It might not be as dire as it looks
On our minds: The coronavirus, its dangers and what it says about today’s world. |
The Case for Not Panicking Over Coronavirus (Yet) |
 | | A cargo plane pilot at Wuhan Tianhe International Airport on Jan. 28.Cheng Min/Xinhua, via Associated Press |
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If you have at all followed coverage of the coronavirus spreading in China and beyond, you are well familiar with the reasons for concern. Tens of thousands infected, nearly 500 dead, government-imposed lockdowns, sweeping travel restrictions and trade stoppages, and plunging stock markets in Asia. |
For the sake of perspective, though, it is also worth considering the case for not completely panicking — at least, not yet. |
This is not to say that everything is fine and dandy with the coronavirus, or that it couldn’t get worse. It’s not, and it could. All we’re saying is that there are a few things that you can weigh alongside the causes for alarm. |
How deadly is coronavirus, really? |
There’s a number you’re probably seeing everywhere: 2.1 percent. |
That is the mortality rate for coronavirus so far within China, according to official Chinese data. The overwhelming majority of cases are in China. |
That’s about one-fifth the mortality rate for SARS, which spread in China in 2002 and 2003. But it’s about 20 times the mortality rate for influenza. So it’s commonly presented as evidence that coronavirus is moderately deadly. |
But dig into that number and you might be left with a different impression. |
The vast majority of deaths have been in the province of Hubei, where the virus first emerged. Three-quarters of all recorded deaths have been in the city of Wuhan. |
In Hubei, the mortality rate is higher than average, at 3.1 percent. In Wuhan, it’s higher still: 4.9 percent. |
Outside of Hubei, the mortality rate in China is so far only 0.16 percent, according to government data — about on par with the common flu, which has a 0.1 percent mortality rate. |
In other words, the data so far suggests that coronavirus itself may not be all that deadly, but that, statistically, most of the danger comes from getting coronavirus in Wuhan. (Giant flashing-neon disclaimer: As the virus runs its course among people currently infected, it may turn out to be deadlier over the longer term than is currently understood.) |
What explains the virus’s relative deadliness in Hubei but not elsewhere? It’s not as if the virus transforms as soon as it crosses provincial borders. |
Health experts suspect that many of those deaths in Hubei and Wuhan were due to the local health system being overwhelmed and underprepared. Many patients were initially turned away, in part because there were insufficient hospital beds (and maybe also insufficient understanding of the virus). |
Recently released government data says that 80 percent of deaths so far were people over age 60, many of whom had pre-existing conditions such as diabetes. For people with those traits, even an unusually severe flu, if left untreated, can be deadly. That doesn’t make their deaths any less tragic or newsworthy, but it is worth factoring into our understanding of the threat. |
Some experts also suspect that the mortality rate in Wuhan and Hubei may be lower than those reported figures. In all the confusion, they speculate, many infections in Hubei may have never been registered, particularly if the symptoms were not severe. |
Still, any virus that can spread quickly enough to overwhelm a major city’s health care system this drastically is something to be taken extremely seriously. But, so far at least, even as cases of coronavirus spread outside of Hubei, those localized pandemic conditions have not repeated. |
What are the long-term scenarios? |
Officials in China and abroad are hoping to contain the virus and let it peter out. That’s what they did with SARS. If they can keep it contained until the summer, when warm weather tends to suppress viruses, they’ve got a shot at success. |
Rather, the experts told Stat News that the likeliest outcome is that the coronavirus becomes endemic. That is, it spreads globally, and continues to circulate among humans forever. |
That scenario might not be nearly as scary as it sounds, though. |
There are already four coronaviruses that have been globally endemic for decades, possibly longer. There is a very good chance you’ve caught one: They’re estimated to cause one quarter of all common colds. |
They can sometimes cause more serious illnesses, like pneumonia; you might’ve thought you’d had an especially serious flu. Like the flu, they are sometimes deadly, but rarely. Often, people who pick up a coronavirus will have no symptoms at all. |
This new coronavirus is obviously much more severe, but that’s often the case for new viruses. There’s no built-in immunity, and it can spread like wildfire. |
By contrast, those four pre-existing coronaviruses have been circling the globe for years, and immunity to them is much more common. That makes individuals less prone to infection and communities less susceptible to Wuhan-style outbreaks. |
If this new coronavirus goes endemic as well, it may follow that same pattern, according to the experts surveyed by Stat News. An endemic coronavirus, like those four other coronaviruses, might come to look a lot like seasonal influenza. |
“For the most part they cause common-cold-type symptoms,” Richard Webby, an influenza expert at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, told the site. “Maybe that is the most likely end scenario if this thing becomes entrenched.” |
Are there going to be dire economic consequences? |
All of these travel restrictions and lockdowns are bad news for the Chinese, and therefore global, economies. You’re already seeing stores and factories close as China’s all-important supply chains shudder to a halt. |
Goldman Sachs estimated that the coronavirus will reduce China’s G.D.P. growth in the first quarter of this year by 0.4 percentage points, and American G.D.P. growth by a similar amount. |
Economically, that’s a huge impact for one microscopic virus. But it’s not world-changing. Quarter-to-quarter G.D.P. growth in the United States regularly fluctuates by two or three times that. |
Some estimates are more dire, suggesting that China could lose as much as one percentage point from its G.D.P. growth figure in this year’s first quarter. Still, the country’s once-breakneck economic growth has been in a managed slowdown for years, so a one-quarter drop is not necessarily going to cause a global shock. |
A big source of concern is that Asian stock markets dove on Monday. But they’ve since rebounded for two days in a row, suggesting that Monday was more of a one-off panic than a catastrophic sell-off. The markets — that nervous, reactive amalgam of banks and investors — appear to see this all as surmountable. |
The other concern you sometimes hear is that coronavirus-related trade and travel restrictions, even if they are intended as temporary, will threaten the very idea of an economically interconnected world. Is globalization itself at risk? |
Economists and trade experts said that such concerns are probably premature, especially given how much the world gains from economic integration with China. The country now makes up 16 percent of worldwide G.D.P. and drives one third of all growth. The costs of even a monthslong freeze in trade and travel pales in comparison. |
Gabriele Spilker, who studies the politics of international trade at the University of Salzburg in Austria, called the coronavirus-related restrictions a “temporary effect.” |
Warwick McKibbin, an economist at Australian National University, said, “The gains from trade and travel far outweigh the short term costs.” He added that this “might lead to greater focus on risk management in production chains and diversification of trade but not the cessation of trade.” |
In other words, countries are likely to find ways to manage the risks of global trade, not to pull back from it. |
Is this proof we live in an increasingly dangerous world? |
You don’t have to look hard to find warnings that the 500 or so deaths from coronavirus should fundamentally change how we look at the world. |
“Maybe this is a warning about globalization,” Tucker Carlson, a popular Fox News host, said on his show last week. “Maybe one of the reasons that the United States has thrived for all these years is that we are physically distant from a lot of the rest of the world and that’s not a bad thing necessarily.” |
Though Mr. Carlson has been a prominent critic of globalization, he is joined even by more establishment-oriented voices. |
“The epidemic has already shown just how vulnerable our interdependent 21st-century economy really is,” reads an eight-byline article in Spiegel, a respected German newsweekly. “It is a story about the globalization of danger.” |
But the threat of disease riding the pathways of globalization isn’t all that new, and is something that the world has been learning how to handle. |
European countries first established institutes for studying foreign diseases in the late 1800s, when colonialism brought trade and travel that ferried viruses and bacteria across the globe. |
Ever since, each outbreak was seen as indicating a terrifying new era of global pandemics that never actually arrived — and instead brought greater global understanding of how to prevent, stop or slow the spread of disease. |
“The very interdependency and connectedness that create such opportunities for the global spread of pathogens also offer mechanisms for innovative, multinational efforts to address the threat,” reads a 2006 study on the links between globalization and disease. |
The study, published by a research center established by the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, cited global panics over border-crossing diseases such as the West Nile virus. |
Without globalization, West Nile would probably never have spread to the United States, as it did in 1999. But fears that West Nile would overwhelm the United States, or be followed by wave after wave of deadly foreign disease, never materialized. |
Instead, the report concludes, governments in countries with cases of West Nile worked together to figure out how to contain and treat the virus. They didn’t eradicate it; the disease has occasionally recurred, causing a spate of deaths in the United States in 2012. But they learned how to manage it — just like any other risk inherent in today’s globalized world. |
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