Coronavirus | PUNT ROAD END | Richmond Tigers Forum
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Coronavirus

An interesting article on Italy's high numbers. In a nut shell:

"Only the most severe cases are being tested, added Galli, and not the entire population -- which in turn, skews the death rate."

Our experience is the same in France - only hospitalised cases are tested.
And its the same in the UK.
If you have symptoms / are sick then the action is stay home and recuperate.
Obviously not enough tests / lab capacity to test widely.

What that means is that Italy is testing at a similar rate to many other countries.... so is that the actual reason for the higher death rate?
Probably its a combination of testing rate and other factors
 
As the rate of infection as reported in the media through confirmed cases has slowed down, I’d like to bring up a few talking points:

- It takes about 10 days before measures appear in the reported numbers.

- Australia is preparing makeshift hospitals and morgues

- We have been extremely low on PPE and test kits for weeks

- China was low on test kits between approx. Jan 30 - Feb 10 when their rate slowed down like ours, then their numbers jumped back up around Feb 17-20.

- It’s probably much higher in the general community today than most people realise

- We aren’t testing for community transmission

And finally, the worst case scenarios will not happen. These are the upper limits of wide ranges provided to governments by our universities.
 
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If 80,000 septics died of the flu in their 2017 / 2018 flu season then it would be completely rational to think that 100,000 septics might die from a similar type virus that there's no vaccine for.

10671 flu pneumonia victims in Oz 2015 / 2017 and there's not a squeak from anyone yet so far less than 20 coroner victims n we've virtually shut the country down.
The reason there are so few deaths is because we virtually closed the country down.
 
Personally I would appreciate if Gia and yourself took the chat into a different thread.
Can I suggest a 'Economic theory and appreciation' or 'My Dad knows bigger economics than your Dad'
:)
There is no chat to be had with David. Our world views are completely at odds so all that’s left is to tell each other to GAGF. David didn’t seem to be getting the hint.
 
So much for China banning the sale and consumption of wild animals :mad:


One of Australia's most popular tourist destinations in Thailand is every bit as bad as China.
Having lived there for five years roughly a decade ago, the famous wet markets at Chatuchak used to anger me enormously.
So many exotic animals from all over the world heaped together in the one place..from baby hedgehogs , to owls, to chameleons etc. all stored in close proximity, in poor hygienic conditions.
These wet markets are a ticking time bomb. I used to comment to my wife that something like COVID-19 was bound to happen.
Seems mother nature got her revenge.
No point just pointing pressure on the Chinese. There needs to be a global push to eradicate wildlife from these markets.

 
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Case count excluding China (updated 11:40pm)

721,313 cases
35,717 deaths (4.95%)
29,878 severe (4%)
559,451 mild (78%)
96,267 recovered (13%)
 
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One of Australia's most popular tourist destinations in Thailand is every bit as bad as China.
Having lived there for five years roughly a decade ago, the famous wet markets at Chatuchak used to anger me enormously.
So many exotic animals from all over the world heaped together in the one place..from baby hedgehogs , to owls, to chameleons etc. all stored in close proximity, in poor hygienic conditions.
These wet markets are a ticking time bomb. I used to comment to my wife that something like COVID-19 was bound to happen.
Seems mother nature got her revenge.
No point just pointing pressure on the Chinese. There needs to be a global push to eradicate wildlife from these markets.

Yes wet markets are disgusting.
I went to that market years ago, and then again about 10 years ago.
Thailand has a huge population with Chinese ancestry, I reckon that they would be the majority of people who are eating those animals.
 
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The Coronavirus Is Becoming A Public Relations Disaster For China
Kenneth Rapoza
Forbes
March 30, 2020


It was only a matter of time before the coronavirus pandemic started to show a rupture in Western relations with China. Today, the market got some of the first hints of a rising probability of “decoupling”.

Evidence came today in the form of two BBC reports, one of the U.K. government of Boris Johnson (who has COVID-19 now) saying there would be ramifications for China failing to share how they stopped the virus from spreading. One such punishment was getting rid of Huawei in their 5G program.

Over the weekend, the Daily Mail reported that the Johnson team doubted China’s SARS-CoV-2 infection count, which totals around 81,000, saying they were probably off by a factor of 40.

The wide spreading disease throughout Europe is turning people off to China in leadership positions who, only a few months ago, were fine with Beijing and thought the U.S. trade war with China was just Trump being Trump. Three years ago, Davos Man invited Xi Jinping to the World Economic Forum, heralding him as the new leader of the free trade world.

The other signal today comes from news reports that Spain, Turkey and The Netherlands are angry with their Chinese partner over what they described as faulty medical equipment used to combat COVID-19.

COVID-19 is the disease caused by the new SARS coronavirus, first reported in Hubei province China in late December.

The Dutch health ministry announced it had recalled 600,000 Made in China face masks. The equipment was used by front-line medical teams. Dutch officials said that the masks did not fit right, and that their filters did not work as intended, the BBC reported on Monday.

"The rest of the shipment was immediately put on hold and has not been distributed,” a statement read. “Now it has been decided not to use any of this shipment.”

On Sunday, U.S. Senator Tom Cotton tweeted out a South China Morning Post story about how Chinese movie theaters are being shuttered one week after being reopened.

Cotton noted, "China just shut down movie theaters nationwide after reopening them. Sound to you like they have pandemic under control? Me neither. China is still lying."

Cotton is a consistent China basher, but his comments come at a time when Italy and the U.S. have long passed China’s total infections. Spain passed this weekend, now with over 85,000 cases. Italy has 11,591 deaths, nearly four times that of China.

The Western world are being made to look like the Three Stooges.

People in the markets are scratching their heads, trying to figure out a timeline as to when this all ends, but unable to fully trust China. Afterall, they ask, how did the epicenter of the outbreak manage to get away with just 81,000 cases, while Italy is still not at peak coronavirus, and some U.S. states are only just getting started?

For sure, China will recover from the coronavirus before it recovers from this face plant with its big investors in the West. The longer this disease ravages the U.S. and Europe, the more it turns into a public relations disaster for the Chinese government.

Their economies are in lockdown and in freefall.

What was once a European recovery story in 2020 is now another year of economic contraction, especially in Italy.

The U.S. economy is also seen ending the year in the red, based on economic projections by Barclays Capital. Every week, the forecasts keep getting worse.

The capitalist Democracies of Europe and the U.S. are on life support, ironically of the kind that requires big government spending to keep people employed who are otherwise at home watching Netflix. In Italy, they cannot even go out for a jog in Milan. In Brazil, Rio de Janeiro beaches are closed. In the U.S., Disney World, the symbol of American life, is closed. Central Park, the heart of the most important city in the nation, has been turned into a M.A.S.H. unit.

As people watch this unfold, Beijing’s response to the coronavirus is increasingly treated with skepticism, if not anger in government circles. They feel China got away unscathed, despite the fact that China is still very much living with this today.

Reports of faulty test kits and medical equipment serve to amplify existing apprehensions. The China zeitgeist is a bit dismal.

In a report by Business Insider yesterday, reporter Adam Payne quotes (anonymously) a British official saying, “There has to be a reckoning when this is over. The anger goes right to the top.”

To be sure, President Xi Jinping has his plate full, says Vladimir Signorelli, head of Bretton Woods Research, a macro investing research firm out of New Jersey. “Repairing China’s global trust may come at a price,”he says. “We expect the Chinese to become more willing to concede in trade negotiations with the U.S. going forward because it’s all about volume and market share. They don’t want to lose anymore market share in the supply chain then they have to because of this disaster.”

American multinational corporations operating in China are likely to take a longer-term view on the China market, especially if China is a domestic market for them, or a launching pad into southeast Asia.

But if COVID-19 severely hurts the home market, then watch for foreign companies to become less ambitious about being in China, UBS strategists led by Wendy Liu in Hong Kong wrote in a client note dated March 27.

“If Chinese subsidiaries are not profitable and remain difficult to turnaround, then the decision to sell or exit could be made. American small to midsized business suppliers based in China are lagging the big corporations in work resumption by about two weeks, and we believe are more likely than the larger companies to exit China,” she says.

Giant corporations like Starbucks and Tesla may very well increase investment there as promised, but that has to do with the local market. That is not an offshoring story.

Meanwhile, as far as China’s coronavirus numbers go, other Asian countries that have had experience with SARS in 2003 were quick to restrict travel, require surgical masks in public, and institute social distancing and other measures to stop the spread. Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan — they have been experts at keeping this thing under control.

If the U.S. can’t trust China for guidance, then they don’t have to look far for a worthy group to imitate.

For its part, Hubei was locked down and people were required to shelter-in-place. Grocery stores were not opened. The government appointed people to do the shopping and delivery to the tens of millions of people stuck at home.

Unlike South Korea, China did not test vast amounts of people so those who may have died and not tested for COVID-19 were unlikely to be counted in the official tally.

“The hardest thing for me was that people died in Wuhan because we didn’t have the ICU beds...especially in the early stages of the outbreak,” says Doctor Peng Zhiyong, Dir of Critical Care at Wuhan’s Zhonghan Hospital in Hubei.

He said that of the patients that needed ICU during the one month period of February 8 to March 7, 25% to 30% of them died. “Asymptomatic patients were probably main source of transmission,” he says, despite some in China saying there is still no evidence of asymptomatic transmission to this day.

Information on how to contain, treat and kill COVID-19 are all over the place.

The U.S. government recently toyed with the idea of locking down the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, the new American Hubei province, but has since balked on that call.

This could prove to be the unwinding, helping spread a disease already cranking up in New Orleans and Detroit as New Yorkers look to get off Manhattan.

President Trump this weekend extended the recommended quarantine measures until the end of April.

By comparison, the epicenter of Hubei was locked down for two months.

This fact isn’t lost on some money managers.

“Yeah, I think we could even go longer than a month,” says Sam Hendel, co-fund manager of the $5 billion asset manager Levin Easterly Partners in Manhattan. He is now working out of his home in Westport, Connecticut. “This is going to take longer because pockets of the country are just starting with this. Spring breakers are coming back and they’re sick and they’re going to get their families sick, and that’s concerning to me,” he says, warning: “Calling a bottom and using China for timing it is a fool’s errand."
 
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That death percentage appears to be gradually increasing every day.
Mathematically it has to when the new case growth stops accelerating (accelerating = increasing at a faster rate). You must catch it before you can die from it.

When the new case growth slows, new deaths represent people who caught it about 8 days earlier, The death percentage must increase for about the same time.
 
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There was a good question yesterday as to why the German fatality rate is so much lower than the Italian fatality rate. There are a number demographic reasons why we should expect lower fatality rate in Germany, less over 65yo, less smoking prevalence, particularly in the west, lower incidence of hypertension, culturally more socially distant. Another reason is that Germany is a week or two behind Italy, and so its fatality rate will appear less simply because, Italy has more time for reported cases to die.

But none of these explain the dramatic difference. The dramatic difference is explained in how the Germans have managed the age of infection. Germany actually has the same or slightly more infections under the age of 60, but dramatically less infections over the ages of 60yo. Germany and Italy both report 94-95% of their deaths in the over 60yo demographic, so if you stop >60yo catching it you dramatically reduce the total deaths.

200331 COVID cases by age, Italy Germany.png

It is important to note in Italy the outbreak started in the older regions in the north and is moving to the younger south.

In Germany the outbreak started in the younger South West and is slowly moving to the older North East.

Because of this, and the fact that Germany is behind Italy on the curve, I anticipate that the difference in fatality rate between the two countries will shrink, but because Germany appears to be doing such a great job of keeping the infection out the >60yo age group it's unlikely the fatality rate gap will close. At least not in this COVID season.

The quicker we take specific action to isolate the oldies in Australia the better. It is the action that will save the most lives and of course prevent health system overload.
 
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The quicker we take specific action to isolate the oldies in Australia the better. It is the action that will save the most lives and of course prevent health system overload.

Take away the high number of cases of older people acquiring the virus on cruise ships (over 25% of all cases from cruises) I think Australia has done very well limiting the incidence in older people. Apart from cruises alot of the acquired cases have also been from overseas travellers returning to Australia which on average would likely be younger.

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