The economic impact from this outbreak will probably last a year or more. China produces a large number of products in the world and most of the products that aren't made in China include components made in China. Just the economic disruption with China essentially shutting down so suddenly is setting off ripples throughout the world's economy.
I don't see the sort of death toll in the developed world (Europe, North America, Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and other countries with similarly advanced health systems) being staggeringly high. We're still at least six months from a vaccine for this virus, possibly longer, and there is no cure, but developed countries have the best secondary care in the world that allows the most people infected with a disease with a self cure rate the best chance to heal on their own and prevent secondary infections. Many of the people who died in the 1918 flu pandemic developed pneumonia. We can treat pneumonia and prevent it better than we did 100 years ago. As well as other secondary infections people weakened by disease tended to get 100 years ago.
China is a very crowded country and the sanitary standards in much of the country are not on par with many developed countries. Because it's the genesis country for the disease, it was widespread in that country before they knew it existed. The government has been lying about the figures, but they are claiming now that the epidemic there has peaked and the case numbers are dropping. That may or may not be true. We'll see in the next few weeks.
If the cases have peaked in China, the overall death toll has been relatively light for a country of over 1 billion people.
Trump's incompetence has drastically weakened the US's ability to respond to this outbreak. They have been thinking completely politically and not from a perspective of policy and that has resulted in the CDC's budget getting slashed, the government flying home 14 people from the cruise ship in Japan who tested positive with no containment (other people on that flight may have been infected and that could be the start of the US spread), and Trump has been more concerned about the stock market's reaction than any actual policy to deal with the problem.
The cruise ship issue is another example of politics over policy. When it started, the administration was content to let the Americans trapped on the ship to rot, until a passenger who personally knew a Republican congressman made a call, then it suddenly became a high priority to bring them all home, even with 14 infected. There was a long delay transferring the passengers from the ship to the airport after they discovered the infected passengers while loading them onto the bus. The CDC did not want to move the infected passengers, but the administration insisted. That decision may be the genesis of an uncontained outbreak in the US.
That was on Feb 17 and I've read the incubation period is about 14 days. We should know by next week.
Trump has been very, very lucky as president. He has not had to face any serious world problems in the three years he's been in office. GW Bush had 9/11 in his first year and Obama came into office under the largest economic meltdown since the Great Depression. This is looking like Trump's Katrina. He crippled the government department tasked with dealing with this sort of thing, and he's playing politics at a time that should be focused on policy.
The human cost of this virus in the developing world could be catastrophic, but the biggest impact in the developed world will likely be more economic both from unnecessary panic as well as real economic impact from supply chains being disrupted. Though even in the developed world there will be people who probably won't be here next year who will be lost to this disease.
Another case of putting politics ahead of policy that goes back a decade is the decision by Republican governors to not take the expansion of Medicaid as part of the ACA. It's resulting in a wave of rural hospital closures in red states:
72 Percent of All Rural Hospital Closures Are in States That Rejected the Medicaid Expansion
This could result in the impact on human life from the corona virus being felt more heavily in red states than blue, even though it's more likely there will be more cases in blue states (the Pacific Rim states have more direct contact with China than most of the rest of the country).
I had a feeling that the corona virus was going to have legs when I heard about it's incubation period. Ebola and SARS are only a few days, which makes them much easier to contain. A 14 day incubation period allows it to spread pretty far before anyone knows it exists. A disease that is easily transmitted, with a long incubation period, with a high mortality rate is the trifecta that keeps infectious disease specialists up at night. Corona isn't an ultra high mortality rate, but it's up there. But it meets the first two criteria.
