There is no escaping the fact that if people decide to stay home, and not even go out to dinner, much less on an airplane or a cruise, it is going to cause a massive shock to the economy.   This is what the stock market seems to be finally grasping.  When cruise lines and airlines and hotels go bankrupt, they don't pay the people they owe money to, and those people don't pay the people they owe money to, and the dominoes start to fall.  Then people get scared, as the probably should be, and they put off any purchase that is optional, and the economy spirals downward.  

I don't know why it has taken the stock market so long to grasp this.   When Venice, Italy, and Milan, Italy, are on lockdown, things are getting very serious.  

So Trump is kind of stuck here.   Downplaying the seriousness of this in order to save the economy might actually do more harm to the economy than good, because if the virus spreads because we didn't take it seriously enough, the economy will be hurt even worse.

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