Investors are panicking too much about coronavirus, MarketWatch recently proclaimed, while offering a handful of stock picks to buy amid the market chaos.

China's President Xi Jinping said on Wednesday that preventing and containing the new coronavirus, which has taken 132 lives and infected 5,974, remained a grim and complex task, the state television reported.

China's economic growth may drop to 5% or even lower due to the coronavirus outbreak, possibly pushing policymakers to introduce more stimulus measures, a report quoted a government economist as saying, Reuters reported.

After fears about the virus roiled global markets earlier this week and sent the S&P 500 to its worst day in nearly four months, U.S. stocks stabilized on Tuesday amid hopes of strong earnings reports.

Meanwhile, MarketWatch columnist Michael Brush offered five reasons why there’s no need to panic:

• Past contagious disease breakouts have been contained. "Even if coronavirus turns out to be as contagious and deadly as really bad contagious diseases like Ebola, it will most likely be successfully curbed. The Ebola outbreak a few years ago was effectively kept in check, and so were the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak of 2003-04, and the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) outbreak early last decade," he said.
• The lockdown affects a small part of China. "The cities locked down are all near Wuhan, in Hubei province, where coronavirus originated. So far, the lockdown affects only around 60 million people out of a population of 1.4 billion," he said. "Likewise, Hubei province only produces about 4.7% of China’s overall GDP, according to the National Bureau of Statistics of China."
• The breakout happened at an opportune time as China’s economy was about to wind down anyway for the Chinese New Year celebration when the outbreak occured.Productivity was already scheduled to take a seasonal dip.
• The public typically tends to overreact to health threats “Whenever there’s a new virus outbreak, people are egged on by the media echo chamber, which latches on to the story and repeats it ad nauseum, drilling fear and concern into the minds of investors and the general public alike. The same thing happens on social media, where rumors can spread unchecked,” he said.
• Any economic impact will be short lived: “Coronavirus fears could hit travel globally, and produce a decline in consumer spending in Asia and the U.S. But the effect tends to wear off pretty fast,” he said.

All of this suggest stocks hit particularly hard because they have exposure to China look like buys here, he said.

Some of his buy recommendations:

Royal Caribbean Cruises (RCL).  “If history is any guide, the weakness in Royal’s stock could present a compelling buying opportunity as consumers have been fairly quick to shrug off illness outbreaks in recent years,” says William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia. The cruise industry actually did better after the SARS outbreak and “more recent outbreaks such as Zika or Ebola have had no discernible impact on cruise demand,” she says.

Other stocks hurt from exposure to the China virus include:

• Starbucks (SBUX)
• Walt Disney (DIS)
• Nike (NKE)
• Las Vegas Sands (LVS) (among other gaming shares).

Meanwhile, Wall Street is rushing to project the fallout from the coronavirus by drawing on the history of the SARS outbreak in 2003 -- in full knowledge that the past is no prologue.

Dramatic changes in China’s economy, its cross-border linkages and the very structure of global markets undermines their go-to historic template, Bloomberg reported.

“The market context at the time of the SARS epidemic could not be more different than it is currently,” Societe Generale SA strategists including Frank Benzimra wrote on Wednesday. “The impact could potentially be deeper and wider due to China’s economic rise over the past 17 years and the very different risk environment this time around.”