The thesis of my blog Bitcoin’s Whiplash Bear Trap 4 months ago has become even more true at the extreme limits of a SLINGSHOT move.
I hope everyone read the numerous updates in my prior blog Bitcoin’s Pivotal, Religious Moment of Transformative Truth Has Likely Arrived (Tomorrow) such as the very important epiphany I discovered about Bitcoin’s valuation model:
I replied to the above tweet:
Bitcoin has bottomed. BTFD!!! Note probably will retest the $3.9k bottom.
Update on Coronavirus Pandemic
Man wears giant disc around his waist to ‘maintain social distancing’
PhD Pathology Chris Martenson has been producing excellent videos. Here he explains why lockdowns and masks (even for healthy people) are necessary and thus why Trump, CDS, Martin Armstrong and other authorities in the West are IDIOTS (skip to 22 minutes for the part about masks):
I used to respect Armstrong but now I just can’t understand this man’s fixation with downplaying the severity of the impacts coming from the nCov-19 pandemic. It’s as if he wants to discourage aggressive “social distancing” that could drastically enhance containment, and wants our healthcare systems to become overwhelmed.
Armstrong blogged Chaos, Viruses & Cash is Not Trash but King:
If the death rate is 2% or 7%, so what? Biological weapons like Antrax have a death rate of 60%+ and the Black Plague killed 50% of the population. We are not at such a dire level yet they have scared the hell out of everyone.
Because we aggressively quarantine and react to Anthrax, such as was purportedly the case for the envelopes sent to some Congresspeople after 9/11. Armstrong is attempting to insinuate that the nCov-19 virus has not escaped containment and has not and will not spread wildly and widely.
This strawman about “scared the hell out of everyone” accuses us of being scared when in fact we are just concerned about for example supply chains becoming disrupted by the implosion of the debt bubble combined with the panic of the general public who are also worried about the same. For example everyone rushes out to buy a month’s worth of supplies just in case and then there’s no drinking water in the grocery store. This is what a Minksy Moment combined with a pandemic can do, and that is not even factoring in the wars that will result as well:
Where is this huge overreaction that Armstrong is alleging? Certainly not an overreaction in social distancing, testing and containment, because there hasn’t been enough of that in the West up until just past few days. There’s an overreaction in the financial markets because the crisis is just getting started and will wax and wane along the way. A dead-cat bounce in the economy is likely this Summer and/or Fall before the next wave of the flu season in 2021. Also the Federal Reserve may be[has been] forced into QE by this pandemic causing it to destroy itself as the ECB has done with negative interest rates, c.f. also Armstrong’s Federal Reserve to Return to its Original Design. The government is likely to goose the economy with liquidity but this will not stop interest rates from rising especially by 2021. Yet it could cause even more rampant bubbles in financial markets, thus exacerbating the growing net worth divide between the 1% and the 99%.
Then Armstrong cites the 2017–18 influenza statistics which were 61,000 deaths out of 45 million estimated infections. So that was a CFR of 0.14%.
From the Diamond Princess and S.Korea’s extensive testing we have an indication that the true CFR for nCov-19 may be ~1%. But that is with good healthcare. When our hospitals are overflowing with ICU patients as is case in Italy already, CFR may be higher.
(click to embiggen)
Actually the CFR may be significantly lower than the data in the image above because perhaps up to ~80% of the cases are so mild that people wouldn’t even bother getting tested, especially for example in children who can still spread the virus to others even if they themselves are nearly asymptomatic such as just a mild cold or runny nose.
In any case, if 45 million Americans will be infected with nCov-19 during the 2021 flu season, then deaths will be up to 1 million. The USA has 32 ICU beds per 100,000 people. 61,000 divided by 300 million is 61 per 300,000 which is only 20 per 100,000. Whereas 300,000 per 300 million is 100 per 100,000 or 3 deaths per ICU bed — tipping our healthcare systems over the threshold of being able to provide care. And that’s not even factoring in what happens when many of the healthcare workers become infected and have to be quarantined unable to fulfill their duties in the healthcare system.
Thus nCov-19 will likely overwhelm the U.S. healthcare system.
If by 2022 some 60% of the USA population will have been cumulatively infected, then cumulative deaths could be over 2 million. That’s 666 deaths per 32 ICU beds or 20 deaths per ICU bed.
Here’s my source for the ICU beds stat:
And that’s if nCov-19 is not a bioweapon designed to insidiously cause worsening or chronic illness over time, or does not naturally mutate into a more deadly variant.
Follows is claimed to be a recent video from Wuhan wherein woman suspected of suffering from a heart attack can’t even be admitted into any hospital:
Twitter: “#Wuhan overwhelmed. No beds, no doctors.”
Again China is allegedly refusing to test and document most infections in Wuhan. UPDATE: Reddit censored the information, but someone sent me a copy:
Wave 2 of covid-19 in China
Discussionhttps://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1239183215161683969?s=21
- jenniferatntdWho would’ve thought the China#1 is telling the truth. There is another wave of cases in China, also hospitals rejecting to accept new patients due to no beds.
This video was shot yesterday:
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1239195945465786372?s=21
- jenniferatntdHold your puts, worse is coming. edit: Sealing cars
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1238882326127525889
- jenniferatntdNo traffic allowed on Hubei highway
https://twitter.com/jenniferatntd/status/1238876456224272384
- jenniferatntd
How will Americans react when they are turned away from hospitals to die in their homes? Someone suggested to me that this might cause us to come together and work more closely together. I don’t disagree with that on a local level, but on the national stage this is likely to cause a political maelstrom and the authorities are likely to react to prove they “are doing something” (which is usually anything iatrogenic that can make the problem worse).
Stress Relief Tangent
It’s not going to be a Captain Jack fantasy unless we orgasmnize:
Cumming together to overcum:
SOS:
All Around The World:
Where’s da party at now? Orgasmize, exodUS…
Very rare SNL episode with “chicken dance” To The Extreme Dance - Vanilla Ice and Posse Live (1991)
The following is the authentic, unadulterated, politically-incorrect, untamed culture I remember from my youth:
Finally:
End Stress Relief Tangent, Back to Reality…
And worse than all of that above is that nCov-19 will pop the debt bubble that has been holding up the global economy.
And pop the bubble of sheepeople herding public confidence in government. Causing “every man for himself” reactionary psychology to kick in as people realize the emperor was wearing no underwear and is impotent in terms of taking care of them.
Economic devastation and the reaction of the public to it, is going to be worse than the deaths from nCov-19. I saw a video of mayhem in a grocery store in the USA as people were fighting over food and toilet paper. A wine bottle shattered on the ground. A man grabbed a shard of glass and used that as a weapon stabbing another man:
Brawls Erupt As Americans Panic Hoard Supplies Amid Pandemic
Even though that’s an isolated incident thus far, the shit really hasn’t hit the fan yet in the West. When people are dying on the streets and no hospital can receive them, then the frustration will really erupt.
Americans are most pissed off that Trump raves about how great our country is and then we can not even test everyone who has flu symptoms for the nCov-19 virus, so that we could have done proper isolation and contact tracing at the onset. This does not inspire confidence that he will effectively handle the crises that are coming. Trump banned travel from some places in China but up until late February the USA had only tested less 500 people for the virus! The virus was spreading and the authorities were incapable of doing detection and containment because the CDC would not allow anyone to perform the detection test under its apparent “Don’t test, don’t tell” policy! And then the CDC mandated test kit conveniently had a faulty reagent, lol.
What comes next as they ramp up testing and find out how pervasive the spread is in some regions, is quarantines on domestic travel such has been done in the Philippines. Then the people are really going to panic. Grocery store shelves may be emptied, because people will fear of eventual “no travel” orders and inability to source food.
What concerns me most is that even some dyed-in-the-wool, Trump supporters have even started to criticize Trump’s nonplussed, aloof, ignorant handling of this crisis. And Democrats have told me that if Trump wins again 2020, then he MUST be removed. They are livid.
Armstrong seems to dismiss that the high likelihood of the public and/or government going crazy is a risk we need to be concerned about. I do not. The reaction to the crisis can be worse than the crisis itself — an iatrogenic outcome.
Trump has been a month or more behind the curve. I publicly predicted the arrival of the pandemic on December 16. Upon the first peep of news on December 31, I remarked to many people that I think that was the start of the pandemic. In late January I was already pissed off that countries were not doing more to test and isolate. By mid-February it became a comedy of errors among most governments with S.Korea and Singapore being exceptions. And I caught the WHO intentionally lying about the severity in China. Appears to have been motivated by wanting a pandemic (perhaps to make the pandemic bonds trigger?)
And yes the government may try to maintain legitimacy and peace and order by increasing draconian controls over our freedoms. Eventually there may be roadblocks everywhere and you need to “show me your papers” before you can drive to another locale.
If this nCov-19 really hides indefinitely in the CNS and attacks the testicles (as some research has indicated it might), we could have long-term impacts with much higher overall incidence of chronic disease and malaise. And even greater push for draconian measures as a response.
Imagine if 10% of the USA population ends up maimed with long-term chronically poor health, such as chronic fatigue, respiratory injury, etc.. Imagine if 25+% of males become infertile.
The main effect of that will be a huge drag on the economy. And the economy was already a humongous debt bubble waiting to be pin-pricked.
So interest rates sky high and egregious stagflation.
What will be worst is how people will react to that economic and healthcare devastation.
The Golden Age that existed since the cessation of WW2 has reached the inflection point of its termination.
Bitcoin
Chaos, Viruses & Cash is Not Trash but King
As for Bitcoin, I was calling for a spike low correction SLINGSHOT before the moonshot that will follow. I did not expect it to spike down to $3.9k. Well also because I didn’t expect that governments would be so derelict with handling a burgeoning pandemic. I was thinking $8k maybe $7k with $6k as the lowest. I certainly thought the 200 WMA at $5.5k would hold as support (and you can see Bitcoin immediately rebounded to that level). But this $3.9k is good. It means Bitcoin is spring loaded for a whiplash moonshot.
We also have had that channel and potential lowest support line drawn on our charts for many months (c.f. Armstrong’s Bitcoin chart in his blog above).
Now we will see the reversal and Bitcoin will break up out of that channel and go much higher than $20k. Armstrong did not predict that. He predicted Bitcoin to crash to $750. I have a link to his blog where he wrote $750.
If Armstrong would draw his lowest support line on the log-scaled vertical price axis chart (instead of the linear chart above), he will see Bitcoin bottomed at that support and within the channel.
Virus Will Not Likely Spread in Rural, Affluent, Tropical Climates
New research specifically for nCov-19 models what I wrote 11 days ago in my prior blog Diabolical MERS-derived, “Chimera” Coronavirus Masquerading as the ‘Common Cold’? about warm climates mitigating efficiency of viral transmission:
Airborne respiratory viruses don’t spread as efficiently in climates with higher absolute humidity.⁴ Warmer air holds more water. A potentially slower growing reservoir due to slower spread can continue in the summer as was the case for the 1918 influenza “Spanish” flu, especially if it’s being continuously replenished by the most severely ill of the traveling soldiers stationed in a nexus of close quarters.
Note so far there’s no exponential community transmission of COVID-19 between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, excepting focuses-of-infection and cold, high altitude climates. And it’s currently Summer in the Southern Hemisphere.
Although mild and asymptomatic cases of nCov-19 infection may be undetected, especially in these poor countries wherein most people don’t go to the doctor when they feel slightly ill unlike in the more affluent Singapore, the absence of reported deaths traced to community transmission in populous, impoverished S.E. Asia seems to indicate the transmission is significantly reduced in warm, humid climates, absent some other focus-of-infection.
There’s been some community transmission since I wrote the above — for example in the Philippines — but that appears to be due to population density, large gatherings such as churches and poverty. That doesn’t appear to be widespread transmission throughout the hinterlands of the Philippines where population density is less than in the squalid, overcrowded cities where Asians are packed in like sardines.
That research paper High Temperature and High Humidity Reduce the Transmission of COVID-19 states:
If omitting control variables, the fixed-effects model of Table 2 provides an estimation of the R₀ value for a certain city given its temperature and relative humidity:
𝑅
R₀= 3.968 − 0.0383 𝑇𝑒𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑟𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒Temperature− 0.0224RelativeHumidity`𝑅𝑒𝑙𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒𝐻𝑢𝑚𝑖𝑑𝑖𝑡𝘺
[…]
If we plug the normal summer temperature and relative humidity of Tokyo (28⁰C and 85%, respectively) into Equation (1), the transmission of the COVID19 in Tokyo will be seriously reduced between March and the Olympics: the estimated R₀ value decreases from
1.914to0.992, a 48% drop!
A R₀ < 1 means the epidemic is shrinking.
There’s a German virologist warning about the epidemic continuing through Summer in Germany, but that’s because Germany is not that warm in Summer. For the months of May through September the average temperature for Berlin is 22⁰C and humidity drops to only 60%, so R₀ = 3.968 − 0.0383 × 22 − 0.0224 × 60 = 1.78.
Where I currently am in McAllen, TX, USA, the computation for May through September will be: R₀ = 3.968 − 0.0383 × 35 − 0.0224 × 75 = 0.95.
(click to embiggen)
I emailed the science writer of Why We Shouldn’t Hope COVID-19 Is Seasonal Like The Flu to point out:
The so called interviewed expert made what I believe to be two errors in her logic, which I would like to call to your attention:
A research paper differs from her claim that nCov-19 spread (ie. R₀) will not be impacted by warmer, more humid weather:
Expert claimed that infections in Singapore and Malaysia contradict the hypothesis which is her evidence for continued spread in warmer weather. However, has she not heard of air-conditioning? Also the following chart (which was featured on the ZeroHedge page The Weather Does Not Make Viruses Go Away) shows that Singapore has a much slower spread than the northern climates and Singapore is testing much more extensively than northern climate countries so their their comparative advantage is even more significant than shown on the following linked chart. Also many of the cases of infection were imported into Singapore from outside in cold climates or were transmitted between living partners. And of course the virus can still spread for those who work/live in air-conditioning:
(click to embiggen)She wondered why viruses in general continue to spread year around in very humid climates but not in warming northern climates. Probably because tropical climates require the use of extensive air-conditioning for any sort of office work. I bet if the factors of air-conditioning and the packed-in-like-sardines living conditions of many tropical populations were removed, we would see viral R₀ fall below the value of 1 in tropical climates.
I hope you will not continue to spread false information which incites further irrational panic. I would appreciate if it you would correct or amend the video. Or at least place a note on the page hosting the video indicating possible caveats.
Note the above cited research paper seems to indicate that northern west coast and the upper northern portions of the USA may not become warm and humid enough to reduce the R₀ below 1. This is probably the reason that the German expert is citing this study to support his new opinion that the virus will not abate in Germany (e.g. Berlin) this summer. Germany simply does not get warm and humid enough in the summer:
Also @American_Buffalo commented on ZeroHedge:
Weather does affect the spread of virus - good weather allows people to get outside and away from crowds. Bad weather has people cooped up inside.
What fuckin’ moron wrote this ****?
Also @SuperareDolo commented
The article is misleading. “Virus doesn't go away” is an awfully sloppy way to say it. What does “go away” mean, anyway? The virus going extinct? True, it does not. But symptoms do go away, especially as vitamin D levels across the population rise to adequate levels. In particular, the inflammatory cytokine storm that puts people in hospital will suddenly disappear. And while all the bureaucrats and tyrants will congratulate themselves for saving the world, they’ll be ignoring the fact the virus is still there, but hiding. It will be back in the fall, and we’ll only know the full extent of the pandemic by late winter next year, so about a year from now.
C.f. also Coronavirus and the Sun: a Lesson from the 1918 Influenza Pandemic:
Also the Stability of SARS Coronavirus in Human Specimens and Environment and Its Sensitivity to Heating and UV Irradiation paper points out that the virus is stable up to 3 – 4 days on most surfaces up to 20⁰C but only “at least 2 hours” at 37⁰C. And was readily destroyed at higher temperatures or with UV light.