Following on from the OP about the potential for a recession, it's worth considering how fast COVID-19 is spreading, and the economic impact of that speeding up or slowing down.
China has done a fairly good job in containing it after a bad start. Having an authoritarian government means that the early whistleblowers were silenced, which lost a few weeks. But on the flip side, it's hard to conceive of a government outside China with the power to make 500 million people self-isolate, which has slowed things down.
These early efforts have bought valuable time to develop a vaccine. Once it gets to the US in a major way though, it will be a different matter. The US could have another Hurricane Katrina moment, where we realise again they're incredibly incompetent and sloppy about keeping their centres of populations safe. When the H1N1/09 flu virus spread through the US and Mexico in 2009, they were slow on everything, and happily ferried thousands of infected people around the world. Up to 200 million people infected and up to 400,000 dead in no time flat.
Even though COVID-19 will probably barely register in the future history of pandemics (it's not the nightmare some believe), if it roars across the US this year it will damage the one thing keeping the US economy afloat - consumer confidence. They're barely travelling at over 2% GDP growth even after trillions of tax cuts, low interest rates, QE, and record debt and deficit, and are suffering weak manufacturing and failing agriculture.
But the 60% of the economy driven by consumer sentiment is currently bullish but could turn bear in a major way. If that happens things will start collapsing very quickly, and Australia will most definitely get caught in the fallout.
