JPMorgan Chase and other banking giants have canceled employee travel to Italy, too.
“Staying put and working from home makes a lot more sense,” Hoover said. “We can accomplish a lot of what we need to accomplish from Chicago. Companies that already have embraced remote work will be in a lot better shape in the next few months. Companies who haven’t embraced remote work are about to.”
Still, outbreak of the respiratory virus, which began in China at yearend, is causing real disruption that won’t be solved by technology. The spread of the coronavirus from Asia to Europe, with fears that the U.S. will be impacted, too, caused investors to shudder. Stocks plummeted 3 percent today, adding to yesterday’s 3 percent drop.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control & Prevention said Americans should prepare for significant disruptions of daily life from the coronavirus outbreak beyond isolated cases, such as the Chicago couple who contracted the virus after a trip to China.
“We expect we will see community spread in this country,” said Nancy Messonnier, director of the CDC’s National Center for Immunization & Respiratory Diseases, referring to person-to-person transmission of the virus. “It is not a matter of if, but a question of when, this will exactly happen.”
The biggest near-term impact is on travel. Companies that already had abandoned travel to Asia also are pulling back elsewhere. That’s a major problem for United Airlines. The Chicago-based carrier said early this week it would pull its forecast for the rest of the year because of the coronavirus.
Although it’s the U.S. carrier with the most exposure to China, United had largely mitigated the damage from the initial outbreak. A new credit-card agreement with JPMorgan Chase and Visa will bring in an extra $400 million in revenue this year, which is about equal to the ticket revenue it got from flying to and from Hong Kong and China last year. Lower oil prices would offset the rest, estimated Cowen.
United shares are down 10.5 percent in the past two days.
Now the disruptions are set to impact Europe, the other big international travel market. Already, the major wireless-phone industry trade show, Mobile World Congress, which had been scheduled for this week, was canceled.
Now the problems are hitting domestic travel, too. AT&T, Verizon and IBM decided not to send employees to this week’s RSA Conference, a major info-tech security meeting, in San Francisco. Facebook canceled its Global Marketing Conference, set for next month, in San Francisco.
Bloomberg contributed.
