WuhanCoronavirus

President Xi warned The Corona virus is 'accelerating' [and the] country [is] facing 'grave situation'.

At the last count [Sunday 26th January 2020], more than 2,000 people globally have been infected., the vast majority of them in China, where 56 people have died from the disease.

[I, for one, believe this number is massively undercounted. Some reports speak to 100,000 infections in China] It looks like it started around December 1st and that it can take up to 23 days to show symptoms. Curiously, "Bill Gates kept telling us a pandemic was coming, in Oct 2019 he ran a simulation of a Coronavirus pandemic, just three months later the real Coronavirus pandemic begins."

@HenryMakow. In an article carried in Business Insider in October last year  Bill Gates said the following thinks a coming disease could kill 30 million people within 6 months - and Gates presented a simulation by the Institute for Disease Modeling that found that a new flu like the one that killed 50 million people in the 1918 pandemic would now most likely kill 30 million people within six months.

The likelihood that such a disease will appear continues to rise. New pathogens emerge all the time as the world population increases and humanity encroaches on wild environments.

It's becoming easier and easier for individual people or small groups to create weaponized diseases that could spread like wildfire around the globe.According to Gates, a small non-state actor could build an even deadlier form of smallpox in a lab.So who had ‘mutated bat-snake flu’ as their top market risk for 2020? tweeted @tracyalloway.

The Precise origins of the Corona virus are yet to be established with Wiley's Journal of Medical Virology saying it may be may be snake-to-human transmission and some even pointing the Finger at the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan bio-safety level four (BSL-4) laboratory and surmising that the only explanation left is artificial DNA modification, possibly by the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which since 2007 has collected samples from thousands of bats across the country and done genetic experiments with them.What is clear is that the CCP suppressed information until we reached a Groucho Marx ''Who Ya Gonna Believe, Me or Your Own Eyes'' moment. 

Epidemiologists speak of Tipping Points. Malcolm Gladwell described the ''Tipping Point''  as the name given to that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It's the boiling point. It's the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.

In an article in 2014 about Ebola I called it the moment of ''escape velocity'' and wrote ''viruses exhibit non-linear and exponential characteristics'' The Mathematics is the basic reproduction number of the infection (R_0), which represents how many People each person infected with the coronavirus is passing the disease on to.

A number of less than 1, means the virus dies out. For a Frame of Reference, the typical R0 attack rate for the seasonal flu is around an R0=1.28. The 2009 flu pandemic R0=1.48. The 1918 Spanish Flu =1.80. The R0 range is somewhere between 2.00-2.6 with Dr. Eric Ding speaking of 3.8 over the weekend. 

@DrEricDing tweeted the new coronavirus is a 3.8!!! How bad is that reproductive R0 value? It is thermonuclear pandemic level bad - never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career [before adjusting his calculations lower to 2.5] Each person infected with coronavirus is passing the disease on to between two and three other people on average at current transmission rates, according to two separate scientific analyses of the epidemic.

Ferguson’s team suggest as many as 4,000 people in Wuhan were already infected by Jan. 18 and that on average each case was infecting two or three others.

A second study by researchers at Britain’s Lancaster University also calculated the contagion rate at 2.5 new people on average being infected by each person already infected.

''Should the epidemic continue unabated in Wuhan, we predict (it) will be substantially larger by Feb. 4,” the scientists wrote.

They estimated that the central Chinese city of Wuhan where the outbreak began in December will alone have around 190,000 cases of infection by Feb. 4., and that “infection will be established in other Chinese cities, and importations to other countries will be more frequent.”

The Lancet now reports that the coronavirus is contagious even when *no symptoms*: specifically: “crucial to isolate patients... quarantine contacts as early as possible because asymptomatic infection appears possible”The overarching Point is that whether its 2.5 or 3.8 this is off the charts. The CCP is building hospitals in a record breaking 7 days but who will man them?

China has locked down a total of 47m of its Citizens. Given the new hyperconnectedness of the World [For example, did you know there is a daily Ethiopian Flight between Wuhan and Addis Abeba - As of Thursday Ethiopian Airlines, which has multiple daily passenger and cargo flights to China and Africa’s busiest airport hub, said it was waiting for guidance from Ethiopia’s Health Ministry on how to respond], I have to assume that the Corona virus is already in Africa but just not diagnosed.

Thats a racing certainty.Paul Virilio wrote ''With every natural disaster, health scare, and malicious rumor now comes the inevitable “information bomb”–live feeds take over real space, and technology connects life to the immediacy of terror, the ultimate expression of speed''And in his book City of panic he described The city reconstructed through the use mediatized panic. Markets bought Gold and G7 Bonds on Friday as Investors dived into Safe Havens, Nest week we could see these moves turn parabolic.

“But it is a curve each of them feels, unmistakably. It is the parabola. They must have guessed, once or twice -guessed and refused to believe -that everything, always, collectively, had been moving toward that purified shape latent in the sky, that shape of no surprise, no second chance, no return.’’

Aly-Khan is a financial analyst