That brings us back to concerns over just how bad the reverberations from Covid-19 will be. The China of 2020 is very different to that of 2003, and so today’s epidemic is likely to have a much bigger international impact than the SARS virus to which it is most often compared. For a start, China’s oil consumption now is more than twice what it was when SARS hit and last year the country accounted for more than three-quarters of the growth in global oil demand, according to the IEA.
