The Indian equity markets Wednesday ended lower but were off lows the after the country's health minister confirmed that the number of coronavirus cases had risen sharply to 28, leading to worries that economic activity may be affected further.

The Sensex closed 214.22 points, or 0.55 percent lower at 38,409.48. That was more than 550 points off lows.

To discuss the impact of the virus and the outlook for the market, CNBC-TV18 spoke with Ajay Srivastava, CEO of Dimensions Corporate Finance Services, Ayon Mukhopadhyay of IIFL and Varun Lohchab, head-institutional research at HDFC Securities.

Srivastava said, “Unfortunately we came into this market on the background of being the most expensive market in the world whether we looked at PEs, earnings per share (EPS) or price to book - we were the most expensive market in the world. So to that extent, the Nifty stocks had to take the brunt because exchange-traded funds (ETF) selling is going on, deleveraging is happening globally and so one cannot see flows coming here.”

“Of course coronavirus is affecting everybody’s sentiment but the big ticket trigger is that the US leverage market is running out and therefore the ETF withdrawal would continue,” he added.

According to Mukhopadhyay, the markets globally are confused and volatile as investors are not sure of the impact of coronavirus.

With regards to Indian equities Mukhopadhyay said, “It’s reasonable to assume that there is going to be a demand side hit regardless of how widely this virus spreads in India and the factors contributing to this will include the global supply chain disruption and overall the demand weakness that is going to happen. Though we have seen reports that resumption of work will happen in China soon etc., it is fair to assume that mostly all global countries will enforce stringent lockdown and given that we live in a global interconnected world it’s fair to assume that supply chain will see interruption for at least a few months.”

Therefore, there is fear in the market that there will be a huge amount of demand weakness in India. So, spaces like discretionary consumption, autos will not see a sharp recovery any time soon is playing on investors' minds, said Mukhopadhyay. According to him, outflows from India are on account on emerging market basket sell-off.

Stock/sector specific, Mukhopadhyay said, "We continue to savour quality names, strong turnarounds but are avoiding cyclicals. So we prefer select banks, insurance companies, some chemicals companies that will continue to outperform."

Meanwhile, Lohchab is of the view that these sort of decline should be used to buy stocks and that is what they have said in their latest strategy report - that stick to the fundamentals and keep buying the stocks where relative risk reward good.