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Macro Thoughts

Policy Makers somehow still believe in their linear minds that more
Free money, more Rate Cuts will resuscitate the Patient which is like
a Patient anaesthetised on the Table.

Home Thoughts

Don DeLillo wrote "Everything is barely weeks. Everything is days. We
have minutes to live."

On the fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day, let’s think for a
moment about the Earth—backdrop for our busy and dramatic life, but
also a planet.
One can observe it dispassionately, through scientific instruments, as
if it were any other planet. And here’s how it looks, these past five
decades:
The white ice at the northern pole, one of the most obvious features
on the planet, has shrunk dramatically: at least half the summer sea
ice in the Arctic is now gone.
The largest living systems on Earth have frayed badly: the Amazon and
the African rain forests are threadbare, patchy, increasingly prone to
fire. The coral reefs, including the giant system fringing the coast
of Australia, are shrinking fast, bleaching white as hotter water
sloshes through them.
Great droughts have spread on the various continental landmasses,
drying for a time some of the globe’s vast river systems—in the
Colorado Basin, in the United States, and in the Murray-Darling Basin,
in Australia—while storms of unprecedented intensity have lashed
islands in the Pacific and the Atlantic.
There has been, on average, a sixty-per-cent decline in populations of
wild animals, part of an epic silencing with few precedents even in
the deep record that geology provides.
The composition of its atmosphere has changed with shocking speed,
and, as a result, the temperature has risen sharply—in the air, in the
oceans.
But one can also observe our planet passionately, through eye and hand
and foot, through nose and ear and heart.

Political Reflections

"Tipping Point" moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical
mass. It's the boiling point. It's the moment on the graph when the
line starts to shoot straight upwards

By the time New York City confirmed its first case of the coronavirus
on March 1, thousands of infections were already silently spreading
through the city, a hidden explosion of a disease that many still
viewed as a remote threat as the city awaited the first signs of
spring.
Hidden outbreaks were also spreading almost completely undetected in
Boston, San Francisco, Chicago and Seattle, long before testing showed
that each city had a major problem, according to a model of the spread
of the disease by researchers at Northeastern University who shared
their results with The New York Times.
Even in early February — while the world focused on China — the virus
was not only likely to be spreading in multiple American cities, but
also seeding blooms of infection elsewhere in the United States, the
researchers found.
As political leaders grappled in February with the question of whether
the outbreak would become serious enough to order measures like school
closures and remote work, little or no systematic testing for the
virus was taking place.
“Meanwhile, in the background, you have this silent chain of
transmission of thousands of people,” said Alessandro Vespignani,
director of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University
in Boston, who led the research team.
Modeling the spread of a disease is inherently inexact, involving
estimates of how often people come in contact and transmit the virus
as they travel, work and socialize. The model estimates all
infections, including those in people who may experience mild or no
symptoms and those that are never detected in testing.
Other disease researchers said the findings of Dr. Vespignani’s team
were broadly in line with their own analyses. The research offers the
first clear accounting of how far behind the United States was in
detecting the virus. And the findings provide a warning of what can
recur, the researchers say, if social distancing restrictions are
lifted too quickly.
Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, said last week that American health officials
had been successful in tracking the first known cases and their
contacts in the United States before the outbreak got out of control.
“Through February 27, this country only had 14 cases,” he said during
a briefing. “We did that isolation and that contact tracing, and it
was very successful. But then, when the virus more exploded, it got
beyond the public health capacity.”
But the new estimates of coronavirus infections are vastly higher than
those official counts.
By late February, as the world’s attention shifted to a dire outbreak
in Italy, those 14 known American cases were a tiny fraction of the
thousands of undetected infections that the researchers estimated were
spreading from person to person across this country.
And more cases may have been arriving in the United States by the day.
“Knowing the number of flights coming into New York from Italy, it was
like watching a horrible train wreck in slow motion,” said Adriana
Heguy, director of the Genome Technology Center at New York
University’s Grossman School of Medicine.
Dr. Heguy’s team and another at the Ichan School of Medicine at Mount
Sinai have found through genetic analysis that the seeds of most
infections in New York came from multiple locations in Europe, rather
than directly from China.
“We weren’t testing, and if you’re not testing you don’t know,” Dr.
Heguy said. The new estimates suggesting that thousands of infections
were spreading silently in the first months of the year “don’t seem
surprising at all,” she said.
There are other signs that the outbreak was worse at an earlier point
than previously known. This week, health officials in Santa Clara
County, Calif., announced a newly discovered coronavirus-linked death
on Feb. 6, weeks earlier than what had been previously thought to be
the first death caused by the virus in the United States.
Some scientists cautioned that the new report’s estimates of an
enormous, unseen wave of infections could be too high — even though
testing surveillance lagged at the time.
“Even with these corrections, it’s still on the high side — this is
higher than I would have expected,” said Dr. Donald Burke, a professor
of epidemiology at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of
Public Health.
Others said that the findings were in line with the fragmentary
evidence that has been available until now. Lauren Ancel Meyers, a
professor of biology and statistics at the University of Texas at
Austin, said that her own risk estimates and most recent projections
reveal a grim stealthiness of early coronavirus spread.
“By the time you see a few cases, it’s pretty certain that you already
have an outbreak underway,” Dr. Meyers said.
Dr. Vespignani’s approach models the outbreak over time based on what
is known about the virus and where it has been detected. It estimates
the spread of the disease by simulating the movements of individual
people based on where people fly, how they move around, when they go
to school and other data. By running the model under various
conditions — when schools are closed, say — his team estimates where
the virus may have spread undetected.
Unseen carriers of the disease, many of them with mild symptoms or
none at all, can still spread the virus. For that reason, by the time
leaders in many cities and states took action, it was already too late
to slow the initial spread.
A few cities with early outbreaks, notably Seattle, are believed to
have avoided enormous growth later by heeding the models available at
the time and taking action well ahead of the rest of the country.
“We knew the numbers we saw were just the tip of iceberg, and that
there were much greater numbers below the surface,” said Jenny A.
Durkan, the mayor of Seattle, in an interview. “We had to act.”
City and state officials in New York acted more slowly, waiting until
known cases were at a higher level to shut down schools and issue a
stay-at-home order. Mayor Bill de Blasio was reluctant to embrace
shutdowns until mid-March, citing the impact they would have on
vulnerable New Yorkers.
“Even while we learn new things about this virus almost daily, one
thing remains consistent: New Yorkers were put at risk by the federal
government’s total failure to provide us with adequate testing
capability,” said the mayor’s press secretary, Freddi Goldstein.
In mid-February, a month before New York City schools were closed, New
York City and San Francisco already had more than 600 people with
unidentified infections, and Seattle, Chicago and Boston already had
more than 100 people, the findings estimate.
By March 1, as New York confirmed its first case, the numbers there
may already have surpassed 10,000.
From these primary travel hubs and a few other cities, the model
shows, the disease was then spread to other locations in the United
States.
Dr. Vespignani said he and his research team warned officials of the
silent spread, posting some of their early projections in
mid-February.
“We were talking to officials here, and it was the same reaction we
got in Italy, in the U.K., in Spain,” Dr. Vespignani said. “They told
me, ‘OK, that’s happening on your computer, not in reality.’ Look,” he
added, “No one’s going to shut down a country based on a model.”
The virus moved under the radar swiftly in February and March, doctors
and researchers said, because few cities or states had adequate
surveillance systems in place.
And testing, if it was being done at all, was haphazard. Emergency
rooms were busy preparing for the predicted onslaught and likely
missed some of early virus-related deaths, and didn’t have time or
tools to verify infections on the fly, experts said.
It was mid-March before teams at N.Y.U. and Mount Sinai began taking
samples for testing in New York.
The new findings from the model produces a range of possible outcomes
for when the virus may have infected 10 people in each city. In New
York, for example, the model shows that the first 10 infected people
could have been walking the streets of the city as early as the last
week in January, or as late as the middle of February.
From there, the infections in the centers of the outbreak grew exponentially.
Trevor Bedford, an associate professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer
Research Center and the University of Washington in Seattle, said it
became clear in late February that “community transmission” — an
infectious outbreak — was probably silently underway in Washington
after a single test result came back positive for someone who had no
symptoms.
Whatever the precise scale of the initial outbreak, that same dynamic
will accelerate once measures to mitigate the spread are relaxed
without other public health measures in place, Dr. Burke said. “When
you take away social distancing, everything will go right through the
roof,” he said.

In 1899, a German bacteriologist named Carl Flügge proved that
microbes can be transmitted ballistically through large droplets that
emit at high velocity from the mouth and nose.
His method for proving the existence of these “Flügge droplets” (as
they came to be known) was to painstakingly count the microbe colonies
growing on culture plates hit with the expelled secretions of infected
lab subjects.
It couldn’t have been pleasant work. But his discoveries saved
countless lives. And more than 12 decades later, these large
respiratory droplets have been identified as a transmission mode for
COVID-19.
Flügge’s graduate students continued his work into the 20th century,
experimenting with different subjects expelling mucosalivary droplets
in different ways.
Eventually they determined, as a 1964 report in the Proceedings of the
Royal Society of Medicine put it, that the quantity of expelled Flügge
droplets varies markedly based on the manner of respiration:
“Very few, if any… droplets are produced during quiet breathing, but
[instead, they] are expelled during activities such as talking,
coughing, blowing and sneezing.”
A single heavy cough, it is now known, can expel as much as a quarter
teaspoon of fluid in the form of Flügge droplets. And the higher the
exit velocity of the cough, the larger the globules that can be
expelled.
Yet if Flügge were with us today, he might be surprised by how little
his science has been usefully advanced over the last few generations.
As Lydia Bourouiba of the MIT Fluid Dynamics of Disease Transmission
Laboratory recently noted in JAMA Insights, the basic framework used
to represent human-to-human transmission of respiratory diseases such
as COVID-19 remain rooted in the tuberculosis era.
According to the binary model established in the 1930s, droplets
typically are classified as either (1) large globules of the Flüggian
variety—arcing through the air like a tennis ball until gravity brings
them down to Earth; or (2) smaller particles, less than five to 10
micrometers in diameter (roughly a 10th the width of a human hair),
which drift lazily through the air as fine aerosols.
In a fascinating paper published on March 26th, Turbulent Gas Clouds
and Respiratory Pathogen Emissions: Potential Implications for
Reducing Transmission of COVID-19, Bourouiba shows that analyzing a
human sneeze is unusually difficult, even by the standards of fluid
dynamics (whose mathematics I once modeled in my former capacity as an
engineer and computer programmer).
That’s because those mucosalivary droplets we emit are cocooned within
a warm, moist enveloping gas cloud—Bourouiba calls it a “puff”—that
protects the droplets from evaporation and allows even small globules
to travel much farther than one might otherwise predict.
The binary distinction between large and small droplets remains
fundamental: Eventually, the big particles fall while the smaller ones
don’t.
But during those first fractions of a second when a sneeze (or cough,
or shout) is expelled, Bourouiba shows, the enveloping gas sheath
allows smaller particles to act, ballistically speaking, as if they
were larger.
The science here is mind-bogglingly complex, because modeling the
puff’s behaviour requires that Bourouiba and her team model not only
the dynamics of the puff as it travels and dissipates, but also the
biophysical and thermodynamic processes unfolding within the gas
cloud.
But the overall upshot is that such a puff “and its payload of
pathogen-bearing droplets of all sizes” can travel seven to eight
meters—about four times the length of the six-foot social-distancing
buffer zone we’ve all been taught to enforce since mid-March.
Bourouiba’s research hits squarely on a blind spot in our knowledge of
COVID-19. On one hand, scientists have an intimate
molecule-by-molecule knowledge of the virus’s structure, its full
genome having been sequenced months ago.
On the other hand, the scientific and lay literature is bursting with
epidemiological reports from just about every corner of the planet.
But the actual nitty-gritty mechanics of actual disease transmission
doesn’t take place on the microscopic scale of nucleic acids or on the
gargantuan scale of whole nations.
It takes place on the everyday face-to-face scale of inches and feet,
as Flügge showed 121 years ago.
And it is on this crucial scale that our knowledge is thinnest.
Despite the passage of four months since the first known human cases
of COVID-19, our public-health officials remain committed to policies
that reflect no clear understanding as to whether it is one-off
ballistic droplet payloads or clouds of fine aerosols that pose the
greatest risk—or even how these two modes compare to the possibility
of indirect infection through contaminated surfaces (known as
“fomites”).
Gaining such an understanding is absolutely critical to the task of
tailoring emerging public-health measures and workplace policies,
because the process of policy optimization depends entirely on which
mechanism (if any) is dominant:
If large droplets are found to be a dominant mode of transmission,
then the expanded use of masks and social distancing is critical,
because the threat will be understood as emerging from the ballistic
droplet flight connected to sneezing, coughing, and laboured
breathing.
We would also be urged to speak softly, avoid “coughing, blowing and
sneezing,” or exhibiting any kind of agitated respiratory state in
public, and angle their mouths downward when speaking.
If lingering clouds of tiny aerosol droplets are found to be a
dominant mode of transmission, on the other hand, then the focus on
sneeze ballistics and the precise geometric delineation of social
distancing protocols become somewhat less important—since particles
that remain indefinitely suspended in an airborne state can travel
over large distances through the normal processes of natural
convection and gas diffusion.
In this case, we would need to prioritize the use of outdoor spaces
(where aerosols are more quickly swept away) and improve the
ventilation of indoor spaces.
If contaminated surfaces are found to be a dominant mode of
transmission, then we would need to continue, and even expand, our
current practice of fastidiously washing hands following contact with
store-bought items and other outside surfaces; as well as wiping down
delivered items with bleach solution or other disinfectants.
Unfortunately, the available international data hasn’t been
particularly helpful in addressing this inquiry.
Every nation is reporting its data in a different way.
And to my knowledge, no one has produced a comprehensive international
database of large COVID-19 infection clusters—or “superspreading
events” (SSEs), as they are sometimes referred to in the scientific
literature—which would facilitate a systematic study of the forms of
behaviour that spread the disease most rapidly.
As SSE expert Richard Stein put it in a definitive 2011 article,
roughly “20% of the individuals within any given population are
thought to contribute at least 80% to the transmission potential” of
typical pathogens.
In the absence of any comprehensive database of COVID-19
superspreading events, I built my own, cataloguing 58 SSEs in 28
different countries (plus ships at sea).
As there is no formal scientific definition of SSE at play, nor any
World Health Organization-established protocol for cataloguing them, I
simply spent several weeks scanning the scientific and lay press for
any information I could find, using search terms such as
“superspreader,” “cluster,” “hot spot”; or non-English variants, such
as superpropagadore.
I also made abundant inquiries to personal and professional contacts
through email and social media, seeking to unearth examples that
hadn’t been reported in the mass media or scientific journals.
That process will continue, and I am appreciative of readers who send
me information I may have missed.
I am not an epidemiologist, let alone a virologist. And the data I am
working with is substandard anyway, as there are all sorts of obvious
selection biases at play, including the editorial biases of the
journalists on whom I rely for local reports.
In some countries, such as South Korea, COVID-19 contact tracing is
meticulous. In other places, it’s virtually non-existent.
Some relatively small SSEs—such as the Chicago cluster surrounding the
superspreader designated by the US Centers for Disease Control as
A1.1—are documented by dozens of different sources.
Yet many much larger SSEs, which have infected hundreds or even
thousands of people, remain only vaguely described in the literature.
In some cases, I found it hard to get even the most basic
information—such as the number of individuals believed to have been
infected or killed by an SSE.
This is one reason why I didn’t impose a hard cut-off in regard to
either index, and instead based my inclusion on whether credible local
sources presented the cluster as epidemiologically noteworthy.
There are no doubt hundreds, or even thousands, of SSEs that simply
have never been reported, and never will be.
And so it is impossible to determine what overall share of global
COVID-19 cases are attributable to SSEs.
To cite one example: Was Liverpool’s March 11 football match against
Atletico Madrid an SSE, as many believe? Possibly. But no one knows,
because the study of COVID-19 SSEs is bedevilled by the same sloppy
contact-tracing practices and inadequate testing resources as has
hampered the public-health response to the disease more generally.
Another research frustration lies with the fact that even countries
that employ competent contact-tracing methods—such as Australia and
New Zealand—withhold important information from publication for
privacy reasons.
(There is a “hospitality worker” in Victoria, for instance, whose case
seems particularly interesting. But I have been unable to find
detailed information about the events and venues at which he infected
others.)
In other cases, I’ve received private correspondence whose contents
I’ve chosen to exclude from my database—involving Purim parties in
Israel, for instance, and a Swedish party at which a whistle
apparently was passed around—because the information can’t be
corroborated through public sources.
I also chose to exclude examples from some countries that have blocked
or distorted information about SSEs. It is widely known, for instance,
that large officially-sanctioned religious gatherings in the Iranian
city of Qom led to massive outbreaks in February. But no adequately
reliable data or public reporting exists as to the extent.
The same is true of the outbreaks that reportedly have broken out
amongst the political leadership in Afghanistan.
The Chinese literature is full of fascinating examples (including one
from a restaurant in Guangdong Province that I discuss in some detail
later on).
But China’s policy of selective disclosure and, in some cases,
outright dishonesty, has made me skeptical of many reported details.
Finally, I have chosen to exclude SSEs that center on hospitals and
old-age homes, despite the fact that in many countries (including
Canada, where I live), these comprise the main spawning ground for
COVID-19.
This is because the purpose of this exercise is to gain information
about the relative effects of three broad modes of COVID-19
transmission—large droplets transmitted ballistically, persistent
concentrations of tiny airborne droplets, and contaminated surfaces.
In hospitals and old-age homes, all three of these mechanisms are
almost invariably at play—as these tend to be shared spaces full of
commonly touched surfaces and close interpersonal contact among
residents and staff.
So they serve to inflate the database without providing assistance in
isolating variables. The same principle is true of COVID-19
transmission within households, which is why I have excluded
intra-household clusters as well.
Only 38 of the 58 SSEs that I recorded were documented in a way that
permitted me to determine their date with any specificity. (And even
in these cases, I sometimes had to make educated estimates because of
the vague nature of the reporting.)
In the case of multi-day SSEs, such as religious festivals, I picked a
day corresponding to the middle of the event. Unfortunately, some of
the largest SSEs, such as those at North American meat processing
plants, can’t be usefully pinpointed at all because the infections
span multiple weeks (or even months), and the employers haven’t
released detailed date-tagged data.
Of the 38 SSEs for which dates could be usefully identified, about 75
percent (29/38) took place in the 26-day span between February 25th
and March 21st, roughly corresponding to the period when thousands of
infected COVID-19 individuals were already traveling around the world,
but before social distancing and event-cancelation policies had been
uniformly implemented in many of the affected countries.
(A notable early outlier is Steve Walsh, who spread COVID-19 from a
Singapore corporate meeting to a French ski resort to his native UK in
late January and early February.)
No doubt, a vast number of SSEs occurred in January and February
without being reported as such, because public-health officials and
journalists weren’t alive to the nature or scale of the coming
pandemic.
But it is reassuring that, so far, April has been almost entirely
bereft of publicly reported SSEs.
I was struck by how few of the SSEs originated in conditions
stereotypically associated with the underclass (though a March
outbreak at a Qatari migrant workers camp in the Industrial Area north
of Doha offers one such example).
Many of the early SSEs, in fact, centered on weddings, birthday
parties, and other events that were described in local media as
glamorous or populated by “socialites.”
Examples here include a March 7 engagement party at a Rio de Janeiro
“mansion” that attracted “high society” fly-ins from around the world,
and a similarly described birthday party in Westport, CT.
It is theoretically possible that socioeconomically privileged
individuals really do lack some immune-response mechanism that
protects individuals who have been exposed to a wider array of
infectious pathogens.
(A recent report on COVID-19 surveillance testing at a Boston homeless
shelter contained the stunning disclosure that 36 percent of 408
screened individuals tested positive for COVID-19. Yet the vast
majority were asymptomatic, and even the few who were symptomatic did
not diverge statistically from the 64 percent of tested individuals
who were COVID-19-negative.)
But absent more data, the more obvious explanation is that these early
SSEs are linked to the intercontinental travel practices of the
guests. (In the case of the Connecticut event, reports the New York
Times, “a visitor from Johannesburg—a 43-year-old businessman—fell ill
on his flight home.” And the Rio party was attended by guests who’d
traveled recently from, or through New York, Belgium and Italy.)
Moreover, COVID-19 outbreaks in poor communities are simply less
likely to be reported, because the victims have less access to
testing, high-end medical care, or media contacts.
In fact, the truly remarkable trend that jumped off my spreadsheet has
nothing to do with the sort of people involved in these SSEs, but
rather the extraordinarily narrow range of underlying activities.
And I believe it is on this point that a close study of SSEs, even one
based on such a biased and incomplete data set as the one I’ve
assembled in my lay capacity, can help us:
Of the 54 SSEs on my list for which the underlying activities were
identified, no fewer than nine were linked to religious services or
missionary work.
This includes massive gatherings such as February’s weeklong Christian
Open Door prayer meeting in Mulhouse, France, which has been linked to
an astounding 2,500 cases; and a massive Tablighi Jamaat Islamic event
in Lahore that attracted a quarter-million people.
But it also includes much smaller-scale religious activities, such as
proselytizing in rural Punjabi villages and a religious meeting in a
Calgary home.
Nineteen of the SSEs—about one-third—involved parties or liquor-fueled
mass attendance festivals of one kind or another, including (as with
the examples cited above) celebrations of weddings, engagements and
birthdays.
Five of the SSEs involved funerals.
Six of the SSEs involved face-to-face business networking. This
includes large-scale events such as Biogen’s notorious Boston
leadership meeting in February, as well as one-on-one business
meetings—from the unidentified “traveling salesperson” who spread
COVID-19 in Maine to Hisham Hamdan, a powerful sovereign-wealth fund
official who spread the disease in Malaysia.
All told, 38 of the 54 SSEs for which activities were known involved
one or more of these four activities—about 70 percent.
Indeed, the categories sometimes overlap, as with patient A1.1 in
Chicago, who attended both a party and a funeral in the space of a few
days; or the New Rochelle, NY man who covered the SSE trifecta of Bar
Mitzvah party, synagogue services, and local funeral, all the while
going to his day job as a lawyer in New York City.
But even that 70 percent figure underestimates the prevalence of these
activities in COVID-19 SSEs, because my database also includes five
SSEs involving two warships and three cruise ships—the USS Roosevelt,
Charles de Gaulle, Diamond Princess, Grand Princess and Ruby
Princess—at least three of which (and probably all five) featured
onboard parties.
These parties, funerals, religious meet-ups and business networking
sessions all seem to have involved the same type of behaviour:
extended, close-range, face-to-face conversation—typically in crowded,
socially animated spaces.
This includes the many people infected by a bartender while being
served at a raucous après ski venue in Austria, and party guests in
Brazil greeting “each other with two kisses on the cheek [a local
custom], hugs and handshakes.”
The funerals in question are generally described as highly intimate
and congested scenes of grieving among close friends and relatives.
In the case of the SSE funeral in Albany, Georgia that devastated the
local population, “people wiped tears away, and embraced, and blew
their noses, and belted out hymns. They laughed, remembering. It was a
big gathering, with upward of 200 mourners overflowing the memorial
chapel, so people had to stand outside.”
The media accounts of these SSEs are full of descriptions in this vein.
At a February 15 festival in Gangelt, a town in Germany’s tiny
Heinsberg district, “beer and wine flowed aplenty as approximately 350
adults in fancy dress locked arms on long wooden benches and swayed to
the rhythm of music provided by a live band. During an interval in the
programme, guests got up to mingle with friends and relatives at other
tables, greeting each other as Rhineland tradition commands, with a
bützchen, or peck on the cheek.”
Since that time, more than 40 Germans from the Heinsberg district have
died. It’s been called “Germany’s Wuhan.”
In the case of religious SSEs, Sikhs, Christians, Jews and Muslims are
all represented in the database. The virus makes no distinction
according to creed, but does seem to prey on physically intimate
congregations that feature some combination of mass participation,
folk proselytizing and spontaneous, emotionally charged expressions of
devotion.
In the case of Islam, it is notable that the same movement, Tablighi
Jamaat, has been responsible for massive outbreaks at completely
separate events in Lahore (noted above), Delhi and Kuala Lampur.
At Mulhouse, the week’s schedule included Christian “choir
performances, collective prayer, singing, sermons from preachers,
workshops, and testimony from people who said God had cured their
illnesses… Many people came day after day, and spent hours there.”
And in Punjab, dozens of Sikhs died thanks to the itinerant rural
preaching of a single (now deceased) infamous septuagenarian named
Baldev Singh (whose deadly travels inspired a hit Punjabi song by
Sidhu Moose Wala, linked immediately below).
Of the 54 SSEs for which underlying activities could be identified,
only 11 did not involve either religious activity, a party, a funeral,
a cruise or extended face-to-face professional networking.
But even in this minority of cases, one can observe almost identical
interpersonal dynamics. Three of the SSEs—in Japan, Skagit County, WA,
and Singapore—involved concert-goers and singing groups belting out
tunes together over a period of hours.
(The Skagit example is particularly interesting, because the
organizers were aware of the COVID-19 risk beforehand, and took the
precaution of spacing out the participants by several feet. If they
had been merely chatting, instead of singing, no one might have gotten
sick.)
Another SSE involved a group of Canadian doctors engaged in a day of
recreational curling. This is a sport that involves hyperventilating
participants frenetically sweeping the ice with brooms while their
faces are positioned inches apart, sometimes changing partners—an
ideal climate for Flüggian infection.
Four of the SSEs were outbreaks at meat-processing plants, in which
“gut snatchers” and other densely packed workers must communicate with
one another amidst the ear-piercing shriek of industrial machinery.
I lack the expertise to determine how the refrigerated nature of some
meat-processing facilities may affect the dynamics of droplet
transmission—though I would also note that at least four of the SSEs
on my list unfolded at European ski resorts.
But high levels of noise do seem to be a common feature of SSEs, as
such environments force conversationalists to speak at extremely close
range.
(Related factors may be at play in old-age homes. These tend to be
quiet places. But the reduced speaking volume and hearing functions of
some elderly residents lend themselves to conversations held at much
closer range than is socially typical in the general population.)
Finally, three of the SSEs involved mass sports spectacles, during
which fans regularly rain saliva in all directions as they communally
celebrate or commiserate in response to each turn of fortune.
(Advance to the 8:30 mark of this video, showing euphoric hometown fan
reaction during the infamous February 19th football match between
Atlanata and Valencia, and you will see exactly what I mean.)
As we now know, the danger starts even before the action begins: One
of the most dangerous things you can do at a sports event in the
COVID-19 era is sing the national anthem.
When do COVID-19 SSEs happen? Based on the list I’ve assembled, the
short answer is: Wherever and whenever people are up in each other’s
faces, laughing, shouting, cheering, sobbing, singing, greeting, and
praying.
You don’t have to be a 19th-century German bacteriologist or MIT
expert in mucosalivary ballistics to understand what this tells us
about the most likely mode of transmission.
It’s worth scanning all the myriad forms of common human activity that
aren’t represented among these listed SSEs: watching movies in a
theater, being on a train or bus, attending theater, opera, or
symphony (these latter activities may seem like rarified examples, but
they are important once you take stock of all those wealthy infectees
who got sick in March, and consider that New York City is a major
COVID-19 hot spot).
These are activities where people often find themselves surrounded by
strangers in densely packed rooms—as with all those above-described
SSEs—but, crucially, where attendees also are expected to sit still
and talk in hushed tones.
The world’s untold thousands of white-collar cubicle farms don’t seem
to be generating COVID-19 SSEs—despite the uneven quality of
ventilation one finds in global workplaces.
Nor have call centers (many of which are still operating) yielded any
SSE that I’ve come across, despite the fact that these are places
where millions of people around the world literally talk for a living.
In New Zealand, one SSE centered on students at a girls’ school. Given
the exuberant and socially intimate way in which children laugh, argue
and gossip, I am surprised there are not more schools on my list.
Moreover, I had trouble finding any SSEs that originated in university
classrooms, which one would expect to be massive engines of infection
if COVID-19 could be transmitted easily through airborne small-droplet
diffusion.
In the United States, the two university-based examples that have
received the most media attention are Liberty University in Lynchburg,
Va. and the University of Texas.
But in neither case was there any apparent connection to classroom
activity. At Liberty, where several employees got sick, the one
student known to be infected isn’t even currently enrolled in classes.
And the UT outbreak, which has caused more than 40 students to be
infected, actually took place on a Spring Break trip to Mexico.
It’s possible, I suppose, that these students spent the week holed up
in a conference room with a stack of books. But my instincts say
otherwise.
It’s similarly notable that airplanes don’t seem to be common sites
for known SSEs, notwithstanding the sardine-like manner in which
airlines transport us and the ample opportunity that the industry’s
bureaucracy offers for contact tracing.
Yes, New Zealand has one cluster that’s based around an infected but
asymptomatic flight attendant. But the many known infections he caused
took place at a wedding reception, not in an airplane.
This flight attendant was running what was, in effect, an unintended
experiment, with the passengers on board his aircraft playing the role
of control group. And the results offer a microcosm of the nature of
SSEs as a whole.
I’ve already cataloged the limitations of my approach at some length.
And I will emphasize again that I am not an epidemiologist,
virologist, or infectious-diseases expert (though I like to think I’ve
made myself a somewhat educated reader of the most recently published
scientific literature in these fields).
But even a layperson can see that there is a fairly clear pattern in
the most notorious, destructive, and widely reported cases of mass
COVID-19 infection—virtually all of which feature forms of human
behaviour that permit the direct ballistic delivery of a large-droplet
Flüggian payload from face A to face B.
If fomites were a major pathway for COVID-19 infection outside of
hospitals, old-age residences, and homes, one would expect restaurant
cooks, mass-transit ticket handlers, and FedEx delivery workers to be
at the center of major clusters. They’re not.
If small-droplet airborne concentrations in unventilated spaces were a
common vector for COVID-19 transmission (as with measles, for
instance), one would expect whole office buildings to become
mass-infection hot spots. That doesn’t seem to have happened.
One critical factor in all this is that we still have no idea what the
minimal infectious dose (MID) is for COVID-19—the number of viral
particles required “to start the pathogenesis cascade that causes a
clinical disease”—even if we do have some idea about what regions of
our respiratory system the virus can use as a point of entry.
Knowing the MID for COVID-19 would be invaluable, because it may well
turn out that it is significantly higher than the viral load capacity
of small droplets, not to mention the even smaller viral load
typically delivered by glancing contact with an infected surface.
This would mean that many of our current COVID-19-avoidance protocols,
however well-intentioned, would be guarding against modes of
transmission that aren’t really significant contributors to the
overall pandemic.
In some cases, public-health rules that guard against non-existent
threats may actually make the problem worse. Consider, for instance,
the spread of COVID-19 among diners at a Guangzhou restaurant on
January 24th, an episode that I have not included in my database, but
which has become the subject of a fascinating forthcoming article in
Emerging Infectious Diseases.
As the authors note, the restaurant in question was air-conditioned on
the date in question. Using video footage, they were able to chart the
position of every diner in the restaurant, and then map their
subsequent infection status in relation to both the single infected
individual known to be present at the time and the air conditioning
system’s outgoing and intake streams.
If the primary transmission mode of COVID-19 were by small,
sub-Flüggian airborne particles, the presence of the forced air
convection might have made the environment safer (especially since
“smear samples from the air conditioner [itself] were all [COVID-19]
nucleotide negative”).
But the researchers instead found evidence for the opposite: “The key
factor for infection was the direction of the airflow,” with
downstream individuals being most at risk—a result consistent with the
thesis that COVID-19 is transmitted primarily through the ballistic
transmission of large respiratory droplets.
None of this has been proven definitively, of course—let alone by any
layperson’s journalistic analysis of a few dozen SSEs. But if the
principal modes of COVID-19 transmission can be narrowed down in this
way, it would provide an enormous boon to the policymakers who are now
starting to think about restarting our economies.
Fighting this disease will always be hard. But it will be harder still
if we fail to develop a proper understanding of the precise way it
attacks us.

The COVID19 is invisible but it has already defeated the most
expensive Aircraft carriers, it lurks everywhere and in silence and
has put down Mecca, St. Peters Square and the Vatican, Qom

International Markets

Euro 1.0762
Dollar Index 100.607
Japan Yen 107.66
Swiss Franc 0.97743
Pound 1.2334
Aussie 0.6339
India Rupee 76.3925
South Korea Won 1236.82
Brazil Real 5.5339
Egypt Pound 15.7894
South Africa Rand 19.1482

Commodities

At this point I would venture Gold is correlated to the #Coronavirus
which is set to turn parabolic and is already non linear and
exponential ~

What I do know is this. Regime implosion is coming to the Oil
Producers and Trump can game the price a little more sure but its a
pointless exercise. Demand has cratered and a return to a hyper
connected 100m barrels per day world is not going to happen for the
foreseeable future. Putin will survive because he prepared for this
moment. Others are as good as terminated.

We are moving from a World of Hyper Connectedness to a World of
Quarantine. A complete Quarantine is the only way to vaccine this
c21st World of ours
#Coronavirus "has started behaving a lot like the once-in-a-century
pathogen we've been worried about." - @BillGates
The Price of Crude Oil is perfectly correlated to the #COVID19 Sudden Stop

“Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all
a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength,
fortune, power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts
obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling
shower of money.”― Ryszard Kapuściński, Shah of Shahs

And with everyone focused on Saudi-Russia-Trump, he notes: “We have no
hope of production cuts matching the demand destruction”

Tullow Oil Plc concluded a years-long process to sell its Uganda
assets to Total SA, a significant step toward reducing its debt pile.
The U.K.-based explorer reached an agreement with the French oil major
to sell its entire interest in the Lake Albert Development Project for
$575 million, it said Thursday in a statement.
In 2019, Tullow was forced to abandon plans for the divestment after
tax negotiations stymied the deal.
The collapse of the deal contributed to a calamitous year for Tullow,
which -- apart from problems in Uganda and Kenya -- faced technical
difficulties in Ghana and disappointing results from wells in Guyana.
Tullow’s stock began a steep decline in 2019, and the drop in oil
prices this year has continued to punish the shares.
Net debt was $2.8 billion at the end of last year.

Emerging Markets

Frontier Markets

Sub Saharan Africa

The president of Madagascar Andry Rajoelina has officially launched a
local herbal remedy claimed to prevent and cure the novel coronavirus.
"Tests have been carried out -- two people have now been cured by this
treatment," Rajoelina told ministers, diplomats and journalists at the
Malagasy Institute of Applied Research (IMRA), which developed the
beverage.
"This herbal tea gives results in seven days," he said.
Downing a dose, he said: "I will be the first to drink this today, in
front of you, to show you that this product cures and does not kill."
The drink, which has been called Covid-Organics, is derived from
artemisia -- a plant with proven efficacy in malaria treatment -- and
other indigenous herbs, according to the IMRA.
But its safety and effectiveness have not been assessed
internationally, nor has any data from trials been published in
peer-reviewed studies. Mainstream scientists have warned of the
potential risk from untested herbal brews.
Rajoelina brushed aside any such reservations and said the concoction
would be offered to schoolchildren, as it was his duty was to "protect
the Malagasy people".
"Covid-Organics will be used as prophylaxis, that is for prevention,
but clinical observations have shown a trend towards its effectiveness
in curative treatment," said Dr. Charles Andrianjara, IMRA's director
general.
The large Indian Ocean island has so far detected 121 cases and no fatality.

But in the coming months, cut flowers might become a sight as rare as
bananas were for children in the Blitz. ⁦@spectator @TheHorseCure
#COVID19
accurately calculating total deaths from Covid-19 in Africa will
involve greater guesswork even than elsewhere, since mathematical
modelling tends to get lost in the Congo’s rainforests or the shifting
sands of Somalia. #COVID19 ⁦@spectator
⁩In other words, the pandemic’s main victims might be ageing
politicians and their hangers--on, who find themselves unable to fly
their private jets to Europe for treatment — a cull of sugar-fed,
obese oligarchs. #COVID19 ⁦@spectator
⁩governor ⁦@MikeSonko promised mass distributions of Hennessy cognac
because ‘alcohol plays a major role in killing the coronavirus’ — but
such clowning aside, slum-dwellers have no cash reserves, nor a
welfare state to rescue them ⁦@LVMH
⁩The recent mistreatment of black people in Guangzhou has horrified
Africans, who know where the virus came from. China has flooded the
continent with its citizens, who along the way have set out to poach
and eat every African wild species imaginable
Yet there is a silver lining. Some years ago, Arab rulers of Sudan
shut down the pipeline that traverses its territory towards Red Sea,
pumping crude oil production from its southern neighbour, South Sudan.
When the embargo hit I predicted social collapse
Yet nothing changed, because South Sudan’s rulers had always stolen
all the oil money. ministers’ fat sons had to cut back on spare parts
for their gold-plated Hummers, whereas most local people simply woke
up in morning to dig their fields & grow sorghum, manioc and
vegetables.
In the same way now, people across Africa will struggle by on the land
relying on extended family relationships. Unless there is a dramatic
reordering of the system, some states will fail, swept away in urban
uprisings and fresh civil conflicts.
Surely it’s time to abolish or reform the edifice of international aid
that has propped up this kleptocracy for decades — the racket run by
⁦@UN agencies and leftist charities like Oxfam
Covid-19 is Chernobyl moment for bad regimes & badly managed aid
programmes in Africa Pestilence heralds a time of change more dramatic
perhaps than any since colonial scramble for Africa. It’s the end of
an epoch and an opportunity for ordinary Africans to build a better
future

The First Issue is whether The #CoronaVirus will infect the Continent
We Know that the #Coronavirus is exponential, non linear and multiplicative.
what exponential disease propagation looks like in the real world.
Real world exponential growth looks like nothing, nothing, nothing ...
then cluster, cluster, cluster ... then BOOM!

''My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;  Look on my Works, ye Mighty,
and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck,
boundless and bare.
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I have a curious Triple Whammy of Kicks [not Hennessey I can assure
you but Coffee, Sturm und Drang and now the practically hourly roll of
#COVID19 Stats]
And the entire China Africa relationship has been an extraordinary
exercise in Narrative Framing and linguistic control, accompanied by a
chorus of Party Hacks chirruping Hosannas at every turn
2-SEP-2019 :: the China EM Frontier Feedback Loop Phenomenon. #COVID19
This Phenomenon was positive for the last two decades but has now
undergone a Trend reversal. The ZAR is the purest proxy for this
Phenomenon.
African Countries heavily dependent on China being the main Taker
arealso at the bleeding edge of this Phenomenon.
This Pressure Point will not ease soon but will continue to intensify

Ramaphosa said the National Coronavirus Command Council decided
restrictions will be lowered from level 5 - the strictest lockdown
stage - to level 4 from next Friday. International borders will remain
closed while travel will be only allowed for essential services.
“We cannot take action today that we will deeply regret tomorrow, we
must avoid a rushed reopening that could risk a spread which would
need to be followed by another hard lockdown,” Ramaphosa said in a
televised address.
South Africa has spent nearly month under restrictions requiring most
of the population to stay at home apart from essential trips, leaving
many struggling without wages and short of supplies.
The country has recorded 3,953 confirmed cases including 75 deaths
with 143,570 people tested for the virus. Thursday saw the highest
one-day leap in infections with 318 new cases, though the health
ministry said this was largely due to intensified screening.
“We have to balance the need to resume economic activity with the
imperative to contain the virus and save lives,” Ramaphosa said.
He did not give details, as expected, on the 500-billion rand ($26
billion) rescue package he announced on Tuesday. But in the speech he
said it was a priority to get the economy restarted and that testing
would continue to be ramped up while social distancing rules remained
in place.
Under the “risk-adjusted” system, authorities will identify which
sectors can operate under various risk scenarios.
“We will implement what we call a risk-adjusted strategy, through
which we take a deliberate and cautious approach to the easing of
current lockdown restrictions,” said Ramaphosa.

Of those, about 24,000 were sent for full testing. It's an excellent
effort to search actively for cases, rather than waiting passively in
hospitals.

Foreign investors are trapped in Nigeria’s debt market as dollar
liquidity dries up due to a lack of fresh inflows.
Some bondholders who sold local-currency securities in March have been
unable to repatriate their proceeds weeks after.
Dollar inflows in Africa’s largest oil-producing nation have taken a
hit from a plunge in crude, which account for 90% of foreign-exchange
earnings.
The , Stanbic IBTC equity analyst Akinbamidele Akintola said by phone.
“Everyone is a buyer of dollars but there is hardly any seller” after
the central bank stopped dollar supply since March 20, Akintola said
in a separate note earlier this month.
Trapped investors are reinvesting funds in high-yielding central bank
bills while they await enough liquidity to get their funds out, said
Samir Gadio, London-based head of Africa strategy at Standard
Chartered Plc.
Yields on the long-dated papers now average 10% to 12% having rallied
about 20% in March.
Some central bank debt auctions in late March and early April recorded
zero bids across certain tenors.
Subscription levels revived again in the past two weeks after
foreigners started reinvesting stranded money, Akintola said by phone
from Lagos.
Reserves have fallen 12% this year to $33.8 billion, raising concerns
that the central bank would soon run out of firepower to defend the
currency.
Overseas traders are more bearish than locals since memories of 2015
capital controls are still fresh in their minds, Christine Phillpotts,
senior vice-president at Alliance Bernstein, said by email.
“Foreign investors need to incorporate the risk and magnitude of
potential naira devaluation when determining the relative
attractiveness of naira yields compared to other emerging markets
whose currencies more accurately reflect current macroeconomic
realities,” she said
Nigerian sovereign bonds have returned 5% this year, compared with the
4% drop in the Bloomberg Barclays Global Emerging Market Local
Currency index.
The Nigerian market’s outperformance is due to the lack of liquidity.
The market is regulator-driven, which is having a lasting effect on
interest rates, Omotola Abimbola, analyst at Chapel Hill Denham, said.
Portfolio managers including Ayodele Salami of Duet Investment,
Akintola of Stanbic and Samir Gadio of Standard Chartered expect
foreign investors to decide their next move based on how the central
bank handles the foreign-exchange market after Nigeria lifts a
four-week lockdown imposed to fight the coronavirus pandemic.
“The investors who are sitting on naira liquidity because they exited
positions and could not get dollars on the way out may wait until the
central bank resumes foreign-currency sales in the investors and
exporters window, presumably at the end of the lockdown,” Samir said.

This week @MoodysInvSvc downgraded Nigeria to negative and we learnt
that Foreign Investors are propping up the Naira to the tune of NGN5.8
trillion ($16 billion) via short-term certificates.
Everyone knows how this story ends. When the music stops, everyone
will dash for the Exit and the currency will collapse just like its
collapsing in Lusaka as we speak

Nigeria’s oil revenue is cratering and there is $16bn of ”hot money”
parked in short term certificates which is all headed for the Exit as
we speak. A Currency Devaluation is now predicted and predictable.

When Meredith Dean pictured her May wedding, she imagined her guests
walking through a meadow of wildflowers. The bridesmaids would carry
bouquets, the groomsmen would wear boutonnieres, and a circle of
flowers would surround Dean and her beau as they exchanged vows.
A wall of flowers would serve as a backdrop for photos. Vases of buds
would run down the center of long dining tables in a barn in New
York’s Catskills. Still more flowers would hang above the dance floor.
Dean had chosen the date so spring blooms would be at their peak:
bright yellow daffodils, fragrant purple hyacinth, puffy peonies,
hydrangea, and, of course, roses.
She hadn’t set a budget yet, leaving it to her floral designer to
decide how many stems to order. “It would be a lot,” she says.
As reports of U.S. Covid-19 cases mounted in early March, Dean, a
29-year-old who works in development at the Museum of Modern Art in
Manhattan, checked the news obsessively.
When authorities cautioned against holding events for more than 250
guests, her colleagues told her not to worry—the wedding was still
months off.
And then on March 15, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
said Americans should avoid gathering in groups larger than 50 for the
next eight weeks. Dean’s wedding was seven weeks away, and she was
expecting about 100 guests.
There wasn’t much for her and her fiancé, David Bradley, a research
scientist for a pharmaceutical company, to discuss.
Neither of them would put friends and family at risk. The next day,
her first working from home in New Jersey, Dean called her wedding
planners and told them she wanted to postpone the celebration.
She was calm on the call, but when she hung up, she sobbed. “I’m not
ashamed of having feelings,” she says.
A delayed wedding is hardly a disaster during a pandemic that’s
killing thousands of people a day, as Dean is quick to note.
But in greenhouses from the highlands of Ecuador and Colombia to the
shores of Kenya’s Lake Naivasha, growers were already stacking roses
in compost heaps.
Within days of the lockdown orders in the U.S. and Europe, as events
were canceled, restaurants closed, and offices emptied, demand for
stems evaporated.
The crash of the $8.5 billion global trade in cut flowers shows how
quickly and distinctively the new coronavirus is disrupting supply
chains, even in places where it isn’t yet pervasive.
After only a few weeks of quarantine, Vermont farmers are dumping milk
in manure pits because of canceled orders from schools. Crops are
withering in Europe as closed borders prevent migrant farmworkers from
harvesting them.
American chicken wing prices cratered before what’s normally a March
Madness-driven boom.
In India, farmers are unloading ripening grapes at one-sixth the usual price.
It’s an open question whether, when consumers start spending again,
their former suppliers will still be around to sell to them.
One of the first people Dean texted after she postponed her wedding
was her floral designer, Laura Clare, who works from the first floor
of a quaint gray building with white trim in Bernardsville, N.J.
Clare, who’s been in business for 20 years, sells bouquets during the
week, and on weekends she designs elaborate arrangements for big
events.
Her wedding clients typically spend from $5,000 to $10,000.
Dean was one of the first brides to contact Clare after the CDC recommendation.
Within a few days, all Clare’s clients planning April weddings were
scrambling to pick dates in the fall. She had to tell brides that some
flowers, such as cherry blossoms, might not be available then.
Soon, as the number of Covid-19 cases in New Jersey passed 1,000, the
governor ordered all but essential businesses to close. Florists
didn’t make the cut.
With her supply wilting, Clare started giving bouquets away,
delivering some to older parishioners at a local church. She
furloughed her five full-time employees and canceled her flower
orders, which usually total at least $5,000 a week.
She’s applying for a Small Business Administration loan that would let
her put her workers back on the payroll. “I’ve been through 9/11,”
Clare says. “I’ve been through Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy. I’ve
never seen anything like this before.”
Flowers are usually ordered about two weeks in advance, so Clare
hadn’t yet placed orders with her wholesaler in New Jersey for Dean’s
wedding.
But she’d been planning to request some hard-to-find blossoms from an
auction in the Netherlands. More than 40% of the world’s flower
exports pass through that country’s auction houses.
The flower trade is a miracle of modern capitalism. A chain of cold
storage starts with stems being picked in places as far-flung as
Africa, the Middle East, and South America, then packed into
refrigerated trucks, driven to refrigerated planes, and flown to
Amsterdam to be auctioned off.
They’re then repacked into more cold trucks and planes and delivered
to supermarkets, florists, and bridal bouquets across Asia, Europe,
and the U.S.
The auctions are run by a cooperative, Royal FloraHolland, formed a
century ago by a group of growers who met in a pub and devised a
system to better control how their flowers were sold.
Royal FloraHolland now runs four auction sites that handle the bulk of
the global trade. Its facility in Aalsmeer, a concrete warehouse
larger than 75 soccer fields, is one of the biggest buildings in
Europe.
Each day before sunrise, workers fill it with truckloads of
chrysanthemums, roses, and tulips. Buyers assemble in rooms filled
with computer screens, where photos of each lot are displayed. Clare’s
order likely would have gone from her wholesaler to a broker here.
The blooms are sold under the traditional Dutch auction system, in
which prices start high then tick lower as a clock counts down. The
first buyer to pounce wins.
As the lots are bought, electric tractors pull long trains of wagons
loaded with blooms from one side of the warehouse to the other. The
average day sees more than 100,000 transactions. Most of the flowers
end up elsewhere in Europe, in under 12 hours.
Spring is usually a busy season, with weddings, Mother’s Day, and
Easter. And in the early days of March, even as the Netherlands was
reporting its first coronavirus infections, the auctions went off as
usual.
But after Italy imposed a national lockdown, France ordered
nonessential stores to close, and Germany called for the cancellation
of most events, the market collapsed.
March 16, the same day Dean postponed her wedding, was the “blackest
day” at the auctions, says Fred van Tol, international sales manager
at Royal FloraHolland.
Growers were calling him in a panic. “Those are difficult phone
calls,” he says. “Their life work is about to implode.”
Rose prices dropped to €0.07 (8¢) a stem that day, down 70% from their
price a year earlier. Traders struggled to make any deals.
At the Naaldwijk auction site, outside The Hague, workers tossed
cartful after cartful of wrapped bouquets and potted houseplants on
the floor so small tractors could scoop them into dumpsters.
The auction house could stabilize prices only by capping supply at 30%
of last year’s level.
In normal times, Dave van der Meer, who runs his own flower export
business, wakes up each morning at 4:30 to start his day at the
Naaldwijk auction.
He’s been walking through the rows of flowers for most of his 50
years, since he was a toddler visiting his father at work.
The auction has now gone quiet. “You can fire a cannonball in the
flower hall without hitting anybody,” he says.
Royal FloraHolland has asked buyers to bid from their home computers
if possible. With prices so low and flights restricted, many growers
have stopped sending flowers altogether. The cooperative estimates the
outbreak will lead to more than $2 billion in losses.
Van der Meer says it took one and a half weeks to shred all the unsold
flowers at Naaldwijk. Even with all the waste, the Dutch florist who
customarily donates thousands of blossoms for the pope’s Easter Mass
decided not to send any this year, to protect volunteers.
The pontiff ultimately performed the liturgy inside St. Peter’s
Basilica rather than outside in the square surrounded by 30 tons of
flowers and 80,000 people.
Before the pandemic, 42 of the cargo flights arriving at Aalsmeer each
week came from Kenya, whose climate allows roses to grow year-round.
The East African nation ships about $1 billion worth of flowers a
year, making it Europe’s biggest supplier. That figure represents
tenfold growth since the 1990s, as investments in infrastructure made
large-scale exports possible.
More than 150,000 people now toil on Kenyan flower farms, many of them
women. The work is grueling, with long shifts in steamy greenhouses,
and laborers earn as little as $70 a month, but it’s a steady paycheck
in a country where those can be hard to come by.
Billy Coulson employs 1,200 people at Nini Flowers, one of many farms
in a valley north of Nairobi, near Lake Naivasha.
Giraffes sometimes wander up to his 50 greenhouses, from which he
usually exports 2.2 million stems each week.
He offers nine varieties of roses, pink and orange and yellow and red,
selling mostly to big European supermarket chains such as Morrisons.
Coulson, 56, was raised in the U.K. and went to work for Kenyan flower
farms after serving in the infantry of the British army. He lives
on-site with his wife and three children.
Business was strong in February, he says. His first cancellations came
in early March, even before Kenya saw its first Covid-19 case.
“We knew there was a problem in China,” Coulson says. “We had no idea
of the scale.” By mid-month his sales had dropped by more than half.
His costs, though, haven’t fallen. He still has to buy chemicals,
fertilizer, and water, and to pay his workers to harvest the flowers,
chop them up, and pile them for disposal.
He’s cut his staff to half time—two weeks on and two weeks off. He
estimates he’s losing €300,000 ($327,930) a month, a level of
disruption far worse than the Kenyan postelection violence and global
financial crisis of more than a decade ago or than the Icelandic
volcanic ash cloud that grounded many cargo flights in 2010.
“It’s a black hole,” he says. “If this goes on for three or four
months, we’re faced with the prospect of closing down.”
The workers will suffer most if farms shutter. Justerian Iminza, a
38-year-old rose harvester for Nini, says she’s already unable to
afford breakfast or lunch for her family.
A widow with two daughters and a son, she migrated to Lake Naivasha to
find work on the flower farms. Her job is a good one, as far as the
industry goes. It’s unionized, and the farm is fair-trade certified.
After 13 years at Nini, she was earning about $110 a month, plus a $25
housing allowance. But now she’s making half as much.
Her credit cooperative has limited withdrawals and stopped making
emergency loans.
 She says that Nini has discussed providing $10 a month in emergency
relief or distributing maize flour, but that nothing has been decided
yet.
“We are all worried,” she says. “We don’t know how long it will last.”
Dean rescheduled her wedding for Aug. 15, picking that date over one
in June (too soon) and Halloween (too close to the U.S. presidential
election).
Her venue, photographer, and floral designer were all amenable to the
switch, but DJ Ben had another gig.
She’s only cautiously optimistic she’ll be able to get married in
August. New Jersey is now a hot spot, with more than 2,300 coronavirus
deaths, and New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has extended his state’s
stay-at-home order order through mid-May.
Even if some businesses reopen soon, no one knows whether an August
wedding in the Catskills will be advisable or permitted.
Coronavirus is now spreading in Kenya, too. President Uhuru Kenyatta
locked down much of the country on April 6. In Ecuador, another major
rose exporter, hospitals and funeral parlors are overwhelmed.
Dean says she’s grateful her floral designer, Clare, will be able to
work with her in August, but Clare doesn’t know what she’ll be able to
import once she reopens.
Dean’s vision for her wedding flowers is all but gone. “They’ll still
be beautiful,” she says. “But I know what they were going to be like.”

Kenya