Economic implications of a SARS/Coronavirus outbreak

I have no real clue as to the extent of the cost on the chinese economy but lunar new year is THE big event there, xmas new year in one, massive gifting and entertainment travelling et
Imagine the cost in australia if all movement was frozen and people stopped shopping at xmas, well so far i think we are at around what 60mil? in cities(rich with $power) stuck at home watching netflix.
All keym touristic monuments are closed, even in Bj or Shanghai
And it will go for at least a couple of weeks min, then even so people do not go to restaurant or movies anymore
By the time this is over, i i wi bet dozen of billions dollars hit on chins economy, and when China sneezes Australia gets the avian flu
Short Rio Fortescue too.get gold

fergee said:

As @qldfrog stated previously looks like Qantas could be ripe for shorting this coming week.

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I also wonder about other airlines, large or small and whether listed or not.

If any are close to the edge financially then this could well push them over. Same with retail, hospitality, tourism etc businesses.

owning stock in the company that produces vaccinations for this will probably be good when they eventually make a vaccine.

In the meantime Shanghai Disney is closed, so I am selling less park tickets, hotel nights, lunches and Mickey Toys.

The thread is economic impact but it's really human impact playing out now.

And to confirm what was always likely to be the case, it's a fast moving situation, and to read things such as:

Even as state media has praised the official response and urged calm, medical staff posted messages on social media saying the situation was much worse than Beijing admitted and that they lacked supplies and protective clothing, with some working with broken goggles.

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The messages, which included appeals for donations, and videos were taken down by censors. Hospital staff have been ordered not to discuss the situation amid the efforts by the authorities to play down the extent of the crisis.

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..can only confirm one's suspicions.

Weibo post illustrates the dire situation in #Wuhan, where supplies and manpower are all stretched to the thinnest level. The user’s dad passed away yesterday following days of unsuccessful treatment. He was waiting for the cremation center to pick up ...... his father’s body but waited overnight and the body still hasn’t been picked up. The hospitals are now refusing to keep dead bodies of #WuhanCoronavirus patients at the hospitals so they pressure family members of patients to arrange pickup of their dead bodies.
Due to the high demands at crematoriums, cremation centers are overwhelmed with requests and like in this case, they can’t dispatch staff to pick up these bodies from the hospitals. Family members continue to face pressure from hospitals, leaving them extremely distressed and vulnerable to catching the disease and having to keep the body somewhere endangering others.
Food fights a breaking out in stores for big bags of rice as people want to hide away.
Interviewing of workers at cremation centers, confirms that there have been un-identified bodies sent directly to the cremation centers!

Oh no ...

my local store has run out of tin foil .... I cant build my hat to protect myself from radio waves.

Seriously, with 7.4 billion people on the planet and a transmission rate of under 3% .... and with a fatal rate even lower, if you catch it .... I would be more likely to be hit by lightening standing during a thunderstorm with a metal golf club.

Ohh I hear thunder ... pity I am not wearing my tin foil hat as well.

Whilst I did read the absurd Lobster price story .... prices at Zero .... well I pay 15 cents per KG ... even $10- per kg. Typical crap story. Fishermen will merely take a break .... whilst exports to the Chinese are a bit lower. Suggesting they stopped totally ... everywhere in China !! Shoot that thunder sounds loud ...

Japanese have stopped eating lobster ? Or Robster in Japanese ,,,, so too say Hong Kong .... no all activity has stopped everywhere.

Gee cant get that lightening to hit ....

Scientifically and I did listen, they are concerned but not that concerned. Low transmission rate adn low fatality rate if you actually get it. Not like say Ebola or the other nastier flu things they had in the past, the head of the Australian scientific guys pointed out it looked less than 5% of the Bird flu or Sars, which had far higher mortality rates.

Maybe crossing against the lights will do it ... tin foil hat .... during a thunderstorm ... crossing in fast flowing traffic with eyes closed and something will occur ?

Just wonder how long China can keep control of quarantined cities. The parts that are very concerning is the fact that the virus is mutating and appears to be getting stronger.

I also suspect that if becomes virulent in cities outside China quarantining whole cities will be far more difficult.

We'll see won't we ?

Here is a full quote from the press conference today, from Ma Xiaowei, China’s health commission minister.


The transmissibility shows signs of increasing and the ‘walking source of infection’ [where patients have few signs of disease] has made it difficult to control and present the disease.


For this new coronavirus we have not identified the source of the infection and we are not clear about the risk of its mutation and how it spreads. Since this is a new coronavirus there might be some changes in the coming days and weeks, and the danger it poses to people of different ages is also changing.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...oll-rises-to-54-as-canada-confirms-first-case

notting said:

Due to the high demands at crematoriums, cremation centers are overwhelmed with requests and like in this case, they can’t dispatch staff to pick up these bodies from the hospitals.

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This is the concerning part above all else.

Wuhan is not a small city. It's almost as large as London or Paris or in more Australian terms it's more than twice the size of Sydney or Melbourne. This isn't some small rural village.

A few quick calculations finds that approximately 400 people would die in Wuhan on a normal day. There's nothing untoward about that, it's just maths when you've got such a large population.

Now we've got 56 reported deaths over several days in a place where ~2800 people die every week and yet the crematoriums are overwhelmed and can't cope? Can't cope with literally just a 2% increase in weekly deaths above the average?

This does not add up.

I just can't believe that under normal circumstances they've got however many crematoriums and they're running flat out 24/7 in a manner comparable to an aluminium smelter (off topic but smelters run constantly because actually stopping and restarting is technically rather difficult but that's not the case with a crematorium). One would reasonably think that they could cope with 2% increase in demand over a week, indeed that would be within normal variation anyway.

This does not add up. Something is wrong - either the bodies aren't really sitting around because they can't be disposed of or there's far more dead than 56 people.

56 people - that's literally a bus load of tourists in a city the size of London or Paris and there's no ability to deal with the bodies? Hmm.......

basilio said:

Just wonder how long China can keep control of quarantined cities. The parts that are very concerning is the fact that the virus is mutating and appears to be getting stronger.

https://www.theguardian.com/science...oll-rises-to-54-as-canada-confirms-first-case

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Imagine if it happened in a democratic Country like here, the U.S or U.K.
The Government wouldn't be allowed to shut down a City, they aren't allowed to shut down anything, the public uproar would be deafening.
Hopefully nothing like it happens here.
What would the press say, "they only have the flu, you can't stop them travelling, who do you think you are? We will march in the streets, we will not be told we can't travel".
Lol what a hoot it would be, something like 'shaun of the dead'.

notting said:

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Have you heard SerpentZA's wife is a doctor? (inside joke if you follow him and c-milk on ADVchina you know)

A lot of reporting coming out next week I think we could see a lot of selling pressure Monday and a PM pop but bulls could push it all aside and "climb the wall of worry" especially if Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Cat, TSLA etc report well, a lot of opposing forces at work here Im going to put my hazz-suit on and go buy some popcorn and get ready to watch the action

Tiger air and virgin already had scary profit figures.imagine after this
Can you short shares in a company which collapses?
If it stops trading are you not a loser too?

qldfrog said:

Tiger air and virgin already had scary profit figures.imagine after this
Can you short shares in a company which collapses?
If it stops trading are you not a loser too?

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They won't go broke, they are owned by 4 major airlines and the company is used to funnel travellers away from Qantas.
Big picture stuff.

Media must be having a slow news week.
Nothing like a panic to stoke emotions.

Just to compare: The flu is roughly 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.

moXJO said:

Media must be having a slow news week.
Nothing like a panic to stoke emotions.

Just to compare: The flu is roughly 3 to 5 million cases of severe illness, and about 290 000 to 650 000 respiratory deaths.

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An epidemic occurs when a disease affects a greater number people than is usual for the locality or one that spreads to areas not usually associated with the disease.

A pandemic is an epidemic of world-wide proportions.

Dona Ferentes said:

An epidemic occurs when a disease affects a greater number people than is usual for the locality or one that spreads to areas not usually associated with the disease.

A pandemic is an epidemic of world-wide proportions.

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when a virus escapes from a lab researching the most potent ones on earth(sure fish market snakes..), you take notice, and China did: they reacted madly fast, think about it
Got pictures of SZ streets empty of cars yesterday, mandatory masks in street and that is in southern China, 900km from Wuhan.
Does anyone think the Chinese gov would see tens of billions of USD go in smoke just to overreact for no reason?
This is BIG and the scale of the chinese measure makes me think it is potentially scary big, you do not quarantine twice the population of Australia for 30 deaths. Epidemic it is, pandemic it will soon be
And here we can not print money to push the can forward, no QE for coro :-(

Our retail figures or carbon emission figures could soon be so irrelevant, Greta and its followers will be happy, but the dolphins may choke on a lot of discarded plastic gloves and masks
Hoping that we will still care about retail figures in 3 months

Dona Ferentes said:

A pandemic is an epidemic of world-wide proportions.

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I am not sure what I would call my issue .... wearing my tin foil hate, with eyes closed .... in a thunderstorm I crossed and crossed the road .... I was not hit by lightening, nor any cars.

This topic, whilst say SARs and its impacts all be it fleeting on anything ... was akin to the Y2K scare which well ... was total BS ...

Speaking of Pandemic and other such words, are ... well ... amusing. In a world where a genocide of millions goes ignored, at times even denied, it would be a good thing for some to cease to exist. Sadly its usually the innocent as opposed to the monsters.

In the time I spent typing, which was not long, in 2020 with 13 million starving in Yemen and 250k dead last year, and 300,000 more this year, that's 800 people dead a day, what significance does this threat have in the greater scheme of things ?

By the time they control and contain this Flu .... or whatever the hell it is ... the grand total will I doubt amount to single day of Yemen's death-toll.

Whilst you or readers are unlikely in the extreme to be hurt by issues in Yemen, we are about as likely ... to get this virus and even less likely it kills us.

Meanwhile whilst distracted in 2017 there were 11,500 bombs and drone strikes via the USA ... a claim of 500 civilian deaths by them, others have it at 35,000 .... and since a single strike at a wedding wiped out 50, at a funeral where they failed to get the person killed 140 and wounded double that ... then the fiasco of the pine nut farmers and 50 killed by accident and double that wounded. Perspective and what the media tells you to pay attention to must be correct ?

Libya just had yet another massive spike in fighting ,,,, 3 million USA citizens got hit yet again with a massive earthquake and the President did not comment on it for 48 hours when previously it got hit by 6 massive quakes. AID was not released because the person did not like the fact they openly despise him. Little place called Puerto Rico

Perspective, importance and well ... distraction ... whilst if you get the Flu or whatever they name this one, so be it ... relevance ? Not a hell of a lot .... ranking ... about the 50th most threatening thing that occurred on this day. Media coverage ?

Think about it ... if you can ... I note every time I flick past Murdoch Fox news of SKY in Australia they are becoming more and more like FOX in the USA with their coverage. To some its how they think and I accept that, reality is one of perspective not often based upon reality .... or actual threats or even any possible relevance to their lives. Information overload and then we get bored and they move on to the next mouse in the spinning treadmill to distract, amuse, scare or entertain us.

Smurf1976 said:

This does not add up. Something is wrong - either the bodies aren't really sitting around because they can't be disposed of or there's far more dead than 56 people.

56 people - that's literally a bus load of tourists in a city the size of London or Paris and there's no ability to deal with the bodies? Hmm.......

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That crossed my mind as well. It doesn't add up. If China wants other countries to believe them, this anomaly needs to be addressed

People who think an outbreak like this at this time of year has little impact for traders are idiots and shouldn't be trading.

In China overall travel on Saturday, the first day of the Lunar New Year, dropped 28.8% from a year ago, said Liu Xiaoming, vice minister of transport. Specifically, he noted declines of:

41.6% in civil air travel

41.5% in rail travel

25% for road transport.

On Sunday, China Railway Chengdu also announced it would halt several high-speed train routes — including some to Shanghai — for the next few days, into early February.

Then of course there is the airline industry and we've seen a big plunge in oil prices.
Oil is as a pervasive market mover as rate cuts and rate hikes.
Then of course their is tourism and travel globally for a start. These are massive industries.
With a low percentage death rate it's certainly not the end of the world.
However there are already huge opportunities emerging.

They are burning through over a million of those stupid moon suits a day and cannot keep up with the medical masks. CSL has gone through the roof. Cathay Pacific and oil related stocks in the US which were all starting to recover have reversed.
These are great trading opportunities.