With little to do this weekend, I decided to ponder on the current death toll from the CCP virus (Because we wouldn't be in this mess if not for the CCP, whom we should probably separate from 'Chinese people')

60,000+ Dead

Think about that for a minute and you'll find it impossible to comprehend. 20x 9/11, give or take. It might be made easier by comparing to other, larger human (or animal) tragedies, but it's not a competition. 60,000 is like... every single person in this neighborhood in downtown Shanghai wiped out. Zombie ghost town.

Except it's kind of worse because rather than entire families getting wiped, it's mostly just one from each family, leaving a handful of despair per household.

Now, based on even the most optimistic modeling, we're looking at a lot more deaths than this. We are barely just beginning if we consider places such as India, where controls have been disastrous and impossible to implement and migrant workers are stampeding back to their hometowns so their government doesn't literally starve them to death.

That being said, this 60,000 death toll does not include deaths related to the consequences of this global shut down which, in the coming months, will be astronomically high, possibly as high as the death from the virus itself.

This phenomenon is going to be impossible to track, and we are going to be left under the assumption that 'countless' have died and leave it at that. Well, that language certainly softens the blow somewhat. 'Some people died or whatever'.

Yet more lives will be lost to long-term economic damage. Millions of businesses gone broke will lead to a rise in suicide, and starvation will likely rise in places such as China, India, and certain South American & African nations.

This death toll increase will further damage the economies around the world as the workforce decreases. True, most dying are elderly and not in the workforce, but when the death toll starts hitting the multiple-hundreds-of-thousands, it all adds up.

Those who survive can't all simply jump back into the business if their businesses no longer exist.

China benefits, obviously, through their proficient skills of authoritarian totalitarianism, they can come out of this comparatively unscathed (though still hurting pretty damn bad), with a Western world now more dependent on their products and services than ever before - assuming the backlash doesn't lead to a decoupling. This I doubt because money is money and people are people and people don't matter as much as money. Fact.

But we will see.

So where will this leave the death toll, kick-started in a little town market selling fish in China?

Well as I said, it's going to be impossible to know. Hell, it's already impossible to know. Some expert models suggest the US data only makes sense if over a million got infected nationwide already, and simply weren't reported or were asymptomatic. There comes a point where it no longer makes sense counting the infected and it's just easier to focus on fixing the mess we're in and keep a vague amount of attention.

But to make matters worse, the numbers in China where things began are so blatantly wrong, to begin with, that we can't even create accurate models on the initial spread of the virus for comparison because China covered it up, silenced the original whistleblowers and expelled the journalists.

I can go more into China politics another time but basically, Xi is never wrong, everything must be downplayed.

So, when Xi says 'I will resolutely annihilate this Virus' - you can be damn sure that's what will happen, regardless of which reality you are living in.

So, let's look at the numbers around the world:

Fatality rates:

• Global: 5%
• Italy: 10%
• Indonesia: 8%
• UK: 6.5%
• Germany: 1%
• South Korea (lowest in the world): 0.7%

Compare that with:

Hubei, where the outbreak started, has a fairly safe rate of about 4%.

The rest of China excluding Hubei: 0.4%

Let's go region by region (which each have populations larger than most countries):

• Guangdong: 0.5%
• Jiangxi: 0.1%
• Jiangsu: 0%
• Shanghai: 0.9%
• Anhui 0.6%
• Zhejiang: 0.08%

Having extensive time living here, and seeing what I've seen, I'm pretty uncomfortable simply accepting that China has the greatest healthcare across the board in the world, including regions such as Anhui, one of the poorest in the country (I've been there, it ain't doing so well).

I'm also not comfortable accepting that they simply figured out instantly the best way to control things, their healthcare system was totally not overwhelmed at all, and everyone just kind of recovered fine. If you feel ok with this, well, I can't prove anything for you, because when it comes to China, finding proof is impossible.

I think, whatever conclusions you gain from this, whether or not we ignore the most sinister premise that China is manipulating this virus to gain dominance over the world economy or whatever, it seems clear to me that even the top officials of China couldn't get themselves a proper count at any point since the beginning times, and continue to fail in these numbers today because there's so much covering up, and indeed, covering up of the covering up lest local officials feel the wrath of benevolent Xi, that the paper trails have simply vanished.

So, do we assume China has a much, much larger death toll than stated?

It's hard to say, but personally I would go with 'absolutely', if not from the virus itself, the government approach surely lead to more deaths in their country.

The same can, to a less or greater extent across the world. Some countries are going to be better or worse at keeping track compared to others. In some cases, this is totally impossible, but in zero cases 100% be tracked.

What about the greater ecosystem?

Pollution is down, and everyone celebrates, but what about when things open up again. Do you think we will just continue this practice due to its nice side-effect? Or do you think countries (China in particular) will go into overdrive and start pumping out that pollution at 3x the rate to catch up with lost time?

How many more deaths will result in this hyper-drive coal consumption? 4.6 million deaths occur from pollution per normal year. What about in a mega-year?

It seems, the more you think about it, the more deaths we can attribute to this tiny little virus, floating around in your snot after jumping from a cute little bat.