The economy is being harmed by the Coronavirus hysteria created by the mainstream media. The virus itself will not harm our economy that much as long as we don't over-react. Most of the damage being done by the Coronavirus is being done by people talking about it and over-reacting. Contrast this with how well the world handled the flu pandemic of 1918. The stock market in the USA actually only dropped about 5% that year.
To put things into perspective, the 1918 flu killed about 50,000,000 people out of 1.6 billion. Today, that would be proportional to a virus killing about 215 million people worldwide. That sounds like it would be devastating, except if there was no global market crash in 1918, there is certainly no reason for us to panic and create one today.
We need to stop panicking, stoically let the virus run its course and keep working or we might suffer an economic depression.
If you look at past epidemics that were brought under control, you will find what people considered an over reaction at the time is exactly what stopped or slowed the spread. When you have an epidemic infecting 175,000 people in almost every country on earth and is growing at a rate of 7% every day there is no way of stopping or slowing it without using extreme measures. There was a window of a few weeks in the US when we could have dramatically slowed the spread, but we ignored it because it would have been an over-reaction since there was only 35 cases in a couple of states. A month later there were nearly 4000 cases in 48 states.
The Spanish influence was so devastating because so many countries had more important issues, namely WWI. The Sedition act of 1918 was used to silence the media. The government referred to it as the grip and urged people to go to work and just ignore it. In munition plants it was considered patriot to work while sick. The results was 116,000 Americans died in combat and 676,000 died of Spanish Influenza.
Letting a virus like the common cold run it's course which usually last only a few day is usually a good idea. But letting a disease with the potential of killing millions is not. The Spanish Influenza is a good example of an epidemic running it's course.