Tom Kirkman

Don't sneeze. Coronavirus is a threat to oil markets and global economies

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1 hour ago, GunnysGhost said:

Agreed.  There are a lot of assumptions in the 'quarantine' argument.  Namely that it hadn't spread from Wuhan province, and therefore only flights out of Wuhan should be halted.

The problem is we know for a fact that it had spread to every region of China.  And those ports of exit have not halted flights.  US and EU airports are accepting thousands / millions of folks from these high-risk areas of China.  But the bigger worry in regards to 'global pandemic' are places like Africa, S. America, etc.  I think it is safe to assume there are unreported / undetected cases there.  Whether the disease gets established in more than one region or not is to be seen.

Too late to put Pandora back in her box. 5 million left Wuhan and an unknown percentage may have been infected. The bad thing about this (possibly engineered) virus is the two week no symptoms incubation period. This is extremely unusual. Having HIV markers isn't a great look either. 

However, just because Africa and South America exist, doesn't mean hordes of Chinese are heading there now to infect people. The single most common second language for Chinese people is English. It's not like they're expert in Swahili and Spanish. 

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As of Saturday, the province [Hubei] has reported 9,074 confirmed cases, with 43,121 still under observation for infection. Of the confirmed cases, 1,118 are in severe condition and 444 are critical.

The numbers of infected and dead are steadily rising, and a study by University of Hong Kong scientists predicted on Friday that as many as 75,815 people in Wuhan may have been infected with the new coronavirus.

common Model (R0=2.68) is not far off for Wuhan ~52k under observation or confirmed vs. 76k by the model.

They obviously missed the boat by waiting to respond till after the start of Lunar new year by which time the seasonal travel brought 5 mil Wuhan residents to travel out of town, taking the virus with them. 

There is a bird flu running through chicken farms in Hunan, just south of Hubei. It is a H5N1 virus with 60% mortality for chickens. No human infections (yet, and we hope it stays that way). Hopefully this one is handled better than the Swine Flu, which decimated the Chinese Pork industry. If Chicken and egg supplies go under in addition to pork, then China is in a world of pain, and food inflation at 20% - already devastating the poor - will be that much worse, possibly 30-40% Which would be socially very destabilizing.

 

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(edited)

6 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

Too late to put Pandora back in her box. 5 million left Wuhan and an unknown percentage may have been infected. The bad thing about this (possibly engineered) virus is the two week no symptoms incubation period. This is extremely unusual. Having HIV markers isn't a great look either. 

However, just because Africa and South America exist, doesn't mean hordes of Chinese are heading there now to infect people. The single most common second language for Chinese people is English. It's not like they're expert in Swahili and Spanish. 

Per Forbes: "There are more than 10,000 Chinese-owned businesses operating in Africa".

Africa has the mineral resources that China needs to be a manufacturing powerhouse, and they have been as capitalistic in establishing themselves there in the past decade as any western nation. 

 

Per your post:

"[aren't] Hordes of Chinese headed there to infect people...."    "...It's not like they're expert in Swahili and Spanish."

Not sure either of those points is true.

Even white-collar middle-managers and blue-collar oil workers / diamond miners from China headed back from visiting family in China to their place of work in Africa (which is a real thing) could number in the hundreds of thousands. 

Plus, if it is as you say and this virus is very nasty and possibly a bioweapon, then how many people does it take to metastasize the virus?  Two?  Ten?  Ten Thousand?  

"There are over 1 million Chinese Nationals calling Africa home."  Article Circa 2014.  Probably much higher now. 

https://qz.com/217597/how-a-million-chinese-migrants-are-building-a-new-empire-in-africa/

 

Edited by GunnysGhost
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17 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

There may well be more concrete basis than you knew. 

This virus has HIV insertions. More fuel to the fire saying it's a bio engineered weapon

 

Yesterday, Twitter permanently banned ZeroHedge's Twitter account, for their reporting on the Coronavirus.

Attached below is a PDF of one of the scientific articles (discussed in the ZeroHedge article above) that got Twitter so upset.  I attached the PDF below, as I expect the link will be removed.  

Screencap of the Abstract (again, discussed in the ZH article)

Abstract.png.30eb9807587c27fddceef8a5d0c88149.png

 

And today's graph update:

586714323_01Febgraphsquare.png.7e4ee76ba2375e01056b9b1a38c3d39f.png

 

PDF attached here (sorry lurkers, pretty sure you need to be a registered member of the forum to download attachments).

Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.pdf

 

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19 hours ago, Ward Smith said:

There may well be more concrete basis than you knew. 

This virus has HIV insertions. More fuel to the fire saying it's a bio engineered weapon

Didn’t take long for the conspiracy theory that it is a bio-engineered weapon to surface. I suppose we should have expected it.

No doubt it is Trump’s fault...

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2 hours ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Didn’t take long for the conspiracy theory that it is a bio-engineered weapon to surface. I suppose we should have expected it.

No doubt it is Trump’s fault...

Not really a very good conspiracy as it’s knocking China on its ass and the oil price with it, who benefits. The greenies May have planned this as only they win at this point. Just watched “outbreak” with Dustin Hoffman for some reason it’s trending on Netflix. Scary really how much easier nowadays than the movie shows how fast a virus can spread to continents in a matter of hours. The incubation period of this virus is also being misreported you can be infected with no symptoms for weeks.

B826D052-0015-4123-BBD4-809879CC802F.jpeg

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(edited)

‘We will admit them if they’re dying’: Wuhan hospitals running low on test kits and beds

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/we-will-admit-them-if-theyre-dying-wuhan-hospitals-running-low-on-test-kits-and-beds/news-story/caead34d2835e44d20ee46bc4c657229

I watched the whole video by Chen Qiushi.  He is being investigated by Chinese authorities for interviewing patients being turned away by hospitals.

This is why the infections and deaths are not 'dropping off'.  They aren't treating all cases of sick people.  They send folks away and only admit them once they are critical, at which time it might be too late to actually administer proper care.

Ambulances are being used to ferry to coroners' and crematory.  "We will admit them if they are dying"..... think about that for a minute.... they only admit when they know they are gonna die.... so they have quick access to the corpse... and a quick cremation. 

These so-called 'hospitals' are just a stopover on the way to the crematory, so that the state can keep the bodies from piling up. 

Edited by GunnysGhost
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3 minutes ago, GunnysGhost said:

They seem more concerned with not allowing a true body count than they do with care.

^

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6 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

 

Yesterday, Twitter permanently banned ZeroHedge's Twitter account, for their reporting on the Coronavirus.

Attached below is a PDF of one of the scientific articles (discussed in the ZeroHedge article above) that got Twitter so upset.  I attached the PDF below, as I expect the link will be removed.  

Screencap of the Abstract (again, discussed in the ZH article)

Abstract.png.30eb9807587c27fddceef8a5d0c88149.png

 

And today's graph update:

586714323_01Febgraphsquare.png.7e4ee76ba2375e01056b9b1a38c3d39f.png

 

PDF attached here (sorry lurkers, pretty sure you need to be a registered member of the forum to download attachments).

Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag.pdf 1.66 MB · 1 download

 

The Adrian Bond account we linked to previously on Medium.com has also been permanently banned. 

Whether you say it was on purpose or an accident, if you stray from the party line (bat plus snake plus wet market) au naturale story, you're banned by the corporate elites owned by the billionaire boys club. Wonder why that is? 

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The numbers out of China on the weekends seem to flatten out on Saturdays/Sundays and then on Monday shoot up (take a look at the 1-24 to 1-25 flattening). Is this weekend no different? If Mondays number rise up by over 2500 new cases or more it shows China is struggling to control the virus. THe other odd reporting out there is new cases are moving up around 1500 cases a day however the rise in dead or recovered is only rising by a 100 or so a day. Either hospitals are stacking up some very sick people or the Chinese are not giving a real picture on how many are dying. You would think if recoveries are taken place they would be quickly reporting these recovered cases (they are not). Financial markets has so far been brushing aside the virus. This week the cards will be laid on the table. IE China is not winning against the Virus and they have to go on a bigger lockdown and the Financial markets along with Oil will take a huge hit, or China can prove they are winning. My bet bigger lockdown and the markets get creamed. China is headed fast into a recession on the backs of the evil little virus, and their teetering financial situation is the true threat to the US right now. Good luck to all

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By now we know that the virus is an escapee from the Wuhan Biosecurity Virology Lab research center where substantial research on the subject of genetically modified coronaviruses has been published. There was plenty of suspicion that the institute was working with the PLA to build biowarfare viruses, which the HIV sequences in the Wuhan coronavirus DNA would obviously indicate was the case. Indeed, if there were such a bioweapons program in China, this was the only place it could have been happening. As per official proclamations, there definitely is a concerted bioweapons effort going on for 20 years.

Obviously, for Chinese face saving reasons, the broader internet media have been censored by the Chinese paranoid PR machine. I don't know with what threats and with what encouragement, but obviously enough to give up on good business. If Malthusian billionaires are involved either in the release or the suppression, I don't know, and I suspect it is not something they did because there is no reason for it. Global births are already down and on a downtrend, And in the key OECD+China heavy resource consumption regions, the trend is far stronger, with populations falling 30-40% by 2050. The Club of Rome projections are off because they got the demographic effects of urbanization wrong. It is simply not happening. I am certain they know that. 

Billionaires in general may have a motive to suppress news on the actual origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus, since have an interest in businesses in China on the financial side, production side, and end market side. Plenty of reasons to pressure Google and twitter etc..

But it is garbage reasoning on the billionaires' club part if that is what they are thinking. China is in the second decade of a terminal decline trend in growth that seems to have gone negative already last year, and by all financial considerations will be followed by a financial crash which will make it that much worse..How recovery proceeds will be a test of China's leadership's comprehension of  how economies work. If it were in Deng's reformist technocrat's hands there may have been an eventual rosy scenario, but those were banished from leadership by the hardliners that put up Xi Jinping at the top of a dictatorship rather than the broader technocratic oligarchy that Deng installed. 

There are plenty of Western vulture funds setting up in China to buy distressed debt and flip assets sold at "firesale" prices. I am not certain the have any advantage over locals having government favor and its printing press at their backs. 

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17387 confirmed 362 dead

472 recovered, Much improved numbers, perhaps an effective treatment has gelled?

Last figure I saw for suspected cases under observation was 43k for Saturday

My expected deaths 362 current + 441 in critical condition + 0.5 X 1100 in serious condition. = 1352 which is 8% mortality on confirmed cases, or 2-3% on a suspect cases basis.

The actual number of dead is not known. But is obviously much greater than published as only confirmed patients are reported as having died from the disease. Those found dead on the street or at home are not tested. Thus a total death toll of ~3000 would not surprise me.It is important to publish the numbers so the world can understand the disease better, but it seems they are not even collected. 

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Coronavirus:

  • China accuses US of causing panic and 'spreading fear'
  • US declared a public health emergency on Friday and said it would deny entry to foreign nationals who had visited China in the past two weeks.
  • https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51353279

 

Huawei keep factories humming despite coronavirus

  • Huawei Technologies Co Ltd said on Monday it had resumed production of goods including consumer devices and carrier equipment, and operations were running normally.
  • https://reut.rs/2tkn2KC

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16 minutes ago, Douglas Buckland said:

Luca, what is your point?

I believe there is a desperate and justified attempt by China to make everything seem under control.
Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot allow the spread of the coronavirus to destabilize the country and create mistrust of its leadership and that of the Communist Party.
The opening of Huawei's factories, in this perspective, does not seem a coincidence.
I think, like many here, that the real data on the virus has not yet come out.

What do you think?

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30 minutes ago, luca mattei said:

I believe there is a desperate and justified attempt by China to make everything seem under control.
Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot allow the spread of the coronavirus to destabilize the country and create mistrust of its leadership and that of the Communist Party.
The opening of Huawei's factories, in this perspective, does not seem a coincidence.
I think, like many here, that the real data on the virus has not yet come out.

What do you think?

I think it is too late for that. Xi (and the party) is already anathema to the Chinese millennials and some older Gen Zs, look up some vids they are posting. The rage is palpable. The CCP is still respected by the elder majority. Unfortunately for them, that is not where instability comes from . Coronavirus is just another failure of the CCP in handling public health issues. Add the recent bird flu wiping out 60% of infected chickens, the swine flu killing the pork industry, and the consequent food inflation - now 19% and possibly 40%  if they can't stop the bird flu from wiping out the chicken and egg supply. And, of course that you need to buy at Walmart and European stores to get safe food. 

China cooked its goose 5 years ago when they panicked in the face of the demographic contraction driving consumption growth to the gutter. They inflated credit even more than before, and are now just running a Ponzi scheme instead of a financial system. The moment cash flows cross 0 it is all over.

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1 hour ago, luca mattei said:

I believe there is a desperate and justified attempt by China to make everything seem under control.
Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot allow the spread of the coronavirus to destabilize the country and create mistrust of its leadership and that of the Communist Party.
The opening of Huawei's factories, in this perspective, does not seem a coincidence.
I think, like many here, that the real data on the virus has not yet come out.

What do you think?

Yes, I think that is/was their intent and I also recon it will fail catastrophically. 

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Just some personal thoughts based on the data on the thread, the reported numbers seem to be more of a function of ability to confirm cases and not how many ppl are actually sick. It feels like we'll be on this incline for a while until the spread is contained and confirmation process can catch up with the spread rate 

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4 hours ago, luca mattei said:

I believe there is a desperate and justified attempt by China to make everything seem under control.
Chinese President Xi Jinping cannot allow the spread of the coronavirus to destabilize the country and create mistrust of its leadership and that of the Communist Party.

The Party and the Virus

... Back to politics. We have had two phases so far. 1 is first discovery followed by total silence. 2 is damage control, and deflecting all blame from the Party.

We are now in phase 3. The WHO, which was caught napping as much as the Party in phase 2, lavishes great praise on that same Party now for its “extraordinary safety measures”. Locking down entire cities (increasingly people are not even allowed to leave their homes), speed-building hospitals, you name it. And the WHO is not the only entity praising the Party.

The reason why there is so much emphasis on this is that the CCP is desperate to show everyone, at home and abroad, that it is in control. That there is no reason to worry, at least not due to actions by the Party. If other countries have problems, that is not the Party’s fault.

And also, the Party will take it from here, no need for foreign assistance. They’ll allow in some doctors, preferably WHO related, and they have asked both the US and EU for medical equipment and doctors’ uniforms, hazmat suits, that sort of thing, just so nobody asks any further questions: see, we do accept help! We’ll let you know if we need anything.

Other than that, the Party is in full control, thank you very much. And if Chinese people start protesting the failures of the Party so far, as they are, that is none of anyone else’s business. “We” have it under control”. Ask the WHO, they said so too.

If the Party is allowed to get away with this behavior aimed at self-preservation above anything else, including human lives of both Chinese and foreigners, something bad is sure to happen. Maybe not this time, maybe this one will fizzle out. But the next one, or the one after that, will not.  ...

 

... Xi can claim today that he has control. He can say things are not too bad, but we don’t really know, he’s issuing the numbers. What we do know, and there’s the crux, is that he was 6 weeks late in starting to acknowledge the epidemic, in contacting the outside world, in acknowledging his mistakes, and in acknowledging that such mistakes are baked into the model that keeps him in power.

●  Phase 1 is complete denial, not a word.

●  Phase 2 is damage control, massaging the numbers downward.

●  Phase 3 is “close all the doors, not to worry, nothing to see here, we got this, no you can’t come in, too risky!”

But, yeah, praise him while you can. The only praise he cares about is from people just as clueless as he is anyway.

The Party is a highly effective vehicle for protecting its own interests and survival. For other things, perhaps not so much. Viruses can be quite deadly at times. Combine them with politics and the risk factor rises exponentially.  ...

 

===============================

A MeSSaGe FRoM FLeeT CoMManD...

1058771298_REMAINCALM.thumb.png.fdcc4d5ce6de7a8d39e26a6e41e50821.png

 

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2 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Viruses can be quite deadly at times. Combine them with politics and the risk factor rises exponentially.  ...

Exactly. And while I'm a patriot, the CDC has been awfully quite about this too. I'm quite sure they've sequenced the relatively simple single-stranded RNA virus. They know precisely whether or not HIV genomic sequences had been inserted by genetic engineering. But they're not telling . . . . . . . us. They're certainly telling President Trump. So we'll likely learn the real answer through trade policies and Chinese access to US banking. 

This is uber-important. If a nasty little coronavirus was being studied by the Wuhan Level 4 Biosafety Laboratory (the only one in all of China), and it escaped, that's one thing--they may have just been studying it as a zoonotic possibility. However, if the errant coronavirus actually had several HIV genomic sequences stuck inside its RNA, that raises the question of bio-weaponization. 

If the latter occurred, well, we are under accidental, premature attack. I'm not trying to promulgate a conspiracy theory but wouldn't it be ironic if all the worry we had about cybersecurity and geopolitical gerrymandering has just been supplanted by a bioweapon? This was actually a big concern way back in the mid to late sixties when I was doing virus research. Back then, there was no worry about the Chinese; it was the Russians. 

For the sake of peace, I sincerely hope this was just a bunch of well-intentioned scientists trying to prevent the next zoonotic virus (like SARS). Beijing's statement that HIV drugs seem to be partially effective against the novel coronavirus makes me wonder. Could be a cousin of the zoonotic HIV virus, or it could be something much more sinister. Politics will tell.

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On 2/2/2020 at 10:50 AM, Tom Kirkman said:

Well, back to basics. I just read on this site that the "Virus" might cause China's oil demand drop 20%...or about 3M barrel/day. Actually that doesn't sound like a lot in the whole scheme of things considering it should be temporary. But, just thinking out loud to myself,  I figure the loss just to (lost) flights to/from China to be about that much. This is just a SWAG as I don't have time to research this. But, I figure those really big planes from the US to there burn around 1000 BARREL just to get over there...and then they gotta come back. Multiply that by a couple thousand flights a day and add in flights from all "the other" countries and we're taking about a bunch of oil? I'm sure someone has all this calculated...or maybe not. I may be way off in either direction(hi/low)? 

 

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2 hours ago, Tom Kirkman said:

●  Phase 1 is complete denial, not a word.

●  Phase 2 is damage control, massaging the numbers downward.

●  Phase 3 is “close all the doors, not to worry, nothing to see here, we got this, no you can’t come in, too risky!”

China Arrested Doctors Who Warned About Coronavirus Outbreak. Now Death Toll’s Rising, Stocks Are Plunging.

The World Health Organization has praised Beijing’s “transparency” and its impressive ability to lock down tens of millions of people. But its fatal first instinct was censorship.

HONG KONG—The new coronavirus that has spread consternation around the world over the last few weeks has now killed more people in China than the SARS epidemic of 2002-2003. China’s health commission reported Sunday that there were 361 deaths nationwide. During the SARS outbreak, 349 people died in mainland China and 774 altogether around the world. The Chinese stock markets took major hits Monday, and the whole nation feels its growing isolation.

Yet last December—before people all over China were falling sick with pneumonia-like symptoms, before people around the world grew alarmed about a disease leaping from captured wild animals to human shoppers in dense Chinese food markets, and before coronavirus reached new shores after being carried onto planes by human hosts, forcing the World Health Organization to declare a global emergency—eight people discussed how several patients in Wuhan were experiencing severe, rapid breakdowns in their respiratory systems.

They were part of a medical school’s alumni group on WeChat, a popular social network in China, and they were concerned that SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, was back. 

It wasn’t long before police detained them. The authorities said these eight doctors and medical technicians were “misinforming” the public, that there was no SARS, that the information was obviously wrong, and that everyone in the city must remain calm. On the first day of 2020, Wuhan police said they had “taken legal measures” against the eight individuals who had “spread rumors.”

Since then, the phenomenal spread of the virus has created cracks even within the normally united front of the Chinese Communist Party. “It might have been fortunate if the public had believed the ‘rumor’ and started to wear masks, carry out sanitization measures, and avoid the wild animal market,” a judge of China’s Supreme People’s Court wrote online last Tuesday.  ...

 

... Authorities are still actively censoring social-media posts and news articles that are questioning the government response to the outbreak. One local man, Fang Bin, uploaded footage of corpses in a van and a hospital in Wuhan, and was then tracked down and taken into custody. His laptop was confiscated, and he had to pedal for three hours on a bicycle to get home after he was questioned, warned, and released. His coronavirus video went viral.  ...

 

... The Chinese government is eager to project the image that everything is under control. ...

 

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