On Wednesday night, President Trump, through it all, took the COVID-19 coronavirus seriously. It banned access to EU countries for 30 days, with some exceptions, including U. S. citizens and legal residents.
Some may find the disease benign. About 95% or more of people who get it will survive, and the symptoms are mild and not frightening. But what’s scary is how temporarily it’s spreading. And there are too many unknowns about the disease to trust the fact. that fewer than 1,000 other people have it.
China has 1,000 to 80,000 patients in about six weeks, the most of them in an autonomous, quarantined state called Hubei.
Italy has gone from about 20 cases two and a half weeks ago to more than 12,000. It is now the Hubei of the Western world.
Travel bans in China have helped mitigate the flow of travelers from there to the United States. All of the first cases last month were Chinese travelers. They have since recovered.
The U. S. was caught off guard in Europe, cruise ships and European business travelers at primary conferences. The U. S. is now playing catch-up in the mitigation phase.
Trump reiterated what the World Health Organization said this week, calling the coronavirus a pandemic.
We are probably one more politician with health problems, or one more breaking factor of the Dow Jones, far from signaling a national emergency, forcing the New York Stock Exchange to close.
“When other people don’t need to attend large events, you start to wonder if worry breeds even more worry. We’re seeing a lot of that today,” says Patrick Healey, founder and president of Caliber Financial Partners in Jersey City. “Until we see fewer cases in Europe, I will be worried. The risk of spread there is higher than in China,” he said, citing the slow reaction of France, Spain, Germany and the United Kingdom. to the crisis.
Trimming the tail
Italy arrived two weeks late, but at least it’s doing something to save Europe. Cierran. Es literally a moment of “stopping the global self to get out. “Italy has followed the Chinese approach. They went into confinement.
The U. S. has two pretty robust case studies on how to respond to COVID-19. One of them is China’s direction of lockdown and forced quarantine, along with stimulus measures.
The other style is that of broad and extensive testing and treatment in South Korea, which has also helped control the disease and keep rates of new infections low. Death rates are even lower, just under 1%.
A hybrid style of the two turns out to be best: virus containment groups. Try like crazy.
China is recovering. Their plan is already underway.
Italy is closed. They have adopted a Chinese technique for bans and quarantines. They acted out of time on the bans imposed on China, which led to the outbreak in the country. (Photo via Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images)
“The Chinese technique has worked. The crackdown has been draconian and has slowed quarterly growth,” said Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, lead economist at the Boston Consulting Group in New York. “The high-frequency knowledge in China, the signals of the movement of goods and people, all of them are experiencing a great recovery. And the infection rate curve of new cases in South Korea has tilted downward. I just hope we don’t see a worsening of the epidemic.
By slowing the spread of the virus, which includes potential spreaders from high-risk countries such as Italy, China, South Korea and Iran, fitness officials are buying time to “flatten the curve. “This prevents hospitals from being overwhelmed, as has been the case lately. This is the case in Italy as cases rise. At the moment, Italy is satisfied with the ICU bed capacity of hospitals, this depends on the hospital.
The lockdown of Hubei, the epicenter province, for just three months means that Hubei now officially has fewer infections than Italy. The number of new patients at China’s “ground zero” has dropped to double digits, down from 3 thousand or 4 weeks ago.
Eventually, South Korea could also be forced to implement a lockdown-style edit to prevent the spread of infection after a user running in a call center tests positive for the disease.
Shops closed at Mangwon Market on March 12, 2020 in Seoul. The South Korean government has raised the coronavirus alert to the “highest level” as the number of cases shown continues across the country. (Photo via Woohae Cho/Getty Images)
Without concrete knowledge about transmission, the threat of spreading the symptoms that appear in the disease is high.
As a result, China has maintained strict population movements in primary cities. South Korea’s style of testing is more challenging for China because of its large urban population, which is why it’s so vital to keep those cities vaccinated equitably.
According to testimonies in Beijing, this vaccination calls for the closure of schools, a ban on cinemas, a ban on buying food in shopping malls, a ban on opening non-essential businesses, and the closure of maximum bank branches.
Stores at 6 p. m. spray with disinfectant. Street fumigations are carried out periodically. Sterilization of buildings is performed several times a day.
This is precisely what Italy is doing now. Fumigation of public spaces, mainly.
In China, it will be necessary to wear a mask; Otherwise, you can’t take a taxi, take public transportation, or enter a business. Temperature readings are mandatory at the front of a work building. People suffering from mild temperatures are sent directly to quarantine, according to resources on the ground.
Entire neighborhoods are off-limits to non-residents, and a corps of security workers patrol to check proof of residency.
Apartments housing people with coronavirus must quarantine. No one can get out.
Beijing now has fewer than 200 cases. Shanghai has fewer than 30, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.
“We simply can’t impose a Chinese-style quarantine, but corporations can impose a work-from-home policy. You can disrupt business and it’s already happening,” says Brendan Ahern, CIO of KraneShares, who is fleeing home on Thursday. “Companies here are moving pretty fast. “
The NBA canceled its entire season. The NHL suspended the rest of its season. Major League Baseball is contemplating postponing Opening Day. The BNP Paribas Tennis Open, scheduled for this week in Indian Wells, has been canceled. Coachella, the indie rock event, has been postponed. Broadway postponed its show for a month. Private schools send young people home for the semester. Princess Cruises will not sail for the next 60 days.
Members of the South Korean military’s reserve forces spray an antiseptic to protect against the coronavirus at a subway station on March 12, 2020. New York state called up the National Guard in New Rochelle this week. (Photo via Woohae Cho/Getty Images)
Mega stimulus
If the U. S. were to be reluctantly dragged into a blockade model between South Korea and China, there would be a further drop in economic activity. Megastimuli will be what will allow us to stay alive.
It’s unclear whether Republicans and Democrats can work together on this, as some might see a shattered economy as a way to finally get rid of Trump in 2021.
“The market will change its prices and stop,” says Nancy Perez, portfolio manager at Boston Private, a wealth control company in Miami. “Both political parties will have to take ownership of it. No party should be blamed for not doing something. “
To offset this headwind, fiscal stimulus is needed so that corporations can meet wages and refinance debt, preferably interest-free directly from the Federal Reserve.
Congress’s crisis relief law may rely on the Federal Reserve’s unlimited checkbook to keep the bankruptcies of individuals, businesses, and even municipalities from skyrocketing.
“Lately I’ve been in dozens of corporations in the S.
Quarantining a city like New York would be a significant tax on any business activity. The administration’s rhetoric about cutting payroll taxes is enough. Bold tax cuts and deferrals would be best. For Cramer, a tax holiday of six months or more is even better.
The U. S. government wants to come together on this issue and inject stimulus into the economy, save others from layoffs and save corporations from bankruptcy, Jim Cramer said today. (Photo by Steven Ferdman/Patrick McMullan Getty Images)
In the first days of the month, China has:
Phases of a pandemic
According to the Center for Disease Control’s “Pandemic Influenza Plan,” updated in 2017, there are four distinct pandemic stages in terms of case counts: onset, acceleration, slowdown, and preparation for the next wave.
Europe and the United States are now in an acceleration phase.
Hubei is in a slowdown phase, after two months of lockdown.
Self-protective quarantine, outbreak containment, and testing are the most productive precautionary techniques in the face of pandemic outbreaks, writes Nassim Nicholas Taleb, famed “black swan” forecaster and author of the book Skin in the Game.
Taleb and colleagues at New York University and the New England Institute for Complex Systems wrote in a recently published note that mobility is critical in the early stages of an outbreak, especially when little is known about the pathogen.
“Reducing mobility in the short term will be costly, but failure will cost everything,” they write.
We are moving to transmission until China is fully functional or Europe takes the plunge. They are just getting started, with slow responses to bans in France, Spain, Germany and the UK (Photo via BRYAN R. SMITH/AFP via Getty Images)
Earlier this week, a closure announcement posted outside a hospital in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, touted the treatment of more than 1,700 patients since Feb. 2 without a single death.
“If there is a broad-based recovery this week and new infections don’t increase, Chinese markets could get back up and running quickly,” said Vladimir Signorelli, director of Bretton Woods Research in Long Valley, New Jersey.
In fact, they are doing better than the United States.
If new cases break out in Shanghai and Beijing, it would deal a severe blow to containment efforts and worsen the global economic outlook. Investors would then calculate recurring outbreaks in Europe and then the U. S. once they’ve gotten past the one they’re facing lately. which can increase in the summer.
“We may see a couple of quarters of negative expansion and a technical recession because of the call for destruction,” Perez says. “Be prepared for volatility. “
BCG’s Carlsson-Szlezak says, “If we still face this challenge this summer, with Chinese-style quarantine measures in places like New York, it will have a massive impact on the economy,” he says. “How big is it? We don’t know.