Fear of Germs Means Cash Is No Longer King During Coronavirus Outbreak

If you visit the few businesses that are actually open during the coronavirus pandemic, you’ll notice that many of them are requiring customers to use debit or credit cards instead of cash. That’s because, as the AP puts it, business owners “fear that physical currency, handled by tens of thousands of people over their useful life, could be a vector for the spreading coronavirus.”

This impulse comes despite the fact that public officials and health experts have said that the risk of transferring the virus through the use of paper money is small.