Jurgis

I have a great business idea. http://www.waldeneffect.org/20120612solarcoolinghat.jpg Just point fans away from the hat and fans would blow away any viruses coming towards a person. This is insta profit. You can thank me later.

LOL, it's kind of ridiculous, but also kind of true. Do you remember in late 2007/early 2008, when a bunch of people on this board were saying "all this crap is happening, and the market is barely reacting negatively. Are we insane, or do we just not get it?" Then in summer 2008, everything collapsed. This felt the same way in February--all this bizarre stuff was happening in the world, but the market remained high for no apparent reason. I could've put 5% percentage of my portfolio in VIX calls and doubled my portfolio. I wouldn't do more than 5%, because you don't need to, timing is hard, and I could be wrong. But it was really obvious from around mid-February that we were in trouble (basically, once containment failed and the virus started popping up all over outside China.) Yes, it was quite obvious. No, I did not sell/hedge/buy puts/etc. The portfolio is down XX%. Like Buffett says, I think I know who the patsy is. ::)

New rule: if the market's obviously going to crash because of a massive pandemic, sell everything, buy levered OOM puts, ... , profit, retire to an island with private jet and no viruses.

This thread has jumped the f%cking shark so high that it's the snakes on the plane all the way down. Please continue. Especially rb. If you survive man, a beer is on me.

Yeah, but there are new cases in Japan. Just few. So they have virus inside the island. And with very little testing going on it should be superspread. Unless they somehow are really lucky to get every single person early on.

Yeah, I'm talking to friend in Japan right now and it's super weird. They don't test. There is pretty much no social isolation. Trains are packed. Masks are used, but not by majority and even people using masks take them off, wipe face with hands, etc. It's just super weird that they don't have superspread.

Number of people dying of malaria is about 400.000 per year. Let's say we value these people's lives at a conservative 100K. So, say, we invest 40 billion a year in trying to save these people. According to the Bill Gates Foundations a 100 billion investment will eradicate the disease forever, so that's what, 2,5 years, and after that zero deaths forever. Atmittedly, a very poor back-of-the-napkin calculation, but so is everybody's virus math as well. And btw, those dying of malaria are mostly children. Those dying of this virus are mostly old people. If you re-do the math based on life expectancy the situation becomes even more ridiculous. But will we invest those kinds of money, or even a fraction? Nah, probably not. We don't see them dying, and those dying will never be us, so why bother. Not saying Trump is right with his "let's get back to work and fuck it"-attitude, but the hypocrisy about how much a life is worth gets to me sometimes. Yes, this is an issue.

Cherry trees are blooming in Tokyo. This is such a beautiful sight that Japanese are all flocking to the parks and saying "Sakuru social distancing!"

Would you really give up kissing just because of some virus?

For people who are saying that everyone should wear mask: where should people get these masks from? Masks are not available for purchasing over a month now. They were out of stock in February and the situation has not improved.

Tail section risk is not that high: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_structural_failures ;D

Yeah, I cannot get toilet paper, so I use $ bills instead. Cheaper too.

It is (hardly) surprising how myopic even intelligent and trained investors are when considering complex systems with multiple levels of effects. 1. Let's move manufacturing to US! - And let's pay increased prices for products. Let's NOT move manufacturing to lowest cost countries, cause consumers will be just fine with higher prices and will never reward cheaper sourcing of goods. And shareholders will cheer companies manufacturing in higher cost locations and having lower margins. NOT. 2. Let's prepare for next pandemic and have ... 10x ICUs ... 10x ventilators ... cause nobody cares about the healthcare costs. The extra capacity costs will be gladly absorbed by taxpayers or shareholders. NOT? 3. Let's not source drugs from China ... cause shareholders and taxpayers would revolt on using substandard source with no quality control ... they would gladly absorb the costs of manufacturing in high quality facility in US. Yeah! Great! All pharma shareholders let's unite and vote for that!

Saw this claim on a roll of toilet paper: "1 roll lasts 1 week" I said "No sh1t!"

You were right, the NAV as of the close yesterday was $48 and it traded between $44.5 and $45.5. It seems like a pretty low risk way to make 5 to 6% in short order as the price of the ETF converges on NAV once selling pressure subsides. You are assuming price is gonna go up to NAV rather than NAV is gonna go down to price. This is far from assured.

Everything.

Lurker for years, my first post on this forum. I had the sae thing in late January. Extreme stomach discomfort that started quite suddenly leading to bouts of vomiting. I couldn't even drive myself back home without puking into a bag. The stomach discomfort got better in 24 hours (mild fever also went away). Then the coughing started which later days. I'd wake up at nights to cough for few minutes each time. Chest tightness also began. I'm a lot better now, but my chest tightness isn't fully gone. If I fully relax my body I can feel a tiny bit of resistance to talking in a whole breath of air. I also have asthma and using my inhaler helped! CorpRaider, keep hope and stay happy. Positivity helps the immune system. Thank God for Netflix. I watched a ton of comedy when I was going through the bug, whatever it was. Stay hydrated!! I never considered Corona seriously but it does look like the symptoms are correlated. Now if there was community transmission in late January, just imagine how off we are with the denominator. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. The hard thing with exponentials is that it's easy to be way off if we are even slightly off in any parameter. What if we are wrong on the start date by a couple of weeks or so? Orthopa's anecdotes and line of thought seems reasonable to me. This might be neither the flu nor COVID-19. It happens quite a bit that viral infections are diagnosed (by exclusion?) and it tests negative for flu. My son years ago had periodic spouts of sickness we could never get to the bottom of. Sometimes, it was just a stomach flu (vomiting), sometimes it was high fever (so high they we went to the ICU with him because were scared) and always tested negative for flu. These period spouts of virus infection went away by itself thankfully as he grow older. I am not a doctor, so don’t claim to know much, but seem seems to be quite often viral infections around they don’t seem to test positive for flu. Anyways, good luck and hopefully you feel better. Even if its’s just a stomach flu it’s no fun, I had my fair shares of those way back, I am afraid that because COVID-19 is not tested, a lot of people may self-diagnose as COVID even though it isn't. (Of course, there's also the opposite: people may self-diagnose as non-COVID even though it is.) Even if these people are tested negative for flu (but then flu testing is also not very common), it's still not necessarily COVID.

This. I've been to Finland a lot and visited Norway two years ago. Great places. In summer. ;) (I've been to Sweden too, but ... who cares 8) )

These people are officially tested and diagnosed or just suspecting that they have CoVid but not tested? Best well wishes to all of them.

Vitamin D deficiency has also long been theorized as one of the factors causing influenza seasonality. See, for example, this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/study-confirms-vitamin-d-protects-against-cold-and-flu/ On the other hand, some studies have suggested that Vitamin D supplementation doesn't do much to present viral respiratory tract infections: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28719693 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26951286 As you note, Vitamin D is very cheap. You can also google to find recent evidence regarding the levels of supplementation that might lead to toxicity (tl;dr -- there appears to be plenty of room to supplement without causing any significant problems). Based on this research, I've been supplementing with Vitamin D since last fall with good results re common cold symptoms (which are an issue with two small children in the house). Of course, n=1 doesn't provide much evidence of anything. Just FYI, there is some evidence that very high doses of Vitamin D can cause/contribute to kidney stones: http://www.vitamindsupplement.com/vitamin-d-and-kidney-stones/ So, don't overdo it, don't mega dose thinking it can't have negative effects. (Anecdotally, I've had kidney stone symptoms that seemed to be correlated with high Vitamin D doses. YMMV.) What was the "high dose" that you were taking? I've read that natural exposure to the sun during summer can often give you an equivalent dose to 15-20k UIs, the body seems pretty good at dealing with higher doses (better than lower doses). It certainly depends where you live, but here in Canada, for someone who's inside the house most of the day, I'm probably getting little naturally so supplementation makes a lot of sense. I've been doing mostly 5k uis during summer and 8-10k uis during winter, probably for about 15 years. It clearly depends on a person. I was taking 5K IUs close to daily. Now I am taking 5K IUs twice a week with no kidney stone symptoms.

Vitamin D deficiency has also long been theorized as one of the factors causing influenza seasonality. See, for example, this paper: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870528/ https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/02/study-confirms-vitamin-d-protects-against-cold-and-flu/ On the other hand, some studies have suggested that Vitamin D supplementation doesn't do much to present viral respiratory tract infections: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28719693 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26951286 As you note, Vitamin D is very cheap. You can also google to find recent evidence regarding the levels of supplementation that might lead to toxicity (tl;dr -- there appears to be plenty of room to supplement without causing any significant problems). Based on this research, I've been supplementing with Vitamin D since last fall with good results re common cold symptoms (which are an issue with two small children in the house). Of course, n=1 doesn't provide much evidence of anything. Just FYI, there is some evidence that very high doses of Vitamin D can cause/contribute to kidney stones: http://www.vitamindsupplement.com/vitamin-d-and-kidney-stones/ So, don't overdo it, don't mega dose thinking it can't have negative effects. (Anecdotally, I've had kidney stone symptoms that seemed to be correlated with high Vitamin D doses. YMMV.)

His advice against taking acetaminophen/tylenol is somewhat controversial. I've heard this theory (i.e. don't reduce fever, your body fights disease better when in fever) before. It is not what most doctors suggest although it is possible that anti-fever medications are overprescribed and overused. Do more research or follow what your doctor says. Also: https://www.thejournal.ie/ibuprofen-cuh-coronavirus-whatsapp-5047311-Mar2020/

"It's just a better version of flu" people are still alive... praise the lord!

They should do infra. But they can't really do infra or anything economy boosting until the pandemic has passed. OK, they can actually throw money on producing tests and building ICU units in 2 days like China did... They could throw money at delivering meals to people who are out of work because of shutdown and quarantine (assuming there's a way to do it safely). Possibly would cost less and deliver more than just cutting the rates. BWDIK.

This.