All Ord will settle at 4900 or 5900?, page-4

Today's fundamental pluses and minuses

The good:

- apparent declining rate of infection in China. Totalitarian window dressing aside I suspect that the use of masks limits spread from the wearer to others. There is also a good chance that less virulent strains are becoming more pronounced in China as a consequence of totalitarian measures that ensure quarantine of more serious strains. This is just my gut feel.

- Italy adopts key aspects of the Chinese approach.

- Test batch of vaccine produced by Uni of Queensland researchers.

The bad:

- After some prompt quarantine and travel restriction action in the US, there is no real preparedness in the US. So even if production in China improves a tad from now on mismanagement of the virus risk in other key economies won't lead to a good global ending.

- Preparedness in less developed countries is as good as non-existent.

- Sanctions on Iran combined with mad mullah regime ensures the spread of what appears to be a more lethal strain through the ME and into neighbouring countries such as Pakistan. Khamenei and Trump are equally guilty of prioritising politics over global public health.

- Locally there has been no visible movement towards a bottom-up business continuity planning approach that could be co-ordinated by Government and Industry groups to mitigate virus spread and economic loss. The "top down" strategies we are hearing about won't work by themselves.

The unknown

There is a lot of unknown.

I am wondering whether some fast tracking of the trial vaccine testing and approval is possible and if so how it could be pushed with open cheque book funding. Different phases can be done in parallel and if wastage happens it happens. Once primate safety is demonstrated healthy volunteers could be called the next day. Also, the usual efficacy benchmarks don't need to be satisfied. The vaccine still needs to be useful but if say a 60 to 70% effectiveness was demonstrated I would go with that while fine tuning it in the lab at the same time. A global approach to batch production should happen early.

The Market?

I've got no idea where it will be in 3 months time however if the debt bombs start exploding the follow on panic would last for at least a year IMHO.