Best practices for social distancing suggest a minimum separation distance of six feet in all directions. While such practices are inconvenient and annoying, most Americans can carry out social distancing should they choose, because most Americans live in environments with hefty elbow room both within their homes as well as in their cities and towns.
 
However, that is not the case in many parts of the world. Most global population centers are far more dense than American cities, with both the typical living quarters and the cities’ footprints themselves being far smaller per unit of population.
 
Add in the concentrating effects of extreme poverty, and in some parts of the world social distancing isn’t even theoretically possible.

The outcomes of such cramped living are extreme and reach far beyond health. Join Peter Zeihan to explore such differences in demographic concentration and economic structure, and apply those findings to the ongoing coronavirus epidemic. One outcome among many: the end of global economic integration.

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Future planned invents include:

• The Unmaking of the Global Economy (April 6)
• The Shattering of Global Oil (April 10)
• Agriculture
• Transport and Supply Chains
• Manufacturing
• Industrial Commodities

Here is the accumulated data of all known cases of coronavirus in the United States, courtesy of The COVID Tracking Project. As you can see the situation is getting both worse and better.
 
Worse in that deaths are starting to rise significantly, and that is far worse than it looks. At present about 40% of deaths are in New York state, with nearly all of those in the New York City area – the first American metropolitan region to suffer a full epidemic. Nor is NYC done. Today’s figures indicate the city has at least another week, likely two, before deaths peak. New York’s experience will soon be echoed in other areas with New Orleans, Seattle, Detroit and Chicago looking particularly worrisome. Not linear, logarithmic.
 
Better in that the United States is finally testing about 100,000 people a day. Without decent epidemiological data any public health policy with an eye on containment or mitigation is simply a shot in the dark. Unfortunately, materials, equipment and lab bottlenecks have made testing numbers plateau at this level. Multi-day delays in receiving test results are widespread. Until the United States can increase testing volumes to at least 1,000,000 a day and reduce testing times to a few hours, the only method the country will have for containing the epidemic is complete economic lockdown.

The United States will be the country that has suffered the greatest recorded deaths from coronavirus within two weeks, and the death toll certainly will not peak within a week of that dire landmark. But as difficult and tragic as it is to imagine, coronavirus will burn a much harsher swathe through other countries in the months to come.

Join Peter Zeihan for an exploration of the pandemic to come. He will discuss how and where coronavirus will impact the major countries of the developing world, and how and where it will remake regional and the global economies both this year and far into the future.

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Long after the epidemic peaks in the United States and Europe it will rage through the developed world, inflicting far deeper damage to populations and economies. The United States has HVAC systems and indoor plumbing and so has the option of social distancing. Much of the world’s population does not.

And while the American economy is largely sequestered from the rest of humanity, that of the developing world is not. Damage there will reverberate through the global system, region by region, sector by sector, in ways that will break the global Order’s very foundation.

Please click “Register here” above for more details.

Coronavirus: The Unmaking of the Global Economy

The United States is extending its recommendation for citizens to stay home by another month, while President Trump has started referring to “only” 100,000 deaths as a positive outcome. If this is the state of the wealthiest country on Earth, how fares the rest of the world? American policy makers and the broader public tend to develop tunnel vision in the face of a crisis, but the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us that the coronavirus neither respects national borders nor cares about personal and corporate balance sheets.

The unfortunate fact is that as dark as the near-term future appears in the United States, a far larger build in cases and deaths will occur throughout the developing world in April and into May.

Join Peter Zeihan and the Zeihan on Geopolitics team to discuss the path of the coronavirus crisis, the impact it will have upon Mexico and Brazil and Nigeria and South Africa and India and Indonesia and more, and how those impacts will fundamentally reshape the global economy.

We hope you will join us for this frank, data-driven seminar and Q&A session.

REGISTER HERE

This videoconference will set the stage for a series of industry-specific seminars to come.

Future events will include:

• Energy
• Agriculture
• Transport and Supply Chains
• Manufacturing
• Industrial Commodities

Throughout media of all forms, we are hungry for information on coronavirus. Some of this is a flat out are-we-doing-better-or-worse-than-they-are, but most of it is simply to try to put what we know into some sort of context that is relevant to our lives.

None of us have much luck with that.

In part it is the nature of data collection during crisis period. Most health care professionals are more interested in saving the life in front of them than typing data into a spreadsheet. But mostly it is because all data is a product of its local circumstances:

In China, even before one considers political motivations, the system strongly discourages the passing on of bad news. As concerned as the Communist Party is with its international image, it is far more concerned with domestic popular responses to continued negative news. That and the Chinese government has a, shall we say, fluid relationship with data. And yet to this point data out of China is still the only large data set on coronavirus infections we have.

I’ve been waiting for some time for South Korea – a country with a great health care system and a strong respect for the application of science. Unfortunately, their “epidemic” is nothing of the sort. Until very recently, half of South Korea’s cases could be traced back to a single megachurch. It’s very useful as a cluster study and wow does it underline the impact of early, wide-spread testing, but it really isn’t the sort of broad-reach dataset that involves multiple regions and age groups that I was hoping to be able draw conclusions from.

Even “worse” most of Korea’s cases at that church involved young people. Their preponderance in the data skews Korea’s mortality data down significantly, so don’t fool yourself. The Korean experience to date of low mortality is not attainable for the United States because it hasn’t been a true broad-based epidemic.

Data out of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore are similarly less than useful as their systems were so strongly proactive that none of the three ever really had epidemics to study.

Next up is Italy, where the local health system was simply overwhelmed unexpectedly. By the time the Italians realized what was happening, hospitals were overflowing. That prevented meaningful testing regimens anywhere outside of the hospitals themselves. Since the virus tends to trigger more severe cases in older patients, only about 10% of Italy’s confirmed cases were in people under age 40, while 70% are among those over age 50. That’s hardly representative.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that Italy’s data shows a death rate far above that of anywhere else. Italy is only now – in the fourth week of their epidemic – doing any significant testing outside of hospitals. So don’t overly fret. While South Korea’s low mortality figures are not America’s future, neither are Italy’s high ones.

All these countries’ experiences hold lessons for all of us, but what they do not hold are clear points of comparison. All the data must be absorbed within the context of which it was produced, in addition to being understood at a specific moment in time. (For the purposes of this post, the data in question is all from March 26.)

We still don’t have a reasonable understanding of the American data because we simply don’t have enough, but we are getting there. As of March 27 the United States has the results from over 500,000 tests, but as of March 19 we had only completed 100,000. The US is only now beginning to get its first look at viral penetration in its primary centers of inflection – and only its primary centers of infection. Testing will continue to increase rapidly both in number and in geographic reach, but kinks in the supply chain remain. Progress will not be in a straight line.

Which means the best comparative data the United States is likely to get before the epidemic washes over the country will be out of Spain and France, a pair of countries who had enough forewarning to begin at least some sporadic testing before their health systems were hit hard. Their data may be the best available, but as their epidemics are likely to occur no more than two to three weeks ahead of America’s, there will not be much time to parse and draw lessons from it.

And none of it will be of use to New York City, which appears likely to suffer its heaviest caseloads right along with the Spanish and French.