If people start dying in the streets in other countries we can start worrying.
I hope you all dumped your “emerging markets” funds before the coronavirus epidemic. Most EM funds were purposely loaded with securities from Chinese banks, insurance firms and industrials, all of which are controlled by the CCP.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn together with the First Gulf War ended the Soviet Empire.
Solzhenitsyn’s books convinced the Soviet people that even in the unlikely event that they conquered the world there would be no escape from (nor even a slight relenting of) the gulag system nor the brutality of their own government.
The First Gulf War convinced the Soviets that winning a war against America wasn’t happening anytime soon.
China, Russia
Nuclear, Biological
Apples, Oranges
Chernobyl was before my time, but I would think nuclear bleep is easily detectable and thus undeniable. We don’t know much about the coronavirus at this time. China’s too good at putting on a face and shutting people up.
I have a suspicious nature so the site of the outbreak, by itself, makes me suspect it came from a lab, not a flying squirrel or bird nest soup or whatever.
In any case, from the information coming out, it doesn’t sound very deadly, and the information NOT coming out may be the Great Stonewall of China.
If so — if they’re that effective at muzzling over a billion people — they’re nowhere near the end of their criminal tyranny.
Old Chinese saying, “1.5 billion can keep a secret, if 100 million of them are dead.”
There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence that the death toll is higher than being said. There’s also a lot of evidence that there are a lot more people with the disease than is being said, which would drastically lower the mortality rate.
The Chinese are flipping out, and the numbers they give appear to be a shade above junk.
For those that have healed or died, the mortality rate from the official numbers has descended from about 65% to 40% in China.
But wait, the Chinese are reported to have been burning dead without testing them for the virus, so that mortality rate could be notably higher.
But wait, when the number with the disease was listed at 1100 and the dead to 41, we were seeing accounts that there were really about 95000 with the disease. That could drop the mortality rate to about 0.04%
But wait, we’ve seen that the Chinese have run out of med supplies, test kits, and have begun barricading people into their homes...which would mean that on one hand the mortality rate there is completely untranslatable to mortality rates there; and on the other hand, the Chinese are completely flipping out, so that suggests something much more serious than the common flu.
As it sits, the mortality rate, in China, appears to be somewhere between 0.04% and 60% or so.
I think the fatality rate is much higher too.
The BBC report said over 10% of the first 99 cases died.
Sites are currently saying 2% based on known deaths/confirmed cases. But recoveries are only 3%. And 13% of confirmed cases are in critical condition.
If only 3% have recovered, then what’s happened to the 97%? Well 2% have died. So 95% are still sick. and 13% are sick and critical.
Deaths are lagging confirmed cases by about 6 days assuming fatality rate of 10%.
| Virus | Death Rate |
|---|---|
|
Wuhan Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV)
|
3%* |
|
SARS
|
10% |
|
MERS
|
34% |
|
Swine Flu
|
0.02% |
So how virulent is it? If it afflicts 25% of the people in China, that's over 10 million dead in China alone.
All because somebody let this thing escape a lab in Wuhan - this is an engineered virus.
We’ve been successful at importing the disease, now infecting 11 Americans, so in a week, we should get a good data point on survivability in the USA. If all 11 kick the bucket, I will be worried. If none of them do, I will treat it like any other flu.
Just adding some perspective here.
Best way to gage the magnitude of the problem is to gauge the actions of the people who actually have access to hard facts.
They are taking this very seriously and , while adopting a wait and see posture, they are quietly getting their ducks in a row to act quickly and decisively in case things break bad in a big way.
When a guy like Tom Cotton explicitly makes the kind of statements he has been making, very good chance that this is a huge bio engineering problem manufactured by the Chinese and not some random event
China has some amazingly brilliant people, but China is culturally and ethically very poorly suited to safely working on virulent and deadly pathogens
In all fairness, I doubt any government could have handled either Chernobyl or Hunan any better. There are realities of nuclear and biological catastrophes that can neither be planned for or responded to.
This being said, response is also situational, that is Chernobyl was very different from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster. And the Coronavirus response is a lot different from the anticipated H5N1 influenza epidemic that didn’t happen but could have been as bad as a thermonuclear war.
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” Xi cannot blame this outbreak on foreign powers”
there have been reports that they already have been doing that ...
“There are reports that the PRC is digging mass graves and burning bodies to deal with the death toll”
no doubt, 4th hand blog “reports” “leaking” out of the PRC are even more reliable than “reports” of “sources” that we see published all the time from such stalwarts as WaPo, NYT, CNN, MSNBC, and NBC ...