[melonkidney]

Your thoughts echo mine very closely. Uncontained spread seems fairly well unavoidable at this point.

By all accounts, the Chinese have so far done a good job of containing the spread inside their borders (outside of Wuhan). But I feel there's a significant lesson to be learned from how the virus exited Wuhan in the first place: containment measures applied too late, after the scale of the problem became too obvious to ignore. I fully expect this response to be the norm, across all scales from community to city to nation.

I think that China and other large (in terms of area) countries like the US will come out of this "OK", modulo the economic impact. For the most part, intranational travel is funneled through long-distance rail and air routes, which are relatively easy to monitor and control. I have more concern for e.g., Western Europe, where there is not a significant geographic separation between the major population centers, and where there is a strong expectation of free & untracked movement.

[torben-friis]

The strong expectation for free untracked movement is no different between eu countries and us states - though I think our geographical distribution of population is indeed different.

I'm from Spain, and as soon as I saw people tested positive in Italy I knew we were going to fall too. Sure enough, we quickly had some cases in the canary islands and now it's already in the mainland, in my city (Madrid). The differences in intra city transportation are gonna be a big difference too, compared to an American city: everyone in the center uses the subway and buses, which are packed at rush hour. It's going to spread like wildfire.

[toyg]

> as soon as I saw people tested positive in Italy I knew we were going to fall too.

And transport connections between Northern Italy and Spain are worse than the ones with France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.

The cat is basically out of the bag. The question now is if we can keep it subdued enough to reach the warmer season, when it might stop on its own like SARS did and/or make it easier for people to develop antibodies.

[jmnicolas]

> modulo the economic impact

This is a BIG modulo, China alone was already a disaster but now that we can see the rest of the world will be hit, the economic consequences will be disastrous.

2008 was a walk in the park compared to what may happen.

[wklauss]

> the economic consequences will be disastrous.

I seriously doubt it will. Once the panic subdues, things will go back to pretty much normal. Flu kills a lot of people every year without serious effects on the worldwide economy. You'll need a mortality rate significantly higher to make a dent in global supply and demand. Of course panic is the key word here. If governments impose severe movement restrictions it could disrupt the supply chain, but nothing about this virus seems to justify it. All the measures taken so far have been extreme because the goal was to stop worldwide expansion at early stages but that has already pretty much failed. Media will get bored of it eventually, vaccine will come a little later. World will keep spinning around.

[jmnicolas]

I know of 2 European car manufacturers that can't build certain cars because they don't have parts from China (Peugeot 208 and Fiat 500L).

This is just a small example, but every industry is hit.

[hiram112]

I think this is going to happen to a lot of manufacturers and industries in the West who are going to lose a lot of money in the short to medium term.

Looking further out, this and the general push back of the last few years with being so dependent on China, may be what further forces the West to start ensuring supply chains are not so dependent on China and the far East.

Companies may start seriously consider the true cost of doing business in China due to unknown events like this, and even more likely ones like military and economic confrontations occur (e.g. tariffs).

This might actually help juice the Western world for a few years as more manufacturing and supply lines are repatrioted.

[jacques_chester]

Viruses don't really pay much attention to economic rivalries and supply chains can be disrupted wherever they exist. As for "helping" the west, you're misunderstanding how gains from trade work.