2020-02-10 Bloomberg Businessweek

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◼ REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek February 10, 2020

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DATA: PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY, WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION, INTERNATIONAL *ESTIMATE BASED ON PRELIMINARY FIGURES.

RESEARCH,JOURNAL OF INFECTIOUS DISEASES, CENTERS FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION, CLINICAL MEDICINE & PAEDIATRICRESPIRATORYREVIEWS,EMERGINGINFECTIOUSDISEASESINASIA,INSTITUTEFORHEALTH

METRICSANDEVALUATION,BMCMEDICINE,EPIDEMIOLOGY,INFORMATIONISBEAUTIFUL.NET

Peopleonepersonwillinfectin a completelysusceptiblepopulation

Fatality rate,logscale

Contagiousness and lethality of airborne viruses

0 5 10

Declared

eradicatedby

theWorldHealth

Organizationin

1980

Bird flu

Hantavirus Smallpox

SARS

Measles

Mumps

Flu

Swine flu

Chickenpox/

shingles

Spanish flu

2019 novel coronavirus*

MERS

his administration has gotten rid of much of the apparatus for
fighting epidemics like this one. The Washington Post reported
in May 2018 that the top White House official on pandemics,
Rear Admiral Timothy Ziemer, had left the administration
and was not being replaced, and the global health security
team he oversaw had been disbanded.
Evidence is mounting that the new virus is less lethal than
the one that caused SARS, but possibly more contagious.
People can pass it along when they have only mild symptoms
or, in some cases, no symptoms at all. SARS wasn’t like that.
So even though technically SARS is more transmissible in a
wholly susceptible population—with a higher “basic repro-
duction number”—the new virus is more contagious under
real-world conditions. Its lack of lethality will hold down the
death toll, but the contagiousness will require continued iso-
lation, quarantines, and social distancing.
At least that’s the current thinking. Success in fighting
the virus depends not only on what people do, but also on
the characteristics of the virus itself, which are still not fully
understood.“It’sallaboutthebug,”saysDr.MarkDenison,
directorofthedivisionofpediatricinfectiousdiseasesat
VanderbiltUniversitySchoolofMedicine.“We’realongfor
therideandrespondingasbestwecan.”
Thenumberofpeoplea viruswillkillcan’tbepredicted
solelyfromitsbasicreproductionnumberanditslethality—i.e.,
the percentage of people who die after becoming infected. As
the chart at right shows, the Spanish flu, which killed about
50 million people after World War I, was neither exception-
ally contagious nor unusually lethal. It “happened to arrive in
a setting when it could establish infections in a lot of people,
in all parts of the world,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, a professor of
ecology and evolutionary biology at Brown University, wrote
in an email. “And so, a 1-2% mortality rate ends up being a lot
of people.” Spanish flu is the nightmare scenario for an uncon-
strained spread of a virus through vulnerable populations.
How to fight the new virus is a contentious issue that will
become even more contentious if the measures adopted to date
prove insufficient. The ethical question is the extent to which
one group’s civil liberties can be abridged for the sake of the
greater good. In medicine, there’s “a fundamental moral axiom
that individual persons are valued as ends in themselves and
should never be used merely as means to another’s ends,” says
a 2007 essay by Dr. Martin Cetron of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention and Dr. Julius Landwirth of the Yale
School of Medicine. “Public health, on the other hand, empha-
sizes collective action for the good of the community.”
China’s measures are imposing a real cost, both human
and economic. In Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province,
test kits and medical supplies are scarce. The sense of being
trapped in a zone of infection is feeding understandable
resentment. That could eventually boil over. In the Ebola
outbreak of 2014, residents of the West Point neighborhood
of Monrovia, Liberia’s capital city, rioted after they were put
under a surprise quarantine.
President Xi Jinping is betting that tough containment

measures now, unpopular as they may be in places, will pay

off by extinguishing the virus and allowing normal economic

activity to resume. He’s clearly unhappy that other countries

are cutting their ties with China, which will delay the econo-

my’s recovery. The Trump administration on Jan. 31 said for-

eign nationals who’d been in China in the last two weeks will

“generally” be denied entry into the U.S. China’s Ministry of

Foreign Affairs accused the White House of spreading fear

and said other countries should not “take advantage of peo-

ple’s precarious position.”

Trump’s restrictions on travelers from China are consid-

erably more popular in the U.S., which so far has managed

to keep a handful of imported cases of the virus from flaring

up into outbreaks. American authorities hope the country

can stymie the virus completely, or at least stall its spread

until a vaccine is available.

One Trump administration official spotted a silver lin-

ing in the outbreak. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told

Fox Business network on Jan. 30 that he thinks it will help

to “accelerate the return of jobs” to the U.S. and Mexico.

(He added that “every American’s heart has to go out to

the victims.”)

Ross’s timing may have been poor, and he ignored the

harm that the coronavirus is doing to U.S. companies that

sell to, buy from, or produce in China. But he’s proba-

bly correct that the fear of pandemics will shorten supply

chains, encouraging companies and countries to produce

more close to home. The coronavirus may further fray the

bonds between the U.S. and China that have been stretched

by Trump’s trade war and the mounting military rivalry

between the two nations.

That, more than any fleeting effect on quarterly GDP, may

be the longest-lasting business impact of the virus known

provisionally as 2019-nCoV. <BW>