Original subtitles

Hi everyone.

My name is to be us and I'm running the behind the scenes of the last Amazon chorus.

And I've actually helped Brock record like 95 percent of this course and sat with him made major structure

and all that.

And you're probably asking why is private not recording this video.

And the reason is that he's currently working on a case study that will specifically show beginners

how they can even in such a scenario where we have this corona virus outbreak that seems to be affecting

the entire world.

They can still go ahead start a business even with limited capital and get going and even use a situation

to their advantage.

While he's doing this case study we still don't want to miss to inform you guys and give you some pointers.

Of course this situation is special and that's probably not a step by step guide here how to prepare

for a situation like this.

However Brock and I spend a lot of time analyzing the situation.

The past few weeks and we wanted to let you know kind of the thought process that we have.

Also maybe the future outlook that we think is important for businesses to to keep to manage their risks

prepare for the situation and maybe even generate a profit from this situation.

In this video I'm going to start by giving you an introduction into the overall situation of the coronavirus.

But it's gonna be different from what you read in the newspaper.

I'm not going to focus too much on the specific numbers also because I want this video to be more general

and give you an idea of how you can think about it in the next few weeks and maybe even the next few

months.

And in order to take the right actions for your business I think you also need to fundamentally understand

how this disease works how it spreads and then how it could affect your business.

So the best way of doing something like that is to look at historical data and then see what can we

learn from that historical data and then projects.

What would that mean for the future.

So let's first look at China.

As many of you probably already know cases started to pick up in January in China and they grew rapidly

towards the end of January and that was right during the Chinese New Year.

And do Chinese New Year as most of you know the factories always closed and no business is being done

in China.

What is also important to know is that is very common in China that people work in a certain city but

then travel back home to their broader family to be with them for Chinese New Year.

So the whole country is travelling in order to be with their families.

For Chinese New Year and then after Chinese New Year they have to travel back to their workplace.

China decided to quarantine a lot of the cities and had a very aggressive response to what the virus.

And if you read in the media you could still tell that a lot of the Western media didn't take the corona

virus as serious and also didn't consider that it could be a threat to their countries.

However you can not always trust what people say to you instead try to look at the actions people take.

If you can see that a country that is current in its entire population and other countries are reacting

by canceling any air travel to those countries then it is apparent that those countries must know that

this threat is larger than they openly admit to.

Also because they don't want to spread any panic.

Now the important part to know here to understand why this virus is moving forward so quickly and why

it seems so hard to stop is that at the moment nobody is sure how the virus works 100 percent but it

seems like people can get effect infected with the virus have minor symptoms or no symptoms at all for

a few days and still transmit the virus before recognizing that they are sick and that they potentially

have the corona virus.

You also got to consider that people who get mildly sick might not go to the hospital right away and

they still keep walking around and spreading the virus.

And so far what has been mostly communicated as a factor of two or three in terms of how many people

are being infected for everyone that is already infected.

So if I get the corona virus on average I would spread it to two to three people.

And what that means is that as long as this rate is higher than one the virus will keep spreading.

And if we can get this rate below 1 the virus will start dying off because less and less people are

getting infected and that is actually something that we can now see now that China has been so strict

and not letting people out.

And it seems like the numbers are going down drastically.

And something that I want to point out here is something that is not discussed often in the media which

is how our case is being identified.

So we have this overall reported number of cases in the world.

Right.

But this number doesn't actually reflect the real number of infections just because we need to do testing

before we can identify someone as having the coronavirus.

And right now so many people are getting infected that in some countries the testing cannot be done

for everyone.

There is not enough testing kits and also only people with severe symptoms are actually being tested

and people with mild symptoms seem to not be tested all that often.

That means always take these numbers with a grain of salt.

And question these numbers.

So oftentimes the number could be much higher but I also want to show that sometimes the numbers are

exaggerated because they want to blow up some new story.

If you have a look at this dashboard which is from John Hopkins University which is an institution you

can trust you will see that we have one hundred ten thousand confirmed cases which is the biggest number

in this right.

But if you actually question what does this number entail like who's counted here.

You will realize that this is also counting people that have been recovered already.

So we have sixty two thousand people that have been recovered but they are still contained in this one

hundred ten thousand people kind of making you think there's way more people infected right now than

they actually are.

So in contrast I have actually found this Web site that shows the number of active cases at the moment.

And you can see that it's actually not going up all the time.

It's actually also going down just because there were so many cases in China and the cases in China

actually seem to go down.

But now it seems to be picking up because of all the other countries where we see a large increase in

cases.

I think the next interesting country to look at here is probably Italy because the outbreak that has

just started and it grew rapidly and I think what is most interesting to us here as entrepreneurs is

the response that we're seeing in terms of the government.

I want to make clear at this point that the threat of this disease is not necessarily how many people

it will kill.

Yes it is a disease that will probably kill a lot of people if it keeps infecting more and more.

However the real worry is more so the infrastructure impact this will have as we can see in the case

of China and in the case of Italy the countries respond by shutting down everything they're shutting

down schools businesses airplanes trains and of course this is exactly the right response.

But this is the impact that we need to focus on when thinking about what does this do towards our business.

So overall I think it's important to point out that this situation is not very similar to anything we

have ever experienced in our lifetimes no matter how old you are probably.

And the causes comparison we have in history to this is the Spanish Flu in 1918.

And I've pulled up this graph in Wikipedia here and over of 500 million people became infected with

the Spanish flu.

I'm not saying that to make you panic.

I'm saying that because we need something to compare to to then take the learnings from that situation.

What we should keep in mind though is that during the Spanish flu people didn't really know what was

happening.

And now we have a lot of information.

We also have information infrastructure that allows us to learn about this rather quickly around the

world and start fighting this disease.

Now going back one more time to what happened in China and specifically looking at what harm you might

have seen that they actually started to build hospitals within a matter of days to be able to care for

all of the sick people and they even turned public and non-public buildings into current in shelters

so they could separate people off.

And that brings me to the point that will be the biggest issue with this disease is that there are not

enough hospitals to care for all of the sick people.

If everyone gets infected at the same time and if you look at the media today nobody is talking about

stopping this disease.

Most people are now talking about slowing the disease down.

And the reason they want to slow it down is so that if we haven't happened more gradual across our population

we will actually be able to care for more of the people because they're not all sick at the same time.

Now knowing this we can start making assumptions about what could potentially happen here in the future.

And at the moment it seems like a lot of countries are at risk or at the point of an outbreak where

the numbers are slowly or sometimes more rapidly increasing.

And most likely the government responses are going to be very similar.

And most of the countries which means they're going to do current teams of big areas and completely

shut down businesses.

Ask it to stay at home and nothing is gonna move anymore.

And I want you to be aware that once a country starts currently earning people they have to just keep

doing that and keep doing that until it's over.

Because if they stop the efforts of course the disease is gonna break out again and start growing quicker

again.

That means even if the government says we're going to currency people for a week you can already expect

that they will keep extending that deadline further and further unless they see that the numbers are

going down.

And even if numbers are going down I think a lot of countries are going to be very very careful about

going back to normal right away just because the risks of this happening again is very very high.

I would like to also point out though that even in the state of emergency certain supply chains will

still operate because at the end of the day people need food and supplies to survive.

And in China they were actually still multiple career services and food delivery services operating

and delivering stuff to people's houses.

So we still have to see how that is going to affect each country individually and how they're going

to react towards it.

But being an e-commerce business at the moment is actually an advantage in comparison to being a retail

business.

Just because once people start getting scared they will order everything from online instead of going

to the store.

Now you might have already known a bunch of this stuff or there was a lot of new information for you

and this seems really really scary.

And I can relate to that 100 percent when I first started looking at the numbers it was driving me crazy

when I was looking at it on a daily basis.

I think it's important as an entrepreneur to see this from a very rational perspective and to consider

the different scenarios that could be happening even though they are scary.

And then it is important to not fall into panic and acting on every single thought that you might have

and every little scared that you might get from numbers that show up in the media.

It is important that you think about things long term and not just short term what is happening tomorrow

but then also how it's going to affect your business in the upcoming months in the next few videos.

We're going to focus on how you can ask the right questions to navigate through this tough time.

I will give you some tips and pointers of what you could potentially do with your business.

We're going to talk about how you could potentially profit from this situation and also how this will

affect your supply chain and what measures you can take to still have products.

We're going to try to keep these videos updates as much as possible.

Well we're also going to try to keep them general because the situation is changing very quickly and

we would love to hear your experience in the comments below.

Maybe you can describe how the corona virus has impacted your business so far.

What measures you took up to this point.

And then also what else you would like to know from us what information you need in order to prepare

for this situation.