Revealing that which is concealed. Learning about anything that resembles real freedom. A journey of self-discovery shared with the world.
Have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them - Ephesians 5-11
Join me and let's follow that high road...
For the past two weeks, even as the market took delight in China's
doctored and fabricated numbers showing the coronavirus spread was
"slowing", we warned again and again that not only was this not the case
(which was confirmed by the latest data out of South Korea, Japan and
now Italy), but that for all its assertions to the contrary, China's
workers simply refused to go back to work (even with FoxConn offering its workers extra bonuses just to return to the factory) and as a result the domestic economy had ground to a halt, something we described previously in:
Unfortunately, one month after the start of the Lunar New Year it's not getting any better, as the latest high frequency updates out of China, courtesy of Goldman Sachs, demonstrate. First, here is China's daily coal consumption which have barely
pushed off the lows, and are roughly 50% where they were a year ago this
time.
With coal demand in the doldrums, it is also to be expected that coal
supply is depressed as well, and indeed coal volumes over the past week
remain 25% lower than the past 3 years' average, and roughly 33% below
the 2019 level. One of the better indicators of real-time commerce, traffic
congestion, remains virtually unchanged, and substantially below where
it was in previous years. Yet, hilariously, this being China even with no transport, no
commerce, and virtually no power plant use, pollution is finally
starting to ramp up. One wonders what is causing this if it's not coal
demand, or transportation: maybe all those crematoriums working
overtime? And speaking of not transport, the number of passengers carried after
the New Year is barely above 10 million, almost 50 million below last
year's levels. Meanwhile, a brief silver lining in the economy was promptly snuffed
out last week, when the property sales volume in 30 major cities crashed
back to earth and remains well below 25% of the seasonal norm. And with no end market demand, it is hardly a surprise that steel
demand has continued to crater, and was below half the normal level from
the past 3 years. Last but not least, and perhaps most ominous of all, the earlier
semi-official data print in the form of the February survey on business
conditions showed a depression level plunge, with the index crashing
more than 18 points, the most on record, to 37.3, which confirms Nomura's expectation of a manufacturing PMI print later this week which may have a 30-handle.
Italy gets it. Their government would rather Italians lived, than be murdered. If you go out and everyone is wearing a mask, damn well better be out for a very good reason.
Italians in the Lombardy region
have begun stockpiling food and basic necessities, leaving shops in a
post-apocalyptic-looking state.
Supermarket shelves were
stripped in mere hours as stocks ran low and queues lengthened, as
evidenced by eyewitness footage from Milan.
Some wistfully joked that it was almost pleasant to be living through what they dubbed a “zombie apocalypse.” Schools
and museums have been closed, events such as the Venice Carnival have
been cancelled while Fashion designer Giorgio Armani reportedly held a
closed-door event to conclude Milan Fashion Week on Sunday by streaming
his latest collection from an empty theater.
Roughly dozens northern Italian towns have been placed on lock-down as the
total number of infected in Italy stands at over 150 publicly admitted to, but real number likely 100x that, considering all hospitals are full of flu patients lining up. Later on Sunday,
officials closed theaters, cinemas and other public places like pubs and
clubs for at least seven days, the majority of which are located in the
densely populated region around Milan.
In one of many shocking videos circulating on Twitter, a recent clip
of a doctor in Hunan that was widely shared by credible journalists
covering the outbreak has caught our attention because it supports reality - which has become increasingly widely adopted among the western
press - that Chinese health officials are seriously under counting the
number of cases and deaths.
As the Washington Post
wrote in a piece published earlier this week: "Chinese leaders and
state media strike a coordinated note this week about the government’s
ability to contain the outbreak, inconsistencies and sudden changes in
official data are leaving experts — and journalists — struggling to plot
meaningful trends, or even place any confidence in the figures coming
from government."
The WaPo reporters pointed to a clear case of manipulation where the authorities suppressed the true number of cases.
Authorities in Hubei province reported good news Thursday: There were
only 349 new coronavirus cases the previous day, the lowest tally in
weeks. The bad - and puzzling - news? Wuhan, the capital of Hubei, reported 615 new cases all by itself. And crematoriums are reporting daily numbers in the 50k A DAY. 50K A DAY!!! Hubei authorities have changed their criteria for counting cases three times over the past week or so.
They are open pit burning bodies which tells us all we need to know, the numbers are catastrophic.
Hubei officials explained that they deducted cases that have not been
confirmed through genetic tests from their total reported number of
cases. Since this mistake was very, very public, we also reported on it.
But we've been reporting on this for weeks.
The mainstream press in the US has since caught on, as the WaPo post
shows. As its reporters claim, though there is no obvious smoking gun,
most experts still believe China is under reporting cases based on
mathematical algorithms and other methods used to project the rate of
infection. All lies. And their lies are killing millions, now and later.
There is no smoking gun suggesting that Chinese officials fabricate
numbers (lying bastards)- at least not since late January. But many researchers say the
official figures intentionally underestimate the true numbers because of orders. That is why having case numbers collected with consistent
methodology would help scholars chart the general contours, if not the
precise values, of how the epidemic is unfolding.
We could go back all the way to the first "shift" in China's
reporting methodology on Feb. 12, when officials reported the first
major spike in cases, shaking market confidence in the process, until
Beijing axed two senior local officials in one of many obvious
scape goatings by Beijing. China's numbers have consistently kept the fatality rate from the
virus at around 2%, when the real numbers range from 35 to 70%. But given the exponential rate of spread outside
China, and evidence that it acted too late with its quarantine's to
really blunt the outbreak, some suspect that this number, too, will rise
once researchers get a fuller picture of what's happening on the
ground.
Considering China and the word ethics are never found in the same sentence together, it's no surprise that this weapon has stopped 1.6 billion dead in their tracks. The coal numbers alone reveal the truth of the matter. To run their power grid, China has enormous coal reserves and uses them for power. The fact that coal usage is flatlined, like on a holiday, says all we need to know that
factories and offices are closed
schools, closed
trains, etc, stopped
The global economy is about to take the nosedive of the 21st century. And turning everything back on and ordering everyone back to work and unwinding their quarantines, will only gurantee that millions are going to die horribly. Numbers cannot even fathom. For that is what they will do, when the banks start failing, and many already are. Finish. DB ------------------------------
Morgan Stanley suggested that real time measurements of Chinese
pollution levels would provide a "quick and dirty" (no pun intended) way
of observing if any of China's major metropolises had returned back to
normal. What it found was that among some of the top Chinese cities
including Guangzhou, Shanghai and Chengdu, a clear pattern was evident –
air pollution was only 20-50% of the historical average. As Morgan Stanley concluded, "This could imply that human activities such as traffic and industrial production within/close to those cities are running 50-80% below their potential capacity." As a reminder, all this is (or technically, isn't) taking place as
President Xi Jinping on Wednesday sought to send a message that progress
had been made in bringing the coronavirus outbreak under control and,
for most parts of the country, the focus should be on getting back to
business. According to state television, Xi chaired a meeting of the
Politburo Standing Committee, China’s supreme political body, on the
latest developments on the crisis and future policy responses,
concluding that there had been “positive changes” with “positive
results”.
Xi also reiterated that all levels of local government and Communist
Party committees must strive to achieve China’s social and development
goals this year, indicating that he did not want the public health crisis to hinder progress. Most importantly, Xi urged local authorities to refrain from taking excessive measures to curb contagion, and yet clip after clip from China...
... shows that the measures being taken are far beyond merely "excessive"
when it comes to limiting the potential spread of the virus, which
probably makes sense considering the unexpected surge in infected cases
in Wuhan, which have sent the total for China just shy of 60,000. Add to this the ongoing uncertainty that Beijing is far behind the
curve in containing the virus, and one can see why most businesses are
reluctant to "get back to normal." In the latest confirmation of just that, several other indicators
have emerged showing that despite Xi's stark demands for 1.4 billion
Chinese to ignore the global pandemic which may very well have been started by one of China's own experimental labs...
“There are plenty of theories out
there because Wuhan does have a P4 lab … maybe this was man-made and
there’s a theory that this could have been part of a bioweapons program.
But that’s just a theory,” says @onlyyoontv on the #coronavirus. pic.twitter.com/1svCAHi0jN
... virtually
all of China - and all those critical supply chains that keep companies
across the globe humming and stocked with critical inventory - remain
on lockdown. As confirmation, while we wait for an update from Morgan Stanley on the latest Chinese pollution data (at least until Beijing's definition of
"pollution" is also revised) here is JPMorgan showing that while
traditionally daily coal consumption - the primary commodity used to
keep China electrified - rebounds in the days following the Lunar New
Year collapse when China hibernates for one week, this year there hasn't
been even a modest uptick higher, indicating that so far there hasn't
been even a modest uptick in output. Yet electricity is just one core indicator of real-time economic
activity. Perhaps an even more critical one is human transit across the
1.4 billion person strong nation. Conveniently there is a way to track
rudimentary traffic patterns across some of China's key metro areas, and
they show that - in a confirmation of the worst-case scenario -
activity, as measured by travel, across most of China appears to have
ground to a halt. The charts below show TomTom's traffic congestion data across key
Chinese cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan as compared to the
average measurement for 2019. What they show is that virtually nobody
appears to be driving in China! Here is Beijing's congestion level over
the past 48 hours (a 7 day average is also available) compared to 2019.
The data indicates that travel is about 70% below its 2019 peak. Similarly, Shanghai is about 60% below its peak: Wuhan, of course, is even worse, with barely any congestion - or traffic - registering.
Amazingly, the industrial hub of Guanghzhou also appears to have ground to a crawl: And as mainland China grinds to a literal halt, traffic in Hong Kong is also starting to slide... ... and surprisingly, even such major hubs of commerce as Singapore are starting to see a traffic impact. By comparison, here is what Los Angeles traffic looks like over the past 48 hours vs 2019 average. While not perfect, and certainly not a comprehensive view of what is
really taking place "on the ground", the above data is a useful
real-time indicator of how the people in China perceive the threat of
the coronavirus pandemic, and one thing is abundantly clear: as the
pandemic spreads further without containment, and as the charts above
flatline, so will China's economy, which means that while Goldman's
draconian view of what happens to Q1 GDP is spot on, the expectation for
a V-shaped recovery in Q2 and onward will vaporize faster than a vial
of ultra-biohazardaous viruses in a Wuhan virology lab.
source zerohedge FURTHER INFORMATION
Latest news Focuses on Shanghai 1. Shanghai building another "Fire God" quarantine holding cell used
to burn bodies, but it's called a "hospital". The government is
treating the outbreak as under wartime conditions. You can imagine the
horror of people who go there assuming they will get help. 2. Wuhan is "many" hiring outside workers to collect and burn dead
bodies. recently the military sent 800 army medical staff and the
Guangzhou sent 300 college med students but it's not enough, to wuhan.
Still they hire more. You can get 2000 RMB for each collected but
there are many volunteers forced into it . Wuhan can burn 2000 each day
in the incinerators,. The rest of them are burned on the street. 3. One factory in China was forcibly converted from making face masks
to making body bags. How ironic. The orders were in the millions! 4.tge r0 infection rate is 6.7. impossible to contain it. 1 will infect 6.7 -------------
People
are dropping dead in the street from multiple organ failure, being
incinerated, and locked in hospital prisons because of a bio-warfare
virus accidentally released by a government lab , but "Xi also
reiterated that all levels of local government and Communist Party
committees must strive to achieve China’s social and development goals
this year, indicating that he did not want the public health crisis to
hinder progress." This is extremely brutal, even for a communist dictatorship.
-----------
So you can see SO2 was trending down at 20 µg/m3 up to 2015 for Wuhan.
Also just published this one on nutritional support, based on a paper just out which shows 82.1% of those tested whilst fighting the virus had lymphopenia:
