Why are tech people freaking out about coronavirus?

* economic impact of fear of a pandemic

* economic impact of shutdown of > 60,000,000 people in china to the rest of the world

* economic impact of panic of people not educated enough to judge real risk of becoming infected

* media inertia

* china specific cover-up tendency

* actions in china

* 2nd and 3rd derivative effects of fear of a pandemic (i.e. delayed/missing deliveries of required medicines)

* fear-caused outage of food etc., since the delivery chain may collapse if fear raises into a critical level

etc.pp.

In other words: from my POV (and my peers), nobody really fears the virus itself but the effect it causes to the social environment.