Via John Authors at Bloomberg:
Like most readers, I care about this most as a human being, rather than as an investment commentator. The prospect of a deadly epidemic is horrific. But viewed dispassionately, the incidents have the following things in common:
- The actual damage (in financial or human terms) is still minimal in the greater scale of things, though the death toll from the virus continues to rise, as do the number of confirmed cases.
- The risks involved are truly terrifying — World War III, or a global pandemic.
- The chance that those risks will actually happen is close to impossible to identify.
- The damage that would be involved in a realistic worst-case scenario, or even a nightmare scenario, is truly impossible to quantify.
