Friday, March 06, 2020

Coronavirus Is Spreading Everywhere

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I mentioned that on Tuesday, a member of Pelosi's inner circle told me that she's leaning towards shutting down Congress because of the pandemic. Remember-- members, may of whom are very old, sit in close proximity and then go out to every corner of the country to shake hands and then come back to sit in close proximity again. Yesterday the Times of London reported that "Parliament may be suspended for five months to prevent MPs from spreading coronavirus across the country. Britain edged closer to an epidemic yesterday with the biggest daily jump in cases leaving 87 people confirmed as infected. Three of the 36 new cases were intensive care patients who had not travelled recently, suggesting that the virus is already spreading more widely than thought in this country. King’s College Hospital in south London confirmed that two recent patients had tested positive. With public bodies boosting preparations for months of disruption, plans are being drawn up that would mean the Commons and Lords not returning after Easter. MPs rise on March 31 and sitting would be suspended until September in 'the longest summer recess we have known.'"

As we've been reporting for a week, Iranian government elites seem devastated by the pandemic, including at least two dozen members of the Majlis (their parliament) and more than another dozen top government officials, including Iraj Harirchi, the deputy health minister we've all seen coughing on TV, Masoumeh Ebtekar, a vice president, Mojtaba Zolnour, Chair of Parliament's National Security and Foreign Affairs Committee, as well as Mohammad Mirmohammadi, a top adviser-- now dead-- to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader. Qom, the de facto seat of power appears to be the epicenter of the outbreak although there are victims in all 31 of the countries provinces. (Schools are closed, concerts and sporting events cancelled and Friday prayers have been banned until further notice.) Tehran, the biggest city, has over 1,500 reported cases. Non-government experts estimate that the real number of cases in Iran is a minimum of 20,000 and as many as 50,000.

The situation in Italy is even worse, where just two Chinese tourists in Rome have led to around 4,000 cases spread throughout the whole country and at least 150 deaths! All schools and universities have been closed. The country's tourist industry has basically ended for now. Austria has ended all train travel between the two countries. Other countries are quarantining all Alitalia passengers as are passengers on intra-European buses coming from Italy. Nearly 50 countries-- including the U.S. (New Hampshire), Mexico, France, Russia, Morocco, Germany, Spain, India, Israel, Andorra, Denmark, all 3 Baltic countries, Holland, New Zealand and the U.K-- have reported cases of coronavirus traced to contact with Italy.


The Trumpist regime-- remember, he only hires the best people-- has botched every single move along the way and yesterday Bloomberg News reported that they won’t be able to meet its promised timeline of having a million coronavirus tests available by the end of the week. Trumpist Senator Rick Scott (R-FL): "There won’t be a million people to get a test by the end of the week. It's way smaller than that."

Ambrose Evan-Pritchard of The Telegraph added that the Fed's misjudged "pyrotechnics" may have brought us even closer to a deflationary bust "If you are going to fire a shock-and-awe bazooka for psychological impact, you must be sure of hitting your mark. The US Federal Reserve has just failed to do this in a spectacular fashion. The first emergency rate cut since the Lehman crisis has precipitated a further slide in 10-year US Treasury yields to unprecedented depths below 1pc, taking the whole sovereign universe into uncharted waters. Are bond markets pricing in a global deflationary bust or just the price distortion of QE a l'outrance ? Take your pick. But note that real yields out to thirty years have crashed deeper into negative territory. The Wicksellian natural rate of interest is falling faster than the Fed can keep up and in doing so it is automatically tightening financial conditions...





We may now be an even more dangerous monetary world. The Fed is closer to policy exhaustion without having achieved anything. It has just two or three cuts left before it hits the floor, given that negative rates in the US are ruled out by the structure of the money market industry. In fairness, the Powell Fed was damned if it did, and damned if it didn’t. The coronavirus amounts to an economic ‘sudden stop’ across the northern hemisphere, likely to hit regions making up 70% of global GDP by mid-March. It is an exogenous shock akin to the outbreak of world war-- a 'once in 100 years catastrophic event' in the words of Ray Dalio from the giant hedge fund Bridgewater-- and it is colliding with global debt ratios at an all-time high of 322pc of GDP, and doing so at a vulnerable point in the business cycle."




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5 Comments:

At 11:33 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

I'm old myself, so don't call me agist.

But remember when mothers used to send their kids to see a sick friend so that their own kids would get infected? Why should the corrupt fossil Democrats be immune to a condition they helped to foment by not EVER standing up to Trump on ANYTHING? Forget about that sorry-ass attempt at impeachment. Pelosi was sabotaging that from the get-go.

So it's time for Mother Nature to clear the House (AND the Senate) of the DINOsaurs and RINOs. She doesn't need an asteroid strike this time to accomplish this.

 
At 1:16 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

Honestly, even if trump/pence/Nazis/democraps didn't totally fuck up the response to this, it would still plow through the population anyway.

In EU cities, the people live typically in higher densities than in the us. They ride public transport much more than in most us cities. A recipe for quick geometric perpetuation.

But even in the us, you cannot contain a virus. It's going to spread until the population dies and develops resistance. The good news here is that the cases of DISEASE among the young is very rare. So while older folks will get sick from it, kids may not do much more than get a sniffle. Hope so anyway.

The problem with test kits is only understandable when you consider that American voters have not voted for a party or candidate that advocated robust public health since... maybe FDR. (note: I remember Ted Kennedy and others promising some form of universal health care as far back as 1972-76... but of course they were lying) Certainly since Reagan, nobody has run on health care except obamanation.. and it turned out that he really meant expensive health INSURANCE for profit. And we re-elected that pos anyway.

nobody in this shithole is going to build test kits for any number of poor hapless souls until somebody commits to pay them to do so at a nice profit. the definition of neoliberalism... and the definition of why it is so fucking bad.

trump advocates cuts to all public health, WHO, CDC and re-limiting access to INSURANCE. Biden and the entire democrap party represents loyal service to for-profit everything, so expect to have to pay lavishly for your "right" to not die, if you can (you know... neoliberalism). Bernie will not be allowed within sniffing distance from the democrap nom... and it appears voters are far too fucking stupid to insist that he be the nom. what's new?

So blame trump for being a total dipshit. ditto pence. But never, ever fool yourself into not including the democrap party... and yourself. If you'd voted for a truly left party instead of the democraps 40 years ago, we might have a shot at a fairly useful response to such a thing.

lesser evilism leads, inexorably, to trump (and worse). but it also leads to a bigger stack of corpses piled up faster due to a pandemic. chew on that turd, all you lesser evilists.

 
At 1:50 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

A dictum in medicine is that you shouldn't do a test unless doing so might actually change management.

Sure, it would be helpful for doctors taking care of seriously ill patients to be able to tell which ones actually have COVID-19 vs much less serious infections.

But it wouldn't make any sense to try to test the wider population. The virus is already too widespread. Even if it were possible to test 10 million people, what would we do with the results? Is the US prepared to put whole cities, even whole counties on complete lockdown for weeks, like they did in China?

At this point, we need to accept that this virus is alreay here, and there are going to be millions of seriously ill people (many requiring hospitalization), and probably thousands of deaths over the next few months.

All the talk about handwashing, disinfectants, and masks is a waste of time. All of that is like trying to keep the tide from coming in. We are not going to stop the spread of this virus.

The real focus needs to be on boosting hospitals' abilities to provide supportive care to the patients who will be coming in. Masks and suits for medical workers. Mechanical ventilators. Antibiotics to fight bacterial infections that secondarily occur in patients sickened by the coronavirus. Etc.

 
At 6:13 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

if Pelosi shuts down the house, trump declares martial law. period.

if the economy keeps collapsing, trump declares martial law. period.

you refuse to vote for morality and principle for 4 decades; you keep electing a party that refuses to fix anything no matter how big or small; you elect trump. you get what you pay for.

 
At 12:18 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said...

1:50, the only focus in a neoliberal shithole will be how to make a profit off of the pandemic. Nobody at the federal level of this shithole's government gives one zeptofuck what victims need to survive. Neither do any states where the Nazis rule. And I've already heard of one city mayor who is trying very hard to thwart an effort by a democrap governor to find somewhere to house and treat victims should the numbers get too much for hospitals.

As always, only if they can afford it, they can pay for it. Otherwise you prolly die.

 

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