This is a public health emergency, which will become a financial...

This is a public health emergency, which will become a financial crisis as it is causing both supply and demand to dry up in lots of key areas.

It's hard to understand or wrap your head around the impacts.

We are waiting on a vaccine which is 12-18 months away, or we are waiting on getting to a level of herd immunity whereby we can handle the virus with our health system capacity being what it is (or a little bit bigger). In the meantime we have to try and stop its spread so we don't unnecessarily avoid killing people we could have avoided. But slowing the spread means it takes longer for herd immunity as well.

So we may see events of 500 people stopped for a while (much longer than the current estimates), we may see further controls in place on restaurants and similar establishments (like what is happening already in US/Europe). Tourism is basically over in Australia, unless you want to visit a remote location! (I run Airbnbs in Melbourne and all future bookings cancelled, and no bookings are being made). Those industries employ a lot of people who will be out of a job, for a period of time which is potentially a very long one.

If you just look at Australia, a lot of the economy is going to grind to a halt. The first stimulus package does nothing to protect those people whose jobs have been lost by the ban on events and gatherings. They have to pay rent/mortgages, utility bills, food and medicines (and their afterpay installments). How will they do that? What about all the hospitality workers when restaurants close? Even if restaurants are able to reopen in a month or two with better controls, are you going to want to go out? Will non essential retail shops close? Or will some small business shut up shop because there are no customers.

This thing is exponentially growing here, and is going to get very bad before it gets better.

And who's to say our current government can be trusted? They got an ad out in 3 hours when they deployed the military during the bushfires, they took weeks to do the same in this crisis.