It's tough to get even bounded estimates on the scope of our current situation, but a useful question to guide that project is:
When Will This End?Most governments, around the world, are lying about everything. Nothing new. There are zero incentives to be transparent, which is why it's remarkably fortunate that Italy has been sounding the alarm for Europe. It's not like the EU has been in any rush to provide aid, and China has famously stepped in to sell them supplies (much of which they got from France, which is poetry.)
Until there are discussions for some kind of "global Marshall Plan" to cut aid checks and provide liquidity for affected nations, nobody is going to come clean. Once that happens, though, expect to see a lot of "recently discovered outbreaks" and "sudden upticks." As air travel gets increasingly locked down, this too will remove some of the stronger economic incentives to lie. (And we may be close to a global moratorium on air travel.)
There has been a lot of anti-American PR in the past week, par for the course considering who journalists are (liberals) and who they work for (globalists). The hype about Taiwan, South Korea and Japan "doing it right" may prove to be somewhat true, but it's likely that these narratives are going to unravel -- especially in Japan, who have taken the samurai oath to hold the Summer Olympics through the plague.
The single biggest problem confounding our understanding of what's coming is still China. Their communications, from their official statements to their media assets around the world, many of them traitors here in America, have been an exercise in PR autocracy from the start, and nothing has changed that.
A lot has been made of Dr. Bruce Ayward's research expedition to China on behalf of WHO, but the data he brough back should be regarded with just as much skepticism as China's GDP. Another voyage into the heart of an allegedly communist empire comes to mind: Edouard Herriot's tour of Ukraine -- or, more hilariously, Henry "Roerich" Wallace's trip to the see the "volunteers" in the Soviet labor camps. WHO's repsonse to nCoV has been influenced by China all along, and there's no reason to assume what he saw in China was anything more than
a work.
(Remember, Italy's honesty is also a strong proof of China's duplicity: they're on track to surpass China's
total death count next week. Either Italians are uniquely, bizarrely succeptible, or China was downplaying their problems by
several orders of magnitude.)
Closer to home, there's been a lot of celebration by Canada and Mexico, and predictably, both of them are lying, too. Canada has
outbreaks of unknown scope underway in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal; and ol' Mexico City
may turn out to be one of the worst hot spots on the continent.
Perhaps
Event 201 was a classic Illuminati ritual -- the smirking Revelation of the Method -- but perhaps it was an earnest warning from experienced experts that nobody, anywhere, was prepared for this kind of system shock. "It's our hope that countries will use this to consider where they are strong and where they are weak," as
Tom Inglesby put it.
Which is not to say such warnings are charitable, or innocent. There are of course considerations of money and power here; everyone in the "Global Health Security" community expects to receive more of both.
So.
We invoke numbers from WHO and CDC because that's the best we have, right? Yet WHO and CDC themselves are also guessing on the basis of the best they have. The difference between WHO officials and the smug pedants on your Facebook feed is the professionals know they're guessing -- and the hall monitors merely know
they're right.
"We have to use the information we have," as
Van Kerkhove puts it, and this is precisely why information warfare is so effective. Whether or not you find
the latest from Global Research to be a convincing case or an inevitable chess move depends on your narrative, your priors and your place in the WW3 ecosystem.
With that in mind, back to the question of forecasting peaks & final acts.
China claims they're
past the peak as of March 12th. And for now, no question, they are.
But there's a lot of dubious assumptions & open questions there, especially with mass travel resuming and businesses re-opening.
They cannot continue their lockdown, for economic and strategic reasons (and in China, as America, there is essentially no sunlight between the two.) They must attempt to ramp up production back towards something approaching normal. The longer these huge interruptions drag on, the more the world will be changed as a result, and the CPC stands to lose decades of work in the space of a single year.
Yet -- has the virus somehow disappeared in China? Have their people gained some kind of immunity? Is there any guarantee, or even strong evidence, that a second outbreak won't get underway just as soon as public transportation volumes get back to normal? I would venture the answer to all three questions is a resounding
"Fuck No."This is an ugly dilemma, and it cuts to the heart of what Cummings and Vallance are grappling with in the UK. Letting the virus burn through your population without taking sweeping containment measures
is not completely insane. If containment only buys you time, and at immense cost, it's essentially a bet that effective vaccines will be available, at scale, by the tail end of the time you've bought.
Otherwise you're just headed straight into another outbreak, because all of the available ingredients for that recipe are still on the table.
Further, global pandemics are a great equalizer: nobody's national responses particularly
matter in the absence of global coordination. Patchwork lockdowns, piecemeal travel bans, all of this merely serves to fragment the problem. Per WHO's best guess data, the biggest story of the past month is the migration of "epicenter"
from China to Europe. That may be in the USA by April 15th.
(So, once again,
heavy seasonal variability is currently humankinds last great hope.)
Nature ran a great piece back in the middle of February, asking experts to speculate on
"When will the coronavirus outbreak peak?" and it's full of solid gold quotables, starting with the subtitle:
"Officials want to know but predictions vary wildly, from now to after hundreds of millions are infected."And this timeless gem I will, with luck, remember for decades:
“If you revise your predictions every week to say that the outbreak will peak in a week or two, eventually you will be correct,” says Brian Labus, who works on disease surveillance at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
Back in the UK,
their wonks are currently projecting the peak in June or July:
Chris Whitty, chief medical officer for England, said he currently expected that the UK would reach the peak of its outbreak in 10 to 14 weeks time.
In Japan,
Mitsuo Kaku was more circumspect, but also more transparent about his reasoning:
Q: When do you expect the outbreak to peak, and when do you expect it to end?
MK: SARS was identified in November 2002, and its peak came around March and April 2003. In July of that year it was announced that the spread had ended. If we think about it on the same lines, then the new coronavirus began in around December 2019, and therefore would be expected to peak between April and May 2020, and continue until August.
The chances of it carrying on past summer are low, but we don't know what will happen. I think we'll be able to see whether the current countermeasures were effective by the end of March. It should gradually become clear how long the outbreak will last.
Here in the US, the CIA's paper of record just published
an interactive infographic that puts the peak squarely around July 2020, only varying the number of infections (and note that even their top-bound estimate of 9.4 million is far short of what Congress
was being told.)
Their model, courtesy of David N. Fisman at U Toronto, assumes a CFR of 1.0 and an r0 of 2.3.Finally, on the prediction market front, even the guy who helped create VIX is in awe of what his famous index is doing.
Via: Mini Mike News“The level of uncertainty is even beyond what we saw in 2008 immediately after Lehman Brothers collapsed,” Dan Galai, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, said in a telephone interview.
...
“If you look at 2008, it spiked and then within a day or two, it was going down very fast,” said Galai. “Here, it’s been steadily going up instead of going down. It’s more violent, and it’s more persistent.”
Galai doesn’t see it falling materially until there’s greater visibility on the extent of the fall-out from the epidemic. With authorities coming under fierce criticism for their handling of the public health emergency, there’s no telling when that will be.
“It’s so much different from the global financial crisis because we’ve seen those cycles before,” said Galai. “This time, nobody has any view or any good prediction of the duration and depth of this epidemic. What we see in the VIX is really the reflection of the enormous uncertainty.”
Sheesh.Things have gotten crazy, right? Been a long year. However, from all available facts, we're still dangling our legs off the edge of the cliff, just ahead of the inflection point where our world and our everyday lives become impossible to recognize. All the precipitous, accelerating insanity we've lived through so far has been, at best, only the beginning of our journey to the center of the coronavirus outbreak.
I joked at the beginning of March that, after spending February desperately trying to convince people they should be far more concerned about this, I would be spending March trying to get people to calm the fuck down. That's mostly proven true; people don't have a lot of gears or gradients between "You're Just Being Paranoid" and "We're All Going To Die."
In closing, I can only recommend that you relax into this. You're not remotely ready for this, but neither is anyone else. Keep talking to your neighbors, keep getting enough sleep, keep enjoying your showers, your meals, and your lives.