“The good news is that China and South Korea appear to be ‘on the mend’”, says Barry Luthwaite in BRL FOCUS, his company’s Weekly Newbuilding Contracts report dated 30th March.
In the first paragraph, Barry mentions that, in spite of the Coronavirus globally, BRL is again managing to uncover a healthy number of orders but they are not sure how long it can last.
In China and South Korea some work is able to resume on ships but the problem is that Europe and the USA are badly hit with the virus and no peak is yet in sight (although Donald Trump said yesterday it will peak in the US in 2 weeks – JHL).
Barry thinks it is not far-fetched, that Covid-19 could linger on for months and I tend to agree.
Barry then goes into detail about the Orders for 38 new vessels reported during week 13 of 2020.
The BRL Shipping Consultants London website can be accessed here.
Checking for the latest news about Coronavirus in South Korea, the implications are that they are over the worst, with fewer cases being diagnosed and fewer deaths recorded every day. Apparently this is due to their government’s swift reaction to the threat, along with a lot of experience learnt when the country was devastated with Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in 2018. It seems things are slowly getting back to normal with businesses and shipyards starting to re-open.
It looks like China is having a similar success rate.
So far in this blog the outlook appears to be encouraging, very encouraging in fact. However, I then researched the Internet for up-to-date news and factual data about the Coronavirus and Covid-19 situation worldwide and the short-term news is not good at all.
The Pharmaceutical Technology website has a page entitled Coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak: Latest news, information and updates, which can be Googled online. At 10pm BST on 1st April, when I checked, it reported:-
873,563 Confirmed Cases
43,451 Deaths
186,827 Recovered
190 Countries Affected
I suspect that all of the 190 affected countries, apart from China and South Korea, still have the worst to come and some of them, if not all of them, are going to be blitzed.
We don’t know which countries will suffer the most, we don’t know how long it will take to get Covid-19 under control globally but if China and South Korea continue with their recovery then we will at least know that there will be an end to it eventually.
In the meantime, we must get on with obeying the rules to help speed up the recovery process.
Stick with it everyone and please take care of yourself.
JHL MBE SSL Co. Chairman
