RE: Monday Opening Prediction = 2% down, 5800 by the end of the week, ?5000 within a month7 Mar 2020 22:49
Because there's much more to it,
Yes I agree we have to take the 100 years of medical/scientific discovery into account. But in which ways will that manifest?
1. Improved healthcare knowledge, facilities and resources -> overall reduced mortality
2. Improved connectivity between nations -> co-operation in the search for treatments and vaccines
3. Improved capacity to logistically organise the nation to delay transmission -> delayed peak of case load
On the other hand, our more advanced world:
1. Makes no difference to pathogenicity of the virus
2. Our more crowded societies promote transmission, think cholera outbreaks in the middle ages except a respiratory equivalent
3 . Improved connectivity is ofcourse a double edged sword. Imagine if the regions of China came out of lockdown in 1-2 weeks. The virus will almost certainly circle the globe (metaphorically) and return to China to infect previously unaffected regions.
Ofcourse there is an element of fear. Epidemiologists here in the UK are estimating the actual number of cases could be 10x what had been reported, ie over 1 million cases across the world, but most are asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic.
But if that is the case and as estimated by same epidemiologists a minimum of 500m become infected,.that is still a mortality of 1.5m. That's a relatively conservative figure too, with the lack of immunity to this virus it could easily affect the majority of the world population over the coming months and years.
With regards to the markets, like I said before there was a correction imminent and this has got to be the worst precipitant imaginable.
Many of today's companies are over leveraged, especially in the mid-cap oil and travel industries. If this plays out anywhere near how the experts are suggesting, we have a long way to go still.