Friday 26 March 2021

Suez Canal Still Blocked! Inflation. More Covid.

 Baltic Dry Index. 2172 -22 Brent Crude 62.67

Spot Gold 1728

Coronavirus Cases 02/04/20 World 1,000,000

Deaths 53,100

Coronavirus Cases 26/03/21 World 126,069,031

Deaths 2,767,376

Henley Royal Regatta (or Henley Regatta, its original name pre-dating Royal patronage) is a rowing event held annually on the River Thames by the town of Henley-on-Thames, England. It was established on 26 March 1839, as an afternoon event.

For once we don’t open with the gambling action in the global stock casinos. They’re due for a fall anyway.

Today we open with the growing disaster in the Suez Canal. With each day of closure roughly another 50 ships pile up at either end awaiting passage.

Pretty soon, real economic consequences will start piling up in Europe and much of Asia. Will it be enough to trigger a black swan stock casino event? 

Below, something no central bankster or spendthrift politician can fix. Two continent’s economies are now largely hostage to what happens next.

If shipping has to be rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, it’s anyone’s guess on how big a hit global supply chains will take.

Oil prices recover some ground on fears Suez blockage may last weeks

March 26, 2021
---- An almost 10% uptick should have states reconsidering reopening plans and trying to accelerate vaccination, focusing on the hardest-hit neighborhoods, Weisfuse said. Growing pandemic fatigue among younger Americans, especially those traveling for spring break, is a significant concern, because they’re less likely to have received shots.

The U.S. has vaccinated 1 in 4 people, and last week averaged about 2.5 million doses per day, according to Bloomberg’s Vaccine Tracker. That’s not enough to reach herd immunity and many public-health experts fear another surge could occur before the immunization push reaches full steam. Texas, Tennessee and Alabama are among the slowest in the country, which may reflect vaccine hesitancy among Republicans, especially men.

While vaccinations and waning seasonality of the coronavirus are playing to the U.S.’s advantage, that’s weighed against more-contagious variants, increasing mobility and declining mask-wearing, Mokdad said.

More

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/us-covid-cases-are-rising-again-reversing-months-of-progress/ar-BB1eXMcj?ocid=uxbndlbing

U.S. COVID response could have avoided hundreds of thousand of deaths - research

March 25, 2021  10:20 AM  By Howard Schneider

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States squandered both money and lives in its response to the coronavirus pandemic, and it could have avoided nearly 400,000 deaths with a more effective health strategy and trimmed federal spending by hundreds of billions of dollars while still supporting those who needed it.

That is the conclusion of a group of research papers released at a Brookings Institution conference this week, offering an early and broad start to what will likely be an intense effort in coming years to assess the response to the worst pandemic in a century.

U.S. COVID-19 fatalities could have stayed under 300,000, versus a death toll of 540,000 and rising, if by last May the country had adopted widespread mask, social distancing, and testing protocols while awaiting a vaccine, estimated Andrew Atkeson, economics professor at University of California, Los Angeles.

He likened the state-by-state, patchwork response to a car’s cruise control. As the virus worsened people hunkered down, but when the situation improved restrictions were dropped and people were less careful, with the result that “the equilibrium level of daily deaths ... remains in a relatively narrow band” until the vaccine arrived.

Atkeson projected a final fatality level of around 670,000 as vaccines spread and the crisis subsides. The outcome, had no vaccine been developed, would have been a far-worse 1.27 million, Atkeson estimated.

The economic response, while mammoth, also could have been better tailored, argued University of California, Berkeley economics professor Christine Romer. She joins former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and several others from the last two Democratic administrations in criticizing the spending authorized since last spring, including the Biden team’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan.

More

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-economy/u-s-covid-response-could-have-avoided-hundreds-of-thousand-of-deaths-research-idUSKBN2BH1DK

1 report, 4 theories: Scientists mull clues on virus’ origin

GENEVA (AP) — A team of international and Chinese scientists is poised to report on its joint search for the origins of the coronavirus that sparked a pandemic after it was first detected in China over a year ago — with four theories being considered, and one the clear frontrunner, according to experts.

The lengthy report is being published after months of wrangling, notably between U.S. and Chinese governments, over how the outbreak emerged, while scientists try to keep their focus on a so-far fruitless search for the origin of a microbe that has killed over 2.7 million people and stifled economies worldwide.

It wasn’t immediately clear when the report will be released after its publication was delayed earlier this month. By many accounts, the report could offer few concrete answers, and may raise further questions.

It will offer a first glance in writing from 10 international epidemiologists, data scientists, veterinary, lab and food safety experts who visited China and the city of Wuhan — where a market was seen as the initial epicenter — earlier this year to work with Chinese counterparts who pulled up the bulk of early data.

Critics have raised questions about the objectivity of the team, insisting that China’s government had a pivotal say over its composition. Defenders of the World Health Organization, which assembled the team, say it can’t simply parachute in experts to tell a country what to do — let alone one as powerful as China.

“I expect that this report will only be a first step into investigating the origins of the virus and that the WHO secretariat will probably say this,” said Matthew Kavanagh, director of Georgetown University’s Global Health Policy and Governance Initiative at the O’Neill Institute. “And I expect some to criticize this as insufficient.”

The Wuhan trip is billed as Phase 1 in a vast undertaking to flesh out the origins of the virus.

The WHO has bristled at depictions of the mission as an “investigation” — saying that smacks of an invasive forensic probe that wasn’t called for under the resolution adopted unanimously by the agency’s member states in May that paved the way for the collaboration. The WHO and China later ironed out the ground rules.

Team member Vladimir Dedkov, an epidemiologist and deputy director of research at the St. Petersburg Pasteur Institute in Russia, summarized the four main leads first laid out at a marathon news conference in China last month about the suspected origins of the first infection in humans. They were, in order of likelihood: from a bat through an intermediary animal; straight from a bat; via contaminated frozen food products; from a leak from a laboratory like the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Officials in China, as well as Chinese team leader Liang Wannian, have promoted the third theory — the cold-chain one — while the U.S. administration under President Donald Trump played up the fourth one, of the lab leak. But Dedkov said those two hypothesis were far down the list of likely sources.

He suggested frozen products on which the virus was found were most likely contaminated by infected people.

More

https://apnews.com/article/pandemics-geneva-coronavirus-pandemic-china-united-nations-478237854902672ac53ab6d9dbfe59ec

 

Next, some vaccine links kindly sent along from a LIR reader in Canada. The links come from a most informative update from Stanford Hospital in California.

World Health Organization - Landscape of COVID-19 candidate vaccineshttps://www.who.int/publications/m/item/draft-landscape-of-covid-19-candidate-vaccines

NY Times Coronavirus Vaccine Trackerhttps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/science/coronavirus-vaccine-tracker.html

Stanford Websitehttps://racetoacure.stanford.edu/clinical-trials/132

Regulatory Focus COVID-19 vaccine trackerhttps://www.raps.org/news-and-articles/news-articles/2020/3/covid-19-vaccine-tracker

Some other useful Covid links.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus resource centre

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html

Rt Covid-19

https://rt.live/

Centers for Disease Control Coronavirus

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/index.html

The Spectator Covid-19 data tracker (UK)

https://data.spectator.co.uk/city/national

Technology Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this section. Updates as they get reported.

Ultra-sensitive flow microsensors

Research could lead to more breakthroughs in neuroscience, metabolism

Date:  March 22, 2021

Source:  University of Massachusetts Amherst

Summary:  A team of scientists have developed the thinnest and most sensitive flow sensor, which could have significant implications for medical research and applications, according to new research.

A team of scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed the thinnest and most sensitive flow sensor, which could have significant implications for medical research and applications, according to new research published recently in Nature Communications.

The research was led by Jinglei Ping, assistant professor of mechanical and industrial engineering, along with a trio of mechanical engineering Ph.D. students: Xiaoyu Zhang, who fabricated the sensor and made the measurement, Eric Chia and Xiao Fan. The findings pave the way for future research on all-electronic, in-vivo flow monitoring in investigating ultra-low-flow life phenomena that is yet to be studied in metabolism processes, retinal hemorheology and neuroscience.

Flow sensors, also known as flowmeters, are devices used to measure the speed of liquid or gas flows. The speed of biofluidic flow is a key physiological parameter but existing flow sensors are either bulky or lack precision and stability. The new flow sensor developed by the UMass Amherst team is based on graphene, a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in honeycomb lattice, to pull in charge from continuous aqueous flow. This phenomenon provides an effective flow-sensing strategy that is self-powered and delivers key performance metrics higher than other electrical approaches by hundreds of times. The graphene flow sensor can detect flow rate as low as a micrometer per second, that is, less than four millimeter per hour, and holds the potential to distinguish minimal changes in blood flow in capillary vessels. The performance of the graphene flow sensor has been stable for periods exceeding half a year.

Ping says the device his team created is the first one to be self-powered and high-performance, and it holds the potential to be implanted for long-term biofluidic flow monitoring. The most straightforward application, he added, may be in healthcare.

More

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/03/210322174954.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fmatter_energy%2Fgraphene+%28Graphene+News+--+ScienceDaily%29

Another weekend and the big question for Europe and Asia is when will the Suez Canal reopen. As important, how much damage is the closure starting to do to Europe’s economies? Asia’s? Will prolonged closure bring on food shortages, supply chain disruption?  Is a prolonged closure inflationary or deflationary?

Longer term, are new rules needed for super sized container ships? Should they be in canals at all?

Have a great weekend everyone.

Inflation is a burden for all Americans, but it's a disaster for the poor, the sick, and the old.

I outlined a balanced anti-inflation program that couples responsible government restraint with responsible wage and price restraint. It's based upon my knowledge that there is a more powerful force than government compulsion--the force created by the cooperative efforts of millions of Americans working toward a common goal. Business and labor have been increasingly supportive. It's imperative that we in government do our part. We must stop excessive government growth, and we must control government spending habits.

Source: Pres. Carter's 1979 State of the Union message to Congress , Jan 23, 1979

 

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