You can find the first two reports on this article on my home page or here ( ONE | TWO PART 1 )
Next, let’s focus on the United States.
At the beginning of the epidemic in the United States, Trump has been calling on people not to panic and treat the epidemic as if it were the flu. It’s no big deal.
In an interview with Fox News on March 4, Trump said that the mortality data previously released by the World Health Organization (3.4%) were not correct in his view, and according to his intuition, the mortality rate should be less than 1% (currently the global mortality rate except China is 3%).
Trump also invented a word called corona flu, which translates to “new crown flu”.
Trump has been trying to treat the new crown epidemic like the flu.
On the other hand, the US CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) is not very powerful.
The official test kit was originally designed as a four-in-one function (that is, a box can detect multiple viruses at the same time), but after actual use, it is found that there are technical defects, not only slow detection but also often uncertain, resulting in CDC unable to carry out large-scale testing.
At the end of February, officials had to let go of state laboratories to develop their own testing boxes.
A few days ago, the University of Washington developed its own testing box and held a press conference to announce that it would conduct its own testing.
Subsequently, the number of confirmed cases in Washington State quickly climbed to 182, and employees of Microsoft, Amazon and other companies were diagnosed with the infection.
Another noteworthy figure is that the total number of deaths in the United States to date is 31, of which 25 are in Washington State, accounting for 80%. This figure is extremely abnormal (the number of confirmed cases in Washington State is less than 20% of the total number of confirmed cases in the United States).
A more reasonable explanation is that some patients who died as a result of the new crown epidemic were not counted in the United States because they died before they could be tested.
The number of deaths from the epidemic in the United States is likely to be greatly underestimated.
What is more intriguing is that the willingness to test CDC in the United States does not seem to be high.
For a long time, the CDC set the test threshold so high that many patients who wanted to do the test could not be tested. (as previously written, the first locally transmitted case in the United States made a request for testing many times, but was rejected by the CDC because it could not meet the test criteria, and was not tested until the person was dying, and was finally diagnosed as positive).
On March 5, the American Nursing Union held a press conference.
Deborah Burger, president of the nurses’ association, read out a letter from a female nurse in California.
The female nurse developed symptoms after testing a confirmed patient, so she was quarantined.
During the quarantine observation, the female nurse and her hospital, as well as local health officials, asked for her to be tested for the virus, but the CDC refused.
CDC refused because she was wearing protective clothing, so she would not be infected with novel coronavirus, so she did not need to be tested.
“What kind of science-based answer is this?”
“What an absurd and ignorant response for a department that controls the health of the country?”
The president of the nurses’ association heckled CDC angrily at a news conference and said nurses had union support and had to ensure that nurses themselves were protected before they could protect their patients (almost going on strike).
Perhaps under the pressure of public opinion, CDC recently changed his view and asked patients who wanted to take the test to go to a doctor on their own, only to be resented by New York Governor Cuomo.
Cuomo said CDC sent patients to see a doctor, but Vice President Pence said they could not do so many tests, causing many people to call and say they wanted to do the test results could not be tested but added to the fear of the public.
Cuomo angrily denounced CDC’s response to the outbreak as “absurd and confused” and accused the Trump administration of managing the outbreak as a “bad plan made by a bad government.”
Combined with a previous report in the New York Times, it was said that US Vice President Pence exercised full control over the news about novel coronavirus.
Virus experts in the United States have also received instructions from the White House not to release information at will without permission.
And Trump repeatedly compared the new crown epidemic with the flu.
This series of operations all point in the same direction-Trump is creating a sense that the epidemic is less serious in order to avoid panic hitting the stock market and causing panic to the psychology of the masses.
But capital markets are not that gullible.
For the uncertainty that the epidemic brings to the US economy and the world economy, many investors will sell their stocks out of risk aversion.
I think this is one of the reasons for the recent decline in US stocks (in the process, leveraged investors may be forced to close their positions because share prices fall too fast, or the quantitative trading model triggers the selling mechanism during the plunge, thus strengthening the downward momentum).
