In other news, Detroit's big three automakers Ford, General Motors, and Fiat-Chrysler are shutting down all of their American factories.
Meanwhile, the market dropped by enough this afternoon to wipe out all the gains since Trump took office in 2017. Trading was automatically halted at one point.
Finally, let us hope these projections from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) are wrong. They estimate at least half of the world's population will be infected by covid-19 over the next year.
“We assume that the virus will infect around 50% of the world population; 20% of the cases will be severe, and 1-3% will result in deaths,” analysts from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) said in a note.
“Death ratios will depend on the capacity of countries to effectively detect, track, and contain the epidemic,” EIU analysts said. “Death ratios will be higher in countries with poor healthcare systems — in Sub-Saharan Africa for instance.” [...]
The EIU also warned in its note that the coronavirus “will become a seasonal disease, with another outbreak in Winter 2020/21,” with analysts adding that they did not expect a vaccine to come onto the market until at least the end of next year.
That last bit concerns me the most. If there's no vaccine for another year, and if the virus resurfaces, the economic consequences won't be limited to just the next few months.
A 1 percent death rate infecting half of the world's population (3.8 billion) would mean 38 million deaths. A 3 percent death rate would mean 114 million deaths. Even a 0.5 percent death rate would mean 19 million deaths. It's a lot.