Tag: INDONESIA

Americans “Should Prepare For Community Spread,” CDC Warns As HHS’ Azar Admits US Lacks Mask Stockpile: Live Updates

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by Tyler Durden
Tue, 02/25/2020 – 09:55

Summary:

  • WHO warns the rest of the world “is not ready for the virus to spread…”

  • CDC warns Americans “should prepare for possible community spread” of virus.

  • HHS Sec. Azar warns US lacks stockpiles of masks

  • Italy Hotel in Lockdown After First Coronavirus Case in Liguria

  • First case in Switzerland

  • First case in Austria

  • First case in Spain

  • Iran Deputy Health Minister infected with Covid-19

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Update (1145ET): US CDC says COVID-19 epidemic is rapidly evolving and expanding, warning that a vaccine could be ready in a year, and Americans should prepare for possible spreads in communities.

“Now is the time for businesses, hospitals, communities, and schools to begin preparing to respond to coronavirus.”

Additionally, HHS Secretary Alex Azar says at Senate panel hearing that the U.S. doesn’t have enough stockpiles of masks and ventilators to fight the coronavirus and that’s one reason the Trump administration is seeking $2.5b in funding.

About 30m so-called N95 respirator masks are stockpiled but as many as 300m are needed for healthcare workers, Azar says, adding that his department doesn’t yet know how much they would cost.

Democratic Sen. Patty Murray, who questioned the administration’s readiness to battle the spread of the virus:

“I’m deeply concerned we’re way behind the eight ball on this,” Murray said while questioning Azar at the Appropriations subcmte hearing.

Azar also says the money would be used to help develop vaccines and treatments for the virus and that a vaccine could be ready in a year.

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Update (1100ET): WHO’s Bruce Aylward told journalists that China’s actions “prevented hundreds of thousands of cases” and warned that the rest of the world “is not ready for the virus to spread,” adding that “countries should instruct citizens now on hygeine.”

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Update (1001ET): A case of the novel corona virus has been confirmed for the first time in Switzerland. The federal government announced on Tuesday. One person was tested positive for the virus, said those responsible.

Italian officials stated that the first patient was “obviously infected in Italy,” and will consider further measures if they think “uncontrolled transmission” of the virus is occurring.

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Update (0950ET): Spanish authorities have confirmed the fourth case of coronavirus in Catalonia, according to La Vanguardia.

Jordan has banned flights arriving from Italy, becoming the first country in the region to guard against travelers from Europe’s third-largest economy.

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Update (0900ET): Iran’s MP Mahmoud Sadeghi said he had tested positive for the coronavirius, telling supporters: “I don’t have a lot of hope of continuing life in this world”.

CBS has confirmed that it was an Italian doctor visiting the Spanish isle of Tenerife who prompted all guests at his hotel to be confined to their rooms on Tuesday. The country has now confirmed nearly 60 cases on Tuesday.

In the UAE, home to long-haul carriers Emirates and Etihad, airlines have suspended flights to and from Iran for at least a week, cutting the country’s 80 million people off from thousands of flights.

Unsurprisingly, the Dems were quick to slam the White House’s $2.5 billion spending plan that was sent lawmakers on Monday to address the deadly coronavirus outbreak. Democrats said the request fell far short of what’s needed.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called the president’s request “long overdue and completely inadequate to the scale of this emergency” in a statement released Monday. She added that the House would propose a “strong, strategic” funding package of its own to address the public health crisis.

Because nothing solves a public health crisis like a political stalemate.

“We have a crisis of coronavirus and President Trump has no plan, no urgency, no understanding of the facts or how to coordinate a response,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.

Trump joked in public remarks Tuesday that if he had authorized more, Chuck Schumer and the rest would be criticizing him, saying “it should be less.”

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For those who have been watching, CNBC has been talking up a storm about the drugmaker Moderna, which delivered its first experimental coronavirus vaccine for testing, with the clinical trial slated to start in April. The WSJ is supposedly one reason why market’s are clinging to optimism on Tuesday.

The CDC’s Dr. Fauci praised the development, said “nothing has ever gone that fast.”

“Going into a Phase One trial within three months of getting the sequence is unquestionably the world indoor record. Nothing has ever gone that fast,” Dr. Fauci said.

As Jim Cramer won’t stop repeating Tuesday morning, the advances are “really remarkable.”

Finally, Austrian health officials have confirmed that at least one of the likely coronavirus patients isolated Tuesday was an Italian living in the country.

This comes after Italian authorities reported the first coronavirus case in the country’s south: a tourist visiting Sicily who had traveled from Bergamo, an Italian city in the Lombardy region.

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Update (0825ET): Bahrain has banned its citizens from traveling to Iran as it reports 9 new cases of coronavirus, raising the total cases in the tiny island kingdom to 17 in the span of 24 hours.

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Update (0800ET): With his reputation under fire and his popularity slipping, PM Giuseppe Conte said Tuesday that he’s confident that the measures his government has put in place will contain the contagion in the coming days.

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This comes after the PM admitted that a hospital in Lombardy inadvertently helped spread the virus by not adhering to certain health-care protocols. The PM has blamed the hospital for the outbreak in the north, raising questions about whether “the European nation is capable of containing the outbreak,” according to CNN. To put things in perspective, Italy now has 3x the number of cases in Hong Kong.

“That certainly contributed to the spread,” Conte said, without naming the institution concerned. The infection has been centered around the town of Codogno, around 35 miles south of Milan.

“Obviously we cannot predict the progress of the virus. It is clear that there has been an outbreak and it has spread from there,” Conte told reporters, referring to the hospital.

A team of health experts from the World Health Organization and the European Center for Disease Prevention and Control arrived in Italy on Monday to assist local authorities while some 100,000 remain under an effective quarantine.

Over in India, Trump added to his earlier comments by saying a vaccine is “very close”, even though the most generous estimates claim we need another year.

Market experts cited a WSJ report on a possible vaccine as helping market sentiment, though even that report made clear that human tests of the drug are not due until the end of April and results not until July or August.

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Update (0650ET): It’s not even 7 am in the US, and it looks like a new outbreak is beginning in Central Europe.

Local news agencies report that Croatia has confirmed its first case, while the Austrian Province of Tyrol has confirmed two cases.

In South Korea, meanwhile, officials have just confirmed the 11th coronavirus-linked death, a Mongolian man in his mid-30s who had a preexisting liver condition.

Over in India, where President Trump is in the middle of an important state visit with the newly reelected Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the president struck an optimistic tone once again claiming that the virus will be a “short-term” problem that won’t have a lasting impact on the global economy.

“I think it’s a problem that’s going to go away,” he said.

Trump also reportedly told a group of executives gathered in India that the US has “essentially closed the borders” (well, not really) and that “we’re fortunate so far and we think it’s going to remain that way,” according to CNN.

Meanwhile, SK officials announced they’re aiming to test more than 200,000 members of the Shincheonji Church of Jesus, the “cult-like” church at the center of the outbreak in SK.

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Last night, a post written by Paul Joseph Watson highlighted commentary from a Harvard epidemiology professor (we realize we’ve heard from pretty much the whole department at this point in the crisis, but bear with us for a moment) who believes that, at some point, ‘we will all get the coronavirus’.

Well, up to 70% of us, but you get the idea: The notion that this outbreak is far from over is finally starting to sink in. Stocks are struggling to erase yesterday’s losses, with US futures pointing to an open in the green after the biggest drop in two years. More corporations trashing their guidance, and more research offering a glimpse of the faltering Chinese economy (offering a hint that all the crematoriums are keeping air pollution levels elevated even as coal consumption and travel plunge) have seemingly trampled all over the market’s Fed-ensured optimism.

And across Europe, the Middle East and the Far East, headlines tied to the outbreak hit at a similarly non-stop pace on Tuesday.

With so much news, where to start?

In China, data out of the Transport Ministry revealed that barely one-third of China’s workforce has returned to work, despite state-inspired threats. CNN reported Tuesday that only 30% of small businesses in China have returned to work. The problem? Travel disruption has left millions of migrant workers stranded. There’s also the question of schools: Some cities, including Shanghai, are offering students the option of completing their studies online after March 2.

China’s rapidly advancing tech sector has responded to the crisis by unleashing a wide range of technologies outfitted for specific tasks, including ferrying supplies to medical workers, fitting drones with thermal cameras and leveraging computer-processing power to aid the search for a vaccine.

In a televised interview, one health official said it might take 28 days to safely say an area is free of coronavirus, while another official insisted that “low risk” areas should “resume normal activity” on Tuesday. The government is dividing the country outside Hubei and Beijing into three ‘risk’ tranches, and will mandate that those in the lowest tranche get back to work, school or whatever they were doing before the virus hit.

Investors are clearly concerned that, instead of the ‘v’-shaped recovery promised by the IMF, the economic bounce-back from the coronavirus might be closer to a “u”-shape. On top of that, as cases proliferate in South Korea, Italy and the US, pundits are beginning to worry that the rest of the world is where China was two months ago – in other words

Throughout the day, South Korea confirmed 144 more cases, bringing the country-wide total to 977, the highest number outside China.

As the Korean government warns that foreigners shouldn’t travel there, Korean Air Lines and Asiana Airlines, to South Korean airlines, said they would halt flights to Daegu until next month, leaving the door open to a longer shutdown.

On Tuesday afternoon, South Korean President Moon Jae-in traveled to Daegu, the city where more than half of the country’s cases have been detected, and advised its residents to stay indoors but pledged to avoid the draconian restrictions Chinese authorities implemented in Wuhan.

Outbreak-related news in Seoul took on a more morbid tone Tuesday following reports in the local press that a civil servant from the Ministry of Justice’s Emergency Safety Planning Office jumped off a bridge in Seoul at around 5 am local time Tuesday.

The official was one of several individuals charged with overseeing the government’s response to the virus. As cases soar and hysteria mounts, we suspect this news won’t exactly help quiet the public’s nerves.

A Singaporean government minister warned that the city-state could impose sweeping travel restrictions targeting South Korea if the outbreak gets worse.

Minutes ago, Italian authorities confirmed another 8 coronavirus cases, 54 of which have been confirmed on Tuesday, bringing the total to 283. 

More than 100,000 Italians in 10 villages are under lockdown in the ‘red zone’ in northern Italy, where the military has been deployed and people have been told to stay inside. Fears about the virus spreading throughout the region were validated yesterday when Spain reported a third case, an Italian traveler. On Tuesday, Reuters reports that Spanish authorities have closed the Tenerife Hotel on the Canary Islands and are testing all of its occupants.

Most of the cases have been recorded in Lombardy (200+), while Veneto, Emilia-Romagna, Piedmont, Bolzano, Trentino and Rome have all confirmed at least one case. The UK government warned that any British travelers in northern Italy should self-isolate, according to the Washington Post.

In Japan, the “J League”, Japan’s professional soccer league, has announced that it will postpone all games until at least March 15, saying in a statement that it’s “fully committed” to stopping the spread of the coronavirus. The decision followed a government recommendation to cancel all public events and gatherings.

Embracing a markedly different approach from Beijing, Japan has announced a new policy on Tuesday designed to focus medical care on the most serious cases, while urging people with mild symptoms to treat themselves at home.

According to the FT, the new strategy of containment announced by a panel overseeing the virus response acknowledged that simply testing everyone potentially exposed to the more than 100 cases outside the ‘Diamond Princess’ would overwhelm its health-care system.

It is radically different approach from that adopted by China,

Though it hasn’t announced new cases in a day or so, Japan has confirmed 840 cases of novel coronavirus so far, with nearly 700 of them linked to the ‘Diamond Princess’ cruise ship.

Iran’s ‘official’ death toll climbed to 14 on Tuesday, with 61 cases confirmed so far. Despite a wave of border closures that left Iran virtually isolated by its neighbors, more cases have started to bleed across the border: Iraqi health ministry officials have confirmed four coronavirus cases in Kirkuk, all of whom are members of a family. He previously looked unwell during a press conference.

Even more embarrassing for the Iranians than having a local lawmaker expose the horrifyingly real death toll: on Tuesday, the government confirmed that a Deputy Health Minister had been sickened by the virus.

We suspect we’ll be hearing more bad news from the Middle East as the full scope of the Iranian outbreak becomes more clear.

 

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COVID-19 Tuesday Morning

By Dr. John Campbell

I may be repeating what others have said, but if the Italian doctor has been in Tenerife for a week, then infections were occurring in Italy at least a week ago. That could explain their relatively high death rates, as there are likely a much larger number of mild cases there. And perhaps elsewhere, as obtaining a covid19 test seems to depend upon contact with Chinese.

Kudos to John for sticking with his convictions. I’ve watched John’s opinion of the WHO slowly slide from disbelief to complete incompetence. This is a positive transition. Keep it up!

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MP INVITES DRAG QUEEN CALLED ‘FLOWJOB’ TO SCHOOL, CALLS COMPLAINING PARENTS “HOMOPHOBIC”

MP Invites Drag Queen Called 'Flowjob' to School, Calls Complaining Parents "Homophobic"

Drag queen had previously uploaded sexually explicit content to Twitter.

  – FEBRUARY 24, 2020

A Scottish MP invited a drag queen called ‘Flowjob’ who had previously uploaded sexually explicit content to Twitter to a primary school and then called parents who complained “homophobic.”

MP Mhairi Black invited ‘Flowjob’ to Glencoates Primary School, Paisley where the drag queen read a story to kids as young as four.

The Sun reports, “The drag queen has regularly uploaded graphic pictures to Twitter, including of simulating a sex act with a dildo and simulating oral sex.”

Parents subsequently complained that they were not informed of the drag queen’s visit and said the visit was “outrageous” and “disgusting.”

“While I don’t agree with the abuse being given, my kids go to this school, there was no information fed to parents about this happening. Surely that’s a parents choice?” one parent told the Daily Star, accusing the ‘woke’ headteacher at the school of trying to further her own career.

“Their username is ‘flowjobqueen’ and their timeline is full of explicit images of them simulating sexual acts. Of course they’ve just just done a drag queen story reading to primary school children,” another parent wrote on social media.

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MP Mhari Black reacted to the criticism by declaring the parents “homophobic.”

“You just know that the people pretending to be livid that a drag queen read a book in a school are also the people who run out to buy their kids the latest Grand Theft Auto on release day,” she said. “Your homophobia is transparent.”

However, children’s rights group forwomen.scot sided with the parents, saying that ‘Flowjob’ was an adult entertainer.

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“Questions about this are legitimate,” the group said in a statement. “A male who dresses as a sexualised parody of a women, goes by the name “flowjob” is hardly a role model for primary aged children. Did no one check this?”

A Renfrewshire Council spokesman said the visit should not have occurred due to the sexually explicit nature of the content posted by ‘Flowjob’, but that it was arranged as part of LGBT History Month.

As we previously highlighted, there have been numerous ‘Drag Queen Story Time’ events at UK libraries, schools and museums in the past few weeks, including an event for under-5’s at a library in Newham, London.

Last month we highlighted the words of an actual drag queen, Kitty Demure, who posted a viral video in which he expressed his amazement at why ‘woke’ parents are allowing their kids to be around drag queens, asking, “Would you want a stripper or a porn star to influence your child?”

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Breaking: Dow Drops 960 Points at Open Over Fears of Coronavirus

by Jim Hoft February 24, 2020

The Dow Jones erased all gains for 2020 at its open on Monday over fears of the spread of the coronavirus.

The stock market was down 3.12% when it opened on Monday.

Over the weekend there were major outbreaks of the coronavirus reported in South Korea, Italy and Iran.
The virus is spreading.

Six nations banned people crossing the border from Iran in an attempt to cut off the spread of the deadly virus.

There are at least 600 cases reported in South Korea.

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Coronavirus: Store Shelves Empty as Panic Buying Hits Italy

Infected victims jump from 3 to 165 in just a few days.

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People in several regions of Italy have reacted to coronavirus spreading throughout the country by panic buying, leaving some store shelves empty.

With 165 people infected, Italy has the most coronavirus victims out of any country in Europe. Five people have died.

Footage out of Milan shot yesterday shows some products almost or entirely out of stock.

Some residents flippantly likened the situation to a “zombie apocalypse.”

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Lock downs are in place in the regions of Lombardy and Veneto, with 50,000 people being unable to leave without special permission.

Numerous museums, cinemas, bars, businesses and schools have also shut down and sporting activities have been suspended.

The Venice Carnival was also cancelled, while designer Giorgio Armani streamed his Milan Fashion Week event from an empty theater.

The panic is largely being driven by the speed at which coronavirus cases in Italy jumped from just 3 on Thursday to over 150 by the end of the weekend.

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Rabobank: Our Coronavirus Base Case Is Rapidly Shifting From “Bad” To “Ugly”

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by Tyler Durden
Mon, 02/24/2020 – 09:38

Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank

Regular readers will know that our four projected COVID-19 scenarios were “Bad, Worse, Ugly, and Unthinkable”. Current news today suggests risks that the base case is rapidly shifting from “Bad”, meaning only China is impacted, to “Ugly”, where both emerging Asia and developed economies see soaring infection rates and deaths.

After all, following Vietnam, Iran now has eight deaths and an uncertain number of cases, prompting schools and universities to closed and the borders with Afghanistan and Pakistan to be sealed from the other side. For an economy already being crushed by sanctions, this is all that it needed. More worrying for markets, South Korea (with a GDP of over USD1 trillion) has also been swamped by hundreds of new cases, a 20-fold leap in just five days, and, as in China, is seeing the highest-level emergency declared, cities on lock-down, gatherings and travel bans in place, and the national assembly additionally suspended. Samsung has had to shutter at least one factory, in the city of Gumi. The Asian economy, already reeling, it about to suffer another major kick.

Worse, in Europe there also are over 160 cases in a cluster in northern Italy, with three deaths so far, and the regions of Lombardy and Veneto, the industrial and financial heartlands, in both panic and lockdown. Venice’s Carnival has been cancelled, and so was a recent fashion show. Italy is 11% of Eurozone GDP, and those two regions are 30% of Italy’s GDP. For a Eurozone already close to recession, that shock could well be more than enough to generate a downturn. Once again, we also see what we said we would in our recent virus special report: a “China-style” response: yesterday a train from Venice to Munich was stopped at the Austrian border because of fears that two passengers on board may have had the virus. So much for Schengen? Recall that the origins of the world “quarantine” come from Venice in an earlier phase of globalisation, and refer to the *40* days sailors had to stay on a visiting ship to prove they were not carrying an infectious disease. No just-in-time supply chains in those days though.

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Meanwhile, China is saying the virus may not have started in the seafood market; hot-headed Chinese social media is saying it might have been America who started it; experts are saying COVID-19 can linger on surfaces for nine days, and is airborne, and can be passively carried with no symptoms for up to *27* days, nearly double the 14 days previously thought; and other reports show that false negative tests are a serious issue, with at least one confirmed case of a patient being tested negative twice and then switching to positive. As the WHO, which has urged us all to travel as normal until now, “because markets”, wails, the window to stop this becoming a global pandemic is closing.

By contrast, China is doing its best to say that all is well. Unsurprisingly, since Party Chairman Xi Jinping placed his hand-picked people in charge, new cases have dropped sharply. Optimists see this means the lockdowns have worked – which means more global lockdowns must now be priced in, however; pessimists suggest data goal-seeking is playing a role here. However, deaths have not fallen yet, with another 97 yesterday raising the overall fatality rate worryingly (and one study of 53 Wuhan patients suggests a 61.5% fatality rate for those with any co-morbidity factor such as diabetes and/or heart or lung disease).

Just as unsurprisingly, Xi has publicly promised China will have beaten the virus by the end of March, and that the overall economic goals for 2020 are still in place, even as right now we are still basically flat-lining as shown by traffic congestion, pollution, and property sales. As we have already covered in recent weeks, the only way for BAU to return ASAP is for everyone to start travelling and gathering and working again: which is exactly how the virus will spread, especially after we have been told there is a 27-day latent period, as well as a clear tendency of asymptomatic carriers, and even more so now it has legs outside China too. Even so, people are being urged back to work as eagerly as they were being told to lock themselves in at home just two weeks ago.

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Equally unsurprisingly, the PBOC, who have already lowered rates 10bp, are making clear that COVID-19 “will be short-lived and will not change the country’s sound economic fundamentals”. With several reports suggesting up to 85% of China’s small business are going to run out of cash within three months, and many within weeks, its banks riddled with bad loans and already under-capitalised, and the state clearly about to embark on another massive debt-splurge to build more infrastructure to keep to a set GDP number regardless, even when China does re-emerge from COVID-19 it will be sagging under an even more unsustainable debt load, and the state will be playing an even larger economic role. It’s also unclear if foreign firms will be as willing to be embedded in a long, China-centric supply chain regardless, making USD inflows less likely; and all of those issues above will mean the weaker CNY we have referred to for years. It is no surprise we are through 7 again; the larger surprise is that we are not closer to 7.20.

More broadly, of course, the “Ugly” scenario is seeing US Treasury yields test critical support levels. The 10-year is now at 1.47% and another leg down will see us in whole new territory. Likewise, the USD is on a roll upwards and threatening to push higher: imagine if European virus cases spread, the same happens in Japan, and China cannot reopen as planned. And imagine what a stronger USD on top of this virus backdrop will mean for emerging-market USD borrowers. Ugly indeed.

Such is the news-flow that I hardly have time to relate that Bernie Sanders handily won the Nevada Democratic caucus, leaving Joe “White Walker” Biden in a poor second place and Mike Bloomberg looking as user-friendly as his terminals are. That makes Bernie the clear presidential nominee front-runner at this stage – and makes many Never-Trumpers into Rather-Trumpers, I would imagine. And imagine if Bernie’s plans for free healthcare for all intersect with a virus outbreak in the US….(on which note, please see our recent Through The Looking Glass report imagining a Sanders presidency).

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WHO Chief Warns “Window Of Opportunity Is Narrowing” As Coronavirus Spreads To Lebanon, Iran & Israel; China Orders Millions Back To Work

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by Tyler Durden
Fri, 02/21/2020 – 11:30

Update (1130ET): Epidemiologist had already warned that patients could be reinfected with the virus. But the Epoch Times’ Jennifer Zeng is sharing a report about a patient in Sichuan (notably one of the provinces visited by WHO experts) who was reinfected with the virus after recovering.

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UPI reported earlier that everal patients in China who were discharged from hospitals after making a full recovery have been reinfected, citing reports in the People’s Daily on Friday.

One patient in Chengdu was discharged from a local hospital and was quarantined for 14 days at home, but somehow became reinfected. And doctors quoted in the story said her case isn’t unique.

It’s also possible to catch the flu twice in one season, but that is rare.

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Update (1100ET): Epoch Times’ Jennifer Zeng is reporting that in parts of China, the government has signaled to workers that they will be “punished” if they don’t report back to work.

And for everyone who gets infected, don’t expect your employer to deal with it, Zeng adds. “if you get infected, it is not a work-related injury. You are on your own.”

That’s pretty chilling stuff, but as we pointed out yesterday, there’s an ongoing debate in parts of the country where case numbers aren’t as high (not that anybody trusts the government’s figures) about whether keeping the economy on lockdown might be doing more harm then good. And in order to prevent a repeat of what happened last time (when millions just simply didn’t show up), it’s upping the ante for citizens who don’t abide by the state’s command.

The New York Times is reporting that, for the first time since the outbreak began, Chinese health officials acknowledged on Friday that their constant changes to the ‘criteria’ for what constitutes a ‘confirmed case’ have sown confusion and mistrust.

As we have assiduously reported, officials in Hubei have revised their case tallies three times now because of these shifting definitions.

in the province hardest hit by the coronavirus acknowledged for the first time on Friday that their methods of confirming and reporting infection numbers had sown confusion and mistrust. They added that they would no longer subtract cases from the total. The message comes just hours after state media reported new breakouts in a handful of Chinese prisons.

Moving over to the WHO’s daily press conference from Switzerland, Director-General Dr. Tedros commented on the new cases and deaths reported in Iran, as well as Lebanon, which reported its first case this morning though hasn’t yet recorded a death.

Dr. Tedros said the new wave of outbreaks suggests that the world is at a “tipping point.”

“The window of opportunity is narrowing,” Dr. Tedros said, and humanity is running out of time to stop this virus before things get much, much worse.

You know, just some reassuring words to kick off the weekend with a little levity.

We’re starting to suspect that Dr. Tedros may have recently purchased some out-of-the-money S&P puts.

Seemingly responding to the growing number of ‘armchair cranks’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’ questioning why a WHO team of experts – a team that includes two Americans – hasn’t yet traveled to Wuhan, Dr. Tedros added that the team is planning to travel to the epicenter of the outbreak on Saturday.

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So far, the team has traveled to Beijing, Sichuan and Guangdong provinces.

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Update (1000ET): Check this out.

The NYT has published an interesting interactive illustrating the huge drop in flights departing from China to the US and other major economies.

The disappearance of tens of thousands of flights leaving China shows “how the coronavirus has hobbled a nation,” the NYT said.

Jan. 23:

Feb. 13:

Put another way:

As the NYT reports, Oxford Economics said in a recent report that the outbreak could wipe $1.1 trillion from global output, which kind of undercuts Larry Kudlow’s stammering on CNBC about this not being a ‘US story’: It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where the US economy would walk away unaffected by this.

See it here.

In other news, Beijing continues to push the ‘everything’s fine; we’re winning’ narrative.

Update (0725ET): Lebanon has confirmed its first case of COVID-9.

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The tiny Levantine state, which has swollen with refugees from nearby Syria in recent years, is in the middle of an economic crisis, and its government is presently weighing whether to default on an upcoming loan payment, which could lead to deeply unpopular austerity measures, as Al Jazeera reports.

Earlier, Israel’s Health Ministry confirmed that an Israeli citizen contracted the virus while aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship (1 of 11 Israeli passengers). She is currently under supervision and isolation in Israel. All 11 were flown out of Japan and sent directly Friday into isolation at Sheba Tel Hashomer Hospital, where they will remain during a 2-week quarantine period. Earlier this week, Israel’s government announced a temporary travel ban on all foreign nationals who had traveled to Thailand, Singapore, Hong Kong and Macao during the past 2 weeks.

Following reports yesterday that two Beijing hospitals had been put under quarantine amid fears of a wider outbreak, WaPo reported that one district in Beijing has been found to have an “infection density” second only to Wuhan on mainland China. This has served to further intensify concerns about what might happen when millions of Chinese return to work next week.

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When historians look back at the COVID-19 outbreak, they’ll remember this week as an important turning point in the crisis, when international public-health experts and investors started to focus their attention on South Korea, Japan and other countries in the region that have seen the number of new cases accelerate markedly in recent days.

Put another way, evidence that the virus is spreading more rapidly within other Asian countries outside mainland China has become impossible to ignore, which is probably why US futures are pointing to a lower open for a second straight day.

As Bloomberg reminds us, South Korea has seen its total cases soar past 200 as the number of infections doubled in 24 hours.

Meanwhile, cases in Singapore and Japan have topped 85, and let’s not forget the 600+ from the ‘Diamond Princess’ who have been excluded from the ‘Japan’ total.

At least as far as deaths are concerned, the numbers outside of China remain small: out of 2,247 deaths, only 13 have occurred in other regions (this includes 2 more deaths in Iran announced just minutes ago).

But there’s no getting around it: the spread of the virus will undoubtedly worsen the economic blowback, as one economist explained to BBG.

“The sudden jump in infections in other parts of Asia, notably in Japan and South Korea, has sparked renewed concerns,” said Khoon Goh, Singapore-based head of Asia research at Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd.

“This points to a new phase in the outbreak, and one which will see continued disruption and more economic impact than previously thought.”

Last night, we reported on the latest case numbers out of South Korea, and more have already been recorded. The current total is 204. Earlier this month, the WHO said China’s approach to tackling the virus should be a “model” for other governments facing similar outbreaks. At the time, experts criticized the organization for appearing to parrot Chinese propaganda. But it looks like they might have been on to something. Because as we reported late last night, the Blue House has ordered a ‘special management zones’ in the cities of Daegu and Cheongdo, or what appears to be a kind of ‘soft’ quarantine. The government said that since they’ve failed to prevent an outbreak, they’re pivoting decidedly to a strategy of containment.

Just a few hours ago, Chinese state media reported that 500 cases – roughly half of the new cases reported in China on Friday – involved prisoners at a handful of jails across the country, according to the Washington Post.

Infections have been confirmed at five prisons in Shandong, Hubei and Zhejiang, according to China’s Ministry of Justice. A prison in eastern Shandong province showed 207 out of 2,077 inmates and staff were infected, and the provincial justice department’s Communist Party secretary was dismissed as a result, the province announced. Another jail in Zhejiang province found 34 cases. Hubei province, at the center of the outbreak, said Friday it found 220 new cases inside penitentiaries.

According to the Washington Post, the prison outbreaks underscore the virus’s easy transmissibility in confined spaces.

Even the Global Times acknowledged that the prison outbreaks have “weakened” Beijing’s claims that the virus is receding…

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…Even as local officials adopt ever-more bizarre and draconian restrictions on individual movement.

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Tests at a prison in eastern Shandong province showed 207 out of 2,077 inmates and staff were infected, and the provincial justice department’s Communist Party secretary was dismissed as a result, the province announced. Another jail in Zhejiang province found 34 cases. Hubei province, at the center of the outbreak, said Friday it found 220 new cases inside penitentiaries.

The prison outbreaks underscored the SARS-CoV-2 virus’s high transmissibility in confined spaces after the disease ravaged the Diamond Princess cruise ship docked in Japan.

While overall numbers remain low, thousands who fear they may have come into contact with a ‘super-spreader’ in Daegu, a city of 2.5 million about 2 hours south of Seoul. The woman, who believed she was suffering from a simple cold because she had not traveled abroad, reportedly attended four church services at a “cult-like” church with 1,100 members in the city, as well as branches in other cities, including Seoul, where the mayor has ordered the local church closed until further notice.

Communist Party leaders made yet another public misstep overnight when health officials said they would once again change their ‘criteria’ for what constitutes a ‘confirmed’ case of COVID-19 back to the more inclusive and accurate definition. Officials said they decided on the switch because they couldn’t subtract already confirmed cases from the total, which sounds…almost plausible.

On CNBC Friday morning, Eunice Yoon, the network’s reporter on the ground in Beijing, interviewed the owner of a Beijing restaurant discussing his fears about going out of business. But as China slouches back to work, millions are worried that Beijing might sacrifice the public welfare to get a few factories up and running.

Looks like the cat’s out of the bag: North Korea has cancelled the Pyongyang Marathon, the country’s largest tourism money-maker, because of COVID-19, according to the operators of several tour companies who spoke with AFP.

Beijing-based Koryo Tours, the official partner of the marathon, said on its website it had “received official confirmation today that the Pyongyang Marathon 2020 is cancelled”.

“This is due to the ongoing closure of the North Korean border and COVID-19 virus situation in China and the greater region,” it added.

North Korean officials have vehemently denied reports that the virus had crossed the Yalu River, evening becoming enraged at the US in response to an offer of assistance from the State Department. Recently, a WHO official said there are “no indications” that the virus has arrived in North Korea, but considering that we’re talking about North Korea, that’s hardly surprising.

As the lockdowns in Beijing, Tianjin and other cities intensified over the last week, more Chinese were subjected to displays like this:

On Friday, Japanese health officials and Carnival Japan will release the last batch of passengers and crew from their 14-day quarantine aboard the ‘Diamond Princess’ despite criticisms from the CDC that Japanese officials had failed to maintain the quarantine. Right now, infectious disease experts see Japan as one of the riskiest places outside China, according to BBG. Health Minister Katsunobu Kato said on Sunday that Japan had lost track of the route of some of the infection cases, which have tripled in the past week to more than 90.

Iran just confirmed 13 more cases and 2 new deaths, mostly in Qoms, the same city where some earlier cases had been detected, while also reporting that the virus has reached Tehran, according to Reuters. So far, seven Iranians have been diagnosed in Qom, four in Tehran and two in Gilan, according to a tweet from the Iranian health ministry. Iranian officials have acknowledged the possibility that the virus might have arrived in every major Iranian city.

Even in Korea, health officials say they their investigators can’t figure out how some of the outbreaks started. That’s not exactly reassuring.

Right now, the focus is on South Korea. Last week, it briefly shifted to the UK before moving on to Japan. Italy just reported another three cases, doubling its count from 3 to six. Will they be next? Maybe Africa?

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