The coronavirus continues to spread from China to people around the world — and U.S. and foreign stock markets are getting sick, too.
The Dow Industrials plummeted more than 400 points, or nearly 1.5%, shortly after the New York Stock Exchange opened on Monday. The broader-based S&P 500 also fell about 1.5%. Stock benchmarks in Europe and Japan’s Nikkei index dropped more than 2%.
The rapidly spreading coronavirus has now infected about 3,000 people in 15 countries — most of them in China, where at least 81 have died of the disease. At least eight cases, with no deaths, have turned up in the U.S. so far.
“Beijing has broadened [its] extraordinary quarantine to more than 50 million people,” reports the Washington Post, “but the mayor of Wuhan, the outbreak’s epicenter, said 5 million people have already left his city.”
American companies doing business in China, including Walt Disney, McDonald’s and Starbucks, have cut back or shut down operations there, as have U.S. airlines and cruise lines.
The only companies that appear to be benefiting from the contagion are makers of surgical face masks, other respiratory protective gear, and rubber gloves.
“Health officials say the virus has the potential to be more deadly than the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak, which killed nearly 800 people and infected more than 8,000,” says the Post.
Even assuming an optimistic 90% quarantine success in China, the Post says, scientists predict more than 59,000 people will be infected and 1,500 will die from the coronavirus — nearly twice the SARS death toll.
Drugmakers are scrambling to create a vaccine against the new virus, but say it could still take as long as a year for one to be made available.
“We have dozens of scientists working on this so we’re pretty confident we can get something made that will work and stay active for the longer term,” Dr. Paul Stoffels, Johnson & Johnson’s chief scientific officer, told CNBC. Stoffels added that J&J has been studying the coronavirus and working on a vaccine for two weeks.
Despite the widespread concern about a pandemic, influenza remains a far greater threat globally.
“The coronavirus outbreak so far still pales in comparison to the death toll from the much more common flu … that kills around half a million people each year,” notes Axios.