The FED has raised rates 425 basis points and they ain’t done. In my mind a recession is a guaranteed event and an epic, generational stock market wipeout is a real possibility. You’ll never forgive yourself if you miss this.
One million Chinese people are at risk of dying from Covid-19 during the coming winter months if President Xi Jinping pursues his pivot to remove strict pandemic controls, new modelling shows. In a stunning reversal after protests against Xi’s zero-Covid policy, Chinese officials have begun dismantling the pandemic control system of lockdowns, mass testing, state quarantine and electronic contact tracing.On Wednesday, authorities for the first time announced that coronavirus patients who were either asymptomatic or had only mild symptoms could isolate at home rather than at hospitals or centralised quarantine facilities, while public venues in many cities would no longer have to check for negative Covid tests. Removal of the restrictions risks sparking an unparalleled “winter wave” of Covid infections that would rapidly overwhelm China’s healthcare system, according to projections by Wigram Capital Advisors, an Asia-focused macroeconomic advisory group that has provided modelling to governments during the pandemic. The models have been reviewed by the Financial Times. Under a scenario where China’s leadership continues to roll back zero-Covid – as it has been doing in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou among other cities in recent days – daily fatalities may reach as high as 20,000 in mid-March. Demand for intensive care units would peak at 10 times higher than capacity by late March and daily hospitalisations would hit 70,000. The winter wave would be exacerbated by the likelihood of the lunar new year holiday, the world’s largest annual human migration, becoming a super spreader event. The projections highlight Beijing’s failure to administer full vaccine courses to tens of millions of elderly Chinese and address the country’s ICU shortage nearly three years since the first Covid cases emerged in Wuhan, central China, in late 2019. It also returns focus to the Xi administration’s refusal to import superior messenger RNA vaccine technology. That is despite months of warnings from health experts as well as modelling by researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University, released in May, which estimated that an unchecked surge of the Omicron variant in the country of 1.4 billion people could lead to almost 1.6 million fatalities within about three months.
“The current propaganda messaging is that a reopening will be costless,” said Rodney Jones, principal at Wigram. “The risk is that they are underestimating just how much work – and cost – the rest of the world has done and borne to get to the point of living with Covid.”
The Wigram models use vaccination and age data, the effect of public health measures and the real-time effective “R value”, a measure of a disease’s ability to spread between people. It also uses the experiences of Singapore, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. For China to also achieve hybrid immunity from infection and vaccinations, which would allow the economy to operate freely, 20 per cent of the population or 290 million people would have to be infected. Given the lack of reporting for positive cases, infections would in reality be 50 per cent higher, at about 30 per cent of the population or 435 million people. Under a scenario of a more gradual and controlled reopening, the process of reaching hybrid immunity would take until August next year, the Wigram modelling showed. This would help cap hospitalisations and deaths until mid-2023. “China has done nothing to prepare for this step, and Xi appears to be doing so on impulse as a reaction to the protests, rather than as part of a careful policy programme,” Mr Jones said. “It would be easier to have confidence in a reopening strategy if it was happening as part of a careful policy strategy, not on impulse, with no preparation.” Goldman Sachs’s baseline scenario is that Beijing will only meaningfully relax Covid controls from around the second quarter of next year, after completing medical preparations including vaccinating the elderly. NN: I stand on my analysis. This will end in tears. Their is no herd immunity, little vaccinations and 1.3 billion people packed tighter then sardines in a can.
China’s retail sales dropped 5.9% in November compared to the same month last year, the National Bureau of Statistics said on Thursday. Sales grew 0.1% compared to October. The fall from November 2021 was much bigger than expected, as analysts forecast a figure of 3.6%. Retail sales amounted to 3.9 trillion yuan. Sales of goods sank by 5.6% year-on-year, while services plunged 8.4%.
NNi: Talk about sucking shut. Bear in mind that they got the lunar new year supper spreader event coming. With no testing and no quarantines,,,, And for more COVID fun no vaccines…..
China will stop collecting and reporting comprehensive Covid case data after it ended mandatory testing for the virus. The move comes amid a general relaxation of Covid-related restrictions as Beijing adjusts its zero-Covid policy following a wave of protests against the restrictions in large Chinese cities. Bloomberg reports from now on the Chinese authorities will only report symptomatic cases of the viral infection as the non-symptomatic ones would be impossible to record without mandatory tests. The country’s reconsideration of its zero-Covid policy has been seen by most as a strong bullish factor for oil prices and benchmarks have been trending higher since China began relaxing the restrictions.
Empty streets, deserted shopping centers, and residents staying away from one another are the new normal in Beijing – but not because the city, like many Chinese ones before it, is under a “zero-Covid” lockdown. On Wednesday, China’s National Health Commission (NHC) gave up trying to keep track of all the new Covid cases, announcing it would no longer include asymptomatic infections in its daily count. It had previously reported these cases, albeit in a separate category from “confirmed,” or symptomatic ones. “It is impossible to accurately grasp the actual number of asymptomatic infections,” the NHC said in a notice, citing reduced levels of official testing. Authorities on Wednesday morning reported 2,249 symptomatic Covid cases nationally for the previous day, 20% of which were detected in the capital. Those figures are also thought to be impacted by reduced testing. CNN reporting from Beijing indicates the case count overall in the Chinese capital could be many times higher than recorded. In a Twitter post, Beijing-based lawyer and former American Chamber of Commerce in China chairman James Zimmerman said about 90% of people in his office had Covid, up from around half a few days ago. “Our ‘work at home’ policy is now ‘work at home if you’re well e nough.’ This thing came on like a runaway freight train,” he wrote on Wednesday. Experts have said the relatively low number of previously infected Covid-19 patients in China and the lower effectiveness of its widely-used inactivated-virus vaccines against Omicron infection – as compared with previous strains and mRNA vaccines – could enable the virus to spread rapidly. “The current strains will spread faster in China than they have spread in other parts of the world because those other parts of the world have some immunity against infection from previous waves of earlier Omicron strains,” said University of Hong Kong chair professor of epidemiology Ben Cowling. The extent of severe disease or death in Covid-19 outbreaks typically takes time to become clear, but there are signs of an impact on the health care system – with authorities in Beijing urging patients who are not seriously ill not to seek the help of emergency services. The city’s major hospitals recorded 19,000 patients with flu symptoms from December 5 to 11 – more than six times that of the previous week, a health official said Monday.
The number of patients visiting fever clinics was 16 times greater on Sunday than a week prior. In China, where there isn’t a strong primary care system, visiting the hospital is common for minor illness.
So far, however, there were only 50 severe and critical cases in hospitals, most of whom had underlying health conditions, Sun Chunlan, China’s top official in charge of managing Covid, said during an inspection of Beijing’s epidemic response on Tuesday. “At present, the number of newly infected people in Beijing is increasing rapidly, but most of them are asymptomatic and mild cases,” said Sun, who also called for more fever clinics to be set up and made assurances that supply of medicines – which have been hit by a surge in purchases in recent days – was being increased. Prominent Shanghai physician Zhang Wenhong warned that hospitals should do everything they could to ensure that health workers were not getting infected as quickly as the people in the communities they serve. Such a situation could result in a shortage of medical staff and infections among patients, he said, according to local media reports. Concerns about scarcity and access to medicines and care have been palpable in public discussion, including on social media. There, a Beijing reporter’s account of her time in a temporary hospital for Covid-19 treatment triggered a firestorm on social media, with a related hashtag getting more than 93 million views on China’s Twitter-like platform Weibo since Monday. Social media users questioned why the reporter, who showed her two-bed room and access to fever medicine in a video interview posted by her employer Beijing Radio and Television Station on Sunday, received such treatment while others were struggling. “Awesome! A young reporter gets a space in a temporary hospital and takes liquid Ibuprofen for children that is hard-to-find for parents in Beijing,” read one sarcastic comment, which got thousands of likes. Another popular response complained that “ordinary people” stay at home with kids and elderly with high fevers. “Could you give (her) bed to me if I called (the hospital)?” the Weibo user asked. Amid fears of the virus, residents have rushed to buy canned peaches, following rumors the vitamin C-loaded snack could prevent or treat Covid. Chinese state media has since warned people the preserved fruit is not a Covid remedy nor a substitute for medicine. NN: My firm belief is China is shutting down. I an convinced as they TRY to open up COVID will cases soar. Consider golden week is coming, where a billion people come in close contact with each other. It is obvious to me a severe COVID crises is here and will get worse through January and February. And i believe their economy will suck shut.
BEIJING (AP) — A rash of COVID-19 cases in schools and businesses were reported by social media users Friday in areas across China after the ruling Communist Party loosened anti-virus rules as it tries to reverse a deepening economic slump. Official data showed a fall in new cases, but those no longer cover big parts of the population after the government on Wednesday ended mandatory testing for many people. That was part of dramatic changes aimed at gradually emerging from “zero-COVID” restrictions that have confined millions of people to their homes and sparked protests and demands for President Xi Jinping to resign. Social media users in Beijing and other cities said coworkers or classmates were ill and some businesses closed due to lack of staff. It wasn’t clear from those accounts, many of which couldn’t be independently confirmed, how far above the official figure the total case numbers might be. “I’m really speechless. Half of the company’s people are out sick, but they still won’t let us all stay home,” said a post signed Tunnel Mouth on the popular Sina Weibo platform. The user gave no name and didn’t respond to questions sent through the account, which said the user was in Beijing. The reports echo the experience of the United States, Europe and other economies that have struggled with outbreaks while trying to restore business activity. But they are a jarring change for China, where “zero COVID,” which aims to isolate every case, disrupted daily life and depressed economic activity but kept infection rates low. Xi’s government began to loosen controls Nov. 11 after promising to reduce their cost and disruption. Imports tumbled 10.9% from a year ago in November in a sign of weak demand. Auto sales fell 26.5% in October.
“Relaxing COVID controls will lead to greater outbreaks,” said Neil Thomas and Laura Gloudeman of Eurasia Group in a report, “but Beijing is unlikely to return to the extended blanket lockdowns that crashed the economy earlier this year.”
The changes suggest the ruling party is easing off its goal of preventing virus transmission, the basis of “zero COVID,” but officials say that strategy still is in effect. Restrictions probably must stay in place at least through mid-2023, public health experts and economists say. They say millions of elderly people need to be vaccinated, which will take months, and hospitals strengthened to cope with a surge in cases. Officials announced a vaccination campaign last week. On Friday, the government reported 16,797 new cases, including 13,160 without symptoms. That was down about one-fifth from the previous day and less than half of last week’s daily peak above 40,000. The requirement for hundreds of millions of people to be tested as often as once a day in some areas over the past two years helped the government spot infections with no symptoms. Ending that approach reduces the cost of monitoring employees and customers at offices, shops and other businesses. But it increases the risk they might spread the virus.
“The re-pivot to growth and the exit from zero-Covid are clear from the top level,” said Larry Hu and Yuxiao Zhang of Macquarie Group, an Australian bank, in a report. However, they warned, “uncertainties remain high,” including “how disruptive the exit of zero-Covid could be.”
Private sector economists have cut forecasts of annual growth to as low as below 3%, which would be less than half of last year’s 8.1% and among the weakest in decades. Social media posts suggested some cities might have outbreaks that weren’t reflected in official figures. Posts dated Thursday by 18 people who said they were in Baoding, a city of 11 million southwest of Beijing, reported they tested positive using home kits or had fevers, sore throats and headaches. Meanwhile, the Baoding city government reported no new cases since Tuesday. Drugstores were mobbed by customers who bought medications to treat sore throats and headaches after rules were dropped that required pharmacists to report those purchases, prompting fears a customer might be forced into a quarantine center. Also Friday, the market regulator announced prices of some medicines including Lianhua Qingwen, a traditional flu treatment, rose as much as 500% over the past month. It said sellers might be punished for price-gouging. Lines formed outside hospitals, though it wasn’t clear how many people wanted treatment for COVID-19 symptoms. People waited four to five hours to get into the fever clinic of Chaoyang Hospital in Beijing, according to a woman who answered the phone there and would give only her surname, Sun. She said no virus test was required but patients had to show a smartphone “health code” app that tracks their vaccine status and whether they have been to areas deemed at high risk of infection. Hong Kong, which enforces its own anti-virus strategy, has faced a similar rise in cases as the southern Chinese city tries to revive its struggling economy by loosening controls on travel and the opening hours of restaurants and pubs. Hong Kong reported 75,000 new cases over the past week, up about 25% from the previous week. But those don’t include an unknown number of people who stay at home with COVID-19 symptoms and never report to the government. NN: Its hard to know how this is going to go. Let me explain the know is COVID cases will soar in absences of mass MODERN Vaccines given to the population. The unknown is how the Chinese bureaucracy will respond. Will they cover up the cases and NOT lockdown the economy. Or will they restore shutdowns and quarantines with a vengeance? The known unknown is if its bad enough massive a large swath of the Chinese population will be unable to work. I a spread in our oil trade after taking profits on the bear spread. I will if i get a further drop leg out of the short side and go into a bull spread. The deciding factor is Chinese demand for oil. When not if China opens up demand for oil will zoom by two to three million barrels a day. In the mean time i want to see if lockdowns return further curtailing oil demand during the winter COVID surge in cases.
Chinese authorities appeared to bend to the will of the people on Wednesday by easing some of the harshest COVID-19 restrictions, but a new study showed the high price the country will pay if it tries to reopen too fast. Asian macroeconomic advisory firm, Wigram Capital Advisors, is warning of a “winter wave” of COVID infections that could swamp the healthcare system, according to a report in the Financial Times, which reviewed the firm’s models. Wigram, which takes into account vaccinations and age data in its modellings that it has provided to governments throughout the pandemic, is predicting a death toll of 20,000 a day by mid-March in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, with daily hospitalizations peaking at 70,000.
The advisory firm is warning that the government has done nothing to prepare the country for a reopening that does not progress cautiously. That’s against the backdrop of a still-low vaccination rate for the elderly, a shortage of intensive care units and vaccines that lack the potency of western rivals.
In addition, the Lunar New Year holiday in January could prove a super spreader event for China, Wigram warned. “The risk is that they are underestimating just how much work — and cost — the rest of the world has done and borne to get to the point of living with Covid,” said Rodney Jones, principal at the firm. In a series of new measures, the National Health Commission on Wednesday announced that COVID-19 tests and proof of health on cellphones will now only be required for nurseries, facilities for the elderly and schools. Lockdowns will be limited to apartment floors and individual buildings, individuals can isolate at home, and schools without outbreaks have been ordered to reopen. The easing comes after recent protests across major cities and in some industrial areas, such as Zhengzhou, the home of one of Apple’s biggest iPhone manufacturer. An International Monetary Fund official said Tuesday that the country’s economic outlook has “darkened noticeably,” due in part to lockdowns. Wigram argued that a more controlled reopening of the economy through next August would see a daily death toll of only 4,000 and total hospitalizations peaking at 200,000, rather than 500,000 in a winter wave. While recent moves by the Chinese government to ease back on its strict COVID policies have given stocks a boost at times, the Hong Kong Hang Seng index tumbled 3.2% on Wednesday, after data showed China exports down 8.7% on the year in November, and imports falling 10.6%. Both numbers were much weaker than analysts expected, as the government’s zero-COVID policies have weighed on the economy. For analysts and markets, a new realization may be forming around the global growth engine that investors have been so eager to see reopen. “It doesn’t seem that long ago that markets were getting all excited over the prospect that China was looking at options to reopen its economy, and while we are seeing a more pragmatic approach any rebound in economic activity is likely to be muted at best,” said Michael Hewson, chief market analyst at CMC Markets, in a note to clients. And China likely has no choice but to continue forcing its cities into intermittent lockdowns at least until the government’s next plenary session of parliament in March and possibly the whole of 2023, predicted Stefan Koopman, senior macro strategist at Rabobank, in a note to clients. “There is a clear risk that more acute changes to China’s COVID policies would lead to chaos in the healthcare system, among others,” said Koopman. NN: China is flirting with a devastating spreading of the plague they created. Things fucked up when it escaped the bio-lab before they developed an effective vaccine. With a fast mutating virus an effective vaccine is essential to making sure the Frankenstein you creates does not come around and eat you. Chinese quarantine policy makes sense when you consider their vast underserved populations and their great fear of mutations. This relaxing of a very effective quarantine program is flirting with economic disaster. China is the worlds largest energy consumer and importer of fossil fuels. I expect this COVID season just getting started to further shut down their economy and to greasily reduce their oil imports.
Bank of America Corporation CEO Brian Moynihan said on Tuesday, during an interview with CNN, that China’s most recent shutdowns of areas hit with the COVID-19 virus will cause further obstruction of supply chains. “We’re all concerned about it,” Moynihan stated, adding that from an economic perspective these shutdowns are likely to cause world disruptions. Meanwhile, commenting on the current situation in the United States, Moynihan asserted that the country’s economy is “holding better than the rest of the world.” NN: I am adamant… In the SHORT term oil prices will plunge as covid shuts down the Chinese economy till spring!
TOKYO/SINGAPORE (Reuters) -Oil jumped on Tuesday, buoyed by hopes that China would relax its COVID-19 controls after rare protests against the country’s zero-COVID strategy over the weekend in big Chinese cities. Brent crude futures advanced $1.4, or 1.7%, and traded at $84.57 a barrel at 0645 GMT. U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures rose $1.17, or 1.5%, to $78.39 a barrel. Both benchmarks gained more than $2 earlier in the day. China held a news conference on COVID prevention and control measures at 3 p.m. (0700 GMT) on Tuesday amid record COVID infections and protests in Shanghai and Beijing.
Asian shares also rallied as unsubstantiated rumours swirled that the unrest might prompt a loosening of the COVID restrictions. Similar rumours have caused markets to zig-zag in recent weeks.
The rare street protests in cities across China over the weekend were a vote against President Xi Jinping’s zero-COVID policy and the strongest public defiance during his political career, China analysts said. Beijing has stuck with the zero-COVID policy even as much of the world has lifted most restrictions. Oil prices are also supported by the expectation that major oil producers would adjust their production plans at the upcoming meeting. The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and allies including Russia, known as OPEC+, are set to hold a meeting on Dec. 4. Analysts at Eurasia Group suggested in a note on Monday that weakened demand out of China could spur OPEC+ to cut output. “Although this is merely a guess … not the official statement from the OPEC, it still reflects the near-term market sentiment and is likely to be the turning point of the oil prices,” analysts from Haitong Futures said in a note. OPEC+ started to lower its output target by 2 million barrels per day (bpd) in November, aiming to shore up oil prices. Markets are also assessing the impact of an upcoming Western price cap on Russian oil. Group of Seven (G7) and European Union diplomats have been discussing a cap of between $65 and $70 a barrel, with the aim of limiting revenue to fund Moscow’s military offensive in Ukraine without disrupting global oil markets. Russia calls its actions in Ukraine “a special operation”. But EU governments failed to agree on Monday on the cap, with Poland insisting the cap should be set lower than proposed by the G7, diplomats said. The price cap is due to come into effect on Dec. 5, when an EU ban on Russian crude also takes effect.
China registered 27,095 new COVID-19 cases on November 20, surpassing the number reported the previous day by 2,660, the country’s National Health Commission stated on Monday. The country also saw two new deaths, raising the total toll to 5,229 since the beginning of the pandemic. The latest statistic comes as the Baiyun district in the port megacity of Guangzhou entered a five-day COVID-19 lockdown, having registered 296 new locally transmitted symptomatic and 7,885 asymptomatic infections. The Baiyun district in the Chinese city of Guangzhou has entered a five-day COVID-19 lockdown, local authorities announced on Sunday. They described the prevention and control situation as “grim,” as China continues to pursue its zero-COVID policy. Guangzhou has seen over 8,000 daily cases for five days in a row, with 8,181 cases in the last 24 hours. Meanwhile, the city of Shijiazhuang advised its residents to remain at home amid rising infection numbers. Its officials stated mass COVID-19 testing will be conducted in some parts of the city. Continue reading “China’s COVID-19 cases jump by 27,095…. China announces first COVID-19 death in almost 6 months”
I find it amazing with the world facing massive inflation, hyper inflation in third world shit holes, a raging war in Europe that’s expanding and the world on the brink of recession, they want you to worry about Gore’s Inconvenient Untruth. We’ll elucidate this foolishness in this next edition of Radio Free Wall Street.
The SARS-CoV-2 virus that results in COVID-19 has been found to damage multiple organs beyond the lung. Interestingly, the SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein can be found circulating in the blood of COVID-19 patients. Experimental findings are demonstrating that the circulating S protein can bind to receptors resulting in inflammation and cell, tissue, and organ damage. Avolio et al. previously determined that the S protein acting through the cluster of differentiation 147 (CD147) receptor, and another unknown mechanism had detrimental effects on human cardiac pericytes (Clin Sci (Lond) (2021) 135 (24): 2667-2689. DOI: 10.1042/CS20210735). These findings support the notion that circulating SARS-CoV-2 S protein could contribute to cardiovascular disease independent of viral infection. Future studies are needed to determine the effect of the S protein on pericytes in other organs and evaluate the effectiveness of CD147 receptor-blocking therapies to decrease organ damage caused by the S protein. NN: We are seeing heart complications in people who have been infected with COVID 19. See the study from a credible source in PubMed below: