From Goldman Sachs research, this is Allison Nathan. Welcome to Top of Mind, a podcast that explores macroeconomic issues on the minds of our clients.

Heading into this year, there was no shortage of global concerns on the horizon, from geopolitical

tensions in the Middle East and North Korea to a high-stakes election year here in the U.S.

But the event that no one expected was the current outbreak of COVID-19.

As we know by now, COVID-19 is a coronavirus that first emerged in the populous city of

Wuhan, China, and is now proving to be more infectious and virulent than the common flu.

The reaction within China was swift, an unprecedented lockdown of much of the country in late

January, effectively halting a vast amount of activity in the

world's second largest economy, with the impact on global supply chains just beginning to emerge.

Although the Chinese economy is starting to limp back to life, the number of international

cases continues to grow. Meanwhile, as data on the economic fallout has begun to trickle in,

and governments and central banks around the world respond, the state of the virus and its impact

on markets and the global economy is top of mind. We start by trying to get a handle on the virus

itself, turning to Dr. Barry Bloom from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public

Health, and Dr. Michael Osterholm, the Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

I asked Dr. Bloom to break down what we do and don't know about the virus right now.

We know thanks to the extraordinary research and scientific work in China, the DNA sequence.

They got it right within 10 days, put it up so that every scientist in the world could start

to think about how to set up diagnostic tests, which were set up in a matter

of days in China, and how to go do things like make drugs and vaccines. So we know a bit about

the virus. I think it's astonishing that the science has moved so quickly. We know that it is spread from person to person. We know

something about a key figure, which is the effective transmission rate, which is how many people

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