Pharmaceuticals for the U.S. market that are made in China are inspected by the FDA at the factories in China. The FDA has pulled out those inspectors. Expect some drug shortages here in the spring.
China has cut their publicly announced prime lending rate. This is an expansionary policy. But it is an exceptionally tiny move. This seems odd, given that China has made exceptionally huge interest moves in the past.
There are reports that the first person to come down with the infection (“Patient Zero”) was bedridden and had no connection to the Huanan wet market. That would tend to point away from conspiracy theories focused on virology labs and escaped bats.
People have locked-down in South Korea’s 4th largest city, Daegu, after an outbreak related to a church service.
Not good:
For the 2nd time today @CDCgov has issued a Level 1 travel alert related to the #COVID19 outbreak, this one for Japan.— Helen Branswell (@HelenBranswell) February 20, 2020
Level 1 does not mean "don't go." It means "be careful/be aware."
It also means CDC thinks the situation there is riskier. Earlier alert was for Hong Kong. pic.twitter.com/xxv0tnUeRn
Remember those 2 hospitals that were built in 10 days? A Tibetan dissident website has posted a video from a contractor who worked on the construction. He says “I don’t know of any hospitals where doors open one way.” There are worse parts. Interpret with care.
Was in Wuhan, I guess:
One of the Wall Street Journal reporters expelled from China today, @Chao_Deng, is in Wuhan, putting herself in the coronavirus's way to bring readers stories of how ordinary people are coping with the outbreak. This is the essence of foreign correspondence: to be on the ground. https://t.co/CjsGqkhb4L— Anna Fifield (@annafifield) February 19, 2020
BTW: China’s government appears to have been insulted by the headline of the article. But, in American newspapers, reporters write articles, while editors write the headlines. The editors are ll in New York. So why expel the reporters from China?
There’s some interesting good news. An internet service named BlueDot forecasts outbreaks based on sifting through internet news reports. BlueDot signaled a problem in Wuhan on December 31. That beat the World Health Organization by 9 days. Even better, reporters have tracked down that less AI and more human systems in Boston and New York started sending out warnings on December 30th. For perspective, the late Dr. Li Wenliang was reaching out — but only to his classmates from med school — that he was seeing odd symptoms on December 30th.
Roughly 200 million children in China have been restricted to online classes.
Iran is starting to report a growing number of cases, and in many cities. We have some expectation that countries with higher real GDP per capita will have better medical systems that are in turn better able to contain outbreaks. But, check your Handbook: Iran’s per capita, measured either way is comparable to China’s. Whether we like the quarantine idea or not, I give China’s more serious government a lot more credit for being able to do one successfully than Iran’s oddly prioritized government. Iran could be a big problem going forward. Also, Lebanon reported its first case, related to someone who traveled from Iran. And … umm … Lebanon has refugee camps.
Critics of how Japan handled the cruise ship with infections suggest that their government was very concerned with keeping the virus from jumping from the ship into Japan, but not very concerned about keeping it from jumping from passenger to passenger. In China, at least, they seem to jump into action when the virus starts to infect multiple people in a quarantined location (like an apartment building).
There’s a bit of anti-Trump bias out there. We talked a bit in class on Wednesday about how the plane bringing Americans back from the cruise ship in Tokyo were placed on a commercial flight with a barrier between the infected and regular passengers. That’s true. Here’s the tradeoff: the CDC wanted the infected people kept isolated (which is a good thing), but the Trump White House said no to that. This is being painted as a bad thing. But think twice about that; they also have to be concerned about encouraging panic. Worry about Iran’s medical system, not Trump’s decisions.
This is from a very big name in international finance:
Yield on the 30-year just #traded at a record low of 1.903% as realization grows that it's unwise to dismiss the #CoronaVirus's negative growth impact "transitory."— Mohamed A. El-Erian (@elerianm) February 21, 2020
Far from certain that its combined demand and supply shock will prove readily containable, temporary and reversible https://t.co/na7Gc4qKbV
Do note the use of the word “transitory”. You’re going to be seeing that a lot in class for the rest of the semester, because it’s part of the jargon of understanding how macroeconomic and financial variable grow through time.
Here’s a new buzzword to be aware of: “gray rhino”:
More like Grey Rhino than Black Swan. The Gray Rhino, “a highly probable, high-impact threat: something we ought to see coming.” You even wrote a book about its inevitably. https://t.co/1W1tw5HoR0— Paul James Harper (@pauljamesharper) February 21, 2020
I like that one. I would clarify it to: highly probable eventually, with low probability at any specific time”. That’s more like the peaceful rhino in a nature documentary deciding to charge David Attenborough’s Range Rover.
My virtual friend Ironman, writing at Political Calculations, has developed an epidemic simulation tool and applied it to the caseload on the cruise ship in Tokyo. He found that everyone on the ship would have been infected within about 60 days. An isolated cruise ship may be a good model for the spread of the virus in a larger closed environment, like the whole planet. Uh oh.
This is kind of gross. A big reason for the spread of SARS in 2002-3 was that it took the fecal-oral route (you can look that up, or imagine what it means). Now actually, this is what common cold viruses do … bathrooms are … hmmm … cleaner in some ways than you might imagine, and dirtier in other ways. Obviously, it’s a good practice to wash your hands. Also a good practice to not use the same bathroom as someone who is sick. In the case of SARS, a particular problem was improperly installed plumbing fixtures, which allowed the virus to travel from a toilet in one apartment to a toilet (and then into the air) in another. Anyway, doctors are starting to report evidence that SARS-CoV2 can infect the same way.
Posting these items when I get a chance, will be updated until class on Friday.
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