Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Health and financial crisis
57 countries exposed to coronavirus
A DEEPENING health crisis became an economic one as well yesterday, with the coronavirus outbreak sapping financial markets, emptying shops and businesses, and putting major sites and events off limits.
Countries on three continents reported their first cases of the virus yesterday as the world prepared for a pandemic and investors dumped equities in expectation of a global recession. Coronavirus panic sent world share markets crashing again, compounding their worst week since the 2008 global financial crisis.
Hopes that the epidemic that started in China late last year would be over in months, and that economic activity would quickly return to normal, have been shattered as the number of international cases have spiralled.
“Investors are trying to price in the worst-case scenario and the biggest risk is what happens now in the United States and other major countries outside of Asia,” said SEI Investments head of Asian equities John Lau.
As the list of countries hit by the illness grew to 57 with Belarus, Lithuania, New Zealand, Nigeria, Azerbaijan and the Netherlands reporting their first cases, the threats to livelihoods were increasingly eyed as warily as the threats to lives.
“It’s not cholera or the black plague,” said Simone Venturini, the city councilor for economic development in Venice, Italy, where tourism already hurt by historic flooding last year has sunk with news of virus cases.
“The damage that worries us even more is the damage to the economy.”
Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the World Health Organisation, said the outbreak “has pandemic potential”, but whatever terminology officials used, the rippling effects were clear.
Attractions including Tokyo Disneyland and Universal Studios Japan announced closures and events that expected tens of thousands, including a tour by the K-pop group BTS, were called off.
Japan’s schools prepared to shut and Hokkaido Island declared a state of emergency, with its governor urging residents to stay at home this the weekend.
Investors watched warily as stocks fell across Asia and girded to see if Wall Street’s brutal run would continue, while businesses both small and large saw weakness and people felt it in their wallets.
In Italy, where the count of 650 cases is growing, hotel bookings were dropping and Premier Giuseppe Conte raised the spectre of recession.
Shopkeepers like Flavio Gastaldi, who has sold souvenirs in Venice for three decades, wondered if they could survive the blow.
“We will return the keys to the landlords soon,” he said.
Some saw dollar signs in the crisis, with 20 people in Italy arrested for selling masks they fraudulently claimed provided complete protection from Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus. Police said they were selling them for as much as €5 000 (R84 000) each.
Pope Francis cancelled other engagements yesterday, a day after the Vatican said he was suffering from a “slight ailment”.
On Thursday, Francis pulled out of celebrating a Lenten service with priests from the Rome diocese in the Basilica of St John in Lateran,about a 6km drive from St Peter’s Square.
On Wednesday, as he held his weekly audience and later led an Ash Wednesday service, he showed symptoms of a cold, with a hoarse voice and frequent coughing.
Meanwhile, parents of “terrified’
Africans stranded in China want help.
More than 4000 African students have been estimated to be in Wuhan, a result of China’s push to expand its influence on the youthful continent.
Bringing them home, governments said was risky.
That leaves African students stuck on ever-emptier campuses in Wuhan, worrying about running out of food or the money to buy it. Some governments have begun sending thousands of dollars to help them get by.
“If I don’t get a reply it worries me, but if I get a reply from any of them I say, ‘Thank you, Jesus,’” Margaret Ntale said about trying to contact her three daughters in Wuhan.
“I have a few friends who are not able to get things like detergent, sanitary towels, and then also not having food, like such things like that,” said one of Ntale’s daughters’ roommates, Joanna Aloyo, via a messaging app.
On Thursday, Ntale joined other parents in Uganda’s capital, Kampala, to talk to local reporters about their fears. And she started to cry.
“You can never know what is going to happen tomorrow. This is what scares me,” Ntale said. “The students are traumatised and equally terrified.
It makes all of us break down.”
The uncertainty about their children is “psychological torture”, another parent said.
At least 70 Ugandan students are stranded in Wuhan. Uganda’s health minister Jane Aceng could not be reached immediately. But two weeks ago she said the ministry was looking at the cost to “isolate, monitor and manage in the event of an outbreak among the group if repatriated”.
Meanwhile, she has said the government would send $60 000 (R922 000) in emergency funds to be distributed among students in Wuhan.
But the parents said their children had not received the money.
Globally, more than 83000 people have fallen ill with the coronavirus. China, though hardest hit, has seen lower numbers of new infections, with 327 new cases reported yesterday, bringing the country’s total to 78 824. Another 44 people died there for a total of 2788.
South Korea has recorded 2 337 cases, the most outside China. Emerging clusters in Italy and in Iran, which has had 34 deaths and 388 cases, have in turn led to infections of people in other countries. |