Coronavirus Solution: Quarantine Nancy Pelosi And CNN On A Container Ship

At the gym today, one of the TVs was showing CNN. Horrible, I know, but it's true. Luckily, the sound was off, but I could see CNN reporters walking down some congressional hallway with Nancy Pelosi, interviewing her.

Why? She has nothing interesting to say at all. "Orange man bad!" would be a simple summation.

Instead, check out this short video (hat tip: Ohioan at Heart) from the Medical Director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Rady Children’s Hospital-San Diego. His take is that the Coronavirus is just a bad cold.

Here's another bit of information that ought to dampen your fears. Best tidbit:

Coronavirus is a familiar illness, and not as bad as others. It is from the SARS family — and less deadly. As Ha’aretz noted, “the mortality rate from the current disease ranges from 0.5 to 2 percent, and is significantly lower than the mortality rate from the 2002 SARS outbreak (9.5 percent) and much lower than the 2012 SARS outbreak (34.4 percent). It may even be close to the mortality rate from an ordinary flu outbreak in the United States.”

Here's a good point from Scott Adams, considering the fact that most Coronavirus infections are unreported.

Can someone explain how we estimate the death rate for Coronavirus without knowing the denominator?

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) February 28, 2020

Finally, the best article I've seen yet on the economic impacts of the virus is this one about container shipping. In short, the actions being taken to stop the spread of the virus are inserting random delays into the global shipping network which will cause all kinds of temporary problems.

1. Chinese manufacturing facilities didn't open after Chinese New Year. A lag followed by a lag which "created massive shortfall in Chinese exports and, therefore, a drop in container demand."
2. Sailings were canceled, which caused "staggering" demand shortfall for containers.
3. "Blank sailings" lead to more blank sailings back to Asia creating 3 - 10 weeks' more lag time.
4. Pre-Chinese New Year peak of delivered cargo results in excess containers building up in places "such as Europe and North America." Repatriating containers takes time and money.

But by all means, let's hear what Nancy Pelosi has to say. That's an excellent use of our time.

Here, deep thinker Pelosi is pondering the effects of the coronavirus on her next botox injections.