Good grief that's a dramatic article. The economic decline may be stark but that's what happens when you effectively freeze economic activity. I'm not really sure why exactly things are never supposed to be the same given that people still have their training, factories are still around and those can be reopened once sufficient safety is guaranteed.

There's disruption in supply chains and business formation and whatnot, but I think it would be better to think about the economy in terms of actual resources and human capital rather than stock market figures, the former isn't vanishing into thin air.

There's this tendency to dramatically overrate the impact of contemporary events. People said the same thing after 9/11 when it came to other aspects of life, and apart from increased airport security and a few costly wars there indeed was nothing new under the sun.

The CDC estimated that the swine flu in 2009 may have killed up to half a million people globally. We'll see what the death toll of this is at the end but this isn't humanity's first pandemic and it isn't its worst, not by a significant margin.