Coronavirus Update for February 20, 2020

Basically every dystopia you’ve seen or read about in the last 20 years is happening in China right now. Here’s a roundup of Coronavirus news:

  • The official infection figures everyone believes are understated:

    Total confirmed cases: 75,751
    Total deaths: 2,130
    Total recovered: 16,847

    There are some MSM outlets saying that, based on those official numbers, the worst of the outbreak has passed. I wouldn’t wager much money on that proposition…

  • American evacuees from the Coronavirus-stricken Diamond Princess cruise ship have been flown to the Nebraska Medical Center campus in Omaha. (Yesterday the official Coronavirus tracker showed a jump in U.S. cases to 29 based on that, but today the tracker number is back down to 15. Curious…)
  • Over 700 people in Washington State being “under supervision” for possible coronavirus infection? “The figure includes close contacts of laboratory confirmed cases, as well as people who have returned from China in the past 14 days that are included in federal quarantine guidance.”
  • Walter Russell Mead on why China is the real sick man of Asia:

    Epidemics also lead us to think about geopolitical and economic hypotheticals. We have seen financial markets shudder and commodity prices fall in the face of what hopefully will be a short-lived disturbance in China’s economic growth. What would happen if—perhaps in response to an epidemic, but more likely following a massive financial collapse—China’s economy were to suffer a long period of even slower growth? What would be the impact of such developments on China’s political stability, on its attitude toward the rest of the world, and to the global balance of power?

    China’s financial markets are probably more dangerous in the long run than China’s wildlife markets. Given the accumulated costs of decades of state-driven lending, massive malfeasance by local officials in cahoots with local banks, a towering property bubble, and vast industrial overcapacity, China is as ripe as a country can be for a massive economic correction. Even a small initial shock could lead to a massive bonfire of the vanities as all the false values, inflated expectations and misallocated assets implode. If that comes, it is far from clear that China’s regulators and decision makers have the technical skills or the political authority to minimize the damage—especially since that would involve enormous losses to the wealth of the politically connected.

    We cannot know when or even if a catastrophe of this scale will take place, but students of geopolitics and international affairs—not to mention business leaders and investors—need to bear in mind that China’s power, impressive as it is, remains brittle. A deadlier virus or a financial-market contagion could transform China’s economic and political outlook at any time.

    Many now fear the coronavirus will become a global pandemic. The consequences of a Chinese economic meltdown would travel with the same sweeping inexorability. Commodity prices around the world would slump, supply chains would break down, and few financial institutions anywhere could escape the knock-on consequences. Recovery in China and elsewhere could be slow, and the social and political effects could be dramatic.

  • China expelled three Wall Street Journal reporters over that editorial:

    Beijing’s propaganda campaign to paper over the depredations of its heavy handed quarantines and other outbreak-suppression efforts was launched into hyperspeed earlier this month as the international community – including the WHO – started questioning everything – from whether Beijing deliberately hid information about the outbreak in the early days (looks like it did), to whether the virus was originally developed in a bioweapons lab in Wuhan before being unleashed on the public (…), to whether Beijing was actually capable of resolving this issue without some kind of intervention.

    These doubts likely played some role in Beijing’s decision to refuse to allow foreign experts into the country – though it gladly accepted shipments of facemasks and medicine – as the most important thing is that the Communist Party project an image of strength upon the global stage.

    Which is probably why this editorial annoyed them so much.

    From time to time, China expels foreign journalists. In recent years, reporters from Bloomberg, WSJ and the New York Times have been booted from the country. But early Wednesday morning, the Wall Street Journal reported that three of its reporters – Deputy Beijing Bureau Chief Josh Chin and reporter Chao Deng, as well as reporter Philip Wen have been ordered to leave China in five days, according to Jonathan Cheng, WSJ’s Beijing bureau chief and a formidable foreign correspondent in his own right.

  • China’ economy is still flatlined.
  • And the Chinese government is telling its citizens to get ready for austerity. Which will come as quite a shock after two decades of overinflated smoke-and-mirrors growth.
  • Coronavirus may be twenty times more readily transmittable from human to human than SARS.
  • Significantly more cases reported in Japan, South Korea, and Singapore.
  • “Are China’s coronavirus figure reliable? Wait, are you suggesting that a communist government might lie?

  • I guess that’s why they’ve deployed 1,600 online trolls to combat the spread of non-Communist-Party-approved information.
  • It’s not just China: The World Health Organization wants tech companies to censor non-approved truths.
  • Speaking of lying, Republican senator Tom Cotton says that China refuses to “hand over evidence concerning the bio-safety level 4 research lab in Wuhan despite a new report from biological scientists at the South China University of Technology saying it may have been the source of the coronavirus outbreak.”
  • China deploys 40 mobile incinerators to Wuhan. “According to the reports, the mobile incinerators are able to destroy up to five tons of waste per day – burning a load in as little as two seconds.” Assuming the average Chinese person is 150 pounds, that means that collectively these 40 incinerators can dispose of 2,666 bodies a day.
  • More numbers out of line with government figures:

  • Get ready for coronavirus-induced drug shortages.
  • Things have gotten so bad in China that some residents have openly called for revolution, and for freedom in both Hong Kong and Tibet:

  • Changes in grocery shopping:

  • Meanwhile in Iran: Two dead and a reported military lockdown in Qom. Qom being the heart of the mullah’s regime, it could also be a long overdue coup by the regular army. Or an attempt to forestall a coup by the Republican Guards/Basij.
  • Finally, here’s a link to N95 facemasks. They’ve gotten pricier, but these show up as in-stock…

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    This entry was posted on Thursday, February 20th, 2020 at 6:53 AM and is filed under Communism, Foreign Policy, Media Watch. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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