Market comment 2020

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The GMB union has warned that workers in the gig economy could be at a disadvantage if they have to self-isolate. Mick Rix, GMB national officer, said: "The threat of coronavirus is a huge problem for employers and worker across the UK. "But workers in the so-called gig economy, or on zero-hours contracts, are left abandoned and penniless if they have to self-isolate. "Once again the bogus self-employment model is screwing over the disadvantaged.

 Coronavirus outbreak 'getting bigger' - WHO - BBC News

Scott Minerd of financial services firm Guggenheim Partners told Bloomberg TV that the coronavirus outbreak “is possibly the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my career”, a time-span which includes the 1987 crash and the collapse of Lehman Brothers. “This has the potential to reel into something extremely serious,” Minerd warned. “It’s very hard to imagine a scenario where you can actually contain this, and so that’s the thing that to me is very frightening.”

 Coronavirus fears trigger biggest one-day fall on US stock market | Business | The Guardian

The problem is that testing in the US has been limited so far, with only a small number of labs available to assess the results, flaws in the manufacturing of the earliest kits sent out to states, and out-of-date criteria for testing people. (Until Friday, most tests focused on people who’d been to China recently or those with known Covid-19 exposure.)

On February 14, the agency also announced it would start testing for the virus in people who hadn’t returned from China across five US cities — New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. But “that effort has not yet begun,” ProPublica reported, due to the lack of reliable tests.

Until early February, only two countries in Africa — Senegal and South Africa — had the lab capacity to screen for the disease. While China has had more capacity than the US, with the ability to distribute as many as 1.65 million tests per week, according to the World Health Organization, that’s still been “entirely insufficient,” Lawrence Gostin, director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University, told Vox. “Lack of testing kits has angered doctors and patients in China,” he added, leading them to lean on things like CT scans and lung X-rays to diagnose patients.

 Preparing for coronavirus in the US: Why the US needs better testing, and fast - Vox