Coronavirus (COVID-19)

I have you as Cassandra for sure.

Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Bahrain all reported their first cases, and all traced to contact with Iran. Earlier cases in Canada, Lebanon and UAE also linked to Iran.

Those 48 people infected in Iran must really get around.

Yes, some people took the threat too lightly. And a few people in particular were dinks to you for no real reason I could see.

Yeah, I was gonna post the same. It seems pretty clear now that this thing is not going to be contained unless summer brings a big reduction in transmission. Still rolling my eyes at the victory lap though, like when something is a decent possibility and you forecast it, you’re totally going to be right a percentage of the time. I could also victory lap on saying the OH NOES MY KIDS takes were paranoid, given that mortality among 0-9 year olds is literally 0.

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market going to be down bigly today, and china futures market already down 3%

I find it interesting that I can never quite tell how futures will translate to the market open. Sometimes the market will open right where you think it should based on the earlier futures trading. But sometimes it opens with a big difference, and this can be in either direction.

Today I think it might just tank even further than the futures indicate, (-2.8% right now), but who knows.

This is going to be really big as it ripples down the supply chain I suspect: Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Am I paranoid by thinking of postponing a vacation to Negril, Jamaica in June? Planned on booking the flight and hotel this week. The transmission to Italy took this to another level for me.

If you’re under the age of 60 you’re being paranoid. Plus you’re assuming that you can avoid this by not traveling, when in reality it’s going to be coming to you shortly.

I’m definitely getting this, my wife is a nurse… and my household has gotten every cold that came through Austin in the last year or so. If this comes to the US I have 0% chance of fading it.

Yeah I think we start seeing some panic selling, if not today, than very soon. Market is already super pumped up and coronavirus going to keep getting worse.

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At this point as someone in logistics who just had a pretty bad year I have zero personal support for us doing the kind of measures that China did. I’d be more OK with it if I thought it would work, but I have zero confidence that it will. Nothing stupider than doing serious harm to the economy to prevent something that goes ahead and happens anyway.

Someone tell the Chinese to stop running wet markets so that this doesn’t ever happen again. This thing is going to be with us until we create a vaccine.

That seems kind of crass, to be honest.

I think we need to support some pretty big changes in the coming weeks and months in order to slow down the transmission enough to reach the summer months and give time to learn more and develop treatments and vaccines. And to try to mitigate the capacity issues for hospitals. That article rugby linked upstream explains very well why it’s important to slow things down even if it can’t be stopped.

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The Chinese just went super hard and it had very little impact. Given that we can’t do the same level of measures in this country legally I think there’s virtually no chance we contain it in any meaningful way. You can call it crass if you want, but I think crass is causing a lot of harm to show how much we care knowing all along that it won’t work in any meaningful way.

Obviously we should do what we can to mitigate it up to the point where we start to see significant diminishing returns. I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t do the 20% of stuff that gets us 80% of the results. What I’m advocating against is something like shutting down all the factories. People who can work from home should, and I suspect it’s going to be a bad time for bars and clubs. Restaurants will probably keep doing food delivery and be fine. Grocery stores should stay open and stocked. Production should continue. Logistics networks should keep making deliveries.

That’s bullshit. Same thing as accusing someone of virtue signaling. God forbid your profits might suffer a bit.

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Bezos waiting for people to hunker down and quarantine at home for a few weeks:

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We’re not talking about profits suffering a little bit just for starters. We’re talking about going to zero potentially for months while costs continue… across a sector that makes up 8% of GDP that has been pushed to the brink by a very very bad 2019. I don’t think you realize how many firms are standing on the precipice right now.

Taking a cyclical industry that just got done with the worst down cycle in a decade and telling them that it’s going to be much worse for a few months… yeah that’s not going to end well.

You haven’t provided a single tangible reason why this should happen in addition to the public health emergency that is Corona virus. The Chinese went about 400% further than we legally can just now and it was a complete failure. Please walk me through why we should ruin millions of people financially and then fail anyway.

Logistics is a super low margin business over the long term. That’s under normal conditions. It’s a lot like farming at the micro level. Lots of huge investments with low yields that take a long time to pay off done with borrowed money.

I don’t agree, at all.

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… it turned into a global pandemic and the graph of infections probably hasn’t stopped going up in an exponential way today. The only way to frame it as anything but an abject failure is to take the Chinese stats at face value.

If you want to do that have at it I guess, but I don’t think you’re qualified to have an opinion about what we should do economically if so.

We need to scale up our ability to make medical equipment (particularly vents and masks as I understand it now) asap, we need to figure out the most common ways it transmits and limit those, and we need to get ready for a tidal wave of serious medical cases to slam into our healthcare system. What we don’t need to do is copy what China just did unsuccessfully with vastly more state power and control than we have. That’s going to be really counterproductive.

On the plus side, cases in mainland China seem to be leveling off.

I’m not saying to copy what China did. Or that I’m not skeptical of the official numbers. But you go on being you.

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