Please consider the following video by Prof. Neil Ferguson.
10 Key Video Points
- 50,000 new cases a day in china
- Infections doubling every 5 days
- Death rate is still unknown
- China likely to peak in March
- Epidemic peak is still a month away
- It will be very hard to control this epidemic the say way we did with SARS 15-20 years ago
- Cases are always underestimated
- Death delays are as long as three weeks
- Reported deaths outside China are not reassuring because of delays
- We still don’t know the full effects
Tweet on Containment Strategies
https://twitter.com/Caroline_OF_B/status/1220757509968781312
Jim Bianco’s Latest Update
Africa Cases Coming
61 Cases on Cruise Ship
Stop the Ridiculous Flu Comparisons
People are still comparing this outbreak with the flu.
Stop already!
60 million people are locked up in China, in their homes. One person is allowed out every three days.
For comparison purposes, the state of california has about 40 million people. Illinois has 13 million. Michigan has 10 million.
So imagine everyone in CA, IL, and MI being locked in their houses, unable to leave other than to buy groceries every three days.
And if you think the reported death count is accurate given 60 million lockups with infections growing by 50,000 per day, you need to think again.
Panic in China
Yesterday, I commented China in State of Panic as Coronavirus Death Toll Rises
Locked In, Literally
China is forcing people into quarantine camps, restricting movement, locking people in their homes (literally), demanding daily temperatures updates from everyone, and now bitching about about travel restrictions of other countries.
Unfortunately, things look to get worse for at least a few more weeks.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Coronavirus becoming serious threat: sehttps://youtu.be/0MGou2k2QVE
I’m a physicist, not an epidemiologist, but I’ve done a simple model for the epidemic, and this is consitent with it. The Chinese tipped their hand by revealing the rate of increase of infections to be 18% day to day. That implies a doubling rate of 3.85 days (not 6.2 or even 5).
There are 4 independent measures of the real level of total infections: Grabiel Leung, Lancet, the ‘under observation’ number, and the Tencent ‘slip up’. And they are all consistent if you correct for their dates.
starting with paitient zero on Dec 1 2019 to day 70 (Feb 8), my model predicts there are now 269,559 infections, with a daily increase of 53,380. If the duration of contagiousness is 21 days, R0 is 3.86.
With reported deaths of 724, we have 31,722 deaths “baked into the cake”, people who are sick now, but will eventuall die. The mortality rate is 10.7%, very close to SARS. But NOBODY believes those death totals.
If we take them up to 2000, the mortality rate goes up to 29% (MERS), inevitable deaths rise to 87,632.
By March 1st, there will be 10.8 Million infections, 24,497 actual deaths, with 1.6 million more inevitable deaths. With th higher death arate that jumps to 73196 actual deaths, and 3.2 million inevitable.
The model is very sensitive to the duration contagiousness. Reducing it quickly makes these numbers better. The quarantines will have that effect, reducing transmissions which will push these numbers out, but only by a few weeks.
Again, this is just my simple model with pretty rough inputs, so don’t place any real trust in it. I really do want to be wrong about this.
A treatment regimen would be even more effective in reducing deaths. Perhaps the AIDS drugs can make a difference as well.
Logically, AIDS drugs might do the trick if the reverse transcriptase of both are similar. However, AIDS drugs are expensive, I believe, and wouldn’t be suitable for mass use, and only in acute cases.
Since the virus also mutates, maybe fast, the long term solution is the flu like method: build up antibodies before the infection happens.
Probably the combination of both. Hope there is enough time.
I have a point that I would like all to consider. All this while the wet market has been seen as the culprit. But, the people who operate the market, the vendors, the suppliers, the administrators, there is not one input about their susceptibility to this virus. It is just a veil. If the percentage of the actual inhabitants of the market are immune then the origin cannot be the market./
It all depends upon how well or poorly their quarantine protocols do. It’s simply too soon to say. But in a month or two, it will be clear if this is becoming a worldwide pandemic or not. Right now, although perfectly reasonable to try to figure out what’s going on, there’s just not enough of a clear data record to go on.
It already is a pandemic dude
Because a few hundred people have died in an 11 million city in China?
It’s a new virus which can result in severe illness, and looks to be human-to-human transmissible. Hence has the possibility of becoming a pandemic. Defining “pandemic” so broadly as to include that in the definition, renders the the whole “pandemic” definition, about as useful as including complementing a woman for her looks in rape statistics.
Stuki if you believe that official death count you are truly nuts
Believing it is even possible to obtain anything like a Divinely ordained accurate “death count” in Wuhan is what’s nuts. Hundreds of people die in Wuhan every day, regardless of this virus. Now every hospital is full of presumably contagious patients, and all resources devoted to this. More people in Wuhan may be dying “because” of this virus, than are dying while infected by the virus…. There’s just no way to know.
And, more importantly unless you are exposed directly to the crisis in Wuhan, neither does what’s happening at essentially ground zero, have much useful predictive value, for estimating how the outbreak may pan out in populations further out. Where, despite obsessive monitoring and attention, so far very few, perhaps surprisingly few even, have died.
Yet, as Ferguson pointed out: Until enough time has gone by, so that reports covering a meaningful number of of end-to-end (infection to final outcome) cases from further out start becoming available, such a “few have died” observation isn’t all that predictive. Hence isn’t all that comforting.
Point being, that exactly how the Chinese choose to count, and whether they do it “right” or not per some random dude on the internet, isn’t really all that important for anyone outside China, where resources and operational plans may be directly influenced by that count.
Or heck, even outside Wuhan, as that is where the deaths are occurring to an overwhelming degree. Hence what is happening there, is what is overwhelmingly determining what the official “counts” are.
Further away, judging by reported counts from Dear Leaders I presume are a priori assumed to be more reliable counters than their Chinese colleagues, this thing is honestly still a bit of a nothingburger. Which may very well change in the next week or so, if Ferguson’s 3 weeks are roughly correct. But that’s no reason to be Greta Thunberg, and just Panic for the sake of it, on the offhand chance that tomorrow may be a bit warmer and more virus filled than today.
Believing in the “leaked” Tencent death count is even more nuts. There’s still no actual confirmation
For it to be a pandemic it needs to escape to the wild in multiple countries in multiple parts of the world. Typically that means multiple continents. Obviously it is an epidemic, and the day may come when it is a pandemic, but as of today it is not.
Well it’s already infected some people outside of China
Everyone keeps looking at the number of cases compared to the number of deaths.
This is completely wrong.
Look back 14 days at the number of infected compared to the number of deaths today.
If the numbers are proportionally wrong this virus is down right terrible. That said most cases probably go undetected so no real comparison can be made.
I said last week we would know the likely outcome by today. We do. It’s not stopping.
The announcement of the death of a foreigner in Wuhan today was telling. I think it was the US government that said that they were pretty much 100% certain it was Coronavirus, but since they hadn’t been able to prove it, it had been recorded as viral pneumonia.
Time to publish the stats for both, I would suggest. If there are 10000 viral pneumonia cases, we have a problem. If there were 200, we don’t.
Yes, pull the historical average pneumonia deaths for Wuhan and compare it to the ones reported now. That is exactly what should be done. I wonder who has that info?
At the rate of 50,000 per day, it would take ~80 years to infect the whole population of China. Such is the staggering size of the population. Perhaps nature has had enough.
Except the infection rate is proportional to the number of people who are currently infected. There is (cf SARS, ebola) a doubling time, at which 1000 new becomes 2000 new becomes 4000 new, until things run out of steam.
Those cruise ships are going to be a very interesting little test case for the epidemiologists.
Anybody feel like going on a cruise around Asia right now?
I wonder how the cancellations are going with the cruise companies?
CRUISING is a utterly stupid , disgusting, definitely decadent and planet destructive way of boredom travelling…. Whatever happens to those people, it serves them right !
There’s a lot of things I think ridiculous (owning dogs in the city, yelling at them: Come here, I said come here.
Still, I will never say death serves them right, not even billionaires taking advantage of other people within the law.
A real misanthrope you are.
Whinnie the Pooh and the CCP is only a handful of people compared to the rest of China, 1.4 billion. How do you stop 1.4 billion people that are pissed of at you. That has got to eating at the top tyrannical dogs.
The Chinese government is anything but tyrannical. They’re adored, if anything, for bringing living standards up so much over the past few decades.
Living standards in third world countries. Easy come easy go.
You need to work in them for a considerable time to see how this turns out.
eg – lots of money to build new infrastructure but zero money to maintain it.
….the final nail in the earth’s coffin…..that’s what China is !
You made a Winnie the Pooh China joke. Super original
Even if China’s numbers are wrong, 50k per day with it doubling every few days seems way out of proportion.
And if that’s really the case, then why isn’t this news more widespread? 50k per freaking day shouldn’t be treated like there truely is only 30k affected overall. Not sure why Neil was so normal when delivering this.
That too struck me as odd. And the fact the US stock market has not crashed. If Mish is right, this is the “Big Short” we’ve been waiting for since 2008?! I personally am 100% out of the stock market.
The answer might be into who is funding his research. He was very airy fairy with his answer when questioned on that.
Having said that – you don’t isolate 400 million people and halt food shipments at the ports for a measly 800 fatalities.
The amount of fatalities is more than SARS so…
Up to 50,000 a day…..
Peak in the epicenter, Wuhan in a month. China overall, a month or two later….. The rest of the world, ???
Those up to 50,000 includes everyone. Who looks to have a “a wide variety” of symptoms. People experiencing “light respiratory discomfort,” isn’t really a public health issue. Spending masssive resources on diagnosing an up to 50,000, and growing, number of people a day, who just happen to cough during flu season, just isn’t viable. Nor particularly useful, for anything more than perhaps obtaining slightly better estimates to plug into models which will still remain highly uncertain.
If, as he insinuates, there is up to 3 week delays before heavy symptoms, including death; we’re still 1 1/2 to 2 weeks away from having anything to go by, wrt people thought to be infected away from the now infamous Wet Market itself. So far, that cohort seems to be doing just fine….
Which, of course, matters somewhere between very little and not at all, until those 1 1/2 to 2 weeks are up, assuming his estimates for time from infection to conclusive outcome is about right. But just as brushing the whole thing off, just because people aren’t (yet) dropping lilke flies all over China and the World, is no doubt irresponsible; so is the morbid fascination with outbidding one another for who can come up with the direst predictions, and throw around the most wild eyed accusations against everyone and his uncle, which is what seems to be the fad du jour on the interwebs these days.
So far, this is just a novel virus which has killed a bunch of people in Wuhan, a few in Wuhan’s immediate surroundings, as well as a very few Wuhanites abroad. Something which, as novel virus outbreaks go, is pretty much expected. But, again, that picture may change dramatically for the worse over the next week or two. Or it may not. Until those two weeks are up, this is just another one of those things which noone really knows much at all about.
That’s true, and apparently the R0 (R-naught) figure is the wildcard. Some viruses remain ‘local’ due to a low R0 value. R0 = 1.28 for common flu and 4.0 (speculated) on Wuhan virus, see@1 :09 mark here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko41qWfOUEk – difference is in 10 cycles you have nine people infected with the common flu versus 262k with the Wuhan virus
Remember Ebola? Despite making it into a major city, it did not go global, even before the vaccine was found. Surprised me, and hopefully 2019-nCoV is the same way.
“People experiencing “light respiratory discomfort,” isn’t really a public health issue.”
They are if they’re contagious & transmitting it it to others.
Transmitting their case of “light respiratory discomfort??”
It might be more serious for the new recipient, just because it has a mild affect on one person doesn’t mean it will be on the next. Or we just don’t know yet.
The Official figures coming from China Appear to completely fictitious – that UK professor already mentioned this and Mish has constantly stated the official numbers are just so much nonsense.
That London professor may we’ll be right. But as soon as he came up with Climate change His credibility took a bit of a nose dive
Fictitious because they are incomplete, is very different from fictitious due to deliberate manipulation. Numbers from China have so much of the former, that there is not even any real point in attempting the latter.
You can’t even begin to differentiate between people who just may start experiencing “light respiratory discomfort” in 5 days, and people who may not. With limited resources available for testing, you can’t rationally even attempt to test, before symptoms are sufficient to start ruling out more common causes for cold/flu like symptoms. So while I’m sure Chinese doctors could also just sit around and speculate, in order to come up with numbers that make for a scarier sounding internet horror story, why not leave that to the English? Who are further away, and have have more time time on their hands to speculate?
When resources are stretched, treating those who need it the most, is the objective. Not trying to goose your numbers as high as possible. Which means attempting to settle on a count which helps differentiate between those who really need treatment, vs those who may yet not.
Of course it’s still possible that the centralized higher ups who report official aggregate numbers, are shaving some off of the aggregate before reporting it, for one reason or another. In a big country, where totals are aggregated from lots of independently reported local counts, there is no way for anyone on the ground to know whether their counts are being shaved or not. But the fact that some guy in England speculates lots and lots of people may be on a path to experience a bout of mild respiratory discomfort on account of a new virus, is no evidence, nor even indication, that this is taking place.
Very reasonable comment. Making predictions when so much is known to be unknown feels good but is unhelpful.
This week in virology(podcast) is a good source of info on this
Trump is having an investigation into whether coronavirus is naturally occurring or bio-engineered. Good question, I’m sure we would all like to have a definitive answer to that. Maybe the dems will try to block that, like they do with everything else Donald tries to do. Surely it must be RACIST! or something like that.
Likely, natural phenomenon
i’m pretty agnostic on Trump, but i don’t think announcements of this kind are helpful. Do the investigation, THEN announce it. China has enough to worry about without being attacked in the court of public opinion
“60 million people are locked up in China, in their homes. One person is allowed out every three days.”
That Chinese government ‘cure’ is worse than the disease. Everyone will be dead from starvation, malnutrition, or poverty. Better to let the virus go now that it’s ‘out there’. Individuals should deal with it, or escape from it, in their own way rather than become dependent on government.
If there are 30,000 deaths as the cencent numbers suggest, maybe the Chinese governmnet feels obliged to choose between 60 million dead and 200 million.
Mish, seems you might have been correct about the “deathatoriums.” Dailymail has a story today that says China is forcing all suspected cases and close contacts into those venues along with the sick. I don’t know why China would do that unless they do not have the capability to test everyone and it is a desperate attempt to stop the spread. Even so, it sounds like a terrible plan. Are members of China’s military going to force people they love into those places at gunpoint? Surely some people who believe they are healthy are going to fight that order to the death.
It is horrific but remember the infected are currently locked in their apartments with family members who are probably already exposed. If the virus is typically mild then the small number of excess deaths are probably acceptable. And if it isn’t – you have to protect the herd. At all costs.
“Protect the herd at all costs.”
I cannot see how that is a reasonable rational for “deathatoriums.” I might go along with an extreme action that does not by design infect the uninfected, or even worse, combine people who are sick with one strain of something with other people who are sick with a different unknown strain of something else. There must be a better way that is more effective at getting the desired result. China has extreme surveillance capabilities which I think they are already using in this crises. They could separate the known infected and order everyone else to extremely limit direct personal contact and track everybody’s movements to keep a record of those that do have contact. If China provides good conditions for the known infected, then they have a good chance people will willingly enroll in central quarantine to stop the spread. Heck, many of the younger infected are probably still healthy enough to help run the quarantine centers. As long as the uninfected bring them food and supplies and carry away the trash, the (mildly) infected could probably take care of themselves while people recover.
From today’s DailyMail online: “8/02/20 08:47 John Edmunds, a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said modelling showed there were ‘ten times more cases than have been reported – or even more’. ” – ask yourself, who to believe, Dr. Edmunds, or Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, China’s WHO puppet? Time will tell.
That’s why the military has guns.
So we short everything, right?
YES. I’m 100% out (even before the virus struck). BTW the market inertia IMO is an example of the “bystander effect” aka “herd mentality” where nobody has yet panicked. Recall the US economy was in recession since late 2007 yet the market did not crash until the fall of 2008. Same now.
I don’t think inflation helps the shorts much.
Expect massive money pumping shortly.
You haven’t seen anything yet.
I think money pumping will begin to have less of an affect soon. It’s a sign of big growing, problems. Might be wrong though, have to wait & see.
I completely agree with you.
Money printing has and is loosing its effectiveness. That doesn’t mean they will give up. As the saying goes “when your a hammer everything is a nail”.
The printing press is their hammer. There is zero (0%) chance they will say we failed and let’s stop printing.
I don’t know the outcome either but I know with 100% certainty they will not stop printing money.
This is why you shouldn’t eat bats or other disease carrying rodents. I talked recently to someone who visited Wuhan markets where they sold animals. They don’t care if you keep it as a pet or consume it.
I saw an article speculating that the animal host was actually an armored anteater, and that the genes were over 99% consistent with corona viruses found in those.
Is it some sort of dinosaur hang-over animal after the great extinction?
One hell of a defence mechanism to carry viruses potentially lethal to the top global predator.
Given it will be warmer in the northern hemisphere soon viruses in general will continue to get stronger. The optimal ambient temperature for viruses to flourish at your nose is 72 degrees. A longer flu season is expected this year because both A and B strains being prevalent for the first time since 2005. That year I had my mother and brother in law in the hospital due to the flu. Hang on to your helmets.
That’s not good. I read something somewhere thinking this particular virus will be slower in warmer weather? No idea why.
Only person I’ve seen suggest warmer weather will help was Trump, and he was almost certainly spitballing.
LMAO, no it wasn’t Trump it was some medical paper.
This is correct.
When the weather is cold, the air is drier and viruses last longer outside the body. Very cold, dry air effectively freeze dries them so they can survive longer. In addition, cold weather means people group together, making transmission easier, it also means less mucus in the nasal passage and lungs. Your cilia cells (which clear pathogens from the lungs) also reduce their activity.
In summer the air is warmer and damper, people don’t associate so closely together, viruses don’t last so long out of the body (not just due to moisture, but also increased UVC as well as UVA and B light), and your cilia cells operate more efficiently using the increased mucus in your airways to clear out the nasties.
Trump is right 🙂
This is all correct but the prevalence of multiple flu viruses as it was 15 years ago tells me it will be a late flu season. Also SARS and MERS happen in the summer in the northern hemisphere and got worse when it got warmer.
So I guess i’m not sure how you would actually come to the conclusion it will peak in march based on current projections? Also, it’s just a model doesn’t mean it will be accurate. Plus peak doesn’t mean it still wont be spreading it just wont be spreading as fast.
Does anyone know if the warmer spring weather will stop this stuff from going around? That could be good for those of us in the US if that’s the case because we will have warmer temps before it gets going. What happens next winter remains to be seen.
One things for sure, there will be economic ripples. We’ll probably know a lot more in a few weeks the way evidence is mounting.
Weather will help. New diagnoses in Wuhan will slow due to the quarantine and the reduced number of unprotected (infected survivors with antibodies). I wouldnt be surprised if it peters out by late April.
Of course summer for some is winter for others. Australians may have a rough ride ahead.
As for next year, those who have had the virus this year will have lost their immunity by then (coronavirus antibodies dont last long). A lot probably depends on southern hemisphere spread April-September (ie outside China). If it is limited enough that it is stamped out by then, recurrence will depend on whether there are any remaining cases in China.
In the very best case, this disappears like SARS until somebody eats a sick pangolin (probably fried in gutter oil – if you haven’t googled gutter oil, don’t do it before breakfast).
In the less optimal case we have another epidemic in the northern hemispere starting October.
And remember that sometimes the second wave is worse than the first (the second wave of 1918 flu killed 5 times as many. As an interesting diversion it has also been posited that the high death rate might be down to salicylate (aspirin) poisoning, since many of the symptoms looked like this and doctors were handing out megadoses of aspirin to flu sufferers, more and more as symptoms worsened.
Thanks. Hopefully you are right.
Actually they are reporting that people an catch this twice … anti-body response seems weak and inadequate.
Nature is trying to balance things out. Nature will win in the end.
If China wants to retain any scrap of credability, they’ll confess just how bad this has gotten, and provide whatever advancement, if any, to figuring out how to stop this, or at least contain it. So far, no one with a brain believes them.
This option isn’t viable for the ccpp.
look at the photo at top, the so called ‘dead body’ with a mask
The person standing near is wearing work-boots and no gloves, now think about this, this is supposed to be a person who died, yet there are no gloves, and the non-standard boots are a joke
So the photo was staged, at least the guy in the foreground has the common blue gloves from harbor-frieght ( chinese junk ), but he has on sneakers, which is really questionable for use as such, and the tyvek suits are really not biological rated, they’re just common gear for spraying around the farm.
…
The obvious here is the obvious
2005 UK patented the corona-virus in question
2015 sent to canada where they spliced it with HIV
2016, a chinese guy ‘stole’ but was most likely given the virus to take to wuhan, where the studied
2019 December it was released, by whom? IMHO by somebody who hates China at the lab, somebody that is connected with the HK riots ( paid by USA-UK )
The biggest lie of all is “Why would the Chinese do this to themselves?”
Look, in the winter of 2019 the USA-UK destroyed the financial hub of CHINA, aka Hong-Kong, now in Jan 2020 the USA-UK destroy the “Chicago of China”.
What’s more to figure out?
Lastly, what’s the point of a photo that is 100% bullshit, lastly body’s laying around China are common, when somebody dies the body is kept for a family member to arrive and take care, its the family who wants a loved-one, returned to their home for the normal 3-5 home funeral
In my travels in China, I have seen dead body’s dozens of times, but they usually cover the face
…
There really is just too much BS on the internet now, especially on this subject, line todays ZH article on this subject, where they declare that Chinese Hospitals don’t have soap, I mean come on, let’s remember here that all the high-tech equipment used in USA is made in China, all the electronics, Chinese hospitals are state-of-the-art, and the doc’s are better educated than the USA AMA racketeers.
Now 800M people are under quarantine in China, which is 1/2 the country, given that 1/2 the country now lives in the city’s this makes sense, I have long said biggest outcome here is people will return to the villages, where they will not get sick.
CCP doesn’t worry about credibility. You “believe” what you are told, or else. They are not about to change that approach here and now. Far from it.
Hubris will forever be the fall of man. China’s politicians do not do any favors for their citizens by hiding information that could be used to stop this. Funny how it seems to affect people aged 45+, for the most part (and anyone immune compromised already). If I were a conspiracy type, I’d be wondering about all that money that won’t be spent on retirement if the majority of them have succumbed to this virus. Government would love that. I’d love to say that it won’t affect the North American continent nearly as badly as Asia, but I don’t know if that something I can wholely believe. For prediction sake, I don’t have the foggiest idea how this will play out, on the global scale.