IF ONLY IT WEREN'T ACCIDENTAL: Government accidentally shuts itself down with ban on non-essential businesses.

Yes, it's the Babylon Bee. I wish it weren't.

THIS IS WHAT WE GOT for $2.2T (that's trillion dollars, folks) worth of coronavirus 'rescue'.

Make-work for bureaucratic wannabes.

POWERLINE'S Week in Pictures has two favorites this week. Here's the first:

And I was always of the opinion that duct tape was the solution to every problem. I was wrong.

Now go see the rest. They're worth the trip.

WUHAN FLU [CORONAVIRUS] UPDATE: There was no update yesterday; believe it or not, in rural Georgia, we're still allowed to travel to visit friends and family (and bring toilet paper).

Here's today's data, updated around 6 pm.

Note I've changed the scale again on the Cases Reported graph and I'll probably have to do it again on Monday or so. Reported cases are still growing, a little more steeply for U.S. cases. Given the increased testing, I'm somewhat surprised they're not growing more rapidly. The good news, though, is that if the vertical scale were logarithmic you could see that the (feared) exponential growth has almost stopped. Plot the data logarithmically and the curves are flat, beginning to bend downward, which means that the growth rate is linear, not exponential.

Death rates are still trending higher, more so in the U.S. Still, both are below (far below for the U.S.) the 1% rate of a normal annual flu season.

Reminder: today 99.82% of the U.S. population are (still) virus-free.

DEFINITION OF EXPERT: from the root words 'ex', meaning has-been, and 'spurt', a drip under pressure.

Applies most frequently to government (and media) experts....

CORRECT: "One of the problems with our ruling class is that it’s not just frequently wrong, it’s that it’s always self-assuredly arrogant in its wrongness."