Coronavirus: when do we reach the bottom of the dip?

[Cortana]

https://www.instagram.com/p/B-j_A3pAx9I/?igshid=1f8jf79m0v40s

Lol.

[bamboo]

@Bojack

@bamboo I think “active cases” is not that relevant, as most of them are not even hospitalised.

Active cases is an irrelevant number because not all of them are hospitalized but also because I have many friends that had clear symptoms of the virus but did not have access to the test because they had only “mild” symptoms and did not belong to group that are at risk. It remains however as relative number a metric of what is going on.

[bamboo]

If we speak of (ir)relevant numbers there is a huge difference between the death cases for Switzerlanf in Worldmeters:

Switzerland COVID - Coronavirus Statistics - Worldometer

And the numbers on the website of BAG:
https://covid-19-schweiz.bagapps.ch/fr-1.html

If anyone can explain the difference I will be grateful.

[1000000CHF]

@Bojack

Remember how we used to say that South Korea made so many tests? Well, it looks like in Switzerland we have made twice as many test per capita. And excluding microstates, only UAE and Norway made more.

The difference is - they did it immediately, we waited for the epidemic to endanger our health system. BTW. In Geneva there’s so many severe cases, they’re running short of personel and Mediciens sans frontiers are helping them. Switzerland receives humanitarian aid - crazy times.

[1000000CHF]

@bamboo

It remains however as relative number a metric of what is going on

Exactly, based on changes in active cases you can estimate R.

[Bojack]

@bamboo

If anyone can explain the difference I will be grateful.

I think (only a theory) that the first chart shows death by date of reporting and the second chart by date of death.

• worldometers collects data from TagesAnzeiger, which in turn collects the reports from the cantons.
• the same applies to corona-data, which collects data from openZH, which crawls the cantonal websites for data every day.
• BAG provides data by the actual date of death. So the numbers for past days can keep growing. Plus, BAG has to manually verify each death case, so they have a slight backlog.

So if you hear today about 75 new reported deaths, then these deaths may have actually happened 1-5 days ago. (again, only a guess)

[Cortana]

I asking myself if this virus will have longterm consequences for several industries like 9/11 for the air industry?

[bamboo]

Another difference between South-Korea and Switzerland is that South-Korea is a peninsula but practically an island as the border is closed in the north. Switzerland in contrary is some kind of central hub of Europe with lots of people crossing the border each day.

[xorfish]

Be careful with the doted data from corona-data.ch

Vaud and Geneva report the numbers always for the day before in the late afternoon. Those regions are together with Ticino the worst hit cantons.

[Bojack]

@xorfish

Be careful with the doted data from corona-data.ch

It’s really hard to miss. The guy made a huge disclaimer, a dotted line and you also see it in the per-canton data. Vaud is always the last one to report. And it really screws up the reported data for websites like worldometers. At least corona-data puts the right date for each canton to compare apples with apples. And then it looks like BAG is even more precise because it groups the data by actual date of death.

[xorfish]

Geneva is even more misleading, they have preliminary data for the current day that is always way lower than what is reported the next day. Maybe they have corrected that now and don’t report preliminary data.

[xorfish]

Does anybody know what the surgical mask production capacity of china is at the moment? It was around 100 million per day a month ago. It would be nice to now what the capacity is right now.

[Dago]

@1000000CHF

BTW. In Geneva there’s so many severe cases, they’re running short of personel and Mediciens sans frontiers are helping them. Switzerland receives humanitarian aid - crazy times.

Things are a lot less dramatic than it seems with regards to the involvement of MSF. They are not helping in the hospital : Comment Médecins sans frontières intervient à Genève | Tribune de Genève

MSF travaille depuis longtemps en partenariat avec les Hôpitaux universitaires de Genève (HUG). Dans le cadre de l’épidémie, nous avons convenu que nous allions suivre certains patients à domicile, soit des personnes suspectes non testées mais présentant des symptômes, soit des personnes soignées pour le Covid 19 et retournées chez elles ou dans leur foyer ou dans les centres d’hébergement.

The HUG are holding up, they are not running short of personnel so far. They have shut down or drastically reduced the size of some services an reallocated the personnel to the the strained services. La Tour has been “réquisitionnée” and non-COVID patients are redirected there.

It is tough of course, very tense. People are tired. Psychologists are now fully part of the teams (to avoid future PTSD if possible, to avoid people breaking down). But they are not running short of personnel or ventilators at this stage. They have scaled up in an admirable way.

[valarmorghulis]

Futures +4%…perhaps time to cash out some shares…

[Cortana]

Or maybe 23/03 was the lowest point.

[bamboo]

There is a tradition of humanitarian medical involvement in Geneva and MSF belongs to this movement for me. I see this as some kind of information exchange between NGO and the established medical infrastructure in the city of the ICRC.

[bamboo]

@Cortana

Or maybe 23/03 was the lowest point.

The peak of the corona fear seems to be over. This post is again a meeting point of market timers.

There is an interesting comment on the Italian page of worldmeters about the real number of cases that could led to herd immunity.

Italy : the real number of COVID-19 cases in the country could be 5,000,0000 (compared to the 119,827 confirmed ones) according to a study which polled people with symptoms who have not been tested, and up to 10,000,000 or even 20,0000,000 after taking into account asymptomatic cases, according to Carlo La Vecchia, a Professor of Medical Statistics and Epidemiology at the Statale di Milano University.

This number would still be insufficient to reach herd immunity , which would require 2/3 of the population (about 40,000,000 people in Italy) having contracted the virus
https://rep.repubblica.it/pwa/locali/2020/04/03/news/milano_la_ricerca_dell_universita_statale_i_contagi_reali_in_italia_potrebbero_essere_5_milioni_-253027121/?ref=RHPPTP-BH-I253056306-C12-P3-S5.4-T1

[Bojack]

@valarmorghulis

Futures +4%…perhaps time to cash out some shares…

I recommend you to watch some Ben Felix as an antidote for such silly talk. He quotes all the time academic research, which proves you can’t be smarter than the market based simply on your intuition.

@bamboo

The peak of the corona fear seems to be over. This post is again a meeting point of market timers.

Absolutely. The 7-day daily death average has already peaked in Italy, Spain, France. US & UK are the only countries with considerable growth. I’m not saying it’s all great, but at least it looks like the “milions will die” scenario will not come into fruition.

[Julianek]

There is a nice article from Ben Carlson that corroborates what I was writing at the beginning of the thread: one year of earnings is not worth a lot in the total valuation of a company.

The Relationship Between Earnings and Bear Markets - A Wealth of Common Sense

Now, that does not mean i have any clue what the market will do in the next few days/weeks/months.
But i know that five years from now, i won’t regret having bought at the current levels…

[valarmorghulis]

don’t worry I am really not into market timing, I know I would only lose money. I am just thinking selling VHT if it comes back to my buying price, then I have a bit more cash to buy VT / VTI. Median buy price of VTI for me is 148, so I can buy some share on discount. As i said in a previous post I wanted anyway to get rid of this sector ETFs that make no sense, and just stick to VTI / VXUS and 5% REIT.