Staff members work at the assemble plant of FAW-Volkswagen Automobile in Chengdu, southwest China's Sichuan Province, Feb. 19, 2020. Liu Kun | Xinhua via Getty Images

BEIJING — Chinese businesses are getting back to work just as many parts of the world are shutting down, and that could add a second jolt to the world's second-largest economy. Mainland China has reported zero new domestically transmitted confirmed coronavirus cases for the last two days, bringing some relief to a country that's been fighting the disease since it first emerged in late December in the city of Wuhan. More than half the country extended a Lunar New Year holiday by at least a week in an effort to limit the virus' spread. Now, data indicates that most of the Chinese businesses that survived the outbreak are back at work. Official and third-party figures say the resumption of work rate is generally 70% or even higher.

But COVID-19 has now spread globally, and concerns the pandemic will cause an economic recession have roiled global markets. In the last day, the total number of deaths from the virus in Italy topped that of China, where the death toll is above 3,200. "Even if you do see an extraordinary level of domestic resiliency — which I should point out is not yet evident in any of our data — the global spread of Covid-19 has shut down all of China's major trading partners at just the wrong time," Leland Miller, chief executive officer of China Beige Book, said in an email. "No matter what Beijing engineers domestically, the growth rate will be capped significantly by what's transpiring across the rest of the world,“ Miller said. His firm publishes a quarterly review of the economy based on a survey of more than 3,300 Chinese businesses.

Much slower growth for China

This week, several economists cut their forecasts for China's GDP, predicting a sharp contraction in the first quarter and low single-digit growth for the year. Last year, the country's official, although frequently doubted, GDP growth rate was 6.1%, the slowest since 1990. Here are some of the revisions: Nomura: to 1.3% from 4.8%

The Economist Intelligence Unit: to 2.1%, from 5.4%

China Renaissance: to 3.5% from 5.6%. The downgrades came after China's National Bureau of Statistics on Monday reported a dismal picture of the economy in January and February. "We were just wondering about the government's willingness to admit it in the official data (before cutting our forecast)," said Tom Rafferty, principal economist for China at The Economist Intelligence Unit. Given the global pandemic, if the Chinese government insisted on reaching a higher growth rate for the year, that would now require a dangerous amount of stimulus, Rafferty said. "Our base case is stimulus is coming. It's not going to be the same level (as it was in) 2009." "Next year things should be back to normal in terms of global demand and supply," Rafferty said. The International Monetary Fund expects China to contribute more than a quarter of the global growth in the next five years, which means the exporting and manufacturing giant's ability to resume business is critical for the world economy. But China also has its hundreds of millions of consumers going for it. "A key mitigating factor for the overall economic growth of the Chinese economy during the rest of 2020 is that domestic consumption has become the most important growth engine for the economy in recent years," Rajiv Biswas, APAC chief economist for IHS Markit, said in an email. "Therefore although China's export sector will be hit during coming months by the impact of the global recession, a recovery in domestic consumption should help to underpin China's economic recovery during the remainder of 2020." IHS Markit predicts China's real GDP will grow 3.9% this year.

China still faces many challenges from virus