While I feel sorry for the people that put the energy to make this happen and also for the people that may lose their jobs this month over this, as a native inhabitant of Barcelona, I can only celebrate the news, even if it is for this terrible reason.
When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact). But usually this only fucks over non MWC attending people, because tickets are so expensive that only people which can use a taxi anyway will go, greatly diminishing the impact of the strike for attendants while making inhabitants lives miserable for that time period.
Also, Barcelona already has a very severe problem of houses being rented out to tourists with very high markups, producing a gentrification of the city (along with other factors, not only the tourism is responsible for this). Events like MWC do not help this situation.
BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.
I'm completely aware that this is not the responsibility of MWC organization or tourists, this is a regulation problem. But since regulation is stacked against us, I can only get happier that this year we won't have to suffer all the inconvenience of the event while reaping almost none of the benefit.
Thanks for the local perspective! I get the feeling MWC is a bit of a scapegoat here, tough.
> When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact).
So won't they just choose any other date with the next highest impact for their strike now? Why is that better?
> BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.
100.000 visitors for 4 days, that must be less than 1% of Barcelona's hotel nights/year. It's also happening during off-season, so shouldn't lead to more housing capacity being taken away from the locals.
I get when people complain about the Olympics in their city or other costly events with unclear rewards, but this seems pretty harmless?
You never really know what you've got till it's gone. A hundred thousand visitors eating, drinking, commuting, sightseeing, dwelling, and flying about in your city in a short period of time.....for many cities that would be a welcome occurrence (apart from the traffic woes).
It's about $500m Euros of revenue, and I saw an estimate of something like 15k part-time jobs due to MWC. No small thing.
I'm also in BCN and everyone always says that but I'm not sure I buy it.
I mean, yeah, some guys benefit from having the MWC for sure but I'm not sure most residents do - I'm not letting out flats or running venues etc. I'm trying to get to work on time and pay my rent.
It reminds me of the similar arguments people make about the big cruise ships that come here - I mean sure, it massively benefits tourist attractions and restaurants etc. but most citizens don't see any of that money, they just get lungfuls of air pollution.
Isn't the sales tax in Barcelona 21%? Seems like it would be a big influx to the city's coffers that could theoretically provide it the means to do something like pay subway workers more and alleviate the need to strike in the first place.
If the money's not being spent in the right place, that's a local political issue that can't solved by anyone except the locals (e.g. those who can vote).
Honestly, the MWC doesn't bother me that much - yeah the metro always goes on strike but that's a problem with the metro unions and the Ayuntamiento not the MWC in my opinion.
But take the case of the cruise ships which do irritate me - every citizen gets to suffer worse air quality so a few can enrich themselves on the tourist money.
I understand that in theory that money might 'trickle down' to the citizenry at large, but it is far from obvious that this actually occurs sufficiently to compensate the downsides.
That money doesn't come for free. It's perfectly rational for people who don't directly benefit from a lot of visitors--but are inconvenienced by them--to wish to forgo both the visitors and the money they spend/taxes they bring in.
I suppose white collar workers who don’t rent out on airbnb don’t see any of that revenue. You could make an argument that they benefit indirectly when their local economy gets a boost and you’d probably be right.
But most people will look at the misery of temporary overcrowding, look at their bank account and think “no, I don’t want this” without considering second order effects.
It is very trendy for Barcelona residents (I am one also) to moan about the MWC or ‘gentrification’.
It is less trendy to complain about the relatively low unemployment and well-maintained civic infrastructure; both of which are boosted by a strong international business presence which employs a lot of people and brings a lot of wealth to the city.
Losing that international presence risks turning the city back to the dirty, poor, backwater it was in the 80s. If living with a couple of major international events a year is the alternative, I know which one I’d choose.
I think the cancellation of the MWC is a disaster for the city, not just in terms of short term economic loss, but in terms of longer term strategy, as the MWC is already muttering about following other events to Madrid or elsewhere.
I find it unfair to call it moaning as is if its a childish reaction. Most of my friends can no longer afford to live in the city itself with their non-IT jobs. The gentrification process is a real thing happening right now with very real consequences.
I guess that MWC is not the problem per se. And it is part of the reason of the exploding international presence at least in the IT sector. But it is part of the problem of the worsening in the quality of life for many people.
My argument is that much of the wealth generated by tourism doesn't necessarily benefit citizens of Barcelona. I'm sure a lot of people are getting a lot of benefits, but I'm not sure it is the people that need it the most.
Where does that attitude towards tourism come from?
I know this is politics but other places would welcome tourism and professional conferences with open arms.
When I see a group of tourists cueing in front of something in Copenhagen - sure - I might get annoyed but those people are bringing in money. Not to me personally. But that tourist money gets taxed or spent again. And ultimately it ends up being spent on a nicer park or causes some new cool restaurant to be viable, all benifical to me.
Eventhough we have extreme political parties here; noone is bad-mouthing tourism. Everyone knows we live of trade and we need to be an open and welcoming place; and it is out own problem to make sure our public transport can handle its peak traffic.
Really, I'm all for responsible tourism. Tourism is very good for the local economy when it is done properly.
But it must come with regulation to avoid encouraging foreign companies (or local, doesn't matter) buying all houses/apartments and then renting them mainly to tourists for a much higher price than locals can pay. Since Barcelona hosts a very high volume of tourists, they can afford to do this almost the whole year.
Please understand, I'm not complaining about tourists (although they come with their own problems, like a 24/7 unwelcome festive ambient in residential neighborhoods...), I'm complaining on how Barcelona is not able to absorb that massive amount of tourism and how it makes lives miserable for local residents, that are pushed out of the city because it is far more beneficial to land-owners to rent to tourists, and how restaurants/shops push prices up too, and how the center of the city is no longer targeted towards locals. And much of the city center's businesses are no longer locally-owned and bring outside supply chains and may employ non local people, so it is not even that beneficial to the community as a whole.
Yes, jobs are created, but tourism-related jobs are not famous for their ability for employees to be able to live in the city itself.
I know this is a local politics problems, one of electing people that will do the right thing, but it's not that easy unfortunately, since voting in spain is very polarized on ideological and tribal feelings. And meanwhile, locals will just suffer the negative aspect of all this while benefiting little.
From what I've read about Barcelona, it's more like living in a Disneyland, every day you're just swimming in crowds of tourists, from all over the world, bringing their idiosyncrasies. All (or a lot) of the shops are shops selling touristic trinkets. Want to eat at that nice restaurant? It's crowded, with loud Americans and Brits. 7 nights a week...
Part of it is that some of the people experiencing the downsides of tourism aren't getting adequate benefits from it. Or perhaps don't see how they're benefiting even though they do.
But here is some interesting real-time traffic congestion data plotted with 2019 averages for cities. Gives a sense of how many people are going back to work.
Scroll down and click "Last 7 days"
Notice SF & London are trending with 2019 averages:
Interest rates are negative. This causes people to chase and a big factor in this bubble. Companies are borrowing billions for free to do stock buybacks and keep the price going straight up. Nothing lasts forever. When is the big question.
What does happen, however, is that many modern buyback deals include a bid that gets more aggressive as the stock trades down. So in a selloff, the buyback actually supports the stock more than in a rally. This reduces downside volatility and prevents panic.
The debt problem is a huge issue, but with interest rates as low as they are, it's not entirely crazy to say "we think we will return more in capital gains from buying our own stock than we will be charged in interest for the loan to do so."
Are people trying to get in and out before the crash to make a quick buck, or are they long and hope to buy at a position cheaper than hypothetical post-recovery prices?
I think it's both. This rally has made people think that the market will outperform in the long run, but even those who believe we're in a bubble have some confidence that we haven't gone entirely euphoric yet.
I personally believe we have gotten to the brink of chaos. Foxconn has major issues getting employees back to work, and Apple has shut down stores in China, but AAPL stock is up. AMD is taking market share from Intel, but INTC rallied almost 10% on earnings. Iran launched missiles at a couple of bases housing Americans, and the market rallied the next day. Boeing stock is trading more than double where it was when the 737 Max 8 took its maiden flight. Everyone mentions in passing that equity values are inflated but nobody seems to give a damn.
Maybe people have gotten burned so many times fading the rally during the past three years that they've just given up on trying to call the top.
My money says it's all going to come crashing down eventually. Markets can remain irrational longer than impatient traders can remain solvent, but they have a way of normalizing sooner or later.
I agree completely. The Fed also can't keep QE programs forever. I think if the Democrats win in the fall, it could be a major trigger. There is no reason to think they won't intend to roll back the tax cuts and push for anti-trust against most FAANG seems likely too. Given how FAANG dominates the S&P, it could spiral quickly. The only question is when and how bad will it be. I think we need a real down cycle because just turning down the burner temporarily means the pop will be even worse.
There's been a grand fiscal policy experiment over the last 12 years unlike anytime before. It has resulted in every asset class losing price discovery mechanisms and basically becoming untethered from fundamentals.
Nobody knows how this will end, or when. Could be months, could be decades.
I agree with your comment about the fiscal policy experiment, but not with your stated timeline of 12 years. QE was a smart way out of the crisis, but we didn't tighten as we ought've when the economy got up to speed about five years ago. I think of QE as the choke on a carbureted engine; once you get things heated up, you should lean out the mixture. Meanwhile, Bernanke is still out here talking about QE as a forever tool for the Fed.
Fundamentals try to explain and predict valuations; they don't dictate them. Only supply and demand, within the constraints of the market, can control valuations. And to be pedantic, price discovery is faster and tighter today than ever before, and that's part of the reason we have so many lively derivatives markets.
The problem, as you aptly point out, is that this price does not fit any model that is blind to the rates component of equity demand. The word "untethered" is totally appropriate for what's happening in the market; there's a disconnect between price action and corporate earnings growth because there's demand for equities in general when everything else yields almost nothing.
Given the short to long term treasury bond yield inversion in 2019, I'm preparing for a recession in 2021 by keeping 10% cash and clearing off all debt.
I also implemented a higher risk strategy when I rebalanced my portfolio at beginning of year: hedging a few healthcare stocks with predictions of around 6% returns, but could see a higher payoff if covid-19 hysteria sets in.
Skeptical of crypto performance during a recession, so rebalanced to 3%
Stock prices are (generally speaking) about the sentiment of the long term performance of a company. The coronavirus has caused a lot of setbacks but it's only a short term problem. As long as a company can survive this short term loss of productivity there is no need for the stock valuation to be lowered.
> The coronavirus has caused a lot of setbacks but it's only a short term problem
We hope it's only a short term problem. It's far to early to say if this outbreak will be contained somehow, if it will continue into the summer, or if it will go away for the summer and come back in the winter again like the flu.
15-20% of people who get this illness require hospitalisation. In the worst case scenario where it infects a billion people... you can do the maths. There is a huge potential for disruption to production and supply chains, especially in developing countries with developing healthcare systems.
If this situation gets out of control, it could trigger a global recession. Nobody is buying much from Wuhan for the foreseeable future. Imagine what would happen if it spreads across Asia.
Containment seems to be working pretty well, if you compare the dynamics of it in China (and on the quarantined cruise ship) to the dynamics of it everywhere else.
We have no way of evaluating the truth of this claim. China has not been straightforward in its count of infections and fatalities [0]. The government has banned funerals for victims and ordered the cremation of their remains [1].
This is unlikely. What is more likely is that all of Chinas poor neighboring countries are simply not reporting cases.
North Korea, Mongolia, Nepal, Northern Thailand, North Vietnam, North India, Eastern Russia, will keep this infection going until the next major outbreak next winter.
Only a minority of countries are doing that. It might work now because most cases are in China. If self-sustaining outbreaks run out of control in Thailand and Singapore, will travellers from there be blocked too? It quickly becomes a game of cat and mouse.
It would affect prices first. The real question mark is if it gets bad enough to where people default on their debt payments (there's over $13 trillion out there today) because the price of basic goods gets too high.
There's a theory out there that traders think the Sanders win(s) mean that Trump will end up winning in the fall, and that that will keep business conditions friendly.
That has a certain ring of plausibility, though I'm skeptical of all explanations of market behavior.
The Fed has been buying treasuries and doing repo market purchases recently, expanding their balance sheet and dumping billions into the financial economy. Those funds have to move somewhere.
1Y Treasuries are yielding around 1.5% right now, while the S&P has rallied 22% in the past year. If you were to park your money somewhere, you would at least consider equities.
The Fed ought to be smoothly unloading some of its balance sheet or otherwise increasing rates, but Mr. Trump doesn't seem too happy about that prospect. Most of the Americans who support him seem to think the Dow Jones is a report card for the economy. Mr. Trump has publicly badgered Powell regarding rate hikes in the recent past.
It definitely feels like people believe the market is going to get even more euphoric, in which case one is tempted to be long in order to ride the bubble all the way up.
What I heard, insurance coverage played the big role. Seems like, in US, insurance companies are able to find exclusions for this scenario on foreign land. This is the text shared by one:
"..Your travel & health insurance could contain exclusions to pandemics since the regional insurance industries can't measure the amount of risk. The insurer might defer to apply broader exclusions...."
So far they say they're "not being considered", which is quite worrying if that means they're not even planning ahead to it as a possible outcome. I sure hope they make the right decision if it becomes necessary, instead of forcing through due to being too preoccupied with national/personal pride.
They were rescheduled (and relocated to Helsinki) first, so the Olympics have been rescheduled before. (On re-reading about it I now realise they were pre-poned, not post-poned, though!) And yes, they were subsequently canceled.
Tons of things have been canceled in APAC generally. MWC was arguably at least somewhat unique among shows in the Americas and Europe because of the combination of its size, the large Chinese presence, and timing. So far other events I'm aware of over the next couple of months are still on though, of course, that could change.
One problem with MWC is that tons of exhibitors & speakers would be traveling there from Asia, including from China. Google and Apple's events can still go ahead with fewer visitors (or a different set of visitors), but MWC would have to adjust quite a lot about the event itself if companies from Asia don't send their people.
Those are quite a ways out and aren't super-large events. If those were to end up being impacted, it means a lot of travel/events/activities are being impacted.
F1 Chinese GP was announced as being canceled/rescheduled today. Interesting that they're canceling events that are scheduled that far out, it wasnt supposed to happen until April 19th.
Several major participants had already backed out or substantially lightened their presence, and a single transmission of the novel coronavirus at MWC would be a disaster for Barcelona as well as GSMA. Not something easily forgotten.
It doesn't make sense from a medical point of view.
China, and specifically Hubei Province and its capital Wuhan, suffer an epidemic that they are trying to control with titanic efforts. 99% of cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, today more than 40,000 with a thousand deaths, have been registered in China. Of them, almost 70% in Hubei. Only 1% of cases have been registered outside China, in 24 countries (including Spain), with transmission chains (secondary cases from a first imported case) very short so far.
To put things in perspective, although perhaps inaccurate, the number of cases of COVID-19 infection in China is less than 3 cases / 100,000 inhabitants.
The flu, in Catalonia, this week has reached figures of 360 cases / 100,000 inhabitants: more than 120 times higher than the incidence of COVID-19 infection in China.[1]
Our Health Alerts and Emergencies system works, works as a team and the protocols established in the EU apply: detect the case, isolate it, treat it and follow all possible contacts. In this way, the transmission chain can likely be properly controlled.
There are many things we do not know for sure about this disease, but most cases (80%) are mild. Serious cases and mortality (2%) will be adjusted downwards safely in the coming weeks, as the detection of mild cases increases. There is WHO data that indicate that control measures are slowing the epidemic in Hubei and better controlling the situation in the rest of China.
From what I understand, the medical community is treating this outbreak with such extreme measures because this virus is a perfect storm of factors that could lead to a new annual disease emerging, just like the flu and cold. It's deadly enough to become a major global concern and transmissible enough that it can continue spreading via asymptomatic hosts and other viral reservoirs between outbreaks. The jury is still out on the virus's rate of mutation but other coronaviruses, like the ones that cause a tenth of common colds, are known to mutate rapidly.
If we fail to stop the spread of the virus now, it may become a fact of life with an even higher annual death rate than the flu. We've already got plenty of infectious diseases and based on the data so far, it's worth extreme measures trying to stop it.
> The flu, in Catalonia, this week has reached figures of 360 cases / 100,000 inhabitants: more than 120 times higher than the incidence of COVID-19 infection in China.[1]
We need to stop comparing this to the flu. The flu is an established widespread virus with a very low mortality rate. This is a new, so far still spreading, virus with what appears to be a high mortality rate.
If you had to choose between being infected with the flu or COVID19 you’d chose the flu because you’re about 20 times more likely to die from COVID19 based on the data available at the moment.
If COVID19 has spread globally and becomes established then it will be similar in terms of deaths to the Spanish Flu. Nobody wants that and it is perfectly reasonable for people to be concerned about wanting to prevent that from happening.
If this does spread into a pandemic then you will be able to rightly come back in 24 months and compare the annual total deaths from COVID19 to the seasonal flu. Until then it’s an entirely incorrect comparison.
> Everything points to this thing having a mortality similar to the seasonal flu.
Can you justify this? I want to be convinced, because at the moment I think it's very optimistic. (There are different estimates for seasonal flu mortality, but it seems to be around 0.1%, so I'm assuming that's roughly the number you mean.)
The mortality measured in China is about 2%. Outside of China, I read it was rather 0.15%. And what I read is the 2% is based on the number of people who show up at the hospital with symptoms and get diagnosed. The doctors think there is a large but unknown population out there, with milder symptoms, who don't show up. Understandly. If you have what looks like a cold, you don't really want to go to the place where everyone is contaminated with the coronavirus.
So it looks like 2% is kind of the upper bound but that the actual rate will be lower.
This is wrong. The only way to get 0.15 is by dividing dead over total cases - which is not the correct math since most people infected are still ongoing.
You have to divide dead over dead+recovered, and outside of China those numbers are still too small to get a reliable number.
In China it is 2% outside Wuhan, but inside Wuhan it is over 4% since the medical system has broken down.
The problem is that the mortality rate might seem lower than it actually is as it takes time for people to die after the infection is identified. Comparing the number of peopl infected upto today and number of deaths upto today is not a correct comparison. A two week delay in the stats should give you a better idea of the mortality rate.
One more pandemic like the flu to contend with is also not a good idea.
It makes sense total sense to compare, it's another respiratory virus, from a family of viruses already known. We must not reinvent the wheel when we know the dynamics of these viruses and the countermeasures to take.
The key metric that determines whether COVID-19 can establish and generate a sustained outbreak is it's ability to reproduce, "R", which represents the average number of individuals to which each transmitter transmits the virus.
- If "R" is greater than 1, the transmission may become sustained;
- If “R” is less than 1, then the transmission will simply dissipate.
In the current outbreak, it represents an R of 2.2 [1], meaning that on average each patient has been spreading infection to 2.2 other people.
Only a little bit more than half of the infections should be avoided so that R falls below 1. Preventive isolation and the measures established by the protocols should be sufficient.
Besides, there is little evidence to suggest the presymptomatic transmission of COVID-19
This is outdated information. Most newer studies put R0 >3 (e.g. [1]) and there are many well documentated cases outside of China now which confirm at least partial presymptomatic transmission (German cluster, Signapore Conference, British prisoners).
> Only 1% of cases have been registered outside China, in 24 countries (including Spain), with transmission chains (secondary cases from a first imported case) very short so far.
It seems completely unsurprising to me that we aren't seeing more cases in other countries so far - almost every country with the exception of Singapore are only testing people who have been in Hubei (or China, if symptoms are serious). Meanwhile Singapore, which actually has been testing more people, has been finding more and more locally transmitted cases, despite huge efforts tracking down and isolating contacts of previous cases.
>Serious cases and mortality (2%) will be adjusted downwards safely in the coming weeks, as the detection of mild cases increases.
Or it could adjust upward, as it seems to often take 3+ weeks to kill. In Singapore 8/50 cases are in critical condition in the ICU (And Singapore has detected many mild cases, even asymptomatic ones). For the flu in the U.S. it seems about 0.1% of cases end up in the ICU, so that's some compelling evidence that this is 10-100x as dangerous as the flu. And what happens to the fatality rate when we run out of ICU beds, as already happens during particularly bad flu seasons?
I'm not saying this will be globally devastating, but I think the chance is high enough that I'm disappointed more extreme actions aren't being taken worldwide.
edit: I also assume the case numbers in China outside of Hubei have been looking better recently because they also can no longer rely on the fact that a sick person has recently been to Hubei to know who to test.
I think people are worried about the unknown unknowns. IIUC, it's infectious for a considerable period of time (one or two weeks) before the infected person becomes systematic. Plus, it's possible that some infectious persons never develop symptoms. Also, the case count is still in exponential growth mode. Plus, information coming out of China might be incomplete.
No idea whether the conference should be cancelled, but it's not an irrational idea. There could be a large number of silent cases outside of China already.
The MWC was going to be attended by 100,000 people, 75% of them from Europe and the US, 10% from Asia-Pacific (excluding China) and 9% from the rest of the world. Only 6% of visitors were going to be from China, and less were expected much less due to the COVD-19.
Can any of them come infected by the COVD-19?
The probability is very low. Almost all of the participants will come from areas where the presence of the COVD-19 is nil or extremely low.
By comparison, a number of passengers equivalent to three times the MWC go through the airports of Atlanta or Los Angeles, two times pass through the airports of London, Paris or Amsterdam each day, and 1.5 times through Madrid and Barcelona each day. And none of them closed so far.
The basic hygiene measures (handwashing, not sneezing or coughing to the open) and common sense are more solid and effective.
If we follow the same line of thinking (we shouldn't), we would have to close all the airports tomorrow.
A significant caveat is that the sink/restroom must allow proper handwashing. Many lack paper towels, for example. If you have to touch the faucet handle or the door after you start washing (which takes two minutes), the method has not been followed. It's harder than it looks.
We have a good understanding of what's happening outside mainland China[1], and China seems (surprisingly) transparent so far. But it is indeed difficult to trust that they have reported 100% of the cases.
I think once the first high profile cancellations (LG, Ericsson) came in it was just a matter of time. We were prepared to go still but one by one everyone we were supposed to meet started canceling. The domino effect of the first cancellations doomed the event.
A lot of money is wasted. Presumably sales at a lot of companies take some incremental hit. Some startup that planned this as their launch event is screwed. A lot of people in Barcelona don't make money they were expecting to make. (Other Barcelona residents breathe a sigh of relief.) So, yes, there's harm even if the decision was probably the rational one.
I work at a startup where we invested quite a bit of time and money for this show. It is a big hit for the smaller companies since it eats away a large chunk of your marketing budget.
You’re right, except cases are not in exponential growth for a period of time already if you’ve been following closely. Right now it’s more or less linear
EDIT: Hubei Province added 14,840 new cases today, my earlier analysis isn't right anymore. I've left it below.
Infected case growth has slowed down primarily because of the quarantine of Hubei province. The virus has up to a two week incubation period, and today two weeks later we're able to result of this quarantine. Case growth in Hubei has slowed down.
The issue now is that every major city in China has local infection clusters, and these infection clusters are growing exponentially.
Even if the net case growth rate is decreasing, the situation is less under control than ever before. Look at China's actions; they're past containment methods and now acting on mitigation.
Just keep in mind that it's been admitted that China is strapped for testing kits and turning people away without testing them. So it's possible that it only turned linear because the number of testing kits available per day is linear.
Not sure of attenuation since according to the Wikipedia page they are now excluding asymptomatic infections from the statistics, which lowers the number of confirmed.
The Wikipedia page says:
"On 6 February, the Chinese National Health Commission started to change how cases were reported – asymptomatic carriers, who tested positive for the virus but did not show clinical symptoms, would no longer be included in the number of confirmed cases. This had the effect of reducing the total number of cases reported, but also meant that potentially contagious individuals were ignored in reports."
Keep in mind, the right model is a large number of overlapping S-curves. The virus may spread like wildfire once it's entered a city, but it first has to do so.
Wuhan is nearing the top of its S-curve, while other cities are still near the start. As such it would make sense for the number of cases to slow down even if it isn't actually being stopped.
I think this is less about MWC or Barcelona having health fears and more the domino effect of big exhibitors pulling out. It seems a lot of those pulled out because their Chinese companies, and presumably impacted by travel restrictions meaning they couldn’t get key people prepared in advance and then out to the event.
Once the big exhibitors pull out you then see attendees doing likewise as meetings they were travelling for get cancelled, and finally smaller exhibitors deciding it’s not worth the effort.
I read your post, looked at your profile, and now I'm suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance.
> To put things in perspective, although perhaps inaccurate, the number of cases of COVID-19 infection in China is less than 3 cases / 100,000 inhabitants.
What kind of perspective are we getting by adding the entirety of China to a locked down Wuhan when considering the infection rate? And then to go on to compare that to flu rates in Catalonia. Really, what point is that supposed to make?
> Our Health Alerts and Emergencies system works, works as a team and the protocols established in the EU apply: detect the case, isolate it, treat it and follow all possible contacts. In this way, the transmission chain can likely be properly controlled.
How can this possibly work if carriers are infectious for lord knows how many days before symptoms appear? It's laughable. How does this crack team of contact follow uppers deal with the case of a single infected metropolitan commuter?
MWC got caught in a tough spot. Lots of companies were pulling out. Companies don't like sending employees to events when, rationally or not, a lot of families are going to be uncomfortable about a family member traveling to a big show with a large number of Chinese attendees. And, of course, a lot of employees also believe, rightly or wrongly, that they can't just say "nope" without consequence.
Many years ago, I remember my company canceling some sales event because of, I think, Gulf War I because they didn't want to tell European employees in particular to travel to the US often on American carriers.
Liability insurance and details like that would of played a bigger part. After all, panic spreads far quicker with better logistics and vectors than any virus ever will.
MWC is a 100,000 person French ski chalet... it makes total sense to cancel it. “Show flu” is a thing... so if just the booth workers come back through customs with even so much as an elevated temperature, it will unnecessarily crowd the quarantine facilities for weeks. You may have math on your side but you’re not winning this one.
Not a practical strategy for thousands of conference attendees packed closely together for a short period of time before flying back home. This virus is too infectious and has too long of an incubation period. That's why so many public events are being canceled. This exact scenario is playing out right now aboard the cruise ship docked in Japan.
For flu, each sick person infects 1 person. So Ro is 1. This means no quarantine needed. But for covid-19 estimated Ro is around 2.5. So containing this virus requires quarantine.
Also this is a novel virus which means this strain is new and may be unpredictable. Mutations may occur.
We even not sure about source of the virus. If it spreads all over the world it could logarithmicly grow in number. Especially for undeveloped counties with weak healthcare infrastructure pose a real threat.
>The novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a recently emerged human pathogen that has spread widely since January 2020. Initially, the basic reproductive number, R0, was estimated to be 2.2 to 2.7. Here we provide a new estimate of this quantity. We collected extensive individual case reports and estimated key epidemiology parameters, including the incubation period. Integrating these estimates and high-resolution real-time human travel and infection data with mathematical models, we estimated that the number of infected individuals during early epidemic double every 2.4 days, and the R0 value is likely to be between 4.7 and 6.6. We further show that quarantine and contact tracing of symptomatic individuals alone may not be effective and early, strong control measures are needed to stop transmission of the virus.
I'm not a doctor or a public health expert, but it seems to be that unqualified uncertainty should not be used as justification for any action other than pursuing more information to qualify that uncertainty. Otherwise we would maximally quarantine any illness for which we are at all uncertain of an upper bound on its basic reproduction number or mortality.
There are degrees of uncertainty, and ranges of plausible severity, even when we haven't actually nailed these down quantitatively. We already have enough information about COVID-19 to raise it far above the threat level of a random virus. And given how quickly and stealthily it seems to be capable of spreading, to take no action beyond 'pursuing more information' would be almost the same as assuming the best possible resolution of our uncertainty. That's no more rational than the other extreme of assuming the very worst.
I was replying specifically to when you said "Also this is a novel virus which means this strain is new and may be unpredictable. Mutations may occur." I interpreted that as meaning that because of our lack of knowledge about this strain and the fact that it may mutate, some unspecified amount of additional concern is warranted.
It does not logically follow from the low infection rates outside of China that these extreme measures are not warranted, quite possibly it's the opposite: low infections follow from strong containment measures.
As for comparisons to the Flu, I see this so often and it always misses the point: it's not one or the other, so why would the medical establishment not fight in the extreme to stop many thousands of deaths that would result if another flu-like disease came along? Second, there is an entire industrial complex complete with seasonal ramp up in staffing to deal with Flu season, and we still see non-negligible fatality rates. Without that support network, which again we don't have for COVID-19, how much worse would things be with the flu? So we should all stop using the flu as some type of benchmark for what a reasonable COVID-19 response looks like.
The scenes from Wuhan are pretty grim - people turned away from hospitals, crematoria running 24/7. I think it's understandable that other countries don't want to repeat that hence caution may be advisable. You don't see anything like that with normal flu.
This point I'm not sure about, because it seems bizarre that everyone would make such an obvious mistake, but: as far as I can tell, the death rate is simply calculated as [current total of recorded deaths] / [current total of recorded cases]. But when the fatal cases take quite a long time to kill (from what I've read, it tends to take a week or so from the onset of symptoms for them to become severe, and up to another two weeks for death to occur -- see https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/reporters-notebo...) and the total number of cases is rising dramatically, surely that skews the figure toward a significant underestimate?
For example, using the simple methodology, SARS' death rate was only about 3%, and that was the number most media used during the outbreak. But years after the epidemic ended, once researchers had greater access to medical records, the death was determined to be 10-15%, or roughly 3-5x higher than originally reported.
In the cases of NCV, there is already significant evidence of under reporting of fatalities by Chinese authorities in Wuhan (some sources suggest that up to 90% of NCV deaths in China may be unreported).
And as the cruise ship stuck outside of Japan demonstrates, the virus may be far more virulent (i.e., contagious) than previously thought.
China just changed how it classifies NCV cases to reduce the number of cases by eliminating those who are infected but not symptomatic meaning the numbers are even less reliable than they were before.
The problem with this is that a number of the superspreaders, like the British fellow that infected 11 other people, and the passenger that infected the cruise ship quarantined in Japan, were not symptomatic when they were infecting others.
It does, but that's a known factor which all medical professionals are aware of. The true number is unknowable until the epidemic is over, so they give the best number we've got in full knowledge that the numerical value will be wrong.
This seems dangerous, if it leads to unwarranted complacency among those who take the number seriously. Do you know the rationale behind reporting a number known to be skewed in this way -- is the idea that it is roughly canceled out by other factors (e.g. the number of undiagnosed mild cases) that push toward an overestimate?
That is a factor, but bluntly put, the ones who are reporting this single number aren't medical professionals.
Those might still use it in conversation amongst each other, sure, but any actual analysis will be based on far more data than a single number. Fundamentally this is the press trying to boil things down to a double soundbite. As usual.
The case fatality ratio is literally defined as deaths over cases, and that's not useless, but it isn't something you should spend much time thinking about either. Reality is always more complex than any single number. Probably you want to know something like "What are the odds of dying if I'm infected" -- that's a different parameter entirely.
I'm not so much worried about how the experts interpret this number behind closed doors, but how everyone else reacts to it. This thread began with someone confidently saying that the 2% death rate will decline as we get better data, and using that to argue against the cancellation of the MWC. I've also seen about a million thinkpieces and social media posts telling us that we're crazy to worry about this virus because the flu is so much worse -- and while they're mostly focusing on the fact that the current number of cases is small compared to seasonal flu, they might not be so dismissive if they knew that 2% could be a significant underestimate of the mortality rate. And I suspect that many (most?) countries' quarantine and related policies are affected by public opinion, rather than being a pure function of expert advice.
2% is almost certainly an underestimate, in this case. I read an article the other day which did statistical analysis on various groups of cases; it came up with a CFR of 18% for Wuhan (95%, 11% to 80-something), and while the expectation for cases in Singapore is still a little over 2%, that's because the medical system in Singapore isn't overwhelmed.
Reporting that would be an equally bad idea, though. The case fatality ratio only counts infections that are severe enough for the patient to go to hospital and become a case, and we know a large fraction of infections don't. Probably over 90%. Which would push that back down to 2%.
Not that a death rate of 2% of all infected is anything short of apocalyptic, but that's why they're trying so hard to quarantine it.
There’s just the little problem of trustworthiness of Chinese numbers. On one hand you have this reassuring data that dynamic of the virus is slowing down, on the other there are serious people with good credentials going on record saying this might get a lot worse before it gets better. 2% CFR on 60% of world’s population is not a negligible number.
99% of cases of coronavirus (COVID-19) infection, today more than 40,000 with a thousand deaths, have been registered in China.
Another perspective is that there were only 41 reported cases in China six weeks ago, and now there are 60,000. So while there are only 500 cases outside China so far, we might want to wait six more weeks before declaring victory.
The newspapers of the time also dubbed the Spanish flu: just a familiar grip we've seen time and time again.
China desperately wants to save face, at the cost of lives. They rejected help from the U.S. CDC as to not appear weak. They already thought they had it under control, before locking down over 50 million people and damaging their economy.
People at risk for the flu can get a flu shot. This disease kills the healthy and average aged. And we all have family members at increased risk.
Even a 2% mortality rate is absolutely horrific. Would you play Russian roulette with those chances? If 60% percent of the world gets infected we are talking many many millions of dead.
How are you going to track contacts, when someone working in a brothel gets it, or someone preparing food in a McDonald's? What if someone takes the virus back to India or Africa?
With 20% needing intensive care, even modern European countries will suffer badly. There simply are not enough beds available, even in the bigger cities.
Mortality is a red herring when you do not count the people still hospitalized after months! Look at the tiny amount of recovered people.
Despite their titanic and gruesome methods to contain it, China has failed. Imagine such an effort in Europe, where people gladly will walk away from quarantine and can not be cowered into compliance or snitching on their coughing neighbors.
We simply do not know enough about morbesity and mortality to say we overreact. Better safe than sorry when uncertainty abound.
China only had 144 flu-caused deaths in an entire year (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1177725.shtml), meaning the Wuhan virus has already killed 7.8 times as many people as the flu kills in an entire year throughout China.
Hilarious, your source is an article that's criticizing China's statistical methods on flu deaths reporting.
From your own source:
"The statistical methods used by the Chinese CDC should be revised, as deaths from pneumonia caused by the flu, for example, are not counted, the observer said."
If you ignore death by pneumonia, the deaths for coronavirus are very low too.
"An analysis led by Chinese scientists published in The Lancet Public Health in September 2019 found that there were 84,200 to 92,000 flu-related deaths in China each year, accounting for 8.2 percent of all deaths from respiratory diseases."
> Hilarious, your source is an article that's criticizing China's statistical methods on flu deaths reporting.
That's literally the point. If the U.S. has 330M people and 30k flu deaths per year, then all else being equal one would expect that what China reports as 144 deaths is really 120,000. Which means that if Corona virus has already killed 7.8 times as many people who have died of the flu (per China's reporting), one would expect that it's really killed 936,000.
Obviously that's very simplistic, but that's basically why people are worried -- no one knows what the real numbers out of China are, so that kind of back-of-the-napkin math is about the best we can do right now.
From what some people tell me, there's also a political reason as there's a lot happening there.
The same companies that rejected to go to Barcelona are attenting ISE in Amsterdam. That makes me thing they junt needed a reason to pull out of Barcelona.
MWC is a lot higher profile. And, once Ericsson pulled out, a number of other companies felt that they wanted to be seen (both internally and externally) as doing the "responsible" thing. And that really opened to floodgates to the point where holding the show without a bunch of major companies and pared-back attendance just didn't make sense.
The death rate has been climbing, today it's 2.5%. Which is a sign that either the reported cases is much lower than the official count or the virus is getting deadlier. From the data we have from other countries it looks like the death rate is stable/low which points to a huge amount of unreported cases.
What is the death rate for the 360 person flu group?
How much can we trust the numbers coming out of China who have retaliated heavily against whistle blowers including one of the original doctors to highlight this crisis, who is now dead?
A copycat suicide is defined as an emulation of another suicide that the person attempting suicide knows about either from local knowledge or due to accounts or depictions of the original suicide on television and in other media.
A spike of emulation suicides after a widely publicized suicide is known as the Werther effect.
This seems like equivocation on the meaning of "catching it." Isolating yourself so that you either have no close relationships or somehow never hear about any suicides among your close relationships is a fairly nonsensical proposal, and probably wouldn't in fact decrease your chances of committing suicide.
You're attacking a strawman here. I never proposed any of that and of course no one is suggesting that you use the exact same airborne infectious disease quarantine procedures for suicide too.
The realization that suicide has contagious properties does have practical ethical ramifications for journalism. It's not some impractical theoretical matter that can't be acted on.
I went to a talk on this very matter. Kurt Cobain's suicide is an interesting case study on how journalism affects the development (or attenuation) of suicide clusters.
The notion of communicability is a broad one, and there are numerous concepts of "epidemic" which extend beyond the notion of purely biologically infectious (bacterial, viral, parasitic) diseases, including "epidemic of obesity", "epidemic of violence", etc.
It was an article regarding the latter which made the general case (and I'll see if I can't turn it up). Effectively: if you have a phenomenon which includes transmission from carrier to susceptible populations, then you're dealing with a case of epidemic.
This generalises in some interesting (and quite probably controversial) ways. Richard Dawkins's notion of the meme -- a unit of transmissible cultural information -- falls squarely within the model, and suggests a further generalisation:
Epidemics exist where there is an infectious agent (biological, material, energetic, informational) originating from some source or reservoir which causes a negative functional or behavioural change in a susceptible population spreading along vectors of transmission. They further have characteristics of exposure-response, latency, transmissivity (e.g., source => individual, sometimes individual => individual), susceptibility or resistance, symptomatic / asymptomatic periods, morbidity and mortality rates, etc.
This means we can look at agents including the familiar bacteria, aemoebae, parasites, and viruses, but also more exotic notions: prions, chemical, physical, and radiological triggers (say, heavy metals, asbestos / PM2.5 matter, radon or plutonium), and cultural or informational ones: cults, religions, mythologies, ideologies, psychological disorders, stress, and the like.
What the model offers are notions of potential containment. I've done some research to see if there's an underlying theory or model of public health or epidemiology (and would expect it to closely correspond to the above). What I've found looking through introductory texts is that there largely is not, but instead the focus is on teaching statistical monitoring methods used within the field. I'm not sure if I'm looking in the wrong places, or if there simply is no such generalised model.
But again: if you can identify specific agents (biological, material, informational, energetic), sources, vectors, susceptibility factors, and the like, then it's possible to apply fairly standard epidemiological notions to prevention.
Note that the direct medical intervention of cure is not on that list -- it's an expensive and uncertain intervention, and one that comes with very high costs. Far better to practice avoidance, increase resistance, and reduce transmission, as well as monitor aggressively for outbreaks. All of which are what we're seeing in the case of 2019-nCoV.
In the case of mental health, the study of suicide itself is foundational to sociology (Emil Durkheim's book of the same title, Suicide: https://archive.org/details/DurkheimEmileSuicideAStudyInSoci...), for numerous reasons. It turns out that rates are very consistent across time, with a few notable exceptions. There's considerable variance across place, whether triggered by culture or natural environment isn't clear. As David Simon, author of The Wire notes, dead bodies are hard to hide (see his excellent "The Audacity of Despair", ignore the recording and speaking quality issues: https://www.invidio.us/watch?v=nRt46W3k-qw). And suicide itself is an extreme act. So by looking at trends with time, you're finding a exceptionally strong signal of underlying social dysfunctions.
Looking at the epidemiological model, isolating yourself might reduce some dynamics of infection (vectors of transmission), but would quite likely increase others (susceptibility through social isolation). The model's underlying premise is that you simply cannot assess these factors in isolation, which would point out the flaw in your reasoning.
These sorts of comparisons are, I would respectfully argue, not very helpful because the various causes of mortality are additive, not competing to kill the same victims (generally).
We don't need a perpetual cycle of coronavirus in addition to the perpetual cycle of the flu that we already have, in addition to suicide and every other cause of death. The world's health organizations are trying desperately to curtail it before it becomes a norm.
Which is why saying "Oh, why cancel this it's no biggie" is just so misled.
If the world was in a situation where we could seriously contain and eliminate the flu, we would surely take every possible measure to do so.
This is a contagion. Read about the Spanish Flu. This looks to be both more contagious, and more deadly in most of the published studies. We hope they are biased and overly pessimistic, but whataboutism isn't helpful here.
Your argument is like if the rug in your living room is on fire, and you say "why worry about that rug--we should really invest in fixing that roof leak." I agree roof leaks are also bad.
Here are the CDC burden (upper bound) estimates for the 2019-2020 flu season: 30 million infections, 30k deaths. In other words, 0.1% of infections are predicted to be fatal, which is substantially lower than the current estimates for 2019-nCoV.
Exactly this. The expected annual deaths from suicide are normally distributed whereas a highly contagious disease is long-tailed, i.e. a non-negligible probability of a huge number of fatalities.
Terrorism kills 2 people per year in the U.S. and we spend 100s of billions. The difference is large companies make more money building weapons than large companies make treating the flue (or mental health).
Edit: The point is, it's all about money. There's no rational reason to spend so much on terrorism and so little on mental health, yet we do.
I disagree, as I posted elsewhere in this thread these annual death rates are drawn from different distributions. The annual suicide rate is normally distributed, in other words the expected number of deaths will be around the same number each year. Terrorism and pandemics are long-tailed meaning a non-negligible probability that the rate shoots up to something much higher than your quoted two per year.
Not going to claim that that money is all well-spent, but terrorism (and security in general) is a rather different problem. A single failure can cost thousands of lives, and huge knock-on effects, as we've sadly seen.
IMHO the coronavirus was used as an excuse to kill a fair that was already producing negative ROI.
Due to the size and fame of the fair, most big companies were forced to participate to "look better" than their competitors, even if they didn't have any great novelty to show there: it was a marketing arms race where each company had to invest more than the previous year.
As a citizen of Barcelona, I welcome this unspected event. A quiet end of winter wihtout thousands of crazy tourists collapsing all the services. I hope MWC celebrates in another city.
Huawei is the reason why this was cancelled.
Huawei has MWC as the big show up/party/global event of the year.
Any excuse is good. Huawei spend Millions in this event, more than anybody else
Recap of screwing Huawei history: Daughter of President jailed for business with Iran, baning their products ( network infrastructure, google apps in devices...), MWC cancelation....
When MWC is ocurring in Barcelona, public transport (subway) goes on strike (because of the maximum impact). But usually this only fucks over non MWC attending people, because tickets are so expensive that only people which can use a taxi anyway will go, greatly diminishing the impact of the strike for attendants while making inhabitants lives miserable for that time period.
Also, Barcelona already has a very severe problem of houses being rented out to tourists with very high markups, producing a gentrification of the city (along with other factors, not only the tourism is responsible for this). Events like MWC do not help this situation.
BCN is already overloaded with tourism, events like MWC only make it worse for those of us that live there.
I'm completely aware that this is not the responsibility of MWC organization or tourists, this is a regulation problem. But since regulation is stacked against us, I can only get happier that this year we won't have to suffer all the inconvenience of the event while reaping almost none of the benefit.