What if a carbapenem-resistant superbug sweeps US hospitals?
Cleaner-than-stated chain: carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella forcing US ward closures and elective-surgery suspensions hits hospital operators (HCA, THC) and medtech elective-procedure volumes, while bidding AMR antibiotic names — a healthcare-sector rotation, not an oil shock. Rhymes with COVID's 2020 elective-surgery halt that crushed hospital and medtech (e.g. Stryker) volumes. The crude/jet-fuel mobility cascade is the wrong transmission — there is no mobility collapse here; risk roots are too oil-routed.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 1–3 years horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella sweeps major US hospital networks, forcing ward closures and elective-surgery suspensions nationwide. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.