Copper market participants should have been gathering in Santiago, Chile, for the annual CESCO dinner on Wednesday March 25. Instead, the country's mining industry was nervously eyeing the spread of the novel coronavirus (2019-nCoV) pandemic, and its government was coming under increasing pressure to impose a lockdown similar to what India and South Africa have instituted.
Chile has so far restricted travel into the country and declared a national emergency a week ago to limit the spread of the coronavirus. It has stopped short of a lockdown, unlike its neighbor Argentina, which has one-third of the cases of Chile but imposed a mandatory quarantine last week.