Joe Gawronski said concerns about the coronavirus outbreak really hit home on March 13. “Our attitude has changed markedly since Friday,” he said of his family’s reaction to the viral outbreak of COVID-19.

The president of New York brokerage firm Rosenblatt Securities lives in Summit, N.J., a suburb a little more than 20 miles west of the New York Stock Exchange in Manhattan, and his children’s school district announced on March 12 that it would be closing until at least April 6 as more than two dozen confirmed cases of the viral pandemic cropped up in the Garden State.
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That may be why, Gawronski, one of the head honchos at the NYSE’s largest floor traders, harbors some ambivalence about the exchange keeping its trading floors open during the pandemic that has spread rapidly across the globe, causing New York City to consider drastic measures to contain the deadly pathogen.

“It’s a tough call,” Gawronski said of keeping the exchange staffed with scores of traders amid the epidemic.

The NYSE officials have been adamant about the need for the exchange to remain open and to maintain a staff of flesh-and-blood traders on the floor even as the New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio hinted on Tuesday at the possibility of tighter restrictions on the movement of the city’s residents to mitigate the contagion, which has infected about 200,000 people worldwide and claimed nearly 8,000 lives, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.