The latest CoV stats seem less worrying than they were a few days ago.For a while, the virus gained 10% new cases every day, but it has slowed down since.For the past few days, it grew by about 2% every day.To give you an idea, at his rate, in 2 months, you can expect 90,000 x 1.02^60 = 300,000 contaminated total. To this you should then subtract the many ones who recovered (the majority).It's really not that much. At all.Even if it went crazy and "exploded" to reach 10 times that, there would still be only 0.038% of the world population affected in two months. And this doesn't count the recoveries, just the total who were infected at some point.In addition, it's good to keep in mind that the death rate of 2-3% is not homogeneous in the population, and vastly varies based on age.If you're less than 40, you only have a 1/500 risk of dying. Not much.If you're 80+ however, it's about 100x more deadly.But this means that the people who are at risk of dying the most are those who are the least productive in society. So not really a threat to the economy.Finally, the most clickbait stories will now focus on "what if a more deadly mutation appears".It can indeed happen, but it's important to understand that natural selection favors traits that improve the likelihood of spreading genes. Even in viruses.For this reason, a deadly mutation is unlikely to spread because:- Killing your hosts is a very bad strategy for spreading.- The more an illness kills, the stronger the measures against it.This is also the reason why the most common illnesses (cold, flu), only cause mild symptoms plus the ones necessary for the disease to spread: coughs and sneezes. When you cough and sneeze, you send the virus in the environment.This is no coincidence.The genes causing this have been selected in viruses because they work at helping the disease spreading. These illnesses are optimal for spreading. This is why they are common.Killing hosts doesn't make for an optimal virus.But even if it mutated, the rate of spreading calculated above holds true.It probably won't affect many people at all.I would advise to keep your cool, don't believe medias that desperately fight for your attention and always try to draw your own, informed conclusions.______________________From the above, you can probably deduce my opinion about the future effect of CoV on the markets:I don't think that the virus will cause much more than the short term panic it just has.The big picture is getting clearer, and crypto should be just fine.______________________Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in any of these fields, and would be happy for anyone to point out where I might be wrong.
Submitted March 02, 2020 at 07:03PM
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