11◼ REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek February 10, 2020
For businesspeople around the world, the new coronavirus
that sprang from China is producing a severe case of cognitive
dissonance. Their eyes are telling them things are bad: rising
fatalities, history’s biggest quarantine, sealed international bor-
ders, broken supply chains, shuttered businesses. But econ-
omists are telling them the epidemic will lower China’s 2020
economic growth by just a couple tenths of a percentage point
and global growth essentially not at all.
So, which is it, a global crisis or a tempest in a Wuhan tea-
pot? A lot hangs on the answer.
The oddly calm economic forecasts are based on the
assumption that the draconian measures imposed around the
world to isolate the sick and the potentially exposed will suc-
ceed in killing off the outbreak, at which point there will be
a sharp economic recovery. That’s what happened after the
2002-03 outbreak of a closely related coronavirus that caused
severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS).
The base case of the professional economists at Bloomberg
Economics is that China’s gross domestic product will expand
5.7% in 2020, vs. a pre-epidemic forecast of 5.9%. In their “pro-
longed outbreak” scenario, with containment not occurring
until the second quarter, the economy grows just a tad less—
5.6%. “Outside China and a few close neighbors, the impact
would be difficult to see in the full-year growth data,” the econ-
omists wrote on Jan. 31.
This quick-bounce-back scenario may well turn out to be● But no one knows how bad the
outbreak will be, and the damage
to globalization could linger● By Peter Coy
The
Economic
Pain Is Mild,
So Far
makelittledifferencetotheorganism’sstructureorfunction,
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scientists how long the virus has been around and how it got
there, as well as how quickly it’s spreading.
Spotting copies of the same version of the virus helps dis-
ease trackers identify chains of transmission that may have
been hidden. “Often when you have a new flare-up of dis-
ease in an area that hasn’t seen cases, you need to find out
if it was transmitting all along and we didn’t know about it,
or is it an introduction from somewhere else,” says Andrew
Rambaut, a professor of molecular evolution at the University
of Edinburgh. “If you can find the contacts, you can break
those chains of transmission.”
Rambaut and his colleague Nick Loman, a professor of
microbial genomics and bioinformatics at the University of
Birmingham, train health workers to use a low-cost, portable
“lab in a suitcase” to decode genomes in places such as West
Africa, where the Ebola virus killed more than 11,000 people
in an outbreak that lasted from late 2013 to 2016. By tracking
individual strains of the virus, identified by certain mutations,
they were able to show that some transmission occurred from
people crossing borders and establish that in some cases the
disease was passed from mother to child.
The lab includes a sequencer, called MinION, made by
Oxford Nanopore Technologies Ltd. in Oxford, England, that’s
about the size of a mobile phone and allows researchers to
identify differences among viral strains. “You can sequence
12 to 24 samples in a day, and you get a good estimate of the
whole genome,” Rambaut says. Those sequences can be com-
pared with other existing strands of DNA to track the virus’s
movement and evolution, he says.
Despite such gains, huge weaknesses remain in disease
fighting worldwide. Although Ebola had been around for
decades before the West Africa epidemic, the virus spread
undetected for three months in Guinea, allowing it to gain
a foothold in cities. The U.S. eventually spent $5.4 billion in
emergency aid to try to get it under control.
Building a global health-care fortress against dangerous
pathogens won’t happen overnight—and will never be fool-
proof. Yet whatever the ultimate cost, it will be far less than
the economic hit from a prolonged global pandemic that
kills millions. “The foundation for better preparedness is
investing in stronger primary health-care systems which
provide surge capacities that can be mobilized for effective
response to contain outbreaks,” Muhammad Ali Pate, global
director for health, nutrition, and population at the World
Bank, wrote in an email.
At some point, the outbreak will subside, and the world will
move on. And that’s precisely the problem. “It’s a battle you
neverwin,”saysPeterDoherty,a researcherinMelbournewho
wona NobelPrizein 1996 fordiscoveringhowtheimmunesys-
temrecognizesvirus-infected cells. “Organisms mutate, apart
from anything else, so it requires constant vigilance and con-
stant research.” —With Jason Gale, Dandan Li, Thomas Mulier,
John Lauerman, Marthe Fourcade, and Yinka Ibukun