From a seafood market to global markets: 2020 has become the year of COVID-19 | ORF

For years in the newsroom, while covering business news, there was this particular phrase that was used when the People’s Bank of China or PBOC (the central bank of China in Beijing) made any monetary policy announcement. Markets would react sharply, and ergo the phrase followed “when China sneezes, the rest of Asia catches a cold”.

It’s a bit surreal and eerie that something so analogized has become literal in the spread of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) from a seafood market in Wuhan, Central China to the rest of the world. But this has long stopped being a China problem. Like virus, like conundrum; this has mutated, percolated, transferred from host to host and pervasive from coast to coast. The problems too have changed shape and size in drastic proportions. It started from a health scare, to cautionary travel to China and the region, to then an epidemic, to a worry in a slowdown over China’s economy, to now being declared a global pandemic with unprecedented health and economic ramifications.

The World Health Organization (WHO) in a manner akin to almost locking the barn door after the horse has bolted declared that the Coronavirus epidemic to be a global pandemic. Days later, President Donald Trump declared this to be a national emergency with the crisis continuing to escalate…