Covid-19: the latest update from London

Hi guys, I thought I'd give you all a quick update from London about the whole Covid-19 situation here. Now firstly, there's no much change to my regular routine - I mostly work from home anyway given that my clients are all over the world and it makes very little difference to me whether I am sitting in the office or at home if I am talking to a client in Taiwan. The only thing that I do regularly is go to my local gymnastics club for training four times a week and I would get really upset if I was no longer able to do that as I am actually in pretty good shape now. The thing is that we are unable to make plans for our next holiday for the moment - my partner is awaiting a medical appointment with the local hospital and good grief, they have such a lousy system. You need your local GP to refer you to the hospital - but the hospital then will call you once they get round to processing your case and we're just waiting for the phone to ring, for them to ask him in for an appointment and until then, we can't book anything and the hospitals are probably overwhelmed with the whole Covid-19 situation. Apart from not being able to go on holiday because of this, well really, nothing much has changed. But here's a few snapshots of how Covid-19 is now affecting life in London and also my thoughts on some of the latest developments.

We all know that the cases are hugely under-reported - all we know is that there are many people with Covid-19 out there but most of them are suffering from very mild symptoms but nonetheless passing it on as carriers. So here's a true story from my friend Jason who had just returned from Italy and he had a bit of a cough - usually something he would totally ignore given that it really was no big deal, but in light of the current circumstances, he went to seek medical advice. So he was told, "because you're in the low risk group (he is a young adult in good health), we're not going to test you. But don't leave your house for 2 weeks, you need to self-isolate just in case you are ill." Jason then asked the doctor if he could just pay for a test and the doctor replied, "oh we don't do the tests here, we need to refer you to the hospital and we're only referring the elderly and those who have underlying medical conditions for the test. But seriously, please self-isolate for 2 weeks and check yourself for fever." And so Jason asked the doctor, okay and what if I get a fever? The doctor then said, "uh, well, then you need to make sure you really stay at home since it's not like we have a cure for this, just self-quarantine." Hence at this stage, we have simply no idea if Jason has Covid-19 or not - because he is not tested, the system isn't testing people like him who are deemed 'low-risk'. However, even if Jason did have Covid-19, then he is not showing up in the official statistics because our testing system basically is so inadequate that they are only bothering with those in the high risk category: the elderly and those with underlying health issues. There must be thousands like Jason out there who may have Covid-19 - unless they are all tested, we cannot trust the official statistics. 

This is in huge contrast to East Asian countries like South Korea and Singapore where testing is carried out with ruthless efficiency and has gone a long way in helping contain the virus. There are two reasons why the testing is so pathetic in the UK - firstly, whilst we have a national health service, it is hugely bureaucratic, under-funded, under-staffed and it is ill-equipped to cope with such a crisis. Currently, they are trying to slash the amount of time you have to wait for a Covid-19 test result from a week to 24 hours - but there are testing kits in places like China and Taiwan which can offer you results in 10 to 15 minutes. However, the very bureaucratic nature of the NHS means that they need to go through months of tedious, boring paperwork before they can consider purchasing any new equipment - so they would rather let patients die than get better testing kits because of this kind of bureaucracy. Secondly, the government prefers testing to be limited because if we implemented a South Korean style testing regime and tested all people like my friend Jason, then the numbers would jump from a few hundred cases to well over 10,000 or even 100,000 cases in a few hours. Most of those people would have very mild or no symptoms at all, but still such a headline would send shock waves into stock market and cause it to crash even further as the true scale of this pandemic is revealed. The government is already struggling to deliver a Brexit and having the economy crash like this isn't going to do them any favours, hence they would deliberately want to limit the availability of testing to keep the official figures low and even if it means a lot more old people die as a result of this virus, the government is cruel and evil enough to turn a blind eye to that as their first priority is the economy.

The same situation is facing America where a lot of the poor don't have access to medical insurance and healthcare, so they cannot even afford to show up at a hospital and get warded for a severe case of Covid-19 induced pneumonia as that would be incredibly expensive. So even if you do make testing free of charge in America, many of the poorer Americans with no health insurance just wouldn't get tested and hope that they can just recover the same way they would from a bad case of flu. 44 million Americans have no health insurance and a further 38 million have inadequate health insurance. This is a man-made disaster we're witnessing in one of the world's richest countries - Trump and his government doesn't care about these poor people, he only cares if the stock market crashes because that would hurt his fellow rich people who have invested in the stock market. Even at this time of crisis, Trump is such a fucking idiot that he is tweeting shit like a wall would protect America from the virus - at which point I can only shake my head and think, what kind of person would want a moron like that for their president? What? Seriously? With nearly 800 cases of Covid-19 in America and only 7 confirmed cases in Mexico, I'm thinking that Mexico needs the wall to be protected from Americans with the virus. Well both Trump and Johnson are both fucking idiots and I've accepted that we live in a world where enough poor and stupid people are willing to vote for them - I'm just glad that when it all this shit comes crashing down, I have enough personal wealth to make sure I will be okay no matter how bad things get. The only consolation is that Trump is woefully out of his depth to handle a crisis like this - a public health emergency on an unprecedented scale, so if things get really bad in America, Trump may lose the next election. That would be the one silver lining in this dark cloud.

Would things in the UK get as bad as in Italy? I don't know - but we are certain that things will get a lot worse over the next few weeks at least before they will get any better. Many are hoping that the warmer weather in spring would stop the spread of the virus but I think that's just wishful thinking. There's a lot of uncertainty at the moment, a simple example is my friend visiting from Spain at the moment. He is due to go home next week but he is now afraid that his flight may be cancelled if things in Spain become as bad as in Italy - if there is a sudden explosion of cases in London, then he may be faced with a quarantine period when he gets back to Spain as he lives in an area with very few cases. He wants to change his flight to go home earlier, ahead of schedule but the airline is telling him that as Spain is not badly affected at the moment, they won't be able to change his flight for free and it would involve a hefty fee to change his flight. Another friend has just been told not to go into the office tomorrow and I asked her, "how long will they expect you to work from home for?" And she said, "until further notice, quite frankly nobody knows what the hell will happen tomorrow, or this time next week. Would the situation get worse, how quickly and how much worse? Nobody has a freaking clue - we simply can't make any long term decisions as a result. So we're now just doing a lot of conference calls and all meetings are cancelled. I would be treating myself to an extra hour in bed since I don't have to commute into the office though, I could get used to this." I get the sense that people are hoping for the best but expecting the worse. Then there's a question of enforcement: even if they want to lock down a city like London, are there enough police officers to enforce a very strict lock down? Can you even find the manpower to make a lock down effective - this is a very big city with 9.3 million people.

The other issue I have faced is how a lot of companies have been plunged into a period of uncertainty - they are cancelling events like conferences, they are stopping their staff from taking business trips and even asking them to work from home if possible. In light of all of this, a lot of projects have been put on hold and so earlier this year, I was looking at doing something quite exciting with the Taiwanese institutional market - that has all been put on hold because everyone's waiting for the whole situation to calm down before making any decisions. A few of my business contacts have chanced on a business opportunity: China, Singapore and Taiwan have had a head start of a good two months in terms of dealing with this pandemic whilst Europe and America have only just awoken to the reality of just how bad things can get. So there are various parties in the Far East looking to sell the best testing kits over to countries who are willing to buy them - but we're not just looking at governmental organisations buying in bulk, anyone running a venue with a lot of people coming and going all the time could need these tests kits: hotels, universities, factories, schools, nursing homes, private hospitals - you name it. One company I'm dealing with has a test kit that can deliver results in just ten minutes, so imagine being able to test all passengers at a major international airport. If you can get accurate results in ten minutes, you can actually have a window of opportunity between the passengers arriving at the airport and boarding the plane to make sure that everyone getting on that plane is tested and you only allow those who are not infected to board the plane - if one airline does that, then every airline would follow suit quickly because passengers will demand it.

Do I have much experience in this field? Hell no, not at all - I am a finance guy, I work in banking, but I am a businessman and I know an opportunity when I see one. The products come with the right certifications and the buyers will not accept a defective product - the appropriate checks and balances are in place. This is no more than supply chain management and few people in the West needed these test kits two months ago, but suddenly they cannot get their hands on it fast enough. It is a new product and the supply chain doesn't exist or at least is a mess at the moment - I spot a business opportunity and before you say, "you're an evil bastard trying to make money out of misery, during the time of a pandemic", my reply to that is simple: if people like me can help get more testing kits into the right hands in the West faster, then more lives can be saved. Remember right wing governments like the ones in the US and UK don't want people tested because it would reveal the true number of cases in the country and that would cause the stock market to crash even further - however, if we can use the private sector to get testing kits into the right hands, then we can ignore the impact it may have on Trump's popularity and the stock market and make sure we help those who are most vulnerable with this vital piece of testing and diagnosis equipment. If I haven't said this enough, I'll say it again: I fucking hate Trump. I hate Trump so much. I also hate Johnson as well. It has been a long time since we have had politicians we can trust. And if I can use my skills as a businessman to bring them down by hurting their popularity, then I shall take great joy in doing so and if I can make some money in the meantime, then why the hell not? At least this is far more sophisticated than those people selling toilet paper, hand-sanitizing gels and face masks on the internet at inflated prices.

Finally, I would like to talk about Trump's bizarre travel ban that hit the news today: we all knew he is so fucking stupid so this doesn't surprise me. He has suspended all flights from 26 countries in the Schengen Zone to the US, but that doesn't include the UK or Ireland. That's a highly ineffective measure because that's a massive loophole. Italy is one of the worst affected countries in the world at the moment - imagine if I wanted to travel from Turin (in the north of Italy) to New York, I can't take a direct flight from Turin to New York - they don't exist. But I can simply fly from Turin to London, transit in London and then fly from London to New York. That's a very common route in any case because Turin is a relatively small city with no direct flights to America in any case - you would need to connect through another big city like Rome, London, Paris or Amsterdam anyway if you wanted to fly to America from somewhere like Turin and the London route remains open. Is this latest travel ban going to cover an Italian passenger traveling through London to the US? No, because London isn't covered in the ban which is bizarre because the situation in London is no better than a lot of places in the 26 countries covered in this ban which covers country like Slovakia and Latvia with just 10 cases each. There are currently 460 cases in the UK (this number reflects poor testing and under-reporting) and just 43 cases in Ireland, yet neither the UK nor Ireland are covered in this ban. I'm just some guy who travels quite a lot for my holidays and I saw the massive loophole in this policy in about 5 seconds? In any case, there is already plenty of cities in America where the virus has taken hold and there is much evidence of community spread - so it is not a virus that foreigners are bringing into America, no the virus is already spreading from person to person in these American communities: people who have never even left America before are getting the virus, so he is shutting the stable doors long after the horses have bolted.

So what will happen as a result of this travel ban? Well, the people who would get hit hardest are the European airlines like KLM, Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia and Swiss who are going to be forced to cancel flights to America because their European passengers cannot travel on those flights. Americans returning to America on these flights are exempt and will be allowed to enter the US, but these airline are probably not going to bother operating half-empty flights to America and back. By the same token, airlines who operate routes originating in the UK and Ireland for American destinations are going to be getting a lot of bookings today as travelers in Europe scramble to reroute themselves via London, Dublin, Manchester and other cities in the UK and Ireland in order to exploit this loophole. So airlines like Aer Lingus, British Airways, Virgin Atlantic, along others like American Airlines, Delta and United who do fly to London are the net beneficiaries of this policy. So someone who was hoping to travel on a direct flight from Berlin to New York will now have to transit via somewhere like London or Dublin - that's utterly ridiculous because that assumes that the authorities in the UK and Ireland will take responsibility to screen all US-bound transit passenger. There's no evidence to suggest that British and Irish airports are any better equipped than European or American airports when it comes to screening infected passengers for the virus and if the American authorities were that concerned, then they need to test and monitor all disembarking passenger at American airports given that we need to queue for a long time to get through US customs.

So that's it from me for now - what do you think? How have you been affected by Covid-19? Have you changed or canceled your travel plans? Are you working from home? Are you washing your hands more often? Do you think that there are plenty of people like my friend Jason out there who probably have the virus but are untested and thus are not showing up in the statistics? How bad will things get in Europe and North America? And what do you think of Trump's latest travel ban? Anyway, in light of the situation, a colleague recently mentioned that people have been afraid of Chinese people wearing masks in public and I replied, "do you know how many European people have died from the Corona virus in places like Italy? This is no longer a Chinese virus, it hasn't been for weeks - plenty of white people are dying from it, keep up with the news. This virus kills white people like you too, you know. This virus is less racist than us human beings - it doesn't discriminate, it will kill anyone." Leave a comment below please and many thanks for reading.