Trumps Oil Industry....

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

2 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

I was making that case, Valerie, but now I think we're well past that point. Yes, in my opinion, the Saudis targeted US oil production from the beginning. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal article, they're parking in the GOM, willing to undercut any bid from the Cushing Hub to the refineries. In doing that they've effectively blocked our entire infrastructure. So now, again just my opinion, if we are to save our oil industry, we must ban them from offloading their oil, except to supply their own 100% owned refinery at Motiva. 

I see no reason to make that exception. That refinery is on US soil. If they want to use 600,000 bbl/day of heavy crude from those VLCCs, they should be required to purchase 600,000 bbl/day of oil from Cushing and put it on those VLCCs and go do whatever thy want with it.

[D Coyne + 305]

2 hours ago, Valerie Williams said:

Yeah, this is bad policy, IMO. I'm against it, even though I will probably lose my job.

Risk and creative destruction is part of the free market ethos. Artificially controlled or government-imposed market control is a losing strategy in that stifles the market and leads to corruption and obfuscation in the long term. In fact, government intervention in the health insurance and medical industries is precisely the reason why we are having such a bad time with that segment of the economy, and of course, everyone finds it all so confusing that the free market is what gets blamed, when the reestablishment of the free market is precisely what could improve that problem.

You can't turn off your principles when the going gets rough, or they're not really principles that are grounded in truth.

Disagree that the free market is always best, I think for healthcare we can do better, but I do agree that bailouts for businesses should generally be avoided, in an economic crisis it is far from clear that free market principles are the best policy, unless one believes a prolonged Depression is the best policy.

[D Coyne + 305]

2 hours ago, Valerie Williams said:

Please pardon my ignorance. What should the RRC be doing?

 

Addendum:====================================================

That question is going to sound sarcastic. I'm truly asking. I'm wondering what type of action I should be looking for from the RRC so I can get better at holding them accountable.

Valerie,

I assume you are familiar with the Texas Railroad Commission.

See https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/04/21/Just-the-Facts-Mam

and https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/03/27/Hold-My-Beer-I-Can-Fix-This

The statement of their mission at page below

https://www.rrc.state.tx.us/site-policies/compact-with-texans/

[D Coyne + 305]

1 hour ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

Direct quote from today's WSJ: "'We pulled the plug,' Mr. Kirkland said. Cantium's fields (US offshore) which were producing 20,000 barrels a day, will be shut for at least two months, possibly four. Gulf Coast refiners told Mr. Kirkland they would substitute Gulf crude with Saudi barrels from two tankers sitting offshore."

It looks to me like "we import very little Saudi oil" until they detect a storage problem and by selling as spot merchants off the coast are able to block all ingress into, and egress from the Cushing Hub. Left to their devices, the Saudis will literally choke off US oil production.

Gerry,

US demand has dropped by about 5000 kb/d, we can put tariffs on Saudi oil if that makes you happy, but we still would have 4650 kb/d too little demand, so we don't really address the problem. World demand for oil has dropped by 30 to 40 Mb/d, the Saudis cannot take care of that problem.

Maybe this will work.

 

[Valerie Williams + 129]

25 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

I was making that case, Valerie, but now I think we're well past that point. Yes, in my opinion, the Saudis targeted US oil production from the beginning. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal article, they're parking in the GOM, willing to undercut any bid from the Cushing Hub to the refineries. In doing that they've effectively blocked our entire infrastructure. So now, again just my opinion, if we are to save our oil industry, we must ban them from offloading their oil, except to supply their own 100% owned refinery at Motiva. 

That's what makes sense to me, FWIW, but does anyone know how to accomplish that?

[Valerie Williams + 129]

13 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Valerie,

I assume you are familiar with the Texas Railroad Commission.

See https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/04/21/Just-the-Facts-Mam

and https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/03/27/Hold-My-Beer-I-Can-Fix-This

The statement of their mission at page below

https://www.rrc.state.tx.us/site-policies/compact-with-texans/

Yes. Texas girl here. And thanks for the articles!

[D Coyne + 305]

40 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

I think that's the pre-pandemic figure, right? We import(ed) Heavy crude to be processed by refineries that are configured for a mix that must currently include that crude. In the short term, we will indeed need to import heavy crude, but we can adjust the tariff/embargo to require that a company that needs to use heavy crude may do so by exporting US crude on a barrel-for-barrel basis.

Dan,

Latest import figures from the EIA, I gave the 4 week average for week ending April 17, 2020 (not pre-pandemic), figures below are weekly numbers, focus on crude oil category.  We could do that I guess, but we would be making the refiners pay a penalty for importing heavy crude.  Are you a Republican?  It seems from a Republican perspective we don't want the government micromanaging the oil industry, we could ban exports of crude for national security reasons (as was done from 1975, under Nixon, to 2015, when the law was changed to allow crude oil exports).  Not allowing oil imports to protect our oil industry seems a rather third world move, again aside from national security reasons, Republicans usually have supported free trade.  If we cannot produce oil cheaply enough in the US to compete, we should import, otherwise we are simply subsidizing the oil industry.

Edited April 23, 2020 by D Coyne

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

9 minutes ago, Valerie Williams said:

That's what makes sense to me, FWIW, but does anyone know how to accomplish that?

The president can do it with one stroke of his pen. Frankly, I don't know what he's waiting for.

37 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

I see no reason to make that exception. That refinery is on US soil. If they want to use 600,000 bbl/day of heavy crude from those VLCCs, they should be required to purchase 600,000 bbl/day of oil from Cushing and put it on those VLCCs and go do whatever thy want with it.

The Saudis used to own Motiva with Shell, but for some years they've owned it 100%, so I'm not sure we could legally block them access to their own facility, or from using whatever feedstock they deem best. But we could assuredly ban them from offloading crude to our refineries, basically undercutting any and all bids to the Cushing Hub for the nefarious purpose of bottlenecking our infrastructure. Their action is blatant and transparent. They just keep on coming, waiting to see if they're rebuffed.

[D Coyne + 305]

35 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

I see no reason to make that exception. That refinery is on US soil. If they want to use 600,000 bbl/day of heavy crude from those VLCCs, they should be required to purchase 600,000 bbl/day of oil from Cushing and put it on those VLCCs and go do whatever thy want with it.

Wow Dan, we will see very little foreign investment in the US, if we pull that sort of move, maybe we should elect Xi Jinping for president, he'd support your suggestion. 

You guys do realize that the input to refineries was 12456 kb/d for the week ending April 17, 2020 and that most of the imported crude comes from Canada.

[surrept33 + 609]

21 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Valerie,

I assume you are familiar with the Texas Railroad Commission.

See https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/04/21/Just-the-Facts-Mam

and https://www.oilystuffblog.com/single-post/2020/03/27/Hold-My-Beer-I-Can-Fix-This

The statement of their mission at page below

https://www.rrc.state.tx.us/site-policies/compact-with-texans/

For much of the time the TRRC was active, it was as much the collusion of the Seven Sisters in the middle east (where production really started growing rapidly after WWII) who helped keep volatility low.

I think the best information where a free market driven price is probably after 1986.

Here is an updated chart, shows how historic this week's plunge was:

 

[Valerie Williams + 129]

3 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

The president can do it with one stroke of his pen. Frankly, I don't know what he's waiting for.

Except the part where we don't purchase enough of a share from them to have enough leverage to change their behavior? However, I guess it depends on your goal. If you want to change the Saudi's behavior, you need a multinational coalition to leverage enough buying power, and agree not to buy Saudi oil.

But if your goal is just American energy independence, then I suppose they can sell their cheap oil elsewhere and we'll just produce and refine our own - our own supply and our own demand? Will that work in the long term? How much shale oil do we have? Would we run out? And how would that affect the offshore market? My job is design of riser equipment & stacks. I selfishly want drillship contracts.

[surrept33 + 609]

Is there are evidence that the Saudis initiated the price war to deal a death blow to US domestic production?

From everything I gather about the early march OPEC+ meeting, the Saudis were leading the charge to institute a historically high cut in response to COVID. This would have maybe helped bouy prices at a time that access to capital markets for shale companies was dwindling. The Saudis were acting in their self interests, but it sure looked like the side effect would have kept US production higher than it would be otherwise.

The response from the Kremlin was cold.  Novak clearly didn't want a COVID-related cut. Sechin, the head of Rosneft and Putin's right hand man, was extremely pissed at the US because of increasing sanctions and was publically pointing out how the OPEC+ was buoying US shale.  If they had let the existing OPEC+ agreement continue, it sure looks like prices would have still tanked due to the demand shock, though in a different time frame.

Again, conjecture, I think the price war was engineered by MBS and his cronies in the spur of the moment after the OPEC meeting (the pricing was announced literally the day after) to force Russia back to the table ASAP, but it fomented nationalistic fervor both in Russia and the US, which MBS didn't expect.

The Saudi royal family derive a lot of prestige from the relationship with the US. MBS appears to be extremely inexperienced especially in geopolitics and prone to spur to non-deliberative thinking as the Khashoggi killing shows.

If Ali al-Naimi was still oil minister, I would have agreed that yes, it was a preplanned strategy by the Saudis to reduce the chances that shale comes back soon. But al-Naimi had a lot more experience on what might be savvy for the Saudis to do.

Edited April 23, 2020 by surrept33

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

3 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Dan,

Latest import figures from the EIA, I gave the 4 week average for week ending April 17, 2020 (not pre-pandemic), figures below are weekly numbers, focus on crude oil category.  We could do that I guess, but we would be making the refiners pay a penalty for importing heavy crude.  Are you a Republican?  It seems from a Republican perspective we don't want the government micromanaging the oil industry, we could ban exports of crude for national security reasons (as was done from 1975, under Nixon, to 2015, when the law was changed to allow crude oil exports).  Not allowing oil imports to protect our oil industry seems a rather third world move, again aside from national security reasons, Republicans usually have supported free trade.  If we cannot produce oil cheaply enough in the US to compete, we should import, otherwise we are simply subsidizing the oil industry.

Democrat to the core, but of the old-fashioned kind. I think government intervention should be minimized. It is however, appropriate in times of actual national emergency, and to protect against foreign attack.

We currently have two separate problems: the pandemic and the attack on US oil by OPEC+. Let's take them separately.

Pandemic: The hard numbers show a continued increase in infections with a doubling time of between 4 and 8 days. The math is brutally simple: ten doubling times (40 to 80 days) will increase the number of deaths by a factor of 1024 if we cannot slow it, adn the only way we have to slow it is lockdown, which is causing the economy to crash. This is easily the biggest national emergency since WWII, and government intervention is not only warranted, but necessary. In my opinion, the appropriate intervention should be aimes at providing support to the economy during its enforces hibernation with an aim to enabling the fastest recovery when lockdown can be safely ended. For oil in particular, this includes mitigating the overfilling of storage by imported oil by declaring an embargo.

OPEC+ attack: This problem is effectively completely swamped by the pandemic crisis, but will remain after the pandemic has (finally) been dealt with. the US government needs to intervene to protect the country from this attack against domestic oil. There has not been a free market in oil since at least 1973, and to pretend otherwise is a fantasy. Government intervention in the form of a tariff is in my opinion the least intrusive intervention. I made the distinction earlier between the product OPEC+ sells (insecure oil) and the product we need to maintain our security (secure oil). We can establish a free market for secure oil.

As a lifelong Democrat, I think there are several thing the government can do more effectively than private enterprise, but as an old Democrat, I'm aware that there are problems the government cannot solve.

[Valerie Williams + 129]

1 hour ago, D Coyne said:

Disagree that the free market is always best, I think for healthcare we can do better, but I do agree that bailouts for businesses should generally be avoided, in an economic crisis it is far from clear that free market principles are the best policy, unless one believes a prolonged Depression is the best policy.

As with anything political, the terms are always ambiguous, and you always need to dig deeper into what one means by "free market" and other labels. I will often promote free market, perhaps in excess, and I'm aware it can make me seem like a zealot. But I do it because I think there is far too much encroachment of centralized government and crony capitalist meddling (and crony capitalists are not capitalists, IMO - closer to fascists, those buggers). I feel the need to balance it out by pushing the rhetoric the other direction.

But when you say that free market is not always best, if you mean that there should be some protections and controls (environmental safeguards, for example, etc.), then of course I totally agree. I wouldn't say I am laissez faire.

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

2 hours ago, BradleyPNW said:

If you guys want to keep bringing it up I can keep talking about it. 

Interesting take, Brad.  We are the bad guys because we keep bringing up your slander?  You are a big man!  You can make accusations against a woman!  I must say I'm impressed.  In fact, I'd like to see just how far you're willing to go with this manly tirade against a woman.  Tell you what, go to this website and tell them just how you feel (keep us on copy, Brad, so we can see what a man can accomplish when he is determined):

whitehouse.gov  

Fill out an online form there to send a message to Mr. and Mrs. Trump.

Edited April 23, 2020 by Dan Warnick

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

42 minutes ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

The president can do it with one stroke of his pen. Frankly, I don't know what he's waiting for.

The Saudis used to own Motiva with Shell, but for some years they've owned it 100%, so I'm not sure we could legally block them access to their own facility, or from using whatever feedstock they deem best. But we could assuredly ban them from offloading crude to our refineries, basically undercutting any and all bids to the Cushing Hub for the nefarious purpose of bottlenecking our infrastructure. Their action is blatant and transparent. They just keep on coming, waiting to see if they're rebuffed.

Gerry, those VLCCs are operating in US waters and must offload under US regulations. A single US customs official can stop them.

[D Coyne + 305]

11 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

Democrat to the core, but of the old-fashioned kind. I think government intervention should be minimized. It is however, appropriate in times of actual national emergency, and to protect against foreign attack.

We currently have two separate problems: the pandemic and the attack on US oil by OPEC+. Let's take them separately.

Pandemic: The hard numbers show a continued increase in infections with a doubling time of between 4 and 8 days. The math is brutally simple: ten doubling times (40 to 80 days) will increase the number of deaths by a factor of 1024 if we cannot slow it, adn the only way we have to slow it is lockdown, which is causing the economy to crash. This is easily the biggest national emergency since WWII, and government intervention is not only warranted, but necessary. In my opinion, the appropriate intervention should be aimes at providing support to the economy during its enforces hibernation with an aim to enabling the fastest recovery when lockdown can be safely ended. For oil in particular, this includes mitigating the overfilling of storage by imported oil by declaring an embargo.

OPEC+ attack: This problem is effectively completely swamped by the pandemic crisis, but will remain after the pandemic has (finally) been dealt with. the US government needs to intervene to protect the country from this attack against domestic oil. There has not been a free market in oil since at least 1973, and to pretend otherwise is a fantasy. Government intervention in the form of a tariff is in my opinion the least intrusive intervention. I made the distinction earlier between the product OPEC+ sells (insecure oil) and the product we need to maintain our security (secure oil). We can establish a free market for secure oil.

As a lifelong Democrat, I think there are several thing the government can do more effectively than private enterprise, but as an old Democrat, I'm aware that there are problems the government cannot solve.

Dan,

Sorry not many who post here are Democrats so I assumed incorrectly.  I don't think an embargo solves much and will tend to create more problems than it solves, producers will need to shut down, it is that simple.  Tight oil output will fall very quickly if new completions stop and lower output wells can be shut in, that is the solution.  Nobody will import oil if there is no place to store it, that problem solves itself.  Sometimes the free market works.  I agree with you on pandemic response, we need to listen to scientists rather than politicians, businessmen and economists.

[Valerie Williams + 129]

16 minutes ago, surrept33 said:

Is there are evidence that the Saudis initiated the price war to deal a death blow to US domestic production?

From everything I gather about the early march OPEC+ meeting, the Saudis were leading the charge to institute a historically high cut in response to COVID. This would have maybe helped bouy prices at a time that access to capital markets for shale companies was dwindling. The Saudis were acting in their self interests, but it sure looked like the side effect would have kept US production higher than it would be otherwise.

The response from the Kremlin was cold. If they had let the existing OPEC+ agreement continue, it sure looks like prices would have still tanked due to the demand shock, though in a different time frame.

Again, conjecture, I think the price war was engineered by MBS and his cronies in the spur of the moment after the OPEC meeting (the pricing was announced literally the day after) to force Russia back to the table ASAP, but it fomented nationalistic fervor both in Russia and the US, which MBS didn't expect.

The Saudi royal family derive a lot of prestige from the relationship with the US. MBS appears to be extremely inexperienced especially in geopolitics and prone to spur to non-deliberative thinking as the Khashoggi killing shows.

If Ali al-Naimi was still oil minister, I would have agreed that yes, it was a preplanned strategy by the Saudis to reduce the chances that shale comes back soon. But al-Naimi had a lot more experience on what might be savvy for the Saudis to do.

Interesting comments. And I have to admit I really would prefer it to be this explanation. Because if it was planned subterfuge, then a case could be made for China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia to be colluding to take advantage of the COVID-19 disaster and exploit our weaknesses. The recent aggressive behavior at sea would seem to reinforce this fear.

Yes, I would rather believe it's all just an unfortunate confluence of poorly considered policies. But... I'm not sure I do. I could see how MBS was an unwitting participant, with Russia provoking the Saudis into their actions, though.

[Geoff Guenther + 317]

6 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

The math is brutally simple: ten doubling times (40 to 80 days) will increase the number of deaths by a factor of 1024 if we cannot slow it, adn the only way we have to slow it is lockdown, which is causing the economy to crash.

To underline your numbers: if 10% of NY has been infected and it caused 20,000 deaths, we can expect 50% infected to cause 100,000 deaths. The US has 15x the population of NY, so you could expect to see 1.5 million deaths unless we can delay the pandemic until we get better treatments.

On the OPEC+ side, the government's probably too slow and too late to do anything about it. Because this market bottom is hitting so hard it also may, mercifully, be a fairly short bottom that shakes out zombies and gets back to a new normal.

A brutal but fast shakeout could see oil back in the $50 range this time next year and without the companies that had to keep drilling just to service their debt. Government intervention could just prolong the agony.

[D Coyne + 305]

11 minutes ago, Valerie Williams said:

As with anything political, the terms are always ambiguous, and you always need to dig deeper into what one means by "free market" and other labels. I will often promote free market, perhaps in excess, and I'm aware it can make me seem like a zealot. But I do it because I think there is far too much encroachment of centralized government and crony capitalist meddling (and crony capitalists are not capitalists, IMO - closer to fascists, those buggers). I feel the need to balance it out by pushing the rhetoric the other direction.

But when you say that free market is not always best, if you mean that there should be some protections and controls (environmental safeguards, for example, etc.), then of course I totally agree. I wouldn't say I am laissez faire.

Valerie,

I believe we are on the same page, many here are more laissez faire as you would term it, so I assumed incorrectly.  I was thinking in terms of Keynesian policy to solve economic crises, I agree government micromanaging of the economy and interference in general should be minimized.

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

2 minutes ago, D Coyne said:

Dan,

Sorry not many who post here are Democrats so I assumed incorrectly.  I don't think an embargo solves much and will tend to create more problems than it solves, producers will need to shut down, it is that simple.  Tight oil output will fall very quickly if new completions stop and lower output wells can be shut in, that is the solution.  Nobody will import oil if there is no place to store it, that problem solves itself.  Sometimes the free market works.  I agree with you on pandemic response, we need to listen to scientists rather than politicians, businessmen and economists.

I take it as given that we must reduce production to match consumption: laws of physics.  I think the embargo would be an immediate short-term temporary thing, pretty much to make those VLCCs go away. We need that storage as a buffer to provide for an orderly shut-in instead of a crash shut-in. As I understand it, If you are forced to pick the wells to shut in based on purely tactical and contractual considerations, you are going to lose a bunch of wells that would otherwise be salvageable. If you could pick the wells to shut in based solely on geology and engineering analysis, You will destroy less physical capital. Your scenario is clearly true in the medium term: total production must be lowered to match total consumption. I'm interested in the very short term, and then in the recovery phase. In an ideal world, we would quickly shut in the losers and where possible choke wells, while continuing to let wells that must continue to pump to stay physically alive do so. Even in this ideal situation, the requires 30% reduction will be brutal and the carnage on paper will be brutal, but the infrastructure will remain to ramp production back up as consumption ramps back up.

[Gerry Maddoux + 3,627]

3 hours ago, Geoff Guenther said:

To underline your numbers: if 10% of NY has been infected and it caused 20,000 deaths, we can expect 50% infected to cause 100,000 deaths. The US has 15x the population of NY, so you could expect to see 1.5 million deaths unless we can delay the pandemic until we get better treatments.

Your derivations presuppose that a) the only herd immunity is expressed via antibodies, and b) the statistics collected in densely packed urban life of NYC can be extrapolated to Omaha. 

1) The Theodore Roosevelt is a closely contained community of 4,800, yet only 240 sailers became ill. The young seldom die, presumably because they don't seem to have cytokine storms from immense antibody titers colliding with heavy viral loads in the lower airways. If that is so, then the younger ward this off more by T-cell immunity. 

2) There is emerging evidence that this virus ran amok in Santa Clara California for quite some time before it was detected. Santa Clara is Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle. The first known death was Feb. 6. The index victim had not traveled abroad recently. The infection rate in Santa Clara is high, yet the seriously ill to death rates are very, very low. Santa Clara is "spread out" in the typical Ca. way. 

***This virus kills predominantly older people, with a predilection for hypertensive males. It uses the ACE2 gateway for cellular entry, which appears to be mitigated against partially by taking ACE-I drugs. Flipping hypoxic patients onto their abdomen sometimes saves a life. Other than these "knowns," I'm not sure we can yet make jumps in demographics, infectivity rate, or morbidity.

 

[Andyoil 0]

For sure he knows the game ... prior to Covid he really supported the sector to succeed .. regulations, pipelines etc .. this Covid driven collapse in demand is unprecedented .. decisions are moving from geopolitical to sector survival so I guess the question for the President to answer is how do you prevent Texas going to 5mbpd 

Edited April 24, 2020 by Andyoil

[D Coyne + 305]

14 hours ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

I take it as given that we must reduce production to match consumption: laws of physics.  I think the embargo would be an immediate short-term temporary thing, pretty much to make those VLCCs go away. We need that storage as a buffer to provide for an orderly shut-in instead of a crash shut-in. As I understand it, If you are forced to pick the wells to shut in based on purely tactical and contractual considerations, you are going to lose a bunch of wells that would otherwise be salvageable. If you could pick the wells to shut in based solely on geology and engineering analysis, You will destroy less physical capital. Your scenario is clearly true in the medium term: total production must be lowered to match total consumption. I'm interested in the very short term, and then in the recovery phase. In an ideal world, we would quickly shut in the losers and where possible choke wells, while continuing to let wells that must continue to pump to stay physically alive do so. Even in this ideal situation, the requires 30% reduction will be brutal and the carnage on paper will be brutal, but the infrastructure will remain to ramp production back up as consumption ramps back up.

Dan,

The question is will government interference cause more harm than good.  Probably this is best done by coordination by local state regulatory authorities as they have better knowledge of the industry than the EIA or Congress, perhaps Congress could pass a law allowing the State agencies to "collude" to regulate the industry collectively.  Banning imports temporarily, would lead to other nations banning crude imports from the US, our net imports of crude plus products is actually negative in the most recent week at -1582 kb/d (that is we had net exports of 1582 kb/d) for week ending April 17, 2020.

See  https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=WTTNTUS2&f=W

[Valerie Williams + 129]

14 hours ago, Gerry Maddoux said:

Your derivations presuppose that a) the only herd immunity is expressed via antibodies, and b) the statistics collected in densely packed urban life of NYC can be extrapolated to Omaha. 

1) The Theodore Roosevelt is a closely contained community of 4,800, yet only 240 sailers became ill. The young seldom die, presumably because they don't seem to have cytokine storms from immense antibody titers colliding with heavy viral loads in the lower airways. If that is so, then the younger ward this off more by T-cell immunity. 

2) There is emerging evidence that this virus ran amok in Santa Clara California for quite some time before it was detected. Santa Clara is Google, Facebook, Apple, Oracle. The first known death was Feb. 6. The index victim had not traveled abroad recently. The infection rate in Santa Clara is high, yet the seriously ill to death rates are very, very low. Santa Clara is "spread out" in the typical Ca. way. 

***This virus kills predominantly older people, with a predilection for hypertensive males. It uses the ACE2 gateway for cellular entry, which appears to be mitigated against partially by taking ACE-I drugs. Flipping hypoxic patients onto their abdomen sometimes saves a life. Other than these "knowns," I'm not sure we can yet make jumps in demographics, infectivity rate, or morbidity.

 

Gerry, are you an oil/energy guy, or a doctor? Renaissance man?