That is about 0.6% of global supply and would increase OPEC+ cuts to 2.3 million bpd. Novak said Russia was watching the impact of the coronavirus outbreak on global energy markets closely but did not indicate what Moscow’s position was.

“The situation remains extremely uncertain,” he said in a statement. “Currently, Russia is closely studying the recommendation of the technical committee in order to evaluate the situation and find a weighted approach based on the market’s interest on the whole.” His comments echoed ones he made last week. TASS news agency, citing unnamed sources, said that Novak will meet leading domestic oil producers on Wednesday to discuss the deal. Oil prices rose around 1% on Tuesday in tandem with a rally in equity markets but investors remained jittery over the coronavirus as deaths from the outbreak rose above 1,000 in China.

The coronavirus epidemic could spread to about two-thirds of the world’s population if it cannot be controlled, according to Hong Kong’s leading public health epidemiologist.

https://youtu.be/T-kRknJVafk

His warning came after the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) said recent cases of coronavirus patients who had never visited China could be the “tip of the iceberg”. Prof Gabriel Leung, the chair of public health medicine at Hong Kong University, said the overriding question was to figure out the size and shape of the iceberg. Most experts thought that each person infected would go on to transmit the virus to about 2.5 other people. That gave an “attack rate” of 60-80%. “Sixty per cent of the world’s population is an awfully big number,” Leung told the Guardian in London, en route to an expert meeting at the WHO in Geneva on Tuesday. Even if the general fatality rate is as low as 1%, which Leung thinks is possible once milder cases are taken into account, the death toll would be massive. He will tell the WHO meeting that the main issue is the scale of the growing worldwide epidemic and the second priority is to find out whether the drastic measures taken by China to prevent the spread have worked – because if so, other countries should think about adopting them. The Geneva meeting brings together more than 400 researchers and national authorities, including some participating by video conference from mainland China and Taiwan. “With 99% of cases in China, this remains very much an emergency for that country, but one that holds a very grave threat for the rest of the world,” the WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in his opening remarks. To date China has reported 42,708 confirmed cases, including 1,017 deaths, Tedros said. Leung – one of the world’s experts on coronavirus epidemics, who played a major role in the Sars outbreak in 2002-03 – works closely with other leading scientists such as counterparts at Imperial College London and Oxford University. At the end of January, he warned in a paper in the Lancet that outbreaks were likely to be “growing exponentially” in cities in China, lagging just one to two weeks behind Wuhan. Elsewhere, “independent self-sustaining outbreaks in major cities globally could become inevitable” because of the substantial movement of people who were infected but had not yet developed symptoms, and the absence of public health measures to stop the spread. Epidemiologists and modellers were trying to figure out what was likely to happen, said Leung. “Is 60-80% of the world’s population going to get infected? Maybe not. Maybe this will come in waves. Maybe the virus is going to attenuate its lethality because it certainly doesn’t help it if it kills everybody in its path, because it will get killed as well,” he said. Experts also need to know whether the restrictions in the centre of Wuhan and other cities have reduced infections. “Have these massive public health interventions, social distancing, and mobility restrictions worked in China?” he asked. “If so, how can we roll them out, or is it not possible?” There would be difficulties. “Let’s assume that they have worked. But how long can you close schools for? How long can you lock down an entire city for? How long can you keep people away from shopping malls? And if you remove those [restrictions], then is it all going to come right back and rage again? So those are very real questions,” he said. If China’s lockdown has not worked, there is another unpalatable truth to face: that the coronavirus might not be possible to contain. Then the world will have to switch tracks: instead of trying to contain the virus, it will have to work to mitigate its effects. For now, containment measures are essential. Leung said the period of time when people were infected but showed no symptoms remained a huge problem. Quarantine was necessary, but to ensure people were not still carrying the virus when they left, everybody should ideally be tested every couple of days. If anyone within a quarantine camp or on a stricken cruise ship tested positive, the clock should be reset to 14 days more for all the others. Some countries at risk because of the movement of people to and from China have taken precautions. On a visit to Thailand three weeks ago, Leung talked to the health minister and advised the setting up of quarantine camps, which the government has done. But other countries with links to China appear, inexplicably, to have no cases – such as Indonesia. “Where are they?” he asked.

BEIJING (AP) — After nearly a week of roaming China’s epidemic-struck city, filming the dead and the sickened in overwhelmed hospitals, the strain of being hounded by both the new virus and the country’s dissent-quelling police started to tell. Chen Qiushi looked haggard and disheveled in his online posts, an almost unrecognizable shadow of the energetic young man who had rolled into Wuhan on a self-assigned mission to tell its inhabitants’ stories, just as authorities locked the city down almost three weeks ago.

Until he disappeared last week, the 34-year-old lawyer-turned-video blogger was one of the most visible pioneers in a small but dogged movement that is defying the ruling Communist Party’s tightly policed monopoly on information.

Armed with smart phones and social media accounts, these citizen-journalists are telling their stories and those of others from Wuhan and other locked-down virus zones in Hubei province. The scale of this non-sanctioned storytelling is unprecedented in any previous major outbreak or disaster in China. It presents a challenge to the Communist Party, which wants to control the narrative of China, as it always has since taking power in 1949. “It’s very different from anything we have witnessed,” said Maria Repnikova, a communications professor at Georgia State University who researches Chinese media. Never have so many Chinese, including victims and health care workers, used their phones to televise their experiences of a disaster, she said. That’s partly because the more than 50 million people locked down in cities under quarantine are “really anxious and bored and their lives have pretty much stopped.” Official state media extol the Communist Party’s massive efforts to build new hospitals in a flash, send in thousands of medical workers and ramp up production of face masks without detailing the underlying conditions that are driving these efforts. Chen did just that in more than 100 posts from Wuhan over two weeks. He showed the sick crammed into hospital corridors and the struggles of residents to get treatment.

“Why am I here? I have stated that it’s my duty to be a citizen-journalist,” he said, filming himself with a selfie stick outside a train station. “What sort of a journalist are you if you don’t dare rush to the front line in a disaster?”

A video posted Jan. 25 showed what Chen said was a body left under a blanket outside an emergency ward. Inside another hospital, he filmed a dead man propped up on a wheelchair, head hanging down and face deathly pale. “What’s wrong with him?” he asked a woman holding the man up with an arm across the chest. “He has already passed,” she said. Chen’s posts and vlogs, or video blogs, garnered millions of views — and police attention. In an anguished video post near the end of his first week in Wuhan, he said police had called him, wanting to know where he was, and questioned his parents.

“I am scared,” he said. “I have the virus in front of me, and on my back, I have the legal and administrative power of China. His voice trembling with emotion and tears welling in his eyes, he vowed to continue “as long as I am alive in this city.” “Even death doesn’t scare me!” he said. “So you think I’m scared of the Communist Party?” Last week, Chen’s posts dried up. His mother broke the silence with a video post in the small hours of Friday. She said Chen was unreachable and appealed for help in finding him. Police also came knocking last week for Fang Bin, who has been posting videos from Wuhan hospitals, including footage of body bags piled in a minibus, waiting to be carted to a crematorium. Fang, a seller of traditional Chinese clothing, filmed a testy exchange through the metal grill of his door with a group of four or five officers. The footage posted on YouTube offered a glimpse into how the security apparatus is working overtime to keep a lid on public anger about the spread of the virus. “Why are there so many of you?” Fang asked. “If I open the door, you’ll take me away!” Chen re-posted that video on his Twitter feed — one of his last tweets before his disappearance. The death of a Wuhan doctor last week focused attention on earlier attempts to suppress speech, and its consequences. Police had accused Dr. Li Wenliang of spreading rumors after he raised alarm in December about the outbreak. He succumbed to the virus, bringing an outpouring of grief, along with anger at authorities for how he had been treated. Nick Note: The Chinese police state dos not want you to know. The Wall Street machine (building a police state in America) is hiding the truth. It is my analysis at the rate this pandemic is spreading and the destitution of S&P500 companies Chinese supply lines and sales their bottom line will be devastated. This is more then a black swan event. Its a flock of black Peking Ducks…… Wall Street can run they even hide for a while. BUT BUT by the time the fat lady dies of phenomena stock markets will be devastated. Their will be a vaccine… by the time that comes the S&P500 will be under  3000. And if the death count soars in China like many epidemiologists predict we cold be looking at a 2400 S&P 500 where we were at back in December 2018.  A little over a year ago. And yes i am full of shit……. SO! 

Republican senator suggests ‘worse than Chernobyl’ coronavirus could’ve come from Chinese ‘superlaboratory’

Republican Sen. Tom Cotton suggested that Chinese officials misled the public on the origins of the novel coronavirus that has killed at least 362 people and infected more than 17,400 others, saying it may have originated in a “superlaboratory.” At a Senate Armed Service Committee hearing with US military leaders on Thursday, Cotton described the coronavirus as the “biggest and most important story in the world” and “worse than Chernobyl.” Cotton, a longtime China hawk, suggested Beijing had not been as forthcoming about the number of infections and was “lying about it from the very beginning” to downplay the seriousness of the epidemic. Chinese officials have been accused of lowering the number of cases and tamping down on reports weeks before it was formally acknowledged by the government. “They also claimed, for almost two months until earlier this week, that it originated in a seafood market in Wuhan,” Cotton said, referring to a study published by The Lancet. “That is not the case.”

Initial studies linked the virus to various sources, including a seafood market in Wuhan, China, and bats. In one of the studies from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, six of the seven virus samples were from patients who worked at the Huanan wholesale seafood market

“Of the original 40 cases, 14 of them had no contact with the seafood market, including patient zero,” Cotton said. “I would note that Wuhan also has China’s only bio-safety level four ‘superlaboratory’ that works with the world’s most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus.” Cotton was referring to China’s first Biosafety Level 4 lab, the Wuhan National Biosafety Laboratory of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which investigates “the most dangerous pathogens,” according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. While Cotton qualified his remarks by saying “we still don’t know where” the virus originated, his comments come amid numerous conspiracy theories about the virus’s origins — including one that says the virus “originated in lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The amount of false information spreading across social-media platforms has prompted several companies, including Facebook, to limit the reach of such posts. In a statement, Facebook said it would display “accurate information” and notify users if they are suspected of sharing false or misleading information. Nick Note: Despite the Happy Days are here again roaring twenties rally in stocks. THIS IS NOT OVER UNTIL YOUR NEIGHBOR DROPS DEAD!. The Coronavirus  is  spreading like wild fire. Social media is taking down the real story. DO NOT BE FOOLED. My bet is with your money and mine that China is in a great big AWH shit. AND AND this will devastate global stock markets. I believe my trades are right. But as you know you place your bets, spin the wheel and see where the little  silver ball lands…. Lady luck and fundamental analysis don’t fail me now!

Coronavirus death toll tops SARS as China goes back to work

Factories in China will slowly begin getting back online tomorrow following an extended Lunar New Year break that saw two-thirds of China’s economy stay closed last week. Meanwhile, the death toll from the new coronavirus outbreak has now surpassed that of the SARS epidemic nearly two decades ago, as the number of fatalities from the virus topped 800. China’s National Health Commission has also confirmed 2,656 new coronavirus cases, bringing the total to 37,198. SARS infected 8,098 people during its outbreak. Nick Note: To me it look like things are getting worse to Wall Street China is a hot place to invest and build things and make moey. Ignore those body bags!

Video: Wuhan, China – people quarantined in their houses screaming out their windows that they have no food. There are 50 million of them.

Declaration gives UK government additional powers as death toll inside China jumps to 908 with more than 40,000 infections