WASHINGTON—U.S. President Donald Trump signed a bill Friday that authorized $8.3 billion in emergency spending to combat the spread of the coronavirus. He had asked Congress to approve $2.5 billion, but the legislators more than tripled that amount before sending it back to him.

“We closed it down, we stopped it,” he told White House reporters shortly afterwards. “That was a very early shutdown, which is something we got right.”

That assessment didn’t square with reports from across the country: 2,773 people were under quarantine in New York City on Friday, and Washington state had reported dozens of new cases during a week when Seattle shut down its schools. Maryland declared a state of emergency after it detected three cases. And while 19 states had confirmed cases, with the death toll across the country at 14, the total number of cases remained unknown.

Trump has nonetheless downplayed the problem, and even offered misinformation in his public statements. On Wednesday, he suggested in a TV interview that those infected could still go to work, contradicting advice from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Last week, he suggested the virus will disappear with the changing of the seasons.

The mixed messaging is making fighting the outbreak harder, experts say.

“Communication wasn’t consistent from the highest levels of government about this thing,” said Dr. Cyrus Shahpar, who used to work on the CDC’s global response team and now leads epidemic prevention with the non-profit Resolve to Save Lives. “In general, they contribute to not having a sense of urgency.”

And urgency, Shahpar says, is exactly what’s needed right now. “We know that it’s a pandemic. It’s in over 80 countries now. It’s over a third of all the world, in six of seven continents,” he noted.

Shahpar expects the outbreak to get worse in the U.S. before it gets better. “I anticipate there will be spread, probably to all 50 states,” he said. “We need to get the testing ramped up. The question will be, can we do all of that to contain it or do we have to move to mitigation when it’s too widespread in the community?

“Given what we’re seeing, the window for containment is smaller and smaller every day in the U.S.”

Not that panic is warranted, he says, so much as a serious and concerted effort to test, treat and take action. Shahpar expects the severity of the pandemic to be in the “low to moderate” range. The H1N1 pandemic in 2009 would be an example of lower-end severity; 20th-century epidemics like the Hong Kong flu and the Asian flu which killed about 1 million people globally, would be in the more moderate range. “We’re headed in that area of moderate, but it’s a lot of uncertainty,” he said.

The spending bill signed by the president, Shahpar says, along with increased availability of testing, is a good step. “Now it’s about just programming that money as soon as possible, and prioritizing it to places that are kind of on the cusp of containment to mitigation.”

Even so, the impact in some places in the U.S. will be fairly pronounced. In places like northern Italy and Iran, cities are turning into virtual ghost towns as businesses are closed, events are cancelled, and people stay inside. That kind of response is starting to be seen in places like Washington state, and Shahpar says he expects to see it in other parts of the country.

All of that is taking a toll on the economy.

The stock market’s plunges over the past two weeks have raised fears of a deep recession, and a surprise interest rate cut Tuesday by the U.S. Federal Reserve didn’t seem to calm fears — the markets plummeted again the next day. “The Fed pulled the fire alarm without telling anybody why,” Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, told Axios. “There is something else going on here that triggered this cut and everybody is struggling to understand what the Fed saw.”

But while a deep and lasting recession is certainly imaginable, it’s not guaranteed, one expert says. “It’s possible that this turns into a worst case, you know, everything is terrible scenario, but it’s not really plausible at this point,” said Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak, the chief economist of Boston Consulting Group. “A plausible scenario has a real economic impact. Demand will fall, supply may also have hiccups, output will be lost temporarily.

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“But you do get to the other side of such an epidemic, and when that happens, you can be in a position where the rebound is very aggressive, where the shock wouldn’t show all that much in annual growth for 2020. That’s like the very best case outcome.”

While Carlsson-Szlezak doesn’t think the U.S. economy will be “permanently damaged,” he says there may be a long delay before it recovers. For Canadians, any slowdown in the U.S. will impact Canada’s economy.

Christopher Sands, director of the Canada Institute at the Wilson Center in Washington, says the coronavirus may have one very specific impact on the Canadian economy. “I think there’s a significant tourism impact if people just discretionarily decide not to travel,” he said.

In 2019, 15 million tourists came to Canada from the United States, representing two-thirds of all international tourism. A drop in that number would have a significant impact on the hotel and restaurant industries, as the SARS crisis did in Toronto in 2003. A widespread outbreak in the U.S. that disrupts business travel could also have a particularly significant impact on Air Canada’s bottom line.

Sands also foresees trouble when it comes to pharmaceutical products like vaccines. “If it’s the U.S. putting a lot of money on the table and Canada says, ‘Yeah, we need some stuff, too,’” Sands thinks there’s a chance that “it’ll be ‘America first.’”

This was edited on March 10, 2020 to reflect that Philipp Carlsson-Szlezak is now the Chief Economist of Boston Consulting Group.

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