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Morgan Stanley’s Sobering COVID-19 Call: ‘This Is Far From Over’
The US coronavirus outbreak will "have a very long tail", Morgan Stanley's biotech analyst Matthew H
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FWIW, I think Morgan’s timeline is reasonable but their conclusions relative to earnings and GDP are not. Return to work this summer will happen, and I expect any bias exerted in most jurisdictions will be pro-work rather than pro-safety. A second wave this fall will be a media snoozer after the first few headlines – with a smaller peak, hospital surge capacity in place, a few treatment options, and comforting news flow about vaccinations by then. “Snoozer” matters, as it helps regulate consumer and business response. I expect the second wave is simply managed to best effort by the medical community and mostly overlooked by everyone else. Re-lockdowns will be reluctantly imposed and widely pushed back to the limits of local hospital capacity.
Basically, Morgan’s timeline – but by August, the “economy vs safety” debate gets consistently called the other direction. Businesses will be busy in a land-grab for the post-Covid economy and sorting out who the survivors are and who replaces them. That one will be a sprint race, not a marathon, and it won’t pause for anything.
I don’t know Uptown. I mean jurisdictions exerting a bias against their own self interest. You can only cover your tracks so well. Risky business to get into.
We’ll see.
-TB