was run at a state or local lab, not the CDC.

Confirmed: The CDC got to test the sample, and confirmed that it was positive.

There’s so much more capacity in the state and local labs, though, that the CDC just changed its guidelines: Presumptive positive tests no longer have to go for the CDC for confirmation, and a positive test anywhere will simply count as…positive.

Even these numbers are incomplete. Tests are still in extremely limited supply in parts of the country, so an area’s case count may have more to do with the number of tests available than the number of cases actually circulating.

Viral BS

Social media is rife with dubious remedies for Covid-19, often attributed to “doctors” and described as “medically proven.” One rumor—that holding your breath for 10 seconds can help you determine whether you have the virus—has been circulated widely, including by several celebrities. Here are a few other things being peddled as corona cures:

air purifiers | heat | tonic water | saltwater | garlic water | drinking lots of water | garlic | onion | vitamin C | supplements | colloidal silver | Tito’s vodka | all alcohol

Influencers and holistic hucksters aren’t alone in taking advantage of the crisis: Be wary of ads pitching gold and silver coins.

If you’re seeing any misinformation, disinformation, or ugly coronavirus sales schemes out there, Quartz investigations reporter Hanna Kozlowksa wants to hear about it. Email her at [email protected].

Here’s the rub

In less than 200 years, we’ve gone from “clean hands optional” to hoarding hand sanitizer for profit. In less than 40 years, Purell went from a money-loser for its parent company to a $250 million-plus business. How did we get here?

1828: Antoine Labarraque recommends the use of “eau de javel,” a sodium hypochlorite solution, for hand hygiene.

1843: American doctor and polymath Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. argues that doctors not washing their hands is a cause of postpartum infections.

1846: Hungarian doctor Ignaz Semmelweis requires his staff to wash their hands with soap and a chlorine solution after making the first scientific connection between hand sanitization and disease prevention.

1860: Pioneering nurse Florence Nightingale recommends that her colleagues wash their hands “very frequently” in her Notes on Nursing.

1861: Louis Pasteur publishes his first findings on the germ theory of disease.

1946: Goldie and Jerry Lippman found Gojo; their first product is a waterless hand cleaner inspired by watching rubber-factory workers clean their hands with benzene.

1966: Nursing student Lupe Hernandez combines alcohol and gel to create a sanitary hand cleaner for when soap and water aren’t available.

1981: The US Centers for Disease Control publishes its first national hand hygiene guidelines.

1988: Gojo introduces Purell, a gel-based ethyl alcohol hand sanitizer.

1997: Germ-X, Purell’s biggest competitor, is introduced.

2002: The CDC revises its hand-hygiene guidelines, recommending the use of hand sanitizer.

2003: Hospital use of alcohol-based hand sanitizer is up 50% over 2001.

2018: Two inmates in Oregon get drunk on hand sanitizer in a jail van and steal an ATV.

If you’re looking for even more information on hand sanitizer, we’re not judging. Check out this Quartz obsession email, where you will learn (and never be able to unlearn) how many people a presidential candidate shakes hands with every day, how to make your own hand sanitizer, and why it’s not a smart cocktail mixer.

Essential reading

• The latest 🌏 figures: 190,140 confirmed cases; 80,648 classified as “recovered.”
• Law and backorder: The legal framework for testing in the US helps explain the delay.
• Set-top box office: Universal Pictures is releasing its current movies online.
• Continental shift: Africa is starting to lock out the world.
• Conclude panicking: In the US at least, the worst part will be over soon.
• I think I like wrestling now? A smackdown with no audience just might be high art.

Oops. In our last email, we wrote about one 1800s cholera outbreak in London that was traced to a contaminated water pump handle. As a reader pointed out, it was the water that carried the cholera. Dr. John Snow traced the disease’s spread to the pump; after local authorities failed to take action, he went ahead and removed the handle himself, making the pump useless. Thank you to Ross—and his very smart partner, who is a student at the Institute of Tropical Disease, where this handle is displayed—for a correction that also taught us something.

Our best wishes for a healthy day. Get in touch with us at [email protected], and live your best Quartz life by downloading our app and becoming a member. Today’s newsletter was brought to you by Walter Frick, Jane Li, Katie Palmer, Hanna Kozlowska, Whet Moser, Patrick deHahn, and Kira Bindrim.