I travel to China and Korea regularly and made several trips while SARS was a thing. The hype and fear (warranted or not) around COVID-19 is much larger than it was for SARS. It's not really quantifiable, but the "mood" is also different somehow. Combine that with bumbling, moronic "leadership" and an endless desire to hype news stories for ratings supremacy and, yeah, good times.
The company I work for has design centers in Wuhan (Hubei), China and Daegu, Korea. For reference, Daegu (at last report) had the highest incidence of COVID-19 infections in Korea. I haven't been to either this year, but we have people coming and going to both locations frequently. I worked directly with a person from our Daegu office last week - he arrived in the U.S. just before the announcement of infections in Korea and returned a few days ago. A person that works in our office returned from Wuhan late last week (they told him to stay home for 14 days and see a doctor before coming back to work). Most of our facilities in China and Korea have forced office employees to work from home. The folks in the manufacturing facilities are working staggered shifts and being told not to congregate in break areas to lower the number of close-proximity groups. I doubt that approach will be very successful (two employees have family members that have been infected and are hospitalized), but they are trying to keep from shutting down production. We are already experiencing parts shortages and supply chain disruptions. The stock market is certainly overreacting, but the reality is that there are tangible effects on the economy and there will be more. I work in IT and support engineering applications. We've started thinking through options to accommodate a significant increase in teleworkers, should the need arise. I'm not a Prepper, but this thing warrants monitoring at the very least.
I thought I shared this link early on, but if you haven't seen it, it's an interesting tracking website from Johns Hopkins. I've been watching it since it came online. The nerd in me appreciates the business intelligence behind the data mapping while the twisted inner-child wants to change the title of the page to "Zombie Apocalypse".
https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps ... 7b48e9ecf6