Quarantine Period Extended to 21 Days
https://twitter.com/COVID_19NEWS/status/1229352316723089409
About Those Tests
https://twitter.com/peppathefrog/status/1229373240805658625
Companies Pile on Debt
Letting Chinese companies pile on more debt to survive the coronavirus is a treatment that’s killing the patient, says @anjani_trivedi https://t.co/T9hXG5Qa4P
— Bloomberg Opinion (@opinion) February 17, 2020
Credit Strains on China – Michael Pettis
…items — that typically comes to around 10% or more. At any rate the main point of the article is absolutely correct: the main impact of the coronavirus will be to accelerate the pace of China’s already-strained credit creation.
— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) February 17, 2020
Handshake or Elbow Bump?
The fast-spreading outbreak is prompting a rethink of the most basic form of business etiquette https://t.co/CHliH643iH
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) February 17, 2020
Toilet Paper Theft
Big time toilet-paper theft. Make up your own funny or clever comment.https://t.co/kuqOnGotgz via @scmpnews
— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) February 17, 2020
Micheal Pettis in France, Can’t Find Masks
…had any of the masks that might protect from the coronavirus. No, she snapped at me, and no shop in France had any masks, and she glared at me so accusingly that I half wanted to apologize and explain how minimal my role had been in the creation of the coronavirus outbreak.
— Michael Pettis (@michaelxpettis) February 17, 2020
Diamond Princess Ship Count Hits 355
29% (+): While 🛳 evacuating, “Japan’s health ministry confirmed 70 additional coronavirus cases on board the ship, bringing the total number of those infected on the Diamond Princess to 355 (1,219 total pax/crew members tested so far) #COVID19 #SARSCoV2 https://t.co/3Z6eWVteCU
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 17, 2020
Sad Milestones
This is quite a sad milestone indeed 😢 https://t.co/bCZW5Qamvg
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 17, 2020
Passenger Ship Traffic Down 49%
#China‘s passenger trips fell to 12.37 million on Feb. 16, 80.6% down from a year earlier, said the Ministry of Transport.
In Jan 10 – Feb 16, total passenger trips fell 49% y/y to 1.45 billion.
— YUAN TALKS (@YuanTalks) February 17, 2020
Early Stages of Pandemic
2) The relative underdiagnosis is from previous public interviews with Neil Ferguson. He even goes farther and suggests only 5% of the cases are being reported (implies 20x underdiagnosis) in China. See video here: https://t.co/5oeIsCctS9 https://t.co/UD1iqFy8p5
— Eric Feigl-Ding (@DrEricDing) February 15, 2020
Global Switch Shortage
*NINTENDO IS LIKELY TO SUFFER GLOBAL SWITCH SHORTAGES FROM VIRUS
*THAILAND CUTS 2020GDP GROWTH ESTIMATE TO RANGE OF 1.5% TO 2.5%
*SINGAPORE LOWERS 2020GDP GROWTH EST. RANGE TO -0.5% TO 1.5%You (and I) might look at these stories and think bad news.
The mkt sees more printing!
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 17, 2020
Nothing to See Here
Singapore has 78 cases and sees its FULL YEAR GDP falling to contraction.
China has 60k+ cases and its official est. sees just 1.5% dip in Q1 2020 (to 4.5%) and then a rebound to business as usual.
Nothing to see here, plenty of paper/toner at the Chinese central bank.
(2/2)
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 17, 2020
Bianco Chart Update
The death rate can only be known at the end. And it will go up as health care systems are stressed and overwhelmed.
A better metric, in real-time, is the no. of serious cases (typically require hospitalization). This is just under 20% (red), or nearly 20x (!) the seasonal flu! https://t.co/xzsSiACFYG pic.twitter.com/FJQLinrNNV
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 16, 2020
Bill Gates vs Average Tweet
But on Wall Street and on twitter their are no shortage of experts in epidemiology. And they nearly all in agreement.
Nothing to see here, and most likely a temporary setback, like a giant snowstorm.
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 16, 2020
Bianco Mortality Rate Charts
https://twitter.com/biancoresearch/status/1229403469863440389
The charts through day 32 (Feb 16) of REPORTING.
Mortality is at a new high versus both SARS and Swine Flu.
Already surpassed SARS infections. Swine flu infections did not reach this point until day 70.@spacenerd14 @MishGEA @ErikSTownsend @RMKOutFront @chrismartenson pic.twitter.com/5LNMFAteTN
— Jim Bianco (@biancoresearch) February 17, 2020
Mike “Mish” Shedock
Total confirmed cases: More than 73,400
Total deaths: At least 1,874
CNBC right now:
Coronavirus live updates: Japan is on ‘cusp’ of outbreak, France warns of pandemic risk
PUBLISHED TUE, FEB 18 20207:34 AM EST
Eventually, over 2 billion people may succumb to the coronavirus.
“How patients go see a doctor is a crucial factor,” Takaji Wakita, the head of the National Institute of Infectious Diseases, said Sunday. “What we’ve come to know so far is there are many who only went through mild symptoms. … Those with mild symptoms are advised not to visit an outpatient doctor but call the consultation center.”
The guidelines advise that people seek a consultation if they have a fever of 37.5 degrees or above for four days or more, experience difficulty breathing or feel severe drowsiness. Medical staff at the center will then advise which hospitals a caller should visit for treatment.”
This basically means Japan is giving up on stopping the virus. Singapore’s PM warned they may get to this place but it looks like Japan beat them to it.
For me, Jim Biancos’s chart of total cases vs ‘serious’ cases is the most troubling yet, but certainly explains the building of 10,000 bed “hospitals” in Wuhan. Simple linear extrapolation of only the WHO reported numbers yields a US death rate in a typical flu season of around 880,000 deaths, or roughly 26X the 34,000 dying of flu this past year.
It probably also accounts for Xi casually, publicly denouncing the practice of eating wild meat two days ago. That’s a start.
Wild meat accounted for the SARS outbreak and almost certainly this one, but a ban won’t help the current outbreak’s progress at all. It may help stop a future one. It won’t stop rural folks from eating wild meat so perhaps the next outbreak will occur in a small town somewhere. Patient Zero in SARS appears to have been a farmer.
There were several apparently unrelated outbreaks in a region, so they reckon that there was a different source to all those first registered
Seems to point to animal traders etc. by their having higher antibodies, but not sure if those are completely SARS specific. So “unknown” but worked its way between that lot and their animals. I am not sure they ever found a wild population with SARS.
“As it turned out, that was very ineffective in preventing spread on the ship,” Fauci told the USA TODAY Editorial Board and reporters Monday. Every hour, another four or five people were being infected.
Fauci didn’t provide how he knew infections were after quarantine, maybe he doesn’t know if they were. Some would be after quarantine from same cabin, there are almost two hundred asymptomatic of the total at present and quarantine has been roughly two weeks. Incubation is up to two weeks also, maybe more. So cannot draw conclusions that easily. If we saw it was all one area of the ship, or a class, or how many were sharing cabins, it would be easier to figure out what is going on maybe. I can’t find this info on the web.
The case numbers being issued by China ( and cited by the WHO and other ‘official’ news sources are as worthless as Bernie Madoff’s numbers to his clients. If one ‘cruise ship’ is reporting 1 go 2% of passengers getting infected EVERY day then what is going on in China is off the charts. Singapore seem to be doing a good job ( for now) in tallying its cases and sources of infection and Japan is trying too but the numbers are still small.
14 American evacuees from the cruise ship have now tested positive. They are supposedly in the “quarantine” area of the plane bringing them back. Also as I said before, the virus became viral since Jan 1st, but we only started blocking people from entering the US since Jan 31st. How can anyone be sure that we have the right numbers in the US?
A cruise ship is a poor comparison to society in general. It is a petri dish for multiplying bacteria. Even without COVID-19, if you go on a cruise, expect to catch a number of flus or colds.
Bolto: Sometimes families are more or less sensitive to a particular virus. Depends on the genes that they carry.
Another example to show why the total death number does not seem correct. A film director and his family (total of 4) died of this virus with a matter of 3~4 weeks. See one of the links: link to star.ettoday.net
This news is available in many Chinese news outlets. If this virus is only <5%, why all 4 people (100%) living together in his family died? And if percentage is higher than 5%, what is the real number of total death so far?
Since this situation has exposed too much dependence of Chinese supplies, will countries and companies shuffle their supply lines a bit after this is over?
Vertical quarantine now in Hong Kong…
Chun Yeung Estate in Fo Tan, which has 4,800 flats, will be used as Hong Kong’s fifth quarantine site as four other facilities are already full…..
Some flights from Hong Kong to US still flying last week.
Tens of thousands of people waited in line to cross the China/HK border before it was closed.
….Hong Kong International Airport handled 5.7 million passengers and 33,210 flight movements in January 2020, decreases of 11.7% and 9.1% year-on-year, respectively.
Cargo throughput dropped 10.4% to 359,000 tonnes when compared to January 2019.
Overall passenger traffic to/from Mainland China, South Korea and Southeast Asia recorded the most significant decreases in January.
Visitor traffic remained weak, showing a year-on-year decrease of 43%. However, travel by Hong Kong residents saw a surge during the Chinese New Year holidays, amounting to a monthly growth of 25% year-on-year….
With another 99 confirmed cases, the most remarkable thing about the Death Princess, er, Diamond Princess is that there are no people reported to have escaped, or attempted to escape, and at the other extreme, there is one American family who is still enjoying the stay sufficiently that they declined to be evacuated. It would seem that at the current pace, every person on board will be infected within another couple weeks.
The Diamond Princess will soon enough give us something we have needed, a finite number of cases which we can track separately to monitor progress. Currently, of 454 cases, 19 are in serious/critical condition. I think it’s a reasonable guess that none of those are from the people detected in the last day or two. If they are all from cases detected a week ago, that would mean 19/135 are in serious/critical condition, or 14%.
Then, with that data, we can work backwards in China. If 14% of cases typically end up in Serious/critical condition, then if there are 11,272 cases in critical/serious condition in China, we can guess that a week ago there were about 80,500 cases rather than the 40,500 cases officially reported. That is consistent with not catching/reporting all the mild cases, but not consistent with the most extreme views on under-reporting by China. Of course, they could be under-reporting serious/critical cases, too.
Some grad student in virology should be chomping at the bit to get on board the Diamond Princess to see how it’s spreading. Check out the air systems, food handling procedures, various kinds of cabin setups, etc. Was that one guy that got off early a super spreader? Did they have some dances on board, what kinds of close-contact activities? So many questions. Sounds like great thesis material to me. Just need a bio-hazard suit and some committee signatures…
I can just imagine all the forms of “close contact activities”. Boggles the mind.
Not sure how many passengers have been tested yet on Diamond Princess, but the reported infection density there seem so far beyond anywhere else outside of possibly Wuhan itself, that one can wonder if they are simply employing a testing regimen that differs from elsewhere. Say, taking swabs from every nook and cranny of people’s bodies, rather than just a quick throat swab..
Or, perhaps, employing tests which either are more sensitive to covid-19, or is picking up a hitherto unknown, closely related, progenitor which may have been circulating asymptomatically, or with only mild symptoms, for quite a bit longer and wider, than the more aggressive one which suddenly brought it to everyone’s attention. (It will be nice if we ever get to the point where fully sequenced representative viral genomes of all positives during “outbreaks”, are published near real time, as current “test results” are rarely either as reliable, nor as unambiguous, as they are often presumed to be.)
Or maybe Diamond Princess just happened to get a huge shipment of fresh exotic meats, from one of the vendors right at ground zero Wuhan, before casting off. And all the passengers have been enjoying it, served rare…..
One way or the other, that ship is starting to look like it is its own, unique universe.
“Hong Kong (CNN)Nearly half of China’s population — more than 780 million people — are currently living under various forms of travel restrictions as authorities race to contain the spread of a deadly virus.”
21 days?
Time to update US quarantine time.
Those cruise people will be in quarantine for another 3 weeks if the CDC is awake.
The number of asymptomatic cases observed from the Diamond Princess should be very disturbing to anyone who is paying attention. The CDC should look for these in the US to determine if it is already too late for quarantines, and move to the next phase of disease mitigation if that is where we already are.
If the “PUI” numbers on the CDC website are accurate and up to date, which they claim they update every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, that means they aren’t even testing everyone, just screening them, which means they’ve already made too many wrong assumptions from the beginning and screwed things up.
They’re not going to prevent an epidemic from coming here, that’s a given. All they can do is buy some time.
If 70% of cases are asymptomatic and the CDC has so far only screened for sick and close contacts, how will quarantining those who are sick and close contacts buy any time? Presumably, 70% of the cases will be in the general population somewhere, going about their business as usual, unable to tell that anything is amiss.
My point was that the CDC needs to determine if they are wasting resources which would be better spent on mitigation rather than containment. Screening people in 5 major cities who report sick with Flu/Cold symptoms is obviously a step in that direction, but they are still not doing anything to check for asymptomatic cases, which might be the majority of cases if the Diamond Princess is any indication.
EDIT: I see that the Daily Mail@Roadrunner12 linked to states that the UK is testing large groups of people and finding very few cases, so maybe asymptomatic infections are not as prevalent as the Diamond Princess might suggest.
I wasn’t disagreeing with you, on the contrary. They’ve already made too many wrong assumptions. I don’t see how we’re going to avoid an epidemic here. The quarantines they are currently doing at this early stage are good, but are just going to slow down the onset. Perhaps it won’t like July/August weather so buying time now is a good thing.
I just wonder.
If we stopped all air travel, stone dead, for six months….what would happen?
“The CDC should look for these in the US to determine if it is already too late for quarantines, and move to the next phase of disease mitigation if that is where we already are.”
As of right, there is no need to worry as its gone by April according to Trump. Trumps really gonna be hopping mad as the US can expect an influx of immigrants as the virus spreads elsewhere.(sarcasm).
“Coronavirus fears have gripped Britain with officials carrying out tests for the killer virus on 1,400 more people across the home nations.
None tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 but the extraordinary figure – the highest in a day so far – reflects growing public anxiety.
More than 4,500 people have now been tested in the UK. Only nine patients have been diagnosed with the never-before-seen virus on British soil.
Health officials fear more cases will crop up, with leading scientists warning hopes of stopping a outbreak are ‘fading by the day’.”