reporter Mark DeCambre details Bill Gates’ views on getting the economy up and running again. He writes:
‘No one should think the government can wave a wand an all of sudden the economy is anything like it was before this happened.’
In a March 31 op-ed in the Washington Post, the tech luminary advised more stringent closures to mitigate the spread of the deadly viral outbreak, saying “shutdown anywhere means shutdown everywhere.”
However, the stock market has mostly been attempting to shrug off worries about COVID-19, which has infected 1.5 million people world-wide and claimed nearly 90,000 lives, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 400 points Thursday, with the S&P 500 index SPX, 1.49% and the Nasdaq Composite COMP, 0.57% also showing strong gains, as investors ignored an ugly report on jobless claims for the week ended April 4 and focused on the Federal Reserve’s $2.3 trillion program to help funnel money to key parts of the economy that has been hard-hit by the response to the epidemic.