Corona Virus: No science can be based on lies and incorrect information!

How many sick people are there in China?

How deadly is the Wuhan Corona Virus?

Somehow it looks more and more like nobody can answer these questions precisely. The number of sick people, close to 10,000 now does not square with what little we hear as feedback from overwhelmed hospitals in Wuhan nor with the extreme measures taken by the Chinese authorities. Likewise, the number of death not reported because they are attributed to other causes or because bodies are sent directly to crematoriums are allegedly much higher than official figures.

This matters a lot!

In politics, it is almost a duty to obfuscate and often lies through your teeth. Then lie again until people start believing that 2+2 equal 3. But not in science. If you base your assumptions on the wrong numbers, you end up with the wrong conclusions and recommendations.

Somehow, this seems to be what is happening with the current epidemic.

Is it just a "normal" flue virus albeit without any vaccine recourse which would mean that most of what we do is overshooting or is it something else which needs to be stopped by all means? The answer to this question depends on two factors, the R0 (propensity to infect other people) and the sick to death ratio.

As always with statistics, if the input data is inaccurate, the output or conclusion will be faulty.  Again, this may well be the case here. The R0 is definitively high and the death ratio seems to be much higher than announced. But, if that is the case, then what?

A country of 1.4 billion people cannot be completely isolated. And in any case, even if it could, it would already be too late. The extreme measures also seems to be counter productive. It looks like 4 to 5 million people did actually escape from the city just before it was closed off. Who can blame them? They did the most logical thing: Run before the storm!

We are less than a month into this pandemic and it already looks out of control, with secondary cases in Japan and maybe in Thailand too. As well as all over China.

The only area in the world from which we have heard nothing yet is Africa. This is odd, because there are close to two million Chinese people living there. It is very unlikely that the virus will avoid the continent. Africa with it's hot climate may not be ideal for a flue-like virus but conversely the continent could very well become a breeding ground for the virus.

Whatever route the virus takes to invade the geographic realm, it has already invaded the economic one. The risk there is not that airlines or hotels will suffer, but that the whole supply chain will be interrupted and will have to permanently relocate out of China. If this happens, then the recession which was already in the cards will become unavoidable and arrive well before the 2020 American elections in November. 

Then what? As with all good black swans, the consequences of this one are impossible to predict. We are still not sure yet that this one is for real, but it looks much more menacing than it did a week ago. It is likely that we will know if the curve is exponential next week, or maybe not if the numbers are not reliable. But by then we will be running behind a virus which will jump by leaps and bonds across borders and incur growing economic pain.

I find it interesting to note that the last big recession started in Wall Street in 1929 (Technically it started a little earlier in Vienna but this is a detail.) but that the US was also the first country to come out of it. Could the pattern repeat this time with China?