China: Coronavirus Pandemic to Economic Recovery - and Beyond

The world economy and humanity are currently devastated by the coronavirus pandemic. Stock markets around the world are down in the range of 30-40% in weeks. The pandemic began in the province of Hubei in China, in a city called Wuhan. Already in December doctors started identifying the new virus, and it since has spread across the globe, leading to massive lockdowns of towns and cities, causing tremendous loss of life and economic activity.

To control the pandemic, China had to lock down Wuhan. No simple task, considering the fact that the city’s population is more than 11 million people, approximately two times the entire population of Norway! It also shut the area off from other parts of China in order to stop the spread.

This all happened during the Chinese New Year, normally the main period for economic activity in China, as millions of people travel across the country to visit family and celebrate the festivities. Typically, this is a time of year they also go on a spending spree. The Chinese economy, which had just started to recover from the slowdown caused by the trade war with the US, suffered severely from the measures to contain the outbreak.

However, the lockdown has helped China flatten its infection curve and the country is now set to return to normal as the number of newly infected are reduced to almost zero. The city of Wuhan is expected to come out of lockdown on April 8th, giving confidence that China may have overcome the worst of the outbreak in terms of loss of lives and infections.

The focus will now shift to the damage the virus has caused the economy and how quickly the country can recover from the shock. By being the country first hit by the outbreak, and the first emerging from it, China will be looked at as the model of how life proceeds and hopefully normalizes by other countries that have been greatly affected by the virus.