Apple said on Friday it would reopen one of the company’s seven retail stores in Shanghai on February 15th albeit with reduced working hours, Reuters reports.
The coronavirus has claimed 1,380 lives, infected 63,851 on the Chinese mainland, and has spread to at least 24 countries.
It has led to lockdown of cities, extended new year holidays and factory closures that have disrupted the supply chains of several companies.
MacDailyNews Take: According to disease modelers, at least 550,000 and possibly as many as 4.4 million cases of the novel coronavirus 2019-nCoV are possible before the outbreak runs its course.
According to Sharon Begley at Stat, “the Covid-19 models ‘are doing quite well, despite a lot of complicated dynamics on the ground,’ said Los Alamos computer scientist Geoff Fairchildd. While it’s not clear yet if they’ve nailed the true numbers of cases, they are correctly projecting the outbreak’s basic shape: increasing exponentially, the number of cases growing more quickly the more cases there are.”
Apple is being prudent in slowly opening a few stores, including this latest Apple Store in Shanghai at reduced hours, to see how things progress before throwing open their doors to the masses everywhere in China.