COVID-19 # 59

There is nothing known for sure about Kim Jong Un. What is new is that a South Korean legislator noted on April 22nd that Pyongyang was put on a sort'of super-lockdown several days previously. No one knows why. Un skipped public ceremonies for the country's biggest holiday on April 15th. And Un's sister Kim Yo Jung (who has always held a ton of official and unofficial power) was formally elevated to a position as de facto successor on April 11th.

Gas is down to 86 cents a gallon, retail, in eastern Wisconsin.

There's excellent coverage of oil tanker storage weirdness in this piece from Zero Hedge. Over 10% of the world's supertanker ships are now being used for storage, prices to charter those ships are way up, total tanker volume used for storage is believed to be up over 50%, and 20% of the world's daily consumption is already anchored off the California coast with nowhere to go. Also, the U.S. doesn't actually get very much of its oil from Saudi Arabia (we have plenty of our own, and S.A. isn't that close), but there are actually tankers with 7 months full of our normal imports from them on their way here right now: the Saudi's are probably glad to have sold it to someone with a ship and are glad to see it go because they have to figure out what to do with the stuff coming out of the ground today.

In a February 13th post I noted oil rig counts, and that's I'd need to return to that data in a month to see what happened. Here you go:

They've been taking 5-10% of rigs out of production each week for about a month now. Note that taking a rig out of production is a ridiculously huge move. Legally, you have to back fill them with concrete down the pipe. "Capping" them is not just putting a screw top on. They will never be used again, although you can drill a new one right next to the old one when the price goes up again.

California officials have pushed back the first death in the U.S. from community spread of COVID-19 by about 3 weeks to February 6th. So it was "in the wild" here in late January. And The New York Times piece entitled "Solving the Mysteries of Coronavirus with Genetic Fingerprints" reports that the first known case imported into the U.S. — for a while we've known someone flew from Wuhan to Seattle with it on January 15th ... you know, before the government in Beijing knew there was a problem — is responsible on its own for cases in 14 states, including Utah. And, there's an intriguing new possibility: while there are hundreds of strains of the virus now, there were only a handful then, and it seems possible that one was in British Columbia even before it was in Seattle (and if you don't know, Vancouver has a huge expatriate Chinese community, and an international airport almost as big as SeaTac).

In India, families and mobs have attacked doctors for being unable to save patients. Not good folks ... not good.

Oktoberfest (the big one, in Munich) has been cancelled. BTW: it starts in mid-September.

Tyson indefinitely closed the country's largest pork plant  due to absenteeism.

Singapore, widely believed to have the best healthcare in the world, continues to get worse.

Remember that China's CDC also uses a 3-level warning system. In March they got the whole country down to level one. Now Chaoyang, an urban district within the Beijing metropolitan area is back up to level three. Chaoyang is close to the airport, as well as home to many expatriate homes. Well, it's a little worse than that: it's home to almost 4 million people, is one of the districts in the city's core, hosts every embassy but for two, and is the location of the central business district for the city.