The Atlantic

The Coronavirus Is a Data Time Bomb

It will be a long time before we understand what the outbreak did to the global economy.
Source: Paul Taylor / Getty / Katie Martin / The Atlantic

So far, less than 0.0008 percent of the humans on Earth have been diagnosed with the disease caused by the coronavirus known as COVID-19. But thanks to the circulation of disease and capital, the whole world has been affected.

Chinese manufacturing cities such as Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, are intimately entangled with the supply chains of the entire world. That means that both the disease and the containment measures enacted to control it (take, for example, the quarantine still in place for 70 million people) will have a dramatic effect on businesses across disparate industries.

Any company—including and —that brings things in from China has to worry about production and distribution slowdowns. That’s were involved in some way with the making of Apple products.

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