With so little testing carried out in the US, the headlines are only just getting going on this story for them I believe.
This is from another article I was reading yesterday:
” During a Senate hearing Tuesday, FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn was greeted by skeptical lawmakers and pushed to explain how he thinks the United States could do a million tests when, to date, it has only been able to perform about 3,600 tests.”
source: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/03/politics/pence-coronavirus-any-american-tested/index.html
With so few tests conducted, it’s no wonder their confirmed cases number is so low, but the CDC has said that every state will be in a position to conduct tests themselves when new kits are distributed.
“A spokesperson for the FDA said in a statement that state and local public health labs will be able to test up to 75,000 people by the end of the week. That spokesperson added that a commercial manufacturer, IDT, is producing additional CDC tests and expects to have shipped test kits capable of about 1 million tests to academic, healthcare and commercial labs by the week’s end.”
It could be a real test for markets if a constant stream of new confirmations start hitting the newswires in the US, and I remain wary of deploying capital during such uncertainty.
Turning to the UK, I was listening to the Chief Medical Offer talk and he suggested we would see 50% of all cases in the next 3 weeks and 95% over 9 weeks.
Using this kind of forecast as an extremely rough and loose guide, it could suggest that somewhere within this 3 week period the ‘peak fear’ kind of period I’ve been looking for in the markets will occur and that could provide a window to start using capital in the hope that this virus outbreak will start to dissipate and allow market action stabilise in the weeks that follow.
Thanks for your time.
$SPX500 $DJ30 $NSDQ100
