China Economic News

[soros]

posted on straits times website :

Meanwhile, public mass for Catholics here have been suspended indefinitely from noon last Saturday, and several large Christian churches have also suspended services.

The National Council of Churches of Singapore said in a letter on its website on Feb 8 that churches here will continue to provide worship service, but requested that those who are unwell to stay home, as they would be denied entry.

Churches here will also be introducing control measures to curb the spread of the coronavirus, such as temperature screening, ventilating their premises and having enough hand-washing facilities, as well as more frequent cleaning, the council added.

Two clusters of coronavirus cases in Singapore have been connected to religious groups here - one linked to The Life Church and Missions, and the largest cluster here which is linked to the Grace Assembly of God church.

The Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (Muis) has also encouraged Muslims attending prayers at mosques to take their own mats and to avoid shaking hands to minimise contact.

On Monday, the ministers highlighted the role of social responsibility in reducing the risk of transmission and that those who are unwell should consult a doctor immediately and avoid going to religious events or places of worship.

Additional measures such as increasing the frequency of commonly-used areas and minimising sharing of common items, as well as having good ventilation at venues where large events are held, were also shared by MOH.

[specuvestor]

Looking at the anecdotal evidence WuFlu is infectious but with low mortality, which as usual will be even 10X lesser in % because the denominator for such pandemic is underaccounted, while the numerator ie death is fairly accurate. Frankly I won't be surprised if 1/2 of Wuhan is infected. Flu season is an annual event like Hurricane season, so the fact the official name is 2019-nCoV tells you that there will be say 2025. It's a more potent strain cause it jumped from animal, hence coronavirus.

Many still don't believe the China numbers, but we can look at the other countries to get a proxy. I think it looks more transparent than say SARS (which I think is nonsense with 350 dead in China vs 300 in HK), with high numbers in Wuhan because I think the place is overwhelmed and virus keeps multiplying within the quarantine area). So any statistical comparison to SARS is meaningless but for those of us who gone through SARS remember SARS as being much more potent: even young healthy adults died which meant immunity was irrelevant.

So being an investor who look through the numbers and not just the numbers face value,  I think the rate of deaths or infection (delta) in China probably peak this week with the 14 days incubation, which SG and HK probably next week or week after. The markets are already accounting for this but the 2nd order impact on the economy will hit fairly soon for the 1Q numbers

I think this is a good site that I monitor daily: https://ncov.dxy.cn/ncovh5/view/pneumonia (It's now black and white in mourning for Doctor Li) The one scary thing I learnt from this is how social-media can influence the psyche of a whole population, from face masks to toilet rolls.

I am willing to bet you are wrong on this  its probably only peaked infection in Wuhan (11 million pop) Hubei 58.5million still lots more to go. And new clusters in Shanghai Beijing and other first tier cities will take a couple months for the virus to go through the population. And the more they try to lock down, the longer it will take for the infection to work its way through the population. 

As it spreads like flu (infective even without symptoms for a week during incubation), rather than SARs (infective only when mild symptoms start, despite being coronavirus family). Containment is actually futile and impossible once you get it in your country, as we can see in SG.. (this is historically proven , even in military setting, flu virus cannot be contained. Everyone is thinking its like SARs just a few months get contained. No big deal lol

Indonesia also just had a plane load of evacuees they are not even testing for the virus. Add in Bali tons of tourist, its going to be another epicenter soon, just as Thailand will be. Another major economy to be might be Japan, especially with their aging population, they will have much higher death rate.

Mortality of 2%+ now from chinese fake figures is also an estimate. If you read the account of the recently deceased doctor(by the way he was 34yo) and other accounts, doctors in Wuhan were told to classify deaths from nCoV as death from whatever other illness patient had. So the "numerator" as you put it is questionable as well. Plus we now have cases in china and overseas of otherwise healthy adults in the late 30s to 50s range that have succumb to the disease or secondary infection after they been weakened by it. To put some perspective, even if its 1% mortality, china has 1.35 billion, if 10% gets it(which i think is conservative given its a new virus) , we will have 135 million infected and 13.5million DEAD in a space of a few months. Thats just china, what about when it eventually and inevitably becomes widespread in USA/Indo/India/South America/Europe??

My take is this is a black swan event that will tip China into recession and start the next GFC. Once the asset bubbles burst and sentiment goes negative, not much central banks can do. In this case, China cant even boost things with infrastructure spending. All the roads and buildings are already empty.

Investments into Gold related sector stocks/etf/physical gold is probably the way to go. But that may be the last thing u need to worry about if you havent stock up on food supplies yet!

356 died in HK alone in 2019 due to flu. Estimated 400k Singaporeans infected by bird flu. Estimated quarter million globally died from Swine flu and ~½ million globally die annually from flu

It’s the similar psychology of aircrash sensational news vs statistics of car deaths. People fear the unknown. And only sensation sells, or generate more hits on social media. The outsized fear currently even exceed SARS which had little social media influence; I think that’s a bigger fear going forward.

Anecdotal evidence is showing Wuflu is more like bird flu than SARS in terms of fatality and infectiousness, excluding Wuhan which is plausibly sorely lack of medical resources and overwhelmed. SG Govt is already signalling that it may not continuously track the infections.

I think we probably need to brace more for the second order impact of economic slowdown.

Just to add, 100 malaysians die on the roads during the recent CNY break. And while trying to find the base rates, realized that Msians are dying on the roads in the tune of 130+ on a weekly basis. So the CNY break is not an outlier.

https://www.nst.com.my/news/nation/2020/...s-one-week

https://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/hea...-accidents

Specuvestor, isn't it the 2nd order effects (which are not obvious to all) that really kills?

How to compare road accident to C-Virus ? Road accident is not contagious , whereas this virus can spread from one to many and still remains unknown to medical expects . Medical resources and treatments are also required for the infected patients .

For detailed info please watch this UK doctor' campbell videos.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCF9IOB2...IBupFtBDxg

This SARS-CoV-2 virus spreads fast like flu. However the fatality rate seems much higher than flu. Another thing to note is the Severe illness rate. at the moment its around >15%. 

Lets do some numbers. SG has population 5.7million. If left unquarantined, or even with current quaratine which i believe is useless, since it spreads like flu. 
U can expect similar penetration to Hubei given singapore is also densely populated. Hubei has 58.5m population. thats about ten times singapore pop.. So if the virus is at the peak in Hubei now like Beijing claims, we should expect a tenth of reported numbers in a few months time? which means

1) 7000 confirmed cases? (probably more since SG detection probably more superior, and the new 30min. test kits are soon to be produced, enhancing detection)
2) 1050 severe cases needing hospital beds? Let's say spread over 2 months, each month need 500 isolation beds with specialty respiratory ward equipments? Obviously even our superb hospitals will be overloaded. So severe cases who are poor and cannot afford will stay home quarantine? die at home?(that will drive up fatality rate rite?)
3) 170 deaths( well maybe 100 since our hospital standard much higher, but keep in mind 2) as well as many old and weak are going to die anyway despite treatment, there are hundreds on renal dialysis/diabetes/asthma etc....

Some estimated calculations of mortuary volumes in Wuhan/Hubei show about 600-1000 bodies being burned a day. (up to u to believe, but if you read the reports below, >100 body bags just for 1 mortuary alone and they are running 24/7, this is very scary. if you calculate the total cremation per day, the "official numbers" of deaths from Beijing is really grossly under reported.

Wuhan crematoriums 'are burning bodies 24/7 to cope with extra workload during coronavirus outbreak'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article...kload.html

Funeral Homes in China's Wuhan 'Working 24/7 to Cremate Bodies'
https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/c...05822.html
[The Wuchang Funeral Home in Wuhan, capital of Hubei province, recently advertised for 20 new members of staff to man a four-hour night shift collecting bodies from their homes]

In addition, i would like to add that if this is not that serious, why is Beijing so concerned and locking down so many cities? It's already rampant in Wuhan/Hubei province , and already spread all over China, so if its only bird flu seriousness why lock down? My guess is that there's something about the death rates and severe illness rates we are not getting the proper data from but Beijing obviously knows what is going on. IMHO fatality rate for this COVID19 might sit as high as 5% but we will need more unbiased info from outside CHina numbers to calculate. 

Just like Shanghai doctors claim aerosol spread but then it was disputed by china CDC later ( was this so as to reduce panic and fear? like so many things authorities are trying to do?) I believe the current transmission rates are partly a result of aerosol spread, since flu spreads by this way as well, and as we can see this Wuhan virus is spreading pretty well too just like flu.[/font]

So should we play down this virus and say "oh its just like the birld flu and seasonal flu, not that serious???" Let's see what sort of mortality rate comes out of those in SG. We still have 6 in critical out of 70+ confirmed cases. By the time we have 100 cases, we might already have 1 death which will put death rate at a significant 1%. And if there is more than 1 death, that would put death rate at 2% which is kinda starting to get scary.

So yeah nothing to be concerned other than economic impact, but that's if you don't have a vunerable ah gong or ah ma at home...

We're not saying there's nothing to be concern about. We're saying it is life-goes-on-as-it-is based on the annual flu statistics. A life lost is still a dear life lost. But it is not SARS or spanish flu

There is a bunch of % that BlueKelah has thrown out. I tend to look at ex China numbers as a whole for % rather than just SG else Phillipines would have 33% fatality. Let me just say that the denominator is likely to be much higher by multiples if you read flu literature. That's why I said in my previous post 7 Feb that I'm not surprised if 1/2 of Wuhan is infected. The numbers are always under reported on the onset cause only very sick patients of flu go and see doctor. Mild patients self-medicate and self heal cause generally there is no cure for flu, including SARS after 17 years, but medicine helps to reduce / suppress the symptoms and speed up the recovery. Most VBs probably catch a flu at least once a year and unless you need MC, you take panadol; that's the majority. 

The common precaution and "cure" for flu is hygiene, water and sleep. BTW the fatality of common flu is <0.1% and that's ~ 1/2 million deaths annually.

Who here actually believes indonesia has zero cases or India / Africa has single digit cases? (hint: they don't test it) Most countries including Singapore's definition of cases is still by lab test while china has moved to clinical diagnosis. If you read between the lines and what PM Lee and MOH is trying to frame the narrative you will know what I mean. Hence it is likely that we will stop reporting the cases at the apt time just as we don't monitor for bird flu.

https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/sin...y-12438600

[holymage]

I seldom agree with BlueKelah's analysis on various companies. But in his latest post (#949), I can't help but to agree. All the points that he raised are same as my thoughts.

The 2% mortality rate is not real. The real number is much closer to 15% than 2%. The numbers are deliberately created to minimize panic among citizens. SARS fatality rate during the initial few weeks was 3.5%, but ended up closer to 10%. We should expect something similar for the Coronavirus, unless a cure is found.

An additional point I would like to add is, the lower mortality rate outside of China vs China. If the virus were to be widespread, resulting in medical systems unable to cater for the needy (supply/demand imbalance), we are likely to see a similar mortality rate as China.

One would be too conceited to treat this as "less severe than the flu", when governments around the world are treating this way more serious than "the flu".

[specuvestor]

I seldom agree with BlueKelah's analysis on various companies. But in his latest post (#949), I can't help but to agree. All the points that he raised are same as my thoughts.

The 2% mortality rate is not real. The real number is much closer to 15% than 2%. The numbers are deliberately created to minimize panic among citizens. SARS fatality rate during the initial few weeks was 3.5%, but ended up closer to 10%. We should expect something similar for the Coronavirus, unless a cure is found.

An additional point I would like to add is, the lower mortality rate outside of China vs China. If the virus were to be widespread, resulting in medical systems unable to cater for the needy (supply/demand imbalance), we are likely to see a similar mortality rate as China.

One would be too conceited to treat this as "less severe than the flu", when governments around the world are treating this way more serious than "the flu".

To be precise, can you point out where did I mention it is "less severe than the flu"? I think after more than a month of data and observation, medical community is starting to tend towards agreeing that it is more like bird flu. So they are not wrong that it can be very widespread but I'm not sure if it was deliberately "sensationalised"

[specuvestor]

To give some numbers:

Outside of mainland China (if one don’t trust China’s numbers) there are 890 confirmed cases with 5 deaths, 0.56% fatality; 123 recoveries so far
Global excluding just Hubei there are 13262 confirmed cases with 79 deaths, 0.6% fatality; 4699 recoveries so far

If we base on generally accepted 10% fatality for those in critical, China will record 2000th death by end of the month, while recoveries will exceed 20k. With ref to my 7th Feb post, the number of new confirmed and suspected adds according to China’s numbers peaked around Feb 5, excluding the one day spike on 12 Feb that included clinical diagnosis. I would double up on BlueKelah’s virtual bet that SG numbers peaked last week. But with the possible irresponsible DBS cluster, SG number of cases likely peak this week if not last week. Symptoms generally develop within 7 days.

The denominator is likely to be much larger based on precedents, so the % will be much smaller; rather than presume the other way round that as denominator gets larger the numerator increases proportionately. AIA and POSB / Chubb is offering insurance on COVID-19 so the actuaries are getting comfortable with the numbers

[Behappyalways]

China Uighurs: Detained for beards, veils and internet browsing
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51520622


新型肺炎 - 湖北加強防控　全省即日起實施24小時封閉管理 20200216 - 香港新聞 - 有線新聞 i-Cable
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPuRCIfGpF8


2020.02.16【文茜世界周報】陸國務院將全面禁野味　廣東率先通過緊急立法
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJsGUYNl...AU&index=1


2020.02.16【文茜世界周報】疫情衝擊返崗不足　大陸節後開工日鬧空城
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqJodE_z...AU&index=2

[Behappyalways]

Woman wears giraffe costume for protection amid coronavirus outbreak in China
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=VU-DDEu4l9o

[soros]

Posted on cnn website ( 18 Feb 2020 )

Hong Kong (CNN)The death toll from the novel coronavirus has reached 1,873, as almost half of China's 1.3 billion-strong population remain subject to varying forms of travel restrictions and other quarantine measures.

On Tuesday, Liu Zhiming, director of the Wuchang hospital in Wuhan, the city at the center of the outbreak, himself died of the virus, according to a statement released by local government authorities.
Liu was a neurosurgeon and is the first hospital director to die as a result of the coronavirus epidemic. His death could renew criticism that the government has not done enough to protect frontline medical workers, many of whom are overworked and overstretched. Also on Tuesday, state media reported that doctors and nurses who die while trying to contain the outbreak will officially be designated as "martyrs."

All but five deaths from the virus have occurred inside mainland China, where an additional 98 fatal cases of Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, were reported Tuesday morning. The number of confirmed cases in China increased by 1,886, bringing the global total to over 73,325.
The vast majority of those cases have been in China, but concern has been growing in the past week over much smaller but growing outbreaks in Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong.

[Behappyalways]

為咗防疫可以去到幾盡？不戴口罩要遊街示眾 綁樹幹用胸圍做口罩；與家人打麻雀都要挨打 - 20200217 - 有線中國組- 有線新聞 i-Cable News
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ge_qDTEjzCg

[soros]

Death toll passes 2,000: The novel coronavirus has now killed more than 2,000 people, all but six of them in mainland China. It has infected more than 75,000 people, with over 1,000 cases outside mainland China.

What's happening on the cruise ship: The remaining passengers aboard the Diamond Princess in Japan began disembarking Wednesday after a 14-day quarantine. A total of 545 cases of the virus are linked to the stricken ship.

https://edition.cnn.com/asia/live-news/c...index.html