Folks, bloomberg is reporting that we might end up experiencing a sharp and short decline in markets thanks to omicron. Therefore, let's get into an omicron update, keep in mind, you can go to the link down below go to met kevin.com cashflow, to sign up for potential future fund announcements, no other subscriptions via that email sign up just in case. We have an announcement check that out link down below hey everyone meet kevin here with a quick, a covid update. We have some good news: new york city, coveted cases, have reached a peak and are beginning their descent.

As of wednesday, positivity testing or testing and positivity rates stood at 17, making the third straight day where fewer than one in five new york tests came back positive. The 17 positivity rate is still much higher than the 1.5 percent we saw just two months ago, but it is down dramatically from the 30 positivity rate that we saw in the past few weeks. This folks uh on screen now is the chart of a covet cases in new york city. You can clearly see an inflection point down about three and a half to four weeks into the beginning of the search.

The beginning of the surge in new york came right around december 18th, we're about three and a half to four weeks from that right now to where we started. Seeing an inflection point to the downside over the last two to three days here, which is very good news. We hope that this continues to the downside. Folks, we are seeing similar inflection points in our national data for the united kingdom.

We are starting to see a little bit of an inflection point up in germany. One of the reasons germany might be seeing a little bit of an inflection up after this down is that we believe that the first wave here in the middle was a delta wave, which then subsided, and now the omicron wave is coming to germany. Canada appears to have hit somewhat of a ceiling, which is a blessing. The united kingdom has had a substantial surge that really began around december 14th and that surge crested around january 5th.

About three weeks later, and for the last week we've been in decline in the united kingdom and the rate of decline has subsided, we've not just hit a ceiling. We have subsided with the rate of decline. Very very positive. France and italy are starting to show tiny little signs that they might be slowing here at the top, but it might be too soon to tell given that we have had little pauses in data reads as well for uh for france and italy.

So we'll keep an eye on this now uh. One thing to keep an eye on is: we have not seen a substantial inflection point to the upside, yet in excess deaths per 100 000 people. This is because in general we have seen uh in the biggest well. I should say the largest inflection point up: we saw in excess deaths uh.

This is how many people we would expect to die versus how many people are actually dying. The largest increase we saw the largest bump here was really when, when delta started, spreading uh. So if we look at around august through september and then briefly thereafter about six weeks after that's when we really started seeing an inflection point up in death right around here in early november, excess deaths in the united states which aligns with when individuals might start dying. After covet exposure due to delta, but we're not really seeing a substantial inflection point to the upside, especially since we've had a delta search that lasted throughout the northeast of the united states through through november delta, was still surging right.

We have now really seen that sort of inflection point up on omicron, which is definitely a sign that omicron is at least based on excess deaths less deadly. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to look at death data for covet and omicron because take a look at this when we look at cumulative deaths due to covet in the united kingdom. Let's say the chart looks like it's going up, but there's a disclaimer here that says limited testing and challenges in the attribute in attributing deaths to covet may mislead or or may not be an accurate count of the true number of deaths from coven. And so we are expecting that the true number of deaths from coe is substantially lower uh than with other uh variants like the delta variant, uh, of course, that that doesn't help us discern why we see this sort of spike here, the seven day average.

And again, it's possibly just because more people are testing positive with covin uh and then who are dying from other reasons. Now uh, we are still seeing more and more evidence that the uh prior either prior illness, with covet or prior illness with get this the common cold. As we talked about and broke, the story about three days ago is helping limit, uh individuals from actually being symptomatic with covid. This is leading less people to get tested than we actually expect.

We think we're only catching about one in five actual positive cases of covid. Given uh at home, testing or lack of testing completely but again, individuals who have been exposed to the cold or who had the cold might actually have a strong t cell response against covid. This is very positive in terms of a development, and it makes sense because the common four to five strains of the common cold are human coronaviruses, which means they're a type of coronavirus uh compared to the sars cov2 that we have now with coven, uh and uh, And we're seeing that immunity transfer over at least to some degree still being studied, but but very good news. Dr fauci believes that everybody is eventually going to get coveted, uh and uh well, essentially, as we begin to live with it, and i think this is quite an interesting u-turn.

Coming from fouchy, the white house will be distributing a 10 million cova tests per month and uh per month to schools, 5 million rapid tests, 5 million pcr tests, of course, tbd. When those will actually arrive. Israel plans to administer a fourth dose of the vaccine for individuals 60 and over, as well as to medical staff, who have had their last booster at least four months ago soon after this announcement, israel released a preliminary study showing that the fourth shot generated a five-fold Boost in antibodies in the week following the booster, but is this really necessary? According to the european drug regulators group, there is still no data supporting the need for a fourth shot and went as far as saying that multiple boosters might ultimately lead to. They wrote potential problems for immune system response.

This was the head of biological health threats at the european medicines agency, the ema and they're, basically saying hey, we're, not sure if we should be boosting folks every four months, that's three times a year. This might be too much and we could end up having larger immune system problems, providing so many uh boosters. So not a raging endorsement by a medical agency for boosters. They prefer a once a year booster like a fluva flu shot, whereas you go into the flu season, you take a shot, but you don't regularly take one to try to get this annual protection uh by just constantly jabbing yourself or getting job the world health organization.

Actually reiterated this indicating that repeated booster doses of the original vaccines are likely to be unsustainable, keep in mind that coveted cases have increased 55 percent for the week ending january. 9Th weekly deaths remained near unchanged from a week prior numbers wise and that's globally, numbers wise. This is 15 million new cases and 43 000 deaths last week. The big question, though, for how covet is going to continue to impact markets has to do with china, for example, in one of the largest ports and production and a production hub for foreign businesses in china.

China ordered a half-day break just for kova testing, bringing fears that omicron might disrupt global supply chains, just like delta did. Hopefully it doesn't, but china has a zero covered policy and multiple cities have gone into lockdown ahead of the winter olympics. Over 20 million people are now confined by these lockdowns in china. All vehicles have been banned from roads moving into one one city, one such city as an example.

It has a population of 5.5 million. You can't even drive into the city right now, and so the economic impact china has on the rest of the world is obviously substantial, specifically with regards to manufacturing, uh the production of goods and services, but then also shipping them getting them out of china. According to bloomberg, we're already seeing trucker shortages and given the lockdowns in china - and this is an exacerbation of trucker shortages that we've seen in the united states as well anyway. This is a brief update on what's going on with kovid.

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