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American From Cruise Ship Tests Positive for Second Time in Malaysia https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/16/coronavirus-latest-updates-china-death-toll-rises.htmlAn American woman who was previously aboard the
MS Westerdam cruise ship in Cambodia has been tested positive after a second test for the coronavirus in Malaysia, local health authorities said Sunday.
The results came after hundreds of passengers were already allowed to leave the ship, and authorities say that more than 140 of those passengers traveled through Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur airport. Many of them traveled to onward destinations in the U.S., Europe and Australia, officials said.-----------------------------
China’s Hubei Province Banning Vehicle Traffic to Contain OutbreakChina’s Hubai province, home to the city of Wuhan and the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak, will ban pedestrian and vehicle traffic to contain its spread, local government officials said Sunday. Service vehicles including ambulances, police cars and those carrying essential goods will be except from the ban.
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Taiwan Confirms First Coronavirus Death on Islandhttps://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/16/coronavirus-latest-updates-china-death-toll-rises.htmlTaiwanese health authorities announced the first death from the coronavirus on the island on Sunday. The deceased was a man in his 60s who had not traveled overseas and had hepatitis B and diabetes, Taiwan’s Health Minister Chen Shih-chung told media. Taiwan has 20 confirmed cases of the virus.
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Coronavirus Is a Data Time Bombhttps://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coronaviruss-effects-on-global-markets-will-be-delayed/606508/So far, less than 0.0008 percent of the humans on Earth have been diagnosed with the coronavirus known as COVID-19. But thanks to the circulation of disease and capital, the whole world has been affected.
Any company—including Apple and Walmart—that brings things in from China has to worry about production and distribution slowdowns.
What makes this all so strange is that a mosaic of facts is known about the economic consequences of coronavirus, but the arrival of those consequences outside China will be delayed, and their magnitude is uncertain.
What Target and other executives are worried about today will actually show up for shoppers in April. You might think that financial markets, at least, would be “pricing in” the problems, but share prices are at record highs. Coronavirus has likely already dealt many of its economic blows—and now those disruptions will trickle through the networks that connect China to the rest of the global economy.
Companies and governments need statistics to understand what’s happening in the world. The U.S. government, for example, maintains a complex data-gathering operation: the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, certain survey programs of the Census, the National Agricultural Statistics Service, the Economic Research Service, and many others. The data that these organizations publish take time to reflect on-the-ground commerce. Under normal conditions, this may not be significant. But
when the economy suffers a globe-altering shock, statistical windows on the world can be dangerously out of step with reality.... Pollution near Shanghai, a reliable and hard-to-fake indicator of economic activity, has plummeted, according to Morgan Stanley.
https://twitter.com/M_PaulMcNamara/status/1226814607156826113?s=20Container ships are sailing with smaller than normal cargo loads. Prices for bulk carriers that move iron ore and coal have collapsed.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/coronavirus-toll-on-shipping-reaches-350-million-a-week-11581366671https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-10/shipping-is-getting-smashed-by-coronavirus-in-more-ways-than-one... “Suddenly, all supply chains seem vulnerable because so many Chinese supply chains within supply chains within supply chains rely on each other for parts and raw materials”
One upshot for Americans is likely, though: Even if the worst of the outbreak is over—and it might not be—bad economic news may well be in our future.
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