Financial pain deepens as nearly 60 countries report virus

TOKYO (AP) — A deepening health crisis became an economic one too Friday as the coronavirus outbreak sapped financial markets, emptied shops and businesses and put major sites and events off limits.

The list of countries hit by the illness edged toward 60 as Mexico, Belarus, Lithuania, New Zealand, Nigeria, Azerbaijan, Iceland and the Netherlands reported their first cases. The threats to livelihoods were increasingly as worrisome 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.”

The head of the World Health Organization said Friday that the risk of the virus spreading worldwide was "very high."

"The continued increase in the number of cases and the number of affected countries over the last few days are clearly of concern," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told reporters in Geneva.

Economists have forecast global growth will slip to 2.4% this year, the slowest since the Great Recession in 2009, and down from earlier expectations closer to 3%.

For the United States, estimates are falling to as low as 1.7% growth this year, down from 2.3% in 2019.

But if the disease known as COVID-19 becomes a global pandemic, economists expect the impact could be much worse, with the U.S. and other global economies falling into recession.

“If we start to see more cases in the United States, if we start to see people not traveling domestically, if we start to see people stay home from work and from stores, then I think the hit is going to get substantially worse,” said Gus Faucher, an economist at PNC Financial.

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