Macro Tourist: Market May Be Mispricing Pneumonia Apocalypse
Read more from The Macro Tourist
I don't like trafficking in end-of-the-world predictions. On the whole, humans tend to figure stuff out, so I am by no means a doomsayer. In fact, the market often worries too much about imaginary disasters, so usually I am on the side of calling for calm.
Yet there is sometimes a potentially worrisome situation that the market seems to ignore. Or at least ignores for a while. Then in a sickening whoosh, the worse case scenario gets discoun
Humans tend to figure stuff out?? They do. The problem is getting the world’s unwashed, uneducated masses to sit up and take notice BEFORE it’s too late and to take the appropriate actions. Almost impossible to accomplish. Take the Environmental Crisis. The Congress of the United States has yet to pass a single meaningful bill to address the problem and I think everyone is “aware” that something is happening that is bad and getting worse.
Yeah you can bet the actual figures are closer to 10x what is ‘officially’ reported by China.
Macro – Man, I agree with your thoughts. The last pandemic was the Spanish flu in 1918 which wiped out 50 to 100 million people. Closer to home, my uncle in the panhandle of Florida had seven brothers and sisters back in 1918. When the pandemic ended, he and his brother were the only siblings who made it. This kind of catastrophe is not built into the algo world. To show you how it freaks people out, I was trying a case when the SARS virus broke loose and was representing a Chinese family in a trade dispute with an American company. I was moving an exhibit into evidence that was a fax from China. The clerk of the court refused to touch the document and told me I was putting her in danger. I explained it was a fax, not an original document from China. She told me to handle it.
The virus belongs to the same family of coronaviruses as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), which killed nearly 800 people globally during a 2002/03 outbreak that also started in China.”
800 is more than zero, but China’s population is closing in on 1.5billion…..so it isn’t much more than zero.
Doesn’t mean we won’t panic……just that we shouldn’t.
“The World Health Organization (WHO) today estimated the overall fatality rate for SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) patients at 14% to 15%, significantly higher than previous estimates. The agency estimated the rate for people older than 64 years to be more than 50%.” http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2003/05/estimates-sars-death-rates-revised-upward Imagine the effect if it’s not contained and is easily spread among people like the regular flu or cold.