Viral Valentines.
It's Valentine's Day, and, jumping immediately to a non sequitur, you'll note that global stocks have fallen on five of the last six Fridays, thanks in no small part to traders' aversion to holding risk into the weekend during the coronavirus outbreak.
That "strong bias" (as Bloomberg's Garfield Reynolds put it) against staying long on Fridays was muted headed into the US session, as global stocks meandered after the latest data showed Thursday's surge in virus cases due to the new reporting me
This. Is. Not. Good.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.07.20021154v1
“Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity. We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period. Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6.”
Then go buy canned corn and board yourself in the basement.
Hey now, H-man, I’m not the one uploading zombie pictures with my blog posts. This is real-time medical research from DARPA and Los Alamos labs. If you download the study and read it, you’ll note that if these updated estimates are correct, we will likely start seeing travel restrictions and social distancing measures implemented globally in the not-so-distant future. If that not relevant to markets than I don’t know what is. I mean, not that it matters, since the CB’s will just dump another few trillion into the monetary base.
Btw, I would love to see some analysis on the potential impact of COVID-19 on China’s bad debt situation.
I’m just kidding. I know it’s bad. I just feel like it’s incumbent upon me to try and provide some levity because the problem with social media right now is that things which are objectively bad (like this virus) are made out to be apocalyptic events, which paradoxically hurts the public because all of the propaganda actually serves to drown out legitimate studies like the one you cited (I haven’t read it, but I’ll take your word for it).
But there some good news, too
“U.S. health officials will monitor people with flu-like symptoms for the coronavirus in five cities, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday.
The five labs are in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York City. Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases at the agency, said the CDC intends to add more cities in the coming weeks until the CDC has achieved “national surveillance.”
By the way, about canned corn. I just check availability of simple disposable face masks in Walgreens – seems like they don’t have anything in stock. I don’t know, may be because all that stuff is manufactured in China and China currently use everything in house. May be there is another reason.
But anyway, in the case of global pandemic it might happen that medical supply in the US is a way limited compared even to China. Especially cheap disposable stuff like masks, visors, full protection suits.
Walgreens is sold out of canned corn and H95 viral masks
I can see my canned corn reference is going to linger in perpetuity. lol