/biz/ - Business & Finance

>>17222186
>>17222226
>>17222366
But wait, there's more.
Let's assume for an instant that 20% of the Chinese population contract nCov19. This is not at all an unlikely scenario at this point. (The Spanish Flu infected 70% of people worldwide and hygiene standards haven't improved much in rural China since then while vastly increased population density in urban areas poses new challenges).
So here we go:
20% means roughly 300M people. We know from the confirmed (possibly fake, as in too positive) data that 80% of patients recover on their own, but 20% require intensive care. This subset experiences a mortality rate of 15% with full support from lung machines, 24h care and medication. However, there is no conceivable way for the Chinese government to prepare adequate care for 60+M infected. The intensive care mortality rate will skyrocket to 50+% once hospitals get completely overwhelmed, a process which we already see unfold.
This means, if the nation-wide containment in China isn't working much, much better than expected, there's a reasonable chance that we'll see 30.000.000 dead Chinks by April.
This may not seem like much in the grand scheme of things but it would totally cripple China for at least 6 months and absolutely ruin their GDP growth which has been under performing for years.
If they've been faking the mortality rate and it's more comparable to SARS at 10%, then things could get even worse than that.
China could lose a decade of gains and its ambitions to overtake the US as the #1 in global GDP by 2025 would evaporate. The entire geopolitical paradigm of the 21st century would be restructured to a substantial extent.
And all this just because some supreme gourmont had to have his uma delicia soupa de batto. What a strange world we live in.