You're right, no one knows the extent of drop and where "the dip" will be. It's already a massive problem though, real--not imagined. Just not in this country.
For me, it still comes back to China. I'll feel confident when they're really back to work. They aren't. This I can say with 100% certainty--and it's going to be a few months. With their outsized importance in the global supply chain, it's already having a significant impact on the global economy, and because of the nature of production of consumer goods, delays from one supplier now result in problems months down the road. The thing a lot of folks don't understand is that many small suppliers were teetering already due to the trade war; they were in a big cash crunch, lead times were getting longer, sourcing was becoming sketchy... The thing that pushed my hand in December to put everything I have in a money market fund wasn't Covid-19, it was the fact that people were actually working right before Chinese New Year. I'd never seen that before, and it smacked of desperation. The virus was just the pin in the balloon and sped up what seemed to be the inevitable.
I do think there is something to be learned from China's response, and how it relates to the US:
1) there's no containing the virus. China sorta did it, but we simply don't have the resources to do what they did in terms of containment. Only a totalitarian surveillance state can pull that off. They're uniquely qualified...
2) mitigation is pretty effective once it does spread
I think that once folks in the US give up on containment and focus on mitigation, the panic will die down. The virus isn't going away anytime soon, it could be here for a couple of years, at least. Once folks accept that and once folks realize that it's not SARS and 10% of folks aren't dying from it, things will likely return to normal. A new normal, after a lot of businesses have gone belly up and there's been a culling of the herd.
