Coronavirus Pandemic (COVID-19) (SARS-CoV-2) [2020]

Interesting that some countries ask travelers to download an app to track their location.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world...8721c35bc157067917f2ba&pinned_post_type=share

 

I expect that the economic impact will long outlast the pandemic. Many businesses will fail, many jobs will be lost and it will take a while to replace them.

 

It's still growing. I.e. there's still an increasing amount of people filling the hospital without a bed or emergency care equipment to take care of them.
The situation is still getting worse, even if the number of confirmed infected isn't accelerated.






BTW in regard to the recovered numbers, in Portugal we've had 43 confirmed recovered and that number hasn't changed for the whole week.
The reason for this is that for a person to be considered recovered, they must:
a) show no symptoms for over a week
b) have one test with negative result after a)
c) have another test with negative result some days after b)

This means each one of the 10 000 confirmed infected in the country will need to take two tests, meaning we'd need to spare over 20 000 tests just to put everyone into the "recovered" list.
We can't spare those many tests. We need them for the health professionals and people with symptoms.

 

of course but just as many people will come out of this better than they went in. My work is paying us a bonus to work from home. So i will end up making more money than I would have during this and my wife's school is working from home. I also bought some stock that i think will pay off a year or two down the line.

 

This makes little sense though and I don't think that is how deaths are normally counted.

As I heard somebody else say: Freddy Mercury died of pneumonia but what killed him was hiv/aids.

Same goes for other people who are very/terminally ill. Covid might have given the final push but if those people had major underlying health issues it makes no sense to count covid as the cause of death and I do not believe this is how it is normally done.

I remember reading the other day that the Netherlands are not counting like this. Corona is only listen as the cause of death if the person was otherwise healthy (or I suppose at least had no major issues that would have put the person at risk of dying of just about anything).

 

Yep. And Google is now providing location data that they use for tracking travel congestion to identify where people band together, how much traffic is down etc. For the Netherlands I hear banding directly outside homes is up 11%, public transport down by 67%, etc.

I presume they have more reliable data for Android than for Apple ...

 

But that's how some countries are recording Covid19 deaths none-the-less, at least in these reports and data that everyone can see. I guess some are wanting to record the direct deaths, whereas others the consequences of Covid19, maybe to get the public to take it seriously? That makes sense. If the number of healthy people dying from Covid19 was 10 a week, and a the number dying from other conditions exacerbated by and fallout from Covid19 care was 10,000 a week, just reporting the direct-deaths would give a false sense of the lack of impact.

 

This is interesting. Finland is trying to do some quarantines, sweden pretty much nothing. Finland is perhaps 1-2 weeks behind sweden but I would say it's pretty plausible to claim sweden is heading to much worse direction. It's also interesting in the sense that those countries are next to each other and countries are similar enough though not same.



https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/total-deaths-covid-19?time=55..71&country=FIN+SWE

 

Not so for my wife. She is now working from home and has just been informed that she will only be working 32 hours per week and not the usual 40. She is paid hourly so that is a 20% pay cut. The company is also stopping the 2% match on her 401k. At least she is still employed and not one of the 7000 employees that are getting laid off from the company. She is in the financial side of the business and not the sales side so that helped in protecting her job.

Last year I believed that a recession was coming and way overdue and in August 2019 of last year I sold all equities and mutual funds in all our IRA's and 401k's and went all cash in Money Market funds. By doing so we saved $60,000 in losses (as of March 24, 2020) we would have occurred if we had stayed in the investments we had last August.

Since the market has crashed and with the market volatility way up I have been buying and selling stocks over very short time frames and pocketing some very nice gains. I just had one transaction (Energy Transfer LP) where I gained 17% in one day (bought 4/1/2020 and sold 4/2/2020). I am again currently 100% in cash (Money Market) and will wait until another buying opportunity comes along.

When I feel that the recession has bottomed and the recovery has started I will then go long with mutual funds and some select stocks but right now is not the time for me to do that.

The strategy for me right now is to do those short term buy's and sell's which has worked well for me this year as that strategy has netted me a 60.67% annualized gains since the start of the year.

 

2019 Novel Coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19) for Dallas County Texas
https://www.dallascounty.org/departments/dchhs/2019-novel-coronavirus.php

April 3, 2020 - 921 confirmed cases - 17 deaths

921 confirmed cases up 90 over yesterday and no new deaths
Those 90 new cases represent a 10.8% increase over the last day

Increases (by percent) over the last 8 days: 21%, 19.6%, 11.1%, 12.5%, 14.9%, 15.8%, 13.7% and now 10.8%
Increases (by count) over the last 8 days: +64, +72, +49, +61, +82, +100, +100 and now +90

 

What measures are in place in Dallas?

 

I am starting to believe this is indeed a fiasco. Many Doctors warn that we should stop listening to the media because they are feeding into the fear and panic and that many deaths are from other conditions but attributed to the virus.
Our minister of health was going to talk live in public and he didnt know that he was on air. He was talking with someone and said that this is just another flu and we made a big deal out of it.
But during his actual talk later he was saying that we should be very strict.

Also in the US, they estimate harsher lockdowns that will continue to Q3 and Q4 and things are expected to normalize end of 2021. Thats a very very long period.

I wonder if the drive of this measures is the idea of possible political costs, or the tendency of the media to make a big deal out of events in a viewing competition, or overall incompetency of many "experts" trying to gain popularity and attention, or something else or a combination of all of the above.

 

Ohio's numbers today, confirmed: 3312 (up from 2902 ), Hospitalized: 895 (up from 802 ), and 91 Deaths (up from 81 ).
Confirmed Cuyahoga County: 780 (Up from 663 ).

The percentage breakdowns are Confirmed cases ~14%, hospitalized ~12%, and deaths at 12%. So still mostly within the same range as previous days this week, with death percentages varying widely because it's still early on in that phase.

 

Finland and Sweden are an odd comparison.
Sweden is a very interesting case though.
They keep day care and schools open up to 16 year olds so parents can keep going to work, there’s freedom of movement, pubs, restaurants and even shopping malls are open, along with all production even though public congregations were recently cut from 500 to 50 participants.
Basically they’ve cut the most egregious contamination paths, and the use of remote teaching for higher education reduces crowding in public transportation. The idea being that society should still be able to keep rolling along, albeit with somewhat flat tires and social distancing. Basically aiming for a sustainable steady state rather than trying to quench the outbreak as fast as possible.
Whether they succeed remains to be seen.

An unavoidable consequence is a faster increase in cases and ultimately deaths, and the pressure on politicians to "show leadership" or simply "do something!" (whether particularly effective or not) is quite strong, so the experiment may be aborted. But their policies recognize that locking down society completely is unsustainable.

 

You will find dumb or at least badly informed people everywhere, but at least with this crisis you can recognize them much more easily. One clear sign is when someone during the last month still claims this is just another flu. China already showed this not to be true, Italy shows this even more clearly, Iran, South Korea, Spain, France, New York .. stats released today show this also to be true already for the Netherlands.

There was a pretty bad wave of flu here two years ago, and Corona is already worse than that peak today, and it’s still worse today than any day before.

This also shows that in the Netherlands everything points to more people dying during this Corona crisis than the confirmed cases that have been reported.

Cijfers RIVM en CBS geven beeld van waar aantal overleden coronapatiënten
https://www.nu.nl/coronavirus/60423...an-waar-aantal-overleden-coronapatienten.html

 

It doesn't look too good for Sweden. At least not if this keeps going on. New daily cases double at alarming rate. Deaths will follow 2-3weeks later. At some point there is no more capacity/free ventilators at hospitals and deaths will spike due to insufficient care. Sweden is going to need more than good luck unless something is changed or there is some kind of unlikely miracle.



https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/sweden/

 

As I understand it the death rate of covid19 is estimated at the moment to be 0.6%. That tries to take undiagnosed cases into account. R value when nothing is done is about 2.2. This means one sick person gives the virus to 2 other people that get sick. This means exponential spread. If we assume that sweden really does nothing and roughly half the population gets infected this year that would be roughly 5 million sick people. Due to the exponential nature of virus spreading a lot of the people would be sick at same time. At best we would get 5000000*0.006 dead = 30000 deaths. Likely this would be way too little as sweden would not have ventilators/nurses/doctors to take care of huge mass of sick people at the same time.

Well, it's anybodys guess what will happen. But 0.006% and r=2.2, half of the population get's sick if nothing is done is good assumptions based on what we know today. Might be the values are lower in the end but it's a huge gamble to bet on that. It would make a lot of sense to take the cautious path and try to slow down the spread.

 

I can't embbed the picture, so I'll link it instead:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EUZrFnTX0AAN_7s?format=jpg

That's 109298 influenza deaths in England+Wales during 2 months in 2018. That North London hospital probably had more patients in critical condition with respiratory symptoms back then. But that somehow didn't require the absolutely insane and draconian measures that are being taken now, worldwide.

I don't know if it's true, but there are some people around here also saying that there has been a previous influx/outflux of tens of thousands of chinese people in the northern italian regions that currently have the highest numbers for covid-19, because those regions are the most industrialized in Italy (also with colder climate and worse air pollution) and the chinese either owned or worked at some factories there. They say that lots of italians in these regions were probably already infected by the chinese when the lockdown started, and so, rather than avoiding infection, the lockdown has actually confined lots of already infected and uninfected people together, increasing the infection rate.

 

Current corona death estimates in usa:



COVID19 deaths estimated to be between 1.5M-2.2M if nothing is done in usa alone. Worst flu year in last 40 years killed 0.080M people in usa. This is not same as flu, not even remotely

https://www.statnews.com/2018/09/26/cdc-us-flu-deaths-winter/

 

Are those deaths from Flu, or deaths? Or made up Daily Mail shit?

https://fullfact.org/health/coronavirus-compare-influenza/

Public Health England estimates that on average 17,000 people have died from the flu in England annually between 2014/15 and 2018/19. However, the yearly deaths vary widely from a high of 28,330 in 2014/15 to a low of 1,692 in 2018/19. Public Health England does not publish a mortality rate for the flu.
​

Feel free to check this data too:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...ulletins/deathsregistrationsummarytables/2018
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopula...les/quarterlymortalityreports/apriltojune2019

Actual deaths first Quarter of every year. No spikes...