I've been watching the worldwide "virus" map for a week or so now. Interesting what is starting to happen ... many countries are basically lying about their infection rates right now. China has basically stopped reporting data to the WHO. Countries like India with 1.1 BILLION people says they only have 72 cases ... uhhh OK.
Basically BILLIONS of dollars a day are lost when a country reports a high infection rate, tourism stops, foreign business travel stops, investments drop. So what we are seeing is a fudging of figures and creation of erroneous figures to maintain a sense of normalcy to the last possible moment.
Imagine a city with a fecal coli-form out break in all the restaurants, everyone starts out being honest, but when the money starts going away, every restaurant wants to be the last one still open, the last one still making money.
On a global scale it could mean Trillions of dollars of income lost or gained. And because of this, the data being reported is going to be absolutely worthless in the coming weeks. Which means that the powers that be are going to be helpless to stop the spread without accurate data.
Italy is probably the only country so far that has done extensive testing, and accurate reporting of data .... and of course it's destroying their economy. By the time the US gets around to large scale testing it's going to be too late to generate any kind of meaningful public policy.
However, I'm of the belief that the mortality rates are far exaggerated right now, there are some epidemiologists that are saying for every one person that has been confirmed, there are 10 that have it and show no serious symptoms, and so are not counted as infected, which inflates the mortality rate.
The biggest flaw I'm seeing worldwide right now is a lack of accurate and timely information about travel restrictions, treatment, infection rates, etc. Lots of governments are basically responding based on rumors.
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