Coronavirus is a chance to buy cheaper – but it comes with a health warning

If anything, stock markets have been slow to respond to the spreading coronavirus outbreak. Stories of Chinese supply interruptions, from JCB digger components to plastic toys, have been circulating since mid-February, while hedge funds have been hard at work short-selling cruise-operator shares: Royal Caribbean and Carnival are both down 30 per cent. Now airlines have taken a pasting too, with easyJet and Ryanair among the big fallers in Monday’s sell-off of European stocks, following news of a cluster of virus cases in northern Italy.

Meanwhile, a turning point may or may not have been reached in the rate of -reported cases in Wuhan, where the outbreak began. The World Health Organization says it has seen positive indications there, but this probably isn’t the moment to start believing propaganda from Beijing: shortly after the announcement that President Xi Jinping was belatedly taking charge of China’s response to the crisis, I read: ‘Ninety per cent of Chinese cities simultaneously recorded a drop in the infection rate.’