From Beijing To Tokyo To Iran To Florida, COVID Mounts A Comeback

In “The Rally’s Next Hurdle: A Wave Of ‘Second Wave’ Coverage“, I talked about the likelihood that market participants will be inundated with tales of rising COVID infection rates over the next several weeks.

This is obviously a delicate subject. The media is obliged to cover any resurgence in the virus, not just because that “sells” (either figuratively or literally) but because it’s in the best interest of the public. People need to be informed so they can avoid getting sick, etc.

Of course, too much coverage risks creating a panic where there wasn’t one previously, and while “better safe than sorry” is, almost unequivocally, the best fallback position to take in a public health crisis, it’s important to acknowledge that at some point, America needs to modify that simplistic slogan to incorporate everything we’ve learned (and continue to learn) while we wait for a vaccine.

South Korea, for example, incorporated what they learned from previous epidemics on the way to quickly containing the virus, despite suffering one of the most acute early outbreaks. To be fair, orchestrating a coordinated response to an epidemic in a country as large and complex as the US is something entirely different from the South Korean experience, but you get the point.

Sunday brought more in the way of scary-sounding COVID headlines. Beijing has closed its biggest food and vegetable supply center after reporting the biggest spike in daily cases in nearly two months. 38 of China’s 57 new cases were local (“homegrown”, as it were) and 36 of them were in Beijing. All of those three-dozen people are tied to the wholesale market. Here, as recounted by The Washington Post, is how this developed:

A man who had visited the Xinfadi market June 3 to buy meat and seafood tested positive for the coronavirus, Beijing’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

Then on Friday, it announced that two quality control workers at the state-owned China Meat Food Research Center who had visited Xinfadi and five other markets in the city to check on standards had also tested positive.

That prompted a frenzy of testing. By the end of Friday, Beijing authorities had swabbed 1,940 workers in major supermarkets and other food markets in the capital, and collected 5,424 environmental samples.

The tests revealed another four symptomatic cases: three were people who worked at the Xinfadi market’s seafood section and another was a customer who had visited the market. None of them had traveled outside Beijing, signaling that the cases had all been transmitted within the city.

“The calls are coming from a phone inside the house!”, to roll out the old horror movie cliché.

Apparently, Xinfadi is the source of nearly three-quarters of Beijing’s fresh vegetables and around 80% of its fruit. The city yanked all fresh salmon from stores, threw it away, and will now screen all meat, frozen and otherwise, around the capital.

“The Xinfadi market covers an area of 112 hectares and has some 1,500 management personnel and more than 4,000 tenants”, Bloomberg writes. “Local authorities have placed 11 residential sub-districts near [the] market under lockdown”.

It’s not just China. Earlier this month, Iran began reporting higher numbers of new cases following the lifting of lockdown measures, including a record number on June 4. It’s worth mentioning that the statistics coming out of Iran are only as accurate as Khamenei allows them to be. That’s not necessarily to say these statistics are wrong, but it is certainly to suggest that they could be understated.

Over the weekend, Iran reported its largest daily death toll in nearly two months. 104 people died of the virus over the past 24 hours, the health ministry said Sunday.

Brazil, meanwhile, is in crisis, thanks in large part to Jair Bolsonaro, whose steadfast refusal to listen to health experts and generalized disregard for science is blamed for what is now the second-deadliest outbreak on the planet.

Critics cite Bolsonaro’s “rejection of the emerging scientific consensus on how to fight the pandemic – including his promotion of unproven remedies such as chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine – as one of the factors that helped tilt the country into its current health crisis”, The New York Times writes, in a new piece, adding that “Bolsonaro has led the country down what health experts call a perilous path [by] sabotag[ing] quarantine measures adopted by governors, encourag[ing] mass rallies and repeatedly dismiss[ing] the danger of the virus, asserting that it was a ‘measly cold’ and that people with ‘athletic backgrounds’, like himself, were impervious to serious complications”.

Absurd? Yes. But also very predictable if you know anything at all about Bolsonaro.

In Japan, Tokyo reported 47 new cases on Sunday, the largest daily jump since May 5. More than two-dozen of those are tied to nightclubs and bars, a city official said at a press briefing.

The timing leaves something to be desired. “On June 11, Tokyo canceled ‘Tokyo Alert’, which called attention to the spread of the infection”, Asahi reports. “However, since then, the number of infected people in Tokyo per day has exceeded 20 for four consecutive days”.

Economy and fiscal policy minister Yasutoshi Nishimura on Saturday laid out a set of guidelines for restaurants and nightclubs. “In addition to asking customers to provide their contact information”, the protocols include an exhortation to “ensure the distance between people is two meters if possible”. Clearly, that isn’t actually possible, depending on the type of venue.

All of this comes on top of rising infection rates across a variety of US cities and localities, which, at least on a quick read, appears consistent not just with increased testing, but with the virus’s known incubation period.

Ironically, the most rational assessment you’ll find of this “second wave” comes from Zhang Wenhong, a top infectious-disease expert in Shanghai who the Post identifies as “a kind of celebrity in China”.

“There is no need to go ­overboard so much as to halt the restoration of our economy and people’s livelihoods”, Zhang wrote on Weibo. He added a caveat: “As long as each and every one of us do our jobs well, and stay aware of personal hygiene and protect [ourselves and each other] in our daily lives, we will be able to keep ourselves safe and keep our cities free from a second wave of infections and virus spread”.

Compare that to Larry Kudlow who, on Friday, said simply: “There is no second wave”.