The Daily Note -- March 9, 2020

MRO and EOG reported huge wells over the weekend. I will talk about that later, and will update RBN Energy as usual later, but I want to get started on "the daily note."

Last week I changed the format for the blog slightly; no one seemed to notice. That's what I was hoping.

I am going to try my darndest (for Harvard elites, look it up) to keep focused on the Bakken and energy-related posts and not clutter the blog with politics, coronavirus, celebrity clickbait, and geo-politics, except as it relates to energy. I will combine those non-Bakken comments in one daily note, and update that note throughout the day. The daily notes are linked by date at the sidebar at the right.

I'm hoping that most of the blog posts will focus on the Bakken and energy-related posts by making this change. There will be exceptions to include but not limited to:

• global warming;
• electric vehicles;
• Minnesota hair flow.

So, let's get on with it, today's daily note so I can get back to MRO and EOG. Wow, they reported some huge wells -- which have huge implications.

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Geo-Politics

This is incredibly cool. The OPEC+ spat between Saudi Arabia .... okay, break, break .... let's get one thing straight. There really is no OPEC+ --- there never was OPEC. OPEC was Saudi Arabia. So, there is not an OPEC+ spat. This is between Saudi Arabia and Russia. Period. Dot. Okay, I'm going to quit here. This requires a post of its own ---

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Coronavirus

Coronavirus: statistics. By country.

• only one country and one continent matter today: 
• the country: Italy
• the continent: Europe
• later, the only country that will matter: the US, but that's a story for another day;
• today, by country:
• China: has it under control; another day with less than 50 new cases; only 23 new deaths;
• quarantines work: China reported no new cases outside the epicenter "yesterday'; in quotations because I'm losing track of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and making things more complicated, there's the nternational date line;
• South Korea: it appears the country is "turning the corner;" less than 200 new cases; 165 to be exact; only three new deaths; 53 / 7,478 = 0.7% fatality rate; has anyone compared the demographics of South Korea with, let's say, northern Italy? or the weather?
• Italy: pending; the country usually reports late in the day; I'm betting at least 1,500 new cases if they're honest; [later: 1,797 -- see comments at this post.]
• Iran: out of control, but maybe doing better than Italy, if one can call 595 new cases in Iran better than Italy; with 43 new deaths, Italy has not reported yet, but of the 79 new deaths today, Iran reported 43 of those new deaths, or slightly more than 50%

Bottom line: Bill Maher is 1000% correct. President Trump needs to replace VP Pence with Bill Maher as the administration's spokesman on coronavirus. "Pence, you're fired." Just joking. But we need someone like Bill Maher to tell America, "get a grip."

Case study: some time ago I mentioned that the Diamond Princess cruise ship would be a great case study. We now have that case study, over at Ice Age Now. It's a must-read article:

• case fatality rate: 0.85 percent (of the 705 that tested positive, six died)
• but look at this: of the 3,711 confined to tight quarters, six died, which converts to 0.25
• transmission in that setting was incredibly low (or they stopped it pretty quickly through quarantines)
• the article does not say if all have been tested, or only those symptomatic; there is such a thing as asymptomatic carriers in all (?) infectious disease outbreaks;
• finally, not a single Diamond Princess patient under the age of 70 has died;

March 8, 2020: the most recent data available. This was a bad, bad day globally. But if one removes Italy, the numbers would look a lot better.

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US Politics

Senile Joe: it's getting much, much worse. His childhood stuttering -- he can no longer pronounce the name of his former boss. Bless his heart. The rest of us have tried forgetting Obama, without success and senile Joe has done just that.

Klobuchar: the Dem's new savior -- as VP.

Hillary: re-calculating, re-calculating, re-calculating. What we need to be watching -- news stories that start to paint Klobuchar in a bad light.