How will Covid-19/Coronavirus Affect my Alternative Investment Portfolio? Part 40: November 28th
Updated: Feb 8, 2021
No Thanksgiving break from virus as third death wave continues surge; Crystal ball looking ominous as new infections soar to stunning records; World round up: U.K. And Netherlands recent progress looking more like a head-fake while world-leading South Korea stumbles; State Roundup: Even more lockdowns come, while some claim it’s too little too late; Georgia’s bellwether economic recovery: 20+ weeks of dismal disappointment; Economy slammed by increasing levels of newly jobless as more analysts fear double-dip recession; Financial cliff: December surprise in the making?; AstraZeneca vaccine’s rollercoaster ride from hero to zero in under a week; Large numbers of minority vaccine skeptics may make ending the pandemic difficult; Pandemic causes extreme mental health crisis with 3 in 4 U.S. young adults struggling, and a quarter “strongly considering” suicide; Update on my portfolio strategy.

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Quick Summary
This week there was alot of info on virus spread, economic impact, investment repercussions, as well as more news regarding vaccines and treatments.
This article is part of a multi-article series that's been published weekly since the pandemic began, back in March 2020. It started with three introductory articles on the virus and its effect on the economy and on alternative investment classes. Then it moved on to weekly updates on the latest and greatest developments (along with weekly updates on my evolving personal portfolio strategy). You can see the links to every article in the series here.
No Thanksgiving Break from Virus as Third Death Wave Continues Surge
For the 31st week in a row, the United States battled the coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2, which causes the Covid-19 disease. Due to the Thanksgivingholiday, many sources did not report all of their data consistently through the week. But as of Saturday morning, the official death toll had climbed to 261,502 (versus 271,192 last Saturday morning). Here's a quick summary of what's happened so far:
The first U.S. death wave started in early March. It was overwhelmingly in urban areas (like New York City in the Northeast). It peaked on April 21st and the country fought it down until July 6th.
The second death wave started on July 7th. This ran predominantly through urban areas in the Sun Belt. It peaked on August 1st, before falling until October 8th.
Then the third death wave began on October 9th and is currently tracking upwards. Unlike earlier waves, this has been spread across the entire country and rural areas are being hammered worse than urban.
How did things go this week?

Again, many sources did not report data towards the end of the week. Despite this, deaths clearly rose from the beginning to the end of the week, as the third wave continued.
Unlike the two previous waves, this third one is widely distributed throughout the country, which many experts say will make it much more difficult to contain and to fight. And as we discussed in late October, this has already caused acute shortages of critical drugs and key medical personnel needed to fight the disease and limit deaths. Still, it’s early and anything is possible. So we’ll be watching this very closely to see what happens.
Crystal Ball Looking Ominous as New Infections Soar To Stunning Records
If we're unable to make clear progress and deaths remain high, then the overwhelming consensus of economists is that this would sabotage hopes of a quick, V-shaped recovery. Instead, the recovery would assume a different shape (W-shaped, U-shaped, etc.). This would be slower, involve more long-term damage to both health and economy, and potentially cause problems for some or many consumers, businesses and investments. (See part 14 for more information on the possible "recovery shapes" and their ramifications).
Since this is potentially so important, let's take a look at one of the leading indicators of upcoming deaths: virus infections. Virus infections tend to lead deaths by anywhere from 2 to 8 weeks (depending on how long it takes someone to die and how long it takes their particular location to report the information). These case numbers are not completely reliable due to testing labs' difficulties, in many parts of the country, with getting results back on time. And some states are not reporting all of the positive tests (specifically, the antigen tests). But they can still provide a clue of what might lie ahead with deaths. How did virus infections look, this week?

Again, many sources didn’t report data at the end of the week due to the holiday. And despite this, deaths were still higher at the end of the week than the beginning. And clearly, the third infection wave is continuing.
Unfortunately, none of this was a surprise. As we discussed in early September, many health experts predicted this would be the inevitable result of lax behavior over the Labor Day weekend (September 7). And that itself wasn't a difficult prediction to make, since the exact same thing happened after the lax behavior over the Memorial Day weekend (May 23)… which ended all progress against the first wave and triggered the second. (See "Forgetting History and Doomed to Repeat It: Will Labor Day Launch the Third Wave, like Memorial Day Kicked Off the Second Wave?").
Sadly, so far, they've been right.
The one silver lining is that the rate of increase decreased ever so slightly at the end of the last week, versus the end of the previous week. So perhaps this is the first sign that some of the newer health restrictions are beginning to take effect. This week’s data is too wonky to analyze, so we’ll look at this next week.
Further below, we’ll take a closer look at what happened at the U.S. state level, to better understand what might happen next. But first, let’s complete our look at the rest of the world for the week.
World Round Up: U.K. And Netherlands Recent Progress Looking More like a Head-Fake while World-Leading South Korea Stumbles.
How did other countries do this week?
As we discussed in part six, South Korea uses an aggressive mixture of the Three T's of epidemic control (testing, tracing and treatment). And through most of the epidemic, it has been one of the world leaders in both minimizing deaths (one of the lowest per million) and also minimizing economic damage (their economy is now mostly open and growth is projected to barely shrink this year, while in comparison, the U.S. still has significant closures and is projected to take a -5.9% hit to GDP).
This week, South Korea looked like this:

This was one of the worst weeks for South Korea in a long time. For the last several weeks, the country has been battling a third wave, which was triggered by a super-spreader event at a church in Seoul. This week, though, deaths accelerated. So things are still not under control. And currently they are only just a little lower than they were at the peak of this first wave.
Still, the biggest positive for South Korea is that (at least so far) their rates have been extraordinarily low compared to virtually every other country in the world. (See chart below for comparison to other countries.) This has been a major factor allowing them to keep their economy open while suffering far less damage than virtually everyone else. And this week again, the South Korean economy continued to remain predominantly open for business. How is Sweden doing?
Unfortunately, it’s only productive to cover Sweden’s developments once a month now (versus every week like we had been doing for months). There used to be hope that their unorthodox lockdown-lite strategy might prove itself as a successful alternate model for other countries to follow. But after a recent surge of infections, hospitalizations and deaths, they’re reversing course and becoming much more similar to others. And so far, the strategy has resulted in worse economic damage and stratospheric deaths (versus the top countries). So, we’ll look at them again in another two weeks.
Meanwhile, the other nations in Europe have been hit by a brutal second wave of deaths. Initially, the continent was bruised badly by the first wave, but used aggressive lockdowns to drive infections and deaths to extremely low levels. So then, countries loosened travel restrictions and reopened schools (despite warnings from many health experts). And, as colder weather hit, the death toll has skyrocketed. So authorities were forced to enact a variety of new lockdowns (which we've described in detail in previous weeks). So how are things going?
First, let’s look at Spain. The country is a popular travel destination and was one of the first to get hit by the second wave. And, in the last two months, they've been battling an increasingly bad situation. But in the last couple weeks, they finally peaked and deaths mercifully dropped off a little bit. This gave hope that they might finally be getting control of things and turning the corner. How did they do this week?

Unfortunately, this week progress stalled out at a high level of deaths. So this was disappointing and not what Spanish authorities hoped to see.
How did some of their neighbors in Europe do? Here's the U.K., France, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Unfortunately, the Netherlands also backtracked this week. Over the last few weeks, they looked like they had turned the corner by plateauing and heading down, but their deaths are up once again.
And the United Kingdom also lost ground. Last week, they showed signs of slowing their upward climb, but instead of building on that this week, they instead accelerated. On the other hand, France maintained its slowdown from last week (although deaths still increased). And Belgium alone held the line and continued to benddown the death curve.
So this was a mixed week and a big letdown from the broad-based progress last week. But we’ll continue to monitor them and we’ll see how they're doing.
State Roundup: Even More Lockdowns Come, While Some Claim It’s Too Little Too Late
Normally, in this part of the weekly review, we look at state-by-state data. And this is helpful, because it can give a sneak preview of what will happen at a national level next. However, since so many states didn’t report data due to the Thanksgiving holiday, this deep-dive will be postponed until next week. Instead, we’ll go right to the high level developments this week.
And this week, additional mayors and governors from both political parties made unilateral attempts to slow down the virus spread by implementing numerous types of lockdowns and safety measures. Newark implemented a voluntary lockdown. Ohio enacted a mask mandate. Vermont prohibited all houseguests. And Denver's Mayor pleaded for residents to stay home for the next month, while acknowledging:
"I know this is hard. I know you hate this."
Despite these localities’ about-faces, many health experts remained skeptical and critical of the strategy and the timing. The program director at the Dartmouth College Center for Global Health Equity, Anne Sosin said:
“Most governors are trying to fight a forest fire of infection with garden-hose measures, and they aren’t even aiming at the right targets or starting at the right time."
And Toby Phillips, who is responsible for collecting endemic responsibilities from 190 countries as the executive director of the Oxford Covid-19 Government Response Tracker, said:
"The moment for acting early with a fast response has passed.
We consider 'early' movement to be when a state or country has no more than 40 new cases per day per million in its population. Once the number goes over 200 cases per million, that's considered 'maximum risk'. The United States is now over 500 cases per million.
And he also pointed out that neglecting the health crisis can be bad economic policy.
“The most expensive way to deal with the virus is to delay the pain until the point when you have to put the economy into a lockdown”
Meanwhile, the virus continued to spread widely across all areas of the country, with the least populated areas continuing to get hammered the worst:

Georgia’s Bellwether economic recovery: 20+ weeks of dismal disappointment
One of the most important questions for investments (as well as for the health of the country) is "what will the shape and speed of the recovery be?" If it's V-shaped and quick, then many investments will be just fine. On the other hand, if it's one of the other shapes (U-shaped, swoosh, etc.), then some or many investments could run into problems. (See part 14 for more information on the possible "recovery shapes" and their ramifications). To monitor the evolving situation, we've been watching Georgia very closely. It was one of the first states to reopen. So we expected this to make it a useful early indicator of what could be in store for some other parts of the nation. Back on April 24, Georgia Governor Brian Kemp reopened nail salons, hairdressers, bowling alleys and gyms (as long as they followed state protocols). Then, three days later, restaurants and theaters were also allowed to reopen. So they've effectively been open for about 6 months.
How are they doing? Since there's no official government or state data on this, we've previously looked at Placer.ai. This is a service which tracks mobile phone usage to different types of businesses to measure foot traffic. And we've watched them week by week across all of Georgia's four primary Covid-19 sensitive industries: restaurants, retail, fitness, and hotels. How’s that gone over the last six or seven months? We've seen different sectors moving back and forth during that time, as well as different individual businesses in those sectors. But overwhelmingly, results have ranged from disappointing to dismal. And while there have been occasional spurts of improvement to celebrate, these have almost always been quickly followed by disappointing backtracking.
So at this point, the Georgia experiment has failed to achieve its goal of a V-shaped recovery. And so, I'm calling a halt to the weekly monitoring of the state and will only be checking in monthly. So, we will look again in three weeks.
Economy Slammed By Increasing Levels of Newly Jobless as More Analysts Fear Double-dip Recession
Unemployment has historically been one of the most reliable indicators of when the U.S. has entered a recession and when it’s left one. So that's why we examine it very closely, every week. And unfortunately, over the last 29 weeks, the economy has been hammered week after week by massive levels of new unemployment. This week was no different, with 778,000 people newly unemployed. This was an increase from the 742,000 last week (and 709,000 the week before).

So for the second week in a row, not only was there no improvement but things moved in the opposite direction and deteriorated further. And at eight months into the pandemic, we’re still getting weekly job losses that are more than three times the pre-pandemic level. Back in June, virtually no one expected the continuing damage to last this long.
Meanwhile, as we've talked about every week for the last several months: "continuing claims" is also a useful statistic to look at within this report. Jobless claims only tell us who lost jobs over the last week, but continuing claims removes the ones who have been rehired. So in theory, continuing claims tells us how many continue to be unemployed right now. This week, the number fell to 6.07 million (6.37 million last week). So there was modest improvement, but it was still disappointing to those hoping for a more meaningful drop.
In practice though, even this number isn't perfect (and may make things look rosier than they really are). The problem is that at this stage of the recession, some people have been unemployed for so long that they've exhausted their unemployment benefits and unhelpfully disappear from view. And the more people who fall out, the more this number will understate the true long-term joblessness.
When that happens, people are added to a new program passed by Congress in the stimulus law called the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC) program. And this gives them an additional 13 weeks of benefits. Again, this may also understate the true joblessness, because if a person stays unemployed for those 13 weeks, then they will disappear from this statistic as well. But even though it’s not perfect, it’s still helpful to look at. And we know that this week, the number on that program grew by 466,000 to 9.15 million.
Regardless of the interpretation of these issues: once again, those hoping for a quick improvement in support of a V-shaped recovery were disappointed.
Catherine Mann, global chief economist at Citigroup Inc., said:
“The continued weakness of the labor market is something that is going to drive the whole economy down. At the same time, solid sectors like manufacturing are going to keep us from being in official recession, but it’s going to be very grim."
Eliza Winger, economist at Bloomberg, had similar thoughts, but was less optimistic:
“If claims continue to move higher in the coming weeks, the chances of the U.S. economy tipping back into a contraction will intensify.”
Meanwhile on Wednesday, the University of Michigan released its final November reading of consumer sentiment. It again was 76.9, which was the weakest in three months. Analysts noted that the slump neatly coincided with the pick-up in virus infection rates.
Later in the day, the U.S. Commerce Department released a report on U.S. household spending. Since consumers are the main driver of the economy, their behaviors can have a significant effect on growth. And the report showed that incomes dropped more than forecast due to a large decline in government stimulus from early in the pandemic. Savings also fell for the sixth month in a row:

By Thursday, more economists were voicing concerns about a dreaded double-dip recession. Such a W-shaped recovery has not been seen in the U.S. since the early 1980s. JPMorgan Chase's top economist, Michael Feroli, said,
“The data show more loss of consumer spending momentum than we had been anticipating, and this happened even before the spread of COVID-19 intensified early in November. If the virus weighs on activity and leads to business closures — temporary or otherwise — we think that related layoffs would show up. [This would] shrink economic activity in the first three months of 2021 by some $50 billion. That translates into an annualized drop in gross domestic product of about 1%."
Michelle Meyer, a top U.S. economist from Bank of America, said:
"We expect COVID cases in the U.S. to continue to rise — and ‘containment measures’ to increase. We see a stalling out of the economy next year.”
And Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, said,
"We expect the economy to shrink at an annual rate of 1.5% — the equivalent of a $25 billion drop in national income per month — in the first quarter next year."
Financial cliff: December surprise in the making?
As we've discussed over the last several months, there's a huge but invisible problem with the economy that's largely unrecognized by the general public. But an overwhelming consensus of economists, analysts (across the political spectrum) and policymakers at the highest levels (including the Federal Reserve) all agree it's essential we find a solution to it.
And if we don't, millions of Americans and businesses are destined to fall over a financial cliff with devastating long-term consequences. If this happens, then we may suffer a debilitating double dip recession (the dreaded "w-shaped recovery"). And investors in many alternative investment asset classes (including certain real estate sectors) could be caught up in a world of hurt.
This financial cliff is caused by several things:
Impending collapse of crucial safety nets: On December 26, 10-12 million people who lost jobs due the crisis are scheduled to lose critical benefits they're currently depending on. These were provided by two government programs created by the stimulus package passed by the government earlier in the year. The first is the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation (PEUC), which gives workers, who've been unemployed so long that they've exhausted state unemployment benefits, an additional 13-week lifeline. The second is the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) for workers in the gig economy who are otherwise unable to get the same benefits that traditional workers receive when they lose their jobs. If they don't get any additional help, the damage to the economy will be severe, immediate and potentially long-lasting.
Foreclosure and rental eviction tsunami: in January 2021, moratoriums on evictions and foreclosures are scheduled to expire. If this happens, then a tidal wave of 8 million delinquent homeowners are set to be foreclosed on and lose their homes (dwarfing the worst of the Great Recession). And millions more delinquent renters (owing an estimated $7.2 billion by the end of the year) will be evicted, as well. As an example, at the beginning of the month, 14 million renters said they had little to no confidence they'd be able to pay, and were at risk of losing a place to live. If the tsunami is allowed to occur, then it would have a devastating effect on real estate and the wider economy.
Student loan resumption: The CARES Act suspended payments and interest on $1.7 trillion in student debt during the pandemic. And the Federal Reserve estimated this saved borrowers from paying about $7 billion a month. But on January 1st, this protection is scheduled to be lifted and payment will become due. If this is allowed to occur, it has the potential to exacerbate the other two issues.
All of these things could be solved by Congress and the President agreeing to pass a new stimulus law. However, over the last several months, efforts to do that have been stymied by enough twists and turns to write a novel.
Here’s the very quick summary:
One political party (which we’ll call the "large stimulus party") controls the House of Representatives and passed a $3.5 trillion stimulus bill. They later downsized it and passed a $2.2 trillion bill.
The other party (which we'll call the "small stimulus party") controls the Senate. Its leadership proposed a $1 billion plan, but could not get enough support from its own members to pass a bill. This was downsized to $500 million, but so far also has insufficient internal consensus to pass a bill.
The White House has held a variety of positions, from less than $1 billion to higher than $2.2 trillion. However, with the loss of the recent November election, it withdrew from negotiations the following week (after previously taking the driver's seat). So this meant that negotiations would be left completely up to Congress.
The President-elect is from the large stimulus party and is scheduled to be sworn in on January 20. He expressed his support for the $2.2 trillion bill.
Control of the Senate will be determined by two January 5th Senate seat runoffs in Georgia. If the small stimulus party wins at least one seat, then nothing will change and they will retain control. On the other hand, if the large stimulus party wins both seats, then a $2.2 trillion - $3.5 trillion stimulus law is expected to be a slam-dunk. Currently, analysts believe the most likely scenario is that seats will be split between the two parties which would result in no change in the lack of new stimulus. However, this is unpredictable and we'll continue to monitor it.
Then last week the Treasury Secretary pulled $580 billion of unspent stimulus funds from the Federal Reserve. Although budget rules say that these cannot be considered new money, it’s expected to provide enough political cover for the small stimulus party senators to claim that this is not new spending and the support stimulus bill.
This week, the parties continued to negotiate. And political analysts held out the slim hope that some form of stimulus may be attached to an upcoming December 11th spending package. This law has to be passed to stop a government shutdown, and some speculated the unemployed might get anywhere from $250-$600 a week.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that the financial cliff is intensifying.
The latest survey found 17.8 million adults are behind in rent or mortgage payments. Even more ominously, 5.8 million are "very likely" to face eviction or foreclosure in the next two months alone. And unfortunately, the problem isn't localized to any one area, but is widespread across the country:

AstraZeneca Vaccine’s Rollercoaster Ride from Hero to Zero in Under a Week
Early in the week, AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford appeared to have fantastic news. They announced that their cheap-and-easy-to-make coronavirus vaccine had passed early stage III trials and was shown to be 90% effective. Only a few weeks ago, most thought this incredible level of success was the stuff of dreams and stardust: an unreachable fantasy. And such results would have put the AstraZeneca vaccine on par with the equally stunning results of both the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines (See November 21st article). But, unlike the latter vaccines (which use a newer mRNA technology), the AstraZeneca vaccine uses an older technology, which doesn't require ultracold storage and is much easier to distribute.
So, stock market investors cheered and the world celebrated at the thought of this third vaccine entering the fight. "Get yourself a Vaccacino!" quipped an exuberant British tabloid, after pointing out that the vaccine would cost less than a cup of coffee.
But others were more skeptical. First, the company followed the precedent set by Pfizer and Moderna and released very little usable information for others to analyze. So the company was criticized for not releasing more complete results. John Moore, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Weill Cornell Medical College, said, "The press release raised more questions than it answered.”
And, Natalie Dean, a biostatistician and an expert in vaccine trial design at the University of Florida, said:
“I just can’t figure out where all the information is coming from and how it’s combining together. AstraZeneca and Oxford get a poor grade for transparency and rigor when it comes to the vaccine trial results they have reported.”
But even the little information that was there made many people scratch their heads.
First, they showed the trial results were not from a single trial like Pfizer and Moderna had done. Instead, they were stitched together from a trial conducted in the U.K. that started in May and another one in Brazil that started in June. And the two trials were substantially different from each other (which can be a scientific “no-no”). For example, they used different dosing schemes and different control injections. This Frankenstein-like combination of two different trials caused some scientists to raise a red flag and say the study will most likely need to be redone.
On top of that, the results only reported information on certain subgroups within each trial. And one of them omitted a subgroup in Brazil that included almost half of the people in the trial in that country. This gave the impression of picking and choosing the data, and raised another big yellow flag for many.
Finally, the results themselves were strange. Two different dose sizes were tested: a pair of shots at full strength and a pair at reduced strength. And surprisingly, the full strength shots did worse and had only a very mediocre 62% efficacy. Meanwhile, the half dose was reported as having the 90% efficacy that was reported in the dramatic headline.
This, on its own, would be surprising and counterintuitive. But many times, scientifically sound studies have revealed unexpected results. So on its own, it wasn't damning.
However, shortly afterwards, the head of AstraZeneca’s non-oncology research and development, made a startlingly candid admission. His name is Mene Pangalos, and he said:
“The reason we had the half-dose is serendipity.”
He went on to explain that at the time, the company was only administering full doses and had gotten a modest efficacy readout of around 62%. But then, they noticed that quite a few people in the U.K. were having much milder side effects than expected (such as much less fatigue, headaches and sore arms).
“So we went back and checked ... and we found out that they had underpredicted the dose of the vaccine by half. So we decided to continue with the half dose and administer the full dose booster shot at the scheduled time."
This nonchalant explanation immediately set off alarm bells with many scientists. How could a well-run trial make such a basic mistake? And if the techniques were that sloppy in this example, then were other mistakes also made? But the studies turned out to have an even bigger problem, as well. Out of the 23,000 participants reported in the Monday press release, only 2,800 volunteers got the half strength dose for the claimed 90% efficacy. And in comparison, Pfizer tested 43,000 participants and Moderna 30,000. Many scoffed at the idea that 2,800 people provided a sufficient testing ground on which to declare results.