The longer Beijing enforces curbs on work and travel, the greater the global economic shock
The workshop of the world is closed. China is on a total-war footing. The Communist Party has evoked the "spirit of 1937" and mobilised all the instruments of its totalitarian surveillance system to fight both coronavirus, and the truth. Make GDP forecasts if you dare.
As of this week two-thirds of the Chinese economy remains shut. More than 80pc of its manufacturing industry is closed, rising to 90pc for exporters.
The Chinese economy is 17pc of the world economy and deeply integrated into international supply chains. It was just 4.5pc of world GDP during the SARS epidemic 2003, which some like to use as a reassuring template. You cannot shut down China for long these days without shutting down the world.
Wednesday's investor euphoria at reports of two new wonder drugs from Zhejiang University show how badly unhinged the market has become. This is not the way that medical science advances. Nor could these anti-virals possibly be ready, in time and at scale, to avert serious economic upheaval.
The open question is whether the coronavirus shock is enough to abort the fragile economic recovery underway since last summer’s near miss, when frightened central bankers in the US, Europe and 47 other jurisdictions cut rates in a drastic monetary U-turn.
Personally, I think the glacial SARS episode tells us little about the fast-spreading Wuhan virus. The 2019-nCoV variant is more akin to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. It appears to be tracking the 1918 death rate at about 2.3pc (20 times normal winter flu) to the extent that we can believe any figures. There is some evidence that it is nearer 4.9pc in Wuhan.
The difference is that Spanish Flu felled the young, because their immune systems went into overdrive: this virus carries away the old.
There is no global economic safety margin. Both the US Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank have already relaunched quantitative easing - a bizarre thing to do if the US economy is really doing as well as Donald Trump claimed in his State of the Union address. Clearly US strength is a late-cycle illusion. Exhaustion has been masked by both by a blast of monetary stimulus and a fiscal deficit near 5pc of GDP.
The scale of disruption in China is already staggering. Hyundai, the fifth-biggest global car maker, has been forced to close all its factories at home in Korea for lack of key components. Volkswagen, Toyota, General Motors and Tesla have all downed tools at their Chinese plants, as has Apple’s iPhone supplier Foxconn.
Crude prices have dropped 20pc since early January, that long-ago moment when eight Wuhan doctors were already trying to alert the world to the virus, only to be arrested for “spreading rumours”.