It will cost hundreds of billions. More people will be unemployed than in the Great Depression while many businesses will be forced to shut their doors but we can’t evaluate if it’s merited because we’re not getting the information necessary to decide.

In the government’s rescue plan politicians clearly took a back seat to economists. And the long term benefit may be that a lot more people will finally appreciate the importance of economic growth and capital investment.

Taiwan didn’t believe China that COVID-19 couldn’t be transmitted by human touch and blocked all flights from Hubei province at the end of 2019.  If China had done the same the spread of the virus would have been dramatically reduced.
UPDATE from thetimes.co.uk: Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December
Chinese laboratories identified a mystery virus as a highly infectious new pathogen by late December last year, but they were ordered to stop tests, destroy samples and suppress the news, a Chinese media outlet has revealed.
A regional health official in Wuhan, centre of the outbreak, demanded the destruction of the lab samples that established the cause of unexplained viral pneumonia on January 1. China did not acknowledge there was human-to-human transmission until more than three weeks later.
The detailed revelations by Caixin Global, a respected independent publication, provide the clearest evidence yet of the scale of the cover-up in the crucial early weeks when the opportunity was lost to control the outbreak. Click to read full article.

As you know – events are moving fast, which has prompted us to raise one financial story from the story of the year – to the story of the last 12 years and now the most important story in our lifetime.