What is your point exactly ?

a) Chinese numbers are bullshit.

b) The Chinese would have not gone into lockdown for few hundred deaths.

c) The lockdown didn’t work because of twitter reports.

I don’t really understand what you are trying to argue here.

Also you still haven’t proposed data that we can look up to next week.
For instance how many deaths in northern Italy should we expect by the end of February? 10? 30? 60?

For instance if we have only 7 deaths then that would make me think the situation is good and that Europe is showing signs of being able to handle moderate clusters.
If we have 50 then I would think that looks very bad.

He's trying to argue that the chinese government is lying and that he's very big brain because he recognizes it

You made an assertion that the lockdown worked because the deaths stabilized after 2 weeks.

My point is, you can't make any conclusions from the reported numbers coming out of China. They are almost certainly lying about the real numbers. The CCP never tell the truth about anything.

It's got nothing to do with the size of my brain. It's just basic common sense.

It's chill bro I'm very big brain too

I mean the numbers are probably bullshit, but even if you're taking everything at face value I guess the reasonable theory would be that the Chinese government (+ like all other world governments at this point) recognized that the virus is highly contagious and likely enough to require intense hospitalization that they won't have the capacity to deal with it properly. Or whatever. Arguing about why they're locking down entire cities and shutting down significant economic production isn't even all that relevant, the thing is they are, so you can assume it's all unnecessary and the virus will spread wherever it may naturally without a major impact, or you can assume that they're taking these measures because for some reason they need to. The latter seems like a much more reasonable assumption without additional evidence.

How would you adjust for different:

1. medications (Japan recently decided to test/use a flu medication that is not available on market afaik but which gov stockpiles, idk if this is available/used in Wuhan but I doubt it)

2. other variables

I like this approach.

Ill def be dumping some equities today.

Unsure how to play this assuming it only gets worse and that a huge number of people vastly underestimate the possible outcomes. This being especially true if and when an outbreak hits Canada/USA.

In what world are these not extremely high probability to take huge hits in the next year?
-airlines
-cruise ships
-expedia
-?

- Iranian non-regime news claiming there are 50 dead in Qom in Iran (official numbers are 12 for the country but rapidly rising).
- It's been detected for the first time in Afghanistan, Bahrain and Kuwait.
- +60 Italy and +231 South Korea. +158 dead world total.

Nice buying opportunity. I got a lot in index funds but sitting on loads of cash. Drop baby drop!!!

what's the best place to see aggregated coronavirus data? the worldometers site seems to update every day but I have no idea how accurate that is or whether there are better sites out there.

Key reports from the WHO Beijing team, who was finally let into the country

- Decline in China Coronavirus Cases is 'Real'
- WHO notes steep drop in fevers reported at hospitals, hospital beds opening up
- About 300 pages of corrupt ass kissing of China, saying that closing borders with China will harm global containment (no, it wouldn't, it would help it).

Looks like extreme containment works, as you'd expect.

If true, that's really good news. I'm still extremely skeptical about numbers coming out of China though.

Chinese government isn’t even lying really. They said very early on they don’t have enough testing kits. After a big burst of diagnosed via non laboratory means in Wuhan, they went back to reporting lab diagnosed. A lot of the slow down in past few days is those clinically diagnosed getting confirmed by lab tests.

That said, Chinese government seems pretty willing to play along with the idea they got it under control. That might be tantamount to lying even though they are admitting to the real issues in fine prints.

Chinese ministry of culture and tourism issued travel warnings telling Chinese citizens not to visit US due to unfair treatment (racial discrimination.) Ironically, the posts are shared by people with plans to ignore the travel warnings (my WeChat is mostly Chinese nationals that studied/are studying in US so that’s no surprise) and are more concerned the reports will disrupt their flights. Meanwhile there are people on WeChat sharing posts condemning people for going back to their daily lives like going to restaurants.

slowdown in china with warming weather and outbreaks in cooler region might lend some credence to the theory warm humid weather will kill it off.

even if true, a lot of nasty developments can happen in 2-3 months before such a scenario kicks in.

From extremely early on, experts predicted overreaction.

Xi gave what amounts to an imperial edict to snuff the virus out. Scientists and experts said genie is out the bottle, cat’s out the bag, and you can’t really (probably) snuff the virus out. This puts health officials and other officials in an impossible situation.

Under these circumstances, political self preservation demands action, at least the appearance of it, even if you know it’s not going to work or it’s going to be counterproductive. In other words, the officials, Xi himself included, went in ass covering mode.

When you have an entire country trying to shut down 1/10 of the global population, it’s inevitable rest of the world will overreact even if every expert recommends otherwise. Nobody wants to be accused of inaction when some people inevitably die.

This actually seems like really sound analysis. Is it right? I don't know.

Most of the market reaction to coronavirus is not because there is an existential threat to humanity, but because the market was overextended and most players were speculating way too much. People thought the fed could fix every problem. Guess what? Money printing can't fix a pandemic that is shutting down large parts of China. That said, when the market settles down this is probably a buying opportunity over the medium term going forward. Who knows when the market settles down though because it's risk profile is currently so asymmetric.

Also, it's possible that the inevitable slow down caused by corona fears could trigger the market to start deleveraging long-term resulting in a protracted bear market. I'd say the odds are like 60-40 in favor of this market continuing higher though.

Edit: I should state the buying opportunity could be significantly lower. I'm short, currently, re-read this and it seems like I'm bullish right now. I'm not, just that there will be a time to be bullish in the future.

Thailand is likely #2 in infections but are not testing. Open borders with extremely high traffic from China (including Wuhan), and they are able to enter Thailand extremely easily. Medical professionals are threatened and forced to remain silent. After 35 confirmed cases, there was an incident with over 100 people in Thailand showing symptoms in one area; now mum is the word. Not even temperature scanning. No testing for symptomatic people. Some reports of people having the symptoms, going to hospital, getting released, returning home, and being told they have the virus.

Even now, there is a 31 year old football coach in an induced coma fighting for his life with a 'lung infection' who will not be tested.

Indonesia and others are also following suit.

We know the Chinese numbers are BS, WHO is failing miserably, I do not think it is ridiculous to estimate an order of magnitude more infections than we are told.

I’m not writing a paper here , I’m trying to figure out an heuristic here , a ball park figure with incomplete information.

Right now we can estimate something between 0,3 to 5% CFR.

WHO and China have both admitted real number of infected is unknown and most experts agree the real number of infected is much bigger than reported.

Lower bound has to be lower. dead/(dead+recovered) outside of Hubei is about 0.14% and has been trending down.

I would have expected them to be a candidate for more cases. I think its hard to hide deaths though.

I think you are right. The odds of CFR being under 0,3% are clearly over 1 in 40 so my initial estimation is wrong.

Bad news : 7 deaths in Italy.
The not so bad news is that they are all really old except for a cancer patient.
We would need over 3000 people infected in northern Italy to have a CFR under 0.3%.

The CFR under 0.3% is pure silly fantasy. grizy was quoting 0.1% in "rest of China" two weeks ago as meaning something. Now that it's 7x higher at least than that, he's switched to the utterly meaningless dead/(dead + recovered). It's just dumb. We know for a fact it's well above 0.3%. The flu is 0.1% and the hospitals overflowing in Wuhan with pneumonia could not happen even at 1/5th of the intensity even with 10x the infections (which happens quite a few flu seasons). We also have the number of younger people dead as a good indication of > 10x flu death rate (70x more young people die from this than the flu). The population death rate is over 1% and likely closer to 2%.