SK Hynix, which supplies Apple with RAM, told 800 of its staff to stay home. It happened after it emerged that one trainee had been in contact with someone who was infected with coronavirus, AppleInsider reported.
SK Hynix on Thursday said it had requested 800 of its workers to quarantine themselves to prevent the spread of the coronavirus as a preventative measure. The precaution was made after the discovery one trainee had met a patient in Daegu, a city in South Korea that is at the center of an outbreak of the virus. The trainee was tested alongside another with symptoms of pneumonia, Reuters reports, though while neither were found to have the virus under the first test, a second is being performed to make sure. The company has also closed its training center and hospital in Incheon.
Check It Out: Coronavirus Fear Leads to 800 Staff at Apple Supplier Staying Home
Charlotte:
Reading the Press coverage of Covid-19 and its economic/market impact, one could be forgiven for thinking that its got ‘missile-lock’ on Apple production. Understandably, given Apple’s global market footprint, coverage is perhaps over-weighted on the outbreak’s impact on Apple. Despite the fact that a dominant component of Apple’s product line is China – dependent, Apple are hardly unique amongst the tech hardware manufacturers. One might suspect that the more rational analysts are focussing on Apple as a bellwether of related business models, perhaps even an indicator of global market prognosis, and not as a uniquely vulnerable company.
Regarding forecasts of the coronavirus’ impact on the global econFortunately, WHO have finally begun acknowledging that the case fatality rate of the virus is well below that of similar zoonotic coronaviral outbreaks, which is 2% in China and nearly an order of magnitude lower outside of China. If anything, this is behaving increasingly like the pandemic influenza A/H1N1 outbreak, which saw high mortality rates in Mexico, but far milder disease elsewhere (indeed, we published that 1 in 5 people in Bangladesh had no symptoms at all during the first wave of pandemic H1N1, which was the most severe https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28688210).
The point is, the Press continue to focus on how many deaths have occurred with little to no context (how many have been infected, and the growing numbers of those with minor or no signs of illness), when in fact, this year a record number of children have died from influenza in the US alone (https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/health/child-flu-deaths-105/index.html), not to mention the number of flu-related cases and deaths world-wide. (I just congratulated a colleague for his sober comments on that article about influenza, which he fears has fallen on deaf ears in the Press.)
Once this settles down, we might find that the economic impact will have been more a function of fear and dread, and increasingly futile attempts at containment, than of real societal impairment from severe illness. If so, then perhaps we will seize this opportunity, as we have so often failed to do in the past, to appreciate the importance of traversing the path of fact and evidence through the valley of uncertainty.
And, should we have a reasonably efficacious vaccine by next year, and should Covid-19 recirculate as many increasingly suspect that it will as a global phenomenon, the market can carry on, and we can go about ignoring that new vaccine with the same consequence as we now ignore the influenza vaccine; once more establishing that market performance is more about our perceptions and fears than it is about reality, and again validate how poor we are at assessing risk.
I think that it isn’t just Apple that in such a situation.