To those people who think this is still going to be cointained/just another cold/etc, think about where we were 3-4 weeks ago and what that has translated to in italy, korea and iran and on the diamond princess, as well as countless other places where it's spreading but not yet detected.

then think about where we are today and how that might translate to additional italy/korea/iran/DP type breakouts over the coming weeks.

i'd bet that 4-6 weeks from now, a breakout like we're seeing in italy today won't even register on the world news scale because there's going to be so many of them everywhere.

this won't be contained. it's done. we need to shut down all mass gatherings, educate people on minimizing the probability of transmission, and basically do everything we can to slow this thing down while we increase capacity for medical treatment (supplies, training military medics/nurses, etc). if we're lucky we'll get a working vaccine rushed out asap.

the big breakouts we're seeing now reached the affected countries in january when worldwide counts were still very low. it makes sense that a lot of countries would have faded it until now by a combination of random chance and the lack of extensive testing. it's coming though.

You gonna do the same plan again next year when we inevitably get new strands of the flu again?

are you gonna go to school next year when you inevitably still don't understand exponential growth?

Why does the "exponential growth" of Covid-19 worry you so much more than the "exponential growth" of new strands of flu viruses?

same reason 1+1 is different from 1+1000000 despite both being "addition"?

I really don't want to make a rash financially decision but this thing seems ****ed.

How can China get back up and running anytime soon with all the congestion it has? The virus is going to need to be almost completely eradicated for that to happen.

What if it keeps spreading in parts of the Middle East and Africa where their healthcare systems aren't remotely equipped to handle 5-10% of patients needing ICU or ER access?

The flu is plenty contagious enough. We don't shut down the world annually because we realistically can't stop the spread and can only manage it.

This Covid-19 is shaping up to be the same thing. Stopping, even slowing, isn't really realistic except in the short term with very drastic measures. We can only manage it.

I've linked to articles before that citywide quarantines and travel bans don't work. That's the opinion of people who have studied epidemics of the past, many of which tried the measures many people seem to insist are necessary.

I agree 100% there are already economic consequences and will be more for some time but it is still not clear to me if/when the stock market will correctly price this risk/reality. I have already moved to a more conservative strategy though due largely to corona and US stock valuations.

I have seen some traders on twitter mocking people who are concerned about the economic impact of corona and saying it is irrational.

We do not know that they have low incidence rates, because they lie, are incompetent, and have testing bottlenecks. Indonesia has had infections, but is reporting zero. Strategically, travel bans incentivize countries to lie until the virus is more widespread in other countries. Any travel ban = instant economic pain. If deny/delay reporting, either the virus subsides, or more countries are affected simultaneously which reduces risk of pariah status.

I would hesitate to extrapolate CFR like this. Average lifespan in Japan is 8 years longer than in China, so biological age and comorbidity at any given chronological age will be different in the two countries. Medical care and treatments are different between Wuhan Cf. Japan. Also other factors. I expect a lower average CFR in Japan than Wuhan (assuming accurate data in both). And some heterogeneity between CFR in different countries for various reasons. Maybe can be adjusted for.

What do you mean they do not work?

It depends when you implement a travel ban and what % of travel you prevent. It could delay the peak of an outbreak and reduce the maxima. This could have benefits eg. more time to prepare, less acute stress on medical facilities, less total infections/deaths.

How the hell do you think they stopped SARS? By extreme containment measures. It worked great. The trouble is that it was done too late here. Could have been contained to China if the WHO head wasn't a corrupt idiot paid off by China and recommended the borders shut with China on the first press conference.

You've been on the wrong side of the analysis the whole time, earlier trying to claim it was no more deadly than the flu. Do you accept now that it is, or are you still pushing the "it's just the flu, guys" stupid narrative?

You can read it exactly at face value. History has repeatedly show mass quarantines for highly contagious diseases don't really work. For diseases that are contagious enough, in fact, it tends to make things worse. Two major mechanisms: overwhelmed health system creates petri dish like conditions; patients go into hiding and literally flee. We're seeing both at work in Wuhan. We saw it with the Diamond Princess cruise in Japan. The best we can really do is ask patients to self-quarantine and accelerate development of vaccines (we made major strides in this) and perhaps anti-viral (we still don't have good anti-virals, even for the flu).

All indications are Covid-19 was probably already widespread before it was detected. By the time the Chinese government even had information worth covering up, tens of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of carriers already fanned out the country and world.

That number of cases went from basically zero to 100+ once widespread testing began in Northern Italy and that (as the link I modelled earlier) the region actually has significantly less risk than many major hubs (Dubai and major cities in NA/Northern Europe mainly) mean in all likelihood we've living with, at a minimum, hundreds of cases of Covid-19 in at least some of the major NA/Norther European cities.

Which history are you talking about? It worked fine for SARS, which is a close relative of this and spread in similar ways.

China's quarantine appears to have worked tremendously well. Hubei is topping out at 80K cases or so (<1% of the population, we know this because of large random sample testing of various country's evacuees). The rest of China they managed to take from 10% growth/day to near zero.

This seems very successful. The "quarantines don't work" is just the medical literature equivalent of edgelords trying to get published. They work great which is why it's the global protocol - it's evidence based standard medicine. Two more reasons to do them: they slow the spread long enough for treatments to be developed, and they slow the spread enough for spring to come which (hopefully, but appears not) usually drops viral infections right down.

How do you think the rest of China would look like right now without quarantine? Peaking and nearly stopped like it is now for something in which one person can infect hundreds in weeks?
I don't see how lack of quarantine helps here. Quarantine reduces the spread rate without any question (over continuing the status quo). That reduce how overwhelmed health care is.

The data just doesn't support this. Again, we have numerous independent population samples from evacuees from the Wuhan region and they come in at <1% infected. The official numbers aren't that far from correct, under counting maybe a few times.

SARS had global outbreaks of 200+ in many spots and they managed to contain it by extreme quarantine measures:



There weren't "10s if not hundreds of thousands" infected at that stage of SARS (because we know the progressing and final count quite accurately), so why would there have been here? The data doesn't support under counting on the level you think is happening, nor does it support quarantine not working.
Probably. But this is because of lack of quarantine and border closing. And we've been here before, with similar global numbers for SARS

I do think this won't contained at this point, but attempts to do so still make sense (Italy would probably be zero if they'd closed the borders to Chinese), buy time, and have worked in exactly this scenario before.

With Diamond Princess we have crucial information. 25 deaths is simply different than 6.
If we get a number like 1,4% CFR when we adjust for age then that’s it’s the ballpark of the Chinese estimate and we can work with 2% as decent enough heuristic.

I'm confused. Now tooth believes the official numbers coming from China are accurate?

We already know the hosptalization rate is way higher than flu from the simple fact that <1% population exposure in Wuhan overwhelmed hospitals with pneumonia patients, thousands of them critical. The flu doesn't do anywhere near that with even 10% of the population infected.

We know it from the fact that >15 people under 40 have died. The population death rate for the flu for under 40s is less than 1 in 100,000.

Diamond Princess should come in at around 50 dead when it's all done.
They're not accurate, but they're also not under counting by the 100x that grizy is suggesting with the comment below, or even 10x. The below is pure fantasy:
He's claiming that at about mid January there were tens to hundreds of thousands infected leaving Wuhan. It's just not true. China numbers probably under count 2-3x but not 100x like Grizy is claiming

Isn’t the Wuhan lockdown a demonstration that quarantine worked? The deaths stabilized after 2 weeks of lockdown. Those numbers would have been much higher without lockdown according to the models I saw in late January.

Do you really think anybody is going to take a chance to see what happens without a quarantine?

I think we will have multiple medium sized clusters around the world for a while contained with draconian measures until either the **** hits the fan and we say **** it or we find some vaccine or treatment.

I think your diamond princess estimate is too pessimistic. Within the realm of possibilities but not the most reasonable pick.

My pick would be around 25 based on likely additional cases, based on the estimated CFR and based on the fact that older people effect balances out with better health care effect.

A 95% interval is probably 6 to 90 deaths.

We are still lacking information imo.

The numbers out of Wuhan (Hubei in general) suggest the handling was an unmitigated disaster.

Yes but that’s because the first pneumonia cases were known in early December and they went on lockdown mode after 7 weeks.

We can’t know what would have happened had they not gone on lockdown mode after 7 weeks but the numbers are telling me that the lockdown managed to stop exponential growth of the number of deaths within 2 weeks.

The numbers are also telling me that the disease has been reasonably contained in the rest of mainland China.

I wouldn't be too sure about that if I were you.

But those are unofficial stats and rumors. And that takes into account only Wuhan not the rest of mainland China. And we don’t know how many unreported deaths happened 3 weeks after the lockdown or 3 weeks before the lockdown.
I don’t trust the Chinese numbers. But if we look at those numbers then the lockdown worked. Period.


That’s why I posted the data we have to look forward, surely the Italians authorities have much less space to bullshit us.
That’s why I gave such a wide range to possible death scenarios in diamond princess and why I think we need to see how northern Italy develops in the next couple of weeks.

Consider that the market is still near ATH, meaning it's likely priced near the best case scenario. If the "rash financial decision" you're considering is exiting equities and foregoing 2-4 weeks of returns while the CV situation comes into focus, you're risking on average maybe what, 1% growth? Now consider if you stay in, what do you expect to lose * how likely is it that this thing is in fact truly ****ed? If you can reasonably estimate those numbers, whatever decision you make won't be rash, just a simple EV calculation.

The conversation should not be : How bad is the Coronavirus?

The conversation should be : what data are we going to analyze during the next week to have an idea of where this is going.

Almost one tenth of the worlds population is in lock-down in China. Their economy is paralyzed.

Do you really think the CCP is doing that because a few hundred people died?