‘We’re At The Peak’: Pandemic Roars Back Onto Traders’ Radar
There was nervous chatter Wednesday about the prospect of a wider selloff amid a rise in global virus cases primarily tied to the rapidly deteriorating situation in India, profiled in "To Go Out Is To Get Infected."
Unfortunately, Narendra Modi seems keen to adopt the Jair Bolsonaro playbook this time around. "I urge states that they should consider lockdowns as the last option," Modi told the nation, in a televised address. "They should earnestly try to avoid lockdowns and focus on micro-conta
2,000 deaths in a day is tragic but it seems a bit hyperbolic to make comparisons with Bolsonaro at this stage. When measured by deaths per million of population, India’s death rate has been very low against many advanced economies (and is a small fraction of Brazil’s). Its actual number of deaths is around 1/3rd of the USA despite having a population more than 4 times larger. We in the UK performed badly in managing Covid too so I am not trying to criticise the USA in saying that. My key point being having advanced economy status was of no great help in protecting from Covid initially but vaccine development and roll-out has become our get out of jail card.
India’s death total is almost surely understated right now. Possibly by a large margin. Read this: https://heisenbergreport.com/2021/04/20/to-go-out-is-to-get-infected-in-india-a-nightmare/
There is no chance (none) that India is reporting COVID deaths with any semblance of precision at this juncture. People are dying too fast for them to keep up. Brazil has no idea what the actual total is. And Bolsonaro doesn’t care.
It’s definitely irrelevant how precisely bad numerically it is vs Brazil as both are very bad and even if you are a soulless calculating husk you should be able to see that an uncontrolled surges in cases anywhere on planet earth means much higher chances for yet another vaccine resistant or immune strain with higher infectiousness, more modes of infection and higher mortality rates. Even worse is that the more places it is out of control the more animal populations it is likely to inhabit. The scenario where it is akin to a globally distributed ebola able to outbreak at any time from one of thousands of locations in a new novel strain should chill us to the bone.
“even if you are a soulless calculating husk” – investors need to be exactly that, to a substantial degree.
As evidenced by the price target increases today on cruise line stocks.
That may be true, but the point still stands. As contagious and dangerous as COVID-19 is, especially for the elderly, it has been comparatively less lethal, measured as deaths per 100 cases, than other coronavirus strains we’ve seen, like SARS and MERS. As bad as this pandemic has been, it could’ve been worse. The possibility of mutations into new novel strains is, imho, still very much a clear and present danger, one that gets worse the longer this scourge runs unchecked across much of the globe.
Wait, isn’t that whole mutation evolution thing just a theory? Shouldn’t we just let all the poor get sick so they can get “natural immunity?”
Sorry, I’m just so tired of all the BS. I finally got my second shot and I can say I haven’t felt this relaxed for months. I’m 76 and I have been on death’s door, seriously, three time since I was 11. That first time, my father’s brother told my mom not to worry because I was “too old to die.” In those days child mortality was high and making it to 11 was a milestone. I was lucky I missed the polio epidemic in the 1950s because my home town was gutted with iron lungs in the hallways and lobbies of the hospitals. For my third escape the doctors not only saved my life but took great pains through several hours of tedious surgery to leave me with a stable quality of life. As to that result my daughter tells me often how lucky I am because they could have skipped all that work and left me no insides and a fate worse than death. We in the US keep objecting to COVID as if it is some sort of unfair inconvenience and theft of our freedom foisted on us by people we don’t like. Ask those folks in India and they will tell you what it really is; it’s the grim reaper and the only reason the outcome isn’t worse is because, like the rest of the system, the GR is short-staffed.