Spekulatius

It is pretty clear that the WHO made serious mistakes in this epidemic. It’s doesn’t seem the right solution for the US to leave the WHO alone as it doesn’t solve any problems. if the WHO is too beholden to China and it t well be, then the solution is to Reduce China’s influence on this very important organization. Why is this organization impotent? An epidemic is a world wide issue as we have seen and it doesn’t care about border, race, politics and skin color. Once it gets started, it’s going to go everywhere. The WHO did blinder, but also keep in mind That when you read what they’re wrote - “No evidence of human to human transmission” - it means exactly nothing! no evidence (yet) doesn’t mean that there is no human to human transmission, it just means that they hunt seen evidence that proof yet. The US he their own boots on the ground and regardless of what the WHO said, we had information already, the intelligence briefing mid January was proof of this. Keep in mind that this thread was started in late January l all based on public domain info. So the failure of the WHO is no excuse for the failure of the US to deal with this internally, especially since many countries have done this so much better l even though they had no better intel than the US. The failure of the WHO need to be investigated and will, other countries have asked for it, but killing the WHO and having no equivalent can’t be the solution. The WHO has helped to prevent Ebola and SARS from becoming an epidemic in the past and maybe others as well. It’s a pretty small insurance policy (~$560M is really a drop on the bucket compared to what we spent to fix this problem).

jschembs, alwaysdrawing & meiroy, If you read some of the latest pages in this topic with focus on "How did USA end up in this actual situation?" - [related to the situation about the Corona virus in the USA] - based on different political orientations, it will actually provide value to you. -There is actually a common denominator & agreement, which is an underlying shared general & deep frustration in the various posts about the situation [, which to me is somehow comforting]. Let’s say it that way. My friends and relatives in Germany are a whole lot more worried about our family than they are about their situation. The stats in my state (MA) are 20x worse than they are over there.

Exactly. It's also a matter of size. For a company as large as Amazon, with their revenue and access to capital, it's not that big of a deal to buy some bankrupt retail assets when the opportunity presents itself. I bet they buy JCP just for the properties. They probably redo them into last mile warehouses.

Yes, PGR is a LT winner. They have increased their revenue growth going into property insurance (they used to do only car) and it’s not clear if they have the same advantage there. It’s trading a bit above its LT valuation baseline. I would buy it if I can get it below 1x EV/ sales. PGR doesn't write its own property. They offload it to the likes of Homesite and First American. This is the reason for their wildly inconsistent policies and pricing across the markets, interesting complaint rates patterns, and varying agent experiences. They are very strong when it comes to auto/motorcycles though I'm not a buyer at these valuations. On a personal note, we switched from Progressive to Erie (home/auto/umbrella) because the quote was about the same but Erie's coverage was substantially better. I wasn’t aware of PGR not writing it’s own property insurance - then it sounds like the deal Geico had with Traveller where they resold Traveller homeowners as a bundle. I found that I can beat Geico’s standalone and bundle price every time with a bundle from an other insurer. In CA, that was Mercury and now on the East coast, with mutual insurers.

re MRNA - they release results of a phase 1 trial. Got a sweet hard deal from the government for vaccine development. Technology sort of unproven and now do a stock offering for $1.25B. How many ethics violations all done at once does this represent? If this doesn’t represent the current state of regulatory capture and pump and dump scheme of the capital markets, I don’t know what will. https://investors.modernatx.com/news-releases/news-release-details/moderna-announces-proposed-public-offering-shares-common-stock-0

Added to HDG.AS (Hunter Douglas ) recently. World leader in window coverings. Cheap and low leverage (debt ~1x EBITDA) . Family run (83%+ owned) and quite illiquid. Bought some before COVID-19 and averaged down after surprisingly good Q1 results. They sure will take a hit from COVID-19 downturn, but it just seems to cheap. http://investor.hunterdouglasgroup.com/news-releases/news-release-details/hunter-douglas-results-q1-2020

Here is a good visualization if current COVD-19 data. I found that the representation usually put forth by the states sucks, it these graphs show actually relevant numbers like - of positive as well as number of cases ( both are Important and need to be seen in context since More tests means more cases). Anyways, this has the total US numbers as well as the charts for each state: https://public.tableau.com/profile/peter.james.walker#!/vizhome/COVID-19SeeYourState/YourStateKeys

LOL. As if the Virus cares about Politics.

Why EV/sales as a metric? Do you expect earnings/sales to falls? It’s not expensive on P/E (like most financials. ) Yes, margins are currently above average and using my price/ sales target would account for mean reversal.

Likely not overcounted. NS is relying on excess mortality numbers but not adjusting downwards for traditional completeness estimates and not adjusting downwards (or upwards) for non-COVID death trends. The former is more important. Recent weekly reports of excess mortality are adjusted upwards for incompleteness, by determined by the %s of reports completed in a certain time t, compared to prior time t-1. This method assumes that excess COVID deaths are prevalent in all incomplete geographies equally - which is most likely not the case. Thanks, I know this is your area of expertise. These excess death numbers are not without issues either, but they serve as a good sanity check for the COVID-19 related death numbers . They revealed that the U.K. for example is undercounting (they admitted such pretty much), but Belgium (which has pretty bad looking numbers ) is over counting (since they count suspect cases as COVID-19 death).

One of the biggest risk in investing is knowing too much about too little, Imo.

Yes, PGR is a LT winner. They have increased their revenue growth going into property insurance (they used to do only car) and it’s not clear if they have the same advantage there. It’s trading a bit above its LT valuation baseline. I would buy it if I can get it below 1x EV/ sales.

CINF is another P&C insurer that doesn’t have expect Virus exclusions in their contracts. Ever since they disclosed this on their CC, the stock has been weak. TRV has explicit Virus exclusion in most of their contracts according to their last CC. I recently bought some. CB also seems OK, but was a bit more Evasive. They have been good underwriters traditionally. Note that business interruption is Traditionally only meant to pay in case it prevents the business from operating due to property damage , but apparently they will get tested by some lawyers. It’s much more harder to argue for paying when it is explicitly excluded, so I think lawyers will go after those that don’t have the Virus exclusion.

COVID-19 death likely undercounted (Nate Silver): https://twitter.com/abcpolitics/status/1262026365907410949?s=21

Biergarten in Bavaria are opening up again. I have been to that on on the picture. https://www.br.de/nachrichten/deutschland-welt/biergaerten-oeffnen-wieder-corona-lockerungen-in-bayern-ab-montag,RyrdS5C Regulations differ from state to state, but the basic rules are the same. Interesting, my mom told me yesterday that cafe’s and restaurants in her town are opened up last week, but every customer one needs to leave a short form with address and contact information. Likely for contact tracing if any outbreak were to occur.

Here are the antibody numbers from some harder his neighborhoods in Boston. Roughly 10% have antibodies, 2.6% were COVID-19 positive. I thought the antibody numbers would be a bit higher by now - we did have higher numbers in Chelsea (~30% and they’d a few weeks back - Chelsea is hardest hit in MA). https://www.boston.com/news/coronavirus/2020/05/15/boston-coronavirus-antibody-testing-results Herd immunity certainly a long way off. Here in the boonies, 35 miles from Boston, we haven’t even started yet. MA is in no man’s land as far as the epidemic is concerned - no herd immunity in sight, but also case numbers aren’t coming down quick enough to do control the disease, if we open up. The leaky shelter in place that we are having doesn’t really get anywhere. There probably is no choice but open up, can’t be shut down forever. Governor Baker will announce his plans tomorrow.

That’s my thinking too. How effective the WFH work style depends heavily on the work force and the nature of the work. When you have a cohesive team they is used to work together, working from home may work quite well. If you have a lot of newer people that need coaching and training and high turnover workforce then it is probably not going to well. In either case, I can see a lot of benefits of meeting and working together in a centralized location from time to time. Personally, I could do 75% of my work well from home , but the remainder would be bit more iffy and at least less efficient.

The first line Ebola treatment is an antibody treatment from Regeneron. It roughly halved the mortality. https://investor.regeneron.com/news-releases/news-release-details/new-england-journal-medicine-publishes-results-ebola-clinical There is a long way from preclinical to a treatment on the Market.

I am not sure which prison data you are referring to. Here are some samples https://www.inquirer.com/news/coronavirus-testing-montgomery-county-jail-asymptomatic-philadelphia-prisons-20200428.html Montgomery County’s jail tested every inmate for COVID-19 — and found 30 times more cases than previously known "171 of those positive inmates exhibited no symptoms at the time their tests were administered." They had 177 test positive of which 171 asympatomatic again confirming Stanford study that there are many asymptomatic cases. Its just that all countries test only with symptoms that we have high CFR. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2020/04/25/coronavirus-testing-prisons-reveals-hidden-asymptomatic-infections/3003307001/ Mass virus testing in state prisons reveals hidden asymptomatic infections; feds join effort More than 90% of the newly diagnosed inmates displayed no symptoms, https://www.axios.com/coronavirus-prisons-asymptomatic-8daaaa08-b53e-4368-adb7-88b7d93efece.html 96% of nearly 3,300 inmates with coronavirus were asymptomatic, survey shows https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-prisons-testing-in/in-four-u-s-state-prisons-nearly-3300-inmates-test-positive-for-coronavirus-96-without-symptoms-idUSKCN2270RX Of the 2,028 who tested positive, close to 95% had no symptoms. I can go on...but the primary conclusion of Stanford study that when we are calculating case fatality rate after testing mostly symptomatic suspected patients, we are missing a lot of asymptomatic infected carriers which would give much smaller IFR. The WHO said 3.5% CFR with low asymptomatic rate which would make 3.5% IFR. WHO still says there are very few asymptomatic covid infected and never updated the 3.5% CFR. So, the prison data infact does support Stanford findings. I am referring to Ohio prison data. Pundits mention that 95% were asymptotic (which means exactly what with prisoners), but they still have around a 1% fatality rate. So ~20% of the symptomic prisoners died.

The Ohio Prison stats seem to indicate a mortality rate of 0.9% (4321 tested positive, 43 died), allürisoner tested apparently, so that a true rate. The Anti study (N=300) that inferred about 15% of the population had the virus inferred a 0.75% fatality rate. The recent Spanish antibody study estimates that 5% had COVID-19. so that’s 47M x0.05=2.35M infected and with 27.5k dead, that‘s a ~1.1% mortality rate. All those mortality rate are likely to go up because of the long tail of morbidity. The results vary of course but I think ~0.8% is a good estimate for the time being. Some countries are doing much better than which gives me hope. The 0.15% of the Stanford study is likely due to erroneous results skewed by false positives. https://www.physiciansweekly.com/spanish-antibody-study-points/

Interesting - these are vineyards (Pfalz?) not grape varieties. Earthy stuff from that area. I grew up surrounded by Rieslings vineyards. I could look at the Wehlener Sonnenuhr Rieslings vineyards from school. Good stuff and I can get it NH liquor stores. I like the Rieslings and other whites from the Finger lakes (upstate NY). They come closest to German wines, imo. There are some Canadian wines from Lake Okanagan area that are equally good, imo. I’d love to go back there. There is a town there that bears the name of our son.

In this, the expert article, also referring to the now famous church coir incident, He estimates that: ~50% transmission are due to aerosols , risk factors: closed areas with bad air circulation and many people on it, speaking and even worse singing 40% larger droplets 10% smear/touch So hand washing may not help that much. Mask helps some, but only N95 helps against aerosols. Staying and meeting other folks outside is probably best. The Church cases are intriguing. One infected person in a large room could infect 30 s with just one exposure. The fact that singing apparently lead to more aerosol emission is likely a contributing factor. This is all a bit speculative, but it does make sense. https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/medizin/covid-19-belastete-troepfchen-machen-geschlossene-raeume-zu-infektionsherden-a-7522885d-7553-4acc-ac5d-ac603552ed06 https://www.erinbromage.com/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them

And BK and USB: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/36104/000120919120029062/xslF345X03/doc4a.xml

And everyone would lose. No, Liberty (the concept) would win. ;) How naive you are. You think China would come out of a world war more democratic? You think liberty in the US would increase in the face of nuclear war? You think Taiwan wouldn't be potentially destroyed? You think dead people are free? Didn't Germany and Japan come out of a world war more democratic? Yes, but it took two trials though. The first one made it worse. I don’t think we want to go there.

Litigation lawyers and lobbyist are leeches, at least on the society as a whole. however depending on how you look at it, they do provide a lot of value for their “customers”, ar least in some cases. Controversial take: All religious organizations can be regarded as leeches. I would rate the Catholic Church as the biggest and certainly one of the most durable ones ( full disclosure: I was raised catholic)