We should not be worry about China .
We should be concerned with cases out side of China.
Even more concerning is regions that are reporting statistically less cases than we should reasonable expect.
For good or ill, we now live in a hyper-connected just-in-time multi-national world. What happens in any country quickly affects every other country through that web of dependencies.
So far, the world has seemed insulated from the shock of the virus spread in China. That is a false perception. In reality, the interdependent chains have already broken. The lag time in the system just hasn’t quite yet been exhausted.
We have seen the first impacts with tourism and travel. Then with small package delivery. All of that is just inconvenient.
Inside China the disruptions have been enormous. With their command economy, those impacts are also not immediately apparent, though they are now becoming apparent.
For international trade, the ships are now idle. The last deliveries have been made or soon will be. The entire cost structure for shipping has now collapsed. Soon, the supply chains will run dry for parts essential to all sorts of products and industries. Replacements are difficult or non existent. It isn’t now a simple matter of cost competition. Stuff just isn’t being made and isn’t available. The whole basis for free market substitution just had piles of rocks and acid thrown into the gears.
That will be hard to restart too.
The financial markets have not as yet recognized the severity of the disruption. There have been localized impacts, especially in China. The big shocks are yet to come.
When those hit, markets globally will be rocked. That means layoffs and job losses. That means huge stock price and commodity impacts. And those will go in every direction. Suppliers, particularly of food stuffs, have lost markets. At the same time, buyers in those markets have no supplier.
As the markets get rocked by that, leaders will no doubt try to prioritize restoring those markets. But that means people going to work, which means spreading disease. Etc...
What happened in China will not stay in China, even if the borders were sealed and no disease escaped. But it did escape, as nations were slow to respond, and slower yet to understand what it takes to stop a pandemic. The chances are very high that the spread was delayed and not stopped, and once the disease begins to explode in South Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, that issues related to freedom and money will subvert efforts to stop the spread.
We already see aspects of that with passengers on cruise ships failing to understand how critical it is that they -not- be allowed back into their own countries until they are assuredly free of disease. They see their personal liberties and financial welfare as paramount. And there are important factors there. But in their personal quest, they put at risk quite literally everyone. There are no easy answers here. And there will be unfairness and injustice.
In China we see things in videos that we have no context for. These appear at least to be egregious violations of personal rights. That may or may not be true. We lack context. But we are or tend to be very quick to jump to conclusions. And no matter what is actually happening (good or ill), there is the larger context of the out of control rapid spread of a highly fatal disease. No decisions here are going to be easy. Some will be very harsh. I do not mean that to justify injustice. Injustice is wrong. In the chaos of catastrophe, just as in war, extremely bad things happen - just or not. And that does not excuse them, or minimize them.
It also is not a basis to grind old axes or animosities, or to exercise racism or xenophobia. This didn’t happen because of an economic system. Neither would a different economic system have fared better. Arguably, the command structure of government and economy in China is all that allowed the extremely rapid response. In other countries those could not occur, and as a result, the explosive spread of the virus would have gone unchecked.
This didn’t happen because of race, creed or belief. This is a disease doing what diseases do. Racism, xenophobia, classism, idealism and the rest have no useful place here. They only serve to distract us from dealing with the disease and it’s attendant impacts on and in every other aspect of society. They can and already have caused horrible negative impacts of their own. They have misled and distracted leaders from thinking clearly and acting correctly and decisively. We have to minimize those disruptions. We must be clear headed.
Etc...
Sam
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