<\/div>\n
BBC:<\/strong> What do you make of what\u2019s going on right now? The Texas governer now ordering facemasks in public. Does it feel precarious?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> No not at all. I live in Houston. I see what\u2019s happening here. I work with hospital groups in Texas. The COVID capacity in their hostpitals is around 25% of the ICU. What I see in international media is about case counts. Case counts are higher because testings have risen dramatically. But in terms of the capacity in hospitals, what I see hospital executives are saying is that they are not alarmed and they are not worried. But a lot of the flurry of hype that I see in the international media is about case counts. When we started this, we talked about flattening the curve so we don\u2019t overwhelm the ICU. We\u2019ve actually done that. We\u2019ve flatten things. And the ICUs are at 20% capacity with COVID. What we\u2019ve seen is a lot of people during the COVID peak, people put off their non-COVID procedures and did not have their non-COVID ailments treated. So when you hear about the COVID capacities in ICUs, what I\u2019m hearing is that those non COVID patients who are coming in, who are a lot worse than they were 2 months ago because they were afraid to go to the hospital.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> That\u2019s really interesting, and the US is not the only nation, I\u2019m certain with, that that\u2019s phenomenon has been observed. But just ot be clear, would you line up with Chris Engram and say that quarantine those who must be quarantined for their own good. Let business proceed?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> Yeah. You have to. When you look at the rates of drug addiction, when you look at the rates of suicide, these things are up 20-30 % over normal times. Certainly, every life matters. Take care of the people who are sick and people who need to take precautions, help them take precautions. All of that is necessary. Wash your hands, all that stuff. But we have to move on with the economy. And the people who don\u2019t have an option, the people who are unemployed. We\u2019ve had almost 200 thousand companies close in the US. Obviously there are a lot of jobs than just that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
The part of this that is most concerning on my part is that it\u2019s largely state and local government officials who are closing the markets, and closing businesses and they have zero fiscal responsibility for the outcome. Meaning, if any fiscal support is to come, it comes from the federal government. But it\u2019s not the federal government that is closing local communities, it\u2019s the city, county, and state officials who are closing. But they are not helping out the business people. They have zero accountability, they have zero fiscal responsibility for their actions, which is the most troubling for me because people are making decisions that sound good politically, sound good on paper, but they are not sound for people\u2019s lives in terms of the general population, in terms of business, in terms of people who need to get out and see people, and certainly mental health. It\u2019s really reached fever pitch. I think people really need to look at the data around death rates, which is critical. The eficacy of the disease, as far as I\u2019m seeing is declining. Death rates per 100 thousand are declining. And Texas, death rates per 100 thousand is 8. Death rates per 100 thousand in New York is 160. So we are 20 times less fatal in Texas than they were in New York.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> You\u2019ve thrown some interesting things in the last few hours on your feed. First of all, you\u2019re talking about the state deparment intervening in terms of those interest in China and investment in China. You also talked about the factory in the Great Bay Area in Southern China thinking about moving house. Just to address those two points, if you would.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> There\u2019s a recent story done. I did not do this story. I am not the origin of this story. But there was a survey done in China\u2019s Greater Bay Area, which is a large factory of the world, where 43% of the survey respondents, who are factory owners said that they are actively considering relocating our of China. That is significant. Nearly half of factory owners in the manufacturing hub of the world are considering moving our of China. There are domestic factories there, of course. We\u2019ve all seen fall out in COVID. There are larger demand issue in China than what we are seeing with the official data. But with trade, I would guess that most of those factories, I need to look deeper into the data, but most of those factories are export-oriented factories. That\u2019s dramatic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> And when it comes to state departments, warning companies on conducting business with China. That\u2019s from Fox News. I\u2019m wondering does that mean don\u2019t do business with China or are we back to the old grievances about intellectual property and so on?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> I think it\u2019s more of the latter than the former. You can always say it\u2019s most prudent not to but I don\u2019t necessarily believe that myself. But I think one has to be very, very careful with intellectual property, of course, that\u2019s an old story. But also with this new legislation that made its way to the US Congress. You have to be careful about who you\u2019re doing business with. I think more than ever, American companies have to be really careful who they\u2019re doing business with. Not just what they\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> Tony, you\u2019ve travelled extremely wildly in Southeast Asia. It seems like a perennial tragedy that the Burmese jade industry, the Burmese hardwood logging sector seems to be so frought with these complexities of the military interference and so on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> Yes, absolutely. I think when I hear about this even specifically, it reminds me of two things. The first is we had a series of Chinese mining incidents probably over the last 10 or 15 years. We\u2019ve heard less of this in the last 5 years. But it also reminded me in Bangladesh. 3 or 4 years ago, there\u2019s a fire in a garment factory and there have been a series of safety incidence there. This is not a perfect analogy but the fact is, the working environments and the physical safety environments in many parts of the world, in Myanmar, are very, very difficult. And Myanmar is a very poor country and people work very hard to make very little money. And the trade offs that they have to make to try to make that money are have to do with their life and their well being.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> Do boycotts work in the commercial sector?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> I think they have an impact. Do they work? I don\u2019t know. It really depends on how you really define success. I think about the change that we\u2019ve had with things like shark fin over the last 15 years. It hasn\u2019t completely stopped people eating shark fin. But certainly a lot more people who won\u2019t do it. And so, you really have to define what success is and really figure out how you get to that success. What was said about people about lusting after something that\u2019s made by someone far, far away. That\u2019s true. They don\u2019t feel any personal consequence for the difficulties and the dangers of making these stuff.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
BBC:<\/strong> On young gambling, as a parent, do you watch this kind of thing? Do you set rules? Is it even gambling playing this kind of stuff?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
TN:<\/strong> I honestly never thought of a loot box as gambling until I saw the story. So, I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s something that I should be interested in and alarmed by. I just never thought of it as gambling. I feel a little bit ignorant.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
Yeah, my kids play Fortnight, they play Over Watch. But I don\u2019t see them with those types of behaviours. But I\u2019ll take another look at it for sure. But again I never saw it as gambling. Maybe I\u2019m just unaware.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Complete Intelligence CEO and Founder Tony Nash joins BBC Business Matters to talk about Texas\u2019s approach on handling coronavirus, why there are nearly half of companies in China\u2019s Greater Bay Area are planning to move out of China move\u00a0out of China, the deadly jade and hardwood industries in Myanmar and if loot box as a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32866,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32865","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-podcasts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32865","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32865"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32865\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32865"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32865"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/completeintel.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32865"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}