The fight for containment is on and so is the effort at damage control.
Chinese markets are set to open again tomorrow having been closed for days. As has become common practice in our new normal any sign of trouble and central banks stop in to support markets.
Hence no surprise that now the CBOC is signaling sizable liquidity injections for Monday:
Central bank to the rescue: $174B in artificial liquidity on Monday https://t.co/cmsu2jYIlF
— Sven Henrich (@NorthmanTrader) February 2, 2020
Also no surprise ahead of market open: A communication effort to shore up confidence and present any news as good news:
Good news! 37 #coronavirus patients were discharged from #Wuhan‘s Jinyintan on Sunday, the highest daily discharge since the pneumonia outbreak began: media reports pic.twitter.com/9MnsWojFZ5
— Global Times (@globaltimesnews) February 2, 2020
Whether these efforts of containment in markets will be enough remains to be seen.
Fact is the virus continues to spread and appears far from contained at this stage:
And the death count is increasing:
The infection count has now reached 14,628 at the time of this writing and this count is assured to continue to increase. The infection count chart looks precariously like it may accelerate further:
So yes, real good news of containment is needed and urgently so as the economic damage will deepen with each passing week.
It’s been said that life imitates art and currently the concern is that infections will keep spreading throughout the world. The challenges of containing a viral outbreak communicated by air have been well imagined in a 2015 film:
Now that the first coronavirus death outside of China has been reported the ante for containment has once again been raised.
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Categories: News Takes
I once met a microbiologist in 1985 who worked for Shell Oil and sold bugs he said. He told me a lot about HIV/Aids and said that any bug that doesn’t have a natural enemy is likely to be manufactured. He also said that any weaponised bug would already have an antidote, which makes sense.
By this measure it is likely that Coronovirus is manufactured and has escaped/or released. Qui Bono? Any country that is facing an economic, contained so far, crisis. I wonder who that might be?
How do you contain a virus that spread by air like that? All it takes is ONE to sneeze in the wrong train/bus/subway. In two weeks one person can spread to quite a lot.. I hope it gets contained, but it seems very sketchy at this point how that can happen?
This post dated 5th Feb 2020, 2300 GMT
On 2019-nCoV, there is less than really bad news:
Number of confirmed cases are taking about 4 days to double;
Deaths are going up about 10% per day;
More are recovering than dying, and that proportion is increasing;
There has not been major spread beyond Hubei province.
The next week will be critical. Has the outbreak been reasonably well contained? China is doing its very best, probably better than any other country could. However, the non-Hubei clusters are coming to the end on their initial incubation periods so we could see a spike in cases from these, which may or not be well contained. If confirmed cases is below 50k in a weeks time we could cross our fingers and hope for things to taper off, if it’s much more then things are probably going to get worse.
Adding for the record 07:30 GMT 13th Feb 2020. Data as of 23:00 12/2/2020.
Total cases 60.332 of which 59,897 mainland China
Deaths 1,369
Recovered 6,061
Had this been a day earlier I could have reported that after 4 days of 3,000+ new cases we’d had 4 days of less than 3,000 cases and fingers crossed would be in order. This latest spike is primarily due to changes in diagnosis, testing and recording, and highlights the difficulty of producing accurate data in the early stages of an epidemic. However, it’s clearly not fully contained. Let’s hope for better news in the next week and weeks to come.