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"There are early signs that past infection by the new coronavirus can prevent future disease. But some infectious-disease experts say there are too many unknowns about the immune system’s response to the virus—including how long immunity might last and the likelihood of reinfection—to rely on the tests to predict complete immunity. “I don’t know we have enough trust in what an exposure means that it would change the way we deploy our workforce,” Kimberly Hanson, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Utah School of Medicine, said at a media briefing. “We’re still trying to figure out what detecting an antibody response means, and if it’s protective or not, we don’t know.” Given the potential shortcomings, early serology tests might prove more useful as a tool for gauging the spread of the virus through communities, rather than for determining whether individuals have full immunity, said Stanford’s Dr. Bendavid."
"For starters, the flu tallies are estimates of total flu burden, while the Covid-19 figures are confirmed cases only. Eventually, the CDC will estimate the total Covid-19 burden, but for now, the numbers are not an apples-to-apples comparison.“We always know confirmed cases are an underestimate,” said Lynnette Brammer, who leads the CDC’s domestic influenza-surveillance team.
In addition, Covid-19 differs from the flu in how quickly it spreads, the length and severity of the illness, and the unusual demands a contagion with no cure places on medical staff and facilities. Instead of gentle waves of cases cascading across the country over a span of six months, like the flu, a tidal wave of Covid-19 cases has swept over a handful of cities in half the time. The concentration of quickly amassing serious infections overwhelmed the affected areas, and the fear is that without social distancing—for now the only effective intervention—other places will have a similar experience. A snapshot of the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic shows the difference in the speed of transmission between a raging flu and the new coronavirus. Comparing only laboratory-confirmed cases, in the first 102 days of the H1N1 flu pandemic, the CDC reported 43,677 illnesses and 302 deaths. In 22 fewer days, Covid-19 infected 11 times as many people and killed 60 times as many. “The flu season is spread out,” said William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. “This is being jammed up in a short time frame.” Covid-19 outbreaks have also been highly localized. “You’ve got a hot-spot pattern instead of an even pattern,” said Emily Martin, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. “All the pressure is concentrated in small areas.”
Not only are more Covid-19 patients coming into hospitals, they require longer care.The median length of stay for adults hospitalized with seasonal flu is 3.6 days, according to research published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases. In nine Seattle-area hospitals, where 12 of 24 Covid-19 patients died through March 23, the median stay was 12 days in the hospital, 9 days in ICU and 10 days on mechanical ventilators. (The median for survivors was 17 days in the hospital, 14 in ICU and 11 on a ventilator.) Having a hospital full of highly contagious patients leads to diminished stores of equipment intended to protect staff members who are also at risk of infection. The University of Michigan Medical Center now requires everyone to wear a mask. Additionally, anyone caring for patients who have or are suspected of having Covid-19 must wear a gown and eye protection. During flu season, the center uses “droplet protection” only in some rooms, and there is no universal masking requirement. “It’s a different world,” Dr. Lauring said. Most people have some immunity to the flu, either from vaccines or previous exposure, and nearly all health-care workers are protected by the flu shot. “It’s not unusual to have compliance rates above 95%,” Vanderbilt’s Dr. Schaffner said, referring to vaccinations of hospital employees. “That’s everybody—doctors, nurses, dietitians, people who clean at night—everybody.” Currently, there is no vaccine or specific treatment for Covid-19, so slowing or stopping its spread has required social distancing.
But there is one quality that might make Covid-19 less problematic than flu. “It’s not changing and mutating at the rate the flu can do,” said Allison Weinmann, an infectious-disease physician at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit. That could make it easier for pharmaceutical companies to develop an effective vaccine—and render Covid-19 no more remarkable than the seasonal flu."
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"As companies of all sizes shut their doors and make claims against their business interruption policies, insurers are coming under the spotlight. Unsurprisingly, few documents explicitly detail how they will deal with this unprecedented pandemic, creating gray areas that insurers and the policyholder will view differently. Claims will be in the “many billions of dollars, if not trillions,” according to Ben Lenhart of law firm Covington. Over the coming months and years these claims will work their way through settlements, arbitration or the courts. But governments are already getting involved. Four U.S. state legislators—insurance is regulated on a state-by-state basis—and a U.K. government committee are all considering both what type of financial support to offer insurers and how to compel or force the companies to be generous with their customers. Insurance, usually considered an economically defensive industry, has underperformed in the current crisis. On both sides of the Atlantic the sector is down about a third this year, compared with 24% for the S&P 500 index and 25% for the Stoxx Europe 600."
"In at least three states, lawmakers have proposed legislation to force insurers to pay billions of dollars for business losses tied to government-ordered shutdowns. In other states, regulators are pushing insurers to expand coverage under personal-car policies to also cover certain commercial activity, such as delivery of takeout meals by owners and employees of restaurants that are struggling to survive bans on dine-in eating. Some regulators have declared moratoriums on cancellations and nonrenewals of policies. And some are urging car insurers to lower people’s bills. These states note that policyholders now working from home don’t have the commutes they used to and thus aren’t on the roads as much. This push comes despite specific contractual exclusions in most standard policies for claims stemming from viruses. As a result, some insurers are threatening court challenges over these efforts to rewrite policies and provide benefits that weren’t priced in. “If elected officials or courts require payment for perils that were excluded and for which no premium was ever collected, catastrophic results are likely to occur and we may deal with a second crisis: insurance insolvencies and impairments,” said Charles Chamness, president of trade group National Association of Mutual Insurance Companies."
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"The dramatic move tallies with President Christine Lagarde’s comment that there are “no limits” to the central bank’s commitment as the economy faces a deep recession due to restrictions intended to stem the spread of the coronavirus. Former President Mario Draghi weighed in with a commentary in the Financial Times on Wednesday urging public authorities not to worry about rising debt levels, arguing that the “the cost of hesitation may be irreversible.” Central banks globally have stepped up with extraordinary measures to fight the crisis. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell made a rare televised interview appearance on Thursday, stating his institution is “not going to run out of ammunition.”
Maybe markets are starting react to this? Or how one can be sure, that cash is going to protect purchasing power in the (near) future? What would you do if you are Norwegian wealth fund?
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https://www.ft.com/content/5ff6469a-6dd8-11ea-89df-41bea055720b
"The new coronavirus may already have infected far more people in the UK than scientists had previously estimated — perhaps as much as half the population — according to modelling by researchers at the University of Oxford.
If the results are confirmed, they imply that fewer than one in a thousand of those infected with Covid-19 become ill enough to need hospital treatment, said Sunetra Gupta, professor of theoretical epidemiology, who led the study. The vast majority develop very mild symptoms or none at all.
“We need immediately to begin large-scale serological surveys — antibody testing — to assess what stage of the epidemic we are in now,” she said."
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-the-coronavirus-as-deadly-as-they-say-11585088464?mod=hp_opin_pos_2
"In Iceland, deCode Genetics is working with the government to perform widespread testing. In a sample of nearly 2,000 entirely asymptomatic people, researchers estimated disease prevalence of just over 1%. Iceland’s first case was reported on Feb. 28, weeks behind the U.S. It’s plausible that the proportion of the U.S. population that has been infected is double, triple or even 10 times as high as the estimates from Iceland. That also implies a dramatically lower fatality rate."
"The epidemic started in China sometime in November or December. The first confirmed U.S. cases included a person who traveled from Wuhan on Jan. 15, and it is likely that the virus entered before that: Tens of thousands of people traveled from Wuhan to the U.S. in December. Existing evidence suggests that the virus is highly transmissible and that the number of infections doubles roughly every three days. An epidemic seed on Jan. 1 implies that by March 9 about six million people in the U.S. would have been infected. As of March 23, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there were 499 Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. If our surmise of six million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%, assuming a two week lag between infection and death. This is one-tenth of the flu mortality rate of 0.1%. Such a low death rate would be cause for optimism."
"This does not make Covid-19 a nonissue. The daily reports from Italy and across the U.S. show real struggles and overwhelmed health systems. But a 20,000- or 40,000-death epidemic is a far less severe problem than one that kills two million. Given the enormous consequences of decisions around Covid-19 response, getting clear data to guide decisions now is critical. We don’t know the true infection rate in the U.S. Antibody testing of representative samples to measure disease prevalence (including the recovered) is crucial. Nearly every day a new lab gets approval for antibody testing, so population testing using this technology is now feasible."
"If we’re right about the limited scale of the epidemic, then measures focused on older populations and hospitals are sensible. Elective procedures will need to be rescheduled. Hospital resources will need to be reallocated to care for critically ill patients. Triage will need to improve. And policy makers will need to focus on reducing risks for older adults and people with underlying medical conditions. A universal quarantine may not be worth the costs it imposes on the economy, community and individual mental and physical health. We should undertake immediate steps to evaluate the empirical basis of the current lockdowns."
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How it is possible to explain that ADS or VIAC are both down -72 and -69 YTD with a pre corona PE ~2, when even AAL is down "only" -45 and trades at pre corona PE ~3. Is VIAC more corona sensitive than AAL?
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/marijuana-madness-turns-into-a-cannabis-crash-11570888800
"Sales disappoint, stocks tumble and startups scramble for financing"
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The vast majority of New York City landlords have little interest in taking on WeWork as a new tenant while the company is struggling to shore up its finances, brokers and landlords say.
Other big U.S. office markets could also suffer from the current aversion to WeWork. Building owners in cities including Chicago, Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco have relied heavily on WeWork to fill excess space and to appeal to startup companies attracted to co-working’s layouts and ethos. Co-working tenants occupy 54.2 million square feet nationally and more than 16.5 % of office demand since the beginning of 2017 can be attributed to WeWork and other co-working firms in 54 major U.S. markets, according to data firm CoStar Group Inc.
S&P Global Ratings on Thursday said it cut a We entity’s credit rating to the lower junk rating of single B-minus from single-B, reflecting “heightened uncertainty around The We Company’s ability to raise capital to support aggressive growth and the pressure this places on liquidity,” S&P said in a press release.
WeWork also became a favorite New York tenant in part because it was sometimes willing to pay above market rents to keep its growth firing. In one recent instance, WeWork made a verbal offer to lease up to 80,000 square feet in a Midtown Manhattan tower—paying a 20% premium to the market rate for space that wouldn’t be available for two years, said Craig Deitelzweig, chief executive of Marx Realty, the building’s owner. But Mr. Deitelzweig said he turned the deal down because he was suspicious of WeWork’s business model. “The numbers do not work,” he said.7
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A bloc of WeWork directors is planning to push Adam Neumann to step down as chief executive after a tumultuous week in which his eccentric behavior and drug use came to light, and the startup delayed its much-anticipated stock-market listing.A group including officials tied to SoftBank Group Corp. , the company’s largest investor, wants Mr. Neumann to relinquish his title of CEO of We Co., the parent of the office-sharing company, people familiar with the matter said.
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/short-term-funding-spike-raises-hopes-for-fed-cuts-11568807648
"The spike in overnight repo rates was caused by a string of coincidental events, including corporate tax payments and Treasury sales, according to analysts and investors. But those events only had such a startling effect because banks were already operating close to the minimum level of reserves they want to hold.
After the 2008 crisis, the Fed’s massive bond-buying programs led to a huge increase in reserves in the system. But that has gone into reverse as the central bank tightened monetary policy in the past couple of years. The Fed’s reversal has forced the U.S. Treasury to sell more bonds to banks and investors. That reduces the amount of money in the financial system because primary dealers buy the bonds using reserves.
The Fed believed there was still spare capacity of $200 billion to $300 billion in reserves before money would get too tight and overnight funding problems would appear, according to Morgan Stanley analysts. However, the combination in recent days of corporate tax payments and Treasury issuance showed that cushion may not have existed."
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/values-rebounding-but-dont-get-your-hopes-up-11568462580?mod=rsswn
"This week has seen the biggest swing from momentum stocks to cheap value stocks since the 2008 bank bailouts. But it isn’t likely to last."
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https://www.wsj.com/articles/storm-clouds-not-capital-ones-ease-for-reinsurers-11567767780
"Reinsurers’ shares already have made huge gains this year. Arch Capital Group Ltd. and RenaissanceRe Holdings Ltd. are up 54% and 41% respectively. Arch Capital is priced at about 1.7 times book value, and RenaissanceRe is at 1.6 times. The latter is close to its highest level since 2007 on that measure."
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"Société Générale analysts calculate that the stocks most closely correlated to Treasurys are the most expensive they have been since at least 2004, when sector differences are stripped out. Meanwhile, the stocks that behave least like bonds are close to the cheapest they have been outside the 2008-09 recession"
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Just look at what multiples to BV SEB or Swedbank, even after the recent scandal, trades, while both also in negative/zero interest rate environment, and then compare them to german banks. Also negative rates, but very diffeent margins and valuatios. So perhaps interest rate environment alone does not explain such situation. Maybe competetive situation/market structure also matters.
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http://brontecapital.blogspot.com/2019/08/thinking-aloud-about-bank-margins-part-2.html
"But there are outliers - and some of them are surprising. The Irish Banks look in Ireland pretty darn profitable. The Scandinavian banks are alright too - despite (say) Swedish interest rates going negative before everyone else.
Even some French regional banks are okay.
And these banks are profitable even in a negative interest rate world.
Swedish banks faced negative rate early - and they came out kind of well."
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Why Has Warren Been So Quiet?
in Berkshire Hathaway
Posted