The stock market tanked Monday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1,032 points at the close, over fears that the coronavirus might have a serious, ongoing impact on the global economy.

Three postwar developments transformed the world economy, integrating it as never before. They greatly enriched the world but made it more vulnerable to global pandemics.

First, after the beggar-thy-neighbor tariff hikes of the Great Depression, major countries began to negotiate after World War II to reduce tariffs and other trade barriers. This dramatically lowered these barriers, greatly stimulating world trade in the process.

Second, the shipping container, developed in the 1950s, vastly reduced the cost of international shipping both by speeding up the transfer of goods between ground and ocean transportation and by virtually eliminating dockside pilferage, a major shipping cost for centuries.

Third, the astonishing rise of China in the late 20th century from an impoverished peasant economy to an economic powerhouse, second only to the United States in size, remade the chessboard of world trade and politics. China boasted much lower labor costs and export-driven economic policies, and as a result, supply chains increasingly originated in the Middle Kingdom, spreading across the rest of the globe.

And so did the coronavirus, which appears to have originated in the major manufacturing center of Wuhan in central China, a city of 11 million souls. Wuhan is also a major transportation hub, located where the great Yangtze River is joined by its largest tributary, the Han. In addition to the water transport, there are dozens of railroads and expressways connecting Wuhan to the rest of China. The city, with reason, has been called “the Chicago of China.”

This, of course, made it all too easy for the coronavirus to spread across China as well.

China has an authoritarian regime, and it is always the instinct of such regimes to suppress bad news. The doctor who first ­reported the virus was admonished for “spreading rumors”; he has since died of the disease. So the epidemic got a good start ­before Beijing set about taking forceful measures, including, in effect, quarantining the entire city of Wuhan and, now, several other major cities.

Major outbreaks of the coronavirus have appeared in South Korea, Iran and Italy as well. At least 29 other countries have also reported cases, including the United States, where 53 cases have been reported as of Tuesday in eight states. Almost all of these patients had contracted the disease while traveling in China. These cases have been mostly isolated at military bases.

The Chinese have reported — though their stats must be taken with caution — 79,000 cases and 2,623 deaths. That is a mortality rate of 3.3 percent.

That is nowhere near the mortality rate of the great flu pandemic of 1918-19, which reached at least 10 percent, killing 50 million people worldwide, let alone the Black Death of the 14th century, which offed one-third of the population of ­Europe. The coronavirus causes serious disease but not, as yet, a particularly deadly one. Just consider: There have been more than 10,000 deaths from flu in the United States so far just this flu season.

All countries are now working with the utmost vigor to isolate cases and to prevent the spread of the virus. This will, inevitably, have considerable short-term impact on their economies, especially China’s, as large numbers of people are idled by quarantine, transportation is disrupted and public events are canceled. There is, however, a good chance that these measures will nip the epidemic in the bud.

The World Health Organization has reported that the epidemic in China is now receding, apparently having peaked around the end of January. There were 2,590 new cases reported on Feb. 2, but only 460 on Monday.

Longer term, companies are already beginning to diversify their supply chains, making them less dependent on China. This will make the global economy more robust and less vulnerable to such disruptions in the future.

There’s an old Wall Street ­adage that one should “sell on trumpets [i.e., good news] and buy on drums.” Monday’s stock-market tumble was, at least so far, selling on drums.

John Steele Gordon writes for Commentary.