Virus UnCertainty

McKinsey piece on restart, watching local businesses closely.

Crushing coronavirus uncertainty: The big ‘unlock’ for our economies

To safeguard lives and livelihoods, we must restore confidence.

This article was a collaborative, global effort by Sven Smit and Martin Hirt, with Penny Dash, Audrey Lucas, Tom Latkovic, Matt Wilson, Ezra Greenberg, Kevin Buehler, and Klemens Hjartar, representing views from The McKinsey Global Institute, and Strategy and Corporate Finance, Healthcare Systems and Services, Public and Social Sector, and Risk practices.

Only eight weeks ago, we published “Safeguarding our lives and our livelihoods: The imperative of our time.” Back then, we worried about the supply of ventilators and critical-care capacity, the world’s ability to suppress the coronavirus, and how governments would respond to the pandemic’s economic fallout. So what has the world learned since?

We now know that we can curb the spread of the virus, can rapidly expand critical care, and are on our way to scaling the availability of testing. We have seen most governments and central banks rapidly move to implement stimulus and liquidity measures to cushion the economic impact. Unfortunately, we have also confirmed that lockdowns cause deep economic shocks: peak to trough, developed economies are likely to see GDPs decline by between 8 and 13 percent in the second quarter of 2020 (Exhibit 1). By the end of April, more than 20.5 million jobs have been lost in the United States since the start of the pandemic. Clearly, some of the initial uncertainty associated with the coronavirus has been reduced—but it remains high.   ... "