As an aside from today's market action (a correction which I think we all knew was inevitable at some point), and since I've been greatly disappointed with the terribly uninformative way in which the various coronavirus data pages have presented the information, I decided to generate my own graphs trying to get a sense of how effective the containment efforts for the virus have been - that is,
new cases by location on each day.
View attachment 508144
Caveat 1: I had to remove all "zero" values because the vast majority of them were cases where a particular data source didn't update between datasets. But it's possible that in some of the low incidence rate areas, there were legitimate cases of zero new cases diagnosed that the graph leaves out.
Caveat 2: These graphs plot total cases, but cases per capita might be a more informative metric.
It's really clear from this how much this is very much a "Wuhan coronavirus" problem at present, and how China has effectively - thusfar at least - managed to contain it in that province (Hubei). It's tried to break out in Zhejiang and Guangdong, but each time the number of cases has gone back down.
That said, they clearly have a lot of work ahead of them in Hubei. I imagine that they're probably focused on compartmentalizing the province and trying to clear it section by section. I also imagine that they'll probably start letting life get back to normal in other provinces, but dialing the pressure back up whenever / wherever an outbreak springs up - compartmentalization rather than broad, sweeping actions.
Just my take, from looking at the data.
(For what it matters: Shanghai borders Zhejiang and Jiangxi)
ED: I just thought of a good way to deal with the "zero problem" listed in the caveats above - rather than plotting datapoints as they're reported, I'm going to plot them relative to time. Will take a few minutes.
5 shares at $762.
